M/F

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and studied English at the university there. He was drafted into the army upon graduation in 1940 and spent six years in the Education Corps. After demobilization, he worked first as a college lecturer in speech and drama and then as a grammar school master. From 1954 to 1960 he was an education officer in the Colonial Service, stationed in Malaya and Borneo, and it was while he was there that he started writing The Malayan Trilogy (published in Penguin as The Long Day Wanes). In 1959 Burgess was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour and was given less than a year to live. He then became a full-time writer and, proving the doctors wrong, went on to write at least one book a year and hundreds of book reviews right up to his death in 1993.

A late starter in the art of fiction, Anthony Burgess had previously spent much creative energy on music, and in his lifetime he composed many full-scale works for orchestra and other media. His Third Symphony was performed in the USA in 1975 and Blooms of Dublin, his musical version of Joyce’s Ulysses, was presented in 1982. He believed that with the fusion of the musical and literary forms lay a possible future for the novel. His many other works include Inside Mr Enderby, Enderby Outside, The Clockwork Testament, Enderby’s Dark Lady, Tremor of Intent; Honey for the Bears; Urgent Copy; Nothing Like the Sun; Man of Nazareth, the basis of his successful TV script Jesus of Nazareth; Earthly Powers, which was voted the best foreign novel of 1980 in France; The End of the World News; The Kingdom of the Wicked, winner of the Prix Europa in Geneva; The Piano Players; Any Old Iron; A Mouthful of Air; Home to QWERTYUIOP, an anthology of his reviews and journalism; and two volumes of autobiography: Little Wilson and Big God, which was awarded the J. R. Ackerley Prize for 1988, and You’ve Had Your Time. A Clockwork Orange was made into a film classic by Stanley Kubrick and was dramatized by the RSC in 1990. His last novel, published in the spring of 1993, was A Dead Man in Deptford, based around the murder of Christopher Marlowe.

Anthony Burgess died in November 1993. The Times described him as ‘one of the cleverest and most original writers of his generation’, and among the many people who paid tribute to him were David Lodge, who considered him ‘an inspiration and example to other writers’, and John Updike, who believed that ‘The literary world seems much more sparsely populated with Anthony Burgess gone. He had the energy and the wide-ranging interests of a dozen writers… [and] seemed not only a prodigious intellect, but an affectionate spirit, whose mind, like Ariel’s, circled the globe in a few seconds.’

Gilbert Adair is a novelist, screenwriter and critic. His most recently published novels were Buenas Noches Buenos Aires and The Dreamers, the latter of which was filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci. He lives in London.

M/F

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Introduction

In ‘Oedipus Wrecks’, one of the eleven essays that make up This Man and Music, an eclectic anthology of writings on musical composition and culture, Anthony Burgess offers a lengthy, comprehensive gloss on the intricate web of references embedded in the narrative of M/F. His justification for this critical apparatus, a justification inscribed within the essay itself, is that it was important for him, in a period of ruthlessly remaindered and/or pulped novels, that some significant trace remain of what was presumably one of his, if few other people’s, personal favourites. Or, putting it bluntly, Burgess, who in his day reviewed innumerable books for the British press, elected to write a review of one of his own books, the kind of densely analytical review he himself patently believed it deserved but never received (except for a lonely rave from Frank Kermode).

The Burgess of ‘Oedipus Wrecks’ (which was, interestingly, also a title used by Woody Allen) is very much the writer as back-seat driver, steering the reader towards the completest possible appreciation of his work like somebody lending unsolicited assistance at a game of solitaire. (‘Black eight on the red nine.’) The most Irish of English writers, he prefers to flaunt his learning rather than wear it lightly or simply let it be. Hence we learn that the plotline of M/F, combining two immemorial literary themes, incest and the double (or incest and what one might whimsically call ‘twincest’), derives essentially from a legend told by the Algonquin tribe of North American Indians – which is why, in its opening chapter, the protagonist, Miles Faber, one of the novel’s several M/F referents, along with male/female, motherfucker, mezzo-forte and so forth, is staying at what is still perhaps the best-known Manhattan hotel, the Algonquin. We learn that he, Burgess, first encountered this legend via a lecture given in Paris by the doyen of structuralist anthropologists, Claude Lévi-Strauss – a source reflected in the rigorous structural underpinning of M/F’s ostensibly corkscrewy storyline as also, more trivially, in its allusions to jeans (Lévi) and Viennese waltzes (Strauss). We learn that one character’s name, Feteki, comes from the Sanskrit word for ‘riddle’ (M/F is not only stuffed with riddles but is one itself); another’s, Fonanta, from Zoon Fonanta, Greek for ‘talking animal’ (virtually all its characters are metaphorised as animals); and a third’s, Aderyn, from the Welsh for ‘bird’ (she, for it’s a she, trains exotic birds for a circus act). Burgess even mischievously directs our attention to a handful of proper names which have no referential significance whatever, inevitably making us wonder fretfully if there might be a meaning in the very absence of meaning.

