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Anthony Burgess

Faber and Faber, Inc.

Jack Be Nimble 1917–37

I don't like to meet my heroes – I prefer to be free to imagine them. Ellmann never met Joyce, but he did encounter Wyndham Lewis in Notting Hill, blind and querulous: 'I'm blind – and I don't like it!' the old Vorticist had growled; and he'd once glimpsed Ezra Pound across a canal in Venice, and Pound had raised his arm in greeting, like a wave from Odysseus. During the war, when he was enlisted as a Yeoman Third Class (a low-grade sergeant) in the American Navy, Ellmann's knee was briefly perched upon by Marlene Dietrich. The closest he got to Wilde was to befriend Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland – though I believe there was a bit of a to-do over Ellmann's conclusion that Oscar had died from an attack of meningitis which was the legacy of tertiary syphilis. And indeed – what descendant would want that residue swimming about the gene pool? (Ellmann was being over-speculative. The certified cause of Wilde's death was an intracranial complication of suppurative otitis media.)

Another reason for avoiding Burgess was that I knew the drill, I knew the lore. The way he chain-smoked Schimmelpennincks, put six tea-bags in his morning cuppa, praised Kingsley Amis for transliterating corm beef, tim peaches and vogka, spoke Anglo-Saxon with Jorge Luis Borges, preferred living in a Bedford Dormobile, greeted people by asking, 'Do I owe you money?' and parted from them by saying, 'I take it you're paying for this lunch?' Several times a season (and each new moon brought in another book to publicise), the distinguished novelist would come to England, like a monster rising from the deep, to appear on television with Michael Parkinson ('For a Lancashire man to live in Monaco is the height of poshness,' gushed the son of Barnsley), Clive James (Q: 'What makes a great writer?' A: 'Death!'), Terry Wogan ('I don't know who Terry Wogan is'), Bernard Levin (who exclaimed, 'Look how you use language, man!'), Jeremy Isaacs ('Do I show off? Does Shakespeare show off? He was a tremendous player with words') or Sue Lawley ('All men dream of fat women, never thin women,' he told her dogmatically); he'd broadcast on radio with Anthony Clare (a charmer who normally could almost read the thoughts of people); he'd hold an audience with Melvyn Bragg ('I spent quite a bit of time with Anthony Burgess over the years'); and for the purposes of a magazine or newspaper profile he'd talk to Martin Amis, Jonathan Meades, Alice Thomas Ellis, Jonathan Coe or Lorna Sage, and they'd be overawed in the presence of the master. He was the star-turn at the Edinburgh Festival, the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and at the Way With Words Literature Festival at Dartington he delivered the inaugural Terence Kilmartin Memorial Lecture (1992). He collected honorary degrees from Manchester, St Andrews and Birmingham. At the University of Kent he gave the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures ('I had always had grave doubts about Eliot's taste and, indeed, intelligence'). Occasionally, traffic went in the opposite direction, Russell Davies reeling around Venice with him, or Nigel Williams making a visit to Bracciano, or Robert Robinson and Duncan Fallowell smoking him out in Monte Carlo. No matter what their nipping and eager air, however, Burgess's interrogators and acolytes, across a thirty-year period, each got the same performance – his conversation was a monologue, delivered in his exhibitionistic Victorian actor-manager voice. So predictable was the entertainment, one of those singalong promptboards may as well have dropped from the flies so that we could all join in, as at a pantomime. He always led off with how neglected he was; how he received insufficient recognition. 'I don't think England likes its writers ... It's a philistine country. The only country in the world where a man of letters is actively looked down on; where it is a matter of pride that the Royal Family love only horses ... Still, the stupidity of the English as a whole has and will be, I suppose, their salvation ... The lack of appreciation in my own country grieves me deeply ... I think it's because I'm a Catholic from the north-west, as simple as that. They just don't like us in the south ... I've had a long swathe of time in which people have been snide and uncomprehending – and this should not happen ... One does feel a little bitter. A little aggrieved ... If they can give Jimmy Savile a knighthood, well, the honours system is so dishonoured that one wouldn't want it ... I'm subject to terrible bouts of anger, being over here. It's the programmes on the television, the things you read in the papers ... We came here on the tube, and you see signs saying, "Give up your seat for an elderly person." I suppose I'm an elderly person, but they don't ... Writers are feared and despised ...'

