Collected Poems

by Anthony Burgess

  Could be allowed. The foul expletive and

  The fair descriptive equally were banned.

  Obscene – the very word was like a sneer,

  Semantically null, a sneeze of fear,

  A spurt of shock confronting what was known,

  Though glossed as monstrous, in a privy zone.

  What decency pronounced should be concealed

  Was with a frightful candour all revealed.

  Strange that our Western culture should proclaim:

  What grants most pleasure also grants most shame.

  But the anomaly, the joy-bred guilt

  Is, when you think of it, already built

  Into our sad condition, for the source

  Of ecstasy is also bestial, coarse,

  A lowly instrument of base discharge.

  Again, note, the disparity is large

  Between the exaltations that we bless

  And the base agent’s total ugliness.

  The foul familiar must be rendered strange

  – The lingam and the yoni, the whole range

  Of Sigmund’s symbols before we can start

  Accepting sex as matter for high art.

  Ulysses and The Rainbow, Lady C.

  Primed act of privy criminality,

  Because of shame wrapped in what should exalt.

  As for The Well of Loneliness, its fault

  Lay in its sex invisible but perverse.

  Love – bad enough; love between women – worse.

  To declare smugly: ‘Look, the battle’s done’

  Is always perilous. Wars are never won.

  A truce looks like a peace. It would appear,

  However, that what book is published here

  Will not be banned for its erotic theme.

  True, Kirkup’s poem on a soldier’s dream,

  A gay centurion eyeing the Crucified

  As fodder for his gaiety, was denied

  The right of print, the poet punished too,

  But blasphemy has always been taboo.

  A whole new generation flourishes

  That does not know what a book-censor is

  Except as history dead and buried. Still,

  Obscenity is not nor ever will

  Be an archaic word. The candid show

  Of love, whether heterosexual or no,

  Remains a most disputable terrain,

  For there is more to sex than Lady Jane,

  John Thomas, Boylan, Molly Bloom, et al.

  Plain eroticism soon becomes banal;

  The stronger gust of sexual cruelty

  Begs exploitation. And coprophagy,

  Necrophily, paedophily all gape,

  Along with sodomy and murderous rape,

  To batten on a hard-won liberty.

  Is there a limit, then, on themes that we

  Submit for the high alchemy of art?

  This is a question we may only start

  To argue when the frontiers that persist

  Between the aesthete and the moralist

  Have better signposts or have none at all.

  As for the law, it is unwise to call

  Upon the jurist’s skill to separate

  Pornography and art. Let not the State,

  Only the aesthetician, work it out

  And tell us what the business is about.

  The writer’s business, on one level, is

  Exploiting varied possibilities

  In human language. There’s a trinity

  Of author’s ends. We clearly see the three –

  The pornographic, the didactic, and

  The static or aesthetic, lie or stand

  At points upon a wide continuum.

  Art’s in the middle, at the far ends come

  Linguistic modes freed from the artist’s aim –

  The urge to educate, or else inflame.

  At one end the didactic; here we seek

  The treatise, large or small, on the technique

  Of dice or dance, the neutron’s mysteries,

  The wide, in contrast, sky’s immensities.

  Appeal is made to the intelligence,

  The reason, the bald brain. In consequence,

  {The language must be plain, denotative,

  {Transparent. No word anywhere may give

  {A breath of the ambiguous, and live.

  Extruded is the human tear or laugh.

  Seek at the other end the pornograph,

  Whose etymology means nothing more

  Than this: the simple picture of a whore.

  Whores, by tradition, need no other names,

  Being mere items in erotic games,

  And the desirable anonymous

  Who, in commercial artwork, ogle us

  With a bared bosom or a silk-clad calf,

  Are each themselves a kind of pornograph.

  But, by extension, the term covers now

  The why, the which, the what, the where, the how

  Of naked congress, dual, multiple,

  With, if need warrants, such additional

  Refinements as the pickaxe and the whip,

  A luscious area for censorship.

  Cocteau – or was it Gide? I am not sure –

  Called pornographs one-handed literature,

  A term that could, with justice, be applied

  To the effusions of the other side,

  For, cooking in the kitchen, we may stand

  Stirring a pan, book in the other hand.

  What the two genres hold in common is

  One-handed, yes, but scarcely literature.

  That bright commodity that sits secure,

  Or nearly, between genres much preferred

  By votaries of the thing and not the word,

  Wishes to move, and wishes to inform,

  But, more, to keep imagination warm.

  {Imagination has no ready role

  {In the other two. A total lack of soul

  {Marks book-as-tool and not organic whole.

  The object of one object is to teach,

  That of the other – help the reader reach

  A swift purgation, often by himself.

  Restore the instrument then to the shelf.

  Both types attain their stark kinetic aims

  Outside, outside – in action or in flames.

