Burgessian Dystopia
Anthony Burgess once remarked, not altogether facetiously, that the ideal reader of his novels should be, among other things, a lapsed Catholic who had read the same books he had. Certainly, when approaching The Wanting Seed (1962),  the reader would find his appreciation of the book enhanced by a knowledge of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” as well as some sense of what J.G. Frazier’s The Golden Bough is about, and (if not a lapsed or loyal Catholic oneself) a look at something like the big paperback Catechism that the Vatican issued a few years ago. Burgess himself called the book “very Catholic.” It’s also very allusive, and the allusions enrich the book considerably, as we’ll see. 

Notoriously a reviewer of his own Inside Mr Enderby, Burgess also reviewed, or at least revisited, The Wanting Seed thirty years later, in You’re Had Your Time, where he quotes (and then half agrees with) an assessment of it as “half-baked,” but only after spending several pages explaining its themes, as if in defence of it. This simultaneously pro and contra approach makes sense. Though flawed, the book has considerable strengths which, 50 years later now, deserve restating.

Admittedly, reading decades-old “futfic” (to use Burgess’s label) often entails winking at quaintly dated details. Though there’s less to overlook in The Wanting Seed than in, say, The Time Machine or Back to Methuselah, it does contain its share of comic oddities—the newsdisc on the wall-spindle, the “long-chain synthetic polymeric amide” outfits, and so on. But such incidental false notes notwithstanding, much of the novel still rings true—perhaps most notably the sort of mythic resonance or background Burgess evokes by literary and religious allusion.

The story itself is fairly simple. Tristram Foxe lives in a future when overpopulation compels a homosexual officialdom to impose strict population controls—including infanticide and secret war-games that result in the dead being processed into food. State suppression of everyone’s natural impulses makes life a dull business, and some refuse to be stifled—Tristram’s wife enjoys a love-affair with his brother, religion revives in rural areas, workers agitate. As all this unrest intensifies, Tristram awakens to his natural bond with his wife, who has fled to the countryside to give birth to illicit (and maybe illegitimate) offspring. His picaresque pursuit of her across an England seething with social change—the book’s philosophy of history is as rambunctious as its quest-story—comprises the bulk of the narrative.

As the story unfolds, “The Waste Land” contributes quotations that implicitly equate the cheerless mood of Tristram’s world of enforced infertility with the arid, sterile atmosphere of Eliot’s poem. Such a comparison plainly suits Burgess’s thematic intentions, because “The Waste Land” is a central 20^th-century text on the subject of spiritual inanition and yearning for inner rejuvenation among dispirited moderns. Burgess himself once summarized the poem’s major theme in an essay: “The modern world,” he writes, “is to Eliot the waste land of ancient legend. It is dry and infertile. It needs the revivifying rain that never comes and which it does not really want…. [T]he modern world is committed to death.” Considering the fictional world Burgess creates in the novel—where pregnant women are treated as criminals, childless professionals  are preferred ahead of child-rearing colleagues, and gay sex is the socially approved form of intercourse—one can view The Wanting Seed as telling on the symbolic level much the same story as The Waste Land, albeit in narrative rather than lyric form. Indeed—since it goes beyond Eliot in not merely diagnosing the modern disease but trying to offer something of a cure—the book can be read as a deliberate reply to (as he’s jokingly described at one point), “Eliot (a long-dead singer of infertility).”

Early in the novel, modern, yearning Tristram (who incidentally stands in ironic contrast to his Wagnerian namesake, that champion of Eros, who’s alluded to in TWL), joins a “I-had-not-thought-death-had-undone-so-many workward crowd” (in echo of Eliot’s Dantesque description of workaday London). A bloodless and callow conformist at this stage of the story, submitting to the laws as readily as any other citizen of a police state, Tristram awakens instinctive disgust in more sanguine characters, like his wife (“she couldn’t bear his touch”) and his brother-in-law Shonny (“there’s something in the very look of the man…that sets my teeth on edge”). He rouses, in other words, the sort of disgust that living people feel in the presence of a corpse: Tristram the cipher perfectly embodies the dead society he inhabits.

