Anthony Burgess

John Anthony Burgess Wilson
Born 25 February 1917(1917-02-25)
Harpurhey, Manchester
Died 22 November 1993 (aged 76)
St John's Wood, London
Pen name Anthony Burgess, John Burgess Wilson, Joseph Kell[1]
Occupation novelist, critic, composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist, educationalist
Nationality British
Writing period 1956-1993
Genres Historical fiction, philosophical novel, satire, epic, spy fiction, horror, biography, literary criticism, travel literature, autobiography
Subjects exile, colonialism, Islam, faith, lust, marriage, evil, alcoholism, homosexuality, linguistics, pornography
Literary movement Modernism
Influences

Anthony Burgess (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) was an English author, poet, playwright, musician, linguist, translator and critic.[2]

Despite being most famous for the controversial dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange, a work he himself dismissed as one of his lesser efforts, Burgess produced numerous other novel's including the Enderby quartet and Earthly Powers. He was a prominent critic, authoring acclaimed studies of classic writers William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.

Aside from literature, Anthony Burgess was also an accomplished musician[3] and linguist; he composed a number of notable libretti and translated the literary masterpieces Cyrano de Bergerac[4], Oedipus the King[5] and Carmen, among others.

Contents

Biography

Early life

Burgess was born John Burgess Wilson on 25 February 1917 in Harpurhey, a northeastern suburb of Manchester, to a Catholic father and a Catholic convert mother. He was known in childhood as Jack Wilson, Little Jack, and Johnny Eagle.[6] Later, at his confirmation, the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson. He began using the pen-name Anthony Burgess in 1956.

Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, Anthony Burgess' mother, died at the age of 30 at home on 19 November 1918, during the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic. The causes of death listed on her death certificate were influenza, acute pneumonia, and cardiac failure. His sister Muriel had died four days earlier on 15 November from influenze, broncho-pneumonia, and cardiac failure, aged eight.[7] Burgess believed that he was resented by his father, Joseph Wilson, for having survived the incident.[8] After the death of his mother, Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, Ann Bromley, in Crumpsall with her two daughters. During this time, Burgess's father worked as a bookkeeper for a beef market by day, and in the evening played the piano at a public house in Miles Platting.[6] In 1922, Joseph Wilson married the landlady of the public house he worked at, Margaret Dwyer.[9] Later Burgess was raised by his stepmother, a woman whom he despised. By 1924, Joseph and Margaret Wilson had established a tobacconist and off-licence business with four properties. The profits from the business paid for Anthony Burgess' education all the way to university.[10]

Manchester University, where Burgess was a student of literature 1937–1940

His childhood was in large part a solitary one. He said of his childhood: "I was either distractedly persecuted or ignored. I was one despised ... Ragged boys in gangs would pounce on the well-dressed like myself".[11] He attended St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School before moving on to Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Elementary School in Moss Side.[12] Burgess felt isolated at school, stating "When I went to school I was able to read. At the Manchester elementary school I attended, most of the children could not read, so I was ... a little apart, rather different from the rest".[13] Good grades resulted in a place at the Catholic Xaverian College.

Burgess wrote that as a young child he did not care at all about music, until one day he heard on his home-built radio "a quite incredible flute solo, sinuous, exotic, erotic" and became spellbound.[14] Eight minutes later the announcer told him he had been listening to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Claude Debussy. He referred to this as a "psychedelic moment ... a recognition of verbally inexpressible spiritual realities".[14] Burgess announced to his family that he wanted to be a composer, but they were against it because "there was no money in it".[14] Music was not taught at his school, so at about age 14 he taught himself to play the piano.[15]

On 18 April 1938 Joseph Wilson died from cardiac failure, pleurisy, and influenza, at the age of 55. He died intestate so left no inheritance.[16]

Burgess entered the Victoria 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. One of Burgess's professors at the University of Manchester was A.J.P. Taylor; grading one of Burgess's term papers, the great historian wrote: "Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge."[17]

War service

In 1940 Burgess joined the Royal Army Medical Corps which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth, Northumberland. He later moved to the Army Educational Corps, where he conducted speech therapy at a mental hospital. He failed in his aspiration to win an officer's commission.

