Anthony Burgess’s take on Hemingway as a drunk boor rings true, and his narrator may have something in common with Somerset Maugham – but does any of this matter?
Sam Jordison
At one point in Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, his author-narrator Kenneth Toomey is unable to talk because his mouth is “bloated” after the kicking he has received from homophobic sailors in Nice. He is then told off by a policeman: “Fiction, pronounced the sergeant, is written from the imagination, it is invention, it requires no meddling with the dangerous exterior world.”
With his frequent smashing of the fourth wall, Toomey seems be keen to make us aware that he is as artificial as everything else in the book, but Burgess the author also makes sure we know he is based on someone real, not invention. Many have pointed out that Toomey has a lot in common with Somerset Maugham: both homosexual, both interested in colonial Malaya, both wealthy playwrights. And Toomey is all too aware that he is not a first-rate writer and may actually be, to use the apocryphal phrase that is always applied to Maugham (but which, funnily enough, has never been satisfactorily attributed), “a first-rate writer of the second rank”.
Earthly Powers
It’s also possible to see smidgeons of Evelyn Waugh in Toomey, as well as lashings of another never-quite-critically-acclaimed-enough author: Burgess himself. Like Toomey, Burgess had run-ins with the authorities in Malta, lived in self-imposed exile from “dreary cold old England”, relocated to New York and Malaya, and didn’t quite make a go of writing screenplays in Hollywood. Like Toomey, Burgess had fervently Catholic family members and was rather more wavering in his own faith.
Arguably, such coincidences of biography don’t matter. It would be a mistake to think that Toomey speaks either for Maugham or his creator. But knowing that many of the things Toomey mentions have real-world counterparts does give Earthly Powers a sense of solidity, as does his frequent witnessing of well-known people and events.
When we read Toomey’s accounts of Spanish flu after the first world war, of mob killings in 1920s Chicago, and of the horrors of Nazi Germany, we can’t help but measure them up against what we know. When Toomey naively grants an interview to the Nazi press, we can’t help but think that his fictional failings feel all too real.
Clever double game
The Hemingway who comes barrelling into Scribners office looking for a “lousy bastard” who insulted his “cojones” is recognisably the drunk boor of legend. Cary Grant, apparently was as “stingy as hell”, in real life as well as this novel. We all know more than we’d like to about the Goebbels who appears in the novel, with his “Rhineland accent”, his painful awareness of his failures as a playwright (which he “blamed” on “the Jews”) and his boring, nasty speechmaking.
Yet Burgess is – as usual – playing a clever double game here. As well as giving us that kick of recognition, he frequently boots the chair out from under us. As Toomey has warned us right from the start, his memory is fallible: “In two ways I was not to be trusted: I was an old man, I was a writer.” The act of remembering, he frequently reminds us, is also an act of creation, something akin to fiction writing: “We are condemned to invent so much of the past.”
Fascinating
So it is that, while many of the events and facts in the novel have real-world counterparts, many of them are deliberately incorrect or entirely fictional. Many of the writers he describes are real, but Toomey’s favourite isn’t. He writes: “The reader will at least know of Jakob Strehler, since he was awarded the 1935 Nobel prize for literature ...” Yet how can we? The Nobel prize for literature was not issued that year. There are dozens, probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of similar inventions in the book, as well as misremembered dates, impossible meetings and inaccurate descriptions.
This uncertainty is fascinating in and of itself, but also feeds into the novel’s central themes of religion and belief. Just as Toomey must decide how much faith he can put in the Catholic church, so we as readers are left wondering about the boundaries between reality and fiction, and what we can and can’t take for truth in the real world.
So we are left wondering how anyone can pronounce with any authority on the natural and the supernatural, the verifiable and the impossible. Who is Kenneth Toomey to say what is real, after all? And who are we, who read him?
-Guardian.uk
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