"Heretical, yes, you were right when you said that. You talk of an abstraction, a ghost."

"I talk of an ultimate reality."

In an essay published in 1967, in a collection entitled The God I Want, Burgess typically conducted his argument as a dialogue between two speakers, in this case "Anthony" and "Burgess". "Anthony", the sceptical voice, interviews "Burgess" who confesses to believing in a God whom he compares to mathematics, to grammar, and to the score of a symphony. Not, he says, the composer. The score, the notation, the form itself of the symphony, the potential experience of coherence and beauty. Like, he might have added, the sonnet form. Elsewhere, he said that his God did exist, but was like a Beethoven symphony eternally playing itself to itself, unconcerned with human plights.

Burgess reincarnates Keats's death, and Belli's Roman life and work, in his own vigorous English. He adds a further puzzle, in the shape of another alter ego, an Englishman called J. J. Wilson, descended from a Joseph Joachim Guglielmi, who lives in Manchester, dies in New York, shadows Burgess-Wilson's own career, translates Belli and is murdered in New York, having written several of Burgess's own rude juvenile sonnets.

Keats wrote his own epitaph, which is on his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. On Burgess's grave is written ABBA ABBA. A. B. is of course also Anthony Burgess.

A. S. Byatt, August 2000

ONE

ONE

"Isaac," he said. "Marmaduke. Which of the two do you more seem to yourself to be?" He mused smiling among the ilex trees. The dome of San Pietro down there in the city was grape-hued in the citron twilight.

"I have never much cared for either name," said Lieutenant Elton of the Royal Engineers. "At school they called me Ikey Marmalade."