That's Dwight Garner, writing in the NYT, who begins by telling us "Long before I read her, I disliked Adrienne Rich" — "She was a radical lesbian separatist who didn’t want men at her readings and would not respond to their questions... a humorless scold... perceived to have bent her sensitive talent on a political wheel." Garner also complains the the biography "makes it difficult for anyone to criticize Rich’s work, for any reason whatsoever, and not be thought complicit in the grinding machinery of misogyny."
I just want to know what Anthony Burgess did, what the "feminist contents" were, and how he satirized them. Here's the biography. From page 246: "[Burgess] cut a tornado's path of destruction through her home.... a mattress missing; a box spring ripped; bedroom tables dotted with cigarette burns; kitchen utensils missing, burned, or broken; a lamp broken; and a sofa and rug stained with spilled food." Rich sought reimbursement, and Burgess said his $475 security deposit ought to cover the "petty" damage, especially since he'd gotten the apartment wired for cable TV.
The "misogynistic novel" was "The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End" (1974). Enderby ≈ Burgess. He's staying in the apartment of "a humorless, man-hating novelist" — ≈ Rich — "whose bookshelves bulge with treatises on race, gender, and revolution that Enderby views with distaste." The quotes are from the new bio, and they don't convey any spirit of satire. And unfortunately, you can't get "The Clockwork Testament" in a Kindle version, so I've reached a dead end.
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62 comments:
Many years ago, I shared an apartment with two of Rich's sons. They were nice guys. A friend of their's said she hated all males except her three sons. While there I read her "Of Women Born". Smart, self-righteous, full of hate; having read it, I wasn't surprised by wokeness.
The Griefs of Women
The griefs of women are quiet, rustle
like crinoline or whisper like
the tearing of old silk;
hum like appliances, give off the sharp sweet smell
of burnt out motors; tap like typewriter keys.
The strengths of women are quiet,
but hardy as the weed that finds its cranny
between the concrete block of the sidewalk
and the concrete slab of the wall, and grows there,
and blooms there.
Men are bums.
We're really better than they are.
Brand X Poetry "The Griefs of Women" after Adrienne Rich
'And unfortunately, you can't get "The Clockwork Testament" in a Kindle version, so I've reached a dead end.'
I think it's on Audible.
I enjoyed the heck out of Burgess' Enderby years ago. Twice, in fact. I wonder how it holds up today. And I've read a lot of his other books but not Enderby's End.
I was introduced to his writing on a train in Morocco in 1971 via a passed-around copy of The Long Day Wanes, a humorous trilogy of novels set in Malaysia as the Brits were in the process of pulling out. It was based on his stint as a British civil servant in that country during those times. I liked it enough to read many more of his works. I'm going to check to see if my library has a copy of End, but I'm not holding my breath.
Her husband committed suicide. But she didn't get the Ted Hughes treatment from the poetry world.
F. X. Enderby, aka Enderby the poet - one of my all-time faves. At the end of "Enderby Inside," the poet decides to kill himself by taking aspirins - Rawcliffe and Vesta have stolen his poems. The girl at the Pharmacy asks him what size he'd like. "Oh, very small," he says. "I have to take rather a lot."
"a passed-around copy of The Long Day Wanes," - the first part of the trilogy,"Time For A Tiger," is the best of the three, IMHO.
Nope -- all the library has is Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers. I liked Enderby a lot more than Orange, loved the humor.
Fortunately my copy of his exposition on linguistics, A Mouthful of Air did not fall victim to some frenzy of decluttering as this post got me all revved up to revisit it.
Odd that this extreme manhater would sublet her apartment to a man. Let him live among her things, sit at her table, sleep in her bed. Maybe Burgess is why she hates men. But the specifics of the torn up tornado's path don't seem that terrible. He may have been a bad tenant and she may have had good reason to be glad when he was out, but the damage sounds pretty minor, something any landlord might have to deal with after a careless tenant leaves.
