‘You’re telling me it wouldn’t do,’ Chuck Szymanowski said.
‘Since the end-words are disyllabic or, er, yes trisyllabic but never monosyllabic. A matter of structure,’ Enderby said. ‘So listen. It will be your balls next, nigger, etc etc. It will be your prick next, nigger, and so on. Now it is the structure that interests me. It’s not, of course, a very subtle or interesting structure, as er Lloyd here would be the first to admit, but it is the structure that has the vitality, not all this nonsense about hate and so on. I mean, imagine a period when this kind of race hate stupidity is all over, and yet the poem – aere perennius, you know – still by some accident survives. Well, it would be taken as a somewhat primitive but still quite engaging essay in vilification in terms of an anatomical catalogue, the structure objectifying and, as it were, cooling the hate. Comic too on the personal level, ‘It will be your balls next, er Crassus or say Lycidas. Rather Catullan. You see.’ He smiled at them. Now they were really learning something.
‘You think,’ Lloyd Utterage panted, ‘you’re going to get away with that, man?’
‘Away with what?’ Enderby asked in honest and rather hurt surprise.
‘Look,’ Ms Tietjens said kindly, ‘he’s British. He doesn’t understand the ethnic agony.’
‘That’s rather a good phrase,’ Enderby said. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, of course. Like saying potato agony. Oh I don’t know, though. The meanings of imaginative language are not the same as those of the defilers of language. Your president, for instance. The black leaders. Lesbian power, if such a thing exists …’
‘He understands it,’ said Lloyd Utterage. ‘His people started it. Nigger-whippers despite their haw-haw-haw old top.’
‘Now that’s interesting,’ Enderby said. ‘You see how the whipping image immediately begat in your imagination the image of a top? You have the makings of a word-man. You’ll be a poet some day when you’ve got over all this nonsense.’ Then he began to repeat nigger-whipper swiftly and quietly like a tongue-twister. ‘Prosodic analysis,’ he said. ‘Do any of you know anything about that? A British linguistic movement, I believe, so it may not have er gotten to you. Nigger and whipper, you see, have two vowels in common. Now note the opposition of the consonants: a rich nasal against a voiceless semi-vowel, a voiced stop against a voiceless. Suppose you tried nigger-killer. Not so effective. Why not? The g doesn’t oppose well to the l. They’re both voiced, you see, and so –’
‘Maaaaaan,’ drawled Lloyd Utterage, leaning back in simulated ease, smiling crocodilewise. ‘You play you little games with youself. All this shit about words. Closing your eyes to what’s going on in the big big world.’
Enderby got angry. ‘Don’t call me maaaaaan,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bloody name and I’ve got a bloody handle to it. And don’t hand me any of that shiiit, to use your own term, about the importance of cutting the white man’s balls off. All that’s going to save your immortal soul, maaaaaan, if you have one, is words. Words words words, you bastard,’ he crescendoed, perhaps going too far.
‘I don’t think you should have said that,’ said a mousy girl called Ms Crooker or Kruger. ‘Bastard, I mean.’
‘Does he have the monopoly of abuse?’ Enderby asked in heat. ‘It’s he who’s doing the playing about, anyway, with his bloody castration fantasies. He wouldn’t have the guts to cut the balls off a pig. Or he might have. If it were a very little pig and ten big fellow melanoids held it down for him. I say,’ he then said, ‘that’s good. Fellow melanoids.’
‘I’m getting out of here,’ Lloyd Utterage said, rising.
‘Oh no you’re not,’ Enderby cried. ‘You’re going to stay and suffer just like I am. Bloody cowardice.’
‘There’s no engagement,’ Lloyd Utterage said. ‘There’s no common area of understanding.’ But he sat down again.
‘Oh yes there is,’ Enderby said. ‘I understand that you want to cut a white man’s genital apparatus off. Well, come and try. But you’ll get this sword in your black guts first.’ And he drew an inch or so of steel.
‘You shouldn’t have said black guts,’ Ms Flugel or Crookback said. It was as though she were Enderby’s guide to polite New York usage.