When Burgess started wailing in this key it was certainly useless to try and contradict him or think you could prevent him. A note of unemphatic irritation crept into his delivery when Anthony Clare probed him about loneliness; and when Bernard Levin said, 'You are an extraordinarily cerebral man. But where's the heart?', Burgess took this as an opportunity to say how scholars at a conference turned their backs on him – 'final confirmation that I'm not an intellectual'. But this was not what Levin had meant, and when it was explained to Burgess that a scholar is not the same thing as an intellectual, Burgess retorted that if we were to look up his big words in a dictionary his vocabulary had probably been used wrongly. Eyes screwed up, smoking hard, it was a dare – he wants to get off this point. 'Graham Greene only writes two hundred words a day, anyway,' he stated, as if one's daily word-count was now (or had been all along) the topic. 'You have great control over your literary technique – and over your feelings,' Levin summed up, leaving it there.

Accused of over-production, or praised for being prolific, Burgess gave the same stock answer: 'I write a thousand words a day. At that rate you'll write War and Peace in a year ... or very near the entire output of E. M. Forster.' This would be the cue for him to insist that it's a class thing, being reviled for getting on with the job and for making money at it: 'To discover virtue in costiveness was a mark of Bloomsbury gentility. Ladies and gentlemen should be above the exigencies of the tradesman's life.' But the opposite of constipation or refined anal retentiveness isn't the healthy evacuation; it's diarrhoea (there's toilet imagery = creativity symbolism aplenty in the Enderby books), and yet Burgess gave every appearance of truly believing that quantity, dolled up as a continuous firework display, with whizzing Catherine wheels and foaming light-fountains, could in itself be a sign of quality; instead of its being, which is surely nearer the case, a substitute for quality. 'No, I don't pause between books,' he admitted in 1990. 'In fact I'm usually writing more than one at a time.' His work, like Attila's sacking, raping and pillaging, monotonously catalogued in the novella 'Hun' (contained in The Devil's Mode), became a pointless activity. It's not fecundity, in his later books, but conspicuous waste; or like Attila's battles, a meaningless feat of endurance.

His motivation? Everybody who met Burgess would hear about his nervous collapse in North Borneo in 1959, where he was employed as an English instructor at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. 'One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough ... I just lay down on the floor. I was picked up and shoved into the local hospital. Various elementary tests were given and then I was sent home to England. Eventually my wife was told there was evidence of a cerebral tumour, but it was inoperable. She told me that they gave me a year to live.' A benign interpretation is that Lynne was being mischievous. But the legend is that, unemployed, Burgess sat at his typewriter and polished off The Doctor Is Sick, Inside Mr Enderby, The Wanting Seed, The Worm and the Ring and One Hand Clapping, one after the other, during the pseudoterminal twelvemonth. Actually, The Worm and the Ring had existed in draft form at least as early as 1954, when Burgess (as Wilson) was still at Banbury Grammar School; colleagues on the staff had read it. But there's no gainsaying Burgess's optimism, hoping to leave his prospective widow well-provided for with royalty payments. And the mighty engine he'd set going inside him wasn't to cease functioning until his death, nearly thirty-five years later. As a matter of fact, such was the stockpile, or such was the period it took for his dynamos to run down, reviews he'd written continued to appear in newspapers posthumously, the novel in verse, Byrne, was published two years after he'd died, and the essay collection One Man's Chorus emerged in 1998, five years after he'd died. It's as if, in some ghostly fashion, he's continuing to bring us airs from heaven or blasts from hell.

At the centre of his work there was a fretting about time and its ebbing; a worry about night falling and the infernal fires approaching. Burgess is precise about measuring time in his fiction (Burgessian boldness and insubordination is offset by a sharp Wilsonian rage at disorder and irresponsibility), and when Spindrift has his wristwatch stolen from a hospital locker in The Doctor Is Sick, he is propelled into a life of crime and chaos. Alex's life of crime, in A Clockwork Orange, is a history of mechanised thuggery. He is converted from being automatically bad into being automatically good. Nando and Paolo Tasca, the volatile Italians in Devil of a State, fight over a stolen pocket watch and enact the Oedipal crime of parricide: as the son measures himself towards manhood, the father measures his own decline. The Long Day Wanes, also known as A Malayan Trilogy, monitors the crepuscular end of the British Empire, its characters watching their power fail like parodic Wagnerian gods. At one point we see 'the Western sky put on a Bayreuth montage of Valhalla'. At another point we hear that 'the white man's day is coming to an end. Götterdämmerung.' The coming to an end of the world itself is charted in The End of the World News: day by day our planet moves nearer its fatal collision with a rogue star.