As a landlord, the listed damages to the apartment I would consider minimal, and readily covered by a security deposit. A missing matress & torn box spring? Duct tape the tear, put a new mattress back on it for $200. Burns on nightstands? Lemon oil, done, $5. Kitchen utensils - a trip to Walmart and $20. Lamps come from Goodwill for $10. Food on the sof and carpet? $100 for a professional rug cleaning and 5 minutes with elbow grease for the sofa. I'm ready to re-rent at a cost of $335, and I pocket $140.
She has nothing to complain about.
It's amazing how many different poets have written poems entitled Apology. But here's Rich's version;
I've said; I wouldn't ever
keep a cat, a dog,
a bird --
chiefly because
I'd rather love my equals.
Today, turning
in the fog of my mind,
I knew the thing I really
couldn't stand in the house
is a woman
(terminal period apparently omitted in original).
Is she a 'poet' or 'poetess'?
Not sure how a radical lesbian would feel about that distinction.
Kind of like how everyone in front of the camera in Hollywood is an 'actor' these days.
It goes without saying that they are all 'artists' practicing their 'craft.'
Puke...
Enderby is one of the best novels I ever read. Thanks for reminding me of it, enough time may have passed to read it again. There is a little scene in there where he is asked to write for a women’s magazine and spends the afternoon reading them so that he can get the right tone, “hours of my life I will never get back.”
There were great comic novels written at that time, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Sot Weed Factor by John Barth, to name a couple. Is anybody writing comic novels anymore? There were little poems interspersed in there that ‘Enderby’ had written which I would lay dollars to donuts are better than anything Rich ever wrote.
These kinds of writers must be snuffed with The Enlightenment, I guess.
"I think it's on Audible.”
'Reading' Burgess on Audible would be like tasting wine through an android’s mouth.
Wait up! I've been commending Burgess here since my early days. I've mentioned Earthly Powers and Enderby, The Wanting Seed . . . those are the ones that come to mind. I think I even quoted the first sentence of EP.
Napoleon Symphony. Other I have forgotten but loved at the time.
AB wrote music criticism for the Speccie back in the 70s (and 80s?) As a composer himself he found it hard to write ABOUT music, and quit after concluding that if you could say anything much about music with words, we wouldn't need music.
He mused on how it is that music can be funny. His example was the "critics" section in Strauss' Heldenleben symphony and you know what? It IS funny.
I've mentioned John Barth too. I was the only graduate student out of scores over the decades, to spot the excerpt from The Sotweed Factor as a hoax in Historical Sources and Methods, when the exercise was evaluating texts for contextual clues. Dr. C never failed to mention that after I became a colleague.
Floating Opera.
Yes, there is so much that I would like to re-read, but it's daunting. I did re-read Bend Sinister this summer. For a picture of creeping fascism (which is recognized as a practice and not a coherent belief system) and the helplessness of individuals before the (therapeutic, read it carefully) State, it's hard to better. And there's the usual word wizardry.
Glory, a few years ago; if I get to another re-read of VN it'll be Invitation.
Oh my goodness, I have a lot to read.
Narr
Bon apetit
Dwight GARNER.
Now I get it...
By the time I got to the second paragraph, even before I read Garner's comment, I disliked her too.
Glad I never heard of her, much less met her.
John Henry
Why
Is poetry so
special
Why
Are poets so
special
What
is it about writing words in odd stanzas
with weird punctuation
That makes people say:
Oh, she is special.
She is a poet
Or is she a poetess?
Perhaps writing a female version of LF's ruminations on underwear
Does the Pope wear underwear?
I sometimes
lie in bed
at night wondering.
And that guy over in the corner?
Don't talk to him
he's a novelist with
no poetry in his soul.
John Henry
'” I think it's on Audible.”
Yes, I saw that, but I need text to blog. I often get the audible plus the text, but audible,alone is a problem.
