Word: burgesses
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These views were futuristically dramatized in both Burgess's novel and Stanley Kubrick's version of The Clockwork Orange. In Enderby's End, Burgess pits the poor poet against the whole city of New York, an area where sin, original or otherwise, is surely not in short supply. Enderby reaches the New World in ways faintly congruent with Burgess's recent career. His name appears among the screenplay credits of a shocking film, and thus notorious, he is offered a teaching post at one of Manhattan's melting-pot universities (in 1972 Burgess lectured...
...many ways a dirty book," Anthony Burgess once warned in the columns of the Yorkshire Post. "Those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to leave it alone." Critic Burgess, as it happened, was reviewing a novel called Inside Mr. Enderby, ostensibly written by one Joseph Kell but actually the work of a prolific British writer named Anthony Burgess...
Readers who ignored Burgess's cheeky advice may remember that the eponymous poet, F.X. Enderby, was a fairly unprepossessing fellow. But due to a surfeit of British cooking and intractable intestines, he frequently emitted noxious sounds from both ends. He lived, moreover, in animal squalor, reclusively scribbling in the bathroom and tossing sections of his poem The Pet Beast into his otherwise unused bathtub...
Original Sin. Enderby's chief drawback was not digestion but want of genius. Burgess can convincingly describe ways in which images might come to a kind of colloidal suspension in the expectant poet's mind. But when he had to cut the cackle and produce the egg, both reader and author were left in the embarrassing presence of Enderby's mediocre verses. Yet Burgess, a man of wit and genius, has been fond enough of this queasy minor poet to devote one, two and now three volumes to him. Why? Because with all his faults, Enderby...
...Burgess, in fact, sees the key moral conflict of our age as an extension of the argument that took place between the heretic Pelagius and St. Augustine some 1,600 years ago. Man, preached Pelagius, is untainted by original sin and is thus perfectible through his own efforts. The cynical saint disagreed and ran Pelagius out of Rome. But this humane heretic's views now dominate society, Burgess suggests, through the delusive notion that men are essentially creatures of their environment whose actions must be controlled by benign behaviorists. Disaster, says Burgess. No original sin, no evil. No evil...