Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

by Burgess, Anthony

  And still, with my flesh all caked and swollen tender bladders at my groin and in my oxters, I could not myself see sin. Some say that the very act of love, when not sanctified, is a way into hell, but, for all my guilt, I could not see it as more than wrong. Right and wrong were the mild engines that drove the pretty poems and plays of Sweet Master S; evil was yet to be born. I could best see love unsanctified as mere clownishness when the burden of seed was dropped. Ben, I remember, Englished Petronius:

  Doing a filthy pleasure is, and short;

  And, done, we soon repent us of the sport.

  Well, there was mountainous belching Ben, a great hod of bricks falling on some poor croshabell, growling and grunting in his ponderous frotting, what time she cried, ‘Oo, th’art a ton weight, ow, hast knocked all wind out on me.’ And yet Ben’s destiny was far removed from my own, blessed as he has been to be able to take the world skin-deep — humours and manners — and to know that the world takes itself skin-deep, though not with Ben’s laws and systems. To some it falls to suffer the fateful lesion and to have that seed enter which fertilises the egg which will hatch the truth about the world.

  I rode to Bath for the waters when the apothecaries and herbalists afforded no help. Riding, I thought of her, trying to pump up bitterness. What she had given me she had to be herself first given. There was no one to blame; we all choose what we will have, but it is unfair that the choice must so often be made in the dark. God is a sort of roaring clown full of bone-cracking japes. It is as though Will Kemp had been monopolist of the Globe.

  What properties those Bath waters had I cannot say, but I was purged to wraith’s thinness. More, my eyes cleared and I could see the world in very sharp colours: its paint seemed hardly dry. More, it was as if length and breadth and height had been but newly created. I wondered what these creatures were that laughed and plotted and chambered. I savoured the word ‘man’ over and over as it were the name of some new animal brought back by sea-adventurers. I was creating man afresh, planting him in a garden with clean white body and the innocent eyes of a deer. But he would not stay there: he must needs leap out to his plotting and blood-letting and sniggering nastiness. Will was knotted within him but it was will towards something that I, as God, could not have made. Therefore there was an opposite to God. This I could see but I still could not feel it. The time was not yet.

  For the present it was enough to ride back to London and castigate the filthy world which I had rendered more filthy. Limping about Bread Street and Milk Street, inhaling Fleet Ditch, I was drawn to searching out my fellows in disease, gloating on a nose-sore like a raspberry, a lip glistening soft, wet, huge, coal-shiny, a naked arm that was yellow streaks and rose pustules, a stone eye mined by worms. Then I reeled with my discovery of what I should have long known — that the fistulas and imposthumes, bent bones, swellings, corrupt sores, fetor were of no different order from the venality and treachery and injustice and cold laughing murder of the Court. And yet none of these leprous and stinking wretches had willed their rottenness. The foul wrong lay then beyond a man’s own purposing; there was somewhere, outside time’s very beginning, an infinite well of putridity from which body and mind alike were driven, by some force unseen and uncontrollable, to drink.

  Was there not somewhere a clean world? Theocritan shepherds piped — Damon, Lycidas, Syphilus (that was the name; that was from Fracastor) — but I saw them too eaten, their sheep with foot-rot, the southern torrents crunching their mean shelters like apples. I turned to the tales of Greek and Trojan and expected to find again what I had known as a boy — war all smiling postures of the dance, a game of buffeting with reed spears. But, of course, they were like ourselves. They were braggarts, cowards, traducers, whores. So I started a play on Troilus and Cressida in disgust that man should be born in baseness and nastiness and my sickness found me a new language for its expression — jerking harsh words, a delirium of coinages and grotesque fusions. I made Ariadne and Arachne one, a fair heroine become a spider by virtue or vice of her labyrinthine weaving. Ariachne. Some cold man some day, reading, will cure that name.

  Here, then, was the end of all sweetness. But I wept to see the end of the honey days, winced to turn Cressida into a whore of the Court. Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. But disease had closed it long before — a swollen ring of corruption. Die in dust but live in filth. Well, if we are to live with it we must somehow ennoble it.

  ii.

  WORMS feed on Hector brave. And on proud sulking Achilles. An atomy dreaming of the subversion of order he erupted — Essex, Felix, Bolingbroke — and was a sore on the white body of the commonwealth. There he was with his mob, advancing on the Capitol. You are all there with your bills and cudgels — Prindable, Lillington, Liddell, Alabaster, Anguish, Edgecumbe, Gildersleeves, Lympe, Pogue, Shackles. Briefly to this end: we are all diseased; and with our surfeiting and wanton hours have brought ourselves into a burning fever. So then the horror was immanent; Essex (Chapman’s own Achilles in the dedication to his Homer) but broke the skin to let it gush in foulness. In my delirium the City was mine own body — fighting broke out in ulcers on left thigh, both armpits, in the spongy and corrupt groin. And then came the end of Essex — a fair head rolling, an heroic head — and near the end of Harry. But Harry was but sent to the Tower.

