Home thoughts from a bawd
Roger Lewis
THE PIANOPLAYERS by Anthony Burgess Hutchinson f8.95 Whilst awaiting Anthony Burgess's autobiography (Little Wilson provisional title) and even my own biography (The Paper Man, provisional title), here is an account of the author's Manchester child- hood, disguised as brothel-keeper Ellen Henshaw's memoir. She is supposed to be chirruping the reminiscence into a cassette- recorder, making for a first-person narra- tion that, though catching nuances of Lancashire speech (flat and repetitive, like the voice of Stan Laurel; or shrill, like Hilda Ogden's), seems to have banished Burgess's self-consciously erudite and famously fizzy prose.
Or has it? He has been a megaphone for an inauspicious maid before, in One Hand Clapping (1961). The device enables Burgess to try out tones and feminine idioms, obviously not naturally his own as Burgess's mentor James Joyce did with Molly Bloom's and Anna Livia Plurabelle's monologues. One Hand Clapping, in which a supermarket shelf-filler brained her mad spouse with a coal hammer, was a garru- lous confession; breezy, flirtatious, preposterous. The Pianoplayers, again co- quettish, is itself, in fact, an instrument playing with sounds. We hear the novel, not just read it. Burgess bangs the typewri- ter (remember his collection of essays was named Homage to QWERT YUIOP) as his hero bangs the piano.
His hero, the pianoplayer Billy Hen- shaw, Ellen's papa, is also a portrait of Burgess's real father, Joseph Wilson. A rather romanticised porttait, but the indi- gence, sparky wit and gentle showmanship seem accurate enough. The big difference is that the actual father/son relationship was, like that of Oedipus, perilous; for Ellen, the father/daughter bond is sweet- ness and light. Is Burgess, imaginatively, laying a ghost to rest, as Hamlet does? But these are issues for elsewhere.. .
Billy Henshaw makes his living Of you could call it a living') providing accompani- ment for silent movies whilst the Vitaphone looms. His wife and son having died in an influenza epidemic (as Burgess's mother and sister did), he brings up his surviving daughter on his own, or with the casual help of the floozies who pass through his life, or bed. There is little money; there is petty thievery; jobs and homes change weekly. Ellen and Billy traipse from tenement to shanty, consum- ing bully beef, strong tea and malt vinegar. `It was not the best place in the world for a kid to be brought up.'
The infant Ellen sits in the stalls of verminous picture-palaces every night. 'I know the films from, say 1924, to the time of The Singing Fool as well as anybody in the world.' Billy, meanwhile, brillantly vamps, his versatility unappreciated by the whelk-sucking mob: 'my dad never com- plained. . . a man of resource, as he called himself.'
Ellen, too, is resourceful. Edging into adolescence, she begins to attract the leers of wheezy old men. One such asks her to skivvy for him, but 'it wasn't the cleaning up he was interested in as you can guess.' If she is groped, as least she is paid off for her pains — or pleasures, for Ellen, receiving expectations of 15 bob a week from hiring out her body, has a premonition of the future which will consist of the oldest profession in the world.
Soft beds and hard battles continue when a landlord partially rapes her; at least the indignity pays the rent. Partial rape, moreover, because Ellen gets to thinking, whilst succumbing, that the female body is like a musical instrument made of flesh and blood that has music waiting inside it.' If she inaugurates Schools of Love (cathouses crossed with convents), men can be taught accurately and sensuously to seduce, just as tickling ivories can be taught.
Though Burgess wants the theme and conceit of The Pianoplayers to be an interfusion of melody and carnality (rhythm and variations important to both), and when Ellen's cherry is plucked she says `this was when I first realised what it was all about, and for some reason I saw my poor dad playing away at the piano,' making the conjunction of sex and the potency of cheap music explicit, the power of the book is in the nostalgia for olden days and being brought up hard. 'I miss all those things now, I can tell you and there's no real way of calling them back.' The end-of- the-pier shows, glorious in their tattiness; the spicy food; the big brassy pubs, with singing-rooms and snugs; the cobbled alleys; the sooty streets with trams; the flashing of frilly knickerbockers and the downing of bottled Bass; days when you could guzzle chocs and smoke fifty wood- bines, 'and nobody said it was bad for you.'
The Pianoplayers was written at least as long ago as 1979. Burgess told an Amer- ican professor: 'My father was a cinema pianist. I've written a little novel about him which I've not published yet. I think it's too short.' Unfortunately, to pad the novella into a novel, once Billy Henshaw dies (at a pianoplaying marathon, where the concert consists of songs not then composed!), we are given a shaggy-dog story about a dead mother-in-law strapped on a roof-rack; and there is also a near- murder with a coal hammer.
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