‘Oedipus Wrecks’, if read after M/F, will certainly provide the novel’s readers with all the exegesis they are ever going to want, and then some; if, on the other hand, read before M/F, it will just as certainly prove counterproductive. What, the pre-M/F reader will be tempted to ask, is the point of Burgess genning up (as even he, famously erudite as he was, must have had to do) on all this arcane linguistico-cultural lore, encoding it into his narrative then blithely supplying us with a master key permitting us to decode it at the other end? The impression would be of a futile and claustrophobic indulgence.

Yet, for the lucky reader who comes to M/F without either preconceptions or foreknowledge, that isn’t at all the case. And, to explain why, I submit the following superficially paradoxical theory: that the experience of reading M/F, a magically virtuosic fable of a young American whose every endeavour to avoid copulation with his own sister brings him ever closer to committing the Oedipal sin, is not merely not diminished but actually enhanced by ignorance of the multilayered referential grid which would appear to be its primary raison d’être.

Consider this string of examples, all of them taken from the novel’s earliest pages. Burgess’s hero – Miles Faber, as I say – is determined to quite New York and fly down to Grencijta, capital of the Caribbean island Castita, in one of whose streets, Indovinella, is located a house containing the literary and artistic remains of his idol, the late poet and painter Sib Legeru; he is, however, repeatedly prevented from doing so by two cartoonishly sinister characters, Loewe and Pardaleos, both lawyers, along with a weird posse of thugs and perverts. I might add that, while still marooned in Manhattan, Faber dreamily overhears the waitresses of a restaurant barking out his fellow diners’ orders: ‘Indiana (or Illinois) nutbake. Chuffed eggs. Saffron toast. Whiting in tarragon, hot. Michigan (or Missouri) oyster-stew. Tenderloin. Hash, eggs. Ribs’.

Now – what the reader of ‘Oedipus Wrecks’ discovers (either before or after the event) is that Grencijta means ‘Big Town’ and Castita ‘Chastity’, which one might just have been capable of guessing on one’s own; that ‘siblegeru’ was the term coined by an Anglo-Saxon bishop, Wulfstan, for incest or ‘lying with one’s sib’, something absolutely nobody could conceivably have guessed on his own; that ‘loewe’ is German for ‘lion’ (and, of course, ‘ewe’ is also lurking in there) and ‘pardaleos’ Greek for ‘leopard’. Of ‘Indovinella’ Burgess cavalierly remarks, ‘I need not translate.’ As for that lovingly detailed menu – which, as it happens, is spread over three pages of M/F as though to render solving the puzzle an even trickier challenge – it turns out, naturally, to be an acrostic. How could the reader have failed to notice, one imagines Burgess thinking, that the initial letters of each of these dishes spell out INCEST WITH MOTHER?

That is, to be sure, all very enlightening, but it’s also a little like being given a crossword clue just as you are about to hit on it yourself. And I think of G. K. Chesterton’s comment when confronted for the first time with Times Square’s gaudily neon-lit advertising billboards. ‘How beautiful they are!’ he exclaimed; only to add, ‘If only one didn’t know how to read!’

