ABBA ABBA Read online

  ABBA ABBA

  Anthony Burgess

  Abba Abba is about two poets who may or may not have met in Rome in 1820-1821. One was John Keats, who was dying in a house on the Spanish Steps. The other was Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli a great poet, though little known outside Rome. The first part of the book is about Keats and Belli. The second part presents Belli himself as poet, translated by Mr. Burgess.

  Anthony Burgess

  ABBA ABBA

  To Liana

  I would reject a petrarchal coronation – on account of my dying day, and because women have Cancers.

  – John Keats

  Introduction

  Anthony Burgess's novels often seem to be a tussle with the art of poetry. His costive poet, Enderby, grinds out in the lavatory poems of metaphysical grim wit which turn out to be Burgess's own early work, at least in part. Enderby embarks on epics about the conflict between St Augustine and the heretical Celt, Pelagius. The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End plays a wildly funny film-script of G. M. Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland across the illiterate transcription of a television chat show by a hopelessly defeated Californian secretary. Burgess's novels about Shakespeare and Marlowe are shot through with overt and covert quotations from the works of those – and other – dramatists. He was given to chiding his reviewers and readers for not noticing complicated musical forms encoded in his works. As he grew older he came to doubt that his readers would any more have the familiarity with the body of poetry in English he took for granted. But even if we cannot recognise everything we can respond to the furious susurration of other vocabularies and rhythms, the counterpoint, the polyphony.

  Why did he do it? He described himself, modestly enough, as a maker of verse rather than poetry. He wrote libretti, and a splendid translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, complete with murderous sonnets. He was a trained linguist, and thought technically about sounds and rhymes in a way most novelists don't. He was driven to manic punning and word-play in the same way as his hero Joyce, and Melville, perhaps, another novelist who kept breaking into verse and parody. He took English poets and poetry as his subject, he said himself, partly because, as an Englishman living in Europe, the language and the literature were his national identity. He didn't know "Thatcher's Britain" well enough to anatomise or attack it. He knew the poets – and he used, taking pride in his identity as a professional writer, to make novels about them to coincide conveniently with their centenaries. A centenary is a technical constraint and challenge like others. He rose to the occasion.

  He used also to say that he was a European writer not only because he lived in Monaco, or Italy, with an Italian wife, but because he was an English Catholic of Irish descent, and the Roman church, and the Latin language, united the histories and crossed the frontiers, of all European countries. The subject matter of Catholic literature was good and evil, heaven and hell, time and eternity. The English novel tended to be about the English class system, which Burgess was interested in, as he was interested in everything, but glad – as a novelist and constructor of mock-epics – to escape.

  There were two Anthony Burgesses, perhaps. One was atheist, English, northern, and interested in the quiddities of the demotic. The other was Catholic, Irish, Latin, and interested in the spiritual life. You find them to a certain extent in the harsh North African Augustine, convinced of predestined bliss or bane, and the British monk, Pelagius, desperately arguing for free will, and human salvation by virtue. You find them also in the two opposed heroes of Earthly Powers, the mild, cowardly, Coward-like professional writer, brother of a versifying music-hall artist, and Carlo, the exorcist Pope, working miracles of salvation and damnation on the cosmic and historical stage. Or you find them, the elements recombined, in the two poets of Abba Abba, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli and John Keats.

  In You've Had Your Time, which Burgess, following St Augustine again, describes as "the second part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" he describes an unpleasant experience he defines as "psychic". He was asked, he says, to read some of Keats's poems at the house on the Spanish Steps where he died.

  "Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to the place where the body died, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves."

  On another occasion, making a television film for Canada, he recited Keats's sonnet "When I have fears that I may cease to be" on the steps outside that house. During the fourteen lines a clear sky became stormy, rain poured, thunder drowned the words. Burgess says he is not "imputing a demonic vindictiveness" to the soul of John Keats, but believes that his fierce creative energy, frustrated by death, haunts the house where he died. He goes on to speculate that if Keats had lived, as Belli did, to the age of 72, he might have moved from his "consumptive romanticism" to a fuller poetry, "doing Browning's work better than Browning". Burgess perhaps admired the Keats of the letters, witty, wise beyond his years, Shakespearean in his quick intelligence, more than the singer of Endymion, the post-Miltonic author of the unfinished Hyperion, or even the dreamy singer of the great Odes.

