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ANTHONY BURGESS
25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993 |
Any regular reader of mine will know in what high esteem I hold the work of English novelist, essayist, memoirist, poet, linguist, translator, librettist and composer Anthony Burgess. The man was an engine, a multi-skilled polymath whose genius seemingly knew no bounds and whose astonishing productivity put the so-called 'artistic achievements' of most of his contemporaries to shame. While the four titles discussed below represent a very small sampling of what has been written by and about him before and since his death, they are definitely worth seeking out by anybody interested in learning more about him and his most famous (but not necessarily best) work of fiction A Clockwork Orange (1962) and the visually arresting 1971 film it went on to inspire.
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| Picador/Pan Macmillan first UK edition, 2005 |
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (2005) by ANDREW BISWELL
The word 'real' is included in the title for a reason. Andrew Biswell, an English academic and literary critic who began studying Burgess's life and work and publishing articles about him in 1995, was partly motivated to write this well balanced, diligently researched biography by the 2002 publication of what remains perhaps the most undeserved assault ever launched against the work and reputation of a dead (and therefore unable to defend himself) British writer. That book, penned by controversial Welsh journalist and biographer Roger Lewis and titled Anthony Burgess: A Life, became a shortlived scandal in the world of English letters, with Lewis being roundly condemned by critics and Burgess fans alike for having published what amounts to a work of extended character assassination fuelled, in the main, by a vindictiveness born of disillusion with his subject and that subject's extensive body of published literary work. As a university student Lewis had revered Burgess, inspiring him to approach the great man with the idea of one day writing his biography. But something went seriously awry during the twenty years it took Lewis to complete the project. So awry, in fact, that he descends to accusing his former idol of being, among other things, a 'lazy sod,' a 'pretentious prick' and, least forgivably of all, a 'complete fucking fool.'
Burgess may have been many things but a fool he was not –– a point consistently re-proven by Biswell who, unlike his loopy predecessor, actually bothered to visit the archives of the writer's papers held at various universities in Canada, France and North America and read his way through all of them, combining this information with cross-checked references drawn from interviews conducted with as many of Burgess's surviving friends, acquaintances, in-laws and contemporaries as he could physically track down. Biswell's approach to his subject is one of rigorous, well informed scholarship (which is only to be expected from a Professor of Modern Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University), untainted by Lewis's inexplicable need to belittle, scorn and repudiate a writer who had done him no injury apart from failing to live up to his somewhat skewed idea of perfection. Needless to say, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess is a reliable and very readable biography, offering verified fact in place of unverified opinion and according its subject the respect due him as an artist and, more importantly, as a human being.
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.
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| William Heinemann Ltd first UK edition, 1987 |
Little Wilson and Big God (1987) by ANTHONY BURGESS
'The professional novelist will sometimes have a sly and perhaps unworthy reason for writing about himself,' Burgess admitted in the first part of what the UK edition of this book described as his confessions. (In the US edition it was labelled his autobiography, perhaps to differentiate it from the slew of indifferently written books regularly published by and about that nation's apparently inexhaustible supply of attention seeking celebrities.) 'In a fallow time, when he does not have the energy to invent, he will be glad to fall back on reminiscence, though recognising that it is difficult to draw a boundary between the remembered and the imagined. Finding no other food, he becomes autophagous. An autobiography may be a substitute for the novel that cannot be written.' This statement has the undeniable ring of truth to it and the glory of Burgess's confessions –– published in two parts in 1987 and 1990 when he was in his seventh decade –– is his uncanny ability to transform what, in the hands of a less gifted writer, might have been little more than a dull recitation of pertinent biographical information enlivened by the occasional facetious anecdote into a compelling literary tour de force, making it, in my view, the best book of its kind published by an English writer in the second half of the twentieth century.
Little Wilson and Big God begins, naturally enough, with the birth of John Burgess Wilson –– who would go on to publish sixty works of fiction, nonfiction and criticism under the pseudonym Anthony Burgess –– on 25 February 1917 in the Lancashire city of Manchester and ends with his return to England in 1959 from colonial service in Malaya (now Malaysia) and on the island of Borneo to be treated for what had been misdiagnosed by his baffled colonial physicians as a fatal brain tumour. Along the way we're treated to absorbing and frequently humorous descriptions of his days as a Catholic schoolboy, a self-taught pianist and fledgling composer, a willingly 'educated' adolescent lover (see below), an unlikely university student, a henpecked fiancée, a soldier who reported for basic training with well-thumbed editions of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce's Ulysses stuffed inside his rucksack and, lastly, a teacher whose task it was to introduce the sons of rubber planters and, following his transfer to the oil rich state of Brunei in Borneo, Muslim princelings to, of all things, North American history. His is an extraordinary journey that proves, to anyone who doubts it, that he was an extraordinarily gifted writer, as this passage describing how he came to lose his virginity should amply demonstrate:
'… She was a widow whose husband had drowned at Southport (this seemed improbable: I had been to Southport and never even seen the sea), and she was earning a living by lecturing for the Workers' Educational Association. Marx and Engels, whoever they were, were among the subjects of her lectures. But she was not disposed to talk about them after our strong tea and ginger snaps. She took from a drawer under her shelves of economic history a packet of condoms… She now gave me detailed instructions about love-making on the rug before the gas-fire. She had fine big bouncing breasts, ripe not ripening, and her skin had an acrid smell as of woodsmoke. Now, protected by latex, I did the deed. It was a totally anonymous undertaking, since she did not ask me my name or divulge hers… She seemed a healthy woman, Protestant of course, who had certain physical needs which needed to be regularly gratified. She gave me a little postcoital instruction in the materialistic philosophy on which Marxist economic theory was based. God was a fable designed to uphold the capitalist exploiters, and sin was a fabrication intended to make the workers feel guilty about demanding their rights. Then, as tumescence renewed itself, that aspect of my new education was remitted. I got home late and weary. My stepmother, not normally given to commiseration, remarked on my tired eyes and said they was making me study too 'ard. She gave me two fried eggs with my bacon.'
