Anthony Burgess - But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings

by Anthony Burgess

Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill; First Edition edition (February 1986)

ISBN-10: 0070089779

Preface
Grunts from a Sexist Pig
Evil Eye
Writer Among Professors
Endtime
Thoughts on the Present Discontents
A Greene Trilogy
1 Monsieur Greene of Antibes
2 How to Defect
3 Hidalgo Ingenioso Christography
Sang Real
Telejesus (or Mediachrist) Quiet Waters
Preparing for the Pope (1982)
The Hard Way Call, Call, Vienna Mine
(or Yours) Malaya
1 Tanah Melayu
2 White Men Sweating
Homage to Barcelona
That Sweet Enemy
Yves and Eve 80
Morbus Gallicus 92
Unclean 98 A Deadly Sin
Creativity for All 100
On the Cards 102
But Do Blondes Prefer
Gentlemen? 104
Beneficent Poppy 107
The Whip 109
Futures 112
1 After Ford 112
2 After Orwell 114
Cry of Pain 117
The British Observed 119
Kant and the Cripple 122
Grace 124
Sophia 127
The OED Man 132
OED+ 138
People as Well as Words 141
Anglo-American 143
English as a Foreign Language 146
Partridge in a Word Tree 148 Where They Think They
Come From 151
Wise Brevities 155
Now Quotes 157
Abiding Mystery 160
Big Book 162
ICC
Slang with Tenure 1 b5
1 P K
1 Crimespeak lb5
2 Ecofreaks, Etc. 168
English as a Creole 170
1 HO
Homo Sibilans 17z
Isoglosses and So Forth 175
Teenspeech 179
Yidglish 181
Onomastic 184
New Light on Language 186
Babel and Bible 189
Firetalk 192
Signals 199
The Language of Food 201
The Times as Guardian 206
The Language Man 209
Ameringlish 211
Fair Speaking 215
Who Said It? 217
1 Oxquote 217
Questioning Kipling 320
Levity and Gravity 323
Ear and Beard's Point 326
Perkinsian Job 329
Sleuth 332
Hem not Writing Good 334
Chip on Shoulder 337
Poor S.O.B. 339
Scott as Hack 342
Cole Fire 345
Thin Man 348
Thurbing 350
Rusticant Wilson 352
Mother of Nightwood 355
Pen Pals 357
Loving the Unlovable 360
War and the Weaker 363
The Magus of Mallorca 365
Miss Shakespeare 373
Living for Writing 375
Inexhaustible Wells 378
H.D. and Husband 383
Pipesmoking Monster 385
Death in Utah 390
Anal Magic 393
Lawrence Elopes 396
New from Scotland 398
A World of Universals 401
Taking Canada Seriously 404
The Last Capote 406
Life after Murder 409
Wicked Mother Russia 412
Red Conversion 414
The Winds of Chelsea 417
Irish Hero 419
All Too Irish 424
Murmurous Mud 427
Favourite Novel 429
Joyce as Centenarian 431
Joyce and Trieste 437
A Truer Joyce 440
The Muse and the Me 443
Irish Facts 445
Gloopy Glupov 448
A Nevsky Prospect 450
Solzhenitsyn as War Poet 452
Dorogoi Bunny, Dear Volodya... 455
Poor Russian Writers 458
Cruel? Crude? 460
Gigs and Games 463
The Boredom of SF 466
Laughs 468
The Smile, Not the Laugh 471
Women Have So Much 473
A Pox on Literature 476
Sahibs 478
Young Man's Anger 481
Tripe? 483
Lovers' Contracts 486
What Makes the Novel Novel 488
Believing in Something 491
States of Grace 493
Magic and Elegance 496
Garping 500
Hitler Lives 502
Hitler's England 504
The Mystery of Evil 506
Fire and Order 509
Nobel Humility 512
Misoginy? 514
The God of Job 516
Raw Matter 519
Patriotic Gore 522
Inky Islands 526
Anglophilia 528
Wandering Through the Grove 531
Shaw's Music 539
Ludwig Van 541
A Gap in Our Musical Education 549
Highly Vocal 551
Artist and Beggar 553
A Poet at the Opera 556
Words Without Music 558
Operatics 561
Wagner in Brown 564
All Too English? 567
S. Without G. 569
A Short Short While 573
Hitter Out 575
The Maestro Heresy 578
Anybody Can Conduct 584
Witch in C Major 587

