Collected Poems

by Anthony Burgess

  77. TWO USES FOR ASHES

  ‘The ashes of my dear departed?’ said

  The widow, serving tea and cake at five

  Five days after the funeral. ‘I contrive

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

  See, they are in an egg-timer instead,

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

  Determined, since he did no work alive,

  The lazy swine will 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 entered, without even saying Please,

  My other apertures. I’ve had enough,

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

  78. ‘THE ORCHIDACEOUS CATALOGUE BEGINS’

  The orchidaceous catalogue begins

  With testicles, 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 (Espan˜ol)’s

  Hemmish and too whimsical The Twins.

  Clashers and bells – poetical if tame.

  Two swinging censors – apt for priest or monk.

  Ivories, if pocket billiards is your game.

  I would prefer to jettison such junk

  And give them geoffrey grigsons as a name,

  If only Grigson had a speck of spunk.

  79. PRIVY MATTERS

  A man sat once, writhing in costive pain,

  For a whole wretched hour, crouching inside

  A public privy. Though he valiantly 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 neighbour box. A hefty splash. He cried:

  ‘Lucky.’ – ‘Lucky? Be damned – that was my watch and chain.’

  There is another ending, one that I

  Have in some scatographic theses met.

  The costive heard the urgent feet come nigh,

  The thunder of release immediate.

  ‘Ah, lucky’, was his sigh. But the reply:

  Went thus: ‘I haven’t got me pants down yet.’

  MOSES

  Foreword 1974

  This verse narrative in eighteen chapters (not books: only epic poems have eighteen books) is an attempt to mediate between the craft of film and the craft of letters. The idea of making a six-part film on the life of the prophet Moses arose in Rome in 1972, and Radiotelevisione Italiana put up the money for it. In 1973, in Rome and New York, Vittorio Bonicelli, Gianfranco de Bosio, Vincenzo Labella and myself worked out the practical details of the project. Despite the Italian provenance, the series was designed as an international venture with an international cast: an American, an Englishman, a Greek, a Swede and a Frenchman were assigned the main roles, but most of the nameless Egyptians and Israelites were Italians.

  The task of hammering out a technique for presenting Moses on the screen which should not seem to compete with Cecil B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments was a collective one, but the writing of a script in English was my responsibility alone. In order to establish a general sense of the narrative movement, and to contrive dialogue which should be neither archaic-poetic nor present-day colloquial, I found it convenient to write out the story in the form of what might be termed a poor man’s epic. Out of the completed narrative, which is what I offer in this book, the six television pun-tate were painfully squeezed.

  People who write fiction for a living, as I do, are often embarrassed when commissioned to write a film script. So much of what we primarily enjoy in the composition of a novel, particularly the evocation of physical sensation and the privilege of looking into not only a character’s sensorium but also his mind, is denied to us. A verbal flow is inhibited by the shibboleth about a film being a visual form that can, at a pinch, do without words altogether. Various costive exigencies are imposed on our tendency to logorrhoea. When Mr Graham Greene was asked to write the original screen-play that was to be The Third Man, he found it necessary to give it the primary, or preliminary, form of a novella. Only in this way could he make his characters come to life. I could not make a novella out of Moses, since there was far too much material and even more lavish ‘passing of time’, but I could not write it as a novel either. If I wrote it in prose at all, I would either produce the Books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which had already been written, or else some wearisome archaeological fantasia in the manner of Thomas Mann.

  Since the traditions of fictional realism and naturalism came into being, the novel has been restricted to the chronicle of more or less real life, full of events which we are ready to be persuaded could conceivably happen in our own experience, given good or ill luck. A certain solidity is expected, so that Moses in such a fictional tradition would have to scratch his left ear occasionally, be depressed at the stink of his unchanged clothes, gaze out with narrowed eyes at the purple Goshen landscape. And if characters are physically solid, they tend to move slowly. A scene, once carefully set up in words, is not easily struck. A novel, Flaubert said, is a heavy machine; cameras, whatever the grips say, are much lighter. And since we expect a novel to be filled with rational events, there is not much room there for the miraculous. Miracles are for fairy stories or for science fiction.

  Although one of the tasks of a fictional chronicler of the career of Moses is to demiraculise wherever possible (manna was really the resin of the tamarisk, blown by the wind; it is easy to strike water from rock when that rock is porous; you can cross the sea of Reeds when the wind blows strongly from the east – and so on), there are still plenty of full-blown and vindictive miracles in Goshen and the desert. Verse will accept these more readily than prose because in verse anything can happen anyway: it is a matter not only of the Homeric tradition but also of the fact that the very movement of verse suggests a wanton twisting of reality. But verse is useful in other ways. It struck me, when first working on Moses, and it goes on striking me, that the techniques of film and verse narrative are very close: both admit economy, ellipsis, rapid shifts of scene. Verse can also give the reader a much clearer idea than prose of the way in which words are actually spoken, indicating, by the crowding of syllables into a line or the thinning of them out, the speed of discourse, making use of the strong initial beat of the line for verbal emphasis, thriving on repetition which, in prose dialogue though not in real-life speech, can seem mannered and wearisome.

