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A Too-Early Death

I am one of those fastidious individuals who, before travelling, has to draw up a reading list suited to the place he is to visit. For this reason, on a recent trip to Rome, I reread Abba Abba (one of Anthony Burgess’s slimmest books, it has the added virtue of fitting easily into a cramped suitcase). By the time he wrote the novel in the mid-seventies, Burgess had lived in Rome and married his second wife, Liana, an Italian contessa. Abba Abba is, amongst other things, a wary tribute to that capital of temporal power.

The novel is divided into two parts. The first, a formally conventional novella, imagines the last weeks of John Keats’s life, when he is attended to by his devoted companion Joseph Severn in their small apartment at 26 Piazza di Spagna. Burgess imagines a meeting between Keats and the poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, the author of over a thousand sonnets in Roman dialect, many of them blasphemous, who was also, as a man of acute contradictions, an official Church censor. Thus the free spirit, fastened to a dying body, meets the believer at war with himself. The second part of Abba Abba consists of Belli’s sonnets on Biblical subjects, their glottal Roman translated into a caustic Mancunian. Burgess, hiding behind a fictional translator, acknowledges both his home town and his (then) adopted homeland. In so doing he engages with recurrent preoccupations: with language and poetry, with belief and unbelief, and with the conflict between our sensual and our spiritual selves. I have to confess that I value the first part of Abba Abba more than the second. Though as a versifying translator Burgess was never less than technically efficient (his Cyrano is now a classic, while his posthumous novel Byrne is written entirely in verse), he seems, in his gusto and erudition, very much a prose man. The Belli sonnets look back on the novella and its themes (abba abba is not only the cry of Our Saviour on the cross but also the rhyme scheme for the opening octet of a sonnet) yet they fail to engage me as the novel does.

There is, of course, inherent poignancy in any account of John Keats’s death at the age of 25. But Burgess does not indulge mawkish sensibilities, capturing inst

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I am one of those fastidious individuals who, before travelling, has to draw up a reading list suited to the place he is to visit. For this reason, on a recent trip to Rome, I reread Abba Abba (one of Anthony Burgess’s slimmest books, it has the added virtue of fitting easily into a cramped suitcase). By the time he wrote the novel in the mid-seventies, Burgess had lived in Rome and married his second wife, Liana, an Italian contessa. Abba Abba is, amongst other things, a wary tribute to that capital of temporal power.

