Devil of a State (1961)

In Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess recalls the composition of this, his seventh-published novel:

"This novel was, is, about Brunei, which was renamed Naraka, Malayo-Arabic for hell. Little invention was needed to contrive a large cast of unbelievable characters and a number of interwoven plots.Though completed in 1958, the work was not published until 1961, for what it was worth it was made a choice of the book society. Heinemann, my publisher, was doubtful about publishing it: it might be libelous. I had to change the setting from Borneo to an East African one. Heinemann was right to be timorous. In early 1958 The Enemy in the Blanket appeared and this at once provoked a libel suit."

So Naraka becomes 'Dunia', and is relocated west some 5000 miles or so to, more-or-less, north-east Sudan (of which name Dunia is perhaps a semi-anagram; 'Dunia' is also Arabic for 'life', a datum to which I'll come back in a moment). In the original draft, the 'British Adviser' is a character; in the novel as published he has become the 'U.N. Adviser'.

As with Burgess's Malayan trilogy, the most obvious effect of the novel is the generation of a very convincing sense of place and time, the approaching end of colonial rule, the landscapes and cultures, mixtures of: all sorts of native inhabitants, Brits like main protagonist Frank Lydgate; Indian and Malay workers there to build a giant Mosque, assisted by Italian marble experts; Australian workers who are there to build the roads, and who say sy rather than say and tike rather than take; a gluttonous Czech painter called Smetana; a half-Irish half-Chinese called Patrick Ong, the rather sinister Carruthers Chung and various others. Burgess keeps the balls up in the air narratively speaking, and the writing is as sharp and vivid and darkly funny as ever. In the capital city, the main characters intrigue and pratfall and hurry about; in the countryside there are dark intimations that headhunting and cannibalism have come back into vogue.

The action happens against the backdrop the building of (and sometimes actually inside) a gigantic new mosque, something the Sultan of Dunia is spending the vast wealth obtained by mining Uranium. This is based upon the construction of the Brunein 'Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque'.

Burgess's Caliph is portrayed as an excessively devout Muslim, who is tolerating the presence in his realm of all these foreigners, non-Muslims and temporary workers only until the mosque is completed. Two key characters in the novel are the opera buffo father-and-son pairing of Nando and Paolo Tasca, who, rather embarrassingly to a 21st-century reader, actually a talk a like a dis aldaway tru Burgess a narrative. It seems only Italian marble is good enough for the Mosque, and only Italian workers can fit it, so the quarreling, bibulous, bottom-pinching, melodramatic-pose-striking, make-a-pass-at-anything-in-a-dress (or a veil) Tasca twosome are tolerated by the authorities. Their (crude, but palpable) colour and vigour contrasts sharply with the protagonist Lydgate: 50, miserable, unliked and unlikeable. He works as 'controller for passports' in what, in this novel, is notionally a U.N. Consolate, but which is actually pretty clearly the British Colonial office. His designated accommodation (the novel opens with a nicely frantic set-piece of him moving into this house, but chasing up and down the main city of Dunia trying to locate his keys) is sub-standard: in a low part of town, with crumbling plaster and worm-riddled furniture, This is because his superior, Mr Mudd, doesn't like him. He disapproves that Lydgate has separated from his Australian wife Lydia, and has instead fathered two children upon a local woman called Wajak. Before the novel opens, Wajak has gone over the water to give birth to a third child, probably not Lydgate's. Lydia, though she has returned to Australia and is having affairs and generally indiscreet with many men about Lydgate's insufficiences, won't divorce him. Lydgate swears off women, complains noisily, gets drunk. To bait him, the maliciously diminutive Mr Mudd (he used to be an amateur jockey, it seems) informs Lydgate that Lynne is coming to Dunia to work as a secretary in the Consulate. This news makes Lydgate alternately furious and despairing. He hasn't got enough money. He drinks too much. He bickers and quarrels like the sparrows in the eaves and gets nowhere.

