Gadfly Glory, Martyr's Farce

By Christopher Porterfield

99 NOVELS: THE BEST IN ENGLISH SINCE 1939 by Anthony Burgess; Summit; 160 pages; $10.95 ENDERBY'S DARK LADY, OR NO END TO ENDERBY by Anthony Burgess; McGraw-Hill; 160 pages; $14.95

This dual publication appears to be as reckless as it is immodest. In 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939, Britain's Anthony Burgess sets up a personal pantheon of later 20th century fiction; then, in Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby, he offers the latest sample of his own handiwork in that line.

"If you disagree violently with some of my choices," writes Burgess in his introduction to 99 Novels, "I shall be pleased." Of course. Why put together such a list unless it is idiosyncratic and provocative? His selections, each defended in a brisk essay of a page or so, include such eyebrow raisers as Erica Jong's How to Save Your Own Life and Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. "It is unwise to disparage the well-made popular," he warns.

The democratic Burgess incorporates most of the canonized major figures (Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Hemingway), but he is in his gadfly glory when he argues for the underrated. At times he pays tribute to a neglected master like Joyce Gary, of whose The Horse's Mouth he writes: "Depicting low life, it blazes with an image of the highest life of all--that of the creative imagination." At other times he elevates a merely unfashionable craftsman like Budd Schulberg, for whose The Disenchanted he makes the dubious claim: "No fiction has ever done better at presenting the inner torments of a writer in decline."

Burgess's most personal predilections come into play not only with the lopsided Englishness of his choices but with his embrace of verbally experimental books (Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan, John Earth's Giles Goat-Boy) and of sci-fi or futuristic visions (Kingsley Amis' The Anti-Death League, Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence). His list is as striking for what it leaves out as for what it includes. Every reader will have his favorite omissions--after all, that is half the fun of literary parlor games like this--but just to name five: John Cheever's Bullet Park, Nigel Dennis' Cards of Identity, J.F. Powers' Morte d'Urban and almost anything by Peter De Vries and Barbara Pym.

A further omission is anything by Anthony Burgess, though the author coyly hints that one of his 27 novels might round off the list nicely. If so, Dark Lady is not the one. The book is too casual and sketchy, with a string of improbable, scurrilously farcical episodes serving for a plot. It measures up to only one of the criteria that Burgess applies in 99 Novels: the novelists' capacity to create "human beings whom we accept as living creatures."

The English poet FX. Enderby, aging, dyspeptic, chronically unfulfilled and disaster prone, is a character so alive that not even his creator could kill him off. Starting in 1963, he has made his disorderly way through three previous Burgess novels (Inside Mr. Enderby; Enderby Outside; The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End), emerging from the lavatory where he writes his unappreciated poems to suffer such indignities as a bad marriage, scandal, a breakdown and success as a screenwriter.

In the finale of Clockwork Testament (1975), Visiting Professor Enderby succumbed to a weak heart and culture shock on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Yet now ("to placate kind readers" who objected, Burgess maintains in a sub-subtitle) he pops up again.

This time Enderby is in Indianapolis, reluctantly scribbling the libretto to a musical crudely based on the life of Shakespeare. His position, as usual, is hopeless. Middle America is all Philistine hostesses and barbarous hotels. At the theater, he bemoans the "limited talents, New World phonemes and intonations and slangy lapses, cecity towards the past, Pyrrhonism and so on of this weak cry of players." His only consolation is his Dark Lady, a savvy black soul singer named April Elgar, who rekindles his lechery (but not his performance) and stuns him by sprinkling her jive talk with quotations from Kant.

As it was in Enderby's previous incarnations, his buffoonery is a form of martyrdom to art. What gives it weight here is a pair of short stories he writes about Shakespeare. They form the opening and closing chapters of Dark Lady. The first, Will and Testament, is a bawdy historical pastiche in which Shakespeare, with Ben Jonson's connivance, manages to insert his name in the King James translation of the 46th Psalm ("Though the mountains shake . . . He cutteth the spear . . ."). The other, The Muse, tells of a scholar from an alternative universe who time-travels to Elizabethan England to verify Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. The scholar meets a bad end, but his copies of the plays fall into the hands of the Bard, who blithely plagiarizes them.

For Enderby, made superstitious by a fire and other misfortunes that plague the Indianapolis musical, the stories are a way to make a fondly mocking peace with Old Will's ghost. As he insists to the actors, "The human side of a great poet . . . must not be traduced. The dead seem to have their own way of responding to the law of libel."

--By Christopher Porterfield