"Half a dollar every time you come," he said. "I know this is going to be Against the Law, you being under the Age of Consent, but I reckon you don't want to be put away as a Young Person in Need of Care and Protection any more than I want to be put away for having Seduced a Minor."
The Pianoplayers is the memoirs of an aged Englishwoman, Ellen Henshaw, living in the south of France, who has dictated them into a tape recorder and had them typed up by a young American writer. In the first chapter of the novel we learn that Ellen became wealthy as a sort of high-class prostitute who has had sex with famous men, and that her father was a talented but unheralded musician, and the succeeding chapters recount the courses of their difficult lives and Ellen's final triumph (if it really is a triumph.)
Ellen's father Bill was a pianoplayer and a petty thief, forced to raise Ellen by himself when, while he was serving in France in World War I, his wife died of the famous Spanish influenza. Bill is a creative and individualistic musician, unable to follow rules or direction, and so unable to play with an orchestra, so he gets jobs playing the piano in motion picture theaters; he watches the film and makes up his own music and contrives sound effects that go along with the action on the screen. His career is a spotty one, as he has trouble getting on with his bosses, and drinks too much besides, and then arrive the talkies, which render him obsolete. Bill then gets work with a "concert party," a sort of musical/comedy troupe, and fouls that up by getting mixed up with the unfaithful wife of the group's violin player.
Meanwhile, little Ellen is learning about music from her Dad, who has his own idiosyncratic methods of teaching musicians, and learning about sex from the adult men--and at least one adult woman--who admire her thirteen-year-old body and take advantage of her. These relationships have a mercenary character, allowing Ellen to supplement the family income.
After he is thrown out of that troupe, Bill is recruited by a shady character to be the star attraction of a crazy business scheme: Bill will embark on a piano marathon, try to play for thirty days straight, with only a two-hour break each day. Halfway through the marathon, which features Bill not only playing pop tunes and famous classical pieces but composing his own opera on the fly (one about the struggle between communism and businesspeople, international war and modern man's abandonment of God) as well as his own symphonies, and two-thirds of the way through the novel, Bill dies of a heart attack.
Ellen, not yet 14 and an orphan, with no relatives with whom she gets on well, is recruited by some sneaky French people posing as nuns and taken to the Continent to work in a brothel catering to men who have some kind of father-daughter incest fetish. When Ellen gets too old for that, she graduates to vanilla sex at a different brothel. Our narrator returns to England shortly before the start of the Second World War and gets married and gives birth to a son. One of the more disturbing aspects of the novel is the revelation that Ellen does not love her son, and considers raising a child pretty boring after an exciting career of being a whore in France:
...he was a sweet child, but I don't know what it was, I didn't have a real motherly feeling towards him, perhaps I was not cut out to be a mother, and I liked him only as I liked the kid of the lady next door.
Ellen leaves her son with some of her husband's relatives and gets a job as a liaison with the Free French, and returns to her calling of having sex with strangers for money. When her husband unexpectedly comes back from fighting the Axis in North Africa to attend Staff College, he catches her with a client and the marriage goes kaput. Showing us readers what sex means to Ellen, she tells him
"What you've had for the cost of a marriage license...adds up to a fair sum of money at the rate I'm entitled to."For Ellen, sex is not an expression of love, but a service to be bought and sold.
After the war, Ellen returns to France and advances in her career as what we now call a sex worker. As we approach page 200 of The Pianoplayers we get the metaphor/analogy/allegory trumpeted on the cover of my paperback: having sex with a woman, Ellen suggests, is like playing the piano--doing it successfully requires talent and training most men lack. By 1956, Ellen is running her own brothel in Singapore and she puts into practice an idea she has had for a while, teaching men how to sexually satisfy a woman, using principles not dissimilar to those used by her father to teach her how to play the piano. She founds schools which provide practical instruction all over the world.
Putting aside the last chapter, The Pianoplayers is an engaging mainstream novel. A musician himself, Burgess fills the novel with information about music, and the same age as the narrator, offers charming anecdotes and insights about ordinary life in the 1920s and 1930s--what people ate, what cinema and the popular theatre were like, etc.; all this is entertaining and enlightening. The pace is brisk and Ellen's voice is colloquial and fun; though almost everything that happens in the novel amounts to some kind of tragedy, act of exploitation or crime, the whole thing is presented in a spirit of fun, and it is fun.
Maybe today people would object to a man writing in the voice of a woman and depicting in a pretty light-hearted--on the surface at least--fashion sexual relationships between adults and a teen-aged girl, relationships that we today would label abuse, sex trafficking and pedophilia or ephebophilia, and that even at the time depicted were considered sinful by the religious authorities and were prosecuted as crimes by the secular authorities, a fact of which Ellen and the Englishmen who take advantage of her are very aware (though the Frenchies seem to blow it off as business as usual!)
Remember when we read Burgess's The Wanting Seed, how we talked about Burgess's theories of history and government and all that? Well, is there a "point" or an argument we can discern from The Pianoplayers that we can discuss? It can't just be a wacky comedy with a strong vein of nostalgia that serves a means for Burgess to voice his love of music, can it?
Perhaps the comedic tone of the novel indicates that the point is that, no matter how hard life is, you can find some pleasure in it if you have the right attitude, Another, related, possibility is that we should see Ellen's wit and bright attitude as a mere smokescreen, that the novel is a reminder that life is horrible and perhaps getting worse. If we move into esoteric territory, perhaps we can see The Pianoplayers as a sneaky defense of traditional gender roles and an attack on sexual license and the sexual revolution. (I know I said this sort of thing about a Thomas Disch story in my last blog post, but it fits here too!) Ellen, deprived of a stable home life by the death of her mother and her father's irresponsibility, becomes a whore who is unable to love her husband or her own child. (Just like I said about the Disch story, the depiction of men's treatment of women, and of employers' treatment of employees, may also make the story fertile ground for feminist and anti-capitalist interpretations. What Burgess's novel has that Disch's lacks is a bunch of religious references that perhaps put forward the idea that mankind's unhappiness is a reflection of our refusal to embrace God and comport ourselves properly in the wonderful world He has given us, a world that, were we to behave, would offer us all a decent life.)
The breathless blurbs overdo it, but The Pianoplayers is an easy to digest, entertaining piece of work.
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