Meanwhile, as the opening date for the mosque approaches, the workers (led by the two Italians) repeatedly strike for better pay. There is a National Independence Movement, whose members have sworn not to cut their hair until their nation is free of foreign rule, and who are trying to obtain a visa for an incendiary speaker to come in and address a meeting. Their leader is called Patu. To go back, for a moment, to the question of dates: there's something interesting here. The Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque was opened in 1958. The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of Sudan, notionally with Egypt but actually a straightforward matter of British colonial rule, ended in 1956. But Brunei remained a British colony until, amazingly, 1984. (Conceivably we might want to read Dunia as a version of Djibouti, and to overlook the fact that the latter was a French colony rather than a British one: if so, independence won't happen until 1977). Depending on how we want to take it, Patu in this novel is either a figure on the very verge of achieving the independence for his nation that he craves so, or is destined to be disappointed. This is important, I think: is the novel about prolonged frustration on a collective as well as an individual level? Or is it about the long day actually waning, and on the very cusp of change? I'm not sure.

***

Devil of a State is dedicated 'To Graham Greene'; but the real presiding spirit here, in terms of writing about the English experience of foreign lands, is surely Evelyn Waugh. There's a similar cynical hardness to the wit, a similar fondness for putting characters through degrading and demeaning twists of fate. For example, and perhaps modeled on the the schoolboy Little Lord Tangent, in the background of Decline and Fall, whose downward path (hurts his foot during a rugger match, foot later turns black; has to be amputated, dies after) pops occasionally into the main narrative, is the fate of the representative from the International Herbal Health Association. He arrives in Dunia to lecture in the capital city, but happens to come into the consulate just as Patu is bribing the official Sebastian Hup to obtain a false visa. To get this European intruder out of the way, they tell him to catch a boat up-river, which, uncertainly, he does ('"Thank you thank you," said the stranger vaguely. "But I had thought—" He wavered, swinging his stick' [101]). Later in the novel we discover that he has been decapitated by natives. The small scandal his fate provokes, very much in the background of the narrative, means that the U.N. Ambassador has to return early to England. Indeed, Burgess is happy to point up the Waugh-ishness of his novel with a little joke:

Mr. Covendry, the State Irrigation Officer, keeping up his reputation as the town intellectual, spoke to Lydia of modern literature. "J.B. Priestley," he was saying. "A bit too advanced for me. A bit too consciously clever.

"Evelyn Waugh?" suggested Lydia.

"With all due deference," smiled Mr. Covendry, "I never really cared for women writers much." [201]

Ho ho. There's a danger, though, I think, in aping the Waugh tone (of going, we might say, on the Waugh path). Waugh's sensibility was haughty and rather cruel, qualities he realised in his writing via a ferocious intelligence and extraordinary certainty of tone. Burgess, though his reputation is, I suppose, for a crusty or curmudgeonly irritation at the insufficiencies of (tick one or more of) modern life, culture, pop music, the young and so on, he isn't fundamentally Waugh-like in his relation to the world. Waugh had a fundamentally exclusionary imagination: he despised many things and many sorts of people, and saw himself not as a satirist but as a man in hell holding up a mirror. (This is what he said to an American interviewer in 1946: '"Are my books meant to be satirical? No. Satire flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous standards ... It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue.'). For all his brilliance, he is a quintessentially aristocratic writer.

Burgess, though, had an inclusive imagination, and his aesthetic, though not democratic, is certainly demotic. He is fascinated rather than repelled by the varieties of human delinquency: adultery, fornication, bribery, lying, cheating and all the kaleidoscopes of selfishness, self-delusion and self-exculpation. Whilst he certainly doesn't see any of this as jolly or fun or (in the long run) satisfying, he also doesn't really see it as flagitous either. It is just how humans behave, broadly speaking. What this means for Devil of a State is that those elements which in Waugh would glitter with a sort of malicious beauty in the cruel mosaic of the whole here seem, somehow, off: random, or nasty, or unfair, because y of keeping with the broader mood of the whole.

