Unavoidable Whimsy

THE EVE OF SAINT VENUS by Anthony Burgess. 138 pages. Norton. $4.95.

The English themselves freely concede that the pleasures of love are something that foreigners are better at. Aphrodite, after all, was a Greek, and Venus a Latin.

Anthony Burgess, a writer of great wit and erudition, once dared to put the goddess of love in a soggy English garden and between damp English sheets. Only a writer as talented as Burgess could have succeeded in such an unpromising enterprise.

Publishing this little work (or opusculum, as Burgess calls it) 20 years after he wrote it and six years after it came out in England, the author also issues a fair warning. The Eve of Saint Venus, he says, "depends for its effect largely on an understanding of the insular and conservative English character, especially as manifested in a silly, ingrown, mainly nonexistent rural aristocracy."

Whimsy is unavoidable. A dotty baronet has received a consignment of cut-rate statues from his alcoholic twin brother. The stone gods and goddesses include, naturally, Venus. A ring slipped on Venus' finger by a nervous bridegroom brings her to life, and love is reborn in a cold climate. The cast of characters, Burgess has explained, is drawn fondly from stock theatrical figures: "The boneheaded gold-hearted country squire in plus fours, the pert and resourceful servant, the grim but reliable chatelaine, the sweet guileless young lovers, the comic Anglican clergyman." Only a writer who can bring such scarecrows to life would be willing to proclaim, let alone admit, that his characters come out of a fusty stage wardrobe. In The Eve of Saint Venus, this miracle is performed.

Burgess' insular joke book is old, but the joke is a good one and the author tells it with relish, as if for the first time. An example of the author's catholic English wit: loony squire replying to a patronizing remark of the vicar's about animal pleasures: "And don't be too hard on animals. There's a lot of good in animals, especially when they're killed and cooked."

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