  But literature is different. It arouses,

  Enflames the Thames, engulfs both men and houses,

  Drags at the heart, excites to cathartise,

  Purges within its rhythm, satisfies.

  The reader, calm of mind, all passion spent,

  Closes its pages, cool and near content.

  True, pornograph and didact are too near

  For verbal art to stay aloof and clear,

  And they may, with the unskilful artist, taint,

  Pollute his purposes and smear his paint.

  Thus, in the fiction of the factive kind,

  That fills the empty hour and lulls the mind,

  The informative and pornographic meet.

  Hero and heroine, beneath a sheet

  Made sweaty by their amorous exercise,

  Recount the history of some enterprise

  Or talk of Tuscan incunabula

  (The Encyclopaedia Britannica

  Fills up the empty space between their ears);

  They quieten the poor fact-soaked reader’s fears

  That mere diversion may become a bore

  By falling to their exercise once more.

  The continuum is bent, the two ends are

  Made one when linear grows circular.

  Condemn the factual when it pretends

  To be inspired by true aesthetic ends

  And, similarly, literary art

  Must be attacked and toughly torn apart

  When it essays a propagandist aim

  (Teaching again); the artist may not claim

  The right to wield the pedagogic chalk,

  Throw out the drama and
resort to talk,

  Hammer a tedious tuneless thesis, or

  Endue the laurels of a senator.

  And when the pornograph presumes to be

  A sort of art, condemn it equally.

  Do not invoke morality; your ground

  Is an aesthetic one and deals with sound

  And unsound literary pretensions. But

  The door to moral questions is not shut.

  The pornographic – is it bad or good?

  It provokes onanism, as it should,

  And moral theory or moral fact

  Means nothing to the masturbator’s act.

  Moral prescriptions never may intrude

  On the amoral bliss of solitude.

  But should pornography refollicate

  The social act of sex, induce a state

  Of mutual satisfaction, where’s the sin?

  Keep out morality; let reason in.

  Still, if the probing police commit to fire

  Those ikons of a desperate desire,

  Who will complain? So long as we ensure

  The mauler’s paws are kept from literature

  {Which, of its nature, is no instrument

  {To gratify the onanist’s intent

  {Or fire the rapist, we can be content.

  We face another question now. Before

  I pose it, let me travel back a score

  Of years or more to a most heinous crime

  Committed in the great permissive time.

  Children were caught and tortured and their screams

  Recorded in a montage helped by themes

  Drawn from the vapid music of the age,

  Then they were slaughtered coldly. Neither rage

  Nor vengeance was the motive of the deed,

  An acte gratuit. One killer who could read

  Admitted frankly that he might have been

  Infected by a glance at Sade’s Justine.

  A lady, brooding on iniquity,

  Let out a scream and screamed: ‘If only we

  Could save one child from lethal agonies

  By burning every book that was or is,

  We should not hesitate,’ implying thus

  The thing we knew – that books are dangerous.

  Literature, certainly, is meant to hurt,

  Seeking not to confirm but to subvert,

  To prick complacency, but not to kill:

  Here the perverted, not subverted will

  Which, heaven be praised, is rare, can be impelled

  To sin by what tradition has long held

  To be not evil but beneficent.

  Take, for example, the Old Testament,

  Root of our culture, bright theophany,

  Source of corruption for one man, for he,

  Eyes misted by the steam of sacrifice,

  Contrived his own sublunar paradise

  By knifing children in Jehovah’s name.

  Even the Catholic mass has garnered blame

  For hinting anthropophagy to one

  Who sought an intimate communion

  By slaying all the women that he could

  To drink their blood. ‘In God’s eyes it was good,’

  God being he. We cannot legislate

  For the unsullied children of the State

  In terms of what will make the bad man worse,

  The madman madder. The whitecoated nurse

  Sequesters what is clearly venomous

  To him but is pure meat and drink to us.

  A boy reads Hamlet and is justified

  In consummating family homicide.

  And so let muted Hamlet join the banned.

  The eye that reads King Lear directs the hand

  That pulls a pair of streaming jellies out.

  That books are instigators we must doubt,

  Along with visual versions of the same,

  Since they but copy life. Life is to blame.

  The question I postponed I now present:

  Does writing have an ethical intent

  Even while taking Wilde’s prescript to heart –

  That art’s created for the sake of art?

  All right – we know that Pater said it first.

  Dear Oscar was remiss enough to burst

  The shackles of Paterian constraint,

  Making repentant Dorian slash the paint.

  He would not shatter, even if he could,

  The bond that bolts pure beauty to the good.

  For art proclaims nobility at best,

  At worst a sick desire of being blest.

  If its implied morality is not

  The one that Church and State alike allot,

  This is because it claims a wider scope

  And stresses love much more than faith and hope.

  No novel ever written praised the bad,

  Diminished sanity and raised the mad

  Except for some ironical effect.