In Bournemouth in 1942 he married Llewela Jones, eldest daughter of a high-school headmaster. She was known to all as "Lynne". Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at the University of Manchester. Their by all accounts tempestuous marriage was childless.

"I really do think, allowing for everything, Lynne was one of the most awful women I've ever met", one friend of the Burgesses once declared. But as Burgess's biographers have pointed out, Lynne provided much unacknowledged help to Burgess as he sought to establish himself as a writer - both financial and as his muse. Lynne died of cirrhosis in 1968.

Gibraltar, where Burgess, then known as Sergeant-Major John Wilson, was stationed in 1943-45

Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar at an army garrison.[notes 1] He worked as a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching German, Russian, French and Spanish. An important role was the help he gave in taking troops through "The British Way and Purpose" programme, which was designed to reintroduce them to the peacetime socialism of the post-war years in Britain, and to gently inculcate a sense of patriotism. He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the Ministry of Education. Burgess's flair for languages was noticed by army intelligence, and he took part in debriefings of Free Dutch and Free French who found refuge in Gibraltar during the war.

On one occasion in the neighbouring Spanish town of La Línea de la Concepción, he was arrested for insulting General Franco. He was released from custody shortly after the incident. Burgess was pursued by military police of the British Armed Forces for desertion after overstaying his leave from Morpeth military base with his bride Lynne in 1941.

During the blackout, Lynne was attacked and suffered a broken finger as a result of her assailants trying to take her wedding ring off her. Burgess was denied leave to see her.[18]

Early teaching career

Burgess left the army in 1946 with the rank of sergeant-major, and 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 near Preston.

In late 1950 he worked as a secondary school teacher at Banbury Grammar School, teaching English literature. In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to occasionally supervise sports, and he also ran the school's drama society. He organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time. These involved local people and students and included productions of T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes.

With financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple was able to put a down payment on a cottage in the village of Adderbury, close to Banbury. He named the cottage "Little Gidding", after one of Eliot's Four Quartets and Aldous Huxley's The Gioconda Smile. In Adderbury Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the Banbury Guardian.

Malaya

The Malay College in Kuala Kangsar, Perak, where Burgess taught in 1954-55, an experience that formed the basis of the novel Time for a Tiger.

In 1954 Burgess joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer in Malaya. He was initially stationed at Kuala Kangsar 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, 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".

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 attacks.

Kota Bharu, Kelantan. Burgess was an education officer at the Malay Teachers' Training College here between 1955 and 1958.

After an alleged dispute with the Malay College's principal over his accommodation, Burgess was posted elsewhere. He and his wife had occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was supposedly minimal, and this caused resentment. This was the professed reason for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan.

Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written, achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the colonial office. He was rewarded with a salary increment for his proficiency in the language. Malay was still at that time rendered in the adapted Arabic script known as Jawi.

He devoted some of his free time in Malaya to creative writing "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it" and 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 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.[notes 2]

Borneo

After a brief period of leave in Britain during 1958, Burgess 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 the sultanate Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State. Although it dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African territory the like of Zanzibar.

The Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque in Bandar Seri Begawan. Burgess was a teacher at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in 1958-59, and the mosque forms the centrepiece of his Brunei novel Devil of a State

About this time Burgess "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom while teaching history. There were reports that he had been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. Burgess has claimed that he was given just a year to live by the physicians, prompting him to write several novels to get money to provide for his widow. This was misleading - there was no tumour, nor was a tumour ever diagnosed - and has been explained by Burgess's biographers by reference to his (mild and mischievous) mythomania.

He was, however, 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. He may also have wished for a pretext to abandon teaching and get going full-time as a writer.

