Novel: The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End

Overview

Anthony Burgess’s third Enderby novel follows the aging, irascible poet in a single, harried day in New York, where accidental celebrity and cultural panic turn him into a lightning rod. The title nods to a public “testament” or defense: a cranky, learned, and often hilarious apologia for the artist’s right to make art without being held responsible for the uses to which others put it. It is also a book about endings, of reputations, illusions, and perhaps of Enderby himself, told with Burgess’s mix of scabrous comedy, high-cultural allusion, and linguistic play.

Plot

Enderby, now an expatriate poet and reluctant academic, has become notorious because a film to which he once supplied a script has turned into a sensational hit blamed for inspiring youth violence. He insists he adapted Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Wreck of the Deutschland” with reverence, only for the director and producers to twist it into a lurid, violent spectacle. New York’s media machine wants his contrition, not his explanation. Shuttled through talk shows and interviews, he is hectored about the supposed social effects of “his” film and baited by students and pundits who see in him the avatar of cultural depravity.

As he lurches from studio to campus to shabby lodgings, Enderby keeps trying to return to poetry, drafting lines on scraps, lecturing on prosody, imagining how the Hopkins poem should have looked on screen. Burgess intercuts Enderby’s day with vivid, inward film sequences: austere, Catholic, sea-tossed tableaux that honor Hopkins’s rhythms and spiritual anguish. These imagined scenes are a counterpoint to the vulgarity attributed to him and a proof, in Enderby’s mind, that he is being punished for a work he did not write.

The city treats him like a comic-opera villain. He is jostled on subways, ambushed on air by moralists, and badgered by administrators who want publicity without scandal. A bungled campus event degenerates into jeers; a private conversation turns into fodder for headlines. Cumulatively, the day becomes an endurance test: of Enderby’s heart, patience, and faith that poetry can still matter. Deciding he has had enough of America, he makes arrangements to leave. The book closes with the sense of a curtain falling, Enderby’s “end” signaled in the final pages, though Burgess would later mischievously revive him in a subsequent volume.

Themes and Style

The novel is a comic jeremiad about artistic intention and public reception. Burgess channels the moral panics surrounding screen violence into a farce of misattribution, asking who bears responsibility when a text is transformed by others and consumed by a mass audience primed for sensation. Enderby’s private, exacting standards, his obsession with meter, his scruffy devotion to the Muse, are constantly set against the marketplace’s demand for spectacle and the media’s appetite for outrage.

Religious imagery and the sea-battered grandeur of Hopkins run through the book, granting the polemic a liturgical undertone. Burgess’s style toggles between coarse bodily humor and baroque eloquence, keeping Enderby ridiculous and dignified at once. The imagined “proper” film of The Wreck of the Deutschland operates as an inner poem: a moving emblem of the art Enderby wishes he could make, untainted by commerce.

Context and Significance

The Clockwork Testament transparently echoes Burgess’s own experience after Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, when accusations about media-inspired violence shadowed the author. By filtering that controversy through Enderby’s misadventures, Burgess produces a brisk, bitterly funny meditation on authorship, censorship, and the hazards of fame. Short, densely allusive, and punctuated by set pieces of linguistic bravura, the book offers both a capstone to Enderby’s comic life and a sardonic confession from a writer who knew too well how a work can slip from its maker’s hands.