Writer and critic, born in Manchester, Greater Manchester, NW England, UK. He studied at Xaverian College and Manchester University, lectured at Birmingham University (194650), worked for the Ministry of Education, and taught at Banbury Grammar School (19504). He then became an education officer in Malaya and Brunei (19549), where his experiences inspired his Malayan Trilogy (1965). His many novels include A Clockwork Orange (1962), 1985 (1978), Earthly Powers (1980), and Any Old Iron (1989). He wrote several critical studies and film scripts, including Jesus of Nazareth (1977). His musical compositions include symphonies, a ballet, and an opera. He also wrote under the name of Joseph Kell as well as under his original name. In his later years he lived in Monaco. In 2004, his widow Liana Burgess, opened the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester as a focal point for his life and work.
Anthony Burgess (February 25, 1917 – November 22, 1993) was an English novelist and critic.
Burgess's fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain's empire in the East, the Enderby cycle of comic novels about a reclusive poet and his muse, the classic speculative recreation of Shakespeare's love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange, and his masterpiece Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century.
He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific journalist, writing in several languages.
Life
Childhood
John Burgess Wilson was born on February 25, 1917 in Harpurhey, a northeastern quarter of Manchester, to a Catholic father and a Catholic convert mother. Later, on his confirmation, the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson. In 1956 he began using the pen-name Anthony Burgess.
His mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, died when Burgess was one year old. Her stage name, according to Burgess, was "The Beautiful Belle Burgess", but there has never been any independent verification of this — no playbills have yet been discovered that include the name.
Burgess described his father, Joseph Wilson, as descended from an "Augustinian Catholic" background. Burgess's father had a variety of careers, working as an army corporal, a bookmaker, a pub piano-player, a pianist in movie theaters accompanying silent films, an encyclopedia salesman, a butcher, a cashier and a tobacconist. Burgess described his father, who later remarried a pub landlady, as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father". Burgess's grandfather was half-Irish.
Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother, whom he detested (he was to include a slatternly caricature of her in the Enderby cycle of novels).
Youth and education
Burgess was to a large degree an autodidact, but nevertheless received a high standard of education.
Good grades from Bishop Bilsborrow resulted in a place at the noted Manchester Catholic secondary school Xaverian College, run by the Xaverian Brothers along religious lines. His history teacher at Xaverian College, L W Dever, is credited with introducing Burgess to James Joyce's writings.
Burgess entered the University of Manchester in 1937, graduating three years later with the degree of Bachelor of Arts (2nd class honours, upper division) in English language and literature.
He had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in mathematics – then a requirement for the subject – were deemed not high enough to qualify for a place on the programme.
Burgess's father died of flu in 1938 and his stepmother of a heart attack in 1940.
War service
In 1940 Burgess began a rather unheroic wartime stint with the military, beginning with the Royal Army Medical Corps, which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth, Northumberland.
In 1942 the marriage took place in Bournemouth between Burgess and a Welshwoman named Llewela Jones, eldest daughter of a high-school headmaster. Although Burgess indicated on numerous occasions that her full name was Llewela Isherwood Jones, the name "Isherwood" does not appear on her birth certificate, and this appears to have been a fabrication. Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at Manchester University. "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.
Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar at an army garrison (see A Vision of Battlements). An important role for Burgess was the help he gave in taking the 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 gently inculcate a sense of patriotism. On one occasion in the neighbouring Spanish town of La Linea, Burgess was arrested for insulting General Franco.
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.
Early teaching career
Burgess left the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, 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 (known as "the Brigg" and associated with the University of Birmingham), which was situated near Preston.
At the end of 1950 he took a job as a secondary school teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School (now defunct) in the market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire (see The Worm and the Ring, which the then mayoress of Banbury claimed libelled her). In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to supervise sports from time to time, and he ran the school's drama society.
The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life.
Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes (Burgess had named his Adderbury cottage Little Gidding, after one of Eliot's Four Quartets) and Aldous Huxley's The Gioconda Smile.
It was in Adderbury that Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the Banbury Guardian.
The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, especially The Bell and The Red Lion, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time.
Malaya
At the end of 1953 Burgess applied for a teaching job on the island of Sark, but did not get the job.
