Anthony Burgess - Enderby Outside

At last, weary, out of the hot noon's humming,

Mounting his own stair,

It was no surprise to find a mother and daughter,

The daughter she. Hospitable, she gave him water.

Windless, the shutters shook.

This was all messed up. The story wouldn't run to another stanza, and this stanza was going to be too long. And the rhythm was atrocious.

A quiet voice said: “I’m coming."

"Oh God God it's the dog," screamed the daughter,

But he, up the miles of leaden water,

Frantically beat for air.

A good discussion about that with somebody, over whisky or stepmother's tea: that was what was needful. The realisation suddenly shocked him. Had not the poet to be alone? He converted that into bowel language and noised it grimly in the still night, clenching the appropriate muscles, but the noise was hollow.

And so she was there again in the lemony Tangerine sunlight of near-winter, this time bringing her towel. The old men, perhaps frightened of the gunpowder running out of the heels of their boots, had stayed away, but there were other customers. Two youngish film-men, in Morocco to choose locations that might serve for Arizona, kept going ja at each other and greedily scoffing Antonio's tapas- fat black olives; hot fried liver on bread; Spanish salad of onion, tomato, vinegar, chopped peppers. An Englishman, in fluent but very English Spanish, expressed to Manuel his love of baseball, a game he had followed passionately when he lived three miles outside Havana. A quiet man, perhaps a Russian, sat at the corner of the counter, steadily and to no effect downing raw Spanish gin.

"Not worth writing," she said, "a poem like that." She had changed back into a crimson dress even briefer than the green one. The baseball aficionado, greying vapidly handsome, kept giving her frank glances, but she did not seem to notice. "You yourself may be moved by it," she said, "because of the emotional impact of the dream itself. But it's dreary old sex images, isn't it, no more. The dog, I mean. North for tumescence. And you’re trying to protect me from yourself, or yourself from me-both silly." Enderby looked at her bitterly, desirable and businesslike as she was. He said:

“That love in the first line. I'm sorry about that. I don't mean it, of course. It was just in the dream."

"All right, we’re scrapping it anyway." And she crumpled the work of three hours of darkness and threw it on the floor. Tetuani gladly picked it up and bore it off to nest with other garbage. "I think," she said, "we'll go for a walk. There's another sonnet we have to work out, isn't there?"

"Another?"

"One you mentioned yesterday. About the Revolt of the Angels or something."

“I’m not sure that I -" He frowned. She punched him vigorously on the arm, saying:

"Oh, don't dither so. We haven't much time." She led him out of the bar, stronger than she looked, and the customers, all of whom were new, assumed that Enderby was an old customer who had had enough.

"Look," Enderby said, when they stood on the esplanade, “I don't understand anything about this at all. Who are you? What right have you? Not," he added, "that I don't appreciate-But really, when you come to consider it -"

The wind whipped rather coldly, but she felt no cold, arms akimbo in her ridiculously brief dress. “You do waste time, don't you? Now how does it begin?"

They walked in the direction of the Medina, and he managed to hit some of it out into the wind. It was as though she were telling him to get it all up, better up than down.

Sick of the sycophantic singing, sick

Of every afternoon's compulsory games -

Sturdy palms set all along the sea-front, the fronds stirred by that wind. The donkeys with loaded panniers, an odd sneering camel.

“That's the general idea, isn't it? Heaven as a minor public school. Did you go to a minor public school?"

"I went,” said Enderby, "to a Catholic day-school." It was Friday, and the devout were shuffling to mosque. The imam or bilal or whatever he was was gargling over a loudspeaker. Brown men, of Rif or Berber stock, followed the voice, looking at her legs, though, with bright-eyed frank but hopeless desire. "It's a lot of superstitious nonsense," she said. "Don't, whatever the temptation, go back to it. Use it as mythology, pluck it bare of images, but don't ever believe in it again. Take the cash in hand and waive the rest."

"An indifferent poet, Fitzgerald." Enderby loved her for saying what she had said.

"Very well, let's have something better."

Sick of the little cliques of county names,

The timebomb in his brain began to tick -

Luncheon in a little restaurant crammed with camp military gear, not too far from the Hotel El Greco. It was run by two men in love with each other, one American, the other English. A handsome Moorish boy who waited on seemed himself in love with the Englishman, who was flaxen, bronzed, petulant and given to shouting at the cook. The Moor was not adept at hiding emotion: his big lower lip trembled and his eyes swam. Enderby and she had a thin dull goulash which she said loudly was bloody terrible. The English lover tossed his head and affricated petulantly against his alveolum, then turned up the music-a sexy cocksure American male voice singing, against a Mahlerian orchestra, thin dull café society songs of the ‘thirties. She prepared to shout that the bloody noise must be turned off: it was interfering with their rhythm. Enderby said:

"Don't. Please. I’ve got to live in this town."

“Yes," she said, her green eyes, their gold very much metal, hard on him. “You lack courage. You’ve been softened by somebody or something. You’re frightened of the young and the experimental and the way-out and the black dog. When Shelley said what he said about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he wasn't really using fancy language. It's only by the exact use of words that people can begin to understand themselves. Poetry isn't a silly little hobby to be practised in the smallest room of the house."

He blushed. “What can I do?”

She sighed. "Get all these old things out of your system first. Then push on."

Beating out number. As arithmetic,

As short division not divided aims,

Resentment flared. But then, carved out in flames,

He read: That flower is not for you to pick.

“It's time," she said, "you started work on a long poem."

"I tried that once. That bastard stole it and vulgarised it. But," and he looked downhill, seaward, "he's paid. Wrapped in a Union Jack, being gently gnawed." “You can get something here. This is a junction. Deucalion's flood and Noah's. Africa and Europe. Christianity and Islam. Past and future. The black and the white. Two rocks looking across at each other. The Straits may have a submarine tunnel. But it was Mallarmé who said that poetry is made with words, not ideas."

"How do you know all this? You're so young."

She spat out breath very nastily. "There you go again. More interested in the false divisions than the true ones. Come on, let's have that sestet."

The sestet ended in a drinking-shop not far from the Souk or Socco, over glasses of warmish pastis. Drab long robes, hoods, ponchos, ass-beaters, loud gargling Moghrabi, nose-picking children who used the other hand to beg. Sympathetic, Enderby gave them little coins.

Therefore he picked it. All things thawed to action,

Sound, colour. A shrill electric bell

Summoned the guard. He gathered up his faction,

Poised on the brink, thought and created hell.

Light shimmered in miraculous refraction

As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.

"That bloody," Enderby said. "It's meant really to express grudging admiration. But that only works if the reader knows I've taken the line from Tennyson's poem about the eagle."