‘Well,’ Enderby said, ‘they are black. Is he going to deny that now?’
‘I never denied anything, man.’
Suddenly the cannibal-haired kike or Jew, Arnold Something, began to laugh in a very high pitch. This started some of the others off: a bespectacled big sloppy student with a sloppy viking moustache, for instance, began to neigh. Lloyd Utterage sulked, as did Enderby. But then Enderby, trying, which was after all his job here, to be helpful, said, ‘Greek hystera, meaning the womb. This shows, and this might possibly bring er here, our friend I mean, and myself into a common area of understanding, that etymology can get in the way of scientific progress, since Sigmund Freud’s opponents in Vienna used etymology to confute his contention that hysteria, as now and here to be witnessed, could be found in the male as well as the female.’ Little of this could be heard over the noise. At length it subsided, and the sloppy viking whose name was, Enderby thought and would now check from the papers before him and yes indeed it was, Sig Hamsun, said:
‘And now how’s about look at my crap.’
That very nearly made the cannibal Jew Arnold begin again, but he was rebuked ironically by Lloyd Utterage, who said: ‘This serious, man, yeah serious, didn’t you know it was serious? Yeah serious, as you very well know.’
Hamsun’s crap, Enderby now saw again, looking through it, was in no way sternly Nordic. To match its excretor it was rather sloppy and fungoid. Enderby recited it grimly however:
‘And as the Manhattan dawn came up
Over the skyline we still lay
In each other’s arms. Then you
Came awake and the Manhattan dawn
Was binocularly presented in your
Blue eyes and in your pink nipples
Monostomatic heaven …’
‘What does that word mean?’ a Ms Hermsprong asked. ‘Mono something.’
‘It means,’ Enderby said, ‘that he had only one mouth.’
‘Well, we all know he only has one mouth. Like everybody else.’
‘Yes,’ Enderby said, ‘but she had two nipples, you see. The point is, I think, that he would have liked to have two mouths, you see. One for each nipple.’
‘No,’ Hamsun said. ‘One mouth was enough.’ He leered.
‘Permit me,’ Enderby said coldly, ‘to tell you what your poem means. Such as it is.’
‘I wrote it, right?’
‘You could just about say that, I suppose. It means fundamentally – which means this is the irreducible minimum of meaning – play between unitary and binary, that is to say: 1 dawn, 2 eyes, 2 nipples, 1 mouth. There’s also colour play, of course: pink dawn in blue sky, two pink dawns in two blue eyes, two pink nipples, one pink mouth (also two pink lips), one blue heaven in pink nipples and pink mouth. You see? Well then, now we come to the autobiographical element or, if you like, the personal content. It’s a childhood reminiscence. The woman in it is your mother. You’re greedy for her breasts, you want two mouths. Why should there be two of everything else, even the manifestly single city and single dawn, and only one sucking mouth? There.’ He sat back in post-exegetical triumph that the twin simmering murder in Lloyd Utterage’s eyes did something to qualify. Ms Tietjens said, in counter-triumph:
‘If you want to know the truth, it was me.’
‘You mean you wrote it? You mean he stole it? You mean –’
‘I mean I’m the woman in the poem, complete with two nipples. As you can vouch for.’
‘Look,’ Enderby said.
‘He wrote it about me.’
‘What I mean is that I didn’t bloody well ask to see them. Here, by the way, is your poem back. With an A on it. And a lousy poem it is, if I may say so. Coming into my apartment,’ he told the class, ‘and stripping off. Something to do with Jesus Christ bein
g a woman. And you,’ he accused, ‘pretending to be lesbian.’
‘I never said I was that. You make too many false assumptions.’
‘Look,’ Enderby said in great weariness and with crackling energy. ‘All of you. A poem isn’t important because of the biographical truth of the content.’
‘Look,’ countersaid the sloppy Nordic, ‘it was one way of keeping her there, can’t you see that? She’s there in that fucking poem for ever. Complete with pink nipples.’