To his credit, Tristram, a schoolteacher, does possesses knowledge, and so has something of a mental life, if next to nothing of a physical one, so far. Still alive enough to feel the occasional pinch of the shackles of political oppression, he exhibits, under such conditions, the prerequisite of any personal vitality—rebelliousness—on an intellectual level (teaching forbidden books like The Golden Bough; sneering at homosexual superiors); whereas his wife rebels on a physical level, by committing adultery. She can also intuit the same latently independent spirit in her husband: “there must be quite a lot of the heretic in you,” she teases him; “you’re quite as bad as I am, in your way.” Hence, however estranged they may seem at the outset, the hope is raised that they may be eventually reconciled. Indeed, the key hope of the book is that Tristram, struggling like “a spermatozoa” toward far-off Beatrice-Joanna (who is her Dantean namesake, as well as Mary pregnant with Christ and the “Urmutter” embodied by all the pagan fertility goddesses), will find his wife again, and so symbolize the fruitful union of the two sexes that will, when applied more widely, fructify the waste land.  “All life is one” is the thematic refrain of the book, and the strictly rationalist social policies of the Pelphase sin, with disastrous environmental results, against this truth of the unity of all life as expressed in traditional culture (“’The art of the past is a kind of glorification of increase,’” notes Tristram) and in religion, as an Easter sermon Tristram hears reiterates: “[Christ]’s blood is not only the blood of man, beast, bird, fish; it is also the rain, the river, the sea. It is the ecstatically pumped seed of men and it is the flowing milk of the mothers of men.”

Such, then, is the goal of the book’s hero and heroine. But to reach it, both of them have to negotiate a society whose Eliotian drabness Burgess drives home with additional allusions to “The Waste Land.” Tristram, for instance, has false teeth, which are a commonplace of health care in the Pelphase, but also make a significant appearance in TWL, when the character Lil is advised to have her rotten teeth pulled and replaced—an image of corroded vitality, with the emblems of natural appetite being replaced with artificial imitations. And then again: “Oh, Dog, Dog, Dog,” laments Tristram when he learns of his wife’s infidelity, making use of his atheistical society’s sanitized profanity (an arbitrary reversal of the old, theistic curse/cri de coeur), but also echoing Eliot again: “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,\Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?\ …O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,\ Or with his nails, he’ll dig it up again….” This comment of one of the narrators of TWL represents a ironic, irreligious revisiting of fertility myths that, like the Christian resurrection story, appeal to the arising of new life in nature and the human spirit. Here, the religious impulse is bothersome to the deadened modern sensibility, and the advice is to keep it “far hence”: the very advice of the rationalist rulers of the Pelphase. And finally, toward the end of The Wanting Seed, one of Beatrice-Joanna’s babies (the one named Tristram) burbles “like Upanishadian thunder, ‘Da da da.’” This is an echo of the dimly hopeful end of TWL, which invokes Hindu scriptures by means of the Sanskrit vocable that baby Tristram burbles. Thunder is a sound that promises the coming of rain, which can irrigate and vivify the land and end, it may be, its terrible barrenness (“If there were water…” sighs one of the poem’s narrators). The significance of rain and water in the poem is matched by the importance, in The Wanting Seed, of the sea—that origin of all life to which Beatrice-Joanna prays (“We’re sick, O sea. Restore us to health, restore us to life”), and which gives rise to an impromptu sea-shanty among the shipmates of Tristram the conscripted soldier, on his way to “battle”:

                        “So just you stand and wait

                        By the garden gate

                        Till my ship comes bouncing o’er the foam.

                        We’ll be together

                        For ever and ever,

                               Never more to roam.”

This echoes, in sentiment (and at least vaguely in subject), the song of a sailor in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, which is quoted in TWL. The book ends, indeed, with a sort of celebration of the sea (“Break, waves. Break with joyful waters”).

        Burgess remarks, in his autobiography, that “I have spent the last twenty-five years thinking that…The Wanting Seed could, in my leisurely old age, be expanded to a length worthy of the subject.” But, as anyone who has looked at a list of Burgess publications will know, his old age never offered sufficient leisure for such an expansion. Even as it stands, though, The Wanting Seed is a solid work that repays a second look, and, in terms of the pleasures it provides new or returning readers, wants for nothing.    

