One Hand Clapping
One Hand Clapping
Anthony Burgess
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request The right of Anthony Burgess to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Copyright (c) 1961 Anthony Burgess Introduction copyright (c) Andrew Biswell, 2013
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. First published in 1961
First published in this edition in 2013 by Serpent's Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 918 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 892 0
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
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To Hazel
Introduction by Andrew Biswell
When Anthony Burgess returned to England from Brunei in the autumn of 1959, he was in a bad way. Having spent five exhausting years working in the tropical heat as a schoolmaster, he had collapsed in his classroom and been stretchered off to hospital with a mysterious illness. He was flown to London, where, over the course of several weeks, he underwent a series of neurological tests, which were inconclusive. Eventually he was discharged from hospital, but his consultant warned him that, for the sake of his health, he should never return to the East. It was evident from this point that his overseas teaching career was at an end.
Fortunately for Burgess and his first wife, he had already embarked on a second career as a comic novelist. The three volumes of his Malayan Trilogy had already appeared to favourable reviews, and a fourth novel had been delivered and was awaiting publication. Contemplating an uncertain future as a freelance writer, Burgess set himself the challenge of finding out how many novels it was possible to write in a single year. He rented a cheap flat in Hove, a fairly respectable town on the south coast of England, and set about the task of becoming a full-time writer. Within twelve months he had finished five publishable novels, including The Doctor Is Sick, Inside Mr Enderby and One Hand Clapping. The works he produced in this remarkable period are widely considered to be among his best. There are no signs of haste or carelessness in this series of novels, despite the speed at which they were written. It was as if the loss of his teaching job had suddenly opened the lock gates, allowing the waters of creativity to gush out. In Urgent Copy, a volume of his literary essays, he compares the fluency of his writing to the music of Mozart, who is said to have finished the overture to The Magic Flute while the audience was taking its seats in the theatre. Burgess, who once told an interviewer that he got creative blocks only from the stationer, was a firm believer in the connection between necessity and invention.
The copiousness of his productivity caused alarm among the editorial staff of William Heinemann, who had been his publishers since 1956. The prospect of flooding the market with five new Burgess novels did not fill them with delight, and they were worried about not being able to get enough review coverage for each book. These novels were gradually released over a period of three years. Heinemann also proposed to invent a nom de plume for Burgess, and to augment the disguise by publishing two of these books under the imprint of Peter Davies, which they owned. Thus it was that the writer 'Joseph Kell' was born, taking his name from the Book of Kells, the ninth-century Irish illuminated manuscript, which had been published in facsimile for the first time in 1951. One Hand Clapping was marketed as Joseph Kell's first novel, and - like many other excellent first novels before and since - it seems to have been totally ignored by the national newspapers. The elaborate rebranding scheme had backfired, generating no reviews whatsoever, and Burgess cursed the incompetence of 'William Hangman', as he renamed his publisher in letters to his friends.
Despite his early lack of recognition and critical attention, this was not to be the end of Joseph Kell. His second novel, Inside Mr Enderby (1963), was favourably reviewed by Peter Green in the Daily Telegraph, and by David Lodge in the Spectator. Another review, published in the Yorkshire Post, was distinctly sceptical: 'This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals ("thin but over-savoury stews", Enderby calls them) and halitosis. It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.' But the author of this review was none other than Anthony Burgess, who was promptly dismissed from his job as the fiction critic of the Yorkshire Post when the fact of his having reviewed his own book became known.1 When the second Enderby novel appeared in 1968, a note on the dust jacket explained: 'Before he died, Joseph Kell bequeathed to Anthony Burgess not merely his copyrights and royalties, but also his identity. [...] Mr Burgess's talent is revealed, on the evidence of this sequel, as not inferior to that of the late Joseph Kell.' Another unexpected twist followed when Burgess produced the first (unpublished) draft of his novel, The Pianoplayers, in 1977, and signed the title page with the name 'Josephine Kell', who was presumably Joseph Kell's fictional sister. This raises the intriguing possibility that Burgess was originally thinking about publishing The Pianoplayers under a female pseudonym. The idea of Burgess as a practical joker, or a protean impersonator, is perhaps not as familiar to readers as it deserves to be.
