Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

‘Lucky.’ – ‘Lucky? Be damned – that was my watch and chain.’

There is another ending, one that I

Have in some scatographic theses met.

The costive heard the urgent feet come nigh,

The thunder of release immediate.

‘Ah, lucky’, was his sigh. But the reply:

Went thus: ‘I haven’t got me pants down yet.’

MOSES

Foreword 1974

This verse narrative in eighteen chapters (not books: only epic poems have eighteen books) is an attempt to mediate between the craft of film and the craft of letters. The idea of making a six-part film on the life of the prophet Moses arose in Rome in 1972, and Radiotelevisione Italiana put up the money for it. In 1973, in Rome and New York, Vittorio Bonicelli, Gianfranco de Bosio, Vincenzo Labella and myself worked out the practical details of the project. Despite the Italian provenance, the series was designed as an international venture with an international cast: an American, an Englishman, a Greek, a Swede and a Frenchman were assigned the main roles, but most of the nameless Egyptians and Israelites were Italians.

The task of hammering out a technique for presenting Moses on the screen which should not seem to compete with Cecil B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments was a collective one, but the writing of a script in English was my responsibility alone. In order to establish a general sense of the narrative movement, and to contrive dialogue which should be neither archaic-poetic nor present-day colloquial, I found it convenient to write out the story in the form of what might be termed a poor man’s epic. Out of the completed narrative, which is what I offer in this book, the six television pun-tate were painfully squeezed.

People who write fiction for a living, as I do, are often embarrassed when commissioned to write a film script. So much of what we primarily enjoy in the composition of a novel, particularly the evocation of physical sensation and the privilege of looking into not only a character’s sensorium but also his mind, is denied to us. A verbal flow is inhibited by the shibboleth about a film being a visual form that can, at a pinch, do without words altogether. Various costive exigencies are imposed on our tendency to logorrhoea. When Mr Graham Greene was asked to write the original screen-play that was to be The Third Man, he found it necessary to give it the primary, or preliminary, form of a novella. Only in this way could he make his characters come to life. I could not make a novella out of Moses, since there was far too much material and even more lavish ‘passing of time’, but I could not write it as a novel either. If I wrote it in prose at all, I would either produce the Books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which had already been written, or else some wearisome archaeological fantasia in the manner of Thomas Mann.

Since the traditions of fictional realism and naturalism came into being, the novel has been restricted to the chronicle of more or less real life, full of events which we are ready to be persuaded could conceivably happen in our own experience, given good or ill luck. A certain solidity is expected, so that Moses in such a fictional tradition would have to scratch his left ear occasionally, be depressed at the stink of his unchanged clothes, gaze out with narrowed eyes at the purple Goshen landscape. And if characters are physically solid, they tend to move slowly. A scene, once carefully set up in words, is not easily struck. A novel, Flaubert said, is a heavy machine; cameras, whatever the grips say, are much lighter. And since we expect a novel to be filled with rational events, there is not much room there for the miraculous. Miracles are for fairy stories or for science fiction.

Although one of the tasks of a fictional chronicler of the career of Moses is to demiraculise wherever possible (manna was really the resin of the tamarisk, blown by the wind; it is easy to strike water from rock when that rock is porous; you can cross the sea of Reeds when the wind blows strongly from the east – and so on), there are still plenty of full-blown and vindictive miracles in Goshen and the desert. Verse will accept these more readily than prose because in verse anything can happen anyway: it is a matter not only of the Homeric tradition but also of the fact that the very movement of verse suggests a wanton twisting of reality. But verse is useful in other ways. It struck me, when first working on Moses, and it goes on striking me, that the techniques of film and verse narrative are very close: both admit economy, ellipsis, rapid shifts of scene. Verse can also give the reader a much clearer idea than prose of the way in which words are actually spoken, indicating, by the crowding of syllables into a line or the thinning of them out, the speed of discourse, making use of the strong initial beat of the line for verbal emphasis, thriving on repetition which, in prose dialogue though not in real-life speech, can seem mannered and wearisome.

Nobody is sure what poetry is. As Dr Johnson said, it is easier to say what it is not. That this work is not poetry there can be no doubt. I am not a poet, though I wrote a novel about a poet and obligingly wrote poetry for him, and I have to emphasise that I have no poetic intent here – no deploying of surprising images, no verbal brilliance and no artful ambiguities. Though poets prefer to work in verse, there is no reason why they should have a monopoly of it. But I am aware that, having used verse, I may well be accused by careless critics of having tried to write poetry. I will go further than a refutation of that and say that I have