Some thoughts about a great novel's opening
by Anne E. Johnson
Pfffrrrummmp.
So runs the first line of Anthony Burgess’ 1963 novel, Inside Mr Enderby. The onomatopoeic
coinage
represents flatulence, of course. It becomes even funnier when one
reads the second line: “And a very happy New Year to you too, Mr Enderby!”
That’s the narrator, out of sleeping Enderby’s earshot, inviting the reader to observe
the novel’s subject.
Mr. Enderby (or Mr without the period, since he’s British)
is a poet. He’s also middle-aged, slovenly, and constipated of bowel and pen.
His tale, the first in a series of four novels about him, begins in the second
section of Chapter 1. The opening section ─ the one starting
with the airish effluvia ─ is an introduction to the
character in second person, as if the reader were being guided through a
writers’ zoo, gawping at a curious creature labeled Poet:
Yes, remark again the scant
hair, the toothless jaw, the ample folds of flesh rising and falling. But what
has prettiness to do with greatness, eh?
Although
Enderby does not consciously hear the commentary we read, he is at one point
described as giving a “posterior riposte.”
In
fact, Burgess draws a constant connect between Enderby’s intestinal plumbing
and his verse output. His work station, or “poetic seat,” as Burgess calls it,
is the porcelain throne itself. The choice is both meaningful and efficient: It
is meaningful as a metaphor for the often painful struggle of the writer to
actually produce anything. It is efficient because, although Enderby the man
can rarely “go” successfully, Enderby the writer makes use of the bowl beyond
its traditional function. In one passage, his failed drafts are “crumpled into
the wastebasket on which he sat.”
Burgess,
it should be noted, is the poster-child for preferring strict metaphor to
simile. Although it creates more work for the reader, who sometimes has to
puzzle out what is meant, the mental toil pays off. That quoted phrase above
about the wastebasket would have been mundane if Burgess had written that
Enderby tossed the draft “into the toilet as if it were a wastebasket.” Because
Burgess lets the toilet simply be a
wastebasket, the image is more powerful.
Do not
think, however, that this approach of bathroom fixture re-identity is in the
interest of delicacy. Remember, the novel does start with a fart.
Pfffrrrummmp.
 |
| Anthony Burgess |
Burgess’
first line could not be more appropriate for the story of a writer seeking
recognition. Enderby struggles to produce what he thinks of as worthy writing.
When he writes at all, he scrawls on toilet paper. His current project is a
huge epic poem, which he amasses by collecting non-execrable lines (those he
deems worth saving from a swirling, watery grave) in a mournful heap of TP
squares in this bathtub. As a result of this unique editorial method, Enderby
also cannot bathe, and so the cycle of self-loathing is reinforced.
Another
reason the first line works is that flatulence is funny and gross. Enderby
himself is funny and gross. This book is funny and gross. And it’s all an
analogy to a writer’s life which often is, by turns, funny and gross.
Flatulence
also drives people away. Just as Enderby is alone and lonely, writing is a
solitary job. The obsessive practice of it, like the overconsumption of pinto
beans or garlic, can render the writer socially toxic.
Inside Mr Enderby
is not only a hilarious and bittersweet portrait of a fictional character. It
is also a truthful, humbling reminder to all of us writers: from Shakespeare on
down, our words are nothing but flatulence of mind and spirit. Only some do
not, shall we say, smell as sweet as others.