  Nobody is sure what poetry is. As Dr Johnson said, it is easier to say what it is not. That this work is not poetry there can be no doubt. I am not a poet, though I wrote a novel about a poet and obligingly wrote poetry for him, and I have to emphasise that I have no poetic intent here – no deploying of surprising images, no verbal brilliance and no artful ambiguities. Though poets prefer to work in verse, there is no reason why they should have a monopoly of it. But I am aware that, having used verse, I may well be accused by careless critics of having tried to write poetry. I will go further than a refutation of that and say that I have not even tried to produce literature. This work is too far cliché-ridden, simplistic and didactic to be classified as anything other than a piece of sub-literature, pop-craft. A poem, even a bad one, is usually called a work of art, but people are reluctant to call even a good film anything other than a piece of craft. We have still to hear the word ‘art’ applied to anything seen on television. I am quite happy to place this book in that sort of no-man’s-land where aesthetic classification is hardly worth bothering about, except by the librarian.

  In 1890, Mark Twain wrote a letter to Andrew Lang in which he said: ‘the little child is permitted to label its drawings “This is a cow – this is a horse” and so on. Th
is protects the child. It saves it from the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticised as kangaroos and work-benches. A man who is whitewashing a fence is doing a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man’s house with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these performances by standards proper to each. Now then, to be fair, an author ought to put upon his book an explanatory line: “This is written for the Belly and the Members.” And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard and thenceforth follow a fairer course.’ This book of mine, then, is written for the Belly and the Members, and I should be grateful for it not to be judged by the standards proper to real epic poets.

  A.B.

  Rome, April 1974

  * *

  Foreword 1976

  A few years ago I was commissioned, along with Vittorio Bonicelli and Gianfranco de Bosio, to provide the script for a television series on birth, life and death of the prophet Moses. I found collaboration difficult and was forced to work entirely on my own, leaving emendation, addition and subtraction to be more or less improvised – by Bonicelli, Gianfranco de Bosio, who was the director, Vincenzo Labella, the producer, the actors Burt Lancaster and Anthony Quayle – while filming proceeded in Israel. The major aesthetic problem was a linguistic one, as it always is with historical or mythical subjects, and I found the only way out of the problem was to precede the assembly of a shooting-script with a more or less literary production – this sort of epic poem you have now in your hands. To have written Moses first as a prose novel would have entailed the setting-up of a somewhat cumbersome mechanism, in which the devices of ‘naturalism’ would have led me to an unwholesome prosaism both in dialogue and récit. Verse moves more quickly and the rhythm of verse permits of a mode of speech midway between the mythical and the colloquial. Out of this homely epic I made my script, but the poem, such as it is, remains and is here for your reading.

  If some of the devices used seem close to the cinematic, that is because I had a film in mind while working on a piece of literature. On the other hand, narrative verse – as you can see from Aurora Leigh as well as the Odyssey – anticipates the cinema. Perhaps the most ambitious film-script ever written is Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, which was completed before even the first crude film had been shown. John Collier recently showed how filmable Paradise Lost is, though his script was, sadly, specifically intended for ‘the cinema of the mind’. Novels are heavily set in their chosen time and place and resist cinematic adaptation more than film-makers will permit themselves to realise. Epics have more to do with wings than with walking, just like films.

  None of us will ever see a film of Beowulf or of The Ring and the Book. We will have to put up instead with impossible adaptations of Tolstoy, Proust, even Joyce – all of which will be artistic as well as financial failures. But here at least you have an epic that became a film, and a not unsuccessful one. Of course, I was lucky to have the Bible behind me.

  Rome, Epiphany, 1976

  1

  THE BONDAGE

  SO Joseph came to die, in some pain, dreaming he was lying

  On a thorny bed called Canaan (drought and famine

  And they went into Egypt and in Egypt they prospered),

  Being a hundred and ten years old, and they embalmed him,

  And he was put in a coffin in Egypt, being a

  Prince of Egypt, the Israelite Joseph a prince of

  Egypt. So Joseph died, the pain passing,

  Smiling on the fulfilment: Egypt the promised land,

  Brown tough shepherds and plump laughing wives

  And son like swords and daughters like date-trees,

  Children tumbling like lambs, the benison of mud.

  Not all shepherds and shepherds’ wives –

  Some rose high, though not so high as Joseph,

  Becoming priests of the gods, Egypt having many gods,

  Officers with seals of their office, officers

  On horseback leading troops, gentlemen,

  Ladies, but mostly men and women in the

  Good air of the delta, lambs and children frisking.