  Creators of necessity elect

  {Creation not destruction as their theme,

  {Fulfilment of a larger moral dream

  {Than waking life is able to esteem.

  And this condition is not blemished if

  Out of the woodwork should exude a whiff

  Of pure diablerie. Our William Blake

  Sought to exalt hell just for heaven’s sake,

  Finding in fire an energy to heat

  Cold bottoms stuck to heaven’s judgment seat,

  Or, if you will, a passion that might thaw

  Enmarbled reason frozen into law.

  The law must trust the artist: only he

  Or she proclaims the human. And if we

  Shudder at evil steaming from a page,

  Then we must damp our moralistic rage,

  Remembering that evil must be shown

  Only that good may be the better known.

  The battle is engaged. The winning side

  Is not foreknown, but victory is implied

  Even for the victim, should the victim be

  Symbolic of a large humanity.

  Art may imply, but not directly speak,

  Scorning the straight path, prizing the oblique,

  Hinting in elegance, loathing to shove

  Us bodily into the lake of love.

  Love. Now religion. A much graver theme

  Confronts us. To begin, let us blaspheme.

  Jesus, the bastard of a drunken brute,

  Was gotten on the village prostitute.

  His followers were active sodomites

  Who dragged in Judas to their dark delights.

  The heavenly kingdom was not for the just

  But just the devotees of lawless lust.

  {Read this, and then re-read it. Having read,

  {Do not heap hot damnation on my head,

  {But add inverted commas and ‘he said’.

  I may have written this, but on behalf

  Of some fictitious sneerer whose foul laugh

  A fictional believer counters thus:

  ‘Your fiction is so vilely blasphemous

  You damn yourself to darkness.’ The reply?

  ‘Christ was a liar and he taught a lie,

  A bastard brat, son of a fucking whore,

  His words a drunkard’s belch and nothing more.’

  Our world is built of opposites. Not strange

  That one mind can engender this exchange,

  And it’s unjust to fasten on to me

  The fouler voice of the antiphony.

  Imagine death and take the blame for death?

  Macbeth is bad, but Shakespeare’s not Macbeth.

  Turn to a later giver of God’s laws

  And you may libel him with greater cause.

  Mohamed claimed no heavenly origin,

  And to defame his essence is no sin.

  ‘This shoveller of camel-droppings who

  Craftily married and pretended to

  Broadcast the Word from Gabriel’s microphone

  – We have
his word for it, but that alone –

  Raped virgins under age and robbed the poor,

  Corrupted Arab, Persian, Turk and Moor,

  And left a bloody legacy of hate

  To doubter, heretic and apostate,

  A stinking rubbish dump made white with paint,

  A shaitan masquerading as a saint.’

  These words are mine, their import otherwise.

  The gravamen of uttering them lies

  With some dim personage who does not exist

  Save in the fancy of the fantasist.

  {We have this right – to voice the darker side;

  {The devil’s sneer is there to be denied,

  {To hear it lying and to say it lied.

  Fanatics live by absolutist laws.

  They, at this time of writing, are the cause

  Of a free writer’s cowering in some den

  Out of the reach, he hopes, of murderous men

  Ordered to hate, but know not what they hate,

  Assassins fed on hashish by a State

  That re-instils the wretched image of

  A God who raves for blood and not for love,

  Who’re promised paradise but, better far,

  Shekels for one swish of the scimitar.

  For a new breed of Censor now arrives,

  Equating human speech with human lives.

  ‘Follow our law,’ he thunders, ‘burn or ban

  Whatever terrifies Islamic man,

  {Even if he’s a tolerated guest

  {Of polities where no faith is oppressed.

  {He has the privilege of knowing best.

  There is no God but Allah. Elohim,

  God or Jehovah is a shadowy dim

  Dull sketch of our invisibly bright One

  Who tells us human revelation’s done.

  For Nabi Musa, Nabi Isa fall

  Before the greatest Nabi of them all.

  Mohamed saw the last effulgence. Bow,

  You rational future, to the Muslim now.

  We hold our paynim hostages and slay

  Should you oppose our word and disobey.’

  Here’s the new foe of liberated speech,

  Whose insolent arm presumes to stretch and reach

  Beyond the confines of Islamic soil.

  Allah alone, whose bounty flows in oil,

  Will reign inviolate, unopposed, serene

  In lands whose present God is the machine,

  And churchbells yield to the muezzin’s wail

  Should oil-rich Islam strike and then prevail.

  Here is a slogan sanity must clutch:

  ‘Belief is dangerous. Don’t believe too much.’

  When I was young, rocked on a papist knee,

  Dense with the dogmas hammered into me,

  On Rome’s authority I used to dub

  The Church of England a mere cricket club,

  A genteel congeries of vague belief,

  Of veal-consumers scared of bloody beef,

  With boyish bishops arguing unvexed

  At contrary glossings of a text,