Burgess was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar, the royal town in Perak, in what were then known as the Federated Malay States.
In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a housemaster in charge of students of the preparatory school, who were housed at a Victorian mansion known as "King's Pavilion".
As his novels and autobiography document, Burgess's late 1950s coincided with the communist insurgency, an undeclared war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) when rubber planters and members of the European community – not to mention many Malays, Chinese and Tamils – were subject to frequent terrorist attacks.
Burgess and his wife had a reputation in Malaya for bolshiness. Powell, about accommodation for himself and his wife, Burgess was posted elsewhere.
Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written, achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the colonial office. He spent much of his free time engaged in creative writing — "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it" — 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 to be published in one volume as The Long Day Wanes. During his time in the East he also wrote English Literature: A Survey for Students, and this book was in fact the first Burgess work published (if we do not count an essay published in the youth section of the London Daily Express when Burgess was a child).
Brunei
After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, 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. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State.
About this time Burgess "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom while teaching history. 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 is inaccurate, and has been explained by Burgess's biographers by reference to his (mild but mischievous) mythomania.
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.
Repatriate years
He was repatriated and relieved of his position in Brunei.
On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynne had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.
The couple lived first in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby quartet of novels). Finally, when Lynne came into some money as a result of the death of her father, the Burgesses decamped to a terraced town house in the Turnham Green section of Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London.
During these years Burgess became, if not quite a close personal friend of, then a regular drinking partner of, the novelist William S.
A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to the USSR, calling at St Petersburg (then still called Leningrad), resulted in Honey For the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang "Nadsat" used in A Clockwork Orange.
European exile
By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a tax exile.
He lived in a house he had bought at Lija, Malta, for a time, but problems with the state censor prompted a move to Rome.
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).
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 (http://www3.monaco.mc/pglib/). 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. Burgess spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet two kilometres outside Lugano, Switzerland.
Five weeks after Lynne's death in 1968 at the age of forty-seven of liver cirrhosis (see Beard's Roman Women), Burgess had remarried, at Hounslow register office, to Liliana Macellari ("Liana"), an Italian translator.
Death
Burgess once wrote: "I shall die somewhere in the Mediterranean lands, with an inaccurate obituary in the Nice-Matin, unmourned, soon forgotten."
It is believed 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", which has several denotations: (1) the Hebrew for "Father, father", that is, an invocation to God as Father (Mark 14:36 etc.); (2) Burgess's initials forwards and backwards; (5) the Burgess novel about the death of Keats, Abba Abba;
Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade, committing suicide at the age of 37 in 2002.
Achievement
Novels
With the Malayan trilogy (Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East), his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. Burgess was working in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W.
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.
Burgess's repatriate years (c. This era also witnessed the publication of The Worm and the Ring, which was withdrawn from circulation under the threat of libel action from one of Burgess'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 tour de force A Clockwork Orange (1962).
Then came 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. 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 this period. 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". Burgess was frequently criticised for writing too many novels and too quickly.
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. 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 heavy (see The Kingdom of the Wicked and Man of Nazareth as well as Earthly Powers). Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic "training" and worldview remained strong in his work all his life.
He kept working through his final illness, and was writing on his deathbed.
Criticism
Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text designed originally for use outside English-speaking countries. He followed this with The Novel Today and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction.
Then came the Joyce studies Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (also published as Re Joyce), Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, and A Shorter Finnegan's Wake.
His Encyclopædia Britannica entry The Novel of 1970 is regarded as a classic of the genre.
Burgess wrote full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D.H.
Linguistics
The polyglot Burgess had command of Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as of some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian.
"Burgess's linguistic training," write Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, "is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronunciations and the niceties of register."
His interest in linguistics was reflected in the Anglo-Russian invented teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (called Nadsat) and in the film Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language for the characters to speak.
The hero of The Doctor is Sick, Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is a lecturer in linguistics.
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 London Observer in 1987: "...on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid – and there is a Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500."
"He was our star reviewer, always eager to take on something new, punctilious with deadlines, length and copy," wrote Burgess's literary editor at the 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).
He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called Will! or The Bawdy Bard.
