Honey for the Bears by Anthony Burgess

'Coming over here with all those bourgeois clothes to sell, but too much concerned with your sexuality, dig, to really get down to a bit of hard work and sell them.  And boasting last night about having a big capitalist shop full of silver and jewels back in England.  Everybody was like disgusted.'

'Not everybody would understand what I was saying.'

'Oh, you got down to speaking Russian pretty good by the time you were trying to tear the clothes off of people.'

It feels like an eternity since I last worked on this ol' blog o' mine, social obligations and the quest for money taking up my time and keeping me from my true calling of reading crazy stories and spoiling them for others.  But today MPorcius Fiction Log is back!  With a mainstream novel I believe worthy of the attention of all readers interested in the Cold War or in sexual orientation and sexual identity, which, judging from what I am hearing on the news, should be just about everybody! 

Our last blog post was about a Fritz Leiber collection on the theme that "man is wolf to man," and within it we noticed an ad for books by Anthony Burgess, the famous British writer responsible for A Clockwork Orange.  One such book was Honey for the Bears, a 1963 novel.  Advertising works, and I was duly inspired to read Honey for the Bears, and settled on a scan available at the internet archive of a 1978 Norton hardcover edition.  

With the sole exception of a chapter which consists of the text of a letter, Honey for the Bears is written in the third-person and our main character, Paul Hussey, is always on screen.  Hussey is an English antiques dealer and an RAF veteran of the Second World War; it was during the war he met his American wife, Belinda.  During his war service, Paul was close to a fellow airman, Robert, whose aircraft was shot down by the Germans and who endured an ordeal in the ocean from which he never truly recovered.  Some years after the war, after both men had married, Paul and Robert reconnected and the two couples became very friendly, spending much time together; they even, it seems, engaged in what amounts to what people call "wife-swapping" or "swinging."  Robert died recently, apparently of a heart attack brought on by lingering effects of his war injuries, throwing Robert's wife, Sandra, into a financial crisis.

Robert, an aficionado of Russian culture and a fluent speaker of Russian, had a risky way of making money.  Robert would buy cheap synthetic dresses by the hundreds and then smuggle them into the Soviet Union, selling them wholesale to a man in Leningrad who would then retail them on the black market.  Robert's untimely demise came after buying one consignment of "twenty dozen" dresses but before departing for the Eastern Bloc, leaving these dresses on Sandra's hands.  Sandra convinced Paul and Belinda to secretly carry the dresses, in violation of Soviet law, to Russia to sell them to that black marketeer, and the couple set off on a Soviet passenger ship with the idea that their trip to Khrushchev's USSR, shortly after the flight of Yuri Gagarin, would be like a holiday.  As the novel begins, they are aboard ship, bound for Leningrad, and things are already going haywire, as Belinda has contracted a mysterious and painful rash and the ships' Soviet doctor doesn't have any penicillin with which to treat her: 

'...it [penicillin] is an English medicine.  But we are on a Soviet ship and it is right we use Soviet medicines.'

This woman blames Belinda's illness on the poor food available in Great Britain, and assures Paul that they will eat better in the USSR.

For most of the novel Belinda and Paul are separated, she in a Leningrad hospital where the medical staff psychoanalyzes her (I don't think we ever learn what that rash was all about), he out on the streets, desperately trying to avoid arrest by the authorities, who have already seized Robert's Russian associate and are pretty sure Paul is equally guilty of "bringing in capitalist goods in order to sell them and thus upset the Soviet economy."  Equally important as the plot threads concerning Belinda's health and Paul's liberty are the many mysteries about Paul and Belinda, the dead Robert and the absent Sandra, that unfold as the novel progresses.   

