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Anthony
Burgess was a novelist of indisputable genius who never published
an indisputably great novel. Some writers–like Ralph
Ellison or Giuseppe di Lampedusa–labor endlessly to focus
their full imagination into a single masterpiece. Burgess
lavishly spread his gifts across thirty-three novels of startling
diversity. He left no magnum opus but scored nearly
a dozen brilliant near-misses. His best novels show such scope,
intelligence, and extravagant originality that many readers
share Gore Vidal's assessment that Burgess was "easily the
most interesting English writer in the last half century."
Burgess's
last novel, Byrne, is not, alas, the masterpiece that
long eluded him. This new volume, however, is so fresh, funny,
and inventive that it ranks among his finest creations. Completed
shortly before his death in 1993, Byrne demonstrates
that not only was Burgess's artistry undiminished at the end
but it was still growing. Many of his books have an experimental
shape, but none is more boldly designed than Byrne,
which unfolds in an entirely new form for Burgess–the
verse novel.
Most
novelists have a youthful fling with poetry before settling
down sensibly with prose, but Burgess never lost his early
passion. He published an epic poem and undertook half a dozen
major verse translations ranging from Oedipus the King
to Cyrano de Bergerac. He also repeatedly placed poets–Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Keats–as the central figures in his novels.
Even his most popular comic character, the constipated F.
X. Enderby, was a poet. (Burgess filled his four Enderby novels
with copious verses purportedly written by his maladroit protagonist.)
In
principle, one had to admire Burgess's ambitious rejection
of literary specialization. Why shouldn't a novelist also
work in poetry or verse drama? In practice, however, the reader
faced a serious problem. Burgess's poetry was vastly inferior
to his prose. Ostentatiously inventive and original, his prose
in novels like A Clockwork Orange or Nothing
Like the Sun was not only delightful but dazzlingly effective.
In contrast, his verse seemed, like poor Mr. Enderby, cramped
and costive.
Mindful
of these failings, I picked up Byrne with trepidation.
What I found was genuinely astonishing–a complex dark
comedy in fluently rhymed verse. Frequently hilarious and
always engaging, this final book simultaneously satisfies
the differing demands of prose fiction and narrative verse.
Composed mostly in the same ottava rima stanza that
Lord Byron used for Don Juan, Byrne shows Burgess
for once fully in command of his poetic medium. One might
expect an author to experience new spiritual insight on his
deathbed, but surely such a technical breakthrough is highly
unusual.
Despite
its singular form, Byrne is an entirely characteristic
Burgess novel. It examines his central themes–sex, religion,
art, and mortality–though with an urgency seldom found
in earlier books. The protagonist is once again an imaginary
artist, in this case Michael Byrne, a minor modern composer
with greater talent in bed than in the concert hall. The novel's
opening section recounts Byrne's public and private careers.
"Failed artist but successful bigamist," he moves opportunistically
from country to country and from bed to bed, leaving a small
tribe of children across the globe. Eventually Byrne vanishes,
presumably dying of old age in Africa.
The
second section shifts abruptly to the present and focuses
on several of Byrne's children now in late middle age. To
their astonishment, they discover that their notorious father
is still alive. He has publicly invited "the fruits of his
insemination / legitimate or not" to a Christmas Eve gathering
at Claridges where he will read his final will and testament.
The rest of Byrne tells of the complicated and violent
paths his children take to this nightmarish reunion.
Perhaps
the novel's most striking episode is Byrne's sojourn in Nazi
Germany. Leaving London with an aging Teutonic diva, Byrne
enters the upper echelons of Berlin Kultur. He recognizes
Nazi racial theories as rubbish, but the amoral adventurer
also notes the professional opportunities afforded an Aryan
composer in Germany's newly Judenfrei musical world.
Soon Byrne writes an operatic showpiece for his soprano lover
set to a libretto by Joseph Goebbels. Burgess brilliantly
counterpoints the composer's personal indifference to the
nightmarish milieu of the age. As Byrne labors on his ambitious
opera, he even finds distractions in the increasingly brutal
society around him.
