A Dead Man in Deptford.

In one of Anthony Burgess's (1917-1993) many comic novels, One Hand Clapping (1972), a woman observes her husband answering quiz questions about books on a television knowledge bowl. For a prize of a thousand pounds, he identifies a group of Renaissance playwrights. While the audience applauds his unlikely success, his wife is startled to see ghostly Dekker, Jonson, and Massinger, silent and dignified, wearing little gold earrings and ruffs. No one in the studio, not even the winning contestant, knows the plays or the men, who have been reduced to revenants conjured up by trivia.

Burgess's last novel, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993) puts the flesh back on Christopher Marlowe, author of Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Tamburlaine. Like his "WS," (William Shakespeare) in Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess's Marlowe eats, drinks, vomits, has sex, witnesses a public execution, betrays and is betrayed, composes blank verse, and participates in the making of Renaissance drama. Like many of Burgess's novels, A Dead Man in Deptford investigates ambition and disappointment, and the inextricable realms of playfulness and guiltiness. No dreary hero, Kit Marlowe, or Morley, or Merlin ("the name is unsure") blasphemes, spies, and speculates with Raleigh and his cohorts in a vividly realized "School of Night." The novel succeeds as an historical fiction by evoking a world and a time; it provides the necessary thrill of brushes with the even-more-famous, as when Kit and Will Shogspere collaborate on a play; and it moves quickly despite the necessary exposition.

In Dead Man, Burgess imagines answers to literary historians' questions about Marlowe: was he really an atheist, and a homosexual; did he spy on the continent for the Crown or was he a double-agent, conspiring with Catholic intriguers; did he really die in a brawl over a tavern bill, or was he assassinated for political reasons? In taking up Christopher Marlowe, in the fourth centenary of his murder, Burgess returns to the subject of his undergraduate thesis to recreate not only an argument, however, but an imagined world. Burgess's Elizabethan playhouses, taverns, jails, roads, country houses, and colleges make effective backdrops for his zingy dialogues and conversations. Although he builds his fiction with eye-catching words, celebrates and concocts etymologies, coincidences, and language games, Burgess excels here as elsewhere in describing the corporeal. The menus are authentically Elizabethan in their combinations of sweet and pungent; the disembowelments are unforgettable, if not the sex; the smell of Virginian tobacco makes some characters crave and others complain. Readers who can locate a library copy of this book, which has not yet appeared in the United States, will not find it abstruse.

In an interview over a decade ago, Burgess explained to the critic Samuel Coale his longstanding interest in Marlowe as deriving from "a kind of Catholic quality." Part fascination with a mysterious career (was he an undercover priest?) and part recognition of the guilt so copiously represented in the plays, Burgess's instinct led him to speculate that Marlowe had betrayed someone and had suffered an irreconcilable desire for both damnation and salvation. As an undergraduate, Burgess had only recently lapsed from the Catholic faith of his upbringing and part of Marlowe's appeal may have lain in the poet's reputation as a notorious atheist and blasphemer. Yet the immediate surroundings of a world at war made Marlowe's visions of hell seem relevant; Burgess recalls in more than one place the experience of taking examinations in a glass-roofed gymnasium, during an air raid, with the bombs going overhead.

The image of a young man packed with knowledge, spilling it out on paper, while the bombers unload their death-dealing cargo can stand usefully as an emblem for and explanation of Anthony Burgess's career. To be prolific, as the word suggests, is to be the opposite of dead. The author of thirty-four works of fiction; two volumes of autobiography; fifteen nonfiction books, including criticism, reviews, and travel writing; a handful of plays, translations, librettos, and screenplays, Burgess produced to the point that he risked censure, not to mention incredulity. Yet, as his critics point out, he started late as a novelist, having first found a vocation as a composer. He had begun publishing novels (the three "Malayan" novels that make up The Long Day Wanes) in the late 1950s, during his service as an education officer in Malaya and Borneo. In 1959 he collapsed with what was diagnosed as a brain tumor and was sent back to England to live out his allotted year. In 1960-61 he published the five novels that he wrote that year in an effort to support himself and to provide for his wife Lynne. He neither died, nor desisted from writing. In 1962 he published A Clockwork Orange, the novella that would make him famous (especially after Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film). Fame fostered his literary career where it has hindered others.