There's a larger question here, too, concerning Burgess's writing that Devil of a State throws into relief. AB writes unlikeable characters. Lydgate is a particularly unlikeable character, but most of Burgess' novels contain versions of this figure: usually male, middle-aged, petty, borderline alcoholic, self-pitying. It flies in the face of one approach to the business of writing popular fiction, of course: readers want characters either likeable or else flawed in ways that enable imaginative engagement (pirates, vampires, sexy S&M billionaires). Caliban doesn't appreciate seeing his own face in the mirror. So why does Burgess do it? Waugh does it too, but only because he thinks homo sapiens fundamentally ghastly. I think Burgess does it for the exact opposite reason. He is offering us his vision of how human beings are and daring us to love them. It is, I think, one of those deep Catholic elements in his being and therefore in his art: God hates the sin, but he loves the sinner and we are all sinners. Sin uglifies us all, but this is not only no impediment to God loving us, it is actually the felix culpa ground of that love. The things that are really to be deplored are sins against love, as Burgess conceives it. Since another of the deep Catholic elements of his being was a horror of divorce, a belief that one should stick with one's spouse no matter what (although a little adulterous sex on the side was basically alright), this in turn steers Devil of a State into a final act peroration to marriage as such.

Lydgate's wife returns and makes his life hell, but in a show down with her and Mudd he finally blurts out the secret he has been holding back the entire novel. When he and Lydia got hitched he was already married to Agnes, an older woman, to whom he'd proposed back in England 'for the money'. Unhappy with married life he had fled: to Madrid, Dar-es-Salaam, Nairobi; but his wife (now a member of a crazy religious cult) had pursued him like an Ἐρῑνύς. Eventually word reached him that she had died of a fever, and believing this true he had married Lydia; but of course Agnes is still alive. In a scene of rather pathetic dignity, with Mudd as witness, Lydgate releases Lydia: their marriage contract was not binding. He resolves to leave Dunia, but one of the Italians bribes the office and steals his ticket. At the end of the novel Agnes reappears, a hideous god-bothering crone, to claim a sobbing Lydgate as her only true husband. His punishment relates to his original transgression: he should not have sinned against marriage in the first place.

This speaks, in a way, to the larger question of Burgess as a person. There were many people who did not like him, of course; and Roger Lewis's extraordinary and horrible 2002 hatchet-job biography (Lewis adjudges AB 'lubricious, sentimental, callous, superficial, crapulous, arcane, laborious, sanctimonious and essentially a fake'; not to mention a 'lazy sod', 'pretentious prick' and 'complete fucking fool') still casts a shadow over his reputation. There are many other people who speak only with kindness and admiration of meeting or knowing him, of course. The real question is: how could it possibly matter if Burgess was an unpleasant a human being as Lewis thinks he was? To vector of the crossover from life to art, in the sense that Burgess often drew on the former for the latter, runs one way, not the other. Only narrow minds use the art to retroform moral judgement regarding the life. A much more interesting procedure is to see how and to what ends art modifies life. I'm not suggesting that moral judgement is outwith Burgess's writing. On the contrary, he is a deeply ethical writer in many ways. But I am suggesting that ethics is rather more than asserting whether one finds a person likeable or not.

***

So what is going on in Devil of a State? The novel, like The Right to an Answer, is divided into five sections, or acts; although here I suspect the intertext is less Shakespearean and more Marlovian. It's Faustus after the devils have dragged him into the inferno. The novel's title isn't kidding. Repeatedly the novel stresses the Hellish qualities of life in Dunia. That this word is the Arabic for 'life' is ironic enough; it is also the Javanese for 'world', which with the flesh and the devils of this book is more like it. In its original form, as we saw at the top of this post, the state was to be called 'Neraka', Malay for 'Hell'. Colonial officers write bad poetry about the place:

Dunia, the little world of the misled,
A deadly living for the living dead.