Similarly with M/F. If one doesn’t know how to read them (‘read’, that is, in the sense of ‘interpret’), how self-sufficiently beautiful are Burgess’s character- and place-names. Sib Legeru, let’s say, might be one of Tolkien’s goblins. Z. Fonanta, Professor Feteki, Llew Aderyn all sound like enigmatic eccentrics out of Kafka or Borges. And one would not be too surprised to come across Castita in one of Stevenson’s pirate romances. For an ‘innocent’ reader, M/F in its entirety bristles with meaning, meaning all the more potent, the more subtle and insidious, for being uncaptioned, for one is constantly aware of the hum of implied meaning even if one doesn’t always know, on a casual conscious level, precisely what that meaning means. Yet, though one may not instantly understand why the author chose this or that specific name, this or that turn of plot, one nevertheless cannot help feeling, as one hacks one’s way through the novel’s lexical thickets, that this is how it had to be, this way and no other. By thus burying its complex network of symbols and references deep in the textures and trappings of the text, so deep that no reader, realistically, will be capable of extricating them without the author’s aid, Burgess is not just flourishing his fabled cleverclogs erudition; it is, supremely, a device by which he was allowed to mine his way to the indelible and indivisible ‘thisness’ of myth.

If Frank Kermode is to be believed, Burgess himself, notwithstanding his own self-exegesis, was ultimately alert to the implications of having what theorists of language call the ‘deep structure’ of his novel, a novel with as many concealed layers as a smuggler’s suitcase, laid too bare. According to Kermode, he became persuaded not just that it was unnecessary for a reader’s enjoyment of M/F that its riddles be answered in advance but also that any instinctive hunger, on the part of that reader, ‘for an alembicated moral’, as he characteristically put it, was a form of cowardice. Magic must be left intact. A riddle is more potent when it remains unanswered and a solved puzzle is as dispiriting as it is momentarily gratifying. Like incest itself, as Kermode pithily proposes, ‘it brings together elements that ought to stay separate’.

The novel, in any case, offers the motivated reader such a cornucopia of less latent inventions and ingenuities that one soon forgets the itch to apply the author’s decoding key. The real pleasures of M/F are those familiar from all of Burgess’s fiction. There is his deft story-telling skill; this mastery of dialogue; his very Irish way with a pun; his brilliance as both an aphorist and a metaphorist (of a limo, he writes that it was ‘a vehicle polished like a shoe’; of a rancid cut of meat, that ‘the beef was as alive as a telephone exchange’); his monstrous climactic twist (one which he reveals in ‘Oedipus Wrecks’ but which I refuse to reveal here); and, as Nabokov phrased it in the last, lyrical sentence of Ada, much, much more.

In his Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada Hans Kurath recognizes no isogloss coincident with the political border along Latitude 49°N.

S. Potter

C’est embêtant, dit Dieu. Quand il n’y aura plus ces Français, Il y a des choses que je fais, il n’y a aura plus personne pour les comprendre.

Charles Péguy

Enter Prine, Leonato, Claudio, and Jacke Wilson Much Ado About Nothing

(First Folio)

All this happened a long time ago. I had not yet come of age, and I’m imposing the postures and language of what I call maturity on that callow weakling in the Algonquin bedroom. I do not think, for instance, that I really replied:

Loewe’s sadness lay between us, unappeased. Believe that I said what follows. Believe everything.

– It was mainly her idea. She said it could be regarded as a mode of protest. Not that she herself, being well past student age, was qualified to protest. It was meant to be, in the British locution, my shew. Shameless public copulation as a means of expressing outrage. Against tyrannical democracies, wars in the name of peace, students forced to study –

– Skeletal Indian children eating dog’s excrement when they’re lucky enough to find any.

– There was no shame at all. It was outside the F. Jannatu Memorial Library. The assistant librarian, Miss F. Carica, was just locking up for the night. I distinctly saw her snake-bangle as she turned the key.

Behold the sheep form side by side

A Teuton roarer of the pride.

Loewe the lawman sat sadly on the chair while I lay unrepentant on the bed. I was naked, though not totally. He wore a discreetly iridescent suit of singalin for the New York heat which raved, cruel as winter, outside. He was leonine to look at only in the hairiness of his paws, but that, after all, was, is, a generic property of animals. His name, though, had bidden me see it as non-human hairiness, and, seeing it, I felt an inexplicable throb of warning in my perineum. I had known a similar throb, though located then in the liver, when Professor Keteki had presented the problem of that entry in Fenwick’s diary, May 2nd, 1596. I drew in the last of my cigarette and stubbed it among the other stubs. Loewe snuffed the smoke like a beast. Throb. He said:

– No. Sinjantin. A product of the Office of Monopoly of the Republic of Korea.

