Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (52 page)

Still the comparison is bluntly made

By all who ever read or tried to read

The Dynasts.
And
The Dynasts
is, indeed,

A monstrous shocking failure. Nonetheless,

Malignity may munch but Muses bless

Failed boldness more than orthodox success.

As for my own flawed superficial thing,

No critic would be fool enough to bring

In Tolstoy guns to blast me into dust.

This is a comic novel and it must

Be read as such, as such deemed good or bad—

A thousand versts away from Tolstoygrad.

Indeed, my working title used to be

This:
The Napoleon Comic Symphony,

A name that reason forced me to reject,

Since comic leads the reader to expect

Contrivances of laughter: comic taste,

Like the term comedy, has been debased.

Arousing mirth—this is not what I’m at:

What’s comedy? Not tragedy. That’s that.

My Ogre, though heroic, is grotesque,

A sort of essay in the picaresque,

Who robs and rapes and lies and kills in fun

And does no lasting harm to anyone.

Standing behind him, though, or to one side,

Another, bigger, hero is implied,

Not comic and not tragic but divine,

Tugging Napoleon’s strings, and also mine,

Controlling form, the story’s ebb and flow—

Beethoven, yes: this you already know.

I was brought up on music and compose

Bad music still, but ever since I chose

The novelist’s métier one mad idea

Has haunted me, and I fulfill it here

Or try to—it is this: somehow to give

Symphonic shape to verbal narrative,

Impose on life, though nerves scream and resist,

The abstract patterns of the symphonist.

I know that several works of literature

Have played the game already: these demur

(
Point Counter Point,
the
Four Quartets
) at going

Further than superficial fancy, showing

A literary fear of the whole hog,

Content with the most general analogue.

The most ambitious effort the world knows

Within this manic field—narrative prose

Made to behave like music—we can hear

When Joyce’s Sirens captivate the ear,

Comic-pedantic fugal, in
Ulysses,

Most brilliant, most ingenious. But this is

Really a piece of elephantine fun

Designed to show the thing cannot be done.

Nor can it. What for years has haunted me

Has been a like impossibility—

A novel where the horrible Marquis

De Sade comes up against Jane Austen and

They clash thematically, the whole thing planned

In four Mozartian movements: first,
con brio;

Adagio
next; next, minuet and trio;

A riotous
allegro
at the end.

I mentioned this to a film-making friend,

Quite casually. Uncasually he said

I ought to write on Bonaparte instead

(He thought of his own art: he wished to plan

An epic film about the Corsican

But lacked a script). At once there flashed in flame

A more ambitious notion—this: to frame

A novel on Napoleon Bonaparte

That followed Ludwig van, and not Mozart.

The symphony was there—Third, in E-Flat,

The Eroica. This novel, then, is that:

Napoleon’s career, unteased, rewoven

Into a pattern borrowed from Beethoven.

The story is well-known: Count Bernadotte

Met Beethoven and said to him: “Why not

A
Sinfonia Buonaparte
?”—”Yes:

This great First Consul merits nothing less,”

Said Beethoven, and so he wrote the work.

But certain ogreish traits began to irk,

Then deeplier disturb, then fire to rage

Ludwig, who ripped the dedication page

To ribbons, crying: “Hero of the age?

Ach, nein
—another tyrant”

He was right: The Duc d’Enghien shot at dead of night,

Without a trial; the Napoleonic line

Secured by regifaction. “Held?
Ach nein
!”

A generalized First Consul yet remains

Inside the symphony: heroic strains

In E-Flat, most heroic key, give out

The essential hero, not the Mafia lout.

My task as novelist? Restore that rogue ram,

That bad Colossus, to the symphonic program,

Dealing in hard particulars but still

Invoking what is always general

In music, the Napoleonic presence

And,
contra punctum,
music’s formal essence—

As far as possible—if it can be done—

It can’t, of course—, and so on, and so on.

The first two movements of the Eroica,

Although (but need I tell you this?) they are

Organized sound, no more, to awe the ear,

Yet do suggest some hero’s brief career.

The
Allegro:
see him live and vigorous,

Striding the earth, stern but magnanimous,

In love with order, his regretful strife

Devoted to the ennobling of our life.

The
Marcia Funebre:
already dead,

The ironic laurels wilting round his head,

He’s borne to burial; we weep, we hear

The purple orators about his bier—

That character, how noble; and how great

Those exploits in the service of the State.