While it is true that Burgess wrote for a living, he also consciously employed language in serious play, to reconcile the opposites he perceived in a Manichaean "duoverse," instead of universe. Though one of his disingenuous narrators claims "It is not to my purpose to observe on good and evil, or right and wrong, since I have little skill in that kind of thinking"(Man of Nazareth, 1979), Burgess was often preoccupied with these issues and endeavored to debunk a too-optimistic Pelagianism and to warn against a too-deterministic Augustinianism in human, as well as fictional affairs. Reconciling the conflict between opposing forces does not, in Burgess's fiction, mean settling for a middle way. He preferred commitment, even to a mistaken ideal, to neutrality. In writing, he engaged in an ongoing comic, cosmic ritual. His career attested to the efficacy of ludic (playful) action, even though his vision, in the novels, was almost unremittingly pessimistic about the use of human endeavor.

In his autobiographies, Burgess indicated that he had recently returned to

the church, although he had also made known his scorn for the reforms it had undergone since his apostasy. His last two novels were less overtly concerned than his previous books with the struggle between Pelagian and Augustinian impulses, and it is not clear how closely he adhered to the Manichaean heresy that undergirded so much of his fiction, though opposites clearly attracted him. In four decades' worth of novels, a reader has ample opportunity to explore the importance of these ideas to Burgess; in fact, they are impossible to avoid, as his critics John J. Stinson and Geoffrey Aggeler have demonstrated. Despite his aversion to didactic fiction, Burgess did not hesitate to instruct (and quiz) his readers on the Pelagian heresy and its bracing Augustinian antidote, discussed in more detail below.

The "kind of Catholic quality" that is so noticeable in Burgess's fiction comes not only from these interests, but from numerous episodes drawn directly from the life and opinions of John Burgess Wilson, a Manchester Catholic, raised by an Irish Catholic stepmother (who repelled him), educated in Catholic schools in the fashion of the 1920s and 1930s, who left the church as a teen-ager, either as a result of guilt about his sexual adventures, or through the too-convincing presentation of Martin Luther's views by a history master (or both). The best guide to Burgess's life is the two-volume autobiography, or confessions, Little Wilson and Big God (1986) and You've Had Your Time (1990). In the first book, Burgess describes his position as a college student: "There was no answer to the world's problems in communism, and no personal salvation in Anglicanism. The solutions probably lay with renegade Catholic liberal humanism." He adds that, fifty years later, he has not much changed this view. Despite years away from the church, including a time when he considered converting to the austerity of Islam, Burgess maintains, in the end, that "one can't throw away the Eucharist so easily." Both resentment of and respect for the institutional church come through in one of Burgess's comments on James Joyce's work, in his excellent introductory book ReJoyce (1965). He writes: "The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence." To simply ignore, take a neutral stance, or choose a less troubling substitute for the church does not occur to Burgess.

In Joyce, Burgess found a Catholic writer he could take seriously. (Reading A Portrait of the Artist when he was a teen-ager, he was temporarily terrified back into the church, but Joyce's writing meant more to Burgess as a novelist than as coreligionist. Studying Finnegan's Wake was a lifelong project.) Of the great English Catholic modern writers he writes with less admiration, "The converts can look back to a family history graced by the economic rewards of Protestantism and to the advantages of an education provided by a Protestant establishment. They converted in a cool time." Although readers will see themes (such as guilt) in common, Burgess does not recognize his faith or culture in Graham Greene's or Evelyn Waugh's fiction. He attributes this to class prejudice: "It evidently hurt Waugh deeply that his typical fellow-worshipper should be an expatriated Irish laborer and that the typical minister of the church should be a Maynooth priest with a brogue." Yet Burgess rails elsewhere against the church's prevailing tackiness--"debased Baroque, debased Rococo...the small church with its incense, with its horrible little paintings, and horrible little statues"--as if aesthetic outrage accounts for his own disaffection. In any case, Burgess's family background and childhood experience gave him an acute sense of being an outsider in his own land, even though he lived abroad most of his adult life. Many of his characters, through temperament, ancestry, immigration, or accident, find themselves in similar situations; it is one of Burgess's accomplishments to have developed his "outsiders" from stock figures (e.g., the colonial abroad; the working-class man with a brain) into vehicles for examining our appalling century.

Burgess returns frequently to the contrasting world views of Pelagianism and Augustinianism to structure his fiction. Often, one misguided character represents the former, while the narrator or main character represents, or comes to see the truth of, the latter. Pelagianism, based on the opinions of the British heretic Pelagius, denies the necessity of grace, putting instead too much faith in human beings' capacity to exercise free will for the good.

