William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Such speculation risks entering the realm of banality and sentiment, but, as we idly cruise the upper atmosphere in our jumbo jets pondering the wisdom of a second Bloody Mary before lunch, and, elsewhere, Stealth bombers wreak pinpoint destruction by laser beam, it is worth reflecting on that winter day at Kill Devil Hills when the five men from Kitty Hawk watched the two brothers in their white muslin flying machine lift off the ground and chug erratically through the air over the chilly sand dunes. It was such a short time ago and feverish hindsight makes one want to invest the occasion with monumental significance. But, reportedly, John Daniels, Will Dough, Adam Etheridge, W. D. Brinkley and Johnny Moore were not overly impressed — they had seen the brothers make much longer and more graceful flights in their gliders in previous years. Even the brothers, when they cabled the news that evening to the family that the flights had been successful, seemed more concerned to let them know that they would be home in time for Christmas. However there was an eyewitness the following year when a new Flyer made the first ever circling flight and with a little effort of imagination one can gain some vicarious sense of the sheer strangeness of the phenomenon, as it must have seemed then, and share a little of the moment, a sense that the world would never be the same again:

The machine is held until ready to start … then with a tremendous flapping and snapping of the four cylinder engine, the huge machine springs aloft. When it first turned that circle, and came near the starting point, I was right in front of it; and I said then, and I believe still it was one of the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight of my life. Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air toward you — a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead … coming right toward you with the tremendous flap of its propellors, and you will have something like what I saw. The younger brother bade me move aside for fear that it might come down suddenly; but I tell you friends, the sensation one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.

1993

About eleven months ago in Edinburgh, so I have just been told by a friend who was there, Anthony Burgess turned to the audience he was addressing and said quite calmly, “I have only a year left to live.” There was a shocked silence and then Anthony, apparently, carried on without a care in the world.

I knew, we knew, that he was not in good health latterly, but the last time I saw him he did not seem much changed. He was smoking, inevitably, and we had a drink or three. He was participating in whatever book business had brought him to London with his usual heroic energy and benign composure, and, for all I know, was writing a novel, a book review and a concerto in his idler moments. All the same, the news of his death comes as a huge shock perhaps because one always thought that, having cheated the grim reaper once, Anthony’s prodigious energy would continue to defy mortality as long as he felt it was worth it.

I refer, of course, to the now legendary moment in 1959 when Anthony was diagnosed as suffering from an inoperable brain tumour and was told he would be dead before a year had run its course. In the time he had left remaining to him, or so he tells it, to provide some sort of legacy for his soon-to-be widow, he wrote four novels, non-stop, one after the other. And when the diagnosis blessedly proved to have been false he carried on working with that same restless creativity. From the outside it seemed as if Anthony’s artistic momentum was indeed a kind of life force, sustaining and vivifying, and that as long as he was there working he would outlive the lot of us.

He was an exemplary writer in many senses. He was the towering example, for instance, to all late starters, not writing his first novel until he was in his forties. He was an intellectual, a polymath, at home in many languages, with a cultural sweep that was awe-inspiring, but at the same time he avoided all pretension and elitism, equally happy to let frivolity and fun — in the form of movies, soap operas, TV, chat shows, beach blanket best sellers or whatever — benefit from his shrewd and enthusiastic evaluation. And he worked hard, worked hard for his living, writing novels and criticism, screenplays and libretti, almost anything he wanted to do and could turn his pen to.

In this sense he seems to me to be a very British writer. If there is one thing that characterizes the British writer, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is that by and large he or she writes a lot , is very productive, is professional. Writing is both a serious calling and a serious career, and Anthony, in the twentieth century, embodied that attitude with more style and panache and consistent high standards than anyone else I can think of. But in many other senses he regarded himself as something of an outsider. A cradle Catholic, a northerner, non-Oxbridge, with a working life spent largely abroad, he considered himself, I believe, beyond the pale of the metropolitan literary world. And so much the better for him: he is the perfect example of the non-parochial in British literature. If ever the British novel is described as being cramped and confined by this cramped and confined little island Anthony Burgess can provide the flourishing counterpoise.

I remember on the occasion of his seventieth birthday celebrations him saying cheerfully on television that he never expected to be honoured by his native country. “You have to be a footballer or a jockey to be recognized by the establishment in Britain,” he said. And of course it is the usual matter of shame and a sad reflection on our inherent philistinism that someone as special and worth celebrating as Anthony should have been ignored. But he would know, as would any person of sense, that what matters in the end is the work done rather than any bauble conferred, and the work will continue to fascinate and beguile in all its multitudinous facets. Amongst the thirty-odd novels he wrote the consensus would probably be that Earthly Powers is his masterpiece and it is hard to argue against its huge and confident sweep. But my own particular favourites, the ones I re-read, are the Enderby novels, Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside , which are about the life and extraordinary times of a minor English poet — wonderfully rich and funny novels. I first read these books twenty years ago at university and read them again when I had the chance to meet Anthony many years later. Enderby, eccentric, unworldly, insouciant, obsessed by his art, but fully caught up in the physical pleasures of this world, brings Anthony’s unique and vital spirit forcefully to mind. I shall go and read them again now, and think how lucky I was — how lucky we all were — to meet and know their remarkable creator.

1993

One lucent September morning in 1928, two Germans, a man and a woman, and their worldly possessions, were landed on the beach of Floreana, an uninhabited island in the Galapagos archipelago. The man, Friedrich Ritter, was small, blond and wiry, a doctor and an amateur philosopher with a bent for bizarre, male-supremacist metaphysics. The woman was his lover, Dore Strauch, equally small, dark and somewhat self-consciously bohemian in dress and manner. She adored and venerated Friedrich.

Friedrich and Dore had planned their new life with Teutonic thoroughness. In Berlin during the course of their affair they accumulated a vast supply of stores and provisions and, when the time came for them to leave, they arranged a dinner party and introduced their astonished, respective spouses to each other and told them of their plans. Friedrich suggested to Herr Strauch that, as he was being deprived of a wife, perhaps it might soften the blow if his wife, Mrs Ritter, came to live and work for Herr Strauch as his housekeeper. This completely bizarre proposal was deemed a very satisfactory arrangement by all parties and so Friedrich’s wife duly moved in with Dore’s husband.