The Poet as Anti-Stereotype

ENDERBY by Anthony Burgess. 412 pages. W. W. Norton. $5.95.

Middle-aged lyric poets, like middle-aged lovers, are somewhat of a contradiction in terms. There is unavoidable comic pathos when words of springtime frenzy clack through dentures and lips that taste of Geritol. But there is about them, also, a kind of Quixotic gallantry. British Novelist Anthony Burgess, 51, has caught these mixed vibrations in a funny and affecting portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man.

Enderby, 45, a flabby, balding and toothless bachelor, is the poet as anti-stereotype. The wind that blows on his Aeolian harp comes out mostly as stomach gas. Belching and backfiring, he sits on his toilet seat day after monotonous day composing a narrative poem about the Minotaur. Yet, as manuscript slowly fills the bathtub, Enderby is a happy and fulfilled man. Living off dividends and tiny royalties, he really needs "nothing except more talent."

Into this w.c. of an Eden slinks Vesta, an unvirginal Eve disguised as a woman's magazine editor. Vesta tempts Enderby into writing non-poems for her journal under the signature of Faith Fortitude, and before he can barricade that bathroom door, she has him out of his holy of holies and into an unholy marriage.

Soon Vesta has made the poet "normal" and "sane" by making him no poet at all. Brainwashed into a wholly new identity, Enderby emerges as Piggy Hogg, an inarticulate London bartender and retread "useful citizen"--the welfare state's version of death and transfiguration.

Scurrilous Charm. Author Burgess is sounding again an ancient warning of his trade: that the poet's natural enemies remain varied and dangerous. The hostile forces manifest themselves as rich but tasteless patrons, pop singers, and even other poets, one of whom steals the Minotaur theme and turns it into a screenplay for Son of the Beast from Outer Space.

But the poet, Burgess also warns, is a dangerous man--one of life's great survivors. In the wildly freewheeling last half of the novel, Enderby returns to claim his old poet's self. On the lam from all his would-be reformers--including the police--he ends up in the layatories of Morocco, blissfully scribbling a long poem based on Hamlet. Enderby may not have the gift for living, but, concludes Burgess, "poets, even minor ones, donate the right words" that enable others to live. On this claim--that they are saviors who cannot save themselves--Burgess rests his case for all poets.

How deep should well-amused readers poke beneath the jaunty black humor and Joycean wordplay? This remains a perennial Burgess puzzle. He is a composer and music critic, a one-time lecturer in phonetics, a learned, lapsed Catholic, and--not the least--a superb writer. Unlike Graham Greene, he does not separate his "serious" novels from his "entertainments." Rather, he tries to make them all two-for-one propositions.

Enderby, an expanded, enriched version of a 1963 work, Inside Mr. Enderby, comes as close as any of Burgess' novels (A Clockwork Orange, Tremor of Intent) to serving both his favorite lightweight tone and one of his favorite heavyweight meanings. Here, with the most offhand, scurrilous charm, he illustrates as well as preaches that the artist is the man who expresses for all men their unbuttoned true selves.

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