Anthony Burgess - Inside Mr Enderby

An aspen hand aspiring now to death

He finished off the bottle in six or seven more handfuls, washing them down carefully. Then, sighing, he lay back. There was nothing to do now except wait. He had committed suicide. He had killed himself. Self-slaughter was of all sins the most reprehensible, being the most cowardly. What punishment awaited suicide? If Rawcliffe were there now he would be able to quote from the Inferno, lavishly, that man who had added to Italian art. Enderby could vaguely remember that suicide belonged to Nether Hell, the Second Ring, between those who had been violent against their neighbours and those who had been violent against God and art and nature. There, in that Third Ring, Rawcliffe rightly belonged, perhaps there already. All these were, Enderby thought, Sins of the Lion. He closed his eyes and saw, quite clearly, the bleeding trees that were the suicides, harpies fluttering about with a rattle of dry wings like the magnified noise of a shaken aspirin bottle. He frowned. All this seemed very unfair. He had, after all, chosen the way of the Second Ring to avoid the way of the Third, and yet both sins were tucked together in the same round slice of Nether Hell.

With infinite care and delicacy the day wormed itself through a continuum of darker and darker greys. The watch on his wrist ticked on healthily, the too-efficient servant that would announce death as coldly as day and breakfast. Enderby began to feel a great tiredness and to hear a loud buzzing in his ears.

A fanfare of loud farts, a cosmic swish of lavatory-flushings. The dark in front of his eyes was cut away in rough slice after rough slice, like black bread, right down to the heel of the loaf. This then began to turn slowly, brightening with each revolution until it became blinding like the sun. Enderby found it an insuperable effort to interpose blankets or hands or eyelids. The circle cracked with intolerable luminosity, and then Enderby seemed to be dragged, with hearty, though somehow archangelic, tug-of-war cries towards some ineffable hidden Presence. Suddenly this Presence, at first humorously offering Itself as a datum for mere intellection, erupted into a tingling ultimate blow at all the senses, and Enderby staggered back.

There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogen, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat-all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. "Help," he tried to call. "Help help help." He fell, crawled, crying, "Help, help." The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it.

"And," said Dr Greenslade the psychiatrist, "we won't try that sort of thing again, will we? For, as we can now see, it only causes lots and lots of worry and trouble to other people." He beamed, a fat youngish man in a white coat not too clean, with the unhealthy complexion of a sweet-eater. "For example, it didn't do our poor old landlady's heart any good, did it? She had to run up the stairs and then down the stairs"-he illustrated this with up-and-then-down-the-air wiggling fingers-"and she was most agitated when the ambulance finally got there. We must consider others, mustn't we? The world wasn't made just for us and nobody else."

Enderby cringed from the nanny-like substitution of first plural for second singular. "Everybody gives trouble when they're dying," he mumbled. "That can't be avoided."

"Ah," pounced Dr Greenslade, "but you didn't die. When people die in the normal decent way they give a normal decent leisurely kind of trouble which harms no one. But you were just caught more or less in the act of sailing off. That meant rushing about and worry for everybody, particularly for your poor old landlady. Besides"-he leaned forward, hushed-"it wasn't just a matter of straight-forward dying with you, was it? It was"-he whispered the dirty words- "attempted suicide."

Enderby bowed his head, this being the required stock response. Then he said, "I'm sorry I made a mess of it. I don't know what came over me. Well, I do in a way, of course, but if I'd been braver, if I'd stuck it out, I think I could have sailed straight through, if you see what I mean. What I mean is that that was just a vision of Hell meant to frighten me. Bogies and so on. It wasn't real."

Dr Greenslade rubbed his hands discreetly. "I can see," he said, "that a lot of fun lies ahead. Though not for me, unfortunately. Still, I'll be getting Wapenshaw's reports. It's a lovely place," he said dreamily, "especially lovely at this time of year. You'll like it."

"Where?" said Enderby with suspicion. "What?" Dr Greenslade had sounded like some Dickens character talking about a beloved idiot-child's grave. "I thought I was being discharged."

"Oh, dear me, no," said shocked Dr Greenslade. "Healthy people don't try to commit suicide, you know. Not coldly and deliberately they don't. And you'd planned this, you know. Preston Hawkes told me you'd planned it. It wasn't just a mad impulse."

"No, it wasn't," said Enderby stoutly. "It was logical. I knew perfectly well what I was doing and I've given you perfectly logical reasons for doing it." He belched acidulously: Greeeeekh. "This hospital food's bloody awful," he said.

"The food at Flitchley is excellent," dreamed Dr Greenslade. "Everything's excellent there. Lovely grounds to walk in. Table tennis. Television. A library of sedative books. Congenial company. You'll be sorry to leave."

"Look," said Enderby quietly, "I'm not going, see? You've got no right to keep me here or send me anywhere. I'm perfectly all right, see? I demand my freedom."

"Now," said Dr Greenslade harshly, changing from nanny to schoolmaster, "let's get one or two things absolutely dear, shall we? There are certain laws in this country appertaining to mental derangement, laws of restraint, certificates and so on. Those laws have, in your case, already been invoked. We can't have people wandering all over the country trying to kill themselves." Enderby closed his eyes to see England swarming, as a log swarms with woodlice, with peripatetic suicides. "You're a danger to yourself," said Dr Greenslade, "and a danger to the community. A man who doesn't respect his own life isn't likely to respect anybody else's. That's logical, isn't it?"

"No," said Enderby promptly.

"Oh, well," said Dr Greenslade sarcastically, "you, of course, are the big expert on logic."

"I don't pretend to be anything," said Enderby loudly, "except a poet whose inspiration has departed. I'm an empty eggshell."

"You are," said Dr Greenslade sternly, "a man of education and culture who can be of great value to the community. When you're made fit again, that is. Empty eggshells, indeed," he poohed. "Poets," he near-sneered. "Those days are past, those wide-eyed romantic days. We're living in a realistic age now," he said. "Science is making giant strides. And as for poets," he said, with sudden bubbling intimacy, "I met a poet once. He was a nice decent fellow with no big ideas about himself. He wrote very nice poetry, too, which was not too difficult to understand." He looked at Enderby as though Enderby's poetry was both not nice and not intelligible. "This man," said Dr Greenslade, "didn't have your advantages. No private income for him, no cosy little flat in a seaside resort. He had a wife and family, and he wasn't ashamed of working for them. He wrote his poetry at week-ends." He nodded at Enderby, week-day poet. "And there was nothing abnormal about him, nothing at all. He didn't go about with a lobster on a string or marry his own sister or eat pepper before drinking claret. He was a decent family man whom nobody would have taken for a poet at all." Enderby groaned frightfully. "And," added Dr Greenslade, "he had a poem in all the anthologies." Enderby held back a loud howl. Then he said: