| Everything but God
by Anne Pierson Wiese
In Europe you can see cathedrals
from far away. As you drive toward them
across the country they are visible—stony
and roosted on the land—even before the towns
that surround them. In New York you come
upon them with no warning, turn a corner
and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's,
spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; dark
St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing
projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.
Lately I have found myself unable
to pass by. The candles' anonymous
wishes waver and flame near the entrance, bright
numerous, transitory and eternal
as a migration: the birds that fly away
are never exactly the same as those that return.
The gray, flowering arches' ribs rise
until they fade, the bones so large and old
they belong to an undetected time
on earth. Here and there people's small backs
in prayer, the windowed saints' robes' orchid
glow, the shadows—ghosts of a long nocturnal
snow from a sky below when we did not yet
exist, with our questions tender as burns.
"Everything but God" by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City. © Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) It's the birthday of the novelist who said, "Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist." That's Anthony Burgess (books by this author), best known as the author of the dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). He was born in Manchester, England, on this day in 1917. He grew up a Catholic in England and majored in English literature. Then he joined the army. He resented authority, was not very well-liked by his peers, and did things that got him in trouble. Once he did not report back from leave on time, and the British military police hunted him down, treating him as a deserter. Still, he did well in the army and rose through the ranks. He was good at languages and he held important positions in military intelligence and as an instructor. It was an incident that occurred during his unhappy army days of World War II that would inspire him to write A Clockwork Orange two decades later. After the army he got a job with the British colonial service and was posted to Malaysia. He taught in a boys' school, became fluent in Malaysian, published some books of literary criticism, and wrote novels for pleasure on the side. From Malaysia, he went to a teaching post in Borneo. He started to get headaches and then one day he collapsed in front of the classroom while giving a history lecture. The Colonial Service flew him back to London, checked him into a neurological ward, and doctors proclaimed that he had a brain tumor — an inoperable one — and that he had one year to live. He also no longer had a job. He might have spent his "terminal year" traveling, but he didn't have any money. In fact, he was determined to make money for his future widow; he decided that he would do this by writing at a furious pace. He wrote five novels in the year following his diagnosis. It turns out that he did not have a brain tumor and he did not die at that time. He kept writing at a furious pace, though, outliving his wife by many years and eventually dying of lung cancer (he was a heavy smoker) in 1993, more than 30 years and 30 books later. His wrote his most famous book, A Clockwork Orange, in just three weeks. He wrote it in 1962, but it was based on something that happened a couple of decades before when he was in the army. He was newly married and his wife was pregnant. One night, while he was at the army base, his wife was mugged by four young U.S. Army deserters in London. After the attack his wife miscarried their child. A Clockwork Orange is set in futuristic England and features a teenage anti-hero named Alex who leads his gang of friends on acts of random violence. Originally the book had 21 chapters. He chose the number carefully, he said, for "21 is the symbol of human maturity, or used to be, since at 21 you got to vote and assumed adult responsibility." But the American publisher didn't like the last chapter, the one where the anti-hero Alex — as Anthony Burgess himself describes it — "grows up and realizes that ultraviolence is a bit of a bore, and it's time he had a wife and a malenky googoogooing malchickiwick to call him dadada. This was meant to be a mature conclusion, but nobody in America has ever liked the idea." Burgess was desperate for money and he didn't really think his book was all that good. He actually thought the American publisher was "being charitable in accepting the work at all." So he accepted the cutting of the final chapter for the U.S. edition. Then Stanley Kubrick bought the film rights, and it was the American version of A Clockwork Orange that he used as a basis for the movie — the one without the final chapter of Alex's maturation and redemption. Kubrick's movie made Burgess' book a big best-seller. Burgess was grateful that Kubrick made him rich but was sorry that his book "became known as the raw material for a film that seemed to glorify sex and violence. ... The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die." He said, "The implied view of juvenile violence as something to go through and then grow out of is missing ... and this reduces the book to a mere parable, whereas it was intended to be a novel." Burgess was also a prolific literary critic. He wrote a couple of books that aimed to make James Joyce more accessible, including Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965) and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973). He made selections for and published in 1969 an abridged version of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. He spent long hours writing. Unlike many writers who swear by morning or late-night writing sessions, he preferred the afternoon best of all. He said: "It's a quiet time. It's a time when one's body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive — the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time, that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness." Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 