And that's that!
Thank you very much to Andrew for joining us today and answering your questions.
Join us for a new book on the Reading group next Tuesday, where we’ll be having a ‘hat month’ in April. Which book should we read to celebrate the human spirit? Have a think this weekend and share your choices with us next week...
Johnfrance asks about Burgess’s relationship with Manchester:
What is it he said: “Pumped up, pompous ol’bastard....that’s wot thay’d call me in Manchester in them days” ... Oh dear... love the guy, grew up with him.
He received a classic piece of hate mail from a Mancunian: 'We've got three graves waiting for you: one for your body, one for your books, and one for your ego.' But he loved Manchester and never stopped visiting it or writing about it.
Alpafo asks:
How did Burgess become so knowledgeable about Joyce?
He was given copies of A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses by his history teacher at school. And he followed Finnegans Wake when it was appearing in serial and pamphlet form in the 1930s. Joyce appealed to Burgess as a fellow lapsed Catholic who was also a modernist and unafraid of experiment. He used to re-read Ulysses (his favourite novel) at least once every year. And he read widely in Joyce criticism and biography.
wordswort asks:
Was Kingsley Amis’s story about Burgess unadorned? He made him sound very egotistical. Gore Vidal was kinder.
Kingsley Amis liked Burgess and I think he must have enjoyed his company. He stopped being able to read his books after Tremor of Intent (1966), which is the kind of experimental work he disliked. Amis wrote some very favourable reviews of the early novels, especially A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed and Honey for the Bears. And he enjoyed AB's science-fiction novels and stories.
bryfox asks:
Always wondered if Burgess actually felt freed by Lynne’s death but never dared admit it. His ‘guilt’ at letting her drink so much didn’t quite convince in his autobiography, and neither did his ‘grief’. She was a piece of work. Thoughts?
He wrote a remarkable series of short stories towards the end of Lynne's life in which husbands dream of murdering their wives. And then when she died he was completely grief-stricken. He wouldn't be the first unhappy husband to have harboured violent fantasies and worked them out on the page.
By his own admission, he had already met Liana before Lynne died, but he stayed with her until the end. It wasn't an easy time. But I imagine that Burgess himself would have been a difficult person to be married to.
'He enjoyed the company of gay people throughout his life'
Michealmack says:
Do you think Burgess was gay or gayish at all? In Earthly Powers which I’ve just finished the narrator/protagonist Kenneth Toomey is gay. His life feels very smoothly written and true (apart from his unusual ubiquity at key moments of the 20th century. But hey it’s a plot device and a brilliant one). As with William Golding, I’ve always had the feeling from his work that Burgess could have been a gaytender (ahem!) Do you agree?
Oh and any thoughts on why AE (George Russell) was chosen to relieve Toomey of his Fellatial virginity? I found it interesting that 1980’s Booker Winner, Golding’s Rites of Passage, had an episode of fellatio at its centre and Earthly Powers has a (presumably) key part of Toomey’s emerging sexual identity featuring the same. Must’ve been something in the air! Thank you.
There are gay and lesbian characters in all of his novels from A Vision of Battlements (written in 1952). This caused at least one of his London publishers to assume that he was gay. Christopher Ricks pointed out in his review of Honey for the Bears (1963) that Burgess was 'subversive' because he presented gay people and lifestyles without making any apology for them. Of course Toomey in Earthly Powers is plagued by guilt, but he is also a man of his time, living in the long shadow of the Oscar Wilde trial. His very public coming-out is a moment of drama and triumph.
The last novel Burgess published before his death was A Dead Man in Deptford, in which he presents Christopher Marlowe as a cheerful sodomite who is also the author of certain Shakespeare plays. I think Burgess was fascinated by questions of sexuality in all of his published work. He enjoyed the company of gay people throughout his life, especially when he was in the Army during WW2, although he was very much married to both of his wives.
