The Complete Enderby (60 page)

This, children, is Morocco. Does it not give you a thrill, seeing what you have all heard or read about so often? Pashas and the Beni-Quarain and camels. Mulai Hafid and Abd-el-Kadir. The light-coloured Sherifians, who claim descent from the Prophet. Palmetto and sandarach and argan and tizra. You say it does
not
give you a thrill, Sandra? Well, child, you were never strong on imagination, were you? And I do not wish to hear of these silly giggly whispers about what
does
give you a thrill. Some of you girls have very few thoughts in your heads. Yes, I mean you too, Andrea. And, Geoffrey, because that elderly Berber is picking his nose you need not feel impelled to do the same. Lions, Bertrand? Lions are much farther south. Leopards here, bears, hyenas, and wild pigs. Bustard, partridge, and water-fowl. Dromedaries and dashing Barbary horses.

This is Tangier, which, you may not know this, once actually belonged to the British. Part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, Portuguese queen of a merry monarch. A pleasant enough town, no longer very distinguished, with some deplorable specimens of architecture. The beach is deserted. This is not the tourist season
and
, besides, it is the hour of the siesta. The beach cafés are garish, the paint peeling on many, but some of their names are rather charming. The Winston Churchill, the Sun Trap, the Cuppa, the Well Come. Those Hebrew letters there mean
kosher
(it is three consonants, the Semitic languages not greatly favouring the alphabeticization of vowels. Yes, Donald, Arabic too is a Semitic language and is vowel-shy. Why then do not the Jews and Arabs, aware of a common origin in speech and alphabetic method as well as genes, taboos, and mythology, get on better together? There, child, you have the eternal mystery of brotherhood. As Blake might have said, Let me hate him, or let me be his brother. But a good question, Donald, and thank you for asking it) which means, of food, not forbidden by religion. A holiday, you see, condones no relaxations of fundamental covenants. Stop grinning, Andrea. I shall lose my temper in a minute.

That one there is having its name repainted. You can see what it will be, in tasteful ultramarine.
La Belle Mer
. Very pretty. Some Frenchman probably, offering a most delicate cuisine, but now neatly sleeping. Listen, you can hear them sleep. Zrrrzzz. Ghraaaaaakh. Ong. Sleep possesses so many of the better sort, and it is sleep that sustains our visitation, to be fractured and fantasticated on waking, perhaps even totally forgotten.

Why are we here? A fair question, Pamela. What has all this to do with literature? I am very glad you asked that. Well, let me say this. Here you have expatriates of Northern stock, interwoven with the Moors and Berbers and Spanish. Many of them have fled their native lands to escape the rigour of the law. Yes, alas, crimes. Expropriation of funds, common theft, sexual inversion. I thought you would ask that, Sandra. That term
sexual
effects, in your case, an almost voltaic connection. The term means nothing more than philoprogenitive urges deflected into channels that possess no generative significance. What’s all that when it’s at home? I expected that remark from you, ignorant girl. I shall ignore it. Ignoration is the only rational response to ignorance. Think that one over, you over-developed little flesh-pot.

And among the exiles from the North are artists, musicians, writers. They have sinned, but they have talent. Desperately they exercise their talent here, dreaming of bitter ale and meadowsweet
but
cut off for ever, yes for ever, from the Piccadilly flyover and the Hyde Park State Museum and the Communal Beerhall on Hammersmith Broadway. Those are the British. The Americans weep too nightly into their highballs for the happy shopping evenings in the Dupermarket, the drive-in color stereo-video, the nuclear throb of the fully automated roadglobe. But they practise their arts. It is writers mostly. Up that hill lives a man who has already produced twenty-five volumes of autobiography: he tears at each instant of his pre-exilic past as though it were a prawn. Another man, on the Calle Larache, eats into his unconscious heart and mounts the regurgitated fragments on fragments of old newspaper. Another man again writes sneering satire, in sub-Popean couplets, on an England already dead. They are small artists, all. Here there is a
rue
Beethoven, also an
avenida
Leonardo da Vinci, a
plaza
de Sade. But no artist here will have a square or thoroughfare named for him. They are nothing.

And yet think what, on three sides, surrounds them, though the fierce Atlantic will give a right orchestration to the muscularity of what, to the sun’s own surprise, has sprung out of sunbaked Africa and Iberia. The glory of the Lusiad (George, you will please not yawn) and the stoic bravery and heartbreak of the Cid, and the myth of Juan and the chronicle of the gaunter Don on the gaunt horse. Clash of guitars up there and the drumroll of hammering heels in the dance, and down there the fever of native timpani. And, east, the tales told of the cruel Sultan Shahriyar, and the delicate verse-traceries of Omar this and Abdul that (all right, Benedict, there is no need to snigger: Islamic poetry is not my subject) and Sayid the other thing.

