Tremor of Intent (2 page)

The second influential writer who stands behind
Tremor of Intent
is Graham Greene, whose thrillers of the 1930s and 1940s Burgess had read with great attention. He was particularly impressed by
The Power and the Glory
, a Buchanesque narrative of pursuit set in Mexico during the socialist persecution of Catholic priests. Greene's hero, a nameless priest who is hunted down by his political adversary, is intended to remind the English reader of the underground priests who had infiltrated England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The connection between priests and spies is underlined in
Tremor of Intent
by Burgess's deployment in the text of a martyrdom narrative, rediscovered in the twentieth century, which describes the fate of Roper's priestly ancestor, the victim of a Tudor persecution. It is likely that Burgess had learned about the dramatic possibilities of such a situation from his reading of Greene.

The other novelist who casts a shadow over
Tremor of Intent
is James Joyce. In 1965 Burgess had visited Dublin for the first time, accompanied by the television producer Christopher Burstall, to make a documentary about Joyce. This film was broadcast under the title
Silence, Exile and Cunning
on BBC 1 on 20 April 1965. In the same year, Burgess published a critical book about Joyce,
Here Comes Everybody
, dedicated to Burstall. The Joyce film is directly referenced in the final section of
Tremor of Intent
, when a character called John (Burgess's real name was John Burgess Wilson) is seen making a film
in a Dublin pub. But the connection with Joyce does not end there. In writing this novel, Burgess set himself the formal challenge of trying to use a different literary form for each chapter. According to his notebook, he originally planned a novel of twenty chapters, which would take the form of a conversation, a monologue, a diary, a television script, and so forth. No doubt he was thinking of the variety of styles and genres deployed in Joyce's
Ulysses
, where each chapter has its own narrative technique. Having recently completed a critical book about Joyce's novels, Burgess could not resist mimicking the dream-discourse of
Finnegans Wake
at the moment when Hillier, reading Roper's memoirs, falls asleep: ‘Knocknoise, distant. Wherewhatwhowhy?' Elsewhere in
Tremor of Intent
we find a Joycean catechism and a parody of the hellfire sermon from
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. Burgess was so deeply immersed in Joyce's writing (he once boasted that he re-read
Ulysses
at least twice a year) that such imitations of the master had come to feel natural and inevitable.

Other features of the writing are distinctly Burgessian. During an epic bout of sexual intercourse in part two, chapter five, Hillier recites an alphabetical list of ships to himself: ‘So to cast forth in that one narrow sweet cave would be to wreck all the ships in the world – Alabama, Ark, Beagle, Bellerophon, Cutty Sark, Dreadnought, Endeavour, Erebus, Fram, Golden Hind, Great Eastern, Great Harry, Marie Celeste, Mayflower, Revenge, Skidbladnir, Victory' (
p. 90
). This is partly an allusion to the famous catalogue of ships in Book Two of Homer's
Iliad
. In context, it is also a recitation intended to help Hillier delay his orgasm. It is characteristic of Burgess that even the sex in his novels possesses a comic dimension, as well as being made to carry a measure of literary freight.

Burgess's second artistic life as a composer is also in evidence, both in the musicality of the sentences and in the references to music. When the ship's band is playing a fox-trot, the drunk pianist plays ‘something atonal and aleatoric', while the drummer and bassist ‘assured the dancers that this was still the dance they had
started off to dance'. In part one, chapter three, Hillier remembers two choirs singing (‘antiphonally') ‘
Babylon the great is fallen
–
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem
' – a reference to
Belshazzar's Feast
(1931) by William Walton, one of Burgess's favourite composers, who strongly influenced his own music.

Some readers have been baffled by the coded message sent to Hillier by his masters in London. The key to the message is found in the couplet ‘November goddess in your glory / Swell the march of England's story'. The November goddess is Elizabeth I, who became queen in November 1558. ‘Two minutes to four' (or 15:58) is also mentioned as a further clue. This suggests that letter transpositions of 4 and 3 will break the code, but in fact transpositions of 4 and 5 are needed (a mistake on Burgess's part). Thus decoded, the message breaks off in mid-sentence, because the ink has been designed to erase itself after a few days, permanently destroying the text.

The early reviews of
Tremor of Intent
were rather mixed. Lawrence Graver in the
New Republic
described it as ‘a kind of clown's
Waste Land
' with a ‘preposterous' plot. Maurice Richardson in the
Observer
said that Burgess ‘overwrites insanely'. In the
Times Literary Supplement
, Vernon Scannell said that ‘Burgess often writes like Nabokov, with the same energy and delight in language, the same constant awareness of nuance and ambiguity'. William Pritchard, in
Partisan Review
(Spring 1967), made an identification between the author and his protagonist: ‘Anthony Burgess, like Hillier in this novel, plays the secret-agent game of “being a good technician, superb at languages, agile, light-fingered, cool.” But behind these ambiguous gifts, sentence by sentence, there stands revealed the man who wrote them, an extraordinary and attractive character whose like has been seldom seen.'

Tremor of Intent
is both an artful work of fiction and a knowing critical commentary on the popular novels of the Cold War era. It is energetic, language-loving and richly rewarding. There is no other novel in English quite like it.

The position at the moment is as follows. I joined the gastronomic cruise at Venice, as planned, and the
Polyolbion
is now throbbing south-east in glorious summer Adriatic weather. Everything at Pulj is in order. D. R. arrived there three days ago to take over, and it was good to have a large vinous night and talk about old adventures. I am well, fit, except for my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis which, anyway, continue to cancel each other out. There will be little opportunity for either to be indulged on this outward voyage (we shall be in the Black Sea the day after tomorrow), but I dribble at the glutinous thought of the mission-accomplished, unbuttoned-with-relief week that will come after the turn-around. Istanbul, Corfu, Villefranche, Ibiza, Southampton. And then free, finished. Me, anyway. But what about poor Roper?

D.R. handed over, as arranged, the ampoules of PSTX; I have, of course, my own syringe. I know the procedure. A sort of proleptic wraith of poor Roper is already lying on the other bunk of this Bibby cabin. I explained to the purser that my friend Mr Innes had been called by unforeseen business to Murfiater but that he would be making his way by road or rail or ferry or something to Yarylyuk and would be joining us there. That was all right, he said, so long as it was clearly understood that there could be no rebate in respect of his missed fifteen hundred miles of cruising (meaning gorging and fornication). Very well, then. For Roper all things are ready, including a new identity. John Innes, expert in fertilisers. The
bearded face of that rubbery man from Metfiz looks sadly back at me from the Innes passport. He has been many things in his time, has he not, that all-purposes lay-figure. He has been a pimp from Mdina, a syphilitic computer-brain skulking in Palaiokastritsa, a kind of small Greek Orthodox deacon, R. J. Geist who had the formula, even a distinguished Ukrainian man of letters set upon for his allegations of pederasty in the Praesidium. And now he is John Innes, who is a sort of egg-cosy for soft-boiled Roper.

I well understand, sir, Her Majesty's Government's palpitating need to have Roper back. Questions in the House, especially after Tass passed through the jubilant news of the breakthrough in rocket-fuel research and Eurovision showed the Beast gliding through May-day Moscow. What I cannot so well understand is the choice of myself as the agent of Roper's repatriation, unless, of course, it is the pure, the ultimate trust which, if I were not modest, I would say I have earned in my fifteen years of work for the Department. But you must surely be aware of a residue of sympathy for a schoolfellow, the fact that until his defection we maintained a sort of exterior friendship, though with many lacunae (war, peace, his marriage, my posting to Pulj); his last communication with the West was a picture post-card to myself, the message cryptic and, so I gather, still being pored over by the cipher-boys:
Two minutes to four – up all their pipes – martyrs' blood flows through them
. Let us get certain things straight about Roper. Approach Number One will never work. I don't think for one moment that Roper can be persuaded to go back to anything. He has this scientist's thoroughness about disposing of the past. He never rummaged among old discarded answers. If he's a heretic at all it's your heresy he subscribes to – the belief that life can be better and man nobler. It's not up to me, of course, to say what a load of bloody nonsense that is. It's not up to me to have a philosophy at all, since I'm nothing more than a superior technician.

