Word: burgess
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...magnificent tirade in Anthony Burgess's novel The Clockwork Testament or Enderby 's End, the poet Enderby rails at his dullard "creative writing" class: "All that's going to save your immortal soul, maaaaaan, if you have one, is words . . . Sooner or later you're all going to jail . . . All you'll have is language, the great conserver . . . Compose in your head. The time will come when you won't even be allowed a stub of pencil and the back of an envelope." There is perhaps too much doomsday in that advice, but anyone...
What is interesting is the freak show, the long line of grumpy midgets, washed-out showmen, and childishly cruel, empty-headed blondes seeking to fill the vacuity of their existence with rich and "devilishly" handsome men. The performances in the film are on the whole superb. Burgess Meredith is excellent as Harry, Faye's father, who has come to Los Angeles after a long career on the vaudeville circuit, now reduced to selling bogus cure-alls door-to-door to the indifferent and openly contemptuous rich. He is the compulsive actor, always "on", even in the midst of his death...
...sour and abject that one understands why Schlesinger ended the film with such a desperate flourish. All the characters from the book are here: Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland in a fine performance), the boggled Midwesterner whose hands, West said, "had a life of their own"; Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), a busted-down vaudevillian whose daughter Faye (Karen Black) is the sort of teasing, intemperate beauty who slaughters men with a smile. Karen Black is a bothersome actress at best, strident and sloppy; she does not even have what acting schools call "the physical apparatus" to be sensual. Faye represents another...
...Burgess supports his dyspeptic Don Quixote through all sorts of polemical extremities. The reader is lashed with puns and offered poetic tidbits taken from Hopkins. But the book succeeds less as a novel than as intellectual program music...
...Burgess might have risked one more quote from Hopkins. Man, one poem said, "This Jack, joke, poor potsherd/ Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond/ Is immortal diamond." Otherwise, what's so wrong with sun-kissed clockwork oranges? ∙Timothy Foote