JOSEPH KELL’S first novel One Hand Clapping was a quiet and cunning female monologue that fell from the presses almost unnoticed.
One Australian periodical acclaimed its virtues in a two-page review that, giving a thorough synopsis of the plot, must have made purchase of the book seem supererogatory. For the rest, reviewers had other things to think about. That little book now thinly stalks the bookstalls as a paperback, its bright eyes quietly watching the reception of its successor.
Whatever readers may think of the content of Inside Mister Enderby, they are hardly likely to ignore the cover. This shows a lavatory seat (wood, not plastic), entwined with ivy. It is Mr Enderby’s lavatory seat, wherefrom he blasts his poetry at the world. (Mr Eliot said recently – and in the Yorkshire Post too – that poetry is a lavatorial or purgative art.)
If the world takes no notice, Mr Enderby will not worry. He has rejected the world: he has retreated to the smallest room in the house; there, scratching bared knees, he writes the verse that his Muse dictates to him.
But the world will not leave him alone altogether. It drags him out of his lavatory to receive a poetry prize and a proposal of marriage from Vesta Bainbridge, a chic vision from a woman’s magazine. Soon, Enderby is on his honeymoon in Rome. The eternal city is the antithesis of the toilet: here is the Church, here is the State, here, in lapidary form well-preserved, is the meanest history known to man. Here, too, is treachery, for Rawcliffe, a jealous fellow-poet, has stolen a poetic plot from Enderby and persuaded Cinecittà to turn it into a bosomy horror film. Enderby, appalled, flees.
But his Muse flees also. He can no longer write. He attempts – unhandily, as with everything except his craft – a suicide which the State tut-tuts over. He is turned into a useful citizen, normal and unpoetic. There is a middle way between greatest Rome and smallest room – the way of the decent job and the decent life. Enderby is cured.
This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygmus, emetic meals (‘thin but over-savoury stews’, Enderby calls them) and halitosis. It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.
It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock.
Yorkshire Post, 16 May 1963
Review of Inside Mister Enderby by Joseph Kell [pseudonym of Anthony Burgess] (London: William Heinemann, 1963)