“Pfffrrrummmp”. “Perrrrrp”. “Querpkprrmp”. These are three of the onomatopoeic neologisms Anthony Burgess has bequeathed to us and posterity within the first two pages of Inside Mr. Enderby (1963), the first installment of his Enderby quartet. A word on posterity later. Let it be enough to write that the “Perrrrp” is closest to the recognized verbal form for the sounds the author is transcribing, and that the sounds occur as his stand-in author Enderby sleeps. These creations ought to bring to mind Joyce’s feline “Mrkgnao” (“Milk now”?) and “Gurrhr”. But Burgess’ hero has stopped wandering, being a middle aged English poet, Francis Xavier Enderby, settled in Brighton by the “green-grey winter Channel”. He has, besides memories of a bad stepmother whose money he nonetheless lives on, awful trouble with his digestion, and needs to sit on the toilet to compose his poems. The conceit for the introduction to the author, which will be brought back in a spectacular way at the end of the quartet, is that a future schoolmaster might use a time machine to bring his pupils to the very bedrooms of literary figures such as Enderby, to see how art and life cohere. Thus literary posterity can be thought of in a new way, and author biography becomes another reality that can be accessed in person. And through an elaborate pun on “posterity” and “posterior” the analogy in Bloom’s outhouse (“Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second.”) has been adapted to the writer’s needs rather than the reader’s. Burgess, who had first published Inside Enderby using the pseudonym Joseph Kell, may have been running a little interference in the posterity game when he reviewed the novel under his own name (as if disinterested) for The Yorkshire Post, by whom he was consequently fired.
Some pages later, after Enderby meets with the strange old birds at the pub, the sonic abstractions will be forced by the vice of Enderby’s verse to produce commands beginning first lines of each stanza:
‘Act! Act!’ The ducks give voice. (1)
‘Prudence! Prudence!’ the pigeons call. (5)
‘Caution! Caution!’ the rooks proclaim. (9)
But this direction will soon be abandoned as Enderby is commissioned both to write love poems for Arry the pub cook’s flame, Thelma, and to contribute to a magazine called Fem by one Vesta Bainbridge, with whom a short marriage is to follow. He is beckoned both forth by Vesta and back to his stepmother, into a confusing double in one of the two, while the muse calls from the other room.
A longer work called The Pet Beast is underway, in which Enderby uses his residual, mostly step-maternal Catholic theology to present the Minotaur as Original Sin and as the necessity-mother for civilization, poetry prizes, the very labyrinth. His Theseus is heretic Pelagius, then, and his victory is humanity’s loss, as “books were buried, statues ground to chalk-dust,” proving a practical case for Augustianism that Burgess and his stand-ins make muchly elsewhere in his work. A reception in London and an indiscreet bender on a Roman honeymoon sees this scheme taken up by a rival but constipated poet Rawcliffe, who updates and makes vulgar Enderby’s work in adapting it for the screen. Rawcliffe will face a dire end in the sequel, Enderby Outside, but before then Enderby will be over-doctored and try to force his own end using a bottle of Aspirin. He’s renamed and reemployed (as “Piggy Hogg” at an agricultural station in “Snorthorpe”), but Enderby’s ends are to be reversed for future entertainment and instruction, for us and for the time traveling schoolchildren creeping round the poet’s bed. The next morning, Enderby reverses the diagram:
Ghosts had been whimpering around, he was sure, ghosts of the dead year. Or perhaps, he smiled wryly at the conceit, posterity had been shyly looking in.