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". 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." He alluded to this in an interview with Don Swaim, explaining that after his wife Lynne had said something "obscene" to the UK Queen's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, during an official visit, the colonial authorities turned against him.[19] He had already earned their displeasure, he told Swaim, by writing for the newspaper of the revolutionary opposition party the Parti Rakyat Brunei, and for his friendship with its leader Dr. Azahari.[19]

Repatriate years

Burgess was later repatriated and relieved of his position in Brunei. He spent some time in the neurological ward of a London hospital (see The Doctor is Sick) where he underwent cerebral tests that, as far as can be made out, proved negative. On his discharge, benefiting from a sum of money his wife had inherited from her father, together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided to become a full-time writer.

The couple lived first in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton. They later moved to a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in Etchingham, approximately a mile from the Jacobean house where Rudyard Kipling lived in Burwash, and also one mile from the Robertsbridge home of Malcolm Muggeridge.

Upon the death of his father-in-law, he and his wife used their inheritance and decamped to a terraced town house in Chiswick. This provided convenient access to the White City BBC television studios in which he later became a frequent guest. During these years Burgess became a regular drinking partner of the novelist William S. Burroughs. Their meetings took place in London and Tangiers.

A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to Leningrad in the USSR, resulted in Honey for the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang "Nadsat" used in A Clockwork Orange.

Liana Macellari, an Italian translator 12 years younger than Burgess, came across Burgess' novels One was Inside Mr Enderby and A Clockwork Orange while writing about English fiction.[20] The two first met in 1963 over lunch in Chiswick. They began an affair and in 1964, Liana gave birth to Burgess' son, Paolo Andrea. The affair was hidden from his now alcoholic wife, with Burgess refusing to leave her for fear of offending his cousin George Patrick Dwyer, then Catholic Bishop of Leeds.[21] Lynne died aged 47 from liver cirrhosis in March 1968.[20][21] Six months later, in September 1968, Burgess married Liana. He then acknowledged the four year old boy as his own, describing himself as "a belated father", although the birth certificate listed Roy Halliday, who was previously Liana's companion, as the father.[20] An attempt to kidnap Paolo-Andrea in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors influencing the family's move to Monaco. Paolo Andrea (also known as Andrew Burgess Wilson) died in London in 2002, aged 37.

Tax exile

To avoid the 90% tax the family would have incurred due to their high income, they left Britain. During their travels through France and across the Alps, Burgess wrote in the back of the van as Liana drove. In this period, he wrote novels and produced film scripts for Lew Grade and Franco Zeffirelli.[21] He occupied grander accommodation this time (at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of houses and apartments numbering in the double figures).

Malta, where Burgess encountered problems with the state censor. After he left the island his house was confiscated for tax evasion

His first place of residence after leaving England was Lija, Malta (1968-1970), where he bought a house. Problems with the Maltese state censor later prompted a move to Rome. He maintained a flat in the Italian capital, 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, 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), where he helped teach the creative writing program, and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York (1972). At City College he was a close colleague and friend of Joseph Heller. He went on to teach creative writing at Columbia University. He was also a writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969) and at the University at Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.

Monaco. Burgess was based here from 1976

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 centre for Irish cultural studies.

Although Burgess lived not far from Graham Greene, whose house was in Antibes, Greene became aggrieved shortly before his death by comments in newspaper articles by Burgess, and broke off all contact. Gore Vidal revealed in his 2006 memoir Point to Point Navigation that Greene disapproved of Burgess's appearance on various European television stations to discuss his (Burgess's) books. Vidal recounts that Greene apparently regarded a willingness to appear on TV as something that ought to be beneath a writer's dignity. "He talks about his books", Vidal quotes an exasperated Greene as saying.

Burgess spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet two kilometres outside Lugano, Switzerland.

Death

Burgess once wrote: "I shall die somewhere in the Mediterranean lands, with an inaccurate obituary in the Nice-Matin, unmourned, soon forgotten."