Encouraged by his novel Tremor of Intent (a parody of James Bond adventures), Burgess wrote a screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. 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). 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. In Burgess's You've Had Your Time, he 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."
His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio.
Sinfoni Melayu, characterised by the Burgess biographer Roger Lewis as "Elgar with bongo-bong drums", was described by Burgess, its composer, as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".
The structure of the novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony, while Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition.
Burgess made plain his low regard for the popular music that has emerged since the mid-1960s, yet he has been called "the godfather of punk" as a result of the nihilist future world he created in A Clockwork Orange.
When Burgess was heard on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programmme in 1966, he made the following choice: Purcell, Rejoice in the Lord Alway;
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 composed the music for the 1971 Minneapolis production of his Cyrano de Bergerac translation, adapting the Rostand play for Broadway.
His new libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based Scottish Opera.
Trivia
Work methods
"I start at the beginning, go to the end, then stop," Burgess once said. 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.Espionage
Burgess had a long-term grievance about being confused with two members of the Cambridge Five: one of the five was Guy Burgess and another Anthony Blunt. Unfortunately, by the time they achieved notoriety, Anthony Burgess's pen-name was well established. He succeeded in extracting an apology from the Paris-based International Herald Tribune in 1983 after the newspaper referred to him in print as "The spy, Anthony Burgess". The Sunday Times newspaper perpetrated a similar error in 1999, referring to "the other British defectors, Anthony Burgess, Donald Maclean and George Blake". Burgess is believed by some, though this is highly conjectural, to have engaged in low-level espionage during his Gibraltar, Malaya and Brunei years and possibly later. See, for example, the London Mail on Sunday, "The greatest story Anthony Burgess never told: his life as a secret agent"; His biographer Roger Lewis claimed that while at the Malayan Teachers' Training College in Kota Bharu, Burgess "was part of a secret plan, in 1955, for the chief ministers of Malaya and Singapore to meet the leader of the outlawed Malayan Communist Party in a jungle clearing". Military authorities who came across a copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake in Burgess's possession in 1941 thought it was some kind of code book. Burgess published a fictional work in the Ian Fleming genre which he entitled Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966). Burgess prepared a screenplay for the James Bond feature The Spy Who Loved Me, which Albert R. Burgess wrote: "My script...was rejected, but my oil tanker (a camouflaged floating palace for the chief villain) was retained." Burgess's biographer Roger Lewis claimed than when he returned from his Burgess research trip to Malaysia in 1999, he met an ex-spy who "told me that Burgess had had dealings with the CIA and that the mind control experiments in A Clockwork Orange, which was written in 1961, were not the novelist's invention....I was told to look closely at what was written on the college pennants that the novel's main character, Alex, had on his bedroom wall: South 4; When he asked the CIA if it would be in a position to release its files on John Wilson (Anthony Burgess), Lewis received this response: "We must neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any records. The journalist Auberon Waugh described Burgess's recipe for hotpot as "disgusting". Burgess often praised a delicacy local to his birthplace of Harpurhey known as cow-heel pie. Burgess was by most accounts a heavy consumer of alcoholic beverages, especially, during his Adderbury years, of cider, of brandy-and-ginger-beer in the East, and of gin in later life. Burgess created his own cocktail, called "Hangman's Blood". In his middle years Burgess often drank beer, and in Malaya the two brands he enjoyed were Tiger and Anchor beer, brewed in both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. The brewery was slow to oblige, only supplying a case several decades later when Burgess had achieved worldwide fame. "Alas," Burgess wrote, "I had become wholly a gin man." Burgess cut his alcohol consumption to some extent in later life. He described his habit as "a patriotic duty to the Exchequer" (tax accounted during Burgess's life, as it does now, for over 80% of the price of a pack of cigarettes in the UK). Burgess's preferred cigar was the Schimmelpenninck Duet. High nicotine ingestion was the cause of the Bürger's disease Burgess suffered, and of the lung cancer that killed him. Burgess was an occasional smoker of opium, which he described as "a fine drug", during both his Kota Bharu and Brunei years. As soon as Burgess handed over the shirts, Greene pulled out