Word: burgess
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...CLOCKWORK TESTAMENT OR ENDERBY'S END by ANTHONY BURGESS 161 pages. Knopf...
...Wendy A. Burgess...
...Enderby's (no first name) death. But it is also an allegorical satire aimed primarily at a dimly perceived America and especially at Stanley Kubrick's bastardization of A Clockwork Orange. Enderby is a poet who has passed his dubious prime--in writing and in life. He, like Burgess, has been asked to teach for a year at Manhattan U., ostensibly because of the controversy his film script has created in America. The name of the film, of course, is changed: Enderby has adapted Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland for the screen, to be produced...
...civilization for Enderby. He loathes his students for their eating, habits and for their anti-intellectualism; he also hates his brightest student because he knows too much. Enderby is the epitome of American notions about British elitist snobbery; and while these notions may be just as false as Burgess's opinion of Americans, they are, as fantasies reflecting actuality, much more damning...
Thankfully, Enderby dies quickly. If he is, as Burgess seems to imply, the embodiment of his imagination, then maybe Burgess will stop writing novels. Or perhaps Enderby will undergo some kind of reincarnation and reappear as a literary critic. His first task should then be to denounce the novel of his real-life counterpart, and --if The Clockwork Testament is any indication of Burgess's potential for the future--Enderby should advise Burgess to stop writing altogether