2In the current study, I will retrace the characteristics of the short story as presented by Anthony Burgess in his 1983 lecture. Using examples from one of his own short stories “Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography” (1977), I will explore these characteristics and offer further analyses, highlighting typical traits of Burgess’s short fiction. In his definition of the short story, Burgess incorporates examples from outside the English-speaking world to identify commonalities within Western writing practices. While Burgess builds primarily on ideas from Edgar Allan Poe and James Joyce, his theory can be understood as also stemming directly from his own practice as a novelist and as a short fiction writer.

Class One and Class Two Fiction

3One of the first characteristics Burgess notes is that there are two types of short stories: one category which is more commercial, more accessible, more anecdotal, and more easily adaptable to the screen (“On the Short Story” 33-34), and another category which is more literary and more philosophical, which reveals a revelation or epiphany, a new perception, and the possibility of change (35-36, 43). Burgess makes a similar distinction with novels, describing two classes of fiction: one that is popular, accessible, and that like “milk,” just flows (“Anthony Burgess Speaks: 1984—Russell Hoban,” my transcription), and one that is more literary:

When language obtrudes, when it refuses to be a pane of well-polished glass through which actions can be viewed, when it prefers opacity to transparency, then it belongs to a different class of literary endeavour than the popular novel. The transparent novel, in which language is not important, I call Class One fiction. The opaque novel, in which language is a character, a constituent of the action, I call Class Two fiction. It’s interesting to note that two of the most remarkable novels belonging to this class in this century—Joyce’s Ulysses and Nabokov’s Lolita—have both earned moral condemnation, just like A Clockwork Orange. It seems that the novelist who is interested in language is also interested in life—too interested, say the censors. (The Ink Trade 242-43)

For Burgess, the commercial aspects of writing are always looming: “We must not forget that writing is a trade as well as an art, and we only write those things that we can sell” (“On the Short Story” 33). The short story, according to Burgess, is a genre that used to be commercially viable but, at the time of his lecture, now struggled to find a paying readership. He writes that this is one of the reasons why he only occasionally attempted to write short stories. Unlike his novels, which he classifies as Class Two fiction, he does not qualify many of his short stories either way. He describes one of his early attempts at short fiction, “The Great Christmas Train Mystery,” as being purely anecdotal, and thus, Class One fiction. Other short stories that he wrote can be considered as Class Two fiction because they are more literary in nature and invite a more analytical reading to reveal an underlying philosophical question.

4“Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography” can be categorized as Class Two fiction because it repaints William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson in a new light, encouraging readers to reconsider how they view the relationship between art and artist. The way in which the story is written and its subject matter encourage the reader to analyze the text, reflecting on both what happens in the story and the significance behind how the story is told.

A Short Story is not a Novel

5Burgess presents his definition of short fiction in contrast to his definition of the novel:

The nature of the novel, it seems to me is this: that it presents an epoch; it presents a whole biography; it presents a number of characters living in a particular place, particular places, at a particular time, particular times. It can be a ragbag, a holdall which contains everything. We never think of form in terms of Dickens, or even in terms of form in Balzac, or in Proust! The whole point is the massive presentation of a number of situations, a number of characters, and if I ask the question, “What do we learn from it?”, of course, the answer is “nothing.” We don’t learn anything, in effect. We are just given a clearer view of an epoch, of a set of characters, the nature of human life, and no more. (“On the Short Story” 34)

As Burgess points out, compared to novels, little happens in short stories. Short stories have limited action and do not have the space for multiple events or a plurality of situations. In this way, it becomes clear that Burgess was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s definition of short fiction, which insists on “a certain unique or single effect” (61, italics in the original), what Brander Matthews formulates as “the unity of impression” (73). There is not enough room in a short story for it to “contain action, . . . events, . . . a denouement, things of change, but all they [the audience] find in these short stories . . . is the possibility of change, the possibility of a new perception, a slight revelation” (Burgess, “On the Short Story” 34). Here Burgess turns to James Joyce’s theory of epiphanies: “the nature of the short story may have nothing to do with length, that there is a kind of short story element, the short story entity, which can be accommodated to any size . . . in that it doesn’t present this process of change taking place in human passions. The possibility of change, yes, and the revelation that may lead to change; but that is for another story and not the story we have been reading” (43). For Burgess, the literary short story often offers a philosophical study of one particular experience, emotion, or state of being.