At the request of James Michie, Burgess's regular editor at Heinemann, the jacket copy for the first hardback edition of One Hand Clapping was written by the author himself:
In this story the young married couple are an ordinary decent young married couple, like what you and I are, only better-looking, perhaps. It's all about the husband having a sort of brain good at winning quizzes, so he wins The Big Money on a TV quiz and then he puts the money on horses and he becomes a rich man. And so then they have the best of everything, like a mink for her and staying at posh hotels and travelling to America and the West Indies and suchlike places, but there's always been somethin niggling in him all the time about the world being a rotten place and not even money can buy anything to make the world a less rotten place and so he suggests that they do themselves in.
That's her story anyway. There is also her sister and brother-in-law in the book, too, and there is this young poet called Redvers Glass that is very attractive. It's all about what it is like living today in England, with the TV and the Supermarket and the weather never too good, and how to get rich and yet not change anything really at all.
One Hand Clapping succeeds as a novel because it creates a totally plausible voice. The story is told by Janet Shirley, aged twenty-three, poorly educated, working-class, but unmistakably a force for life. Janet lives with her husband Howard in 'Bradcaster', a fictional version of Burgess's native Manchester. Their life is one of simple pleasures and their aspirations are modest, until Howard appears on a television quiz show. After this life-changing event, they begin to associate with unsavoury characters, chief among whom is Redvers Glass, an impoverished poet who benefits from Howard's patronage. Although the story itself might appear, if viewed from a distance, to be either flimsy or sensational, Janet herself is the true centre of attention, and her narration is characterful enough to bind the various elements together. Recalling her school days at the Hawthorn Road Secondary Mod, she tells us that 'Mr Thornton, who taught history, said he knew we wouldn't be interested in all those old kings and queens so he just played his guitar and sang very dull songs, so we weren't allowed to have any history'. Burgess makes it clear th
at Janet, though obviously intelligent and observant, is very much a product of the culture of her time. He is fascinated by her; and she is fascinated by the technological innovations of the post-war era, such as tinned food, television and advertising. This allows the novel to carry out its bigger task of making a diagnosis of contemporary culture: 'I was suddenly very hungry as soon as they brought on the commercials, what with advertising tinned Steak and Kidney Pudding and then tinned Risotto and whatnot. So I made myself a very quick sandwich of a wedge of corned beef left over from the morning [...] So my heart was in my mouth, all mixed up with corned-beef sandwich.' As the novel progresses, Janet acquires a stature beyond that of a mere Pavlovian subject, salivating at food adverts on television. She becomes a vehicle for a recognisably Lancastrian style of gallows humour - also found in north-western comedians such as Caroline Aherne and Les Dawson - which Burgess had absorbed as a schoolboy in the 1920s and 1930s: 'The best first thing to do, when you've got a dead body [...] on the kitchen floor is to make yourself a good strong cup of tea.'
One Hand Clapping is one of a group of novels in which Burgess considers the condition of England in the early 1960s. In the earliest of these books, The Right to An Answer, the jaded ex-colonial narrator J.W. Denham characterises England in terms of disorder and unease: 'married women dancing to the juke-box'; 'casserole from a time-controlled electric cooker'; 'semi-detacheds with the pebble-dash all over the blind-end walls'; and 'the alphabet pasta of the television aerials - X, Y, H, T'. Elsewhere, and less gloomily, Burgess parodies aspects of his own situation in The Doctor is Sick, which involves a lecturer in phonetics escaping from hospital on the eve of a serious brain operation, roaming London in search of his absent wife, keeping company with mobsters and villains (who speak a strange yet plausible slang invented by Burgess), and being reduced to petty crime in order to survive in the unforgiving underworld of Soho. As in One Hand Clapping, Burgess's interest lies in the language and behaviour of ordinary people.
