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Anthony Burgess

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Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was an English novelist and critic. He was also active as a composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator and educationalist. Born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe. His fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East, the Enderby cycle of comic novels about a reclusive poet and his muse, the classic speculative recreation of Shakespeare's love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange, and his magnum opus Earthly Powers, a panoramic Tolstoyan saga of the 20th century. He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and turned out large quantities of journalism in various languages. The translator and adapter of Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen for the stage, he scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

Life

Childhood

Anthony Burgess was born on February 25, 1917 in Harpurhey, a northeastern quarter of Manchester, England, to a Catholic family. He was left without a mother at one year old by the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic ("Spanish flu"), which also took the life of his sister Muriel.

His mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, who was a Catholic convert, had been a minor actress and dancer appearing at such theaters as the Manchester Ardwick Empire. Her stage name was "The Beautiful Belle Burgess".

His father, Joseph Wilson, whom Burgess described as descending from an "Augustinian Catholic" background (which probably refers to recusancy), died in 1948. Burgess père was among other things a bookie and a pianist in movie theaters, accompanying the silent films of the era (see the novel The Pianoplayers). Burgess described his father, who remarried to a pub landlady, as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father".

Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother. Christened John Burgess Wilson, he was known as "Jack". His childhood was in large part a solitary one. His home was rooms above an off-licence and newspaper-tobacconist shop that his aunt ran, and above a pub.

Youth and education

Burgess was schooled at St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School, and later at Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School in Moss Side. For some years his family lived on Princess Street in the same district. Good grades from Bishop Bilsborrow resulted in a place at the noted Manchester Catholic secondary school, the Jesuit-run Xaverian College.

He entered the University of Manchester in 1937, graduating three years later with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, 2nd class honours, upper division, in English language and literature. His thesis was on the subject of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

He had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in physics – then a requirement for the subject – were deemed not high enough to qualify for a place on the program.

Burgess's father died of flu in 1938 and his stepmother of a heart attack in 1940.

War service

In 1940 Burgess began a rather unheroic wartime stint with the military, beginning with the Royal Army Medical Corps, which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth, Northumberland. During this period he sometimes directed an army dance band. He later moved to the Army Educational Corps, where among other things he conducted speech therapy at a mental hospital. He failed in his aspiration to win an officer's commission.

In 1942 the marriage took place in Bournemouth between Burgess and a Welshwoman named Llwela Jones, eldest daughter of a high school principal. She was known to all as "Lynne". Although Burgess indicated on numerous occasions that her full name was Llwela Isherwood Jones, the name "Isherwood" does not appear on her birth certificate. Nor was Lynne related to the writer Christopher Isherwood as many people had believed. Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at Manchester University. Their marriage was childless, and she died of cirrhosis in 1968.

Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar, a British territory at the southern tip of Spain that Britain has controlled since the Treaty of Utrecht, at an army garrison (see A Vision of Battlements). Here he was a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching German, Russian, French and Spanish, and he helped instruct the troops in "The British Way and Purpose". He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the UK Ministry of Education.

Early teaching career

Leaving the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, Burgess was for the next four years a lecturer in speech and drama, at the Mid-West School of Education near Wolverhampton, and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College (known as "the Brigg" and associated with the University of Birmingham), near Preston.

At the end of 1950 he took up a job as a secondary school teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School (now defunct) in the market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire (see The Worm and the Ring, which the then mayoress of Banbury claimed libeled her). In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to supervise sports from time to time, and he ran the school's drama society.

The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life. Thanks to financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple were able to buy a cottage in the picturesque village of Adderbury, not far from Banbury.

Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time involving local people and students, including productions of T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes (Burgess had named his Adderbury cottage Little Gidding, after one of Eliot's Four Quartets) and Aldous Huxley's The Gioconda Smile.

It was in Adderbury that Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the Banbury Guardian.

The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, especially one called The Bell, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time.