‘I’m not a thing to be kept,’ Ms Tietjens said hotly. ‘Can’t you see that attitude makes some of us go the way we do?’
‘The point is,’ Enderby said, ‘that there are certain terrible urgencies.’ Lloyd Utterage guffaw-sneered in a way that Enderby could only think of as niggerish. It was in the act of the formulation of the term that he realized with great exactitude the impossibility of his position. There was no communication; he was too old-fashioned; he had always been too old-fashioned. ‘The urgencies are not political or racial or social. They’re, so to speak, semantic. Only the poetical inquiry can discover what language really is. And all you’re doing is letting yourselves be ensnared into the irrelevancies of the slogan on the one hand and sanctified sensation on the other.’ So. Identity? Unimportant. Sensation? Unimportant. What the hell was left? ‘The urgent task is the task of conservation. To hold the complex totality of linguistic meaning within a shape you can isolate from the dirty world.’
‘The complex what?’ Ms Hermsprong asked. The rest of them looked at him as if he were, which he probably was, mad.
‘Never mind,’ Enderby said. ‘You can’t fight. You’ll never prevail against the big bastards of computerized organizations that are kindly letting you enjoy the illusion of freedom. The people who write poems, even bad ones, are not the people who are going to rule. Sooner or later you’re all going to go to jail. You have to learn to be alone, no sex, not even any books. All you’ll have is language, the great conserver, and poetry, the great isolate shaper. Stock your minds with language, for Christ’s sake. Learn how to write what’s memorable. No, not write, compose in your head. The time will come when you won’t even be allowed a stub of pencil and the back of an envelope.’ He paused, looking down. He looked up at their pity and wonder and the black man’s hatred. ‘Try,’ he said lamely, ‘heroic couplets.’
The cannibal Arnold said: ‘How long will you be staying?’
Enderby grinned citrously. ‘Not much longer, I suppose. I’m not doing any good, am I?’ Nobody said anything. Hamsun did a slow and not ungraceful shrug. Chuck Szymanowski said:
‘You’re defeatist. You’re anti-life. You’re not helping any. The time will come later for all this artsy shmartsy crap. But it’s not now.’
‘If it’s not now,’ Enderby said, ‘it’s not ever.’ He didn’t trouble to get angry at the designation of high and neutral art as crap. ‘You can’t split life into diachronic segments.’ He would write a letter of resignation when he got back to the apartment. No, he wouldn’t even do that. Today was what? Friday the twenty-sixth. There would be a salary cheque for him on Monday. Grab that and go. He was, by God, after all, despite everything, free. Ms Cooper or Krugman said, kindly it seemed:
‘What’s your idea of a good poem?’
‘Well,’ Enderby said. ‘Perhaps this:
Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is gone to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
State in wonted manner keep.
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright …’
‘Jesus,’ Lloyd Utterage said with awe. ‘Playing your little games, man.’ And then, blood mixed somewhere down there in his larynx: ‘You bastard. You misleading reactionary evil bastard.’
6
ENDERBY SAW, IN gloomy clarity, going back to 96th Street on the IRT, that the area of freedom was very small. Ein wenig frei was about right. He was not free, for instance, not to be messily beaten up by the black gang Lloyd Utterage had, in sincere and breathy confidence with much African vowel-lengthening, promised to unleash on him during the weekend. He was not free not to feel excruciating stabs in his calves, something probably to do with the silting up of the arteries, which had now come upon him as he embraced the metal monkey-pole in the IRT train, all the seats having been taken by young black and brown thugs just out of school, who should by rights be forced to stand up for their elders. But he was free to leave America. A matter of booking on a plane to Madrid and then another to Tangier. Being free in this area, however, he decided not to make use of his freedom. Which meant he would not be free not to be messily beaten up etc etc. Which meant he was choosing to be messily … etc. They would bruise and rend his body, but there would be a thin clear as it were refrigerated self deep within, unbruisable and unrendable and, as it were, free. Augustine of Hippo, whom he now saw blanketed and shockhaired like Lloyd Utterage, was waiting for him back in the apartment to sort out other aspects of freedom for him. But, wait … he had to appear on a television talk-show some time this evening, didn’t he? He must not forget that, he must keep track of the time. Ein wenig frei to speak out for Gerard Manley Hopkins, sufferer, mystic, artist, pre-Freudian.