(that couplet would scan better with 'Neraka' instead of 'Dunia, the'). Other colonial officers sing a little ditty at a review they organise:

I'm not in a state of grace.
It's something far far loonier.
I'm a terrible case; see the lines on my face? In in the state of Dunia.

I'm not in a state of sin.
Indeed, I'd very much soonier.
I'm getting so thin; what a mess I am in.
I'm in the State of Dunia.

I'm not in a state of health—
My voice gets croakier and croonier.
But I've picked up some wealth and I've done it by stealth.
I'm in the State of Dunia. [205-06]

Those croaks intimate the Aristophanic froggishness of the this underworld. Frogs repeatedly croak and flop across the pages of the novel, and the last chapter of the novel opens with a Batrachoid peroration:

Another arid morning, wet nakedness under the mosquito-net panting in the humid air. The brown and green frogs had engaged at midnight, hopping into action, brekekekking martially. Corpses in no-frog's-land, the wounded piled up at the regimental aid posts, orderlies bringing succour to the feebly croaking. ... All night long the deep-chested chorus hopped into people's dreams and out again. [279]

Lydgate cannot escape Dunia, or his ghastly true wife, try as he might. Why this is Dunia; nor am I out of it.

Hell, then, is frustration and confinement. Tantalus is one figure. Lydgate doesn't hope for much, but whatever he does hope for is denied him. After lusting fruitlessly after women the whole novel, Nando Tasco is finally visited by Eileen, the wife of an Australian who is trying to turn tricks on the side and earn a bit of money: but he's too ill to take advantage ('Nando Tasco tried to rise from his bed. It was hopeless: he ached so, he felt so tired' [272]). There's something of Dives and Lazarus in the way the respective positions of colonizer and colonised here are styled, too. But the core trope of 'Hell' in this book is something else, which relates back to unlikeable actual Anthony Burgess and his circumstances with Lynne (to quote Roger Lewis's brimstone-whiffy biography once again, Lynne was 'a nymphomaniacal alcoholic', 'out of her face on shot glasses of vodka', 'threw a pass at every male she met', 'middle-aged, sagging and reeking of gin', 'once you'd seen her project a stream of vomit, like the trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel, six feet across a room, you'd seen everything.'). Hell, in this novel, is marriage.

Towards the end of the novel, young Paolo Tasco, driven to despair by his father's bullying and his own frustrations (for he too is desperate to get his leg-over, and has to endure Tantalus-like carnal denial), barricades himself into the room at the top of the minaret of the nearly-completed Mosque. The holy building cannot, obviously, be opened and displayed to all the many visiting Muslim dignitaries from around the world with an infidel lurking in its minaret; but removing him is made more difficult by the fact that, for reasons of rather involved plotting, young Paolo has become a figurehead for the Independence movement, and 'Italy!' one of the slogans chanted by the crowds gathered at the base of the minaret, who believe it means 'freedom' (maybe the joke has something to do with the Arabic for 'union', 'ittihad'). Paolo is eventually ejected under cover of night, and his father is absolutely furious with him -- he himself had to climb all the steps of the minaret to seize him, and the effort has broken his health. He plans to exile his son to some jungly part of Africa, there to suffer; but a letter from his wife, back in Italy, gives him a better idea. She suggests that he returns home and marries rich Novello's daughter Lucrezia: 'she is older than Paolo about seven years,' writes the mother. 'But if he loves her and she loves him age is not important. She is not beautiful in her face but I think perhaps her soul is beautiful. She is big and strong, and I think that is what Paolo needs to keep him in order. Her upper teeth are false, but her lower teeth are all her own' [248]. Papa Tasco is delighted with this notion:

That, thought Nando Tasca, would be the worst punishment of all. Marriage. Why hadn't he thought of that before? If Novello's eldest daughter were anything like Novello's wife—ay, Novello's monumental ugliness and Signora Novello's slate-pencil gramophone voice, together with the thorough and utter bitchiness of the grandmother, why, Paolo would be well served ... What were lions, leeches and cannibals to a daughter of Novello's? [249]