I actually like a fair amount of poetry and have a number of books of poetry on my shelves.
I just don't see it as any more important than any other ind of writing. Nor do I see poets as any better or worse people than any other kind of writer.
There is nothing special about poetry.
Robert Service wrote "The Spell of the Yukon" as
poetry.
Joseph Conrad wrote "Youth" as prose.
Both were written about the same time, both tell almost the same story, both move me to tears when I read them
John Henry
(And now it's lunchtime and I think I'll go whoop it up with the boys at the Malamute Saloon)
"Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. “
Anybody wonder why poetry is dead? That poem “Apology” is just lousy. Cringeworthy if offered as a serious effort. “Ooh! I just thought of something! Let me write a poem and tart it up with bizarre punctuation and poetical formatting.
You know what line Burgess never would have written? “In the fog of my mind.”
I don’t know when the apartment rental happened, but the story alone has been worth more to her than the damages cost, and in the 1960s, $1950 would buy you a factory fresh VW. But the damages do sound like Enderby.
I guess that Burgess disagreed with me.
Mr Burgess wore a saffron shirt open above light blue slacks, his wavy dark hair falling limp in the steaming heat. Reminded by a visitor that he had taught for many years in Malaya in a similar climate, he retorted with a Brendan Behan scowl: ‘I never got used to it.’
‘Joyce is an auditory writer,’ he explained. ‘Most modern bestsellers write for the eye. A writer like Arthur Hailey, of Airport or Hotel, you find you do a lot of skipping … You might get together and read Joyce aloud, in small groups — or alone, in the lavatory.’
Mr Burgess plunged into the reading like an actor, reading the lines with Irish passion, interrupting with cool English footnotes and warm commentaries.
“You might get together and read Joyce aloud, ... alone, in the lavatory.” That’s Enderby all over.
Maybe if he was the guy reading it. I just feel like it’s so hard to go back and reread with an audio book, and hard to get all of Burgess cruising though it with no stops to think. The better a novel is, the more you stop and think about what was just said. Likely Burgess is so much smarter than me that he can take this stuff in at speed.
There is a little recording of a lecture by Burgess to one of his classes at the time, complete with the sound of chalk on the blackboard.
https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/a-class-act-anthony-burgess-at-city-college-new-york/
If the novel came out in ‘74 the sublet had to have been a few years before that. Who had cable around ‘71? Manhattan wasn’t hooked up for cable until the 80s.
That's Dwight Garner, writing in the NYT, who begins by telling us "Long before I read her, I disliked Adrienne Rich" — "She was a radical lesbian separatist who didn’t want men at her readings ...."
But was she hot, Dwight?
Blogger Joe Smith said...
It goes without saying that they are all 'artists' practicing their 'craft.'
So is it art or is it a craft?
Since everything ends up as Seinfeld anyway, let's just jump to him.
Jerry S and LD conceived of the Seinfeld show, wrote much of it and were the creative minds behind it.
They are artists, IMHO.
Jason Alexander, Julia Dreyfuss and Kramer did a helluva job interpreting what Jerry and LD wrote and bringing it to life. They were really good at it.
They are craftspeople practicing a craft.
Jerry, because he created and starred, was both an artist and a craftsman.
Few people are totally one or the other. It is more of a continuum.
But most actors are not artists. They are simply craftspeople carrying out ideas that artists came up with.
We need both in this world.
John Henry
I remember reading The Sotweed factor in a single sitting, well, I read it in bed, I started reading it in the evening to go to sleep, and finished it at about ten in the morning. People knew how to write then, but our feminist lit teachers were inflicting things like “Fear of Flying” on us, which on a technical level were so inferior to other writers of the time, but they had the political message that had just started to become the mission of English Departments. You know, the hatred of men. We got the message Erica.
Burned kitchen utensils?
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45082/the-shooting-of-dan-mcgrew Robert Service
What a great poem.
Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.
I first came across Rich in the Norton Anthology I stole from my sister. I liked the two poems that were in it from Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and "Diving Into the Wreck" I think it was titled. So, I went to the Emory Library to get more- defintely hours of my life I won't get back- at least 2.
Clockwork Testament, as the name suggests, concerns Burgess working through his post-Kubrick fame, or infamy. Enderby has written a biography of Gerald Manley Hopkins, and it's adapted for movies by some Ken-Russell type. Causes a sensation, howls of outrage, moral panic. Enderby goes on the fictional equivalent of "The Tonight Show," and Burgess writes the scene as a transcription of the program. It's absolutely brilliant and hilarious.
Greatest novelist of the post-war period, period.
Need to read the whole review. Garner revised his opinion over time.
"Garner revised his opinion over time.”
Of course he did. As Jake Tapper allowed yesterday, you have to look at future employability when giving your opinions, just like he does, and look how rich Jake Tapper got!
"The griefs of women are quiet, rustle
like crinoline or whisper like
the tearing of old silk"
No doubt Althouse would consider this sarcasm. Rich as the Mick of feminism.
A post about the differences between Gluck and Rich becomes the occasion for celebrating the works of Anthony Burgess. Take that female poets and the feminist sensibility you rode in here on. The commenters here know who's on first.
I though the comment by the "landlord" was a little obnoxious and self centered. Just because the repairs involved are nothing to you doesn't mean everyone else has that skill set. I don't know Rich's physical condition at the time of the incident with Burgess, but she lived in my town and I saw her on occasion in her later years and she was physically a very small woman who had physical limitations, difficulty walking, etc. So she comes back to her apartment and it's filthy and she had to do repairs and moving mattresses, etc.? Of course she probably had to hire someone to help with all that. Burgess sounds like he was a pig.
Burgess was one of my favorite writers in the 80's. Read all the major books and greatly enjoyed the Enderby books. Had forgotten about him, but I'll reread some of his books to see how they hold up and help me through the Covid doldrum I'm currently stuck in.
"Burgess sounds like he was a pig.”
Anybody who ever read an Enderby novel knows that Burgess was a pig.
Adrienne Rich, Anthony Burgess and the cockroaches
And, your Times subscription may give you access to additional information in the 29 October 1972 Burgess article mentioned in this link.
He killed her fish.
Fellow deplorables! Please don't think ill of me, but I confess I have a book of Rich poems on my shelves. I even marked one I liked. Mea culpa.
Fellow deplorables! Just so you think well of me, I should add that I have many more volumes of Burgess on my shelves. Somehow missed Enderby though. mea culpa.
Fellow deplorables! In order to escape Althouse's feminist wrath by not focusing on Burgess entirely, is there one female poet we can admit to liking or admiring?
"is there one female poet we can admit to liking or admiring?"
Sappho.
Narr
Slow pitch
"is there one female poet we can admit to liking or admiring?”
Alannis Morrisette.
"In order to escape Althouse's feminist wrath by not focusing on Burgess entirely, is there one female poet we can admit to liking or admiring?"
Your question assumes logic, fairness and reciprocity are aspects of feminist wrath - whether that of Althouse or others.
"The griefs of women are quiet”
If only.
"When years later she announced she was leaving her husband, the economist Alfred H. Conrad, and their three young sons, Conrad drove to Vermont and committed suicide near the family’s summer house."
What a candy-ass pipsqueak. I suppose he thought she would take care of the kids? No wonder she hated men. I'd hate us myself if we were all that useless.
And unfortunately, you can't get "The Clockwork Testament" in a Kindle version, so I've reached a dead end.
Yeah.....I wonder why that is??
"is there one female poet we can admit to liking or admiring?”
Wislawa Szymborska.
A poet even Althouse might like.
And: Anna Akhmatova.
Foreigners count, right?
Well, without moderation we also get great investment opportunities.
