Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

The response to all this of the spirit of Shakespeare was not reported from Mrs Schoenbaum's residence, since she was spending a week or so in Miami, but small and as it were distracted punishments dogged Enderby's residence at the Sheraton. He got himself stuck in the elevator, between floors too; he fell heavily in the bath, a proof that, anyway, baths were dangerous; plugging in his kettle to make tea, he somehow managed to fuse all the lights of that floor; he slipped on a patch of ice in the forecourt of the hotel; he was served a decayed shirred egg. He was glad to get back to the Holiday Inn in Terrebasse. Shakespeare's spirit, having many preoccupations, probably mainly to do with the price of formerly Shakespeare land in Stratford's environs, would not find him there again, not being concerned to listen in to Ms Grace Hope telling him, Enderby, that the budget for a writer had to be kept low, stars costing so much, the Holiday Inn was where he had been put in the first place and that was where he should stay. Question of taxi fares also from Indianapolis to the theatre. In Terrebasse he could slither on the brief ice between place of work and of repose. Well, it was just as well. Corruption because of proximity of, most dangerous word in language. Oldfellow too much around in bar and dining room too, when Ms Grace Hope had returned to California, betraying faggishness, a genuine attribute, not just conventional smear from April Elgar, by pawing his understudy, primarily Essex, Dick Corcoran the SF man. Get the bloody job finished, get air fare, get home.

"You not been around much," she said to him one day when they met by chance, indeed coming simultaneously out of neighbouring toilet doors in the Peter Brook Theater. Enderby eyed her bitterly, trying to look like disguised Rosalind in some ridiculous black trendy production of As You Like It, that was to say in peaked corduroy cap and patched boilersuit, but breathing very quintessence of elegance and glamour. He also looked guiltily on her, since he had decided to get rid of her at the end of the first act. He could not go on with this ahistorical nonsense. Christ, they were dealing with real and documented situations. Toplady and she could do what the hell they wished, but he would not be a party to their falsifyings. "Where," she said, "you go for Thanksgiving?"

"Thanksgiving?" he said. "Oh, yes. Of course, that's why they served turkey and pumpkin pie, ridiculous washy stuff. I'd nothing," he said, suddenly sorry for himself, "to be thankful for, really. Besides, they were a hell of a long time achieving a reasonable harvest. The Pilgrim Fathers, that is. Good theologians but bad farmers. No, I just stayed where I was."

"Where you going for Christmas?"

"Same thing, I suppose. Turkey and. Perhaps they don't serve pumpkin pie at Christmas."

"Christmas," she said, "you're coming home with me."

Enderby took that in very slowly. "Home?" he said.

"Not my apartment in New York. Home where my momma is. And the kids. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina."

"Kids? Which kids?"

"My kids. Bobby and Nelson. Five and seven. My momma looks after them."

"And who," dithered Enderby, "is their father?"

"Their daddy done go away," she slavesingsonged. "I tell him to get the hell out. He was prime meatjuice, baby, but he done hit the bottle and was a real no good mean nigger. Now he's in a black stud agency for white women some place."

"In what," Enderby asked, "capacity do I? That is to say."

"Momma," she said, "don't hold with poets and showbiz people and all that crap. She's a gooood woman. Reads the Bible all day. You got to come to momma's house that I bought for her out of my sinful showbiz success as an Englishman spreading the word of the Lord, kind of a smalltown Billy Graham, dig, I worked all this out in mah lil what ah calls mah mahnd, you got to be called Reverend. You'll be okay, momma cooks real good."

Enderby had read in some magazine of soulfood, strange name, as though the soul resided in the lowliest of animal organs, intestines, hog's bellylinings, spleens. Perhaps it did, black wisdom. Also mustard greens.

"And," she said, "she makes tea good and strong in a quart brown pot, ladling it in by the shovel. She drinks it all day when the kids are at school, reading her Bible. You better bone up on your Bible, Reverend, don't want to be caught out."

Enderby warmed at once to the quart brown pot. "That goes with the name Johnson," he said. "Dr Samuel Johnson, great tea drinker. Boswell said he must have had exceptionally strong nerves."

"How did you know that," she asked, surprised, in a straight, or American straight, voice, "about Boswell? My great grand-pappy was called Boswell Johnson."

"Some learned and facetious slaveowner," Enderby said, catching with no pleasure an image of elephant hided men called Cudge whining under Simon Legree whips in the cottonfields, what time old massa in the parlour read with mild interest a great record of the conversation of the English Enlightenment. And then: "Alas, I have no money. I can't afford the fare."

"I pay, baby. Ah is a rich lil gal."

"Well, then, yes, thank you, it's a great honour and you're very very generous." Then he began to weep, he did not know why. The voice of Toplady sounded over loudspeakers, its very tones giving him a partial reason why, calling the company together. "Sorry," Enderby sniffed, "ridiculous, I know. Emotional lability. Creative tension, something. Again thank you."

^^She laid on him hands intended for comfort but provocative of a ferocious glandular gear change and said: "Something's going on in there, I know. Life's not easy, kid. We'll talk again, okay." And she darted off, showing a cunningly placed patch, affluent mockery of the Third World to which her colour entitled her to belong, but Abe Fourscore had changed all that, on her divine posterior. Enderby returned to his little room and switched on the electric typewriter, which sang gently to him of the need to work and not waste current. He relented somewhat (there was always this danger, adjacent toilet doors or a jaunty "Hi" in the greenroom) and did not wipe her wholly out of Act Two, no confrontation of queens but mention of her part as evil genius of uprising, and then she was to languish in some jail or other or be thrown onto the ragheaps of Clerkenwell, no more be heard of Mistress Lucy Negro except as pocked whore. But then.

Then there was Hamlet, Will as ghost misnaming prince as Hamnet, sick for many reasons (death of son and end of Shakespeare line; his lordly friend Southampton in prison; the loss of a rare mistress, brightness falls from the air or hair) and sent off to Stratford to be made whole. And in marital embraces with ginger Anne (it had been decided, and no bad idea, to combine the parts of queen and Mistress Shakespeare) he dreams of Afric gold, Egypt being in Africa. And so Cleopatra. But who was he, Enderby, to adapt a great tragedy to 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? A straight blank verse Cleopatra, and she could not do it. Dumbshow to music (not Silversmith's, better to drag in some genuine musician from Indiana University, a Moog man who, forced to write tonalities wholly atmospheric, would produce the diluted romanticism that was his true, if suppressed, idiom?)? Enderby lighted a White Owl. Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang'd empire fall! The world well lost for love, and did the world include art and, for that matter, William Shakespeare?

Let's have one other gaudy night,

Let's have one other bawdy night

And fright the white owls away.

Come, captains, drink beneath the stars

Until the wine peeps through your scars,

Drink till the dawning of the day!