Malaya

In January 1954 Burgess was interviewed by the British Colonial Office for a post in Malaya (now Malaysia) as a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service. Several months later he and his wife travelled to Singapore by the liner Willem Ruys from Southampton with stops in Port Said and Colombo.

Burgess was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar, the royal town in Perak, in what were then known as the Federated Malay States. Here he taught at the Malay College, dubbed "the Eton of the East" and now known as Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK).

In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a housemaster in charge of students of the preparatory school, who were housed at a Victorian mansion known as "King's Pavilion". The building was once occupied by the British Resident in Perak. This edifice had gained notoriety during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police).

As his novels and autobiography document, Burgess's late 1950s coincided with the communist insurgency, an undeclared war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) when rubber planters and members of the European community – not to mention many Malays, Chinese and Tamils – were subject to frequent terrorist attack.

Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, an alleged dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife, Burgess was posted elsewhere – the couple occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was supposedly minimal. This, at any rate, was the reason given for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan. This is located on the Siamese border; the Thais had ceded the area to the British in 1909 and a British adviser had been installed.

Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written (the language was still at that time rendered in the adapted Arabic script known as Jawi). He spent much of his free time engaged in creative writing, "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it". He published his first novels, Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. These became known as "The Malayan Trilogy" and were later to be published in one volume as The Long Day Wanes. During his time in the East he also wrote English Literature: A Survey for Students, and this book was in fact the first Burgess work published (if we do not count an essay published in the youth section of the London newspaper the Daily Express when Burgess was a child).

Brunei

After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, he took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State . Although the novel dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African "sultanate" similar to Zanzibar.

About this time Burgess collapsed in a Brunei classroom while teaching history (he was explaining to his Bruneian students the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party). He is thought about now to have been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. However, this is disputed. Some accounts have him suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status.

Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration". But he gave a different account to the British arts and media veteran Jeremy Isaacs in 1987 when he said: "I was driven out of the Colonial Service for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons."

Repatriate years

He was repatriated and spent some time in a London hospital (see The Doctor Is Sick). There he underwent cerebral tests which, as far as can be made out, proved negative.

On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he found he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.

The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby tetralogy); in a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham, just down the road from the residence in Burwash once occupied by Rudyard Kipling; and in a terraced town house in Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London, conveniently located for the White City BBC television studios of which he was a frequent guest in this period.

A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to Russia, calling at St Petersburg (then Leningrad), resulted in Honey For the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang for A Clockwork Orange.

Exile

By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a tax exile. It was in grander accommodation this time; indeed, at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of multiple houses and apartments, numbering in the double figures.

He lived in a house he had bought at Lija, Malta, for a time, but problems with the state censor prompted a move to Rome. He maintained a flat in the Italian capital and a country house in Bracciano, and a property in Montalbuccio. There was a villa in Provence, in Callian of the Var, France, and an apartment just off Baker Street, London, England, very near the presumed home of Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.

Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1970) and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York (1972), and teaching creative writing at Columbia University. He had also been writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969) and at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.

Eventually he settled in Monaco, where he was active in the local community, becoming a co-founder in 1984 of the Princess Grace Irish Library, a center for Irish cultural studies (http://www3.monaco.mc/pglib/) He spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet, in Lugano, Switzerland.

After Lynne's death in 1968 at the age of forty-seven of liver cirrhosis (see Beard's Roman Women), he had remarried, to Liliana Macellari, an Italian translator, adopting the latter's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.

Death

A lifelong heavy smoker, Burgess returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, England, where he owned a house, to die of lung cancer on November 22, 1993. He was 76 years old. His actual death occurred at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in the St John's Wood neighborhood of London. He is thought to have composed the novel Byrne on his deathbed.

It is believed he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Moston Cemetery, Manchester, England, but in the event they went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo.

The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, reads "Abba Abba", which encapsulates six things in one: (1) the Hebrew for "Father, father", that is, an invocation to God as Father (Mark 14:36 etc.); (2) Burgess's initials forwards and backwards; (3) the pop group ABBA, which achieved world fame in the 1970s when Burgess was himself at the height of his powers; (4) part of the rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan sonnet; (5) the last words Jesus uttered, in Aramaic, from the Cross; and (6) the Burgess novel about the death of Keats Abba Abba.

Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade.

Achievement

Novels

With the Malayan trilogy (Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East), his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya) to set alongside George Orwell's Burma (Burmese Days), E.M. Forster's India (A Passage to India) and Graham Greene's Viet Nam (The Quiet American), and continuing in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.

Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese, necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi, having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay, and this is reflected in the verisimilitude and interest in indigenous concerns that marks the trilogy.

His repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just the Enderby cycle but the neglected The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping (to which the director Francis Coppola has recently acquired the film rights), partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. This era also witnessed the publication of The Worm and the Ring, which was withdrawn from circulation under the threat of libel action from one of Burgess' former co-workers.

A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a controversial film adaptation), the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynne was allegedly robbed and assaulted in London during the blackout by US army deserters (an event that may have contributed to a miscarriage she suffered), the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more especially the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.

By the 1970s Burgess's output had become highly experimental, and some critics see a falling-off in quality in this period. MF (1971) showed the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. Beard's Roman Women is considered by many to be his worst novel (plea of mitigation: it was written entirely while on the road in his Bedford Dormobile campervan). But Napoleon Symphony, though flawed, contains among many other things a superb portrait of an Arab society under occupation by a western power (Egypt by France).

There was a triumphant return to form in the 1980s, when religious themes began to weigh heavy (see The Kingdom of the Wicked and Man of Nazareth as well as Earthly Powers).

Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic "training" and worldview remained strong in his work all his life – notably in the discussion of free will in A Clockwork Orange and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church due to what can be understood as Satanic influence in Earthly Powers (1980), which was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.

He won few honours in his own country - his masterpiece Earthly Powers, for example, famously failed to win the English "Booker" prize for fiction, although he took honorary degrees from St Andrews, Birmingham and Manchester universities and was a Fellow of England's Royal Society of Literature. He did better on the European continent, where he garnered the "Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres" distinction of France and became a Monagesque "Commandeur de Merite Culturel".

Criticism

Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text for newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students, which is still used in many schools today. He followed this with The Novel Today and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction.

Then came the Joyce studies Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (also published as Re Joyce), Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, and A Shorter Finnegan's Wake.

His Encyclopædia Britannica entry The Novel, the for 1970 is regarded as a classic of the genre.

Burgess has written full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. His Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 remains an invaluable guide, while Obscenity and the Arts explores issues of pornography.

Linguistics

Burgess was polyglot, with a command of Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian.

"Burgess's linguistic training," write Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, "is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronounciations and the niceties of register."

His interest in linguistics was reflected in the Anglo-Russian invented teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (called Nadsat) and in the film Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language for the characters to speak.

The hero of The Doctor is Sick, Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is a lecturer in linguistics. He escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech".

Burgess, who had lectured on phonetics at the University of Birmingham in the late 1940s, investigates the field of linguistics in Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air.

Journalism

Burgess produced journalism in American, Italian, French and British newspapers and magazines regularly – even compulsively – and in prodigious quantities. Martin Amis wrote in the London newspaper the Observer in 1987: "...on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid – and there is a Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500."

"He was our star reviewer, always eager to take on something new, punctilious with deadlines, length and copy," wrote Burgess's literary editor at the London Observer newspaper, Michael Ratcliffe.

Selections of Burgess's journalism are to be found in Urgent Copy, Homage to QWERT YUIOP and One Man's Chorus.

Screenwriting

Burgess wrote the screenplays for Moses the Lawgiver (Gianfranco De Bosio 1975, with Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quayle and Ingrid Thulin), Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli 1977, with Robert Powell, Olivia Hussey and Rod Steiger), and A.D. (Stuart Cooper 1985, with Ava Gardner, Anthony Andrews and James Mason).