There are several interesting recurring themes in Honey for the Bears.  A big one, of course, is the Cold War, and Burgess offers a peculiarly English or British or maybe European view of the struggle between the liberal democracies of the West and communist totalitarianism of the East.  Burgess portrays the Soviet Union as poor and dirty, the communist system as inefficient and inhuman and its officials as incompetent and inhumane; Western supporters of the USSR are shown to be, at best, a bunch of dopes--among Paul and Belinda's fellow passengers are a leftist British "lecturer" (I guess this is equivalent to an American assistant professor) and her posse of students, jerks who slavishly parrot the propaganda from Moscow.  But all you commies and Russophiles out there will be relieved to hear that Burgess has many arrows in his quiver and a lot more to say about the Cold War than that.  For one thing, he stresses continuities between Tsarist (as he spells it) and post-Revolutionary Russia.  More interestingly still, Paul repeatedly notices similarities between the Russian people and the working-class English people among whom he grew up.  (Paul, though now a middle-class shop owner interested in serious literature, was born into a working-class family, and did not attend university.)  Again and again a Russian's appearance reminds him of a relative of his own he knew in his youth, and Paul quickly comes to like the ordinary Russian people, no matter what atrocities the Soviet authorities inflict on him.  The ordinary people of Russia and England are essentially, Burgess seems to be suggesting, the same. 

Belinda being American, and the fact that Paul meets other expatriate Yanks in Leningrad, gives Burgess a ready platform to present opinions of the United States, and he sets up a sort of parallelism between the land of the free and the home of the brave and the Evil Empire, with Paul saying stuff like "You Americans and Russians are all the same.  You promise things and you don't keep your promises.  You just can't be trusted, that's what it is."  (Again the idea that people separated by geographic, political and ethnic boundaries are essentially the same.)  How seriously we should take Paul's assessments is an open question; for one thing, Paul is portrayed as not only a loser but also as an aggressor himself.  It seems possible that Paul's attitude is meant as much to portray the psychological effect on Great Britain of being demoted from world leader to junior partner as it is to reflect reality; it is absurd to think that two nations as different culturally, economically, politically as were the USA and the USSR in the early Sixties are "the same," but from the point of view of an exhausted Britain the similarities of the two superpowers, both (apparently at least) vigorous and expanding their might and influence, perhaps their similarities are more notable than their differences.  

Having raised the idea that Paul is a loser and an aggressor brings us to another of Honey for the Bear's big themes: sex, and in particular homosexuality and sexual ambiguity.  Homosexuality is mentioned on the first page when a minor character, Madox, opines that, in the same way homosexuals aren't homosexuals all the time, say when they are asleep or on the toilet, communists can't be communists all the time.  Burgess's novel is full of mysteries--some of which are resolved, and others of which go unsolved--and they all seem to revolve around sexual identity and sexual orientation.  For example, Paul is unable to identify the sex of another secondary character introduced on page one, an irascible trouble-making oldster in a wheelchair whom Paul dubs "Dr. Tiresias," a reference to Greek myth and of course T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, of which Burgess was a devoted fan.  We never learn this mysterious figure's sex or name; Madox, this individual's assistant, just calls his employer "the Doc."

We gradually learn as the novel progresses how unusual Paul's and Belinda's sexual lives have been.  Paul is less interested in sex than is Belinda, and it turns out that Paul and Robert had a brief homosexual fling; the woman doctor treating Belinda in the hospital claims that one of Belinda's problems is that Paul is gay and is thus does not really lover her and is unable to satisfy her.  At the apartment of a young left-wing American (who claims to want to help Paul but betrays him to the Soviet authorities), Paul gets terribly drunk and sexually assaults a series of men.

At the start of the novel, Belinda expresses bitterness, even hatred of Sandra, claiming she probably murdered Robert.  At first Paul simply thinks this is because (as he suspects) all women really hate each other, and later he wonders if it is jealously that has raised her ire--maybe Belinda suspects Paul of preferring Sandra to his own wife, or maybe Belinda preferred Robert over Paul and envies the time Sandra spent with the now forever lost Robert.  Eventually Paul realizes that Belinda and Sandra were lesbian lovers.

Paul is something of a screw up, and is repeatedly portrayed as impotent and emasculated.  For example, in a bicycle accident years ago he lost his four lower front teeth, and wears a little denture in that space.  Well, the Soviet customs agent who fails to confiscate the 240 contraband dresses or Paul's copy of the forbidden Doctor Zhivago seizes the tube of adhesive Paul uses to secure this denture, saying it is a narcotic, and throughout the middle section of the novel the thing threatens to fall out, despite Paul's efforts to jam it in place with cotton and little pieces of wood (ouch!); it is finally lost when Soviet police beat up poor Paul (ouch again!)  Paul physically forces himself on a woman who shows contempt for him and when she has finally succumbed to his desires he finds himself unable to maintain an erection, inspiring her to laugh at him.