  However Burgess is very clear that the novel, Abba Abba, which recounts briefly and economically the death of Keats, sprang more from an obsession with the Roman poet, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. Belli died in 1861, at 72 – he could have met Keats in Rome, though there is no evidence that he did. He was the author of 2,279 sonnets in the Roman dialect, and the sonnets were blasphemous, obscene and according to Burgess full of scholarly curiosity about their own language. He was also a Vatican censor, a double man, like Burgess himself, in some ways. Burgess quotes the American poet, Robert Penn Warren, who said that the great nineteenth-century poets were Keats and Belli. Burgess began translating Belli's sonnets before he conceived his Keats novel – indeed, significantly, whilst he was working on his translation of the amorous sonnets of Cyrano de Bergerac. In the end Burgess translated "seventy-odd" of the sonnets. Liana Burgess pointed out to me that he translated them into a Manchester voice, an English version of the harsh, guttural Roman Italian. He confined himself to the theological ones that "gave full scope to the employment of the blasphemy of the Roman gutters". He speculates in his Confessions that Keats, if he had lived, might have learned to employ the colloquial, the obscene, the blasphemous. Like Belli.

  Burgess's Keats, too, has things in common with his inventor. He was told in 1960 that he had an inoperable brain tumour and a year to live. He began writing novels to make money for his widow-to-be (his first wife Lynne) and wrote fluently and furiously under the pressure of the death sentence. Burgess's Keats is young, of a poor family, and a resolute atheist who believes that his end is final. He is also a European – he speaks at the beginning of the novel of the god, his god, Apollo, and his classical learning gives him the breadth Burgess's own education gave him. Burgess uses Keats's sonnet on a cat, with its spitting consonants and material solidity, to excellent effect – and he uses the voice (one of Keats's voices) of restless, mocking punning which recurs in the light poems and the letters. The wonderful scatological bravura passage from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy which Burgess's Keats recites to cheer his friend Elton is in fact quoted at length by Keats in a letter to George and Georgiana Keats. Both the cat sonnet and the Burton quotation have a roughness and a force in common with Burgess's renderings of Belli.

  The story of Keats's tragic death is well known, and dramatising it against its true outline, at once stark and full of beautiful and terrible detail, is a difficult task. Here is the Keats who gave up contact with Fanny Brawne because it was too painful, who in the end asked that his Shakespeare and other books of poetry be removed, who instructed grimly that his epitaph should be "Here lies one whose name was writ in water". Here is
the Keats who was a trained surgeon, who had nursed his brother through the consumption that had killed him, who recognised the coming agony, tried to prevent it by suicide, and was lovingly, and religiously, frustrated by Joseph Severn. Here is the Keats who was horribly afraid of the dark, and considerately brave. He was a tough intelligence, and Burgess uses one of his most uncompromising statements as his own epigraph. "I would reject a petrarchal coronation – on account of my dying day, and because women have Cancers." The grim voice of the dying surgeon speaks in counterpoint to the classical, flowery poet.

  Burgess's novel – like all his novels – is about body and soul. Belli's blasphemous sonnets about the Incarnation represent one embodiment of spirit in earthy language. Burgess's Keats's dialogue, with its deliberately tasteless and inconveniently frank wit, is another embodiment. The soul is perhaps only the breath, the word of mouth. The title of the novel, Abba Abba, represents the cry of the dying Christ on the cross to his unhearing Father. It also represents, as Belli tells Cardinal Fabiani, the octave of the rhyme scheme of a petrarchan sonnet. For Burgess's Belli this sonnet is a kind of Incarnation. He says:

  "The sonnet form must have existed in potentia from the beginning, but it was made flesh such as Petrarch. Behind the thousands of sonnets in the world, in Tuscan, Roman, French, German, even English, shines the one ultimate perfect sonnet… The wordless sonnet that still rhymes, that says nothing, having no words, but yet speaks… the ultimate statement whose meaning is itself. What is this, your eminence, but the true image of God?"

