"Fag?" said Piggy Hogg (as he was jocularly called) to his companion. Bob Curran took one, nodding his thanks. He pulled out a cheap cylindrical lighter and struck it, the flame invisible in noon air that was all flame. Piggy Hogg bent over, sucking his fag alight.
"Won't be long for you now," said Bob Curran.
"Won't be long," said Piggy Hogg, taking in the long receding bank of willows. "Next week, they reckon." He detached a tobacco fibre from his lower lip. The lips were framed in brown beard pied with grey; his skin was tanned; he wore steel spectacles. He had something of the look of Hemingway, but there his association with literature ended. A moderately well-spoken middle-aged man evidently not used to manual work, but a good trier, respected by his ward-mates, helpful as a letter-writer. Some had said that it was a waste of an educated man, putting him like they said they were going to as bar-tender in training at a Midland hotel. But Piggy Hogg knew it was no waste.
A couple of nights back he had, after lights out, slipped on his bedroom headphones. Rejecting, with a click of the plastic dial on the wall, first the Light, then the Home, he had notched into the Third. A bored-sounding young man had been talking about Modern Poetry: "… Enderby, before his unaccountable disappearance… established as a good minor poet in the tradition… perhaps little to say to our generation… the more significent work of Jarvis, Sime and Cazalet…" He had listened with absolutely no interest. One was used, one was thrown away; Enderby had come out of it better than many; Hogg was looking forward to being a bar-tender. A bar-tender, moreover, who would be different from most, quite a character with his odd lines of poetry thrown out over the frothing pints. Behind the words and rhythms lay the sensations. Time for those.
"What did the old sky-pilot have to say to you?" asked Bob Curran.
"Him?" said Piggy Hoggy vaguely. "Oh, I thought he made out quite a reasonable case for the Church of England. It's a communion of sorts. It doesn't make too many demands. He lent me some books to read, but I told him I'm not much of a reading man. If it'll give him any pleasure, I'll join."
"I've never been much of a man for religion myself," said Bob Curran. "My dad was a tinker and all tinkers are atheists. We used to have a lot of fun, I remember, on Thursday evenings in the old days. You know, belly of pork and cider and somebody would give a talk about Causal Necessity and then there'd be one hell of a discussion afterwards. All in our front parlour, you know, with The Death of Nelson above the Joanna." Bob Curran was a very lean man of fifty-seven, a radio salesman recovering from schizophrenia. "It seems to me," he said, "that people had more faith in those days. They believed more. Why, I do believe that my old man, who was nothing more than an ignorant old tinker, believed more in there not being a God than some of these religious sods today believe in there being one. It's a funny old world," he concluded, as he always did.
"Oh, yes," agreed Piggy Hogg, "but it's not without interest." After lunch there was to be a cricket match between the Home and the local St John Ambulance. Piggy Hogg had been persuaded to umpire. He had always been flustered by l.b.w. but, he had decided, when in doubt over any appeal except an obvious clean bowl or catch, always to say, "Not out". That night there was to be a singsong led by Dr Wapenshaw, with beer from the canteen-two bottles a man. Piggy Hogg led the winning quiz-team. He had beaten Alfred Breasley at chess.
"Right, my tigers," called Mr Peacock. "Old Charlie's boot's free from stones." (Old Charlie grinned without teeth.) "God's in his heaven, all's right with the etcetera etcetera. On our merry way. Let me see, it's Saturday, isn't it? Corned beef and mashed and beetroot and treacle tart to follow. Right, Piggy old man, stop slavering at the chops. Let's march."
Piggy Hogg glanced up at the tiny clouds (cotton-wool stoppers from heavenly aspirin-bottles) and down at the sun-warmed boats on the shore that looked like chicken-carcasses. A swan opened an archangelic wing. Shouldering his hoe, chucking away his fag-butt, he marched.
About the Author
Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and studied English at the university there. He was drafted into the army upon graduation in 1940 and spent six years in the Education Corps. After demobilization, he worked first as a college lecturer in Speech and Drama and then as a grammar-school master. From 1954 to 1960 he was an education officer in the Colonial Service, stationed in Malaya and Borneo, and it was while he was there that he started writing The Malayan Trilogy, which is published by Penguin as The Long Day Wanes. In 1959 Burgess was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour and was given less than a year to live. He then became a full-time writer and, proving the doctors wrong, went on to write at least one book a year and hundreds of book reviews right up until his death in 1993.
A late starter in the art of fiction, Anthony Burgess had previously spent much creative energy on music, and in his lifetime he composed many full-scale works for orchestra and other media. His Third Symphony was performed in the USA in 1975 and Blooms of Dublin, his musical version of Joyce's Ulysses, was presented in 1982. He believed that with the fusion of the musical and literary forms lay a possible future for the novel. The Enderby novels: Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament and Enderby's Dark Lady, are also published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics as The Complete Enderby. His many other works include Tremor of Intent; Honey for the Bears; Urgent Copy; Nothing Like the Sun; Man of Nazareth, the basis of his successful TV script Jesus of Nazareth; Earthly Powers, which was voted the best foreign novel of 1980 in France; The End of the World News; The Kingdom of the Wicked, winner of the Prix Europa in Geneva; The Piano Players; Any Old Iron; A Mouthful of Air; Homage to QWERTYUIOP, an anthology of his reviews and journalism; and two volumes of autobiography: Little Wilson and Big God, which was awarded the J. R. Ackerley Prize for 1988, and You've Had Your Time. His last novel, published in the spring of 1993, was A Dead Man in Deptford, based around the murder of Christopher Marlowe.
Anthony Burgess died in November 1993, and is survived by his second wife and his son. The Times described him as 'one of the cleverest and most original writers of his generation', and among the many people who paid him tribute were David Lodge, who considered him 'an inspiration and example to other writers', and John Updike, who believed that 'the literary world seems much more sparsely populated with Anthony Burgess gone. He had the energy and the wide-ranging interests of a dozen writers… [and] seemed not only a prodigious intellect, but an affectionate spirit, whose mind, like Ariel's, circled the globe in a few seconds.'
Scan Notes, v3.0
Proofed carefully against DT, italics and special characters intact. I will be scanning the other three books soon. If you are wondering what the hell "For Cough" means, read the following excerpt from an interview with Burgess.
"But I think there's more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness. When I wrote my first Enderby novel I had to make my hero say 'For cough,' since 'Fuck off' was not then acceptable. With the second book the climate had changed and Enderby was at liberty to say 'Fuck off.' I wasn't happy. It was too easy. He still said 'For cough' while others responded with 'Fuck off.' A compromise. Literature, however, thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical difficulties."