In fact he died in the country of his birth. He returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, where he owned a house, to await death. He died on November 22, 1993. His death (from lung cancer) occurred at the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in the St John's Wood neighbourhood of London. He is thought to have composed the novel Byrne on his deathbed.

It is believed by some that he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Moston Cemetery in Manchester, but they instead 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", being

Burgess had delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for Benny Hill in 1992; the eulogies at his own memorial service at St Paul's, Covent Garden, London in 1994 were delivered by the journalist Auberon Waugh and the novelist William Boyd.

Achievement

Novels

His Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes—the three books are Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East—was Burgess's first published venture into the art of fiction.

It was Burgess's ambition to become "the true fictional expert on Malaya", and with the trilogy, he certainly staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya).

The trilogy joined a family of such Eastern fictional explorations, among them Orwell's treatment of Burma (Burmese Days), Forster's of India (A Passage to India) and Greene's of Vietnam (The Quiet American). Burgess was working in the tradition established by Kipling for British India and, for the Southeast Asian experience, Conrad and 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. This linguistic command results in an impressive authenticity and sensitive understanding of indigenous concerns in the trilogy.

Burgess's repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just Enderby but the neglected The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping, partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. This period 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's former colleagues.

A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a motion picture adaptation), the dystopian 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 deserters from the U.S. Army (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 music that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him. In the non-fiction book Flame Into Being (1985), Burgess described A Clockwork Orange as "a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die."

Burgess followed this with Nothing Like the Sun, a fictional recreation of Shakespeare's love-life and an examination of the (partly syphilitic, it was implied) sources of the bard's imaginative vision. The novel, which made some use of Edgar I. Fripp's 1938 biography Shakespeare, Man and Artist, won critical acclaim and placed Burgess in the front rank of novelists of his generation.

By the 1970s his output had become highly experimental, and some see a falling-off in the quality of his work in the period between the release of the Clockwork Orange movie, which brought Burgess fame, and the end of the decade.

Indeed, Burgess has been considered by some critics to be uneven in the quality of his output, and he has been faulted for what has been called a "novelettish kind of dialogue".

The bold and extraordinarily complex M/F (1971) showed the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists, and was later listed by the writer himself as one of the works of which he was most proud. Beard's Roman Women is considered by some to be his least successful novel (plea of mitigation: it was written entirely while on the road in his Bedford Dormobile campervan). Burgess has frequently been criticised for writing too many novels and too quickly. All the same, Beard was revealing on a personal level, dealing with the death of his first wife, his bereavement, and the affair that led to his second marriage.

In another ambitious and unashamedly modernist fictional expedition, Napoleon Symphony, Burgess brought Bonaparte to life by shaping the novel's structure on Beethoven's Eroica symphony. This daring fictional experiment contains among many other assets a superb portrait of an Arab and Muslim society under occupation by a Christian western power (Egypt by Catholic France). The novel showed that while Burgess always regarded himself as little more than a student and epigone of Joyce, he was able at times to equal the master of modernism in literary sophistication and range.

There was a triumphant return to form in the 1980s, when religious themes began to weigh heavily (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. This is notable 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). That work was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.

He kept working through his final illness, and was writing on his deathbed. A late novel was Any Old Iron, a generational saga about two families, one Russian-Welsh, the other Jewish. It encompasses the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the early years of the State of Israel, as well as the imagined rediscovery of King Arthur's Excalibur.

A Dead Man in Deptford, about Christopher Marlowe, is a kind of companion volume to his Shakespeare novel Nothing Like the Sun. The verse novel Byrne was published posthumously.

Criticism

Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text designed originally for use outside English-speaking countries. Aimed at newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students is still used in many schools today. He followed this with The Novel To-day 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) and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. Also published was A Shorter 'Finnegans Wake', Burgess's abridgement.

His 1970 Encyclopædia Britannica entry on the novel (under "Novel, the") is regarded as a classic of the genre.

Burgess wrote 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 the published lecture Obscenity and the Arts explores issues of pornography.