In Burgess's view, liberals take the Pelagian wrong turn, failing to recognize that education, individual effort, and government oversight cannot correct the world's problems. The Augustinian view, perhaps closer to Burgess's own, insists that Original Sin leads humans inevitably into evil. Pelagian and Augustinian come into conflict, and in The Wanting Seed (1962), into alternating periods of rule over a state over-burdened with citizens. In this novel, a satirical "Malthusian strip-cartoon," the state combats overpopulation by rewarding infanticide, punishing the fertile, waging wars against imaginary enemies, encouraging homosexuality, and condoning cannibalism. The tactics vary according to the view that has come into the ascendancy: in the "Pelphase," optimism ultimately justifies a police state in which disappointment at human failings leads to repressive measures; a chaotic "Interphase" results from the relaxation of sanctions; and the "Gusphase" follows, its philosophical pessimism to be undermined by the surprising fact that people behave better than they ought to, given their innate depravity. Burgess writes, "We tend to Augustinianism when we are disgusted with our own selfishness, to Pelagianism when we seem to have behaved well. Free will is of the essence of Pelagianism; determinism...of Augustinianism." Round and round we go, with no way out, and no solution, especially as we will never know how free we really are, given Original Sin.

The fundamental article of Burgess's faith is that free will defines humanity (in this he resembles Pelagians), so he represents the curtailment of choices as fundamentally wrong. In A Clockwork Orange, Burgess reprehends behaviorist conditioning (the delinquent narrator is compelled to watch films of atrocities after receiving a drug that induces nausea), for its infringement of free will. The once ultra-violent Alex can no longer react with the badness of the self, which was made by "Bog or God." Ultimately Alex is deprogrammed, so that he may enjoy music and elect to kick, murder, and rape again. Whether Alex could ever choose to be good depends on which version of the novel you read. For the American edition, the last chapter was chopped off; Burgess explains that the structure of the book, in three sections of seven chapters, adds up to twenty-one, the traditional number of maturity. With only twenty, you miss Alex "renouncing violence as a childish toy." Even without the ending, however, Burgess makes it plain in A Clockwork Orange that goodness is no virtue if it has not been chosen and that the state's attempt to eliminate evil is an assault on the self.

One of Burgess's very best novels, Earthly Powers (1980), takes up the Augustinian/Pelagian antithesis in a richer, fuller fiction. It brings together two characters, the narrator, Kenneth Toomey (a homosexual novelist, loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham), and his brother-in-law the pope, Carlo Campanati (loosely based on, and attacking, Pope John XXIII). The novel unfolds retrospectively as Toomey recounts in more than replete detail the events (personal, familial, literary, and world-historical) that lead to his giving of testimony regarding Don Carlo's miraculous healing of a child. Toomey, a popular writer and a rationalist, is exiled from the church because, as he sees it, God made him a homosexual. Ironically, he is the self-appointed Augustinian of the book, while the Holy Father Don Carlo seeks to advance the Pelagian cause through ecumenicism. The evidence suggests that Don Carlo is not a saint, but an agent of the devil. Toomey discovers that the child cured by Carlo grows up to be a Jim Jones-type, who massacres his misguided followers (including two of Toomey's relatives) in a eucharist of cyanide.

Carlo's attempt to reunify Christianity leads to another grisly communion, in which two more of Toomey's young relatives are eaten by cannibals at their celebration of the Eucharist. With mass suicide on one end and cannibalism on the other, the fruits of Pelagianism are realized in a sacrament that has become diabolical. Here Burgess's taste for ironies and inversion leads him once again to the Manichaean conclusion. Yet the author is more sly than this summary suggests; since readers derive their information from Toomey's colorful, exaggerated, and consciously crafted reminiscences, they may suspect that they are dealing with that modern creature, the unreliable narrator. Despite the implausibility, the conceit of a single mind encompassing the experience of modernity works because Toomey's recollection is broadly inclusive. He spills forth theological disputations, popular song lyrics, descriptions of his sister's fashionable outfits, and perfectly reproduced repartee from decades past. In Earthly Powers the imaginary and the incredible come together in a fabulous book.

Some readers have found Earthly Powers wearying--my father, for instance, can't get through it. Burgess's fictional output was so various and so plentiful that a reader who is irritated by the metafictional riddling of MF (1971) might still be delighted by the Enderby books (1963, 1968). The evocation of a not-so-distant lost world (the silent movies, popular songs, and favorite foods) in The Pianoplayers (1986) may appeal, though the speculations about Shakespeare's love-life and career appall, or vice versa. Reading around in Burgess is rewarding and often surprising. One of his most hilarious characters, the race-relations researcher Mr. Raj, transforms an otherwise unremarkable book about wife-swapping, The Right to an Answer (1960).