6In these definitions of the short story and their contrast to the definition of the novel, Burgess highlights many important features of short fiction: the singularity of the situation; a refusal to present or understand the entirety of human nature but rather an insistence on one element; the idea of fragmentation; and the implication of the readers in the reading process to engage their imagination to fill in the gaps left by the story. According to Burgess, the short story often features “a deliberate taming of action to the state of genuine stasis . . . a stasis which will suddenly, we hope, turn up at unexpected points and produce an epiphany, a vision” (42). Literary (Class Two) short stories are those in which “nothing happens”; their “essence is style or exact observations rather than events” (39). Oscar Wilde’s ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ principle also influenced Burgess’s understanding of the short story. Throughout his discussions of fiction in this lecture and in his many essays and books on the subject, Burgess insists on the inherent value of art in allowing people to look at life from a different perspective. This new perspective is often aesthetically pleasing, and it encourages the reader/audience to think about both what is being presented and how it has been presented. Burgess, like Wilde, insists that art should avoid teaching or preaching:

Let’s suppose that the whole process of artistic communication is contained in the middle of a line. This line is a continuum. At one end of it, it uses the materials of communication to instruct, at the other end it uses those materials to excite. In other words, there is a static area in the middle, and at one end a didactic area, at the other a pornographic area. The true artist has to avoid invading either of these two areas, but avoidance is not easy (The Ink Trade 237)

Burgess denies that a work is art if it goes beyond these limits in either direction.

7In “Will and Testament,” there are several noteworthy events like the foiling of Gunpowder Plot and the execution of those involved, the opening of King Lear, Shakespeare’s diagnosis of syphilis, and Shakespeare’s reworking of Psalm 46 for the King James Version of the Bible. At first glance, all of this action might seem to be in disaccord with Burgess’s own definition of short fiction. However, the second part of the title, “A Fragment of Biography,” emphasizes the incompleteness of the telling of these events. The story only sheds light on the events from one angle. The reader is given a brief glimpse into the busy life of William Shakespeare, at least how Burgess imagined it to be. Furthermore, the underlying musical structure of this short story, which will be studied below, puts these events in perspective and functions as a metafictional device.

9According to Calvin S. Brown, “The general basis of harmony and counterpoint—the simultaneous presentation of two or more tones—presents such mechanical difficulties as to be practically impossible in literature” (39). However, where Brown finds a literary analogy for harmony is in the form of word plays or puns, where one word can simultaneously be understood to have two different meanings, which is exactly how Burgess’s title “Will and Testament” functions (42). Furthermore, like Trois Contes by Gustave Flaubert and Rudyard Kipling’s short stories, as analyzed by Burgess in his keynote lecture, “Will and Testament” seeks to evoke a specific time and place, affording the reader the pleasure of metaphorically time traveling to a sort of mythical past—Elizabethan England as imagined by Burgess. The mock-Elizabethan dialect also contributes to the aesthetic beauty of the text.

Short Fiction and Music

10In defining short fiction, as mentioned above, Burgess looked to Poe’s famous characterization of short works of narrative fiction given in “Review of Twice-Told Tales”:

We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal. The ordinary novel is objectionable . . . . As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But a simple cessation in the reading, would, of itself, be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control. (61)

11For example, Burgess uses repetition to shape the structure of “Will and Testament” into the musical form of a rondo. The first use of the term ‘rondeau’ refers to a form of medieval French music and poetry. It was one of the three formes fixes of late medieval French art. However, it fell out of use during the sixteenth century (Cerquiglini-Toulet 1). In the seventeenth century, French baroque composers like Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Louis Couperin, and Jean-Baptiste Lully, used the rondeau form for instrumental compositions, namely for works on the harpsichord (Randel 433). The baroque rondeau form was comprised of “a refrain of 8 or 16 measures . . . played in alternation with a succession of couplets (episodes) so as to form a chainlike structure of variable length: abacad, etc.” (DeVoto). The repetition of a refrain alternating with other musical material remains consistent in the development of rondeau form. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the classical rondo, with the Italian spelling, developed out of the baroque rondeau. In classical rondo form, there is a refrain A that opens the work and then repeats after every successive episode. The episodes can repeat or can each be different. The most common rondo pattern is ABACABA.

