Anthony Burgess Enderby 03 The Clockwork Testament

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.Most of the Serious Calls came from what was known as the Coast and were for his landlady.She was connected with some religiolesbic movement there and she had neglected to send a circular letter about her sabbatical.The insults and obscenities were usually meant for Enderby.He had written a very unwise article for a magazine, in which he said that he thought little of black literature because it tended to tendentiousness and that the Amerindians had shown no evidence of talent for anything except scalping and very inferior folk-craft.One of his callers, who had once termed him a toothless cocksucker (that toothlessness had been right, anyway, at that time anyway), was always threatening to bring a tomahawk to 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, which was where Enderby lodged.Also students would ring anonymously at deliberately awkward hours to revile him for his various faults-chauvinism, or some such thing; ignorance of literary figures important to the young; failure to see merit in their own free verse and gutter vocabulary.They would revile him also in class, of course, but not so freely as on the telephone.Everybody felt naked these days without the mediacy of a mode of mechanical communication.Eight of eight.The telephone rang.Enderby decided to give it the honour of full dentition, so he jammed in the encrusted lower denture.Try it out.Gum still sorish.But, of course, that was the hardened Gripdent or whatever it was.He had them all."Professor Enderby?""Speaking.""You don't know me, but this is just to inform you that both my husband and I consider that your film is filth.""It's not my film.I only wrote the-""You have a lot to answer for, my husband says.Don't you think there's enough juvenile crime in our streets without filth like yours abetting it?""But it's not filth and it's not my-""Obscene filth.Let me inform you that my husband is six feet three and broad in proportion-""Is he a red Indian?""That's just the sort of cheap insult I would expect from a man capable of-""If you're going to send him round here, with or without tomahawk-"She had put down the receiver.What he had been going to say was that there was twenty-four-hour armed protection in the apartment lobby as well as many closed-circuit television screens.This, however, would not help him if the enemies were within the block itself.That he had enemies in the block he knew-a gat-toothed black writer and his wife; a single woman with dogs who had objected to his mentioning in his magazine article the abundance of cockroaches in this part of Manhattan, as though it were a shameful family secret; a couple of fattish electronic guitarists who had smelt his loathing as they had gone up together once in the elevator.And there might be also others affronted by the film just this moment referred to.Flashback.Into the bar-restaurant Enderby, exiled poet, ran in Tangier, film men had one day come.Kasbah location work or something of the kind.One of the film men, who had seemed and indeed proved to be big in his field, an American director considered for the brilliance of his visual invention quite as good as any director in Europe, said something about wanting to make, because of the visual possibilities, a shipwreck film.Enderby, behind bar and hence free to join in conversation without any imputation of insolence, having also British accent, said something about The Wreck of the Deutschland."Too many Kraut Kaput movies lately.Last days of Hitler, Joe Krankenhaus already working on Goebbels, then there was Visconti.""A ship," said Enderby, "called the Deutschland.Hopkins wrote it.""Al Hopkins?""G.M.," Enderby said, adding, "S.J.""Never heard of him.Why does he want all those initials?""Five Franciscan nuns," Enderby said, "exiled from Germany because of the Falk Laws.'On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, take settler and seaman, tell men with women, two hundred souls in the round…' ""He knows it all, by God.When?""1875.December 7th.""Nuns," mused the famed director."What were these laws?"" 'Rhine refused them.Thames would ruin them,' " Enderby said." 'Surf, snow, river and earth,' " he said, " 'gnashed.' ""Totalitarian intolerance," the director's assistant and friend said."Nuns beaten up in the streets.Habits torn off.Best done in flashback.The storm symbolic as well as real.What happens at the end?" he asked keenly Enderby."They all get wrecked in the Goodwin Sands.The Kentish Knock, to be precise.And then there's this final prayer.'Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east…' ""In movies," the director said kindly, as to a child, "you don't want too many words.You see that? It's what we call a visual medium.Two more double scatches on the racks.""I know all about that," Enderby said with heat, pouring whisky sightlessly for these two men."When they did my Pet Beast it became nothing but visual clichés.In Rome it was.Cinecittà.The bastard.But he's dead now.""Who's dead?""Rawcliffe," Enderby said [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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