'I can think of no other writer whose work has given me as much consistent pleasure during the 30 years I've been reading him'
Technoguys has several questions about Burgess’s life:
Did he feign a brain tumour, or was he told he had one, to get out of his teaching post in Malaya?
He became successful writing A Clockwork Orange, due to Kubrick’s film of the book which he said misrepresented it, but said it was peripheral to his output anyway... There’s a question of why he moved abroad, was it to save on tax? He must have had wealth. And how much did he really believe in God , Catholicism or Original Sin?
Was he any good in your opinion as a writer, and why isn’t he read today? Is it because he is unsituated politically? Was he a post-colonial jingoist? Was he an attention-seeking verbalist, showing off his cleverness? For all the brilliance of his ear for social register and phonological awareness, was he any better than a second rate novelist?
Burgess was successful long before the Kubrick film was released. He was widely praised by the New York Times and all of the British papers. The French critic Helene Cixous was publishing long articles about the importance of his novels in Le Monde long before they'd even been translated into French.
I think he left England in 1968 because he was already used to living abroad (Gibraltar, Malaya) and because he wanted to avoid the 90% rate of income tax. He was much more at home in Italy and France, and he was welcomed there. He always thought of himself as a European writer, not a British one.
Regarding Burgess's alleged "conservatism", he voted Labour in 1945, consorted with revolutionary Marxists in Brunei, and later supported the anarchists and the communists when he lived in Italy. He wasn't shy when it came to voicing his dislike of "Mrs effing Thatcher". The Malayan Trilogy articulates serious doubts and reservations about colonialism. It would be very misleading to represent AB as an apologist for the colonial system.
Having looked at the available medical records and discussed them with professors of neurology, I would say that the brain tumour was a misdiagnosis rather than something he made up.
You can call him second-rate if you like, but I simply disagree. I can think of no other writer whose work has given me as much consistent pleasure during the 30 years I've been reading him. Burgess deserves to be remembered as a towering figure in C20th literature. His works are still widely read all over the world, and he has a large following in places such as China, Russia and South America.
Updated
'I don't doubt that Burgess was haunted by this traumatic episode'
BMacLean asks:
The violent rape of his pregnant first wife Lynne by four attackers must have been a profoundly traumatic experience - primarily for her, of course, but also for Burgess himself. Is it fair to say that he attempted to work out that trauma periodically in his fiction (e.g. Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers)? If so, did he ever talk about what it was like seeing the Clockwork Orange scene enacted on the screen? Was Lynne’s alcoholism thought to have been a result of that episode?
The term “Venerean strabismus” crops up several times in Earthly Powers: did Burgess know a woman in real life who displayed this characteristic?
Burgess writes in Little Wilson and Big God that the attack on Lynne was 'not sexual'. She was very badly beaten up by GI deserters during WW2, and she lost her unborn child as a result. It must have been a horrific experience. As for the Clockwork Orange connection, it would be very odd if the rape scene had been an attempt to revisit the attack on Lynne from the viewpoint of one of the perpetrators, especially since Lynne was still alive when the novel was published. But I don't doubt that Burgess was haunted by this traumatic episode. It destroyed his first marriage and it destroyed Lynne.
Re: the veneran strabismus, this also appears in a number of other Burgess novels. I think he found it attractive. And he probably liked the sound of the words.
(Hortense, if anyone's interested, was the name of one of AB's French translators.)
Updated
Swelter has a question about the picture above:
Are the books on the bookshelf behind you in the picture from Burgess’ library? From my own library I recognise two volumes with Burgess introductions: The John Collier Reader and The Aerodrome.
Yes, those are Burgess's books. There are 7728 books at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester, transported from his houses in Bracciano and Monaco. The University of Angers has another book collection from his houses in Callian and Malta.
'Burgess cast himself as the unreliable narrator of his own life's story'
MeanMachine really loves Earthly Powers:
I divorced my wife in 2014, mainly because she would not take Earthly Powers seriously. I have recently discovered that she put The Real Life in a dustbin just before or after that. So my question would be, what is your take, generally, of the relation between fact and fiction, in the (unreal) life of AB?