  My most utter shame that year was to stand at my father’s graveside shaking with my disease, eyes curiously on my head-patches naked of hair and the ulcer on my mouth. He is truly a great gentleman now; he hath, see, the aristocrat of diseases. All I could see in Anne was the memory of old orgies and that particular orgy I had interrupted that day of my sudden homecoming. Let me keep away; I will lodge this night not in my own house but at the inn. Tell my daughters it is nothing, but a slight distemper, no more.

  I could tell the time was coming when I should know the great revelation. Meantime I could only cling to my image of order, the smooth white body of a hardly imaginable Eternal City. I dreamed of myself as Caesar, old and with Gilbert’s falling sickness, and Brutus was, for some reason, Ben, chider, mocker, an opposing spirit. The image of the falling city, prefigured in the prodigies of a night, was drawn from my own body — the bloody holes, the burning hand. The fall of the commonwealth is so terrible because it is the fall of the body. It is no sweeping away of things abstract but the tearing of sensible nerve and the wrenching of tissue to draw blood.

  iii.

  I AWOKE in the middle of the night — the bellman calling that it was four and fine — to find her there at last, the goddess. It was without formality, unannounced by trumpets or prodigious harbingers. She was in the likeness of F, gold-skinned, naked. I could meet the terror of her eyes with calm. In her hands she held a small vial wrought of some stone like porphyry. This she placed by my bed and then, without smiling or utterance of any word of love, bore down on me, caressing my scabby and pocked flesh. I was her unwilling succubus. The moment of total possession was marked in me by a sense of something breaking, the rupturing of a hymen unknown to anatomists. She, at this moment, unstoppered her porphyry vial and released——

  She released unbelievable effluvia. It seemed not possible. The hopelessness of man’s condition was revealed in odours that came direct, in a kind of innocent Eden freshness, from that prime and original well. The rest of my life, such as it might be, must be spent in making those effluvia real to all. For the first time it was made clear to me that language was no vehicle of soothing prettiness to warm cold castles that waited for spring, no ornament for ladies or great lords, chiming, beguiling, but a potency of sharp knives and brutal hammers. I understood what she herself was — no angel of evil but an uncovenanted power. But, so desperate was the enemy, she had been drawn by an irresistible force to become, if not herself evil, yet contracted to be the articulatrix of evil.

  She did not so much leave my chamber as disintegrate into particles which settled themselves, as in a permanent home, into the orifices of my body — disturbing the hairs in my nostr
ils, the labyrinth of my ears, the sore lower entrances. What was now most palpable was what, before, might have seemed only a transitory vision of the nature of the world, a sick man’s fancy. But of the primacy of what there was no single word to describe (save the word no, perhaps) I was aware as of something physical.

  Oh, the cruelty of the joke and the shameful weakness of the forces of good. Why had no poet seen it before? No poet had seen it before because only these times were reserved for the first seeing of it. My disease was a modern disease; it was the same disease as that which cracked order in State and Church and the institutions of both. We have had the best of our time.

  iv.

  THERE he is, John Hall, the quality’s own physician, my son-in-law. He surveys me frowning, pursing his lips, stroking his beard. Little time to go now, he thinks; perhaps in tomorrow’s early hours. He will record nothing of his father-in-law’s disease in his notebooks. He is one for purging and letting, most of his patients — Sir This, Lady That, my lord Such-and-such — suffering from surfeits of pigeon-flesh and cream. His father-in-law’s disease was one only to be whispered about: he saw what the world was and he wrote it down to the dictation of a goddess.

  — Plays? He wrote plays?

  — Aye, plays. His plays were first all flowers and love and sweet laughter or else the stirring true record of England’s progress towards order. Then he brooded on what he called evil, aye.

  — Evil? Wrongs, that is?

  — Nay, not wrongs, for wrongs, he said, were man-made and might be redressed. But he thought that the great white body of the world was set upon by an illness from beyond, gratuitous and incurable. And that even the name Love was, far from being the best invocation against it, often the very conjuration that summoned the mining and ulcerating hordes. We are, he seemed to say, poisoned at source.

  — How showed he it?

  — Oh, he created these great men powerless against evil. There were good men drawn into its web or weak men who beat their fists vainly at it. Or there were men who themselves embodied the disease, the breakers and corrupters of the State. Though it was not always the State; sometimes it was marriage.

  — He has been happily married?

  — My mother-in-law has been, I believe, a good wife to him. She has been faithful throughout. He himself, though, has been guilty of bed-breach.

  — Let us hearken. He mumbles something.

  —Aye. It will not now be long. He will come very soon now to his final utterance.

  — Was he a great man? Shall we take the utterance down?