a knife and severed the cuffs, into which opium pellets had been sewn. Burgess evinced qualified approval towards the smoking of hemp or cannabis, but with the proviso that it should be a means to an end rather than the end itself. Burgess's preferred medium of payment for his work, he indicated, was "non-taxable cash", and he maintained one or more Swiss bank accounts. Burgess's house in Lija, Malta, was confiscated by the Maltese authorities over non-payment of taxes. Burgess was a currency smuggler. Burgess also knew Thomas slightly, and greatly admired his work. In Burgess's novel Time For A Tiger, the Malay state of Perak is named Lanchap, which is the Malay word for masturbate. Burgess announced on several occasions – it appeared to be a matter of some pride – that he had never in his life had carnal relations with an Englishwoman. In Burgess's novel Beds in the East, one of the principal characters is named Mahalingam, which is "great phallus" in Sanskrit. Burgess was occasionally troubled, especially in his earlier years, by the problem of premature ejaculation and writes comically about it in the Enderby tetralogy and elsewhere. The comedian Benny Hill described Burgess as "the greatest living expert on sex".Mischief
When Burgess applied for the job of schoolteacher at Banbury Grammar school in 1950, he claimed in his résumé to be the co-author, with "Dr. H.P. London's Daily Mail newspaper published in the 1960s a number of comically puritanical letters written by Burgess purporting to be from an Indian Muslim named "Mohammed Ali", who expressed for the benefit of Mail readers his utter disgust at the degradation of contemporary western morals. In the novel The Enemy in the Blanket, Burgess calls the state's main town Kenching, which is "urine" in Malay, while another place is named Tahi Panas ("steaming excrement"). Burgess was sacked as literary critic for the English provincial newspaper the Yorkshire Post after he wrote a review of his own Inside Mr Enderby and it appeared in the newspaper. The novel had been published under the pseudonym Joseph Kell, and the newspaper's editor did not know that Kell was Burgess. Burgess protested, to no avail, that Walter Scott had also once reviewed one of his own novels. Burgess was dismissed from a job he held for a short time as a pub pianist after he insisted on playing, in its entirety, the Jupiter part of Holst's The Planets. James Joyce's Ulysses was banned in Britain when Burgess was a teenager. Ironically in view of this, Burgess has been dubbed "the Godfather of Punk" because of the vivid nihilist world he created in the novel A Clockwork Orange. The Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham was a great admirer of Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange. The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone at the cemetery in Monte Carlo includes an (almost certainly unintentional) reference to the pop group ABBA, who enjoyed huge success at a time – the late 1970s – when Burgess, too, had achieved world fame. This reference is actually to the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA in sonnets, as explored in Burgess's novel of that name. There has been a great deal of pop-world plagiarism from Burgess. To take some examples more or less at random: The Sheffield electropop band Heaven 17 paid Burgess the compliment of naming themselves after a band that appears in Burgess's 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange (though they dropped the "the"). Another Sheffield group, Moloko, took its name from Burgess's (Russian-derived) Nadsat word for a drug-spiked milk drink. Burgess was placed 1,579th after taking, and presumably failing, the Customs & One of Burgess's professors at Manchester University was A.J.P. Grading one of Burgess's term papers, the great historian wrote: "Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge."Polyglottal virtuosity
During his years in Malaya, and after he had mastered Jawi, the Arabic script adapted for Malay, Burgess taught himself the Persian language, after which he produced a translation of Eliot's The Waste Land into Persian. Anthony Burgess, known in Argentina as the British Borges, and Jorge Luis Borges, known in Britain as the Argentine Burgess, each spoke both English and Spanish fluently. But when Burgess and Borges met, each decided it would be unequal and unfair to the other, and inappropriate, to plump for either of the two languages when conversing. (However, this may be apocryphal: another account has them merely reciting a poem in Old English together.) 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. It tells of Burgess, the great linguist, 'bellowing Malay at a succession of Malayan waitresses' but 'unable to make himself understood'. 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. Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; Burgess suffered what was reported as a collapse in Brunei Town in 1959, apparently occasioned by overwork, indications of incipient (rather than chronic) alcoholism, and poor nutrition. Burgess claimed to have been trepanned by Dr Bannister. Burgess had a bout of chickenpox in 1969. Burgess was addicted to tobacco. Burgess nursed a lifelong hatred for physical fitness and its advocates and exponents.Names and namesakes