– I first came across them at the Montreal Expo. It was there too that I first got this feeling of the evil of divisions. I had crossed a border, but I was still in North America.

Loewe sighed, and it was (throb) like a miniature imploded roar. His glasses flashed with reflections of burning West 44th Street.

– I needn’t say, he needn’t have said, how shocked your father would have been. Thrown out of college for a shameful, shameless –

– My fellow-students are agitating for my reinstatement. Firearms flashing on the campus. Books burned at sundown – reactionary Whitman, fascist Shakespeare, filthy bourgeois Marx, Webster with his too many words. A student has a right to fuck in public.

I took another Sinjantin out of its pack and then reinstated it. I must watch my health. I was thin and not strong. I had had cardiac rheumatism, various kinds of asthma, colitis, nervous eczema, spermatorrhea. I was, I recognized, mentally ill-balanced. I was given to sexual exhibitionism despite my low physical energy. My brain loved to be crammed with the fracted crackers of useless data. If a fact was useless, I homed unerringly on it. But I was determined to reform. I was going to find out more about the work of Sib Legeru. Useless really, though, for who would care, who would want to know, how many knew even the name? And Sib Legeru’s work was exciting to me because of its elevation of the useless, unviable, unclassifiable into –

– It didn’t work. I was advised to transfer to something useless. I was appalled by the lack of oceanic mysteries in Business Management. But, when you come to think of it, Elizabethan drama can teach you a lot about business. Intrigues, stabs in the dark, fraternal treachery, poisoned banquets –

– There was this matter of the entry in Fenwick’s diary. He was recording the wonders of London life to savour in provincial or foreign exile. He’d seen a play at the Rose playhouse on the Bankside in the summer of 1596. All he said of it was: Gold gold and even titularly so. Professor Keteki was drunk that morning. His wife had given birth to a son, their first. You could smell the Scotch from the third row. Keteki, crane-like in body, owl-headed, ululating a mostly unintelligible lecture, with the smell of Scotch as a kind of gloss.

– He was quite intelligible, however, when he offered twenty dollars to anyone who could say what play Fenwick had seen.

– It came in a flash. I’d been dating a Maltese girl from Toronto, a student of her native literature. She’d shown me one of her texts, and I was struck by the word JEW, pronounced jew. She said it meant or, the conjunction. But or in French and heraldry is gold. She’d also said once that I was as randy as a fenech, meaning rabbit. So this Fenwick might have been Fenech – a common enough Maltese surname, I gathered – and an English-speaking Maltese agent of the English chapter of the Knights. The play he’d seen had to be Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. I’d got the twenty dollars out of Keteki before he’d wiped the chalk off his fingers. I drank the money.

– There’s a Chinese restaurant in Riverhead called the Pu Kow Tow. Riverhead, as you may know, was named for Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s birthplace. A great hero up there, Amherst. He did for the French and made North America free to revolt against the British. His nephew, William Pitt Amherst, was sent to China as British ambassador. He messed up the job by refusing to grovel before the Emperor.

– First, to complete the story. I meant to eat there, but I got drinking instead. There was this very gay and game lady, also drinking. She taught them to mix a cocktail called a Clubfoot. Very brutal, with Bacardi and bourbon and double cream. She was just passing through, she said, on her way to Albany. She had this very game idea.

Looking down at my hand, I discovered that I’d been smoking another Sinjantin in total automatism. But I was determined to reform. I was nearly twenty-one, and time was slipping away.

– I know, I said, all about what’s due to me in due time. At the moment I’m still concerned with my education. I want to pay a visit to Castita.

– Latitude 15, south of Hispaniola. Three hundred miles west of the Leewards. A one-time British protectorate. Capital, Grencijta. Population –

– I know where it is. I know all about the damn place. What I don’t understand is –

– Why is simple. Professor Keteki got me interested in a man called Sib Legeru, a Castitan poet and painter. Very obscure, very talented. You’ve never heard of him, nor has anyone else. His writings are unpublished and his paintings mouldering away unseen. I read a xeroxed manuscript. Astonishing. There was a colonial administrator who did his best for Legeru’s work when Legeru died. A certain Sir James Pismire. He fixed up a sort of Legeru museum on Castita, an unvisited house with the key hanging up in a tobacconist’s. I’m curious. I want to pay it a visit.