Bitter Experience

Martin Amis’s novels have been appearing more or less triennially since The Rachel Papers in 1973, when he was 24. When Night Train, a sort of philosophical thriller (and a short trip—only 147 pages), appeared in 1997,  the year 2000 seemed the logical ETA for the next big fiction: but the year passed with no new novel coming puffing down the tracks. What arrived instead was a memoir weighty in size and subject matter, a work that urgently, often painfully, recounted and reflected on what those early novels by a precocious talent barely out of Oxford could not have: Experience.

Amis, 50 at the time of writing, was secure in his reputation as one of Britain’s leading serious novelists, as well as being a celebrity hotly watched by the country’s literary journalists. These, by and large, bore him a long-standing grudge—or so the story goes—for his unfair fast-track to artistic success (from Oxford to a junior editorship on the Times Literary Supplement overnight, plus endless handy pointers, presumably, from his novelist dad, Sir Kingsley, whose circle of friends included many of the best writers of his generation, all of whom lucky little Martin got to meet during long, drunken luncheons in the living room: or so the story goes, more or less). Martin’s story—Experience: A Memoir—doesn’t deny the defining fact of fame in his life, either his own fame or that of his father and his circle. “Namedropping is unavoidabl[e]” he warns at the outset, and many names appear: Larkin, Graves, Betjemen, Bellow, MacEwan, Rushdie, Vidal, Naipaul, and others. But no life, Amis insists, however dazzlingly spotlit, lacks for shadows, and this book, for all its trademark stylistic verve and mordant wit, is a book of shadows: ghosts, griefs, and dark forebodings walk its pages, and the absence of the steady comedy and caricature of the novels give it, for the most part, a tragic vision.

My life, it seems to me, is ridiculously shapeless. I know what makes a good narrative, and lives don’t have much of that—pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness. It is often the case that a Life, at least to start with, will resemble a success story; but the only shape that life dependably exhibits is that of tragedy—minus all the grand stuff about nemesis, fortune’s wheel, and the fatal flaw. Tragedy follows the line of the mouth on the tragic mask…. You rise to a crest and then curve down to a further point along the same latitude.

  Of course songs of experience are often bitter, and although Blake, author of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, believed innocence could be regained in some measure in the midst of the disillusions of adulthood, death and loss don’t go away. Amis makes brief, maybe envious reference to Blake singing on his deathbed; when his wife asked him whose songs they were, he answered: “My beloved, they are not mine, no, they are not mine.” But no overheard heavenly choruses attend the two defining deaths of Amis’s book: the first, his father’s, a slow and miserable one, and the second, his young cousin’s, sudden, mysterious—and unbelievably savage.

“Perhaps the most revealing thing my father ever said,” Amis notes, “was in response to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s question…‘You [an] atheist?’ He answered: ‘Well yes, but it’s more that I hate him.’” Sir Kingsley Amis died in 1995, after months of Alzheimer’s disease had stopped him from finishing a novel and finally stopped all clear speech. This Amis sums up with the remark, “the words had left him,” and words had been the substance of the elder writer’s only faith. The wrenching record of the family’s hospital visits and bedside vigils illustrate the terminal facts all human roads point toward, past a certain age: “the articles of faith for a man of fifty,” as Amis calls them: “the parents are going, the children are staying, and I am somewhere in between.” As these articles suggest, the faith of the younger Amis is no more theological than that of the elder, but constitutes, as one would expect from a latter-day litterateur, a stoic (and sometimes rather mopey) humanism. In a chapter called “Permanent Soul,” he quotes Saul Bellow on the need to establish “sober, decent terms with death” and illustrates the dictum with a description of the death of the poet Cecil Day Lewis, which he witnessed:

 

[H]is equanimity, his stillness, drew me in closer. It was an extraordinary demonstration. He was showing how you could keep your self-possession, right to the end; you still had your permanent soul…And the dying got done.

 

The idea that living and dying, after the spontaneous joie de vivre of childhood has faded, are equally tasks to be stoically accepted, echoes throughout the book: “existence still is the job,” he remarks in a chapter that uses that phrase for its title. It’s funny that a writer who considers himself so boldly philosophical can have his outlook reduced in the end to the British stiff upper lip.

But that may be unfair, because the stiffly upper-lipped are famously humourless, and what Amis is famous for is finding humour amid all his post-modern disaffection, and he does so in Experience—including a joking trope of the stiff upper lip idea itself. In the midst of middle-aged dental woes—aches, implants and “falsies”—he finds himself, recently divested of all his front teeth, with the flaccid, dangling opposite of the mouth of a British stoic. The dental torment here becomes a image of  life’s larger ones, and the resolve to grin and bear it all is sadly laughed at.