Since Burgess's vocabulary, his love of odd words, old words, off-the-beaten-track words, his fascination with foreign tongues, etymologies, and dialects, has the effect of encrusting his fiction with a scumbled surface of language, my own favorites tend to be those novels that can support and justify this layer of discourse. His novels about writers, real or invented, such as A Dead Man in Deptford (Marlowe), Nothing Like the Sun (Shakespeare), Abba Abba (Keats), the Enderby books (about a fictional poet), and Earthly Powers (Toomey, the writer of potboilers), make good vehicles for the Burgess lexicon. Certain pet words in that well-used and ever-burgeoning collection reveal Burgess's obsession with the body. To some extent he simply follows his master Joyce here, in representing the physicality of his fictional creatures. Yet he can hardly write a book without "emetic," "costive," "engorged," or "eructation." A concordance would embarrass not for what his characters' bodies do, but in what terms.

Repetition of material, from the level of the habitually used word, or irresistible epigram, or quick characterization, to the level of situations, events, and authorial hobbyhorses was Burgess's greatest weakness. When the repetition works within a novel as part of a "musical" structure, it is a desirable part of form. But in the realm of content, repetitions seem lazy. How many female characters can demonstrate their slovenliness by picking their teeth with tram tickets before the reader wonders whether a different bad habit might do the trick as well? To learn the autobiographical source of the detail (in this case, Burgess's loathsome stepmother) makes the repetition appear compulsive.

Burgess was brave to have published his autobiographies, for he tempts his reader to see the thinly-disguised as merely thin, in some cases. And yet he lived such a fascinating life that even his worst autobiographical books (such as Beard's Roman Women, 1976) have interesting features. He made excellent use in his fiction of a life that took him from Manchester to Gibraltar to Malaya to Borneo, from England to the United States to Malta, Italy, Monaco, and Switzerland. It is difficult to place Burgess the novelist on the map of contemporary fiction--he moves around so much! This novelist, critic, composer, traveler, amateur linguist, teacher, citizen of the twentieth century possessed "a kind of catholic quality" in the breadth and inclusiveness of his interests. Burgess's books were written, he said, "not merely to earn bread and gin but out of a conviction that the manipulation of language to the end of pleasing and enlightening is not to be despised." He made a modest claim for a monumental career.

Suzanne Keen's critical essay on Anthony Burgess is another in our series of articles on contemporary Catholic writers of fiction. We have asked our essayists to give an overview of the author's work, showing our readers where and how this writer locates the central human drama, the big questions, the religious crisis of our time. What does the Catholic sensibility of Anthony Burgess tell us about our common world, about the state of our souls? The most recently published article in the series was written by James Finn on Robert Stone (November 5, 1993).

Books discussed

in this essay

Abba Abba, Faber, 127 pp. (out of print).

Beard's Roman Women, McGraw Hill, 155 pp. (out of print).

A Clockwork Orange, Norton, $7.95, 188 pp.

A Dead Man in Deptford, Hutchinson, not available in U.S.

Earthly Powers, Carroll and Graf, $15.95, 608 pp.

Enderby, Norton, 412 pp. (out of print).

Little Wilson and Big God: The First Part of the Confessions, Grove-Atlantic, $14.95, 460 pp.

The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan

Trilogy, Norton, $10.95, 512 pp.

Man of Nazareth, McGraw Hill, 357 pp. (out of print).

MF, Knopf, 242 pp. (out of print).

Nothing Like the Sun, Norton, $9.95, 240 pp.

One Hand Clapping, Knopf, 216 pp. (out of print).

The Pianoplayers, Pocket Books, $4.95

ReJoyce, Norton, $8.95, 276 pp.

The Right to an Answer, Norton, $3.95, 255 pp.

The Wanting Seed, Norton, $9.95, 288 pp.

You've Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions, Grove Atlantic, $23.50, 403 pp.

In addition to Anthony Burgess's fiction and autobiographies, I have drawn on a 1981 interview with Samuel Coale (Modern Fiction Studies, 27:3, 429-452). l am indebted in my discussion of the Pelagian, Augustinian. and Manichaean in Burgess to the work of John J, Stinson (Anthony Burgess Revisited, Twayne, 1991 ) and Geoffrey Aggeler (Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist, University of Alabama Press, 1979).

SUZANNE KEEN, a frequent Commonweal contributor, teaches English at Yale University.