Smelling of stolen apples but otherwise

Ready to scorch, a punishing sun, saying:

Where is this man of the northern sea, let me

Chide him, let me do more if

His heresy merits it, what is his heresy?

And a hand-rubbing priest, olive-skinned,

Garlic-breathed, looked up at the

Great African solar face to whine:

If it please you, the heresy is evidently a

Heresy but there is as yet no name for it.

And Augustine said: All things must have a name,

Otherwise, Proteus-like, they slither and slide

From the grasp. A thing does not

Exist until it has a name. Name it

After this sea-man, call it after

Pelagius. And lo the heresy existed.

What could be written sometime, Enderby suddenly thought, was a saga of a man's teeth-the Odontiad. The idea came to him because of this image of the African bishop and saint and chider, whose thirty-two wholesome and gleaming teeth he clearly saw, flashing like two ivory blades (an upper teeth and a lower teeth) as he gnashed out condemnatory silver Latin. The Odontiad-a poetic record of dental decay in thirty-two books. The idea excited him so much that he felt an untimely and certainly unearned gust of hunger. He sharply down-sir-downed his growling stomach and went on with his work.

Pelagius appeared, north-pale, cool as one of

Britain's summers, to say, in British Latin:

Christ redeemed us from the general sin, from

The Adamic inheritance, the sour apple

Stuck in the throat (and underneath his solar

Hide Augustine blushed). And thus, my lord,

Man was set free, no longer bounden

In sin's bond. He is free to choose

To sin or not to sin, he is in no wise

Predisposed, it is all a matter of

Human choice. And by his own effort, yea,

His own effort only, not some matter of God's

Grace arbitrarily and capriciously

Bestowed, he may reach heaven, he may indeed

Make his heaven. He is free to do so.

Do you deny his freedom? Do you deny

That God's incredible benison was to

Make man free, if he wished, to offend him?

That no greater love is conceivable

Than to leave the creature free to hate

The creator and come to love the hard way

But always (mark this mark this) by his own

Will by his own free will?

Cool Britain thus spoke, a land where indeed a

Man groans not for the grace of rain, where

He can sow and reap, a green land, where

The God of unpredictable Africa is

A strange God

It was no use. He ached with hunger. He went rumbling to the kitchen and looked at his untidy store cupboards. Soon he sat down to a new-rinsed dish of yesterday's stew reheated (chuck steak, onions, carrots, spuds, well-spiced with Lea and Perrin's and a generous drop or so of chili sauce) while there sang on the stove in deep though tepid fat a whole bag of ready-cut crinkled potato pieces and, in another pan, slices of spongy canned meat called Mensch or Munch or something. The kettle was on for tea.

To his surprise, Enderby felt, while sitting calm, relaxed, and in mildly pleasant anticipation of good things to come, a sudden spasm that was not quite dyspepsia. An obscene pain struck in the breastbone, then climbed with some difficulty into the left clavicle and, from there, cascaded like a handful of heavy money down the left upper arm. He was appalled, outraged, what had he done to deserve-He caught an image of Henry James's face for some reason, similarly appalled though in a manner somehow patrician. Then nausea, sweating, and very cruel pain took over entirely. What the hell did one do now? The dish of half-eaten stew did not tell him, except not to finish it. What was that about the something-or-other distinguished thing? Ah yes, death. He was going to die. That was what it was.

He staggered moaning and cursing about the unfairness to the living room (dying room?). Death. It was very important to know what he was dying of. Was this what was called a heart attack? He sat on a comfortless chair and saw pain dripping onto the floor from his forehead. His shirt was soaked. It was so bloody hot. Breathing was very difficult. He tried to stop breathing, but his body, ill as it was, was not going to have that. Forced to take in a sharp lungful, he found the pain receding. Not death then. Not yet. A warning only. There was a statutory number of heart attacks before the ultimate, was there not? What he was being warned against he did not know. Smoking? Masturbation? Poetry?

He smelt smoke. Ah, was that also a symptom, a dysfunctioning of the olfactory system or something? But no, it was the damned food he had left sizzling. He tottered back into the kitchen and turned everything off. Didn't feel much like eating now.

Enderby left the apartment and the apartment building itself with great caution, as though death, having promised sometime to present himself in one form, might (with a dirtiness more appropriate to life) now present himself in another. Enderby was well wrapped against what he took to be the February cold. He had looked from his twelfth-floor window to see fur caps as if this were Moscow, though also sun and wind-scoured sidewalks. Liverish weather, then. He was dressed in his old beret, woollen gloves, and a kind of sculpted Edwardian overcoat bequeathed by his old enemy Rawcliffe. Rawcliffe was long dead. He had died bloodily, fecally, messily, and now, to quote his own poem, practically his only own poem, his salts drained into alien soil. He had got death over with, then. He was, in a sense, lucky.

Perhaps posthumous life was better than the real thing. Oh God yes, I remember Enderby, what a man. Eater, drinker, wencher, and such exotic adventures. You could go on living without all the trouble of still being alive. Your character got blurred and mingled with those of other dead men, wittier, handsomer, themselves more vital now that they were dead. And there was one's work, good or bad but still a death-cheater. Perennius acre, and it was no vain boast even for the lousiest sonneteer that the Muse had ever farted onto. It wasn't death that was the trouble, of course, it was dying.

Enderby also carried, or was part carried by, a very special stick or cane. It was a swordstick, also formerly Rawcliffe's property. Enderby had gathered that it was illegal to go around with it in America, a concealed weapon, but that was the worst bloody hypocrisy he had ever met in this hypocritical country where everybody had a gun. He had not had cause to use the sword part of the stick, but it was a comfort to have in the foul streets that, like pustular bandages, wrapped the running sore of his university around. For corruption of the best was always the worst, lilies that fester, etc. What had been a centre of incorrupt learning was now a whorehouse of progressive intellectual abdication. The kids had to have what they wanted, this being a so-called democracy: courses in soul cookery, whatever that was, and petromusicology, that being teen-age garbage now treated as an art, and the history of black slavery, and innumerable branches of a subject called sociology. The past was spat upon and the future was ready to be spat upon too, since this would quickly enough turn itself into the past.

The elevator depressed Enderby to a vestibule with telescreens on the wall, each channel showing something different but always people unbent on violence or breaking in, it being too early in the day and probably too cold. A Puerto Rican named Sancho sat, in the uniform designed by Ms. Schwarz of the block police committee, nursing a submachine gun. He greeted Enderby in Puerto Rican and Enderby responded in Tangerine. The point was: where was the capital of Spanish these days? Certainly not Madrid. And of English? Certainly not London. Enderby, British poet. That was exact but somehow ludicrous. Wordsworth, British poet. That was ludicrous in a different way. When Wordsworth wrote of a British shepherd, as he did somewhere, he meant a remote shadowy Celt. Enderby went out into the cold and walked carefully, leaning on his swordstick, towards Broadway. This afternoon he had two classes and he wondered if he was up to either of them. The first was a formal lecture really in which, heretically, he taught, told, gave out information. It was minor Elizabethan dramatists, a subject none of the regular English Department was willing-or, so far as he could tell, qualified-to teach. This afternoon he was dealing with-