– I refuse to be superstitious. Your poor father met his death in the Caribbean, as you know.

– Never mind. The position is this. You come of age in, let me see, when is it –

– That’s not, shall I say, a very filial attitude. Your father had the cause of miscegenation very much at heart.

– Oh, Loewe said, that’s very much a young man’s notion. If everybody married for love it would be one hell of a world. Love is something you learn along with the other duties of marriage. All the rest is for poets. I hope to God, he went on, worried, that the Ang family don’t find out about your, your –

– The Riverhead Star didn’t carry anything. The college authorities saw to that. Something may get through to the more responsible organs, but there’ll be no name mentioned. Protesting students possess only a collective existence. Identity swallowed in purpose or ritual. Slogans at the point of orgasm. Guitars and bongo drums and a brotherhood-of-man song. Glossy young beards opening to cheer us on to a dead heat.

– The young lady, Miss Ang, is a very estimable young lady. Her photographs don’t do her justice. And very strictly brought up. These old Cantonese families. Moral, very moral.

– Moral, indeed. A dynastic marriage. A device for getting money. Otherwise that combine in Salt Lake City –

– Well, Loewe said irrelevantly, you can’t imagine anybody in Salt Lake City doing what you did. I mean, the reliability of a product is tied up with the morality of the producers.

– As for you going to Castita – I can’t for the moment see anything – There may be something in a subsidiary file – I’ll see when I get back to the –

– There’s a clause about reasonable sums being doled out in respect of your education. Education, indeed.

– I had Miss Castorino get five hundred from the bank. A thousand’s much too much. Five hundred should keep you going very adequately till your birthday.

From among the papers, all about me, he dug out a puzzle torn from some newspaper or other. I now throbbed from prepuce to anus.

– Up, I am a rolling river;

Down, a scent-and-colour-giver.

The answer was obvious: flower. But the throb told me not to give Loewe the answer. Why not? I’d been quick enough with that answer to Keteki. Then I knew why not. Loewe was being, for some reason, deceitful. The up and down of his clue referred to the respective tongue-positions that started off the diphthongs of flow and flower. No crossword, except in a linguistics journal, would have so learned a clue, and linguistics journals did not go in for crosswords. Loewe smiled, saccholactically.

The throb went. Loewe seemed to shrink and become less hirsute. He nodded, seeming pleased, and said:

– I’m not sure that I want to inherit. Let Salt Lake City take over. I like to feel I’m a free man.

– Oh, for God’s sake, Loewe scoffed. Nobody’s free. I mean, choice is limited by inbuilt structures and predetermined genetic patterns and all the rest of it.

– Nobody can help thinking these things these days. The French started all that. Not a very abstract people, despite their boasts about being the big rational nation. Philosophy can only come to life in the bedchamber or over the coq au vin or before the firing squad.

– As for freedom, you’re not free not to eat and sleep. You’re free to cease to exist, of course, but then freedom has no more meaning. It’s just silence and emptiness.

– Only if you’re thinking in terms of structures. Perhaps you can get beyond structure and cohesion and find that it’s not quite silent and empty. Words and colours totally free because totally meaningless. That’s what I expect to find in the work of Sib Legeru.

– And, Loewe said, not listening, on top of necessity there’s duty. Your very name implies duty. That’s its meaning.

– It means a soldier. You were enrolled before birth in the regiment of your family name. Miles in the service of the Fabers.

– Yes? But your father wanted the Fabers to embrace everybody. You marry Miss Ang and your son marries Miss Makarere and his son marries Maimunah binte Abdullah, and so on for ever. Creative miscegenation, he called it. The only hope, he said.

– For God’s sake. Today’s youth. Is that all your moonlit campus frolic meant? Nihilism. I thought you were supposed to be protesting about something.

Generous in victory, he handed over four bills of a hundred and five twenties. I crushed the stern presidential faces together in my hand that held yet another burning Sinjantin. I said:

– I have no duty to an abstraction. I mean the abstraction called Faber. My father cared nothing for me. He even refused to see me when I –

– You have to make allowances. When your mother was drowned he changed terribly.

– To see you would have reminded him of her. But he provided. He’ll go on providing.

– Miss Emmett was no real substitute for a parent. Where is Miss Emmett, by the way?