  Daughter can overcome power of evil. Son not. Nor Hamlet nor Othello, both my sons. That poor Kate Hamlet was drowned for love. Water and a virgin girl. They are our only cleansers.

  — The last word is usually nonsense.

  v.

  MY summary, physician.

  I thought, that day, that what happened to me was manner of a contagion from my brother Gilbert. It was on-stage. It was Hamlet. I was the Ghost, croaking my objurgations. Then (they told me this, shocked, thereafter) I let forth a great shriek, fell, foamed, kicked, rolled. The audience accounted it fine acting.

  What followed was of little use to the playhouse. I forgot lines, my brains were constantly tired, I neglected my affairs, I raged, I hated then loved, loved then hated. One day I shocked myself by pissing openly near Whitehall. I woke three nights with so extreme a desire for ale that I went out, near-naked, to knock up the landlord of the Triple Tun. I took to brothel-going. And there it was, in Clerkenwell, that I——

  She looked not diseased, only her golden flesh seemed changed to an iron-colour. Her breasts sagged, her belly pouted, her hair was a tangle of wires, here and there a tooth was gone. We looked at one another, and I saw myself in her eyes — hair vanished in tufts, fat stolid face, doublet unbuttoned for the greater ease of my flesh. I nodded and nodded in a sort of satisfaction that we both exemplified the rottenness of the world. And then I said what had long been on my mind: —

  — A gift from him, was it not?

  She hung her head, saying nothing. We might all then, the three of us, be drawn into the one corruption. But the work of those two was done. Consummatum est, erat. I could no longer lie with her. Yet, leaving, I could have wept, had there been in me any longer the capability of tears, for all the Beauty that the Enemy took away. I must eternise that tawny queenliness, cursing.

  Not lie with her, but with others. Joan, Kate, Meg, Susan, Margery, Tooth, Samson, the Yellow One. The cock crowed to bursting. Meantime I spent my money, often without premeditation — on the house in Blackfriars, the red Hungarian cloak, a job of malt, a share in a company that did not exist, a pipe of Canary, horses (one an Arab), a doublet studded with glass cut like jewels. Back here in Stratford I roared my greatness out. That night with Ben and Drayton in the inn I shouted that I was God. But the goddess was firm within me: she had opened up these terrible Indies but remained as my navigatrix. The lands, Hoby, you told me of, the strange birds, the talking fruit, the three-legged men — they all exist; you were no liar.

  vi.

  QUESTIONS? You wish to know how ventriloquial all this is, who is really speaking? This is no impersonation, ladies and gentlemen. When the Poisoner comes he comes to break, and walls are among the things he breaks. I am sick and tired and long for my East. Take off at. Your faces are very dim about me.

  What is your great crime, then?

  Love, love, and it is always love. Not wisely but too. Fatimah. I will distribute copies of that sonnet after the lecture. You can never win, for love is both an image of eternal order and at the same time the rebel and destructive spirochaete. Let us have no nonsensical talk about merging and melting souls, though, binary suns, two spheres in a single orbit. There is the flesh and the flesh makes all. Literature is an epiphenomenon of the action of the flesh.

  How about blood?

  The West is eveningland, the East morningland. He sent his blood out there. I am of his blood. The male line died in the West. It was right it should continue in the East. Summon no one. I shall be all right. One short sleep past.

  Subject-matter?

  Oaklings, footsticks, cinques, moxibustion, the Maccabees, the Lydian mode (soft, effeminate), the snow-goose or whitebrant, rose-windows, government, the conflagration of citadel and senate-house, Bucephalus, the Antilegomena, Simnel Sunday, the torrid zone, Wapping, my lord’s top-boots, the shoeflower, prostitute boys, dittany, face-ague, cosmic cinefaction, the Antipodes, the Gate of Bab, Fidessa, Rattlin the Reefer, Taliesin, the dead head in alchemy, the bar, dungeons, skylarks, the wind, Thaumast, the dark eyes of London, the fellowship of the frog, Gesta Regum Anglorum, Myrddhin, faithful dealing, A Girle worth Gold, viticulture, the Queen that’s dead (bee, meadow, chess, Bench, regnant), imposts of arches, pollards, sea-fox and sea-hog and sea-heath, the sigmoid curve, cardinals, touchability.

  What would you have now?

  No more. No no no more. Never again.

  One last word. One last last last last word.

  My Lord.

  Copyright © 1964 by Anthony Burgess

  Copyright renewed 1992 by Anthony Burgess

  First published as a Norton paperback 1975; reissued 1996, 2103

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burgess, Anthony, 1917–1993.

  Nothing like the sun : a story of Shakespeare's love-life / Anthony Burgess.


  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-393-34640-4 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-0-393-34676-3 (e-book)

  1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Fiction.

  2. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Fiction.

  3. Dramatists—Fiction. 4. Biographical fiction. 5. Love stories.

  I. Title.

  PR6052.U638N68 213

  823'.914—dc23

  2013015074

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