"The question of sartorial approach is relevant, I think. When John Keats had difficulty with a poem he would wash and put on a clean shirt. The stiff collar and bow tie and tails of the concertgoer induce a tense attitude appropriate to the hearing of complex music. The British colonial officer would dress for dinner, even in the jungle, to encourage self-discipline. There is no essential virtue in comfort. To be relaxed is good if it is part of a process of systole and diastole. Relaxation comes between phases of tenseness. Art is essentially tense. The trouble with your er art is that it is not tense." They all looked at him, not tense. Many of their names he still refused to take seriously-Chuck Szymanowski, for instance. His sole black man was called Lloyd Utterage, a very reasonable name. This man was very ugly, which was a pity and which Enderby deeply regretted, but he had very beautiful clothes, mostly of hot-coloured blanketing materials, topped with a cannibal-style wire-wool hairshock. He was very tense too, and this too Enderby naturally approved. But he was full of hate, and this was a bore. "I will not," Enderby said, turning to him, "read out all your poem, which may be described as a sort of litany of anatomic vilification. Two stanzas will perhaps suffice." And he read them with detached primness:
"It will be your balls next, whitey,
A loving snipping of the scrotum
With rather rusty nail scissors,
And they tumble out then to be
Crunched underfoot crunch crunch.
It will be your prick next, whitey,
A loving chopping segmentally
With an already bloodstained meat hatchet,
And it will lie with the dog turds
To be squashed squash squash.
"One point," he said. "If the prick is to be chopped in segments it will not resemble a dog turd. The writing of er verse does not excuse you from considerations of er-"
"He says it will lie with the dog turds," Ms. Tietjens said. "He doesn't say it will look like one."
"Yes yes, Sylvia, but-"
"Lydia."
"Of course, thinking of Ford. Sorry. But, you see, the word it suggests that it's still a unity, not a number of chopped bits of er penis. Do you see my point?"
"Yeah," Lloyd Utterage said, "but it's not a point worth seeing. The point is the hate."
"The poetry is in the pity," said Enderby. "Wilfred Owen. He was wrong, of course. It was the other way round. As I was saying, a unity and rather resembling a dog turd. So the image is of this er prick indistinguishable from-"
"Like Lloyd said," said a very spotty Jewish boy named Arnold Something, his hair also cannibalistically arranged, "it's the hate that it's about. Poetry is made out of emotions," he pronounced.
"Oh no," Enderby said. "Oh very much no. Oh very very very much no and no again. Poetry is made out of words."
"It's the hate," Lloyd Utterage said. "It's the expression of the black experience."
"Now," Enderby said, "we will try a little experiment. I take it that this term whitey is racialist and full of opprobrium and so on. Suppose now we substitute for it the word er nigger-" There was a general gasp of disbelief. "I mean, if, as you said, the point is the hate, then the hate can best be expressed-and, indeed, in poetry must be expressed-as an emotion available to the generality of mankind. So instead of either whitey or nigger you could have, er, bohunk or, say, kike. But kike probably wouldn't do-"
"You're telling me it wouldn't do," Chuck Szymanowski said.
"-Since the end words are disyllabic or er yes trisyllabic but never monosyllabic. A matter of structure," Enderby said. "So listen. It will be your balls next, nigger, etc. etc. It will be your prick next, nigger, and so on. Now it is the structure that interests me. It's not, of course, a very subtle or interesting structure, as er Lloyd here would be the first to admit, but it is the structure that has the vitality, not all this nonsense about hate and so on. I mean, imagine a period when this kind of race-hate stupidity is all over, and yet the poem-perennius aere, you know-still by some accident survives. Well, it would be taken as a somewhat primitive but still quite engaging essay in vilification in terms of an anatomical catalogue, the structure objectifying and, as it were, cooling the hate. Comic too on the personal level-It will be your balls next, er Crassus or say Lycidas. Rather Catullan. You see." He smiled at them. Now they were really learning something.
"You think," Lloyd Utterage panted, "you're going to get away with that, man?"
"Away with what?" Enderby asked in honest and rather hurt surprise.
"Look," Ms. Tietjens said kindly, "he's British. He doesn't understand the ethnic agony."
"That's rather a good phrase," Enderby said. "It doesn't mean anything, of course. Like saying potato agony. Oh I don't know, though. The meanings of imaginative language are not the same as those of the defilers of language. Your President, for instance. The black leaders. Lesbian power, if such a thing exists-"
"He understands it," said Lloyd Utterage. "His people started it. Nigger-whippers despite their haw-haw-haw old top."
"Now that's interesting," Enderby said. "You see how the whipping image immediately begat in your imagination the image of a top? You have the makings of a word man. You'll be a poet someday when you've got over all this nonsense." Then he began to repeat nigger-whipper swiftly and quietly like a tongue-twister. "Prosodic analysis," he said. "Do any of you know anything about that? A British linguistic movement, I believe, so it may not have er gotten to you. Nigger and whipper, you see, have two vowels in common. Now note the opposition of the consonants-a rich nasal against a voiceless semivowel, a voiced stop against a voiceless. Suppose you tried nigger-killer. Not so effective. Why not? The g doesn't oppose well to the l. They're both voiced, you see, and so-"
"Maaaaaan," drawled Lloyd Utterage, leaning back in simulated ease, smiling crocodilewise. "You play your little games with yourself. All this shit about words. Closing your eyes to what's going on in the big big world."
Enderby got angry. "Don't call me maaaaaan," he said. "I've got a bloody name and I've got a bloody handle to it. And don't hand me any of that shit, to use your own term, about the importance of cutting the white man's balls off. All that's going to save your immortal soul, maaaaaan, if you have one, is words. Words words words, you bastard," he crescendoed, perhaps going too far.