Word: sinful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...story comes from the private diaries of William Ewart Gladstone, Queen Victoria's least favorite Prime Minister, who, in his avowed efforts to save prostitutes from sin, apparently indulged in unspecified sexual pleasures and then scourged himself in punishment. The other, released by the Public Records office, discloses an unsuccessful cover-up by the British Cabinet and Buckingham Palace, which tried to suppress the facts about the homosexual activities of Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the then Prince of Wales who in 1901 became King Edward...
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...
...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...
...university on the Upper West Side, Enderby is soon a man much bemused and beleaguered by moralists and behaviorists. In vain he declares that art-even execrable art-is neutral. Loathing the movie more than anyone, he sees it not as a cause but as a symptom of sin. "You ignore art as so much unnecessary garbage," he howls at his tormentors, "or you blame it for your own crimes." Even members of Enderby's creative writing class see him as a "misleading reactionary bastard." He has failed, it appears, to see merit in their "free verse and gutter...