The novel is divided into two parts. The first, a formally conventional novella, imagines the last weeks of John Keats’s life, when he is attended to by his devoted companion Joseph Severn in their small apartment at 26 Piazza di Spagna. Burgess imagines a meeting between Keats and the poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, the author of over a thousand sonnets in Roman dialect, many of them blasphemous, who was also, as a man of acute contradictions, an official Church censor. Thus the free spirit, fastened to a dying body, meets the believer at war with himself. The second part of Abba Abba consists of Belli’s sonnets on Biblical subjects, their glottal Roman translated into a caustic Mancunian. Burgess, hiding behind a fictional translator, acknowledges both his home town and his (then) adopted homeland. In so doing he engages with recurrent preoccupations: with language and poetry, with belief and unbelief, and with the conflict between our sensual and our spiritual selves. I have to confess that I value the first part of Abba Abba more than the second. Though as a versifying translator Burgess was never less than technically efficient (his Cyrano is now a classic, while his posthumous novel Byrne is written entirely in verse), he seems, in his gusto and erudition, very much a prose man. The Belli sonnets look back on the novella and its themes (abba abba is not only the cry of Our Saviour on the cross but also the rhyme scheme for the opening octet of a sonnet) yet they fail to engage me as the novel does. There is, of course, inherent poignancy in any account of John Keats’s death at the age of 25. But Burgess does not indulge mawkish sensibilities, capturing instead something of the passionate, brilliant and sceptical man to be found in Keats’s letters. Few writers come so alive in their letters as Keats does. Reading them I feel almost in his presence, and I cannot view this late, poetic fragment (addressed possibly to Fanny Brawne) without feeling a cold pulse in my spine:
This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is – I hold it towards you.
Burgess seems to have felt keenly the injustice of the poet’s too-early death. His Keats is tender, angry and desperate. He curses Severn’s God while holding no hope in him; he begs for laudanum so that he may end his sufferings. In a brief moment of remission he sees a new path that his poetry might have taken: a path towards the earthy and demotic that, in the event, only Belli lived to tread. Like the deaths of Mozart and Schubert, the premature loss of John Keats poses one of the great ‘what if ’ questions in art. As Burgess puts it in the second part of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, ‘Would he not have outgrown his consumptive romanticism and, with that Shakespearean wit and intelligence manifested in his letters, moved on to a fuller poetry, doing Browning’s work better than Browning?’ The next sentence illustrates the central hypothesis of Abba Abba. ‘Could he [Keats] have learned from Belli how to employ the colloquial, the obscene, the blasphemous?’ It’s hardly surprising that Burgess should have found this notion exciting. His own work engages with language (many languages, indeed, for he was both a polyglot and a linguist) from the mock Elizabethan of his Shakespeare fantasy Nothing Like the Sun to the futuristic teenage slang in A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a worldly and rambunctious novelist; obscenities of violence and sex belong in his fiction because they occur in human nature, and he could write with gusto about matters that, as a private citizen, he would surely have deplored. As for blasphemy, the cradle Catholic made fertile material from the clash between the body and the spirit. Watching, in the last chapter of the novella, Keats’s coffin being taken to the Protestant cemetery in Rome, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli loses his temper with a priest who scoffs at the corpse about to be ‘interred in the dark’. ‘He had’, Belli says, ‘more light in his little toe than you have in your fat carcase.’ Belli the reluctant Church censor, who yet deplores the innate irreverence of his fellow Romans, has not begun to write his demotic sonnets. It is Keats who, unwittingly, prompts him to begin this work, recognizing that some spark of the sacred must be found in the very dust and disorder of human life. In 1816 William Hazlitt wrote (and Keats would probably have read the essay, if not discussed it with him) that ‘the infinite quantity of dramatic invention shown in Shakespeare takes from his gusto’. I would suggest the same for Burgess. He was, by virtue of his Catholicism as well as his facility with languages, catholic (in the sense of all-embracing) in his vision. There is nothing of the puritan introspective about him. His fiction is expansive, generous in its openness to diverse cultures and never shy of embracing grand themes. His was a kind of brazen loquacity. Not for Burgess the agonizing over a phrase, the head-scratching pursuit of le mot juste. The words seem to have come to him swiftly (as a composer he had a good ear). On the other hand, if a writer got there before him, he was not averse to a bit of borrowing. Consider this little act of plagiarism: one all the more impressive for coming in the very first paragraph of the novel.
He mused smiling among the ilex trees. The dome of San Pietro down there in the city was grape-hued in the citron twilight.
Compare this to a description from Robert Gittings’s John Keats, where his subject could
look out over the dome of St Peter’s, a dark grape colour in the lemon-tinted dusk. Loitering under the ilexes . . .
The wording is too close merely to be accidental. Not that I wish to condemn Burgess for his temerity. It was part of the man, an adjunct to his appetite and proof of his literary nerve.

* * *

Entering the Keats and Shelley Memorial in Rome (Shelley, having drowned at sea, is something of an intruder; but who can separate the Romantic dead after two centuries of myth-making?) proved for me an anticlimax. Only the rooms remain: the furnishings had to be burned, by municipal order, after Keats died. I spent ten minutes in the room where the poet struggled, with lungs dwindled almost to nothing, to breathe his last. It is a dispiritingly narrow cell just above the Spanish Steps. I tried to imagine how it might have felt for the agonizing man to hear life outside continuing just as he was forced to leave it. There was, however, no intimation of a ghostly presence. I doubt that things were different thirty years ago for Burgess; but he dared in his splendid ‘confessions’ to claim otherwise.
I was asked to read some of Keats’s poems at the house on the Spanish Steps where he died. Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to the place where the body died . . . It seemed to me rather that a fierce creative energy, forbidden its total fulfilment by a premature physical death, frustrated into destructiveness, was hovering around the house where he died.
True? It doesn’t greatly matter: Burgess illustrates his point. John Keats had an intense appetite for life and work and these were denied fulfilment. The writing days that Burgess devoted to the poet’s story must have seemed haunted, his dreaming nights chilled. He took the offered hand and, through a sustained act of sympathy, brought Keats to life in our imagination.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Gregory Norminton 2007


About the contributor

Gregory Norminton is the author of four novels. A completist by nature, he is always on the lookout for Burgess’s worst, out-of-print books.

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