– There are a number of charities. He goes on providing. I don’t see the whole picture. Your father employed various legal advisers. There’s one in Florida, another in the state of Washington –

– You’ll learn a lot between now and your birthday. An arranged marriage is nothing very terrible. French civilization is based on arranged marriages.

– That’s right, Loewe said indulgently, packing me away in his paperholder. You go right on claiming. But not in that terribly immoral way any more. It was a very shameful thing to do.

When Loewe had gone, I telephoned Air Carib and booked my one-way flight to Grencijta. The next one left from Kennedy at 22.00. There’d been no need, then, for Loewe to book this room at the Algonquin, for which I would have to pay out of the five hundred dollars (I’d need every cent). We could have conferred at Grand Central, whither I’d come on the filthy train from Springfield, Mass. Or at his office. Still, being here, I’d get some of my moneysworth. I showered, then dug out a clean shirt and the summerweight green pants from my grip. Transferring coins and matches and pocket-knife from the summerweight blue, I found a crumpled slip of paper. It was a note in felt-pen. A yummy piece of protest. Hope we’ll protest some more some place some time. A small small world. Remember Carlotta. How had she managed to slip that slip in? Of course, yes, there’d been one hell of a scuffle between our student abettors and the armed Burns men who were our campus police. We’d sheltered in the tent of the crowd, covering with speed the functional nakedness that was our badge of criminal identity. She’d taken me back to her room at the Lord Cumberland Inn and ordered sandwiches and coffee. Then the Clubfoot had risen on me and I’d been sick in the toilet. My nakedness, I kept thinking while I threw and threw, was still capering out there. My act, like a rousing sermon, was being broadcast by the idiot protestants. Faber, you’re out. No, no, I quit.

Showered and dressed, I looked for the television set. As this was the Algonquin, it was concealed in a mahogany sideboard. Strong literary tradition, Ross, blind Thurber, fat Woolcott, Dorothy Parker who knocked everything. I tried channel after channel, but they were all dull, as if for the benefit of those literary ghosts. A pop group wailed, scruffy in checkered shirts and levis. There was an old movie with a funeral in it, wreaths being laid sobbingly on the coffin to music that sounded like Death and Transfiguration. An untrustworthy young man in black spoke to the frail weeded widow:

The living-on bit was true of my own dead father, though there was no fatherly image in what he had made, and even my physical memories were quite unreliable. I just couldn’t see any face. He lived on in his will, so rightly named. And then I remembered the manner of his death. An aircraft – Air Carib? – hijacked and diverted to Havana, there to disintegrate on landing. Where had he been going? Business, something to do with business, investigating openings in Kingston or Ciudad Trujillo, perhaps even Grencijta. Anna Sewell Products, my conditional inheritance.

I tried another channel, and it was slow-motion trampoline stuff, athletes dreamily levitating to waltz-music – Artist’s Life, Morning Papers, Vienna Blood, one of those. Then another channel, and a Red Indian in a smart suit and hexagonal glasses was a guest on a show, and he was talking about the Weskerini and Nipissing tribes that now, alas, lived on only in the names of certain pseudo-Indian curios manufactured in Wisconsin. Those were, I remembered, members of the great Algonquin family: exquisite coincidence. West 44th Street was Indian territory; a few doors away stood the Iroquois, named for the traditional enemies of the Algonquin nation. Dozing off, I asked myself why the Algonquin and Iroquois were like birds. Nothing to do with the feathers they wore; wait, wait – pigeons. I’d seen a documentary movie of the Berlin Wall, and the commentator had commented, rather movingly, on the pigeons that foraged to and fro, east and west, over it, perching and nesting in blessed ignorance of the bitter ideology that cut a city in half. The border between Canada and the rebellious Union had meant only transitory foreign alliances to the Iroquois and the Algonquin. The Moon of Bright Nights came, and the Moon of Leaves followed, and the long hunting year died in the Moon of Snowshoes, and the opechee and owaissa returned in their season, and the dahinda croaked, and Gitche Gumee, Big-Sea Water, Lake Superior, endured the lash of Mudjekeewis, and the wawa or wild goose flapped wawa wawa over it. And all white men resolved at length into palefaces, French or English, royalist or republican, and all their tongues were ultimately forked.