Yawwwwww. Ogre. Uuuuuugh.

The pain of their awakening, not all of them alone, to the coming of the Tangerine evening. All right, we all know that a tangerine is a small orange, much flattened at the poles. Very funny, Geoffrey. But perhaps now you will consider why it is called what it is called. The calligraphic neons will glow –
fa
and
kaf
and
kaf
and
nun
and
tok
– and the shops resume their oil-lit trades. Ladies in yashmaks and caftans will stroll the
rues
or
calles
, and the boys will jeer and giggle at the few male tourists and point at their younger brothers as if they were carcases of tender
lamb
. And the writers will groan at their words of the forenoon and despair.

So away! Our camels sniff the evening and are glad. A quotation, if you
must
know, Benedict. Let us leave them, for men must be left to, each, the dreeing of his own weird. A man must contrive such happiness as he can. So must we all. So must we all, Geoffrey and Benedict and George and Donald and Andrea and Pamela and that horried Sandra and – Oh, get into line there. We take off, into the Atlantic wind. The moon, sickle of Islam, has risen. The planets Marikh and Zuhrah and Zuhal shine. The stars, in American issue army boots, slide silently to their allotted posts. And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax and glitter, as with atmospheric dust, with those impurities which we call meaning. Away, children! Leave them to it.

Until the final glacier grips

Each island, with its dream of ships

And and and and. Keep on. It will come out right, given time and application. You can, when depressed, pluck your own sweet bay or
laurus nobilis
. It grows here. Nobody will pluck it for you. The aromatic leaves are useful in cookery, and you can cure your sick cat with the berries.

THE POEMS THAT
follow have not, for some reason, appeared in any of the published volumes of Enderby’s verse, and the last poem has not previously been published at all. The poems beginning ‘Anciently the man who showed …’, ‘They fear and hate the Donne and Dante in him …’, and ‘Semitic violins by the wailing wall …’, allegedly from Enderby’s juvenile productions, cannot be traced either in published or manuscript form. It may be of interest to note, however, that the catalogue of the ill-fated Gorgon Press, which specialized in verse printed at the author’s own expense, lists a volume by one A. Rawcliffe –
Balls and Talk
: Poems 1936. No copies of this volume have as yet come to light.

A.B.

There arose those winning life between two wars,

Born out of one, doomed food for the other,

Floodroars ever in the ears.

Slothlovers hardly, hardly fighters:

Resentment spent against stone, long beaten out of

Minds resigned to the new:

Useless to queue for respirators.

Besides, what worse chaos to come back to.

Home, limbs heavy with mud and work, to sleep

To sweep out a house days deep in dirt.

Knowing finally man would limbs loin face

Efface utterly, leaving in his place

Engines rusting to world’s end, heirs to warfare

Fonctionnant d’une manière automatique
.

Summer swamps the land, the sun imprisons us,

The pen slithers in the examinee’s fingers,

And colliding lips of lovers slide on sweat

When, blind, they inherit their tactile world.

Spectacles mist, handveins show blue, the urge to undress

Breeds passion in unexpected places. Barrage balloons

Soar silver in silver ether. Lying on grass,

We watch them, docile monsters, unwind to the zenith.

Drops of that flood out of France, with mud and work

Stained, loll in the trams, drinking their cigarettes,

Their presence defiling the flannels and summer frocks,

The hunters to hound our safety, spoil the summer.

War becomes time, and long logic

On buried premises; spring supervenes

With the circle as badge which, pun and profundity,

Vast, appears line and logical,

But, small, shows travel returning.

Circle is circle, proves nothing, makes nothing,

Swallows up process and end in no argument,

Brings new picture of old time.

Here in barracks is intake of birds,

The sun holds early his orderly room,

The pale company clerk is uneasy

As spring brings odour of other springs.

The truckdriver sings, free of the road,

The load of winter and war becomes

Embarrassing as a younger self.

Words disintegrate; war is words.

The blue of summer morning begs

The country journey to be made,

The sun that gilds the breakfast eggs

Illuminates the marmalade.

A cheque is smiling on the desk.

Remembered smells upon the lane

Breed hunger for the picaresque

To blood the buried springs again.

Here is the pub and here the church

And there our thirty miles of sun,

The river and the rod and the perch,

The noonday drinking just begun.

Let beer beneath the neighbour trees

Swill all that afternoon away,

And onions, crisp to sullen cheese,

Yield the sharp succulence of today.

Today remembers breaking out

The fire that burned the hayfield black.

An army that was grey with drought

Shows to my stick its fossil track.

Returning evening rose on rose

Or pomegranate rouge and ripe;

The lamp upon the pavement throws

The ectoplasm of my pipe.