"Well, without moderation we also get great investment opportunities."
We have a thread winner!
"... they had the political message that had just started to become the mission of English Departments. You know, the hatred of men. We got the message Erica."
Around twelve, I made the astonishing discovery that I was allowed to check out books from the adult section of the library. I never looked back! When I had read most of John O'Hara, and was listlessly searching the shelf for just one more I hadn't read already, I came across Edna O'Brien, Girls in Their Married Bliss. Dear me, that was a revelation.
Blogger readering said...
Well, without moderation we also get great investment opportunities.
We could all become Rich.
Srsly? I am not a poetry person. I can appreciate it in small doses, and actually can recall easily quite a few phrases or turns of language that are striking or memorable, but in the main it's not that interesting to me.
Lady poets least of the breed.
Narr
Call me a chauvinist
Reading about freaks can be fun. But she sounds like an oddball who's become "famous" because she had the right powerful friends and the right politics.
That's incredibly boring.
The Clockwork Testament is actually a very funny and perceptive book. Minor Burgess, but the depictions of politcal correctness in class, which leads a bored Enderby to invent the unknown poet Gervaise Whitelady, are ahead of their time.
Lisel Mueller
German-American
Given the greater audience for fiction -- even now -- than for poetry, it's not surprising that talk turns to a novelist, though I would have thought Burgess was one who had fallen into the memory hole.
As poets go, Rich wasn't bad, so far as I know, but as she didn't like men to come to her readings, is it really surprising that a lot of people don't want to talk about her poetry?
https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/adrienne-rich-anthony-burgess-and-the-cockroaches-by-andrew-biswell/
"is there one female poet we can admit to liking or admiring?”
Marianne Moore, maybe, before the latest biography came out.
Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Lasker-Schuler, maybe. Elizabeth Bishop.
"As poets go, Rich wasn't bad"
Well, there about 5,000 of those. So, that's why she' relatively unknown. Great poets are known for their poetry. Bad ones are known for their private life. We've had great woman poets: Dickinson and Plath come to mind. But we're now in an age where who you are is more important then what you do. Which is another way of saying, no one REALLY care about poetry or fiction anymore.
I'll have to read Burgess' novel. I loved Clockwork Orange and thought Kubrick drained all the intelligence and style out of it when he made his horrible, cold, lifeless movie.
Burgess, or maybe it was Amis, said "I don't like American writers. they're all either Jews or Hicks". I like that kind of panache.
I like Emily Dickinson. I enjoyed reading her poems and, what's more, some of them I more or less understood. Most of her poems are very short. That's always a good sign in a poem. If you can't say it in eight lines, don't say it.... I've gotten through some long poems by Frost, but later for Eliot and Pound and forget about Derek Walcott.... Also Dickinson had the great advantage of writing poetry back in the 19th century. Back then, poets wrote to be understood by the general public rather than the poetry editor of The New Yorker. Every so often I take a peek at one of the poems there, but beat a quick retreat. I think nowadays most people get their sustaining dose of poetry in music lyrics. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are definitely poets, and you can hum over the parts you don't understand.
Sebastian beat me to it, of course; but yes, Szymborska, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva. And of course Dickinson.
Rosalyn, as a landlord my understanding of the norms of human behavior has been forcibly moved so far toward the cynical that I burst out laffing at your naivete. Renters are pigs on two legs, almost without exception. Security Deposits, again almost without exception, are more than consumed by tenant misbdhavior. Any landlord saying otherwise should expect a lot of disapointment.
Clockwork Orange was great, on paper and on screen. Two of the great creative artists of the era; not all such adaptations turn out as well.
Burgess also invented the proto-language used in the movie Quest for Fire. Search for Fire?
Narr
Quest for the Chariots of Fire?
I had too much Emily Dickinson in high school. Also she's too New Englandy. And Harold Bloom makes too much of a big deal about her. Also, I struggle with the punctuation.
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