In my dream a munching toothless squaw appeared, feeling her way in near-blindness, and a chief boomed, plumed as long as a keyboard: It is she of the koko-koho. Owls flurried about her in a gale that was a broth of their feathers, twitting away. One owl perched on her left shoulder, rocked, settled, then owled me in the eyes and spoke. Esa esa, it twitted. I fought my way up through burst featherbeds to waking. I lay and panted, tasting salt on my upper lip as though I’d drunk tequila. On my palate the stale Sinjantin smoke lay like dirt. The long day was declining. An after-image of birds or angels gyrated. It was the television, some programme about hunting in Maine. Then a commercial broke in, something earnest about stomach acid and ulcers. I looked at my watch, but it had stopped at 19.17. I dialled ULCERSS but got no reply. ULCERSS, I remembered, led astray by the commercial, was for Los Angeles; in New York it was NERVOUS. Time, north or south, was as painful as a Mauer or a parallel or a taxonomy. NERVOUS told me it was time for dinner.

Something like that, anyway. Dreams, I was thinking, foretell (when they prophesy at all) only trivialities. In the cheap bright eathouse on the Avenue of the Americas I ordered, with my hot beef sandwich, a soft drink new to me Coco-Coho, confected in Shawnee, Michigan. The bottle was owl-shaped – the potter’s first crude moulding, though in green glass – and the label showed what considerations of economy and packing forbade to be sculpted – stare, ears, beak. The drink was green and frothy with a faint bite of angostura under the saccharine. It amused me to take my revenge upon that hisser of my dream by drinking his likeness off, hiss and all.

I ate my hot beef sandwich in the European manner, with knife as well as fork. Although I was an American, and had a passport to prove it, I had lived as a child so long outside America that many aspects of its life still struck me strangely. Why, for instance, cut everything first, in the manner of the nursery, in order to fork in everything after? Infantilism, mom standing fondly by to approve the hungry tining of the mom-cut morsels? A relic of the Union’s urgent need to be educated, a Noah Webster spelling-book gripped in the left hand? Or perhaps the left hand had once gripped the fork, the right ready for the holster. Chew your meat and your enemy simultaneously. Or perhaps once, in this still violent country, your knife had been removed as soon as possible by the cautious frontier waiter, lest, after cutting meat, you thought of cutting throats. There was an American thing against knives. At breakfast you were allowed only one knife, so that ham-fat flavoured the strawberry jelly. A vestigial something or other.

And then there was this business of the hot beef sandwich – a virtual Sunday dinner for one dollar fifty. The British, with whom I’d had my earlier education, were supposed to be the great understating race, but to call a Sunday dinner a sandwich was the litotic, or something, end. Under the thick slab of steer, mashed potatoes, tomato-wheel, peas, obligatory fluted cup of coleslaw (signature, only marginally esculent, of the Spirit of American Short Order Cookery), there indeed lay a gravylogged shive of white bread, pored like a sponge, but that was a mere etymology, no more.

– Synchronic metaphor of the diachronic. An instant soup, as here, symbolizing the New World’s rejection of history, but in France there are still kitchens where soup has simmered for all of four centuries.

France again. The voice had a French accent and was rapid. I couldn’t see its owner, for this was a place in which, if you didn’t wish to eat in enstaged dramatic public at the huge half-wheel of the counter, you had to be nooked between wooden partitions. I was so nooked, and so was the speaker.

– Thus, a good meat broth set bubbling about the time of the League of Cambrai, bits of sausage added while Gaston de Foix was fighting in Italy, cabbage shredded in while the Guises were shredding the Huguenots, a few new beef bones to celebrate the Aristocratic Fronde, fresh pork scraps for the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle –

Masochism? A teacher of French too discursive for our utilitarian classrooms, hence poor and driven to instant soup?

– End of neck for the Jacobins, chitterlings Code Napoléon, bitter herbs for Elba.

Able, very, evidently, but this was no country for such mushy fantasy. His interlocutor seemed to reply in Yiddish – Shmegegge, chaver or something – but that was perhaps somebody else’s interlocutor. What was a Yiddish-speaker doing in a non-kosher noshery? It was time to drain my coffee and go.

The French-accented speaker, I found, was speaking his English into a miniature Imoto tape-recorder.

– Douse the fire, cool the broth, and history dissolves into that amorphous and malodorous brewis which is termed the economy of nature –