Anthony Burgess was known to many people in Italy, where he lived for several years, as Antonio Borghese. He also published under his real name John Burgess Wilson and the pen-name Joseph Kell. Burgess considered the composer Derek Bourgeois to be his alter ego. There is a prominent 17th-century Anthony Burgess, also a writer. A pastor at a church in Sutton Coldfield, Anthony Burgess was the author of such works as The Doctrine of Original Sin and A Vindication of the Moral Law. The modern Burgess had an ambivalent attitude towards conversion. So it may be significant that his namesake Pastor Anthony Burgess's most important work is entitled Spiritual Refining: The Anatomy of True & There is a 20th-century Anthony Burgess of note, also a writer. Like his more famous namesake, Anthony Burgess was fascinated by musical theatre and authored two acclaimed works on the subject, The Notary in Opera (1994) and The Notary and Other Lawyers in Gilbert and Sullivan (1997). A noted linguist, notary public and sometime Master of The Worshipful Company of Scriveners of the City of London (aka The Mysterie of Writers of the Court Lettern), Anthony Burgess was a partner in the firm of Cheeswright, Casey & Given their shared interest in opera and foreign languages, it is interesting (though idle) to speculate on whether the two Anthony Burgesses ever met. There is a 21st-century Anthony Burgess, a banker who is head of European mergers & Burgess was arguably as prodigious a creator of nonce words and neologisms, especially in A Clockwork Orange but across the whole range of his work, as Frank Gelett Burgess of "blurb", "bleesh", "bromide" and "gloogo" fame. The comedian Bernard Manning owns the venue, which is in Rochdale Road, very near Carisbrook Street where Burgess was born. Eulogies at Burgess's memorial service at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, London in 1994 were delivered by the journalist Auberon Waugh and the novelist William Boyd.General
Burgess wrote a full-length textbook in 1947 called The Young Fiddler's Tunebook. When Burgess was attacked by muggers in New York City one day in the early seventies, he brandished the swordstick that he tended to carry with him in the city's streets. One of Burgess's last speaking engagements was at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1992. The subject of his address was 'translation', and Burgess quipped that he himself was 'shortly to be translated'. Burgess was pursued by the Military Police for desertion after overstaying his leave from Morpeth military base with his bride Lynne in 1941. 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. And in the novel 1985 (1978), Burgess imagines what Britain might be like if a virile, triumphant Islam won far-reaching influence in the country. Burgess, Slightly Foxed: Fact and Fiction' (the New Yorker magazine, 1995). Burgess, along with Quentin Crisp, took the photographs included in the 1992 Overlook Press edition of Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone. Burgess sought unsuccessfully to make the critic and journalist Rhoda Koenig, architect of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, his adopted daughter.Odyssey
Principal sites, travelling south to north from Brunei to Scotland:
Bandar Seri Begawan: Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College (workplace 1958-1959) Kuala Kangsar, Perak: Malay College (workplace 1954-55); King's Pavilion (former Residence of the Governor of Perak, Burgess residence 1954-55; 9 rue Princess Marie-de-Lorraine, Princess Grace Irish Library (co-founder) Callian, the Var, Provence: rue des Muets (residence from 1976) Angers: 2, rue Alexandre Fleming (Anthony Burgess Center) Lugano: chalet, with nuclear shelter in cellar; residence from 1986 Dormobile: occasional trans-European mobile residence, 1968 to early 1970s Hove and Brighton, Sussex coast: apartments (residence 1959) Etchingham, East Sussex: ‘Applegarth' (semi-detached house), High Street, A265 road (residence 1959-1964) London: 24, Glebe Street, Turnham Green, Chiswick (leasehold [55 years remaining] terraced house purchased 1963, residence 1964-68, then sub-let to a personal friend of the Burgesses); Burgess said half a century later that it had been "turned into a shebeen before it was demolished"); 10 Tatton Grove, Withington (International Anthony Burgess Foundation); Monsall Road (Isolation Hospital, where the young Burgess was treated for scarlet fever, 1928); "turned into a Muslim ghetto", Burgess later said); Central Library, St Peter's Square (is picked up in his teens "by a woman of about 40" next to the card catalogue and taken to her flat, where he lost his virginity) Warrington: Peninsula Barracks (Infantry Training Centre, 1943) Preston: Bamber Bridge (Emergency Teacher Training College, 1948) Morpeth, Northumberland: Cheviot Hall (Burgess joined 189 Field Ambulance of the B Company, 1941) Austin, Texas: 21st and Guadalupe, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (lung cancer diagnosis, 1992) Buffalo, New York: writer-in-residence, State University of New York 1976 Eskbank, near Edinburgh: Royal Army Medical Corps (joined 1940)Works
"That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters." — Anthony Burgess.