Brilliant stuff and entirely typical of Burgess's ability to render scenes from his life with novelistic exactitude while juxtaposing the amusingly ludicrous with the unpromisingly mundane. How many sixteen year old boys receive lectures about Marxist economics between their first and second sexual experiences, happily provided by a female teacher from the WEA randomly encountered while browsing the stacks in their local library? The story could be pure invention and quite probably is, given his introductory statement that fact has a slippery way of becoming reimagined as fiction after being filtered through the unreliable sieve of memory. But it is the story or what Burgess, the cradle Catholic, called the confession that matters and not, as the aforementioned Roger Lewis would have us believe, that it may have been exaggerated or even fabricated for the sake of heightened comic effect.
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| William Heinemann Ltd first UK edition, 1990 |
The confessions continue in You've Had Your Time (1990), which begins in 1959 with Burgess's unusual decision to earn his living as a writer while awaiting confirmation that he was in fact afflicted with a brain tumour that would kill him in less than a year. He did this for two reasons –– in the hope of finding what had been his elusive métier or life purpose before that life came to a premature end and to provide for the impending widowhood of his Welsh-born wife Lynne (her own anglicized version of the name Llewela) whose extended stay in the Far East had had a devastating physical and psychological impact on her, seeing her become an adulterous alcoholic whose gin-fuelled tirades could intimidate even the hardiest member of the British Colonial Service and allegedly prompted her, during an official royal reception that she and her husband were invited to attend while stationed in Brunei, to make an obscene remark to no less a personage than the Duke of Edinburgh. (Burgess, while no scandaliser of royalty, did enjoy sexual liaisons with several women during his marriage to Lynne, most of which he justifies by reminding his readers that she had cheated on him first.)
It is Lynne's struggle with alcoholism and its side effects, along with his own devotion to the craft of writing, which dominates much of You've Had Your Time, giving Burgess a forum in which to deal with the guilt generated by his wife's long anticipated but still upsetting death –– of a massive portal haemorrhage induced by cirrhosis of the liver –– on 20 March 1968. A heavy drinker himself before, during and after their re-location to the tropics and hastily arranged return to suburban London following his tumour diagnosis (which may have been the Colonial Service's way of getting rid of him following Lynne's run in with Prince Philip and the publication of several articles he wrote in support of the Brunei opposition party), Burgess could not escape the feeling that he was responsible for his wife's passing –– a guilt that does not diminish even when his barely repressed resentment of her comes bubbling to the surface, too bitterly obvious to overlook:
'What nonsense I had preached about free will: I should have snatched tumblers from her hand, emptied bottles down the sink. That, of course, would have been cruel. I had taken her to the tropics, where shortage of vitamin B is hard on the liver. I had always persuaded her to drink drink for drink with me, ignoring the truth that women's livers are not men's. At the beginning of our relationship she had hated pubs; I taught her to love them. The attack in blacked out London [Lynne had been beaten and robbed by four US servicemen, presumably deserters, on her way home from work in April 1944, causing her to suffer a miscarriage] had produced dysmenorrhea and a need to take in much liquid to replace the steady trickle of lost blood. She had opted for beer by the pint, which, on her recovery and modest Malaysian prosperity, she had abandoned for gin, a more compact way of feeding the alcoholic need that beer, more or less on doctor's orders, had induced. And yet I hugged the blame. It was right for me to feel like a murderer.'
This passage reveals what were clearly Burgess's very mixed emotions about his wife, her death and his failure to confront what had become, by 1968, her untreatable dipsomania. He seems to be hedging his bets and continues to do so throughout the book as though eager to avoid awakening the wrath of Lynne's family (whom he often criticises for what Andrew Biswell suggests may have been reasons of jealousy given its comfortable middle-class background) or, as a youthfully indoctrinated if no longer practicing Catholic, of a scolding judgmental God. But the important point to bear in mind is that he never evades the issue as he could so easily have done had he wished to spare himself calumny and safeguard his reputation. The facts may be distorted, as they no doubt are in much of Little Wilson and Big God, but they are still there to be discovered by anybody prepared to dig beneath the surface of the language to tease out the lingering but still painful emotions that inspired it. This is, after all, a confession and the alleged purpose of confession as practiced in the Catholic faith is to expiate one's sins via the act of verbal contrition. Lacking a real life auditor, Burgess chose to do his confessing to the silent unsanctified reader whose forgiveness, he hoped, would prove easier to obtain than that of his deceased spouse.