Burgess devised the stone-age language for La Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire) (Jean-Jacques Annaud 1981, with Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nicholas Kadi).

He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called Will! or The Bawdy Bard. It was based on his novel Nothing Like The Sun.

Symphonies

As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He composed regularly throughout his life.

His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio. His Symphony (No. 3) in C was premiered by the University of Iowa orchestra in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in This Man and Music.

Sinfoni Melayu, characterised by the Burgess biographer Roger Lewis as "Elgar with bongo-bong drums", was described by Burgess, its composer, as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".

The structure of the novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony, while Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition.

Burgess made plain his low regard for the popular music that has emerged since the mid-1960s, yet he has been called "the godfather of punk" as a result of the nihilist future world he created in A Clockwork Orange.

When Burgess was heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 'Desert Island Discs' radio programme in 1966, he made the following choice: Purcell, 'Rejoice in the Lord Alway'; Bach, Goldberg Variations No 13; Elgar, Symphony No.1 in A flat major; Wagner, Walter's Trial Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Debussy, Fêtes; Lambert, 'The Rio Grande'; Walton, Symphony No.1 in B flat; and Vaughan Williams, 'On Wenlock Edge'.

Opera and Musicals

Burgess produced a translation of Bizet's Carmen which was performed by the British company English National Opera.

He created an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982 and performed on the BBC), and composed the music for the 1971 Minneapolis production of his Cyrano de Bergerac translation, adapting the Rostand play for Broadway.

His editing and revision of the libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based opera company Scottish Opera.

Work methods

"I start at the beginning, go to the end, then stop," Burgess once said.

He revealed in Martin Seymour-Smith's Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980) that he would often prepare a synopsis with a name-list before beginning a project. But Seymour-Smith wrote: "Burgess believes overplanning is fatal to creativity and regards his unconscious mind and the act of writing itself as indispensable guides. He does not produce a draft of a whole novel which he then revises, but prefers to get one page finished before he goes on to the next, which involves a good deal of revision and correction."

His work routine from when he began writing until his death was to produce 1,000 words of fair copy per day, weekends included, 365 days a year. His favoured time for working was the afternoon, since "the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon".

Trivia

Espionage

  • Anthony Burgess had a long-term peeve of being confused with members of the Cambridge Five. This is partly because one of the members was called Guy Burgess, and another Anthony Blunt. Unfortunately, by the time they achieved notoriety, Anthony Burgess' pen-name was well established. He succeeded in extracting an apology from the Paris-based International Herald Tribune in 1983 after the newspaper referred to him in a print as "The spy, Anthony Burgess". The London Sunday Times newspaper perpetrated a similar error in 1999, referring to "the other British defectors, Anthony Burgess, Donald Maclean and George Blake".
  • Burgess is believed by some, though this is highly conjectural, to have engaged in low-level espionage during his Gibraltar, Malaya and Brunei years and possibly later. See, for example, the London Mail on Sunday, "The greatest story Anthony Burgess never told: his life as a secret agent"; and many other media articles in this not very authoritative but intriguing vein. It is speculated that he may have provided his superiors (the Colonial Office and perhaps the Kuala Lumpur-based British intelligence authorities, and later MI5) with information about any communist actions or sympathies, however trivial, among his colleagues and students and, after his return from the East, among the people he met and associated with. Since lives were at stake during the Malayan Emergency, this would not have been an unusual or exceptionable activity – in fact it might well have been regarded as irresponsible not to assist in this way. The term used for an operative of this type and pay-grade was "ground observer".
  • Military authorities who came across a copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake in Burgess's possession in 1941 thought it was some kind of code book.
  • Burgess published a fictional work in the Ian Fleming genre which he entitled Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966).
  • Burgess prepared a screenplay for the James Bond feature The Spy Who Loved Me, which Albert R. Broccoli produced in 1977. It was turned down. Burgess wrote: "My script...was rejected, but my oil tanker (a camouflaged floating palace for the chief villain) was retained."