  "Heretical, yes, you were right when you said that. You talk of an abstraction, a ghost."

  "I talk of an ultimate reality."

  In an essay published in 1967, in a collection entitled The God I Want, Burgess typically conducted his argument as a dialogue between two speakers, in this case "Anthony" and "Burgess". "Anthony", the sceptical voice, interviews "Burgess" who confesses to believing in a God whom he compares to mathematics, to grammar, and to the score of a symphony. Not, he says, the composer. The score, the notation, the form itself of the symphony, the potential experience of coherence and beauty. Like, he might have added, the sonnet form. Elsewhere, he said that his God did exist, but was like a Beethoven symphony eternally playing itself to itself, unconcerned with human plights.

  Burgess reincarnates Keats's death, and Belli's Roman life and work, in his own vigorous English. He adds a further puzzle, in the shape of another alter ego, an Englishman called J. J. Wilson, descended from a Joseph Joachim Guglielmi, who lives in Manchester, dies in New York, shadows Burgess-Wilson's own career, translates Belli and is murdered in New York, having written several of Burgess's own rude juvenile sonnets.

  Keats wrote his own epitaph, which is on his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. On Burgess's grave is written ABBA ABBA. A. B. is of course also Anthony Burgess.

  A. S. Byatt, August 2000

  ONE

  ONE

  "Isaac," he said. "Marmaduke. Which of the two do you more seem to yourself to be?" He mused smiling among the ilex trees. The dome of San Pietro down there in the city was grape-hued in the citron twilight.

  "I have never much cared for either name," said Lieutenant Elton of the Royal Engineers. "At school they called me Ikey Marmalade."

  "We're both edibles then. Junkets, me."

  "Junkets? Oh yes. Jun Kets."

  "To be eaten by Fairy Mab."

  Elton did not catch the reference. He took out his handkerchief, coughed harshly into it, then examined the sputum in the lemon dusk. Satisfied with what he saw, he wrapped it and stowed it in his pocket. He said:

  "It's the mildness here that is good. The winter will be very mild, you will see. Extremes are bad. On St Helena a raging summer is ready to begin. Not good for the lungs, that climate. Not good for the liver. Not good for anything."

  "You spoke with Bony at all?"

  "He waved his arms and said something about earthquakes or it may have been earthworks. Or earthworms, for that matter. I could not understand his French very well. I saw him digging a lot. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, he shouted at me. That's from the atheist Voltaire."

  "You don't admire Voltaire?"

  "A damned atheist."

  "Here comes his sister."

  "Voltaire's?"

  "No, no, no. God in heaven, here truly comes his sister. To us."

  Pauline Bonaparte glided in the dimming light, a couple of servants behind her, taking her evening walk on the Pincio. Elegant, lovely, with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort, fine-nostrilled, fine-eyed, she peered with fine eyes at the taller and more handsome of the two young men, gliding closer to peer better. Elton stood stiffly as though on adjutant's parade, suffering the inspection. She smiled and nodded and glided on. His friend laughed, though nervously.

  "Fairy Mab will have you."

  "Ah no. Ah no she'll not. I'm no whoremaster."

  "Faithful to the one at home?"

  "Yes, you could say faithful."

  John brooded. "I too. The animal ecstasy of the flesh denied to us. We're not winds to play on that Aeolian Harp."

  "What Aeolian Harp?"

  "Her as Venus Reclining. Canova's work, apt for the hallway of a whorehouse. To be played on by any wind that blows, gale, zephyr, postcenal eructation." He paused to take in shallow breaths while Elton looked puzzled. "Can they be disjointed, disjuncted, disjunketed?"

  "What?" They turned, in Pauline's far wake, towards the Spanish Steps.

