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

not even tried to produce literature. This work is too far cliché-ridden, simplistic and didactic to be classified as anything other than a piece of sub-literature, pop-craft. A poem, even a bad one, is usually called a work of art, but people are reluctant to call even a good film anything other than a piece of craft. We have still to hear the word ‘art’ applied to anything seen on television. I am quite happy to place this book in that sort of no-man’s-land where aesthetic classification is hardly worth bothering about, except by the librarian.

In 1890, Mark Twain wrote a letter to Andrew Lang in which he said: ‘the little child is permitted to label its drawings “This is a cow – this is a horse” and so on. This protects the child. It saves it from the sorrow and wrong of hearing its cows and its horses criticised as kangaroos and work-benches. A man who is whitewashing a fence is doing a useful thing, so also is the man who is adorning a rich man’s house with costly frescoes; and all of us are sane enough to judge these performances by standards proper to each. Now then, to be fair, an author ought to put upon his book an explanatory line: “This is written for the Belly and the Members.” And the critic ought to hold himself in honor bound to put away from him his ancient habit of judging all books by one standard and thenceforth follow a fairer course.’ This book of mine, then, is written for the Belly and the Members, and I should be grateful for it not to be judged by the standards proper to real epic poets.

A.B.

Rome, April 1974

* *

Foreword 1976

A few years ago I was commissioned, along with Vittorio Bonicelli and Gianfranco de Bosio, to provide the script for a television series on birth, life and death of the prophet Moses. I found collaboration difficult and was forced to work entirely on my own, leaving emendation, addition and subtraction to be more or less improvised – by Bonicelli, Gianfranco de Bosio, who was the director, Vincenzo Labella, the producer, the actors Burt Lancaster and Anthony Quayle – while filming proceeded in Israel. The major aesthetic problem was a linguistic one, as it always is with historical or mythical subjects, and I found the only way out of the problem was to precede the assembly of a shooting-script with a more or less literary production – this sort of epic poem you have now in your hands. To have written Moses first as a prose novel would have entailed the setting-up of a somewhat cumbersome mechanism, in which the devices of ‘naturalism’ would have led me to an unwholesome prosaism both in dialogue and récit. Verse moves more quickly and the rhythm of verse permits of a mode of speech midway between the mythical and the colloquial. Out of this homely epic I made my script, but the poem, such as it is, remains and is here for your reading.

If some of the devices used seem close to the cinematic, that is because I had a film in mind while working on a piece of literature. On the other hand, narrative verse – as you can see from Aurora Leigh as well as the Odyssey – anticipates the cinema. Perhaps the most ambitious film-script ever written is Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, which was completed before even the first crude film had been shown. John Collier recently showed how filmable Paradise Lost is, though his script was, sadly, specifically intended for ‘the cinema of the mind’. Novels are heavily set in their chosen time and place and resist cinematic adaptation more than film-makers will permit themselves to realise. Epics have more to do with wings than with walking, just like films.

None of us will ever see a film of Beowulf or of The Ring and the Book. We will have to put up instead with impossible adaptations of Tolstoy, Proust, even Joyce – all of which will be artistic as well as financial failures. But here at least you have an epic that became a film, and a not unsuccessful one. Of course, I was lucky to have the Bible behind me.

Rome, Epiphany, 1976

1

THE BONDAGE

SO Joseph came to die, in some pain, dreaming he was lying

On a thorny bed called Canaan (drought and famine

And they went into Egypt and in Egypt they prospered),

Being a hundred and ten years old, and they embalmed him,

And he was put in a coffin in Egypt, being a

Prince of Egypt, the Israelite Joseph a prince of

Egypt. So Joseph died, the pain passing,

Smiling on the fulfilment: Egypt the promised land,

Brown tough shepherds and plump laughing wives

And son like swords and daughters like date-trees,

Children tumbling like lambs, the benison of mud.

Not all shepherds and shepherds’ wives –

Some rose high, though not so high as Joseph,

Becoming priests of the gods, Egypt having many gods,

Officers with seals of their office, officers

On horseback leading troops, gentlemen,

Ladies, but mostly men and women in the

Good air of the delta, lambs and children frisking.

And the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly,

And multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty,

And the land was filled with them, filled with the

Tribe of Jacob and of Reuben, Simeon, Levi,

Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Benjamin,

Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher,

The tribes keeping their distance one from another,

But all with a memory of a dead land called Canaan

And of a dead prince of god of Egypt called Joseph.

Now there arose up a new king over Egypt,

Which knew not Joseph

Behold, the people of the children of Israel

Are more and mightier than we.

The great intellectual eroded face of the Pharaoh,

The tired eroded voice, the wasted body in gold cloth,

The ringed claws grasping the sphinx-arms

Of the pharaonic throne, aromatic gums asmoke,

Slaves with feather-fans, effigies, effigies,

All empty-eyed. The councillors listened.

‘Their men are bursting with seed. Their women

Are round like fruit. Their encampments are loud

With the bleating of children. They multiply, multiply.’

A councillor said: ‘Your divine majesty

Has some