Happily, You've Had Your Time is not all guilt and gloom. There is also acceptance and emergence from grief and his happier second marriage to Liana Johnson née Macellari, his unrevealed Italian-born lover since 1963 and the mother of his son Paolo Andrea (later known as Andrew Burgess Wilson) whom he did not know about or meet until the boy was four. And, of course, the worlds of literature, publishing, the theatre, journalism and script writing in both Hollywood and Europe to explore and assess, which Burgess does with his usual mordant wit and sharply comical eye for the absurd. The confession ends in his new home of Monaco in 1982, two years after the publication of Earthly Powers, the novel many people, myself included, consider to be his masterpiece. (It also earned him his one and only nomination for the Man-Booker Prize, which was won in 1980 by William Golding, a novelist whose work he greatly admired.) The book ends with a brief summary of his work as a composer –– as a boy he had dreamed of combining that career with the no less creative one of part-time cartoonist –– and the encouraging statement that his novels were '… written not merely to earn bread and gin but out of conviction that the manipulation of language to the end of pleasing and enlightening is not to be despised, despite what the postman greeting an unshaven yawner may think. I have done my best, and no one can do more. I may yet have my time.'
Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.
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| University Press of Mississippi, 2008 |
Conversations with Anthony Burgess (2008) by EARL G INGERSOLL and MARY C INGERSOLL [editors]
The contents page of this brief but valuable book –– Go On Writing till Ninety or One Hundred, Cynical About the Great Words, Dealing with the Hinterland of the Consciousness, Dressing for Dinner in the Jungle, Doing What The Hell You Like in a Novel, Working on Apocalypse, Guilt's a Good Thing, The Sense of an Audience, Getting Your Day's Work Done Before Breakfast, Reinventing the Language, We Must Be Free, Guilty As Hell –– could serve as an ad hoc list of Burgess's preoccupations throughout the course of his long and, despite his many protests to the contrary, successful thirty-seven year literary career. These twelve interviews, conducted by various journalists between 1971 and 1989, reveal a writer of unusual eloquence who was not afraid to speak honestly about himself, what he set out to accomplish in his work and his role, if any, in the ongoing development of British and, by implication, world literature. (Burgess once described himself as a 'minor novelist' –– a statement I find staggering given his fecundity and the sheer originality of most of what he published. No one wrote like Burgess and Burgess wrote like no one. A much harder feat to accomplish than it may seem.)
More direct than his two volumes of carefully composed confessions, these interviews show us a Burgess who was neither comfortable with nor welcoming of the notoriety generated by Stanley Kubrick's controversial 1971 cinematic adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, a film whose misleadingly perceived glorification of violence and other types of flagrantly anti-social behaviour he struggled to come to terms with until the day he died. He wrote several essays about what he considered to be a minor novella in which he attempted to explain its true theme, which is not the glorification of violence but rather the need for humankind to make a conscious individual choice between good and evil and the idea of redemption as a self-generated process rather than one which ought to be imposed on us by governments, demagogues or any other authority figure who attempts to justify barbarities like torture and brainwashing by mislabelling them as essential public services. A dramatized version of the book appeared in 1987 –– featuring the 'epilogue' ending that Kubrick and Burgess's original North American publisher perhaps chose to omit at the author's own suggestion (this remains unclear) –– and was subsequently adapted for radio by BBC Wales.
Burgess is at his best, of course, when the topic under discussion is literature –– his own and that of his contemporaries or, in many cases, that created by his chief role models James Joyce and William Shakespeare. (He wrote books about both writers and also composed the libretto for an unproduced Hollywood musical about Shakespeare and the book and lyrics for a musical version of Joyce's groundbreaking 1922 Modernist masterpiece Ulysses titled Blooms of Dublin.) Along the way we get to hear his opinions on everything from the trend toward unisexism, the belief of some critics that he wrote clumsily and too much, the respective futures of the novel and the Western forms of Christianity and the impact that British taxation laws had on the ability of British writers to make any kind of decently consistent living from their work. What it gives us is a portrait of a rounded human being who could be, by turns, gruff, grumpy, erudite, compassionate, reactionary and, more often than not, gracious and admirable. The book is an essential addition to any Burgess collection and one I would unhesitatingly recommend to anybody seeking to gain an understanding of the man who created Alex, his three droogs and the brilliant Russian-inspired language he chose to call nadsat.
Conversations with Anthony Burgess may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online provider.
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ANTHONY BURGESS
c 1990 |
April 2017 saw the re-publication of the 1986 novel The Pianoplayers as the first volume of The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, a project undertaken by the Manchester University Press which will eventually reprint most if not all of his work, including a selection of his letters, in newly annotated and restored versions 'designed for students, teachers, scholars and general readers who are seeking accessible but rigorous critical editions of each book.'
THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION is an English-based non-profit organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess' in addition to operating an archive/performance space in his birthplace of Manchester.
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Last updated 30 September 2021
