The Complete Enderby (67 page)

Coming out of the subway, walking through the disfigured streets full of decayed and disaffected and dogmerds, he felt a sudden and inappropriate accession of wellbeing. It was as though that lunchtime spasm had cleared away black humours inaccessible to the Chinese black draught. Everything came back about minor Elizabethan drama, though in the form of a great cinema poster with a brooding Shakespeare in the middle. But the supporting cast was set neatly about: George Peele, carrying a copy of
The Old Wives’ Tale
and singing in a fumetto about chopcherry chop-cherry ripe within; poor cirrhotic Robert Greene conjuring Friars Bacon and Bungay; Tom Brightness-falls-from-the-air Nashe; others, including Dekker eating a pancake. That was all right, then. But wait – who were those other others? Anthony Munday, yes yes, a bad playbotcher but he certainly existed. Plowman? A play called
A Priest in a Whorehouse
? Deverish?
England’s Might or The Triumphs of Gloriana
?

Treading through rack of crumpled protest handouts, dessicated leaves, beercans, admitted with reluctance by a black armed policeman, he made his familiar way to the officially desecrated chapel which now held partitioned classrooms. Heart thumping, though fairly healthily, he entered his own (he was no more than five minutes late) to find his twenty or so students waiting. There were Chinese, skullcapped Hebrews, a girl from the Coast who piquantly combined black and Japanese, a beerfat Irishman with red thatch, an exquisite Latin nymph, a cunning knowall of the Kickapoo nation. He stood looking vaguely at them all. They
lounged
and ate snacks and drank from cans and smoked pot and looked back at him. He didn’t know whether to sit or not at the table on which someone had chalked
ASSFUCK
. A little indisposed today, ladies and gentlemen. But no, he would doggedly stand. He stood. That bright Elizabethan poster swiftly evanesced. He gaped. All was blank except for imagination, which was a scurrying colony of termites. He said:

‘Today, ladies and gentlemen, continuing our necessarily superficial survey of the minor Elizabethan dramatists –’

The door opened and a boy and a girl, wan and breathless from swift fumbling in the corridor, entered, buttoning. They sat, looking up at him, panting.

‘We come to –’ But who the hell did we come to? They waited, he waited. He went to the blackboard and wiped off some elementary English grammar. The chalk in his grip trembled, broke in two. He wrote to his astonishment the name
GERVASE WHITELADY
. He added, in greater surprise and fear, the dates 1559–1591. He turned shaking to see that many of the students were taking the data down on bits of paper. He was committed now: this bloody man, not yet brought into existence, had to have existed. ‘Gervase Whitelady,’ he said, matter-of-factly, almost with a smear of the boredom proper to mention of a name nauseatingly well-known among scholars. ‘Not a great name – a name, indeed, that some of you have probably never even heard of –’ But the Kickapoo knowall had heard of it all right: he nodded with superior vigour. ‘– But we cannot afford to neglect his achievement, such as it was. Whitelady was the second son of Giles Whitelady, a scrivener. The family had settled in Pease Pottage, not far from the seaside town we now call Brighton, and were supporters of the Moabite persuasion of crypto-reformed Christianity as far back as the time of Wyclif.’ He looked at them all, incurious lot of young bastards. ‘Any questions?’ There were no questions. ‘Very well, then.’ The Kickapoo shot up a hand. ‘Yes?’

‘Is Whitelady the one who collaborated with – what was the name of the guy now – Fenprick? You know, they did this comedy together what the hell was the name of it?’

A very cunning young redskin sod, ought to be kept on his reservation. Enderby was not going to have this. ‘Are you quite
sure
you mean Fenprick, er, er …’

‘Running Deer is the name, professor. It might have been Fencock. A lot of these British names sound crazy.’