An excellent question. And I'm very pleased to know that you think highly of Earthly Powers. It's interesting to read Burgess's 2 vols of confessions in the light of Toomey's fictional autobiography, 'Confabulations', which appears in chapter 82 of EP: 'All memories are disordered. The truth, if not mathematical, is what we think we remember' (p. 645). I would say that Burgess (much like Toomey) casts himself as the unreliable narrator of his own life's story. He says at the beginning of Little Wilson and Big God that it is a book about memory, and that he has not checked any facts apart from the spelling of Malay words. Writing his biography, I was surprised by the extent to which his autobiography was informed by his own re-reading the novels. In the sections on Gibraltar and Leningrad, he recycles episodes and sometimes paragraphs from the published novels, none of which seem to have any basis in fact. Deborah Rogers, who was Burgess's agent and friend, said that he was happiest when he was inside his own head. In his novel The Doctor Is Sick, Burgess presents a character, Edwin Spindrift, who is mad about words and language. The problem is that he has become detached from the real-life things to which the words refer. I'm sure that Edwin is a kind of self-caricature, and that Burgess was well aware of the dangers of putting language and literature before life.
blindalley says:
My uncle left a non-fiction book by Burgess called A Mouthful of Air. What other non-fiction did Burgess write, if any?
Non-fiction works include 2 books about James Joyce, English Literature: A Survey for Students, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, a book about the life and work of D.H. Lawrence (Flame Into Being), an illustrated book about New York (titled New York), The Novel Now, This Man and Music (about his life as a composer), 3 vols of essays (Urgent Copy, Homage to Qwert Yuiop, One Man's Chorus). He also translated 3 novels out of French and produced English translations of Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, The Miser by Moliere, and Woe Out of Wit by the Russian playwright Gribyedov.
I recommend the 2 vols of autobiography: Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You've Had Your Time (1990), both available in paperback from Vintage.
Updated
Bullfinchington says:
The Sci-Fi third of The End of the World News feels very hackneyed, indeed barely proof-read, so to what extent was his 2000-word-before-breakfast habit a bad one?
In the same work, in the Trotsky musical section, Burgess appeared to give the impression that he was fluent in Russian. How much of a polyglot was he really in connection with non-romantic languages?
If you think I’m putting the boot in, I can say that I agreed with his take on Joyce’s Ulysses, and regard Earthly Powers as a 20th Century masterpiece.
The genesis of The End of the World News is that the futuristic section was written quite carefully over a period of about 6 years. It began as a novella, which was then translated into at least 2 drafts of a film script before being re-purposed as one of the 3 narratives within the published novel. Burgess also read it aloud and recorded his reading on audio cassettes so that he could test his dialogue on the ear.
Re: languages, he spoke Malay (to the equivalent of degree standard), tourist Russian and a small amount of Chinese, Hebrew and Classical Greek. He claimed to have a good reading knowledge of Koranic Arabic. He tried to learn Japanese at the age of 75 but found it difficult. He tried and failed to learn Irish in the 1960s.
'Burgess disliked Jimmy Savile as a representative of youth culture and pop music, which he despised'
darrenlollipopman says:
Burgess was particularly sensitive to the smiling nastiness of the British establishment, and could write of it quite brilliantly (I’m thinking of the murders of the heroes of Napoleon Symphony and A Dead Man in Deptford, as well as his disgust at the Stephen Ward affair). He was one of the few people to point out Jimmy Savile’s true nature (‘The most evil man in Britain’, ‘That lover of the young’ - You’ve had your time). Are you aware of any unpublished insights he may have had into establishment cover-ups of the recent past, simply for the sake of historical openness, you understand?
Burgess disliked Jimmy Savile as a representative of youth culture and pop music, which he despised. JS had also been awarded an OBE and a knighthood: the kind of public honours that Burgess believed he was owed but never received.