Burgess's vision was apocalyptic – he was convinced (his) time was running out. What he enjoyed about living in Lugano, towards the end of his life, in a new chalet where the heating system hummed like a ship's engine and the nuclear bunker in the basement was used to store back-copies of Corriere della Serra (many containing articles by himself), was that the looming mountains 'impose their sempiternity upon my ephemerality'. Something would last, at least. 'Swiss clocks keep good time and the Alps look scrubbed ... There are worse places.' After the famous death sentence was passed and he'd decided to compose novels, and the energy and industriousness never slacked, and he continued to sustain himself through work ('The only way I can live with myself, I find, is to justify my being here at all, and the way of justification is the way of work. I feel guilty when I am not writing, and so I write'), and it was as if he'd turned himself, like his Swiss hot-water boiler, into a machine ('I'm not proud of my work by any means. But I am proud of my persistence – of pushing on at it'), no wonder he could gather his journalism as Homage to Qwert Yuiop, for he did seem espoused to his typewriter keyboard. His characters, too, in his fictions, are less bundles of thoughts and impressions than cybernauts with components prone to error. Keats dies messily in Abba Abba (and the real Keats once wrote to Reynolds, 'until we are sick, we understand not'); Shakespeare dies syphilitically in Nothing Like the Sun; Freud dies cancerously in The End of the World News; and Herod, in Burgess's adaptation of Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ, is afflicted with migraine – his cure: mass infanticide:

Sleep, still my aching brain;
Sleep, ease my anguished spirit.
Unfold your wings
And bear me from this prisonhouse of pain.

People don't have thoughts; they have bodies which decay, appetites which need fulfilling – and everything stems from this. Burgess's humans are humanoids, spouting theories about Free Will and Predestination, Freudian psychoanalysis, Hopkins' poems, or the correct recipe for Lancashire Hot Pot. They give lectures. And in The Wanting Seed and 1985, for instance, history itself – the characters' environment – is robotic. There is no progress, only repetition. The future depicted is an exaggeration of the egregious elements from the present – as the sci-fi glam-rock landscape in A Clockwork Orange was an exaggeration of the Mods and Rockers trend of the early sixties.

Burgess's tendency to exaggerate could be regarded as preachy, slip-shod and over-boisterous. (Geoffrey Grigson said that the personality behind the prose must surely be 'coarse and unattractive'.) It is, nevertheless, what gives a great deal of his work a broad, slapstick edge – and it is what prevents him, at his best, from being portentous and stuffy. Farce is a mechanical form: characters whizz from one catastrophe to the next, and Burgess's novels, with their busy plots and people built from the outside in, are farcical picaresques. His characters are automata who do his bidding. (He would never have claimed, as Kingsley Amis did, that novel-writing involves 'some non-conscious level'.) Their pratfalls and collisions are engineered malfunctions – Enderby whirls about London, Rome and Tangiers; Paul, in Honey for the Bears, capers around Leningrad; Edwin, in The Doctor Is Sick, travels in the criminal underworld; Hillier, in the Ian Fleming pastiche, Tremor of Intent, has fast-paced adventures in Istanbul; Ron Beard is chased by whip-cracking lulus in Beard's Roman Women; Toomey is made to jostle with famous writers in Earthly Powers (originally called The Creators); and there are the wandering disciples and apostles in Man of Nazareth and The Kingdom of the Wicked; the wandering tribe in Moses: A Narrative Poem ... Burgess himself, in his memoirs, makes his own life, too, seem like a Boulting Brothers film.

What with his saturation in Joyce (on whom he wrote two booklength critical studies), it might be anticipated that Odysseus, the supertramp, is the progenitor of Burgess's meandering, lost picaros. In fact, the origins are in Oedipus. Odysseus's destiny was to return home (as Leopold Bloom does); Burgess's characters, like the Theban king, end up without home or homeland – as Burgess himself drifted from house to house, complaining of exile, buying and discarding property. In 1972, he actually wrote Oedipus the King, a loose and 'neurotically distorted baroque' adaptation of Sophocles' play, for the Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis. And if you look at his novels, they are full of mythical motifs: rootlessness, attitudes to kinship and power, riddles.

In Beds in the East, Victor Crabbe is bitten on the foot by a scorpion. He is bandaged and limps: 'I am now Club Foot the Tyrant ... But I didn't kill my father and I didn't marry my mother.' What, in that case, is his Oedipal crime? If Crabbe is a representative of colonial usurpers, his transgression has been against history: the British stole the history of Malaya from its rightful owners; they usurped the throne. In Malaya, the British had no roots. They interposed between the Malays and the Malayan past: they appeared, as from nowhere, to govern, as Oedipus did in Thebes. Crabbe may seem more like the Sphinx, another creature which arrived unheralded bringing its curses. So may the British seem sphinx-like (or sphingyne in Burgess's coinage); the novel deplores their Westminster legislature and gadgets like refrigerators. So too may Oedipus. He, at a moment of despair in Burgess's Minneapolis translation, believes himself to be a duplicate of the Sphinx.

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Excerpted from Anthony Burgess by Roger Lewis. Copyright © 2002 Roger Lewis. Excerpted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc..
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