  "Love and the animal ecstasy."

  "It is ennobled," said Lieutenant Elton RE, "by love. It ceases to be animal and becomes divine."

  "In what bad poet did you read that?"

  "I read no poetry. I read only engineering manuals and the Holy Bible."

  "And Marmaduke said unto Isaac: Get thee gone and build thee an earthworm, earthwork I would say. And lo it was done and earth did quake with the work thereof."

  "I think you laugh at me much of the time."

  "Kindly, though. You will admit kindly." They started going down the Steps. "And talking of kindly, would it not be a kindly act to accost the Divine Pauline and speak of her brother, saying he is well and digging hard?"

  "He is not well. They say he will be dead this time next year." And then: "Accost. I will keep out of the way of her accosting."

  "You will be no accostermonger."

  "You laugh at me much of the time."

  They had come all the way down the Steps, quieter now than in the daytime, and John led Elton to the Barcaccia, whose water music could, with the evening stilling of the piazza, be clearly heard. "This," John said, "tries to sing me to sleep."

  "You really are a poetical sort of fellow. And you have really brought out a book?"

  "Alas."

  Elton chuckled uneasily. "Will we meet tomorrow?"

  "Under the ilexes. I've been searching for a rhyme for ilex. We have a terrible language for rhymes, Isaac Marmaduke. It makes poetical engineering most difficult. Here the people shout in rhyme without reason. Put on your armour, duke, be calmer, duke, cried Marmaduke. We're always being betrayed into comedy. You see how difficult it all is. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."

  "That's what Bony said. After the retreat out of Russia."

  "He may go down in history as a great theoretician of the arts. Well, Mr Elton sir, under the ilexes let it be." Elton, though in civilian dress, sketched a salute and loped off across the piazza towards the Caffé Greco. John stood a while by Bernini's broken marble boat, listening to the water music. He tried to identify himself with the water, to be the water, to feel the small sick parcel of flesh that was himself liquefy joyfully, joyfully relish its own wetness and singing clarity. He sprang back with a start into nerve and bone to find a hand on his arm. James Clark, his doctor, with a smiling stranger. Clark said:

  "Ye should be hame the noo, Master Keats. The nicht air -"

  "Is nae halesome. Aye, I ken." The stranger looked pu
zzled with the very puzzlement of Lieutenant Elton. "I mean no mockery," John said. "Doctor Clark knows that his deliberate use of Scotch inspires confidence. Scotch engineers, Scotch doctors -"

  "Scotch reviewers," said the stranger.

  "Somehow I knew you understood English."

  "This is Mr Keats," Clark said. "This is Signor Giovanni Gulielmi, man of letters and citizen of Rome."

  "I know your work," said Gulielmi. "I know your Endymion well -"

  "Ah, no, not that botched mawkery."

  "Also your volume of this year. Would you call that too a botched mockery?"

  "Mawkery," John corrected. "A neologism. The critics were always on to me for making up words. A real writer, they seemed to imply, would get all his words from Johnson's Dictionary. Sorry, I seem to start with a mockery and continue with a rebuke. You speak English excellent well, before God, with a right slight accent of the North. I would I had but a hundredth of that skill in the Tuscan."

  "In, in," urged Clark, impelling John by the elbow. "Is Mr Severn already at home?"

  "I let my keeper loose for the evening. He has gone to see the sculptures of a certain Mr Ewing."

  "William Ewing," Gulielmi said. "He has a certain small talent. His figures are recognisably figures, one may say so much."

  "I envy," John panted, climbing the marble stairway to the second floor of Number 26, "any man who can carve marble. To climb it," seeing old Mr Gibson come from the top floor, candle-lighted by his French valet, "is for me, in my present state," having just visited Mr O'Hara up there, "work enough. Your servant, sir."

  "Evening, evening," old Mr Gibson growled, passing, candle proceeding.

  "Easy, man, easy," said Clark, trying to pull John to a standstill by his coattail. "There's all the time in the world." Then he emended: "I' the worrrruld."