On the other hand, he also made allegations against Edward Heath in an interview published in an American academic journal in 1981, and these seem to have no basis. I think he simply repeated rumours he'd heard elsewhere. Living in Malta and Italy and the south of France, he didn't have access to any special information about the British establishment. He hated politicians, regardless of their politics.
Shuggiebear asks:
Did Burgess ever become reconciled to the Beatles?
There is a copy of Yellow Submarine in the vinyl collection at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester. We're not sure who it belonged to. It could have been bought by Burgess's son. When Burgess was asked to write an article about punk in the late 1970s, he said that the Sex Pistols made him nostalgic for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He'd hated them at the time, of course. There is a character called Yod Crewsey in the second Enderby book (published 1968) who is clearly intended to be an unflattering caricature of John Lennon.
'I don't believe the conspiracy theory about Burgess being a secret agent for the KGB'
lulusbackintown asks:
1) In the concluding scenes of the film of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Alexander DeLarge’s name is changed in the newspaper front pages to ‘Alex Burgess’. Kubrick had a black sense of humour but was never the in-jokey type. Was this ever explained? Was Anthony Burgess aware of this? If so, what was his feeling about it?
2) Before reading your cracking biog (creep, creep, fawn, fawn), I had the great misfortune to read Roger Lewis’ thoroughly nasty attempt. Did you read it? What did you make of Lewis’ theory about ‘A Clockwork Orange’ not being written by Burgess at all, and was some elaborate code detailing the whereabouts of secret American nuclear missile bases?
3) After having it ignored on a shelf for years, last Saturday I picked up ‘The Doctor Is Sick’ and read the whole thing in one sitting. (And this is rare for me; I generally nod off after a couple of pages of a novel.) Absolutely brilliant! Did his wife at the time not read his work, or realise how much he drew from his own life? Did no acquaintance mention it to her?
4) For the doubters of Burgess, is there a particular work you slide under their sneering noses to convince them of his talents?
1. Burgess wasn't involved in the making of the film and he didn't see it until it was complete. He deplores this continuity error in You've Had Your Time.
2. No, I don't believe the conspiracy theory about Burgess being a secret agent and communicating with his KGB paymasters by putting coded messages into the text of his novels. Blake Morrison was also contacted by the person who made these claims and he writes about her in his contribution to a book called Mind Readings: Writers' Journeys Through Mental States (1996).
3. I'm not sure that Llewela read any of Burgess's novels after Time for a Tiger. He says in the autobiography that she didn't. I also find this surprising, as The Doctor Is Sick is dedicated to her, but there is no evidence (in letters, etc.) to suggest otherwise.
4. I'd recommend Inside Mr Enderby to anyone. And Earthly Powers, of course.
And he also has a counter answer for question No 4:
Updated
Swelter has three questions about Earthly Powers:
Since this novel is far longer than anything else Burgess wrote, did he do any unusual preparation or research or take any different approaches to its writing compared to his other novels?
The real-world events behind the “Children of God” storyline occurred in late 1978. As this episode seems key to his novel’s theme and structure, it was surprising to me that AB decided to fictionalize such a recent event. Did Burgess have some other storyline planned for the character who became God Manning before the events of Jonestown happened?
It appears that Burgess was working on Earthly Powers from the early to mid-1970s up to very close to the time of its publication (your biography states that in 1973, “the first forty pages of this novel were filed away in a sun-bleached folder”). Why does the last page say only “MONACO 1980”? Was all the writing in fact done in that year, or does he not conform to the Joycean convention of indicating the range of years during which a work was written?
Working from memory, I think there is a letter to Burgess from his agent, Deborah Rogers, in which she writes about the 'Pope novel' in 1970.
He wrote a series of quite detailed synopses, possibly for the benefit of US publishers who were in a bidding war and didn't want to read the complete 900-page manuscript.
