Grand Illusions

By R.Z. Shepperd

NAPOLEON SYMPHONY by ANTHONY BURGESS 365 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Anyone who read A Clockwork Orange before having his eyeballs poached by Stanley Kubrick's movie version knows Anthony Burgess as a writer with a hearty appetite for the cosmic bite into such subjects as original sin, good v. evil and spiritual sloth--not to mention the need for individual moral choice. He is also intimidatingly prolific and versatile.

Since 1956 he has written 20 novels, four books of criticism, a Shakespeare biography, a study of linguistics, dozens of critical articles and scores of bread-and-butter reviews.

A Burgess novel is frequently an embarrassment of riches, a kind of conspicuous consumption of exotic plot thickeners, linguistic games, disturbing tragicomedy, Manichaean trampoline acts and Christian and mythological symbolism. Thematically speaking, anything goes--as Burgess demonstrated three years ago in MF, a novel of contemporary incest based on an Algonquin Indian myth. In his latest offering, Napoleon Symphony, the author, who is also a serious composer, has reached for everything from kazoos to pipe organs. The result is a mock epic about the career of Napoleon Bonaparte that sometimes reads like Dickens, sometimes like Tennyson and Wordsworth, with an occasional gash of Gerard Manley Hopkins' gold-vermilion. "The last section of the book is written in the style of Henry James," Burgess explains without a trace of solemnity, "because Henry James believed he was Napoleon when he was dying."

The novel itself is divided into four movements corresponding to the parts of Beethoven's Third Symphony, "The Eroica." (Beethoven originally dedicated "The Eroica " to Napoleon, but tore up the dedication after the First Consul of France crowned himself Emperor.) At times the Burgess Bonaparte resembles a cross between Charles de Gaulle and Douglas MacArthur. At times he is an 18th century Mafia capo trying to manage overextended holdings and control his greedy relatives. Burgess seeks to evoke the heaving spirit of the Napoleonic age by rouging (and noiring) the historical facts with catchy dialogue and fantasy. As he points out in a closing epistle to the reader, written in rhymed couplets:

My Ogre, though heroic, is grotesque,

A sort of essay in the picaresque.

All the principal historical players are carefully accounted for. To begin with, there are the women in N's life. First comes indolent Josephine cuckolding her warrior-husband while he is off subjugating the Mamelukes in Egypt. Then his Empress--the mother of his only acknowledged son--homesick Marie-Louise, who stuffs herself with Austrian chocolate and drinks coffee in clear violation of the Emperor's trade-war embargo. Napoleon's mother, Madame Mere, casts a practical Corsican eye on ephemeral pomp and circumstance, while prudently stuffing gold in her socks. And of course Talleyrand appears, ceaselessly tacking for advantage and trimming his sails at the hint of rough weather.

On the broader screen of history, Burgess gets his effects by balancing the horrors of war with some of the absurdities of political power and private weaknesses. Napoleon is at times almost lovable, particularly when he discovers that the people of France are so blinded by the myth of Bonaparte that they do not even recognize him when he chooses to walk the streets as an ordinary citizen. Burgess also locates Napoleon's own blind spots. On drama, for example: "Tragedy must never have chairs on the stage. Tragic characters never sit down." And the Emperor's effort to abolish Europe's old aristocracy and nationalism, to create a unified Europe under the banner of French Enlightenment and Gallic law, failed to take into account the primitive, nearly mystical origins of national identities.

His attitude and policies regarding the German states, for example, actually helped drive the Teutonic princes together. As a result, Napoleon helped lay the foundation for German nationalism and France's conqueror, Bismarck.

Burgess grants Napoleon both genius and idealism, but he has great fun exploring the Emperor's lack of moral sensitivity and aesthetic judgment. As the torch carrier of the Enlightenment, a kind of social engineer who believed man was perfectible through political institutions, Burgess's Napoleon ignores the intransigent nature of evil.

As Beethoven is supposed to have said when he retracted the dedication of "The Eroica," "Held, nein [Hero, no]!"

Burgess, the Christian moralist, appears to agree. His reasons are worked out in a fugue of ideas at the book's end where the exiled, cancerous--perhaps even dead--Napoleon encounters a mysterious female apparition. Since she coldly puts Napoleon in his place, she may well be Clio, the Muse of history.

In any case, she declares that Beethoven's art is more important than Napoleon's military skill--"an art," she unkindly notes, "highly wasteful of its materials." Napoleon, whose mind or spirit at this point is soaring like the last movement of "The Eroica, "appears to get the message: musical forms may reveal divine essences, while his own kinetic life has been shaped by a gargantuan but finite will, whose only form was eventually a form of selfdelusion. Napoleon Symphony is, in some sense, an entertaining and elaborate joke. What the punch line comes down to is the simple fact that even Napoleon thought he was Napoleon. "

R.Z. Sheppard

"Awwk! Awwk!" sings Anthony Burgess in a loud, hoarse baritone. "Those E-flat major chords get the reader awake." Then in deep, funereal tones, quoting from his own book, he continues: "There he lies/ Ensanguinated tyrant/ O bloody, bloody tyrant/ See/ How the sin within/ Doth incarnadine/ His skin/ From the shin to the chin." "Perhaps," he adds, "Knopf should have given away a free record with every copy."

The stage for this performance is the Rome apartment where Burgess lives with his second wife Liana and their nine-year-old son Andrea, surrounded with the tools of his many trades --books, typewriters, recording equipment, even an electronic organ. The confidence, vitality and theatricality are typical. All his readers are familiar by now with the story of how he got his start as a novelist when doctors declared that he had only a year to live and he began writing like a man possessed, determined to build up an estate for his future widow.

Sacred Cow. The doctors were wrong, of course. But Burgess still works with the passionate speed of a condemned man. Right now he has three new novels in the works: an espionage thriller in a "super-James Bond vein," a biographical fiction based on his pianist father's musical career, and a novel devoted to Pope John XXIII, about whom Burgess, a strict English Catholic, is highly critical. Soon to be published is the third and concluding volume of the Enderby novels, the story of a poet who loses and then regains his creative gift, generally regarded as one of Burgess's finest literary accomplishments. There is also an epic poem based on his recent script for the Italian TV production of Moses--with Burt Lancaster in the title role. In his spare time, Burgess looks for someone to put on his musical based on James Joyce's Ulysses.

Burgess has strong, not to say brash, opinions on practically everything of importance and is not overly modest. "If I may say so, writing Napoleon Symphony was probably more difficult than writing a War and Peace, which can go on as long as it likes, and does." He kicks another sacred Russian cow in Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "The most swollen reputation of our day," he observes of the Nobel-prizewinning exile. "They say he is a great writer because he is a great man."

Ironically, to Burgess, who carries high the torch of fiction's modernist tradition, the future of literary studies and serious reading looks bleak. "Nobody reads in the past any more," he grieves. "You can major in literature in America beginning with Hermann Hesse." (Burgess should know. He has spent most of the past five years teaching at Princeton and the City College of New York, though he now intends to devote himself full time to writing.) The author's exuberant pessimism extends to the course of democratic government, especially in his native England. His solution is for England to be part of a global English-speaking union with Australia, America and Canada, to be governed by a constitutional monarch. It may sound positively Napoleonic, but it has vision--the vision of a bold artist who has yet to meet his Waterloo.

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