The Write Advice 190: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

I find it hard to evaluate the new books I read and, as I get older, I find even the act of reading difficult.  This is because a fair-sized area of my brain is concerned with working out new novels, and other people's imaginative writings get in the way of this… Whether novelists are really qualified to judge other people's books is hard to say.  It was Cyril Connolly who… said that everybody who has written a book knows how difficult it is to do, and hence is favourably disposed to anyone who has written even a very bad one.  Book-writing is hard on the brain and excruciating to the body:  it engenders tobacco-addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence.  Behind the new bad book one is asked to review lie untold misery and a very little hope.  One's heart, stomach and anal tract go out to the doomed aspirant.

      On the whole, I think I have been kinder and more cautious to other authors than, for the good of the art of writing, I ought to have been.  Critics who know everything about books except how to write them –– there are several of these around in London and New York, and far too many in Paris –– have a sharp-eyed fierceness which, although possibly really a sublimation of sheer howling jealousy, is generally taken to be essential to good criticism.  It is noteworthy, and it has been frequently noted, that the verb 'criticise' has, in the market-place, a wholly pejorative denotation, as in 'Oh, don't keep on criticising all the bloody time.'

 

Foreword to Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (1968)

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, an English-based organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.'  It also operates an archive/performance space in his home town of Manchester.

http://www.anthonyburgess.org/
 
 
 
 
 
 

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