Food and drink

  • Burgess was a Lancastrian, so it is no surprise that one of his favourite dishes, mentioned many times in his novels, autobiography and elsewhere, was Lancashire Hotpot. The journalist Auberon Waugh famously described Burgess's recipe for Lancashire Hotpot as "disgusting".
  • Burgess was by most accounts a heavy consumer of alcoholic beverages, especially, during his Adderbury years, of cider, and of gin in later life. However, he did not drink as heavily as his first wife Lynne, who lost her life to liver cirrhosis. Burgess is thought to have cut his alcohol consumption to some extent in later life, often substituting tea.
  • In his middle years Burgess often drank beer, and in Malaya the two brands he enjoyed were Tiger and Anchor beer, brewed in both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. He reveals in his autobiography that he was hoping after his Time For A Tiger was published to receive a complimentary case of Tiger beer from the manufacturer. The brewery was slow to oblige, only supplying a case several decades later when Burgess had achieved worldwide fame. "Alas," Burgess wrote, "I had become wholly a gin man."
  • For his morning cup of tea, Burgess habitually suffused up to six tea-bags per small teapot. And when drinking tea from a (pint-sized) mug at other times of the day, multiple tea-bags were also used. His preferred brand of tea was Twining's Irish Breakfast.

Smoking

  • Burgess was an occasional smoker of opium, which he described as "a fine drug", during both his Kota Bharu and Brunei years. But he was under no illusions as to the negative effects of the drug: "Later, abetted by an ailing liver, the bad visions would come," he wrote.
  • Burgess evinced qualified approval towards the smoking of hemp or cannabis, but with the proviso that it should be a means to an end rather than the end itself. Speaking of young people in a BBC Omnibus documentary in the 1960s, he said: "They smoke their marihuana, which is an admirable thing in itself, but no end of anything..."

Finances

  • Burgess made no secret of his determination throughout his career to thwart tax authorities worldwide, whom he described as "the fiscal tyrants".
  • Burgess's preferred medium of payment for his work, he indicated, was "non-taxable cash", and he maintained one or more Swiss bank accounts.
  • Burgess's house in Lija, Malta, was confiscated by the Maltese authorities over non-payment of taxes.
  • Burgess was a currency smuggler. His house in Bracciano was, he wrote, paid for "by smuggling dollar royalty cheques into the peninsula and paying them into the bank account of an expatriate American sculptor living near Rome".

Sex

  • Burgess claimed that Holofernes was in Elizabethan times used as a slang word for penis .
  • In Burgess's novel Time For A Tiger, the Malay state of Perak is named Lanchap, which is the Malay word for masturbate.
  • Burgess announced on several occasions – it appeared to be a matter of some pride – that he had never in his life had carnal relations with an Englishwoman.
  • He enjoyed a miscellany of sexual partners from other lands, however, including Buginese, Japanese, Welsh, Malay, Chinese, Siamese, Italian and Singhalese women. And he wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (p. 386), that he had had sexual encounters "with Tamil women blacker than Africans, including a girl who could not have been older than twelve, but none with Bengalis and Punjabis". The vast majority of the encounters had been, as he put it, "sadly commercial".
  • He claimed to have discovered the secret of controlling climax and prolonging pleasure during sexual congress. It was, he wrote, "a matter of reciting Milton only – 'High on a throne of royal state...' (Paradise Lost, Book Two)."
  • The comedian Benny Hill described Burgess as "the greatest living expert on sex".

Mischief

  • London's Daily Mail newspaper published in the 1960s a number of comically puritanical letters written by Burgess purporting to be from an Indian Muslim named "Mohammed Ali", who expressed for the benefit of Mail readers his utter disgust at the degradation of contemporary western morals.
  • Burgess was sacked as literary critic for the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post after he wrote a review of his own Inside Mr Enderby and it appeared in the newspaper. The novel had been published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell, and the newspaper's editor did not know that Kell was Burgess. Burgess protested, to no avail, that Walter Scott had also once reviewed one of his own novels. The offending review, which was not at all commendatory, read in part: "This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals...and halitosis. It may well make some people sick....It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock."