Although he does seem to have taken some details of the Children of God from Jonestown, Burgess was generally interested in the phenomenon of religious cults and wrote about them elsewhere (in The Wanting Seed and The End of the World News, for example). I expect that he always intended the child saved by Carlo's miracle to become the leader of a cult. The deaths at Jonestown were a confirmation of his suspicions about how such cults were likely to end.
The date given at the end of the book is the date of completion. Burgess doesn't normally give, on the final page, the date when he'd begun the book (but I know there are a couple of exceptions to this, such as Napoleon Symphony and Beard's Roman Women).
'A lot of his friends believed that he was, to some extent, self-created'
Kungfulil says:
The question I’d like answered: Are there/were there any stories of unprintable filth, orgies, drug addictions, unspeakable violence, home-made porn films, that sort of thing or was he - I haven’t read your book on AB - the man he presented to the world: a hard working, not very attractive, heart-breakingly bald, a bit of a loner, a bit of a fibber, big-brained, hyperactive genius? Did you like him? Would you have? Do you think?
I think he lived the life he describes in the autobiography, although there seem to be one or two fictional notches on his bed-post. Robert McCrum (who met Burgess) describes him as a mixture of polymath and charlatan who was also great fun. That corresponds with the impression I get from reading his letters and diaries. I never met him, but I interviewed around 300 people who had known him. Almost without exception, they remembered him with affection, though a lot of his friends and associates believed that he was, to some extent, self-created. I think I'd have enjoyed his company. Whether he'd have welcomed a biographer looking into his life is another matter, of course.
usefulmirage has a question about Burgess’s unpublished script for The Spy Who Loved Me (this James Bond fan website includes a description of the plot by Burgess himself):
Have you read AB’s script for The Spy Who Loved Me? Is it any good? What are his other unpublished film scripts like?
The film scripts are very interesting, especially to people who know the novels. Burgess wrote scripts based on Enderby, The Doctor is Sick and A Clockwork Orange, all of which contain new scenes which don't appear in the novels. He adapted The Wanting Seed as a vehicle for Sophia Loren, at the request of Carlo Ponti. Burgess was heavily in demand as a screen-writer, especially after the success of Moses the Lawgiver and Jesus of Nazareth on TV in the 1970s. The Spy Who Loved Me script is similar to Tremor of Intent, and it resurrects some characters from that novel. Burgess admired Ian Fleming and he obviously read the James Bond novels with close attention. He wrote an introduction to the paperback reprints of the Bond novels published by Coronet in the 1980s.
AB also wrote scripts about Samson and Delila, Shakespeare (a musical), the end of the world, the life of Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini. None of these projects went into production, but copies survive in the various Burgess archives.
'I think his reasons for leaving England were complex... you're right to suggest that he didn't enjoy paying income tax at the 90% rate introduced by Labour'
Technoguys says:
Burgess was one of the most lively writers in this country but he lived largely on the continent. We have a lot of his interviews on YouTube. He gave a sense of not being appreciated in England but often expressed a lot of nostalgia to come back and live here. To what extent was his exile due to i) money, ii) tax, iii) Catholicism, iv) dislike of the English novel and subject matter?
Why didn’t he win any major literary prizes (he did deserve them). I noticed he often worked or had interviews in the USA, where he seemed more appreciated. What did his critics have against him in this country? I feel A Clockwork Orange unfairly gave people the wrong impression of his ability, due mainly to the film. He always hated that.
Was his prolixity and verbosity held against him? Burgess was always generous towards others.
I think his reasons for leaving England in 1968 were complex. He married an Italian woman and they both wanted to live abroad. He'd already spent time in Gibraltar, Malaya, Russia and America, and he felt, as a freelance writer, that it didn't much matter where he lived. You're right to suggest that he didn't enjoy paying income tax at the 90% rate introduced by the Labour government under Harold Wilson. And Burgess was not alone in leaving England at this time. I think Richard Burton moved to Switzerland for similar reasons.