(The sexual transgressions don't end there--we learn that Belinda was raped by her father--a professor of English--and that the young Paul was aroused by the smell of his mother.  Yikes!)

Burgess combines two of his themes--the alleged similarity of the United States and the Soviet Union and Paul's impotence--in a scene in which Paul is interrogated by the police; this scene strongly suggests Paul is meant to represent a Britain/Western Europe that is psychologically scarred by the World Wars and feels hopeless and impotent in a world in which it lies trapped between two revolutionary superpowers characterized by boundless ambition, one that transforms the world with market capitalism and the other that seeks to do so with totalitarian socialism.

'You are very optimistic in the West, that must be admitted.  You look forward to a future.'

'No,' said Paul, 'not a future.  At least not in Europe.  America's different, of course, but America's really only a kind of Russia.  You've no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future.  It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive.'  

'Or like being impotent,' said Zverkov.  Paul blushed.  

In the last quarter of Honey for the Bears, Belinda leaves Paul for the lesbian doctor who has been psychoanalyzing her, following her to her ancestral home in the Crimea on the coast of the Sea of Azov.  Belinda leaves Paul a letter that constitutes the entire text of a chapter and gives Burgess a chance to parody both Americans and English people by depicting an American view of England.  Perhaps the most memorable sally in the letter is Belinda's idea that a life of relative freedom and wealth has made Love with a capital "L" almost disappear in Britain and America, because so many substitutes for Love are easily available; in Russia, by contrast, Love flourishes, because Love is all the people of the USSR have amid their many enduing hardships. 

Dr. Tiresias returns to the narrative--it is revealed this mysterious character is a smuggler who brings contraband to the Soviet Union secreted in his or her wheelchair.  Because Belinda is staying behind, Paul has an extra passport and an extra place on the ship upon which he will be leaving the worker's paradise; the Doc arranges for a young Russian man wanted by the authorities who has long been in hiding to take Belinda's place on the ship.  Is this guy really the feeble-minded but physically massive son of a dissident musician who was Robert's favorite composer?  Or just a violent criminal who has aided Dr. Tiresias in his or her smuggling and will rat out the Doc if the ruthless Soviet cops get their hands on him?      

In keeping with the novel's themes of gender-bending and of ludicrous incompetence and failure, this joker is very badly disguised as a woman, and he and Paul are caught by the crew of the ship en route to Helsinki.  In port in Finland the two Soviet police officers who beat up Paul come back into his life, tasked with taking him and the cross-dressing fugitive back to Leningrad.  In an inversion of the shipboard events at the start of the story, in which a communist English academic and her mob of leftist students maligned Paul, Paul and his slow-witted companion are rescued by a Russophobic British lecturer who leads a squad of hefty English football fans in disrupting the transfer of the captives to the shore.  

The story ends on a hopeful note as Paul accepts his homosexuality and reflects that small countries like Finland and England have a role to play in the world now dominated by the Americans and the Soviet communists: the job of preserving the beautiful high culture of the past from the market efficiency of the USA and the gruesome totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.  Maybe we should see Honey For the Bears as a warning from a conservative about the dangers to happiness, love and freedom posed by both the market and the state.

As I have chronicled, Honey for the Bears addresses all sorts of interesting topics and is full of allusions and references to art, music and literature (I have limited myself to a mention of Eliot, but Shakespeare and Tolstoy and others are in there.)  The novel is also cleverly structured and written; everything fits together in a satisfying way--the way passionate lecturers, a female useful idiot and then a male historian who oddly has it in for Russians because of things he read in his research on Richard Chancellor, bookend the story is one example.  At the same time, Paul's saga is kind of sad and sometimes disgusting, and in many ways, including morally, it is ambiguous--none of the characters is very likable or admirable, for example.  So, it is not exactly a fun or light read. 

Thumbs up from me, but be forewarned, though it is marketed as a comedy, Honey for the Bears is no joy ride, people!

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It's back to science fiction stories for our next episode, oh my brothers.  Stay tuned!