For this man of 50, and parent, the fact that “the children are staying” is the bright point in all the shadows. The ultimate piece of information in The Information (1994) is the fact that we die, and the ultimate experience in Experience is the realization of mortality. Childhood has yet to face this: in its innocence it perceives life as promise; play, not work. Amis’s memories of his own childhood, recounted in the early chapters, are largely fond, and his children (including one he never meets until she is almost 20) repeatedly relieve the gravitas.

But what if innocence is violently interrupted? The most harrowing part of the memoir recounts the disappearance of Amis’s cousin Lucy Partington in 1973, when she was 21. Her remains were exhumed twenty years later from the back yard of Frederick West, the worst serial killer in British history. Besides his other victims, West raped and sexually tortured his own children, murdering two of them. For Amis, he is the embodiment of evil, and the discovery of evil is part of no longer being a child. To a parent, though, the knowledge of the sort of world one’s children must soon enter is almost worse than one’s own experience of that world. On this painful subject, as on others, Amis grits his teeth, or his dentures, and writes—well.           

Wells' Monsters
All the current paperbacks and Hollywood movies that luridly speculate about human cloning find an antique echo in The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells’s short ghoulish “scientific romance”—as all his SF thrillers were then called.  The old page-turning horror story exploits the same fears we have today—that science and medicine, augmented by our growing knowledge of evolutionary mechanisms, could lead some maverick madman to manipulate the basic constituents of life in order to make up life-forms of his own. Nowadays, the madman might be a national government operating in secret; in Wells’s charmingly old-fashioned version, it is the renegade vivisectionist Moreau and his island of monstrosities.

The book remains what it was originally meant to be—a rattling good read, with lots of hunts, fistfights, shoot-outs, drooling ghouls, and Robinson Crusoe-style survival strategies. “How do I live through this day—this hour?” is the question the narrator repeatedly asks himself, hunkered in bushes, cowering behind rocks, at wit’s end—or almost. For Wells, it is wits—human intelligence and inventiveness—that is the true hero of the story, as it was of all his other romances, and indeed of his own life, which was a struggle from working-class obscurity to worldwide renown. (Ultimately, of course, mere intelligence proved insufficient; his personal life was chaotic, and his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, despairing.)

The main flaw of Moreau is conceded by the narrator: he can’t describe the mutant beasts very accurately, apart from saying they’re bizarrely humanoid while retaining animal vestiges, and often he only nicknames them, calling them Ape-Man, or Rhinoceros-Man, or Leopard-Zebra guy, or whatever. Despite this, it is a crazy, hallucinogenic ride, and the chapter about the Law is excellent satire, if somewhat heavy-handed, in suggesting the human religious impulse is born out of pain and ignorance and our nearness to our animal past.

Ornamental Things

Brigid Brophy makes Anna, the protagonist of The Snow Ball, note that she would like to be a sort of perfection, not a person, “an ornamental thing, but not a work of art…simply a work of craft, a decoration, something very contrived, very highly wrought, that wouldn’t touch the heart at all.” This is a fair description of what the book itself is—and exquisitely so—with its polished prose, cool comedy, and deep sadness in parts. Anna’s dread of death, Ruth’s fear of sex and life, and the  extremes between the artfully composed Anna and the shapeless Anne and Tom-Tom—all are deftly pictured poignancies. Throughout the book, shapelessness, haphazardness and spontaneity are associated with life and wealth, which dance and revel at the ball, while art only leans on the parapet and watches, sunk in gloomy conversation.

           If a work of art is simply a work of craft of the highest possible refinement, then The Snow Ball is a work of art. 

A Book of Marriages

      George Eliot’s Middlemarch richly provides one of the chief pleasures of Victorian novels, the relation of a complete social world by an all-wise, all-knowing narrator. The delight of being told and shown, by a supremely intelligent, well-informed friend, everything we want to know about a community of people, is as keen here as it is in anything by Dickens. And the quality that Eliot’s narrative voice is richest in is compassion: “Poor Mr Casaubon,” it commiserates; “poor Dorothea,” “poor Lydgate,” “poor Rosamond,” “poor Will.” The sympathy goes as deep as the insight into the psychology of each burdened soul, who is shown to be the author, most of the time, of his own woe.