He was well placed to observe some of the recent shifts in English culture, having returned to it in 1959 after an absence of half a decade, during which it had changed very rapidly. In One Hand Clapping, he articulates an anxiety about the 'deadly transatlantic influence' of American culture, which was creeping inexorably into Britain through films and popular music. An affluent new youth culture had begun to emerge, manifesting itself first in the Teddy Boys (originally known as the 'Edwardian strutters') and later in the dandified sub-cultures of the Mods and Rockers, whose conflicts on Brighton beach in the mid-1960s were anticipated by Burgess in his depiction of gang violence in A Clockwork Orange. Rationing of commodities such as meat and sugar had still been in force when Burgess left England in 1954. When he came back, he was astonished by the variety of goods available in the shops. In a radio interview with Patricia Brent in 1959, he spoke about his impressions of the country he had left, which he now returned to with an outsider's eye: 'I could spend my entire leave, I think, just looking at the shops, just looking at the enormous cauliflowers, which one doesn't have to pay ten shillings for, as I do in Borneo. The marvellous quality of the meat, the entertainment, the spring flowers [...] And yet all people can do, it seems, is to watch the television.'
Burgess's attitude towards television was complicated and full of contradictions. Although some of his writing about quiz shows and commercials bristles with contempt, he was one of the first literary writers to involve himself in the making of television programmes, and he took it seriously enough as an art form to spend five years writing a regular column of TV criticism for the Listener. This was at a time when other novelists boasted that they did not even own a television. Evelyn Waugh had to borrow a set from his servants to watch his famous Face to Face interview with John Freeman.
A reading of Burgess's Listener reviews demonstrates that he was much more excited about television than One Hand Clapping might lead us to believe. He was full of praise for innovative programmes such as The Prisoner and Till Death Us Do Part, though Coronation Street reminded him so painfully of his childhood that he could not watch it with pleasure. He acknowledged that the 1964 broadcast of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem from Coventry Cathedral was an event of great cultural significance, and one of his reviews provoked a formal complaint from the Soviet ambassador and a denunciation of Burgess as a Western imperialist lackey on Radio Moscow. When he ended his stint as a television critic, he acknowledged that he had learned a good deal from his regular viewing. And he went on to write scripts for a number of epic television serials, including Moses the Lawgiver for Lew Grade and Jesus of Nazareth for Franco Zeffirelli. If his response to visual culture in One Hand Clapping is in some respects satirical, it is clear that, like many of the best satirists, he was half in love with the object of his criticism.
One other kind of cultural discussion in One Hand Clapping concerns the value of poetry and the behaviour of bohemian poets. When Howard commissions Redvers Glass to write a long poem about the state of society, Burgess is able to satisfy his impulse (frequently visible elsewhere) to smuggle poetry into the text of his novel. The figure of the poet is important because he is able to articulate problems and ideas which lie beyond the limits of Howard and Janet's straightforward language. But his presence adds another element to the story, since it allows Burgess to say something about the importance of art, and to imply that lives lived without any awareness of literature and poetry are in some sense impoverished. According to Burgess's scheme of things, Redvers Glass seems to stand at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from the television quiz show Over and Over, with its moronic presenter (modelled on Hughie Green) and crowd-pleasing vulgarity. On the other hand, the novel has its doubts about the disreputable poet, and there is a strong possibility that his poem is less remarkable and original than he thinks it is. Some of the lines, and the general atmosphere of the poem, are lifted directly from T. S. Eliot's unfinished melodrama, Sweeney Agonistes.