A
heavy task, but there was light relief
In the Germanic ambience, boisterous, brash,
Torchlit parades and pogroms, guttural grief
In emigration queues, the smash and crash
Of pawnshop windows by insentient beef
In uniform, the gush of beer, the splash
Of schnapps, the joy of being drunk and Aryan,
Though Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
Alternately
hilarious and bitter, the opening section stands as one of
the finest things Burgess ever wrote. A self-consciously literary
artist, Burgess customarily built his novels in layers. A
comic plot might be set upon a theological allegory and then
refracted again through an unreliable narrator. Byrne
proceeds in a similar manner. The first section is simultaneously
a mock biography of a failed Modernist and a scathing critique
of art's relations and responsibilities to society–all
told, we eventually discover, by a journalist who may himself
be one of Byrne's deserted illegitimate children.
If
the later sections do not sustain the comic brilliance of
the opening, they still read very well. Only the ending disappoints.
Patterning his climax after the harrowing conclusion of Conrad's
The Heart of Darkness, Burgess miscalculates. Significantly,
the problem is prosodic as well as narrative. The author allows
the superannuated and demented Byrne to read his last will
in five gnomic sonnets. The poem's narrative momentum founders
at just the moment it needed to hold swift and steady.
The
poetic style of Byrne might reasonably be termed Byronic
if it didn't also sound exactly like Burgess. Not the least
of the book's accomplishments is a richly textured verse style
that fully accommodates the quirky particulars of the novelist's
voice. Shedding the lofty models who had so often inhibited
his early poetry–especially Gerard Manley Hopkins and
T. S. Eliot–Burgess finally permitted himself to write
verse that didn't strive to be poetic. Instead, Byrne marries
the novelistic virtues of energetic narrative and social observation
with "old-fashioned rhyme." The result is a tangy style that
combines the author's earthy sensibility with the compression
and evocative musicality of formal verse. When Byrne, currently
a film composer, weds a fellow employee at the Korda brothers'
London studios, Burgess sums up the marriage in a single well-turned
stanza:
He
married Brenda Brown, who worked in make-up
–A cosmetician: God was not much more
(Kosmetikos from kosmos)–keen to take
up
Domestic calm he once had thought a bore.
She was a decent girl who did not rake up
Harsh details of the life he'd lived before.
Happy in Morden, mortgaged, half-detached,
He fertilised her eggs. They duly hatched.
If
Byrne is a novel built in layers, no one familiar with
Burgess's life and career can fail to recognize that one layer
is autobiographical. The two main characters–Byrne and
his son Tim–are both unflattering versions of the author.
Tim, a faithless priest, hopes to make a secular living by
writing religious documentaries for American Protestants.
(In his final years Burgess wrote Biblical mini-series for
American networks.) Midway through the novel Tim provides
a more disturbing parallel. He begins coughing blood, only
to discover–as Burgess did–that he is dying of lung
cancer. As a medieval monk might place a skull on his writing
desk as a memento mori, Burgess put his own dying body
into his final book.
Equally
chilling are the parallels with Byrne himself. This Anglo-Irish,
lapsed Catholic artist bears many obvious resemblances to
his Anglo-Irish, lapsed, Catholic creator. In interviews,
Burgess, an internationally successful novelist, critic, screenwriter,
and translator, habitually described himself as "a failed
composer." (Until writing his first novel at thirty-eight,
he had concentrated on music and continued to compose throughout
his life.) Byrne is an extended meditation on an artist
whose work has come to nothing. Byrne's music will make no
claim on posterity. Even his profligate sexuality proved futile.
All of his scattered sons and daughters are childless. As
the narrator admits, the future will bring only oblivion to
his depraved protagonist:
The
fascination of the reprehensible
Is my true driving force – was, I should say.
There's no defending of the indefensible,
No armature to strengthen feet of clay.
Wretches like Byrne are far from indispensable,
A single puff will blow their dust away.
Paronomasia is a needless joke:
He needs no fire to turn him into smoke.
Paronomasia–a
typical Burgessian touch. (The word is the rhetorical term
for a pun.) Even contemplating the possibility of his own
physical and artistic extinction, the author revels in the
power of language. Perhaps it will be just that deep impulse
of delight in the face of human finitude that will keep posterity
reading Burgess.
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