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

Flashback. Into the bar-restaurant Enderby, exiled poet, ran in Tangier, film men had one day come. Kasbah location work or something of the kind. One of the film men, who had seemed and indeed proved to be big in his field, an American director considered for the brilliance of his visual invention quite as good as any director in Europe, said something about wanting to make, because of the visual possibilities, a shipwreck film. Enderby, behind bar and hence free to join in conversation without any imputation of insolence, having also British accent, said something about The Wreck of the Deutschland.

"Too many Kraut Kaput movies lately. Last days of Hitler, Joe Krankenhaus already working on Goebbels, then there was Visconti."

"A ship," said Enderby, "called the Deutschland. Hopkins wrote it."

"Al Hopkins?"

"G.M.," Enderby said, adding, "S.J."

"Never heard of him. Why does he want all those initials?"

"Five Franciscan nuns," Enderby said, "exiled from Germany because of the Falk Laws. 'On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, take settler and seaman, tell men with women, two hundred souls in the round…' "

"He knows it all, by God. When?"

"1875. December 7th."

"Nuns," mused the famed director. "What were these laws?"

" 'Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them,' " Enderby said. " 'Surf, snow, river and earth,' " he said, " 'gnashed.' "

"Totalitarian intolerance," the director's assistant and friend said. "Nuns beaten up in the streets. Habits torn off. Best done in flashback. The storm symbolic as well as real. What happens at the end?" he asked keenly Enderby.

"They all get wrecked in the Goodwin Sands. The Kentish Knock, to be precise. And then there's this final prayer. 'Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east…' "

"In movies," the director said kindly, as to a child, "you don't want too many words. You see that? It's what we call a visual medium. Two more double scatches on the racks."

"I know all about that," Enderby said with heat, pouring whisky sightlessly for these two men. "When they did my Pet Beast it became nothing but visual clichés. In Rome it was. Cinecittà. The bastard. But he's dead now."

"Who's dead?"

"Rawcliffe," Enderby said. "He used to own this place." The two men stared at him. "What I mean is," Enderby said, "that there was this film. Movie, you'd call it, ridiculous word. In Italian, L'Animal Binato . That was Son of the Beast from Outer Space. In English that is," he explained.

"But that," the director said, "was a small masterpiece. Alberto Formica, dead now poor bastard, well ahead of his time. The clichés were deliberate, it summed up a whole era. So." He looked at Enderby with new interest. "What did you say your name was? Rawcliffe? I always thought Rawcliffe was dead."

"Enderby," Enderby said. "Enderby the poet."

"You did the script, you say?" the assistant and friend said.

"I wrote The Pet Beast."

"Why," the director said, taking out a visiting card from among embossed instruments of international credit, "don't you write us a letter, the shipwreck story I mean, setting it all out?"

Enderby smiled knowingly, a poet but up to their little tricks. "I give you a film script for nothing," he said. "I've heard of this letter business before." The card read Melvin Schaumwein, Chisel Productions. "If I do you a script I shall want paying for it."

"How much?" said Mr. Schaumwein.

Enderby smiled. "A lot," he said. The money part of his brain grew suddenly delirious, lifelong abstainer fed with sudden gin. He trembled as with the prospect of sexual outrage. "A thousand dollars," he said. They stared at him. "There," he said. And then: "Somewhere in that region anyway. I'm not what you'd call a greedy man."

"We might manage five hundred," Schaumwein's assistant-friend said. "On delivery, of course. Provided that it's what might be termed satisfactory."

"Seven hundred and fifty," Enderby said. "I'm not what you'd call a greedy man."

"It's not an original," Mr. Schaumwein said. "You mentioned some guy called Hopkins that wrote the book. Who is he, where is he, who do I see about the rights?"

"Hopkins," Enderby said, "died in 1889. His poems were published in 1918. The Wreck of the Deutschland is out of copyright."

"I think," Mr. Schaumwein said carefully, "we'll have two more scatches on the racks."

What, after Mr. Schaumwein had gone back to the Kasbah and then presumably home to Chisel Productions, was to surprise Enderby was that the project was to be taken seriously presumably. For a letter came from the friend-assistant, name revealed as Martin Droeshout (familiar vaguely to Enderby in some vague picture connection or other), confirming that, for $750.00, Enderby would deliver a treatment for a film tentatively entitled The Wreck of the Deutschland, based on a story by Hopkins, which story their researchers had not been able to bring to light despite prolonged research, had Enderby got the name right, but it didn't matter as subject was in public domain. Enderby presumed that the word treatment was another word for shooting script (a lot of film men had been to his bar at one time or another, so the latter term was familiar to him). He had even looked at the shooting script of a film in which a heavy though not explicit sexual sequence had actually been shot, at midnight with spotlights and a humming generator truck, on the beach just near to his beach cafe-restaurant, La Belle Mer. So, while his boys snored or writhed sexually with each other during the siesta, he got down to typewriter-pecking out his cinematisation of a great poem, delighting in such curt visual directives as VLS, CU, and so on, though not always clearly understanding what they meant.

Lightning lashes a rod on top of a church.

PRIEST'S VOICE: Yes. Yes. Yes.

Thunder rolls. A priest on his knees at the altar looks up, sweating. It is Fr. Hopkins, S.J.

FR. HOPKINS, S.J.: Thou heardest me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God.

The camera pans slowly across lovely-asunder starlight.

4. EXTERIOR NIGHT THE GROUNDS OF A THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Father Hopkins, S.J., looks up ecstatically at all the firefolk sitting in the air and then kisses his hand at them.

5. EXTERIOR SUNSET THE DAPPLED-WITH-DAMSON WEST

Father Hopkins, S.J., kisses his hand at it.

The scene begins with a CU of Irish stew being placed on a table by an ill-girt scullion. Then the camera pulls back to show priests talking vigorously.

PRIEST #1: These Falk Laws in Germany are abominable and totally sinful.

PRIEST #2: I hear that a group of Franciscan nuns are sailing to America next Saturday.

The voice of Father Hopkins, S.J., is heard from another part of the table.

HOPKINS (OS): Glory be to God for dappled things-For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow…

The priests look at each other.

Father Hopkins is talking earnestly to a very beautiful fellow-priest, who listens attentively.

HOPKINS: Since, though he is under the world's splendour and wonder, his mystery must be instressed, stressed…

FELLOW-PRIEST: I quite understand.

The camera pans rapidly back to the other two priests, who look at each other.

PRIEST # 1: (sotto voce) Jesus Christ.

It worried Enderby a little, as he proceeded with his film version of the first part of the poem, that Hopkins should appear to be a bit cracked. There was also a problem in forcing a relevance between the first part and the second. Enderby, serving one morning abstractedly sloe gin to two customers, hit on a solution. "Sacrifice," he said suddenly. The customers took their sloe gins away to a far table. The idea being that Hopkins wanted to be Christ but that the tall nun, Gertrude, kindly became Christ for him, and that her sort of crucifixion on the Kentish Knock (sounded, he thought gloomily, like some rural sexual aberration) might conceivably be thought of as helping to bring our King back, oh, upon English souls.