ABBA ABBA

by Anthony Burgess

  So that was acceptable and all was, in a word, well.

  He had one dream or vision that shocked him at first with a sense of blasphemy, though it must be a sense borrowed from Severn, since he who did not believe could not well blaspheme. Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him thus that the sonnet form might subsist above language, but he did not see how this was possible. Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things in the outer world to which it adhered, and a ghost of a ghost was a notion untenable totally. And yet it seemed that two men, of language mutually unintelligible, might in a sense achieve communication through recognition of what a sonnet was. Belli and himself, for instance. Then breathing became a craft to be craftily learnt again, a matter of catching the gods of unbreathing off their guard.

  St Valentine's Day came, and with it Valentino Llanos to announce he would go to England soon. Then a week passed and two more days, and John knew his dying day had come, yet to achieve death might be a day's hard labour. Severn held him, as it were carrying him to the gate, but he could not bear Severn's laboured breathing, for it struck like ice. To put off the world outside – the children's cries, snatches of song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eye, even the brain that scurried with thoughts and words and images. It took long hours to die.

  "I'm. Sorry. Severn. My weight."

  "Nothing, it's nothing, rest now."

  He tried to give up breathing, to yield to the breathless gods, but his body, worn out as it was, would not have that. It pumped in its feeble eggspoons of Roman air, motes in the sun and all, but there seemed to be nothing in his body to engage the air. The afternoon wore on to evening and his brain was fuddled and he groped for the essence he had called I. It fell through his fingers.

  "John. John."

  There was nothing there to make any answer. Severn dropped the body to the bed and the body gave out some teaspoons of fluid and a final sigh.

  The quiet house became busy. The apartment was stripped of everything, and the children gaped at the carts outside in the piazza, on to which furniture, rugs, rolls of stripped off wallpaper were piled, to be taken off for the burning. Signora Angeletti presented a bill. "I have money enough, fear not, madam," Severn said. "Only enough, but enough." The plates and cups they had used, these he smashed with his cane, smashed and smashed while Signora Angeletti cried, "Accidenti."

  The body was opened up by Drs. Clark and M.P. There were no lungs left. There were no lungs left at all. The lungless body was placed in a plain deal coffin and the lid hammered on by undertaker's men who coughed from the fumigation. A plot had been reserved in the Protestant Cemetery.

  Belli came reluctantly, almost dragged by Gulielmi, to the Piazza di Spagna before dawn. The mourners felt the February chill, their breath visible in the lamps of the hearse and the carriages. The coffin was taken down the stairs and appeared at the door when Don Benedetto arrived on the square, ready to climb the Steps for early service. He nodded at Gulielmi and Belli. He knew them both.

  "A very young man," he said. "A poet, was he not?"

  "An English poet," Belli said. "Now dead of consumption."

  "We know not the day nor the hour," said Don Benedetto, who was fat, hale, nearly sixty. "These Protestants," he added.

  "He did not call himself a Protestant," Gulielmi said. "He was a saintly young man, but he was neither Protestant nor Catholic."

  Don Benedetto puffed at that saintly. "Interred in the dark," he said. "Darkness to darkness."

  "What," said Belli, "do you mean by that?"

  "The unenlightened. We may not even speak of invincible ignorance. All those nations that have turned their backs on the light."

  "He had," Belli said, "more light in his little toe than you have in your entire fat carcase."

  "No," said Gulielmi. "Please. Not now."

  "I know nothing of him," Belli said, "but that I am prepared to say again and again. Priests live by the letter and poets by the word. Do you not say anything about poets turning their backs to the light."

  "You are understandably upset," the priest said, "and it is early and chilly and dark. I will pretend I did not hear what you said."

  "Oh, I said it," Belli cried. "Wipe that sanctimonius smirk from your jowls or I will wipe it for you."

  "Please," Gulielmi said.

  "Bloodsuckers, preyers on the people, purveyors of gloom, fear and uncharity."

  "You will hear more of this," Don Benedetto said. He began to climb the Steps.

  "You will hear more, you mean," Belli cried after him. "Much more, bloated parasite." And then, to Gulielmi: "God forgive me, what gets into me?"

  The cortège was ready to move off.

  TWO

  So John Keats died on February 23, 1821, and Napoleon Bonaparte died a little over two months later. Percy Bysshe Shelley, having presented Keats in Adonais as a sensitive plant choked by weeds but paradoxically surviving his killers in the form of a spirit of Eternal Beauty, was drowned in 1822, reduced to ashes on an heroic pyre, then, like Keats, interred in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. Lord Byron, fighting for the independence of Greece, died in Greece in 1824. The intensest phase of the Romantic Movement was thus coming to an end.