Enderby looked long on him. ‘The dates of Richard Fenpick,’ he said – ‘note that it is
pick
not
prick
, by the way, er, er –’ Running Deer, indeed. He must sometime look through the admission cards they were supposed to hand in. ‘His dates are 1574–1619. He could hardly have collaborated with er …’ He checked the name from the board. ‘Er, Whitelady unless he had been a sort of infant prodigy, and I can assure you he was er not.’ He now felt a hunger to say more about this Fenpick, whose career and even physical lineaments were being presented most lucidly to a wing of his brain which, he was sure, had been newly erected between the heart attack and now. ‘What,’ he said with large energy and confidence, ‘we most certainly do know about er Fenpick is his instrumentality in bringing the Essex rebellion to a happy conclusion.’ To his shock the hand of a girl who had just come in with that oversexed lout there, still panting, shot up. She cried:

‘Happy for whom?’

‘For er everybody concerned,’ Enderby er affirmed. ‘It had happened before in history, English naturally, as Whatsisname’s own er conveniently or inconveniently dramatized.’

‘Inconvenient for whom?’

‘For er those concerned.’

‘What she means is,’ said the redthatched beerswollen Irish student, ‘that the movie was on last night. The Late Late Date-with-the-Great Show. What Bette Davis called it was
Richard Two
.’

‘
Elizabeth and Essex
,’ the buttoned girl said. ‘It failed and she had his head cut off but she cried because it’s a Cruel Necessity.’

‘What Professor Enderby was trying to say,’ the Kickapoo said, ‘was that the record is all a lie. There was really a King Robert the First on the British throne, disguised as the Queen.’ Enderby looked bitterly at him, saying:

‘Are you trying to take the –
Are you having a go?
’

‘Pardon me?’

‘The vital statistics,’ a young Talmudist said, pencil poised at the ready. ‘This Whitelady.’

‘Who? Ah, yes.’

‘The works.’

‘The works,’ Enderby said, with refocillated energy. ‘Ah, yes. One long poem on a classical theme, the love of er Hostus for Primula. The title, I mean the hero and heroine are eponymous.’ He clearly saw a first edition of the damned poem with titlepage a horrid mixture of typefaces, fat illdrawn nymphs on it, a round chop which said Bibliotheca Somethingorother. ‘Specimen lines,’ he continued boldly:

‘Then as the moon engilds the Thalian fields

The nymph her er knotted maidenhead thus yields,

In joy the howlets owl it to the night,

In joy fair Cynthia augments her light,

The bubbling conies in their warrens er move

And simulate the transports of their love.’

‘But that’s beautiful,’ said the beautiful Latin nymph, unfat, unilldrawn, unknotted.

‘Crap,’ the Talmudist offered. ‘The transports of
whose
love?’

‘Theirs, of course,’ Enderby said. ‘Primavera and the er her lover.’

‘There were six plays,’ the Kickapoo said, ‘if I remember correctly.’

‘Seven,’ Enderby said, ‘if you count the one long attributed to er Sidebottom –’

‘Crazy British names.’

‘But now pretty firmly established as mainly the work of er the man we’re dealing with, with an act and a half by an unknown hand.’

‘How can they tell?’

‘Computer work,’ Enderby said vaguely. ‘Cybernetic wonders in Texas or some such place.’ He saw now fairly clearly that he would have to be for the chop. Or no, no, I quit. This was intolerable.

‘What plays?’ the Chinese next to the Talmudist said, a small round cheerful boy, perhaps an assistant cook in his spare time or main time if this were his spare time.

‘Yes,’ with fine briskness. ‘Take these down.
What do you lack, fair mistress?
A comedy, done by the Earl of Leicester’s Men, 1588.
The Tragedy of Canicula
, Earl of Sussex’s Men, the same year. A year
later
came
The History of Lambert Simnel
, performed at court for the Shrovetide Revels. And then there was, let me see –’

‘Where can we get hold of them?’ the Melanonipponese said crossly. ‘I mean, there’s not much point in just having the titles.’

‘Impossible,’ prompt Enderby said. ‘Long out of print. It’s only important for your purpose that you know that Longbottom that is to say Whitelady actually existed –’

‘But how do we know he did?’ There were two very obdurate strains in this mixed Coast girl.