  And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly,

  And multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty,

  And the land was filled with them, filled with the

  Tribe of Jacob and of Reuben, Simeon, Levi,

  Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin,

  Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher,

  The tribes keeping their distance one from another,

  But all with a memory of a dead land called Canaan

  And of a dead prince of god of Egypt called Joseph.

  Now there arose up a new king over Egypt,

  Which knew not Joseph

  Behold, the people of the children of Israel

  Are more and mightier than we.

  The great intellectual eroded face of the Pharaoh,

  The tired eroded voice, the wasted body in gold cloth,

  The ringed claws grasping the sphinx-arms

  Of the pharaonic throne, aromatic gums asmoke,

  Slaves with feather-fans, effigies, effigies,

  All empty-eyed. The councillors listened.

  ‘Their men are bursting with seed. Their women

  Are round like fruit. Their encampments are loud

  With the bleating of children. They multiply, multiply.’

  A councillor said: ‘Your divine majesty

  Has some immediate danger in mind?’ And Pharaoh:

  ‘War. Should there be war

  With some alien people, might not these

  Aliens in our midst join with our enemies.

  Immediate danger. Let danger be always immediate.

  It is a sound thesis. Let us defend ourselves

  Before we are attacked.’ And another councillor:

  ‘Your divine majesty’s immediate orders?’

  ‘I specify nothing,’ Pharaoh said. ‘I say:

  Deal wisely with them. Use – immediate wisdom.’

  So immediate wisdom, in the dust of hooves

  And the shine of metal, thundered into the sheep-shearing.

  The pipe faltered and the song ceased and the dance,

  Israelite mouths open in wonder and fear

  As the captain in metal looked about him, taking his time,

  Picking at length on one: ‘You. Yes, you. Your name?’

  The man drew his wife and son and daughter to him, saying:

  ‘Amram. Of the tribe of Levi.’ And the captain:

  ‘Pay heed, Amram, of the tribe of Levi. You,

  Your wife, your son, your daughter, your beasts and chattels,

  All that is yours, these from this day stand confiscate

  And are given up to the power of Egypt. In the name of

  Horus the god, ruler of the world of the living

  And of the dead.’ He signalled abruptly and

  The ravaging began: the soldiers, going baaaaaah,

  Herding the men and women and children like sheep

  While the sheep ran bleating in disorder, foodstores trampled,

  Tents fired, garments torn, and Amram cried: ‘Why? Why?’

  And the grinning captain answered: ‘Immediate wisdom.’

  Therefore did they set over them taskmasters

  To afflict them with their burdens.

  And they were set to build for Pharaoh treasure-cities,

  And the names of the cities were Ra’amses and Pithom.

  Amram was surprised, pushed down the dusty street

  Of Pithom with wife and family, that the enslavement

  Had already gone so far: Israelites

  Of other tribes long-settled, ready to laugh

  At a wavering old man, a newcomer, who cried out:

  ‘You can’t cram us in here like so many

  Dates in a jar. We’re shepherds. We live on the

  Open plains. Shut us up h
ere and we’ll die.’ –

  ‘Oh no, not die,’ jabbed a soldier. ‘Work, you’ll work.’

  Work, and a whip cracked. The quarters were overcrowded,

  Suitable for slaves. Amram at the door, shy, said:

  ‘Jochebed, my wife, and my son Aaron and

  Miriam my daughter, and I am Amram of the

  Tribe of Levi.’ A woman said: ‘Woman of the

  Tribe of Levi, help me to help yourselves to a

  Little space. A very little.’ A blind old man

  Groped through the noise and smells and dark towards Amram:

  Ah, a good fresh smell of shepherd. Share this

  Bit of bread with me, take it, go on. I’d say

  That Egyptian food is good food, not that I

  See much of it, not that I

  See much. Near-blind and old, no good as a worker.

  The workers get all. Where are you from then?’

  Amram: ‘From the vale of Shefru.’ – ‘I’d say you were a

  Liar. I’d say the tribe of Levi was

  Never in Shefru.’ And Amram, patiently:

  ‘My father was Cheat, my father’s father was Levi.

  Do you follow me? My father’s father was

  Levi the son of Jacob.’ And the old man: ‘I’d

  Say that was a possible story. Me and my family,

  We’re from the tribe of Gad. But you’ll find a

  Lot of the tribes all mashed together here –

  Benjamin, Reuben, Zebulon – a lot of tribes and

  All slaves. I’d say there was a sort of mystery in it,

  The twelve tribes brought together at last. But in

  Slavery, as it’s called. I’d say that he was

  Laughing at us, it, if he exists that is, you know, the

  Old one, older than me, the

  God of Abraham, as they call him.‘Where the children were playing

  There was a cry and a rattling of little stones

  On the clay floor: Miriam, daughter of Amram,

  Had pulled a necklace from the neck of an

  Older girl, crying: ‘It’s sinful. To wear a thing like that.

  An Egyptian thing.’ Tears and reproaches and the

  Mothers and fathers stepping in, but Aaron grinned.