Pop-culture influence

  • Burgess's contempt for post-World War Two popular music was thinly veiled. Its proponents are merciliessly satirised in Enderby Outside, which features a lamentable rock band called Yod Crewsy and the Fixers who composed "emetic little songs".
  • Ironically in view of this, Burgess has been dubbed "the Godfather of Punk" because of the vivid nihilist world he created in the novel A Clockwork Orange.
  • The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone at the cemetery in Monte Carlo includes a (possibly ironical) reference to the pop group Abba, who enjoyed huge success at a time – the late 1970s – when Burgess, too, had achieved world fame.

There has been a great deal pop-world plagiarism from Burgess. To take just three examples more or less at random:

  • The Sheffield electropop band Heaven 17 paid Burgess the compliment of naming themselves after a band that appears in Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange (though they dropped the "the").
  • Another Sheffield group, Moloko, took its name from Burgess's (Russian-derived) Nadsat word for a drug-spiked milk drink.
  • The German punk rockers Die Toten Hosen's album Ein kleines bisschen Horrorshow referred to the Nadsat term, and Poland's Myslovitz produced an album called Korova Milky Bar.

Early triumphs

  • Burgess's first published work was an essay on Torbay for the children's section of the London Daily Express newspaper in 1928.
  • Burgess was placed 1,579th after taking England's Customs & Excise test in 1928.
  • One of Burgess's professors at Manchester University was A.J.P. Taylor. Grading one of Burgess's term papers, the great historian wrote: 'Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge.'

Polyglottal virtuosity

  • During his years in Malaya, and after he had mastered Jawi, the Arabic script adapted for Malay, Burgess taught himself the Persian language, after which he produced an authoritative translation of Eliot's The Waste Land into Persian. It was never published, in Tehran or elsewhere. He also worked on an anthology of the best of English literature translated into Malay, which also did not achieve publication.
  • Anthony Burgess, known in Argentina as the British Borges, and Jorge Luis Borges, known in Britain as the Argentine Burgess, each spoke both English and Spanish fluently. But when Burgess-Borges met, each decided it would be unequal and unfair to the other, and inappropriate, to plump for either of the two languages when conversing. So the polyglot pair forged a compromise, deciding to conduct their lengthy, wide-ranging philological and literary conversations in Old Norse.
The Chinese restaurant affair

Burgess’s multilingual proficiency came under attack in Roger Lewis's 2002 biography. Lewis claimed that during production in Malaysia of the BBC documentary “A Kind of Failure” (1982), Burgess, supposedly fluent in Malay, was unable to communicate with several waitresses at a restaurant where they were filming. It was claimed also that the documentary's director deliberately kept these moments intact in the film in order to expose Burgess’s linguistic pretensions.

There was a mixed response to the charge. For example, one critic appeared to accept the veracity of the claim, saying it “had me laughing immoderately”, while another dismissed it as “another of Lewis’s little smears”.

A letter from David Wallace that appeared in the magazine of the London ‘‘Independent on Sunday’’ newspaper on 25 November 2002 shed light on the affair.

Wallace's letter read, in part: “…the tale was inaccurate. It tells of Burgess, the great linguist, 'bellowing Malay at a succession of Malayan waitresses' but 'unable to make himself understood'. The source of this tale was a 20-year-old BBC documentary....[The suggestion was] that the director left the scene in, in order to poke fun at the great author. Not so, and I can be sure, as I was that director…. The story as seen on television made it clear that Burgess knew that these waitresses were not Malay. It was a Chinese restaurant and Burgess's point was that the ethnic Chinese had little time for the government-enforced national language, Bahasa Malaysia [i.e. Malay]. Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; it was the girls in question who did not.”

