ABBA ABBA

Anthony Burgess

ABBA ABBA

To Liana

I would reject a petrarchal coronation – on account of my dying day, and because women have Cancers.

– John Keats

Introduction

Anthony Burgess's novels often seem to be a tussle with the art of poetry. His costive poet, Enderby, grinds out in the lavatory poems of metaphysical grim wit which turn out to be Burgess's own early work, at least in part. Enderby embarks on epics about the conflict between St Augustine and the heretical Celt, Pelagius. The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End plays a wildly fu

Why did he do it? He described himself, modestly enough, as a maker of verse rather than poetry. He wrote libretti, and a splendid translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, complete with murderous so

He used also to say that he was a European writer not only because he lived in Monaco, or Italy, with an Italian wife, but because he was an English Catholic of Irish descent, and the Roman church, and the Latin language, united the histories and crossed the frontiers, of all European countries. The subject matter of Catholic literature was good and evil, heaven and hell, time and eternity. The English novel tended to be about the English class system, which Burgess was interested in, as he was interested in everything, but glad – as a novelist and constructor of mock-epics – to escape.

There were two Anthony Burgesses, perhaps. One was atheist, English, northern, and interested in the quiddities of the demotic. The other was Catholic, Irish, Latin, and interested in the spiritual life. You find them to a certain extent in the harsh North African Augustine, convinced of predestined bliss or bane, and the British monk, Pelagius, desperately arguing for free will, and human salvation by virtue. You find them also in the two opposed heroes of Earthly Powers, the mild, cowardly, Coward-like professional writer, brother of a versifying music-hall artist, and Carlo, the exorcist Pope, working miracles of salvation and damnation on the cosmic and historical stage. Or you find them, the elements recombined, in the two poets of Abba Abba, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli and John Keats.

In You've Had Your Time, which Burgess, following St Augustine again, describes as "the second part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess" he describes an unpleasant experience he defines as "psychic". He was asked, he says, 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, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves."

On another occasion, making a television film for Canada, he recited Keats's so

However Burgess is very clear that the novel, Abba Abba, which recounts briefly and economically the death of Keats, sprang more from an obsession with the Roman poet, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. Belli died in 1861, at 72 – he could have met Keats in Rome, though there is no evidence that he did. He was the author of 2,279 so

Burgess's Keats, too, has things in common with his inventor. He was told in 1960 that he had an inoperable brain tumour and a year to live. He began writing novels to make money for his widow-to-be (his first wife Ly