12“Will and Testament” can similarly be divided into four parts. They are not of equal length, but each part begins with either an exact repetition or a variation on the sentence: “When Ben Jonson was let out of jail he went straight to William Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street and said: ‘Let us go and drink’” (“Will and Testament” 9). It is this sentence that indicates the reprise of the A section (see also “Will and Testament” 3, 26, and 29). There is only a slight modification for the last appearance: “When Ben Jonson was let out of jail, he went straight to William Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street. Before he could say aught of going out to drink, Will said: ‘I have writ this new play. It is based on Gunpowder Plot’” (“Will and Testament” 39). In the first and third appearances of the A section, a version of the same reply follows: “‘Ben,’ Will cried. ‘Your ears are untrimmed and your nose whole. . . . I’m glad to see you are well,’” lengthening the amount of text that is repeated (“Will and Testament” 9). In the second appearance of the A section, Will responds with “Ben,” but then makes it clear that he does not want to go back to the tavern they went to the first time around. This slight modification allows the narrative to continue without negating the effect of the repetition of the A section. After this repetitive greeting, Ben and Will go out for a drink together. Each discussion between Ben and Will then leads to the events that follow in the other sections.

Pregnant Statements, Epiphanies, and Revelations

14In examining short stories by Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling, Burgess speaks of “pregnant statement[s]” and of the “symbolic dealing out of the inner problems” (“On the Short Story” 42, 44). Here, Burgess suggests that common to the short story genre is a certain density of language that serves the economy of the form. Authors of short stories, in order to be concise, often resort to what can be called literary harmony, in which a word, an expression, or a symbol can simultaneously carry different meanings and implications. This was considered above with the title “Will and Testament.” It can also be found in studying the implications of the story’s form.

16The repetition of the A section also provides a comic element to contrast the otherwise serious events of the other sections. Henri Bergson offers two reasons as to why repetition may be found funny. First, he writes, “The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living. . . . This deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter” (34). The idea of two men always saying the same basic phrases when they see each other is somewhat mechanical and thus, becomes comical. Secondly, Bergson discusses the idea of humor found in repetitive coincidences:

Our present problem . . . deals . . . with a situation, that is, a combination of circumstances, which recurs several times in its original form and thus contrasts with the changing stream of life. . . . Thus, you meet a friend in the street whom you have not seen for an age; there is nothing comic in the situation. If, however, you meet him again the same day, and then a third and a fourth time, you may laugh at the “coincidence.” Now, picture to yourself a series of imaginary events which affords a tolerably fair illusion of life, and within this ever-moving series imagine one and the same scene reproduced either by the same characters or by different ones: again you will have a coincidence, though a far more extraordinary one. (90)

An improbable coincidence is exactly what is found in “Will and Testament.” It is laughably absurd to think of the same events reoccurring in the same way. Moreover, the extraordinary—incidents like being arrested and released—is presented as ordinary. This repetitive treatment coupled with the unexpected normality surrounding an extraordinary event affords the reader comic amusement.

17The dance structure, thus, adds both philosophical and humoristic layers to the text. While at first it may seem that the repetition of the A section would lengthen the story, it seems unlikely that such a wealth of connotations and questions, along with humor, could have been added into the story in a more concise, effective, and meaningful way. It is through this musical structure that the reader is afforded an epiphany or revelation. Just as Shakespeare is confronted with his own mortality in discovering that he has syphilis, the readers, too, can glimpse their own small lives in the ever-turning course of events. However, being faced with death is not a moment of horror. Shakespeare considers certain important elements in his life—should he become Catholic, for example—but then turns back to the work at hand. Death is always looming somewhere in the corner, but it is no excuse for not continuing to live in the meantime.

18As Burgess explains, “The artist takes raw material and forces or coaxes it into a pattern” (English Literature 4). For Burgess, this pattern is reassuring; it is a source of truth and unity: “We see the ugliness of a diseased body and the comeliness of a healthy one; sometimes we say, ‘Life is good’; sometimes we say, ‘Life is bad.’ Which is the true statement? Because we can find no single answer we become confused. A work of art seems to give us the single answer by seeming to show that there is order or pattern in life” (4). He continues,

You see, then, that this excitement we derive from a work of art is mostly the excitement of seeing connections that did not exist before, of seeing quite different aspects of life unified through a pattern. . . . But on a higher level our personal troubles are relieved when we can be made to see them as part of a pattern, so that here again we have the discovery of unity, of one personal experience being part of a greater whole. We feel that we do not have to bear this sorrow on our own: our sorrow is part of a huge organisation—the universe—and a necessary part of it. And when we discover that a thing is necessary we no longer complain about it. (5-6)

In “Will and Testament,” Burgess explores this underlying vision of life in an artistic way, affording the reader a small revelation about art and life in general.

