Anthony Burgess - The Clockwork Testament (Or - Enderby 's End)

A thing exquisitely coarse shot up from Enderby's schooldays. It was neat, too. Dirty verse depended upon an almost Augustan neatness. " 'The boy stood in the witness box,' " he recited, " 'Picking his nose like fury-' " There were loud cries of hey hey and Lansing picked up a packet of Shagbag or something from among the various commercial artifacts stowed behind the ashtray-and-waterbottle table. "I think," he cried, "it's time we heard another important message. Girls," he counter-recited, "is your fried chicken greasy?"

"-'Little blocks, And aimed it at the jury.' "

"Because if you want it to be crisp and dry as the bone within, here's how to do it." There were at once waving fat studio major-domos running around, and the monitor screens began to show hideous greasy fried chicken, oleic, aureate.

"All right all right," Sperr Lansing was saying, "it's going to be Jake Summers next. Look," he said to Enderby, "keep it clean, willya."

"I was only trying to keep it vulgar," Enderby said. "It's evidently a vulgar sort of show."

"It wasn't till you got on it, buster," Miss Elderley began.

"Well, damn it," Enderby said, "the amount of tit you're showing, if you don't mind my saying so, is hardly conducive to the maintenance of a high standard of intellectual discourse."

"You leave my bosoms out of this-"

"There's only one bosom. A bosom is a dual entity."

"I object to him using that word about me. I've met these bastards before-"

"I object to being called a bastard-"

"Either sex maniacs or fags-"

Sperr Lansing composed his face to beatific calm and told the camera and the audience: "Welcome back, folks. Now here's the man who pays for a moon shot with every Broadway success he writes. Somebody once said that there were only two men of the theatre-Jake Speare and Jake Summers. Well, here's one of them."

Underneath the applause and the shambling on of a small near-bald clerkly man in spectacles and sweatshirt, Enderby said to Miss Elderley:

"I suppose you wouldn't call that vulgar. Eh? Jakes Peare, indeed. And I'll tell you another thing-I won't be called a bloody fag."

"I didn't say that. I said the British are either fags or sex maniacs. Keep it quiet, willya."

For Sperr Lansing was now praising this Summers man lavishly to his face. "-five hundred and forty-five performances is what I have written down here. To what do you attribute-"

Summers was wearily modest. "Write well, I guess. Keep it clean, I guess. When they do it, they do it offstage." Applause and laughter. "No, yah. Let them hear about sex and violence, I guess, not see it." A and L. "Talking about poetry," he said, "I used to write it. Then I meet this guy on his yacht and he says give it up, there's nothing in it." Applause.

Enderby saw the tortured ecstatic face of Father Hopkins on top of the bugler and went mad. "Filth," he said, "filth and vulgarity."

"Aw, can it willya," Miss Elderley said. Professor Glass said:

"It is not my place, not here and now that is, to proffer any diagnosis of er Professor Endlessly's perpetual er manic state of excitation. Facts must be faced, though. The world has changed. England is no longer the centre of a world empire. The English language has found its finest er flowering in what he called a colonial territory."

"Attaboy," Miss Elderley said. "Wow."

"Be fair, I guess," Summers said. "Those boys with guitars."

"He feels his manhood threatened," Professor Elderglass went on. "Note how his dress proclaims an er long-dead national virility. He thinks man is being abolished. His kind of man."

"Bankside," Summers said. Everybody roared.

"Yes, the character or homunculus in your play. Man qua man. Man in his humanity. Man as Thou not It. Man as a person not a thing. These are not very helpful expressions, but they supply a clue. What is being abolished is autonomous man-the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity."

"That's it, you bastard," Enderby said, "you've summed it all up."

"His abolition has been long overdue. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanise man, it de-homunculises him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. Hamlet, in the play I have already mentioned, by your fellow-playwright, Mr. Summers, said of man, 'How like a god.' Pavlov said, 'How like a dog.' But that was a step forward. Man is much more than a dog, but like a dog he is within range of a scientific analysis."

"Look," shouted Enderby over the applause, "I won't have it, see. We're free and we're free to take our punishment. Like Hopkins. I suppose you'd watch him doing it with your bloody neat little bow tie on and say how like a dog. Well, he's been punished enough with this bloody film or movie as you'd call it, bloody childish. That's his hell. He was gall, he was heartburn."

"He should have taken Windkill," Jake Summers said and got roars. Enderby was very nearly sidetracked.

"Leave the commercials to me, Jake," Lansing said, delighted. "And talking about commercials it's time we took another-"

"Oh no it bloody well isn't," Enderby shouted. "You can keep your bloody homunculus, for that's all he is-"

"Pardon me, it's you who believe in the homunculus-"

"Man was always violent and always sinful and always will be."

"And now he's got to change."

"He won't change, not unless he becomes something else. Can't you see that that's where the drama of life is, the high purple, the tragic-"

"Oh my," Jake Summers sighed histrionically and was at once loudly rewarded. "No time for comedy," he added and then was not clearly understood.

"The evolution of a culture," Professor Lookingglass said, "is a gigantic exercise in self-control. It is often said that a scientific view of man leads to wounded vanity, a sense of hopelessness, and nostalgia-"

"Nostalgia means homesickness," Enderby cried. "And we're all homesick. Homesick for sin and colour and drunkenness-"

"Ah, so that's what it is," Miss Elderley said. "You're stoned."

"Homesick for the past." Enderby could feel himself ready to weep. But then fire possessed him just as Sperr Lansing said, "And now we let our sponsor get a word in-" Enderby stood and declaimed:

"For how to the heart's cheering

The down-dugged ground-hugged grey

Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing

Of pied and peeled May!"

"Fellers," Sperr Lansing said, "do you ever feel, you know, not up to it?" He held in his hands a product called, apparently, Mansex. "Well, just watch this." Then he turned on Enderby, as did everybody, including the sweating studio major-domos. The band, which appeared to have a whole Wagnerian brass section as well as innumerable saxophones and a drummer in charge sitting high on a throne, gave out very piercingly and thuddingly.

Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,

With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,

What by your measure is the heaven of desire,

The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

SPERR: Well I don't think it can. You'd better get on to Harry right away.

ENDERBY: Fucking home uncle us (????) indeed. Ill give you fucking home uncle as (?????) . Degradation of humanity. No, but it was not these the jading and jar of the cart (?) times tasking it is fathers (?) that asking for ease of the sodden with its sorrowing hart (art?) not danger electrical horror then further it finds the appealing of the passion is tenderer (?) in prayer apart other I gather in measure her minds burden in winds (????????)