‘Records,’ Enderby said. ‘Look it all up in the appropriate books. Use your library, that’s what it’s for. One cannot exaggerate the importance of er his contribution to the medium, as an influence that is, the influence of his rhythm is quite apparent in the earlier plays of er –’

‘Mangold Smotherwild,’ the Kickapoo said, no longer sneeringly outside the creative process but almost sweatily in the middle of it. Enderby saw that he could always say that he had been trying out a new subject called Creative Literary History. They might even write articles about it:
The Use of the Fictive Alternative World in the Teaching of Literature
. Somebody called out: ‘Specimen.’

‘No trouble at all,’ Enderby said. ‘In the first scene of
Give you good den good my masters
you have a soliloquy by a minor character named Retchpork. It goes, as I remember, something like this:

So the world ticks, aye, like to a tocking clock

On th’wall of naked else infinitude,

Am I am hither come to lend an ear

To manners, modes and bawdries of this town

In hope to school myself in knavery.

Aye, ’tis a knavish world wherein the whore

And bawd and pickpurse, he of the quatertrey,

The coneycatcher, prigger, jack o’ the trumps

Do profit mightily while the studious lamp

Affords but little glimmer to the starved

And studious partisan of learning’s lore.

Therefore, I say, am I come hither, aye,

To be enrolled in knavish roguery.

But soft, who’s this? Aye, marry, by my troth,

A subject apt for working on. Good den,

My master, prithee what o’clock hast thou,

You
I would say, and
have
not
hast
, forgive

Such rustical familiarity

From one unlearn’d in all the lore polite

Of streets, piazzas and the panoply

Of populous cities –

Something like that, anyway,’ Enderby said. ‘I could go on if you wished. But it’s all a bit dull.’

‘If it’s all a bit dull,’ the Irish one said, ‘why do we have to have it?’

‘I thought you said he was influential,’ somebody else complained.

‘Well, he was. Dully influential,’ the Kickapoo said.

‘Dead at thirty-two,’ Enderby said, having checked with the blackboard data. ‘Dead in a duel or perhaps of the French pox or of a surfeit of pickled herrings and onions in vinegar with crushed peppercorns and sour ale, or, of course, of the plague. It was a pretty bad year for the plague, I think, 1591.’ He saw Whitelady peering beseechingly at him, a white face from the shades, begging for a good epitaph. ‘He was nothing,’ Enderby said brutally, the face flinching as though from blows, ‘so you can forget about him. One of the unknown poets who never properly mastered their craft, spurned by the Muse.’ The whole luggage of Elizabethan drama was now, unfantasticated by fictional additions, neatly stacked before him. He knew what was in it and what wasn’t. This Whitelady wasn’t there. And yet, as the mowing face and haunted eyes, watching his, showed, in a sense he was. ‘The important thing,’ Enderby pronounced, ‘is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen. How much do you think you’re entitled to, you?’ he asked the Kickapoo.

‘As much as I can get.’

‘And that’s a good answer,’ Enderby said, meaning it, meaning it more than they, in their present stage of growth, could possibly mean it. He suddenly felt a tearful love and compassion for these
poor
orphans, manipulated by brutal statesmen and the makers of tooth-eroding sweet poisonous drinks and (his face blotted temporarily out that of anguished Whitelady) the bearded Southern colonel who made it a virtue to lick chickenfat off your fingers. Schmalz and Chutzpah. The names swam in, as from the Book of Deuteronomy. Who were they? Lawyers? He said: ‘Life is sensation, which includes thought, and the sensation of having sensation, which ought to take care of all your stupid worries about identity. Christ, Whitelady has identity. But what he doesn’t have and what he never had is the sensation of having sensations. Better and cleverer people than we are can be invented.’ He saw how wrong he was about
aere perennius
. ‘But what can’t be invented is,’ he said, directly addressing the couple who had come in late, ‘what you two were doing outside in the corridor.’