For He's a Jolly Good Fellow the Pianoplayers

By Paul Gray

During the past three decades, Author Anthony Burgess has produced a truly stupendous volume of writing. The number of his novels now approaches 30. There have also been more than 20 other books, including nonfiction, literary criticism, biography, children's stories, poems, plays and translations, not to mention screenplays and a relentless stream of uncollected reviews and journalistic pieces. This frenzy of production has made the author famous and, paradoxically, a tad unwelcome. Readers and reviewers, confronted regularly with someone who makes himself impossible to ignore, are likely to decide to do just that. A new Burgess? Never mind; let it pass. There will be another one in a few months.

Probably so. But skipping The Pianoplayers is not a good idea. Burgess, 69, has recaptured the same linguistic verve and inventiveness that marked his earlier fiction, especially The Doctor Is Sick (1960) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). He has also created a heroine to rival, in nearly every respect, the comically seedy poet Enderby, hero of four Burgess novels. Ellen Henshaw is an old woman living in the south of France when she decides to set down her memoirs, with the stenographic assistance of one Rolf Marcus, an itinerant and blocked American journalist who needs the lodgings that she can provide. Ellen confesses, up front, that she has been known in her none-too-proper prime as La Belle Helene, but as she begins to spin her tale, she could easily be confused with a number of other names, including the Wife of Bath, Fanny Hill, Molly Bloom and Mrs. Malaprop.

* Ellen conceives of her story as a tribute to "my poor dear, dead dad," and that is pretty much what she provides. Billy Henshaw inherits sole responsibility for his young daughter after his wife and son die during the influenza epidemic that swept through Britain in World War I. "My dad always called himself not a pianist but a pianoplayer," Ellen recalls. "Pianoplayer gives you the idea of him and the instrument being like all one thing, jammed together." Billy makes his way by accompanying the silent films at a Manchester movie house during the mid-1920s. Unfortunately, he possesses not only an artistic temperament that rebels at the exigencies of routine but also a taste for booze. One night, well liquored, he improvises a score for a film about the life of Christ and plays For He's a Jolly Good Fellow during a scene depicting the Resurrection. So much for that job.

Daughter and father next fetch up in the English seacoast resort of Blackpool, where Billy has caught on with a music-hall troupe. He gets in trouble there too, falling for the company's soubrette, stage-named Maggie Paramour, who is married to a violinist in the same motley ensemble. Ellen, by this time nubile and knowing beyond her years, sees trouble coming from several directions, but not the sexual ambush by Mr. Flushing, whose wife owns the boarding house where she and her father stay and where Billy has fallen a wee bit behind in paying the bills. After this rude assault, Ellen has an insight about her corporeal self and that of women in general: "A Female Body is not just a piece of liver from the butcher . . . It is more like a musical instrument made of flesh and blood that has music waiting inside it but only for properly trained hands to coax out. Make the bastards learn."

That she does, later, as a lady of pleasure, madam and finally founder of an international chain of Schools of Love. But Ellen's experiences are no more colorful than her manner of reporting them. Burgess turns his heroine's "Uneducated English" into a marvelously supple and comic tool of exposition. When she recalls the job that finally did her father in, a pianoplaying marathon in Blackpool, Ellen tries to give some sense of Billy's repertoire during his last 15 days at the keyboard; several pages of song titles follow, including Beethoven's Mignonette in G, the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tan Houser and Pomp and Circumference March. The sharpie who egged Billy on to this fatal enterprise was named Jeremiah Feldfloh, which Ellen has trouble getting right; she tries Flyblow, Fieldflow, Freeflow, Feelflo, Fallfly, Flowflaw and numerous other permutations, most suggesting the evanescence of entrepreneurship.

Despite her little learning, Ellen is something of a student of the language. She ponders little oddities of British speech: "I wonder why everything always has to be nice, a nice cup of tea, a nice plate of bread and butter." Not surprisingly, the term brothel attracts her attention: "That is a terrible word and yet also a funny word, kind of domestic in a way, it always brings back my aunt saying when I was a kid living with her: Drink it all up now, that broth'll stick to your ribs." She looks at stale sayings with new eyes: "Don't cross your bridges till you come to them is my motto, though how you can cross a bridge before coming to it I've never properly understood."

Best of all, she makes her disreputable old father seem oddly heroic and their life together, despite the troubles, a comic romp. To read The Pianoplayers is to understand Ellen's observation, gleaned from watching those music-hall routines at Blackpool, on the infectious quality of laughter: "Once an audience starts they'll go on all night."