A Place of Literary Experimentation

19Three quarters into his lecture, Burgess stated, “There is a lot more to be said. The more one thinks of a short story as practiced in the English language, the more one is aware that there is not a single definition. There’s no worry. It is not a form which one can place in a dictionary of literary terms and exactly define” (“On the Short Story” 43-44). This seems to point to the diversity of various types of short stories, like anecdotal short stories and detective stories, to name a few, but it also suggests that the short story may also be characterized by its experimental affordances. For Burgess, short fiction was often a successful way of experimenting with form. In analyzing Borges’s “Averroës’s Search,” Burgess notes, “Now again, this is not quite a short story as we know it. It’s as though Borges has to try a particular experiment, which cannot go on too long, and, hence, he borrows the form of a few pages which we associate with the traditional narrative short story, called ‘una ficcion,’ and gets away with a bit of literary experimentation because he's chosen a very short form” (40). This is also the case with “Will and Testament.” This is the only fictional work that Burgess wrote in rondo form.

Intertextuality, Myth without Action

24In Victoria Brazier’s article “The Fictional Shakespeares of Anthony Burgess,” the story is contextualized briefly: “A re-working of Rudyard Kipling’s short-story of 1934, ‘Proofs of Holy Writ’, Burgess presented Will and Testament [sic] as part of the International Shakespeare Association Congress in Washington D.C. in April 1976.” Kipling’s story is a likely hypotext because it features William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, called Will and Ben respectively, sitting at a table in the orchard of New Place discussing current events (of the time), their thoughts on art, and working together to improve the poetic quality of the forthcoming King James Version of the Bible. The language spoken between the two imitates Elizabethan English, and lines from and references to their plays are woven into the dialogue. The title, for example, is from Othello, act 3, scene 3. In context, “the phrase refers to the probative value of Scripture, but here Kipling punningly uses it to mean printer’s proofs of the new translation of the Bible” (Engle). As mentioned above, the wordplay in Burgess’s title seems to echo that of Kipling’s.

25Given that the dance form reflects a certain philosophy on art and life, Burgess’s text, as a reaction to Kipling’s, affords the reader the opportunity to reconsider Kipling’s short story and compare how Burgess’s story offers a different perspective. Even though Burgess’s Will is an artist, it is his art that elevates him and not his character. He is no saint, and there is no reason to expect him to be one. Burgess’s Shakespeare and his fictionalized version Will are both driven by a “powerful libido” (Shakespeare 221). In his fictional accounts, Burgess’s Will is bisexual, having affairs with both Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and the ‘Dark Lady’ Fatimah, a Malaysian prostitute who ultimately infects him with syphilis. In “Will and Testament,” the affair with Southampton is suggested, and while Fatimah is absent, he is diagnosed with syphilis, nonetheless. Burgess’s Shakespeare is fully human: “We need not repine at the lack of a satisfactory Shakespeare portrait. To see his face, we need only look in a mirror. He is ourselves, ordinary suffering humanity, fired by moderate ambitions, concerned with money, the victim of desire, all too mortal. . . . We are all Will. Shakespeare is the name of one of our redeemers” (Shakespeare 261). The fact that Burgess self-identifies with Shakespeare brings autobiographical elements into his fictional Wills. For example, Will’s declaration, “I will turn papist” at the end of “Will and Testament” reflects Burgess’s own Catholic upbringing (39). At times, Will becomes an autobiographical projection of Burgess himself.

26Similarly, Kipling scholar John Coates notes autobiographical elements connecting Kipling to his portrayal of Will:

One intriguing point about the portrait of the ideal artist (for that is what it surely is) which Kipling offers, is the contrast between Shakespeare’s personal lack of egotism, his relaxed, undemanding attitudes to friends or casual contacts, and the way in which he stiffens into a rigorous hardness in the service of his “Demon.” This, it is clear, brings him on to a higher level of consciousness. (19)

27Kipling’s characterization of Shakespeare often does not correspond to Burgess’s depiction of Shakespeare, nor do these characteristics match the ideal Burgessian artist. Likewise, Kipling’s portrayal of Jonson is less affectionate than Burgess’s is. As Coates writes, “Both aspects of the ‘Shakespearian’ mind, the mind of the ideal artist Kipling aspired to be, are alien to the Jonsonian temper, the judging, categorising, theorising intellect” (19). As for the characterization of Ben Jonson, Burgess’s Ben appears as he is described in Shakespeare (166). Burgess writes him as a spy, who plays a role in foiling Gunpowder Plot. Whereas Kipling’s Will says, “‘And Kit [Christopher Marlow] that was my master in the beginning, he died when all the world was young. . . . I envied Kit’” (“Proofs of Holy Writ”), it is Ben who follows in Marlow’s footsteps as both rumored spy and playwright in Burgess’s story. Here, Ben is quick-thinking, witty, and pragmatic. Despite spending his days in and out of prison and having been in a fight and killed a man, he is shown to be more level-headed and rational than his friend Will.