  Lieutenant Elton died in Switzerland a year and more after the death of Keats. Joseph Severn returned to England but went back to Rome, there to live long as British consul and to become a venerable Roman figure. Valentino Llanos visited England, met Fanny Brawne and Fanny Keats, John's sister, married the latter and took her to Spain when the political atmosphere there had grown more liberal. They lived happily. Dr Clark became physician to Queen Victoria and was knighted. Belli became a censor and wrote 2,279 sonnets in the Roman dialect, most of them coarse and obscene, many of them blasphemous. He never quite learned to reconcile the conformist and rebellious sides of his nature. Before he died at the age of 72 in 1861 he ordered his verse panorama of Roman life to be destroyed, but the order was, thanks to a liberal and far-sighted senior prelate, disobeyed. The sonnets were not published in Belli's lifetime and were known chiefly through Belli's tavern recitations of them. The Russian writer Gogol, who spent some time in Rome, heard Belli and was impressed. Sainte-Beuve in Paris heard about Belli and mentioned him in a Causerie de Lundi. James Joyce, the Irish novelist, who worked miserably as a bank clerk in Rome in the 1900s, seems to have read Belli, whose vast sonnet-sequence, presenting realistically the demotic life of a great capital city, may be regarded as a kind of proto-Ulysses. Belli can be seen as an underground link between the age of romanticism and the age of naturalism.

  Giovanni Gulielmi's mother decided, in tremulous old age, that she would leave Rome and die in England. Gulielmi took her back overland on a long and painful journey. When they reached Manchester in 1832 she was not quite ready for death, but her son reserved a plot for her in Moston Cemetery. Meanwhile, forty years old, he fell in love with Sara Higginbotham, the daughter of a Manchester cotton broker and nearly twenty years his junior. Gulielmi sold his Italian property and bought a house of some size in Rusholme, close to Platt Fields. His mother duly died and he wrote an indifferent sonnet in English extolling her virtues. He prospered as the translator of Dicken's novels into Italian, taught Italian privately, helped certain Manchester cotton houses with their Italian and French correspondence.

  Mr and Mrs Gulielmi had one child only, a son named Joseph Joachim, born in 1840. Joseph Joachim was trained as a singer at the Manchester Royal College of Music, and had a notable bass voice notably heard in performances of Handel and Mendelssohn oratorio and in sung mass at the Church of the Holy Name, Manchester, but he became best
known as a private teacher of bel canto and pianoforte. Manchester was then, as now, a very musical city. Joseph Joachim married a Scottish lady, Ann Mackenzie, and had three children. The youngest child, Joseph John Gulielmi, worked for the United Cattle Products Company and anglicised his name to Wilson during a wave of anti-Italian feeling occasioned by alleged ice-cream poisoning in the 1890s in the Lancashire coastal resorts of Blackpool, Clevelys, Bispham and Fleetwood.

  Joseph John Wilson married an Irish waitress he met in one of the U.C.P. restaurants in Manchester. This girl, six months after the marriage, gave birth to a son named for his grandfather Joseph Joachim. This boy, born in Moss Side in 1916, was to be – by a twist if not genetic then purely coincidental, since family interest in Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli was born and apparently died with the founder of the family – the translator into English of the great Roman poet. He had no linguistic endowment for the task, since Italian was no longer spoken in the family, but as a boy at St Bede's College, Manchester, he showed skill in facetious or scurrilous versifying and a passion for the Petrarchan sonnet-form. While in the Fifth Form he openly sneered in class at Wordsworth's ineptness in management of the ABBA ABBA rhyme-scheme as also at Rupert Brooke's timidity. But he praised the fearlessness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet not then much read. He drew laughter from his fellow-pupils and his English teacher alike when he stoutly declared that Keats's best Petrarchan sonnet was the one on Mrs Reynolds's cat.

  J. J. Wilson was himself no poet. He made a strict distinction, even as a schoolboy, between the art of poetry and the craft of verse. His approach to the craft of the Petrarchan sonnet may be seen in three versifyings of low jokes made at the age of eighteen and submitted to the school magazine. They were rejected but not before they had, by some oversight, got into galley proof.

  The Bet

  Some men were talking, as men often will,

  About their wives. And each with each one vied.

  Over his beer, with a grim sort of pride,

  Saying: "Mine's ugly." – "But mine's uglier still,"

  Comparing photographs. "If looks could kill,

  My missis could effect mass homicide.

  Just look." But one man, with no picture, cried:

  "Ugly? Come home with me and feast your fill."

  A bet, then? Reet. The money was not lacking,

  A quid per man. Their winter breaths asmoke,

  They homed with him when "Time please" sent them packing.

  "Get ready, missis." From upstairs she spoke:

  "Am I to hide me face wi' piece of sacking?"

  "Nay," he called, "it's a bet, lass, not a poke."

  Two Uses for Ashes

  "The ashes of my dear departed?" said

  The widow, serving tea and cakes at five

  Five days after the funeral. "I contrive

  To house them aptly. No, not lapped in lead.

  See, they are in an eggtimer instead,

  There on the mantelpiece. Ah, ladies, I've

  Determined, since he did no work alive,

  The lazy pig shall do some now he's dead."

  One widow took her man's remains as snuff,

  Achieving an orgasmic kind of sneeze.

  She said: "The bugger's appetite was rough.

  He hentered, without even saying please,

  My bother hapertures. Enough's enough.

  But as he's dead I'll not begrudge him these."

  Privy Matters

  A man sat once, writhing in costive pain,

  For a whole wretched hour, crouching inside

  A public W.C. And though he tried

  To loose the load, his muscles limp with strain,

  He could not. Yet again. Again. Again.