I understand the reason, sir, for two approaches to Roper,
persuasion first and force after. There's the propaganda value of freedom of choice, even though the horse's-mouth official letters in my jacket-lining neigh fantastic offers. And then, after a month or so, the judgement. Anyway, I confront Roper. I prepare to confront him by being not myself but Mr Sebastian Jagger (the rubber man wasn't needed, of course, for my fake passport). Jagger, typewriter expert; why didn't you christen me Qwert Yuiop? Jagger goes ashore and, in some restaurant lavatory, is swiftly transformed into something plausible and quacking, totally Slavonic. And then, if things go as they ought to go, a swift taxi journey to wherever Roper is at that hour of night, to be peeled off from the rest of the delegates of the scientific
sbyezd
. And then it will be I, very much the past, very much the old ways, not merely smelling of a West that has given him no answers but smelling of himself, an old formula discarded.

You think he can be persuaded? Or rather, do you think I can find it in my heart to be all that persuasive? How far am I (I am able to speak boldly now, this being my last assignment) convinced enough to want to convince? It's all been a bloody big game – the genocidal formulae, the rocketry, the foolproof early warning devices mere counters in it. But nobody, sir, is going to kill anybody. This concept of a megadeath is as remotely unreal as specular stone or any other mediaeval nonsense. Some day anthropologists will comment in gently concealed wonder on the ludic element in our serious flirting with collective suicide. For my part, I've always played the game of being a good technician, superb at languages, agile, light-fingered, cool. But otherwise I'm a void, a dark sack crammed with skills. I have a dream of life, but no one ideology will realise it for me better than any other. I mean a warm flat, a sufficiency of spirits, a record-player, the whole of
The Ring
on disc. I would be glad to be rid of my other appetites, since they represent disease, and disease, besides being expensive, robs one of self-sufficiency. A doctor I met in Mohammedia on that hashish-ring
assignment persuaded me that a simple operation would take care of both, since they are somehow cognate. Ultimately I have a desire for a spacious loghouse on a vast Northern lake, conifers all about, all oxygen and chlorophyll, paddle-steamers honking through the mist. The bar on board the
Männikkö
is stocked with drinks of intriguing nomenclature –
Juhannus
,
Huhtikuu
,
Edustaja
,
Kreikka
,
Silmäpari
– and the captain, who has a large private income, is round-buyingly drunk but never offensive. They serve mouthwatering food – fish soused and salted, garnished with gherkins; slivers of hot spiced meat on toasted rye-and there are blonde pouting girls who twitch for savage anonymous love. Some day I will have that operation.

Look in my glands and not in the psychologist's report. I am mentally and morally sound. I tut-tut at St Augustine, with his ‘O God make me pure but not yet'. Irresponsible, no appointment duly noted in the diary, the abrogation of free will. If you, sir, were really reading this, you would frown an instant, sniffing a connection between St Augustine (though of Canterbury, not Hippo, not less worthy but duller), Roper and myself. He was the patron saint of the Catholic college in Bradcaster where Roper and I were fellow-pupils. You have the name of the school in the files but you have not its smell, nor the smell of the city surrounding it. Bradcaster smelt of tanneries, breweries, dray-horses, canals, dirt in old crevices, brick-dust, the wood of tram-benches, hash, hot pies with gravy, cowheel stew, beer. It did not, sir, smell of Rupert Brooke's or your England. The school smelt of Catholicism, meaning the thick black cloth of clerical habits, stale incense, holy water, fasting breaths, stockfish, the tensions of celibacy. It was a day-school, but it had room for forty or so boarders. Roper and I were boarders, our homes being so far away, exiles from the South – Kent I, Dorset he – who had sat for scholarships and got them. The best Catholic schools are in the North, since the English Reformation, like blood from the feet when the arteries harden, could not push up so far so
easily. And, of course, you have Catholic Liverpool, a kind of debased Dublin. There we were then, two Southern exiles among Old Catholics, transplanted Irish, the odd foreigner with a father in the consular service. We were Catholics, but we sounded Protestants with our long-aaaaa'd English; our tones were not those of purevowelled orthodoxy. And so Roper and I had to be friends. We had adjoining desks and beds. There was nothing homosexual about our relationship. I think we even found each other's flesh antipathetic, never wrestling as friends often do. I know I would cringe a little at Roper's whiteness, exposed for bed or the showers, fancying that a smell of decay came off it. As for heterosexuality, well, that was fornication, you see. The heterosexual act was a mortal sin outside the married state, that was made very clear. Except, we accepted, for such foreigners as had had Catholicism before we got it and hence had sort of founder members' special concessions.