28While these two stories offer different perspectives on the lives and personalities of Shakespeare and Jonson, they both serve to pay homage to these two great writers. Burgess also honors Kipling in the act of his retelling, showing Kipling’s story to be interesting and worthy enough to elicit Burgess’s own artistic response.

Synesthetic Language

30“Will and Testament” is no exception, and the following example will serve as case in point:

Out in silver street, which the sun had promoted to gold, they saw beggars, legless soldiers, drunken sailors, whores, dead cats, ordinary decent citizens in stuff gowns, a kilted Highlander with a flask of usquebaugh in place of a sporran. A ballad singer with few teeth sang:
For bonny sweet Robin was all my joy,
And Robin came oft to my bed.
But Robin did wrong, so to end his song
The headsman did chop off his head. (9-10)

The description above encourages readers not only to imagine the setting visually, but its sounds and smells can come alive in the imagination. By setting the lyrics to the song apart in italics, the Renaissance song “My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone,” also entitled “Bonny Sweet Robin,” becomes intermedially present in the story. William Chappell writes that the original lyrics have been lost, but he hypothesizes that Ophelia sings a version of this popular song in Hamlet Act 4, Scene 5 (153). Here Burgess picks up Ophelia’s song and fittingly modifies it to match the story he is telling. Even if some readers are not familiar with the original melody, they may compose their own tunes and hear the song with their minds’ ears, supporting even further the intended synesthetic experience of the text.

31“Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography” was originally released as a limited-edition publication by Plain Wrapper Press in 1977. According to Graham Foster, only eighty-six copies were produced. Foster writes that the story was published “with eight screenprints and other ornamentations by [Joe] Tilson. It [was] enclosed in a box made of Romanian oak, with five embellished panels by Tilson” (Foster). This multimodal dimension contributes to the overall aesthetic of the work and encourages the work to be considered in its materiality—as a work of art both visually and linguistically. The combination of the synesthetic language, the use of a musical form, the song lyrics, and the visual art by Tilson creates a holistic art experience, recalling Shakespeare’s own plays.

Fragmented, Unfinished

33In turning one last time to “Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography,” in the title itself, Burgess highlights the incomplete nature of his literary project in the form of a short story. His goal is not to tell the reader everything about Shakespeare’s life, but rather to engage the reader in a short consideration of what a brief period of his life might have been like. As mentioned above, each return of the refrain A signals a skip ahead in time, which reinforces the fragmentary nature of the story itself. The reader is encouraged to imagine the details to fill in the time that passes in these gaps, before the start of the story, and most specifically, what happens after the final period.

34Through my analysis of Burgess’s 1983 lecture and his short story “Will and Testament,” I have tried to focus on many of the characteristics typical of Burgess’s short fiction. Different classes of fiction, the commercial considerations of the author, the differences between short stories and novels, the frequent presence of intermedial techniques and references, the affordance of epiphanies or revelations, metaphorical language, experimentation, rewriting, and fragmentation are all common traits that Burgess highlights in his very dense talk. In Burgess’s short fiction, music and synesthetic language are recurrent features used to create interest and complexity. In the case study of “Will and Testament,” the use of a refrain has proven particularly versatile thereby contributing to the brevity of the text. Through this repetition, a musical structure was created that intentionally raises questions within the reader, thanks to its “single effect,” about the passage of time and the cyclical nature of life. At the same time, thanks to the mechanical aspects of repetition, humor has been added as a contrast to an otherwise rather serious, historically based fictional story. Typical of short fiction, Burgess asks a lot of his readers in terms of artistic and historical baggage so that his stories can be enjoyed to their fullest. The reward, though, is an entertaining reading experience full of wit, linguistic games, and hidden references to other works and brimming with questions that encourage the reader to reflect on what they have read and how it was constructed.

35Despite the rather unfavorable opening remarks he made about short fiction over forty years ago, Burgess, nevertheless, revealed his careful understanding of the genre of the short story in his 1983 lecture. Consequently, it is unsurprising that, despite all the research it took me to locate many of his short stories, he has shown himself adept at crafting his own short fiction, as well.