Fiction
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) One Hand Clapping (1961) A Clockwork Orange (1962) The Wanting Seed (1962) Honey for the Bears (1963) Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) (Volume 1 of the Enderby tetralogy) 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) "I Wish My Wife Was Dead", "An American Organ", "A Pair Of Gloves", short stories, in The Eighth Pan Book of Horror Stories and Lie Ten Nights Awake, ed. Alex Hamilton (Berkley N2067, 1971) Enderby Outside (1968) (Volume 2 of the Enderby tetralogy) A Shorter 'Finnegans Wake' (1969) (editor) M/F (1971) Sophocles' Oedipus the King (1972) (translation and adaptation) Napoleon Symphony (1974) The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974) (Volume 3 of the Enderby tetralogy) A Long Trip to Tea Time (for children) (1976) Moses: A Narrative (1976) (long poem) Beard's Roman Women (1976) Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography (1977) Abba Abba (1977) 1985 (1978) Man of Nazareth: A Novel (1979) (based on his screenplay for Jesus of Nazareth (movie) ) The Land Where The Ice Cream Grows (for children) (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 tetralogy) The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985) Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1985) (translation and stage adaptation) Oberon Past and Present (with J.R. Planche) (1985) The Pianoplayers (1986) Blooms of Dublin: A Musical Play Based On James Joyce's Ulysses (1986) Bizet's Carmen, libretto (1986) (translation) A Clockwork Orange: A Play With Music (1987) Any Old Iron (1988) The Devil's Mode and Other Stories (1989) (short stories) Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) A Dead Man in Deptford (1993) Byrne: A Novel (poem) (1995) Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems (2002)Non-fiction
English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958) The Novel To-day (1963) Language Made Plain (1964) (ISBN 0-8152-0222-9) Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965), also published as Re Joyce The Coaching Days of England (1966) (editor) The Age of the Grand Tour (1966) (co-editor with Francis Haskell) The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967) Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (journalism) (1968) Novel, The (Encyclopædia Britannica essay) (1970) Shakespeare (1970) 'What is Pornography?' (essay) in Perspectives on Pornography, ed. Hughes (1970) Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973) Obscenity and the Arts (1973) New York (1976) A Christmas Recipe (1977) Ernest Hemingway and his World (1978), also published as Ernest Hemingway Scrissero in Inglese (1979) ("They Wrote in English", Italy only) This Man and Music (1982) On Going To Bed (1982) Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence (1985) Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986), also published as But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings Little Wilson and Big God, Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Autobiography, Part 1) (1986) An Essay on Censorship (letter to Salman Rushdie in verse) (1989) You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Autobiography, Part 2) (1990) On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang, Being a Celestial Colloquy, an Opera Libretto, a Film Script, a Schizophrenic Dialogue, a Bewildered Rumination (1991) A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992) (ISBN 0-688-11935-2) Childhood (Penguin 60s) (1996) One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings (journalism) (1998) Spain: The Best Travel Writing from the New York Times (2001) (section) Return Trip to Tango (anthology of material published in Translation magazine) (2003) (section)Selected musical compositions