He rests in peace beneath this hallowed shroud,

Quite dead, and resurrection’s not allowed.

But stay—there are two movements still to run:

The subject’s buried; what’s then to be done?

The
Scherzo
—how? The brisk
Finale
—who?

Beethoven smiles: “What I propose to do

Is to invoke another noble creature,

No child of Nature, but of Supernature.

The vague historical—that’s finished with;

Now the particularity of myth.”

What myth? What hero? Aaaaah—Prometheus.

Beethoven makes it fiery-clear to us

In his
Finale
who the hero is.

He takes a bass and then a theme from his

Own ballet music on Prometheus, then

Builds variations till the count of ten.

The
Scherzo
—is it fancy that hears roar

The flames which from the gods the hero tore

To bring to man? Those horns—what are they doing?

The hunt is up, it is the gods pursuing.

In Plutarch’s
Lives
the heroes go in pairs—

One fabulous and one historic. There’s

The origin, one thinks, of this device:

The heroic is displayed not once but twice.

The novelist must deal in unity

Of character, so that was not for me—

Two slabs of prose about Napoleon

Followed by two (much lighter) based upon

Prometheus. You see, then, what I’ve done:

Forced mythic and historic into one.

The trio of my (sort of)
Scherzo
is

A play in verse the Emperor witnesses

Based on Prometheus, written by a man

Named, quite improbably, Enuiluban—

Nabuliune, him. In the last part

(Whose variations do not dare the art

Of parody, however it appears)

Another victim claims our tears or ears

Or eyes or fancy—three fused into one—

Though basically Promethapoleon,

Chained to a rock, his liver eagled out,

This, then, is what the novel is about:

Its key E-Flat, its form pseudo-symphonic,

Ending upon a forte major tonic,

Napoleon triumphant—so he is,

Since, unfulfilled in life, that plan of his

Now operates at last: proud England, cowed

Back into Europe, humbled, silenced, bowed.

Let hell’s or heaven’s belfries clang out loud.

Praise for

NAPOLEON SYMPHONY

“It is more consistently funny than any book of Mr Burgess’s that I know, and it even makes the old Corsican gangster and tyrant interesting. . . . [Burgess] is particularly good at deaths. . . . And his own prose, when he is not being a ventriloquist, is invariably thick and solid and mouthfilling. . . .
Napoleon Symphony
is a rich vast growling narrative poem sometimes in prose. The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch.”

—Paul Chipchase,
Tablet

“[Burgess’s] dedication to a full use and extension of language and the intrinsic power of his subject-matter explain a consistent aim: to remind readers of the novel that the language still has enormous potential untapped by Englishmen; to entertain and not to bore; to use comedy as a toy weapon whose well set-up thrusts will make rhetorical address more acceptable; and to explode (again) the fallacy of experimental = meaningless by taking on the challenge of Joyce.”

—Graham Fawcett,
Books and Bookmen

“There are more profound writers than Burgess in the canon but I can think of few who are so literate and no one who is as marvellously entertaining.
Napoleon Symphony
is, in my opinion, the best novel so far in his extraordinary career.”

—John Mills,
Queen’s Quarterly

“From gutteral snarls to breathings of passion to squeals of despair, the narrative swells with sound, complex, Joycean, organized like music; and the exercise as a whole is ebullient, entertaining and crammed with
live
history.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“The verbal roulades are abundant, together with the bawdy, the scatological, the witty. . . . Few of the characters are particularly attractive, but they weren’t in real life. They are complex and believably human, de Stael most of all. The retreat from Borodino reads with mounting horror, while the period of exile on St Helena almost elicits pity. The novel is massive and innovative.”

—Robb McKenzie,
Library Journal

BOOKS BY ANTHONY BURGESS IN NORTON PAPERBACK

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The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy

Copyright © 1974 by Anthony Burgess

All rights reserved
First published as a Norton paperback 1980, reissued 2014

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Burgess, Anthony, 1917–1993.
Napoleon symphony / Anthony Burgess.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-393-35015-9 (pbk.)
1. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821—Fiction. 2. France—Kings and rulers—
Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.U638N36 2014
823’.914—dc23

2014028530

ISBN 978-0-393-35016-6 (e-book)

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