Two chapters later, Lydgate, frustrated in his attempts to escape Dunia, is finally tracked down by his 'true' wife Agnes: 'an old woman, about sixty, thin, lined, very brown, dry, gair quite grey, dressed in a costume of striped moygashel, stick legs panted in mosquito-boots, gold ring on her left ring-finger, fingers like bones' [275]. As the novel ends we grasp that Lydgate will not again escape his skeleton wife. He is married and therefore he is damned. 'It is better to marry than to burn,' said the verse from 1 Corinthians (6:19) which Burgess chooses as epigraph to this novel; and by the end we see that it's possible to do both.

This is a striking and not very comfortable view of marriage, but that, presumably, is the point. For a believing Catholic, happily joined to a spouse, marriage is a sacrament. Without the substructure of holiness it is only a state. But states, Burgess understands, are robust and carceral entities. And if sacraments are of God, then states must belong to the other feller; and so we have our title.

In one of the odder textual strategies of the novel, the final chapters of parts 1 and 2, and the final paragraph of the otherwise conventional last chapter of part 3—but, strangely, not parts 4 or 5—are give over to a sermonizing voice pastiched out of the 17th-century. At the end of chapter 6 Lydgate cries that he wants 'to sleep and never wake up again'. Chapter 7 begins:

Ah, Frances Burroughs Lydgate, why dost thou seek not temporary oblivion merely but a sempiturnal quietus? Sleep is thy meed, thy due after the long rigours of the day, but why callest thou on thy Maker (with as little ceremony as though wouldst call on some heathen boy from Cathay for a strong but well-watered potion) for a cessation of his great gift of existence? Existence, though echoest? It is but that. What more dost thou want? Thou hast work, a wage, a board and a bed. Thou hast benison of perpetual heat in a land where summer dieth not. [67]

There are three and a half pages of this; the voice wondering if a What The Thunder Said shower of refreshing rain will end the spiritual barrenness ('the parched grass looks up to be fed. Is it rain?'); but this monsoon becomes instead a new torment, provoking only a series of petty inconveniences. Lydgate

dreams that he is in hell and that Lazarus (though he is indeed no Dives) comes at regular intervals and drops water into his open mouth. He wakes to find the roof leaking. The cigarettes on his side-table are soaked. He has no others. Water is dripping on him with the regularity of a Roman water-clock that thinks the empire will last for ever. God curse them all. [70]

Funny, in a dark kind of way. The second sermon occupies chapter 14 and is addressed to Paolo, rebuking him for angrily cursing his own (obnoxious, bullying) father:

Ah, young Signore, stride in anger, dost thou, back that way that but lately thou didst come? The anger thou quelledst in tears thou badest revive in thy father's house. The sin of anger is in all truth bad enough, but anger toward they father, who gave thee thy being, who maintained and schooled thee, who is now the means to enlighten they mind further through travel in outlandish parts, this is of all sings perhaps the most reprehensible. [135]

The sermon voice is reduced to a mere paragraph at the end of chapter 21 (concluding part 3); again haranguing Lydgate, this time on the subject of marriage ('Ah, Frances Burroughs Lydgate, at it again? ... we are all members of one another, that the perfect round of man and woman in hardly contrived harmony is a shadow or figure of that heavenly round of harmony in which we are destined ultimately to merge our shrinking selfhood becoming one with the one with the one with the one with the' [189])—except that this time Lydgate peremptorily interrupts the voice ('shut up, shut up, shut up') and we don't hear from it again. Sermons are squeezed out. There's a randy Italian teenager in the minaret rather than an imam. Rain does not refresh, but only batters and yells ('the sky gaped stupidly and spewed pure water. All sound else was drowned' [281]). What a grim comic novel this turns out to be.