The title is not altogether facetious. As every hammerer at a typewriter knows, QWERTYUIOP is the blazon on the second bank of the keyboard from the top. I have earned my living with a typewriter for the last twenty-five years, and I have developed an affection for the instrument analogous to my love for my old Gaveau piano, which once belonged to Josephine Baker. But whereas a piano, once acquired, becomes a permanent article of furniture, typewriters break down irreparably and have to be replaced. Yet the old loved name - Qwert Yuiop - reappears and proclaims a continuity of identity, minimally modified when it gets into Italy or France and becomes Qzert Yuiop. Without Qwert Yuiop's willingness to submit to my punishing fingers I doubt if I could have sustained the profession of author. I know how to use a pen, but ever since I took my last written examination, the pen has always been for me a musical instrument: I still write orchestral scores with it but, associating it as I do with the shaping of notes and dynamic signals, I find it difficult to put it in the service of any written statement longer than allegro ma non troppo. Still, I do not have to make excuses for not being a literary penman (except in so far as they say that typewriterese is a recognized and debased type of prose). Nobody is nowadays, and thralldom to Qwert Yuiop persists even when the writer graduates from the neolithic technology of the typewriter to the electronic mysteries of the word processor.

As I write, an IBM word processor with daisywheel sits malevolently waiting for me in a customs shed. I am scared of making the transition from clattering Qwert Yuiop to his velvety successor, even though I am beginning to be warned that publishers will soon accept from authors only floppy discs. I have not even made the hop from manual to electric typewriter. I do not like the low hum which says 'Get on with it, you're wasting power', and I do not like my hammering to be muffled. When you hear your own clatter you know you are at work, as a blacksmith is. More, the rest of the household knows you are at work and does not suspect you of covertly devouring a Playboy centrefold.

Qwert Yuiop in his traditional form, which is not much different from the way he was in the pioneering Remington days, when Yost and Soule thought of a writing machine as a kind of gun (hence 'Chicago typewriter'), not only relates authorship to artisanship; he separates the written from the writer (a pen is too close to the heart) and brings him closer to that objectification which only the final printed copy can bestow. A writer does not pour out his heart or even talk on paper. He creates an artifact. Even a newspaper article is an artifact, a thing for use. When used it is discarded, having done its work. It is not like a book or a symphony, which the creator submits, with little hope, to the notice of posterity 'Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof,' says a character in Joyce's Ulysses. He means primarily the news, but he must mean also the kind of thing represented by what I have assembled here -chiefly comments on books, the writings of a writer on other people's writing, which - since a publishing event is a new thing that happens - may be considered news about the unnewsworthy.

Why trouble to collect such ephemera and put them to bed between hard or soft covers? Chiefly because of writer's guilt. A novelist like myself brings out a novel occasionally, and it is assumed by some that he does nothing between novels. Writers are supposed to be lazy (H .G. Wells admitted to an idleness that kept him glued to the chair; glued to (he chair, he felt he might as well write), but a collection of a writer's journalism is meant to convince the reading world that, like everybody else, he gets on with what the French call the boulot. In this book you will find evidence that, in the last seven years, I have not been altogether idle. The pieces I have collected amount to about one third of my total journalistic output during that period. It has been a period spent mostly on the Cote d'Azur, a region dedicated to that rich idleness which former President Nixon inveighed against, and my response to other people's sybaritic laziness has been to work hard.