As he let himself into the apartment, he was aware of the ghost of the cardiac attack, if that was what it was, earlier; not shooting but already shot, a sort of bruised line of trajectory. It was obvious that he was intended to be doing some urgent thinking about death. He gloomed at the mess of the kitchen, lusting for a pint of strong tea and a wedge of some creature of Sara Lee. He gave way to the lust defiantly, grumbling round the sitting-room while the water boiled, searching for his ALABAMA mug. He found it eventually, full of warmish water that had once been ice. Soon he was able to sit on a pouffe, gorging sponge and orange cream out of one fist, the other holding the handle of the mug of mahogany tea like a weapon against Death, what time he looked at a children’s cartoon programme on television. It was all talking animals in reds, blues, and yellows, but you could see the chained wit and liberalism of the creators escaping from odd holes in the fabric: that legalistic pig there was surely the vice-president? Might it be possible to get the story of Augustine and Pelagius across in cartoon-form?
Back in the study-bedroom with his draft, he saw how bad it was and how much work on it lay ahead. And yet he was supposed to start thinking of death. It was the leaving of things unfinished that was so intolerable. It was all very well for Jesus Christ, not himself a writer though no mean orator, to talk about thinking not of the morrow. If you’d started a long poem you had to think of the bloody morrow. You could better cope with the feckless Nazarene philosophy if you were like those scrounging dope-takers who littered the city. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, as also the dope thereof.
Augustine said: If the Almighty is also Allknowing,
He knows the precise number of hairs that will fall to the floor
From your next barbering, which may also be your last.
He knows the number of drops of lentil soup
That will fall on your robe from your careless spooning
On August 5th, 425. He knows every sin
As yet uncommitted, can measure its purulence
On a precise scale of micropeccatins, a micropeccatin
Being, one might fancifully suppose,
The smallest unit of sinfulness. He knows
And knew when the very concept of man itched within him
The precise date of your dispatch, the precise
Allotment of paradisal or infernal space
Awaiting you. Would you diminish the Allknowing
By making man free? This is heresy.
But that God is merciful as well as allknowing
Has been long revealed: he is not himself bound
To fulfil foreknowledge. He scatters grace
Liberally and arbitrarily, so all men may hope,
Even you, man of the northern seas, may hope.
And a greater word is love. Out of his love
He makes man free to accept or reject him.
He could foreknow but refuses to foreknow
Any, even the most trivial, human act until
The act has been enacted, and then he knows.
So men are free, are touched by God’s own freedom.
Christ with his blood washed out original sin,
So we are in no wise predisposed to sin
More than to do good: we are free, free,
Free to build our salvation. Halleluiah.
But the man of Hippo, with an African blast,
Blasted this man of the cool north …
No no no, Enderby said to himself. It could not be done. This was not poetry. You could not make poetry out of raw doctrine. You had to find symbols, and he had no symbols. The poem could not be written. He was free. The paper chains rustled off. He stuffed them into the waste-basket. Free. Free to start writing the Odontiad. Hence bound to start writing the Odontiad. Hence not free.
He sighed bitterly and went to the bathroom to start tarting himself up for the television show. Clean and bleeding, he put on garments bequeathed to him by Rawcliffe and stood, at length, to review himself at length in the long wall-mirror near the bedroom door. Seedy Edwardian, recaller of dead glories, finale of Elgar’s First Symphony belting out Massive Hope for the Future. There was an empire in those days, and it was assumed that the centre of the English language was London. Wealthy Americans were still humble provincials. Ichabod. He put on the sculpted overcoat and his beret and, swordstick pathetic in his feeble gripe, went out.
The Complete Enderby Page 51