It's also true that his work sold better in places such as America, France and Italy than it did in the UK. He won prizes in Italy and France, but there was never much recognition in Britain. Burgess received public honours from France and Monaco, but nothing at all from England except a plastic plaque presented to him by Mrs Thatcher at the British Press Awards in 1979.
Kungfulil left this wonderful question (very much worth reading to the end):
The book world seems a dull place without characters like Burgess. And even though he failed, on some levels, to pull off an all singing all dancing literary reputation, due in part to the sheer volume of his output, the bullshittiness and snobbery of his critics and the jealousy of his peers and literary enemies, I believe, played a major role in rubbishing his achievements (nobody seemed to mind that Dickens popped off books like cap-guns (isn’t this what a professional writer is meant to do?). I doubt your average English Lit student would have the brain capacity or the level of concentration needed to engage with the comedic genius of a book like Earthly Powers. Burgess, like so many of our great writers, is kicked to the literary sidelines, out of sheer laziness on the part of academics who can’t see beyond the writers initial hit, in Burgesses case, A Clockwork Orange. So my question is, where did Burgess get his hair cut?
And Andrew has an answer:
Alas, there are no hairdressing bills in the archive, so this vital information may be lost to posterity. Burgess's first wife used to cut his hair at home in the 1950s, with the aid of of pudding bowl. Re: the combover, people forget how common a sight this was until fairly recently. There must have been a fashion for this style among gentlemen's barbers, and you probably got it whether you'd asked for it or not. Burgess was not alone in pioneering the combover. Think about Robert Robinson and Bobby Charlton. Also famous politicians, such as Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d'Estaing, the President of France. The late Stanley Kubrick was also not above this sort of thing. Even today, the combover seems to be back in fashion among world statesmen (I mention no names for fear of libel writs). It's part of the history of style, like Paisley shirts, platform shoes or bell-bottomed trousers.
Regarding Burgess's readership, I have a strong impression that Earthly Powers is being read and enjoyed by young people, among many other readers. As for his reputation in academic places, Lorna Sage wrote in 1993 that AB didn't seem to fit comfortably into any of the standard categories. But this has changed a lot in recent years. People are reading him as a post-colonial writer (Devil of a State, The Malayan Trilogy), a faker-up of historical texts (e.g. in Nothing Like the Sun, ABBA ABBA), a satirical novelist (The Wanting Seed, 1985), a comedian of culture (The Doctor Is Sick, Enderby), or a science-fiction writer (The End of the World News). This is to say nothing of his non-fiction books about literary history, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, etc.
'I think there's been a great resurgence in his reputation over the past 10 years'
ID1767193 asks:
Burgess seems to have a very mixed reputation with critics and readers. How much of this down to his personality and how do you think he will be read in the future?
I think there's been a great resurgence in his reputation over the past ten years. There is more of his work in print now than at any other time since his death in 1993, and this speaks of a certain confidence on the part of publishers. It's been very pleasing to see other writers advocating his work: people like A.S. Byatt, William Boyd, Blake Morrison, Nicholas Blincoe, A.L. Kennedy, Tash Aw, Kevin Jackson and the Spanish novelist Roderigo Fresan.
As for the future, I think people will want to go on reading novels such as Nothing Like the Sun, A Dead Man in Deptford, the Malayan Trilogy, the four Enderby novels, and other forgotten books such as Honey for the Bears, The Right to an Answer and Tremor of Intent. His work is so copious and varied that it speaks to almost any reader. There are even children's books, one of which (A Long Trip to Teatime) has been reprinted by Dover Editions this month. The two volumes of autobiography are also remarkable pieces of writing.
I have a fondness for Byrne, his posthumously published novel-in-verse, which has never quite found the readership it deserves.
Future publications will include editions of the short stories and the letters, as well as reprints of lost and forgotten novels.