Linguistics

The polyglot Burgess had 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. In Earthly Powers, German, or perhaps its sound to an unlearned ear, is described as "a glottal fishboneclearing soulful sobbing sausagemachine of a language".

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

His interest in linguistics was reflected in the invented, Anglo-Russian teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (Nadsat), and in the movie Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language (Ulam) 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 British, Italian, French and American newspapers and magazines regularly–even compulsively–and in prodigious quantities. Martin Amis quipped in The Observer (London) 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 Observer, 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).

He 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).

Burgess was co-writer of the script for the TV series Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1980).

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.

Among the motion picture treatments he produced are Amundsen, Attila, The Black Prince, Cyrus the Great, Dawn Chorus, The Dirty Tricks of Bertoldo, Eternal Life, Onassis, Puma, Samson and Delila, Schreber, The Sexual Habits of the English Middle Class, Shah, That Man Freud and Uncle Ludwig.

Encouraged by his novel Tremor of Intent (a parody of James Bond adventures), Burgess wrote a screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. It was rejected. Burgess's plot featured Bond's identical twin 008 and revolved around an organisation called CHAOS (Consortium for the Hastening of the Annihilation of Organised Society). CHAOS has accumulated enough money to achieve its plans and is now concentrating on power for its own sake. It blackmails international figures into humiliating themselves by terrorism. During Burgess's proposed opening sequence, an airliner full of passengers is exploded as it takes off, CHAOS's response to the Pope's refusal to personally whitewash the Sistine Chapel. Bond discovers a plot to implant 'micro-nukes' in appendectomy patients, the aim being to blow up Sydney Opera House during a visit by international royals and presidents (this atrocity being in response to the US President's refusal to masturbate on live TV). In You've Had Your Time, Burgess commented that the only idea that survived from his screenplay was that the villains' hideout was a ship disguised as an oil tanker.

Symphonies

As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He was an accomplished musician and 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 Iowa City 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 Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony, while Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition, among other things attempting a fictional representation of Symphony No.40. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 features prominently in A Clockwork Orange (and also in Stanley Kubrick's film version of the novel).

When Burgess was on the BBC'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.

For a list of some of Burgess's musical compositions, see under List of Burgess' works.

Opera and musicals

Burgess produced a translation of Bizet's Carmen which was performed by the 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 wrote the book for the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano, using his own adaptation of the Rostand play as its basis.

His new libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based Scottish Opera.

Work methods

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 output from when he began writing professionally in his early forties until his death was to produce, at a minimum, 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".

Controversies

Espionage

Censorship

Even so, by the end of 2007, the ban had been lifted, and the title was again on open sale.

Mischief

Linguistic gifts

Burgess's multilingual proficiency came under discussion 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).

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 a 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 failed to achieve publication.

Islam

The Ubudiah Mosque features prominently in Time for a Tiger, Burgess's novel of Kuala Kangsar

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."

He later fantasized: "Four wives and an incalculable number of offspring, all attesting my virility and sustained by my patriarchal authority."

In the novel 1985 (1978), Burgess imagines what Britain might be like if a virile, triumphant Islam won far-reaching influence in the country.

Pop-culture influence

  • The Sheffield electropop band Heaven 17 named themselves after a band that appears in Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange (although 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 Horrorschau referred to the Nadsat term, and Poland's Myslovitz produced an album called Korova Milky Bar.
  • A popular bar and music venue in Liverpool is named the "Korova."