If Burgess was unforgiving in his fictional treatment of bohemian poets, this was partly because his first wife had had an affair with Dylan Thomas during the Second World War. It is no coincidence that Redvers Glass bears a close physical resemblance to Thomas: 'He was a young man with a bitter sort of face, no overcoat on but a thick pullover up to his neck. His hair wasn't exactly long but he had a long straight bit in front that kept falling into his eyes. His complexion was very sallow, rather dirty-looking.' Thomas was remembered even by his friends as an accomplished sponger who would turn up unexpectedly and mess up other people's houses, and many of his less attractive qualities are given to the poet in the novel. Yet there is an element of affectionate joking in Burgess's presentation of Redvers Glass, and the memory of his wife's affair did not get in the way of his sincere admiration of Thomas as 'the greatest lyric poet of the twentieth century.'2
Despite its dark prognostications about the forces which threaten to undermine English culture, One Hand Clapping is a novel which invites us to respond with laughter rather than despair. If Burgess is vaguely anxious about the future, the character of Janet is a persuasive answer to many of those anxieties. Her energy and optimism, qualified by large doses of wit and cynicism, will be enough to see her through. In One Hand Clapping and The Pianoplayers, Burgess produced a remarkable pair of novels with strong female narrators. The republication of this book allows us to think again about his reputation, and to see how very good he could be as a comedian of culture.
Chapter 1
I was Janet Shirley, nee Barnes, and my husband was Howard Shirley, and in this story he was nearly twenty-seven and I was just gone twenty-three. We lived on the Shortshawe Council Estate in North Bradcaster, Number 4 Cranmer Road off Whitgift Road which leads into town, and we paid thirty-two and six a week rent. Just up the road from us was, and is, I guess, Shoe Lane which was on the TV commercials as Shining Shoe Lane, which made all those who lived there very boastful in a silly way, as if they'd done something clever. All the roads on our side wer
e named after bishops - Ridley Road, Latimer Road, Fisher Road and Laud Road - and there was never any call to use those in TV commercials. Howard worked at the Oak Crescent Used Car Mart and I helped to fill up the shelves at the Hastings Road Supermarket, so at the time there was nothing very special about us. We had a TV, a radio with a strap like a handbag for carrying round the house, a washing-machine, a vac, but no car of our own or children. We had been married since I was nineteen. That was not young in my family, my mother was married at sixteen and my sister Myrtle (Sadler) at seventeen. My sister Myrtle, as you'll see, made a mess of her marriage, but that was nothing to do with marrying young, she would have made a mess at whatever age, marrying a man like Michael.
Howard and I met when I was still at the Hawthorn Road Secondary Modern School, only fifteen, and he had been out of the Grammar School three years. I looked older than I was, like most of the girls did, and as there wasn't a lot to learn in school we used to spend a lot of time on our appearance. I will say, though, that Miss Spenser took us twice a week for Make-up, Deportment and Dress Sense, but the poor old thing did not know much about it. Besides, it always seemed wrong to us girls to have something like that in a school, and that the tax-payer's money should be spent better. There was also Ballroom Dancing and what was called Homecraft. None of the teachers knew very much about what they taught and it was pathetic, sometimes, the way they tried to make our schooldays happy. There was young Mr Slessor with the beard who said he was a beatnik and called us cats and chicks. He was supposed to teach English but said like he didn't dig the king's jive. Crazy, man, real cool. It was pathetic. Mr Thornton, who taught history, said he knew we wouldn't be interested in all those old kings and queens so he just played his guitar and sang very dull songs, so we weren't allowed to have any history and I was good at that at the primary. Then there was old puffing and blowing Mr Portman, a portly man you could say, who took us for General Science, but he was a bit too fond of asking us girls to go round and help him in the little apparatus room, breathing hard on us. I hit him once but he never did anything about that. I came out of Hawthorn Road Secondary Mod knowing nothing, but they always say that if you're a girl, and pretty like I was, you didn't need to know all that much. I could look smashing, though I say it myself, and I got whistled at, and I could do snappy back-answers, like when some boy said at a dance, 'What's cooking, good-looking?' you had to reply, 'Nothing spectacular, Dracula.' But sometimes they were so ignorant they didn't know what Dracula was, so you had to think of something else.