MikeStephens says:
“What’ll it be then, eh?” Do you think this is the best opening line of a novel, pulling the reader instantly into the media res, but also establishing the vibrant, dialogue-rich focus of the work, or is that honour held by another author, or does Burgess have a better opening line in any of his other novels?
My own particular favourite, from Orwell’s ‘1984’; “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”, is coloured by Burgess himself who helped me understand the strangeness of the thirteenth hour striking.
I've always liked the opening lines from his novel M/F: 'Totally naked, for god's sake?' 'Functionally naked, call it. All relevant zones exposed.' An arresting opening if ever I saw one.
The Malayan Trilogy also has a strong opening: 'East? They wouldn't know the bloody East if they saw it. Not if you was to hand it to them on a plate would they know it was the East.' These words are spoken by Flaherty, a colonial policeman and notorious pub bore.
Burgess often begins with a flavoursome line of dialogue. Speech is an important part of character-building in all of his novels.
'For relaxation he composed music in the evenings while watching TV'
hemingway62 says:
There was a time when I remember Burgess seeming to be everywhere, doing television appearances on chat shows and late night discussion broadcasts, promoting his latest books, reviewing books by other writers, etc. He also seemed to be the man to go to whenever the newspapers needed something on a writer who had just died or just to fill space in their paper, on any topic - I remember reading something he had written for one of the evening newspapers about the origins of superstitions regarding Friday 13th, which I imagine he knocked out quickly on request. Could you say something about where this energy of his came from and the ability he seemed to have of being able to store masses of information and bring it out when required? Also, did he ever sleep?
I don't think he took weekends off or went on holidays. For relaxation he composed music in the evenings while watching TV. He felt that he'd started late (his first novel wasn't published until he was 39) and there was a sense of trying to catch up with other writers who'd been at it since their early 20s. He also said that the financial rewards of being a novelist were so meagre that it was necessary to write a lot to pay the bills. He didn't have any family money.
And I think Burgess enjoyed writing, in the same way that he enjoyed translating French or Italian poetry, or composing music, or doing crosswords: it gave him a sense of working out problems, or bringing order to chaotic experience. It's worth noting that the period of his first marriage was also the time when he was at his most productive as a novelist. His first wife, Llewela, was an alcoholic who regularly started fights with broken bottles in pubs. She was, by all accounts, an impossible person, but Burgess remained with her for 25 years. By the time she died in 1968 he was in the habit of writing a lot. I imagine that going to the study to inhabit fictional worlds must have been a kind of escapism for him.
dnevnik dnevnik asks:
Is there any chance whatsoever for Mr Burgess’s fourth collection of essays/reviews in not too distant future? For example, Martin Amis will get this chance once again, this year, like Christopher Hitchens did two years before with ‘and yet...’. has anyone in the publishing world, respectable or not, shown any interest in Mr Burgess’s still unpublished newspaper work? or even considered an online publication perhaps?
Carcanet have commissioned a new collection of essays by Burgess, to be published in 2018 under the title THE INK TRADE. This will include a number of unpublished and uncollected literary essays. Some of his journalism was only ever published in Italy. He wrote the essays in English and they were translated by Liana Burgess, his second wife and Italian translator.
There is also a selection of essays and reviews on the Anthony Burgess Foundation's website: www.anthonyburgess.org
Re: the last question, you can read more about the legal obstacles surrounding The Worm and the Ring here – it is an interesting case.
Swelter says:
Thanks for writing the biography, as a long-time Burgess fan I enjoyed it very much. Do you still think, as you indicated in The Real Life, that The Worm and the Ring is free of any legal obstacles to its re-publication? If so, is there any possibility of that happening in the near future?
There are fairly advanced plans to reprint The Worm and the Ring in its original form. It's a lost Burgess classic: a retelling of Wagner's Ring cycle, updated and transposed to England during the Festival of Britain in 1951. I've recently finished work on a new edition of Burgess's first novel, A Vision of Battlements, which is due to be published this summer. It deals with his Amry career and the time he spent in Gibraltar during WW2. The new editions will include introductions and substantial endnotes. Manchester University Press are also publishing The Pianoplayers this year.