        Marriage emerges as the book’s central concern, in particular in its role as scourge of egotism and purger of youthful illusion. The purgatory can be lifelong, as with Lydgate, or mercifully brief, as with Dorothea and Casaubon, but the closest and least breakable of social bonds teaches its bitter lesson in every case. The narrator as utterly objective, dispassionate observer of the power-politics of matrimony becomes of course a fiction within the larger fiction of the story. The reader, lacking the luxury of perfect detachment, is forever wanting to take sides, to sympathize with one sufferer at the expense of another; but the narrator rises above the battle and deals with equal magnanimity to all, and this pose of (impossibly) perfect impartiality is the Victorian novel’s greatest contribution to moral art, and finds no finer expression than in Middlemarch. The reader, like nowhere else in his experience, where he is continually blinded by self-interest, views the human drama from the standpoint of true justice—a dizzying height. But of course this is the point of a masterpiece. It is, as Janet Frame says in An Angel at My Table, “one of the rewards of alliance with any great work of art”—an elevation of perspective, “a sensation of being in an upper storey of the mind and heart…as if ordinary people were suddenly called upon to see the point of view of angels.”

Misanthropy Made Plain

           Richard Wilbur’s rhymed couplet translation of Molière unfolds in a long, dazzling parade of pithy aphorisms and pungent epigrams. This is not surprising, given the verse form. The favourite tool of English satirists of the 18^th century (see for example Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes”), the razor-sharp two-liner suits a moralizing, pontificating tone better than any other, and Alceste, the titular curmudgeon of the first play, moralizes and pontificates at length—and brilliantly. Indeed, he takes up where Shakespeare’s embittered outcast, Timon of Athens, leaves off. Timon delivers his great, world-damning soliloquy outside the walls of Athens and then most of his caustic wit is spent, but Alceste’s rants at Philinte in Act One are just the start of his outraged speechifying. What is worst in people—all the unchanging darkness of the human heart—is the subject of the play, and Alceste’s bitter criticisms are no less perennial than what is being criticized. The modern edge given to the jibes by the modern translation underscore a key point: we’re as bad as we ever were, and solace for the moral imagination can be found, albeit of a sour-tasting sort, in the pages of The Misanthrope.

In Tartuffe there is a villain who is vilified and vanquished, and the reader can gloat at his downfall just as he groans at the credulity of the gulls who succumb to his trickery, and think himself superior. But in The Misanthrope there is no one worst wrongdoer and the reader realizes his own faults are on display as much as anybody else’s, in the great parade of follies that so galls Alceste. Indeed, even Alceste ultimately concedes, after all his stone-throwing, that he too is not without sin.

 

Bellovian Soliloquys

T.S. Eliot believed we irreligious moderns are “distracted from distraction by distraction”—diverted from a life of dispassionate spiritual seeking by our myriad amusements, our mass movements and mass media. Sixtyish Charlie Citrine, historian and biographer, the narrator and protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow, believes this also and hates it; but, unlike Eliot, he can’t identify his dissent with a religious tradition rich in appeals to a higher life. Left to thrash out some sense of things on his own, he cuts a comical figure—anxiously talky, bumblingly earnest, infinitely pained by his private impressions of the world, and torn by spiritual longings that must contend with the mire of his personal life, the mess of modernity: divorce litigation, love-affairs, bad business ventures, and intimations of mortality. The book, despite its colourful characters (assorted lovers, lawyers and low-life), is mostly Citrine talking to himself, in desperate soliloquy, allusive and erudite and at times tiresome but more often effortlessly tossing off breath-taking apercus. Citrine, like Bellow, seems to have read everything.

Bellow’s novels are all strange sad comedies of self-consciousness, and constitute a highly original fusion of wisdom writing and bumptious confession, with the result that the awake, mindful, modern individual is rendered as a ridiculous, poignant, needy but half-noble creature, driven by forces he doesn’t understand, both inner and outer, but which he at least has the dignity to question. Bald summation in limited space of all the themes Humboldt’s Gift encompasses, all the questions it asks, is impossible and would diminish the sustained, Shakespearean raging and fuming—all Citrine’s sound and fury, that he wants so badly to signify something.