Lewis may not have been fully aware of the fact that a quarter of Malaysia's population is made up of Hokkien- and Cantonese-speaking Chinese. However, Malay had been installed as the National Language with the installation of the Language Act of 1967. By 1982 all national primary and secondary schools in Malaysia would have been teaching with Bahasa Melayu as a base language (see Harold Crouch, Government and Society in Malaysia, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996). It would be unlikely that the Chinese waitresses were completely unable to understand Malay, given the kind of power Malay had as a language of communication and organization in the country. They were probably very capable of speaking the language; one might ask, rather, whether they were refusing to do so with Burgess for political reasons.

Health

  • He was short-sighted, although reluctant to wear spectacles. He wrote that he once walked into a bank, lent against the counter and ordered a drink.
  • Burgess suffered a collapse in Brunei Town in 1959, apparently occasioned by overwork, indications of incipient (rather than chronic) alcoholism, and poor nutrition. He had to be airlifted to England for tests and treatment.
  • He suffered from what he referred to as the Writer's Evil (haemorrhoids).
  • He used Dexedrine to aid concentration when working.

Names and namesakes

  • Anthony Burgess was known to many people in Italy, where he lived for several years, as Antonio Borghese.
  • Burgess also published under the pen-names John Burgess Wilson and Joseph Kell.
  • There is a 17th-century Anthony Burgess, also a writer. A pastor at a church in Sutton Coldfield, Anthony Burgess was the author of such works as The Doctrine of Original Sin and A Vindication of the Moral Law. The modern Burgess had an ambivalent attitude towards conversion. He tended to contrast, in certain respects unfavourably or at least cynically, the camp of cradle Catholics, in which was included such writers as Belloc, Joyce, Braine, Lodge and himself, with that of converts such as Hopkins, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh and Spark. So it may be significant that his namesake Pastor Anthony Burgess's most important work is entitled Spiritual Refining: The Anatomy of True & False Conversion. Still regarded as useful, it remains in print, and is published by International Outreach Incorporated.
  • Burgess was arguably as prodigious a creator of neologisms, especially in A Clockwork Orange but across the whole range of his work, as Frank Gelett Burgess of "blurb", "bleesh", "bromide" and "gloogo" fame.

Birthplace

  • Burgess's birthplace of Harpurhey offers a sharp contrast to Monte Carlo, where he spent most of his latter years. Harpurhey was described in a 2004 London Independent on Sunday article by Ian Herbert North as "the most miserable place in Britain". North reveals that two neighbourhoods in Harpurhey are classified by the UK government as among the five most deprived in the country.

Memorial services

  • Burgess delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for Benny Hill in 1992.

General

  • Burgess was among a select group of celebrity owners of the classic Bedford Dormobile (a campervan or motorhome of the Bedford marque, manufactured in England by Vauxhall Motors). He and his second wife spent, in the early years of their marriage, long periods on the road across western Europe, especially in France and Sicily, his wife driving the Dormobile while he wrote at a desk behind.
  • Burgess wrote a full-length textbook in 1947 called The Young Fiddler's Tunebook. It was never published.
  • One of Burgess's last speaking engagements was at England's Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1992. The subject of his address was 'translation', and Burgess quipped that he himself was 'shortly to be translated' (he died 13 months later).
  • Burgess was pursued by English army MPs for desertion after overstaying his vacation away from Morpeth military base with his new bride Lynne in 1941.
  • When he was repatriated from Borneo in 1959 after suffering a collapse, Burgess was treated by the neurologist Roger Bannister, who in his days as an athlete had been the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes.
  • For a brief period during his studies of the Malay language and culture during the late 1950s, Burgess seriously considered becoming a Muslim. Explaining the allure of Islam in a 1969 interview with the University of Alabama scholar Geoffrey Aggeler, Burgess remarked: "You believe in one God. You say your prayers five times a day. You have a tremendous amount of freedom, sexual freedom; you can have four wives. The wife herself has a commensurate freedom. She can achieve divorce in the same way a man can." And in the novel 1985 (1978), Burgess imagines what Britain might be like if a virile, triumphant Islam won far-reaching influence in the country.
  • Burgess never learned how to drive a car.
  • Burgess took his Siamese cat to Malaya with him. It had an enjoyable tour but sadly died in Khota Bharu, within walking distance of the Siamese border.
  • He had a border collie during his Etchingham days, which he named Hajjii.