Honours

Selected works

Main article: List of Burgess' works

Novels

  • Time for a Tiger (1956) (Volume 1 of the Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes)
  • The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) (Volume 2 of the trilogy)
  • Beds in the East (1959) (Volume 3 of the trilogy)
  • The Right to an Answer (1960)
  • The Doctor is Sick (1960)
  • The Worm and the Ring (1960)
  • Devil of a State (1961)
  • (as Joseph Kell) One Hand Clapping (1961)
  • A Clockwork Orange (1962; 2008 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award)
  • The Wanting Seed (1962)
  • Honey for the Bears (1963)
  • (as Joseph Kell) Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) (Volume 1 of the Enderby quartet)
  • The Eve of St. Venus (1964)
  • Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964)
  • A Vision of Battlements (1965)
  • Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966)
  • Enderby Outside (1968) (Volume 2 of the Enderby quartet)
  • M/F (1971)
  • Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974)
  • The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974) (Volume 3 of the Enderby quartet)
  • Beard's Roman Women (1976)
  • Abba Abba (1977)
  • 1985 (1978)
  • Man of Nazareth (based on his screenplay for Jesus of Nazareth) (1979)
  • Earthly Powers (1980)
  • The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982)
  • Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End of Enderby (1984) (Volume 4 of the Enderby quartet)
  • The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)
  • The Pianoplayers (1986)
  • Any Old Iron (1988)
  • Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)
  • A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
  • Byrne: A Novel (in verse) (1995)

Bibliography

Biographies

Selected studies

Memoirs

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

Collections

Notes

  1. ↑ See A Vision of Battlements.
  2. ↑ Not including an essay published in the youth section of the London Daily Express when he was a child.

References

Notes
  1. ↑ David 1973, p. 181.
  2. ↑ http://kirjasto.sci.fi/burgess.htm
  3. ↑ http://bu.univ-angers.fr/EXTRANET/AnthonyBURGESS/NL1Music.html
  4. ↑ http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=10971252&matches=42&author=Burgess%2C+Anthony&browse=1&cm_sp=works*listing*title
  5. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/Oedipus-King-Minnesota-drama-editions/dp/0816606676
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Lewis 2002, p. 67.
  7. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 62.
  8. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 64.
  9. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 68.
  10. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 70.
  11. ↑ Lewis 2002, pp. 53–54.
  12. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 57.
  13. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 66.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Burgess 1982, pp. 17–18.
  15. ↑ Burgess 1982, p. 19.
  16. ↑ Burgess 1982, pp. 70–71.
  17. ↑ Lewis 2002, p. 95.
  18. ↑ Lewis 2002, pp. 107, 128.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 1985 interview with Anthony Burgess
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 "Liana Burgess". The Times (13 December 2007). Retrieved on 11 September 2008.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 "Liana Burgess". The Daily Telegraph (6 December 2007). Retrieved on 11 September 2008.
  22. ↑ Byatt, A. S. "Other pasts, other places". Salon.com Book Bag. June 21, 1999.
Bibliography

External links

Works of Anthony Burgess
Novels
The Malayan Trilogy · Time for a Tiger · The Enemy in the Blanket · Beds in the East · The Right to an Answer · The Doctor is Sick · The Worm and the Ring · Devil of a State · One Hand Clapping · A Clockwork Orange · The Wanting Seed · Honey for the Bears · Inside Mr. Enderby · The Eve of St. Venus · Nothing Like the Sun · A Vision of Battlements · Tremor of Intent · Enderby Outside · M/F · Napoleon Symphony · The Clockwork Testament · Beard's Roman Women · Abba Abba · 1985 · Man of Nazareth · Earthly Powers · The End of the World News · Enderby's Dark Lady · The Kingdom of the Wicked · The Pianoplayers · Any Old Iron · Mozart and the Wolf Gang · A Dead Man in Deptford · Byrne
Short stories
The Devil's Mode
Poetry
Moses: A Narrative · Revolutionary Sonnets
Essays
An Essay on Censorship · Homage to QWERT YUIOP · One Man's Chorus
Critical works
Shakespeare · Joysprick · Ninety-Nine Novels · A Mouthful of Air
Autobiography
Little Wilson and Big God · You've Had Your Time
Persondata
NAME Burgess, Anthony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilson, John Anthony Burgess
SHORT DESCRIPTION Novelist, critic, composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist, educationalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Harpurhey, Manchester, England
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1993
PLACE OF DEATH St John's Wood, London, England