'Graham Greene disliked the novel that Burgess dedicated to him and was rude enough to say so'
judgeDAmNationAgain asks:
Hi Andrew, Earthly Powers is my first taste of Burgess (albeit quite a filling one), and one of the pervading themes is about the unimportance of the father compared to the mother (I can’t remember the exact phrase from the book) - so I was wondering what Burgess’ relationship with his father was like, and how similar it was to that between Kenneth Toomey and his father in the book, seeing as his mother also died during the Spanish flu epidemic.
Also, there is obviously a lot of religion in the novel, and it seems to me that a lot of the action itself seems quite biblical, with its countless treatment of fathers, sons and daughters, many hints at incest, (is there a Bible story where someone loses an eye like Hortense) - so my second question (if I’m allowed) is how much interest Burgess had in religion (particularly Christianity), and whether this was purely academic (so to speak) or more along the lines of C. S. Lewis, Graham Greene, etc.?
Burgess inherited his love of music from his father. They used to attend concerts together at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, including the first performance of The Rio Grande by Constant Lambert in 1929.
Re: religion, Burgess was born a Catholic but he stopped going to church at the age of 16. He attended Catholic schools in Manchester and his extended family was solidly Catholic: two of his cousins became priests. Catholicism was part of the air he breathed, and he said that it had informed all of his writing (e.g. the debates about evil and free will in A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers). AB's novel Man of Nazareth (1979) is a retelling of the gospels from the viewpoint of a sceptic who doesn't believe in miracles.
Burgess enjoyed a long correspondence with Graham Greene from 1957 until they fell out in 1989. AB reviewed and admired most of Greene's novels on publication, and he wrote GG's obituary for the Daily Telegraph in 1991.
Theirs was an uneasy friendship, to say the least. Greene disliked the novel (Devil of a State) that Burgess dedicated to him in 1961 and was rude enough to say so. GG casts a shadow over Tremor of Intent, AB's Catholic cold war thriller. Beds in the East, AB's third novel, owes a large debt to The Quiet American. The Doctor Is Sick has been described as a comic rewriting of Brighton Rock.
Thank you to Andrew for joining us!
Hello. I'm very pleased to be here. I'll do my best to respond to all questions.
Five copies of The Real Life of Anthony Burgess up for grabs
Guardian contributor Okay! Excitingly, we have five copies of The Real Life Of Anthony Burgess to give away to the next five people in the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive question in the comments section below.
If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Lucy Poulden with your address (lucy.poulden@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
Join us at 1pm on Friday for a chat about Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess’s biographer Andrew Biswell will be joining us for a live Q&A at 1pm on Friday 31 March.
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess is a fascinating, detailed and forgiving portrait of a brilliant and unusual man. One made all the more interesting because part of Biswell’s job has been to gently unpick the stories Burgess told about himself in his novels and his own volumes of autobiography. Alas, we learn that Burgess may not have been chased down the street by his doctor in Malaya, the four-minute mile hero Roger Bannister. But his love of gin, cigarettes, travel and literature ensure he remains an engaging and intriguing subject. Not to mention the fact that he was generally ready and able to cause controversy, consternation and confusion as well as delight and enlightenment.
The book was widely praised on its release. Robert McCrum, for instance, called it was “absorbing” and “a work of scholarship, understanding and sympathetic portraiture”. Meanwhile, Andrew has continued to study and explain the work of Burgess as a professor of modern literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and as the director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. To whet your appetite, you can also enjoy listening to Andrew discussing Burgess’s musical work and tastes in this excellent Radio 3 broadcast.
Andrew will be with us from 1pm on Friday 31 March – but do please feel free to get your question in early.
Updated
Many thanks for all of your questions. It's been a pleasure.