'A Manchester Overture' (1989) 'Tommy Reilly's Maggot', duet for harmonica and piano (1940s) 'Rome in the Rain', piano and orchestra (1976) Kalau Tuan Mudek Ka-Ulu, five Malay pantuns for soprano and native instruments (1955) 'Gibraltar', symphonic poem (1944) Dr Faustus, one-act opera (1940) 'Trois Morceaux Irlandais', guitar quartet (1980s) 'Bethlehem Palm Trees' (Lope de Vega) (1972) Chaika, for ship's orchestra (1961; from the audience (1957) Mr W.S., ballet suite for orchestra (1979) 'Cabbage Face', song for vaudeville skit (1937) Sinfonietta for jazz combo Pando, march for a P&O orchestra (1958) 'Everyone suddenly burst out singing' (Sassoon) for voices and piano (1942) Concertos for piano and flute 'The Ascent of F6' (Isherwood), music for dance orchestra (1948) 'Ode: Celebration for a Malay college', for boys' voices and piano (1954) 'Cantata for a Malay college' (1954) Passacaglia for orchestra (1961) 'Song of the South Downs' (1959) 'Mr Burgess's Almanack', winds & percussion (1987) The Eyes of New York music score for movie project (1975) 'Ich weiss es ist aus', group of cabaret songs (1939) Music for Will! (1968) Sonatas for piano (1946, 1951) and cello (1944) Trotsky in New York, opera (1980) Three guitar quartets, No. 1 in homage to Ravel (1986-1989) The Brides of Enderby, song cycle (1977) 'Music for Hiroshima', for double string orchestra (1945) Suite for orchestra of Malays, Chinese and Indians (1956)Prefaces, etc.
Introduction to Henry Howarth Bashford's Augustus Carp, Esquire, By Himself: Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man (Heinemann 1966) Introduction to Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (Pan Books 1967) Introduction to Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin 1967) Introduction to Hubert Selby Jr's Last Exit to Brooklyn (Calder and Boyars 1968) Introduction to Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan (Penguin 1968) Introduction to G.K. Lawrence's Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan Places) (Viking Press 1972) Foreword to Douglas Jerrold's Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures (Harvill 1974) Introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company (Murray 1975) Introduction to Maugham's Malaysian Stories (Heinemann 1978) Introduction to The Best Short Stories of J.G. Co 1978) Preface to Modern Irish Short Stories, edited by Ben Forkner (Viking Press 1980) Introduction to Rex Warner's The Aerodrome (Oxford University Press 1982) Afterword to The Heritage of British Literature (Thames and Hudson 1983) Introduction to Richard Aldington's The Colonel's Daughter (Hogarth Press 1986) Foreword to Alison Armstrong's The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill Press 1986) Introduction to Venice: An Illustrated Anthology, compiled by Michael Marquesee (Conran Octopus 1988) Preface to Ian Fleming's Casino Royale (Coronet Books 1988) Preface to Ian Fleming's Dr. No (Coronet Books 1988) Preface to Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die (Coronet Books 1988) Preface to Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice (Coronet Books 1988) Preface to David W. Barber's Bach, Beethoven and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught (Sound And Vision Publishing 1988) Introduction to James Hanley's Boy (Andre Deutsch 1990) Introduction to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin Authentic Texts 1991) Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Penguin Authentic Texts 1991) Introduction to James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Vintage 1992) Introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses (Vintage 1992) Introduction to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (Vintage 1992) Preface to The Book of Tea (Flammarion 1992) Introduction to Bob Cato and Greg Vitiello's Joyce Images (W.W. Warburg 1994) Preface to Gore Vidal's Creation (Vintage USA 2002 edition of 1981 novel)Further reading
Biographies
Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (2005). Dubbed "Biswell's Life of Burgess", the well-researched and authoritative work was semi-authorised by Burgess's widow Liana.Selected studies
Michael Ratcliffe, entry on Burgess for the New Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Richard Mathews, The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (Borgo Press, 1990) Martine Ghosh-Schellhorn, Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character (Peter Lang AG, 1986) Geoffrey Aggeler, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Alabama, 1979) Samuel Coale, Anthony Burgess (New York, 1981) A.A. Devitis, Anthony Burgess (New York, 1972) Jerome Gold, The Prisoner's Son: Homage to Anthony Burgess (Black Heron Press 1996) Robert K. Morris, The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess (Missouri, 1971) Carol M.Memoirs
A few of the memoirs and other books in which Burgess is discussed:
Michael Mewshaw, 'Do I Owe You Something?', Granta No. Man Is An Onion (1972)
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