The Burgess tourist trail

Burgessians are recommended to follow the trail in a 1960s-era Bedford Dormobile. The principal Burgess sites, travelling south to north, are as follows:

Brunei

Malaysia

Malta

Italy

  • Rome: 16A Piazza Santa Cecilia (residence from 1971)

Monaco

  • Monte Carlo: 44 Rue Grimaldi, Condamine district (residence from 1976); 9 rue Princess Marie-de-Lorraine, Princess Grace Irish Library (co-founder)

France

  • Callian, the Var, Provence: Rue des Muets (residence from 1976)
  • Angers: 2, rue Alexandre Fleming (Anthony Burgess Center)

Switzerland

'Bedford'

  • Dormobile: occasional residence from 1968 to early ]]1970s]]

England

  • Etchingham, East Sussex: ‘Applegarth’ (semi-detached house), High Street, A265 road (residence 1959-1964)
  • London: 24, Glebe Street, Chiswick (terraced house, residence 1964-1968); 60 Grove End Road, St John’s Wood (Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth; deathplace 1993); Twickenham (house; date of purchase unknown but believed to be 1980s)
  • Oxfordshire: Banbury, Banbury Grammar School (workplace 1950-1954); Adderbury, 44, Water Lane (labourer’s 2-bedroom cottage then named Little Gidding, residence 1950-54)
  • Manchester: 91 Carisbrook Street, Harpurhey (birthplace 1917); Upper Monsall Street (St Edmund’s RC Elementary School 1923); Princess Road (Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Elementary School 1924); 21 Princess Road, Moss Side (tobacconist’s shop and residence 1924); 261 Moss Lane East (off-licence and residence 1924; Burgess said half a century later that it was “turned into a shebeen before it was demolished”); 10 Tatton Grove, Withington (International Anthony Burgess Foundation); Oxford Road (Church of the Holy Name, attended by the young Burgess); Monsall Road (Isolation Hospital, where the young Burgess treated for scarlet fever 1928); Victoria Park, Rusholme (Xaverian College, from 1928; “turned into a Muslim ghetto”, Burgess later said); Manchester University (from 1937)
  • Preston: Bamber Bridge (Emergency Teacher Training College, 1948)

USA

  • Austin: 21st and Guadalupe, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Trove of Burgessiana, with papers dating from 1956 to 1997, the bulk being 1970s and 1980s

Scotland

  • Eskbank, near Edinburgh: Royal Army Medical Corps (joined 1940)

Works

"That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters." -- Anthony Burgess

Fiction

Non-fiction

Major musical compositions

Prefaces, etc.

Further reading

Biographies

  • Roger Lewis, a former Fellow of Wolfson College in the University of Oxford, England, has written an impressionistic and often penetrating biography. His Anthony Burgess, a blend of vilification and affectionate tribute, was published in 2002.
  • Michael Ratcliffe wrote the entry on Burgess for the New Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

Selected critical studies

  • Richard Mathews, The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (Borgo Press, 1990)
  • Martine Ghosh-Schellhorn, Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character (Peter Lang AG, 1986)
  • Geoffrey Aggeler, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Alabama, 1979)
  • Samuel Coale, Anthony Burgess (New York, 1981)
  • A.A. Devitis, Anthony Burgess (New York, 1972)
  • Jerome Gold, The Prisoner's Son: Homage to Anthony Burgess (Black Heron Press 1996)
  • Robert K. Morris, The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess (Missouri, 1971)
  • Carol M. Dix, Anthony Burgess (British Council, 1971)
  • Paul Phillips, A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess (due for publication mid-2006 by Manchester University Press).

Memoirs

A few of the memoirs and other books in which Burgess is discussed:

Notable media profiles

Collections

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