  But no. He heard a desperate urgent stride

  To the next nook. A hefty splash. He cried:

  "Lucky." – "Lucky? That was my watch and chain."

  There is another ending, one that I

  Have in a scatographic thesis met.

  The costive heard the urgent feet draw nigh,

  The thunder of release immediate.

  "Ah, lucky," was his sigh. But the reply:

  "Lucky? I haven't got me kecks down yet."

  These sonnets are juvenile and tasteless, as one might expect from a Catholic Manchester schoolboy, but the same charges have been made against the work of Belli himself. One ought to note the attempt on the part of J. J. Wilson to use dialectal elements. A Catholic provincial, aware of his foreign blood, he never felt wholly at home in the patrician language of the British Establishment and would, especially in exalted company, deliberately use mystifying dialect words or adopt an exaggerated and near-unintelligible Lancashire accent. He was a small man, with reddish-gold hair inherited from his Irish mother, delicately, or frailly, made, shy, melancholic, heavy-smoking. He would smoke anything, from the wild flower called honesty to pure latakea, and his chest was weak. He was, he said, married to smoke. He never had any other wife.

  Strangely, J. J. Wilson made his first translation of Belli, paraphrase rather, before becoming acquainted with the poet. A student at the University of Manchester in 1937, he was present at a lecture given to the University Literary Society by the Oxford poet G--y G--n. At the discussion over biscuits and coffee afterwards, J. J. ventured a remark to the effect that certain vital human experiences, such as menstruation in women and hangover in both sexes, had never been seriously dealt with even by modern poets. G--n looked him up and down over his coffee-cup and said: "You seem to be a rather coarse and unattractive character." Stung, Wilson went home and wrote the following:

  The orchidaceous catalogue begins

  With testicles, it carries on with balls,

  Ballocks and pills and pillocks. Then it calls

  On Urdu slang for goolies. Gism-bins

  Is somewhat precious, and superior grins

  Greet antique terms like cullions. Genitals?

  Too generalised. Cojones (Español)'s

  Exotic, and too whimsical The Twins.

  Clashers and bells – poetical if tame.

  Two swinging censers – apt for priest or monk.

  Ivories, if pocket billiards is your game.

  I would prefer to jettison such junk

  And give them g--y g--ns as a name,

  If only G--n had a speck of spunk.

  Later he was to discover that he had, by anticipation, contrived a loose English equivalent of one of Belli's more outrageous sonnets.

  Wilson took a moderate bachelor's degree in English Literature together with a subsidiary qualification in Italian. The language thus came back to the family via an interest in Petrarch. Of Belli Wilson had still heard nothing. He took a short holiday in Rome in 1938, was nearly beaten up by Fascisti when he made a "fat bacon" gesture at a portrait of Mussolini, but did not visit the Viale of Trastevere, where a statue of Belli stands. Because of his pulmonary weakness, he was rejected by the armed forces when war broke out, and he spent five years in the Ministry of Information, where his versifying talents were sporadically used for a propagandist end. He was loaned out briefly to the Ministry of Food, for which he wrote "Don't pine for a pud, make do with a spud" when flour was short and potatoes in reasonable supply, but the rhyme was rejected as possessing only a dialectal validity.

  After the war J. J. Wilson, through a friend met in the American Embassy in London, was found a subsidiary post in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York City. He worked and lived in Manhattan until his death in 1959. He discovered the three-volume edition of Belli's Sonetti (Mondadori, 1952) in Brentano's bookshop, casually opened the first volume, and was at once both horrified and fascinated by the strange appearance of Belli's language:

  Vedi l'appiggionante c'ha ggiudizzio

  Come, s'è ffatta presto le sscioccajje?

  E ttu, ccojjona, hai quer mazzato vizzio

  D'avé scrupolo inzino de la pajje!

  But, more than anything, it was the demented devotion to t
he sonnet-form that now drew him to Belli, and he saw a strenuous hobby beckoning – the translating of all the 2,279 sonnets of Belli into what he was to call "English with a Manchester accent." He needed help with the Roman dialect and had to search hard in New York, whose Italian population is mainly Neapolitan, Calabrese, Sicilian, to find a speaker and reader of Romanesco. A countergirl in the New York office of Alitalia – Susanna Roberti – was able to help him, and, horrified and fascinated by the magnitude of his self-imposed task, he set himself to translate a sonnet every day. He did not get far. He chose those sonnets dealing with biblical subjects and managed to achieve draft translations of them all. They follow here, unedited. He died prematurely (but what, when we think of Keats, can this be made to mean?), badly slashed and cracked by hoodlums on West 91st Street, where he lived, when he was staggering home at three in the morning from a party on East 84th Street. An uneasy and unhandsome death. The person is snatched away and the goods remain. And all this is the law and constitution of nature.

  The Creation of the World

  One day the bakers God amp; Son set to

  And baked, to show their pasta-master's skill,

  This loaf the world, though the odd imbecile

  Swears it's a melon, and the thing just grew.

  They made a sun, a moon, a green and blue

  Atlas, chucked stars like money from a till,