BiographyIf genius is a flame, talent can be a firework. For every genuinely great writer there are scores of busy scribblers, many a one of whom is greeted on appearance by this or that reviewer - likewise dubiously talented, for the most part - as if a new star had popped up in the literary firmament, but whose little light quickly fizzles out. The first enemy of promise is promise itself.
Anthony Burgess was possessed of a gigantic talent; possessed may be the apt word, for his urge to write drove him like the very devil. His first love was music, and to the end of his life he strove to present himself to the world as a serious composer, though the world consistently turned a deaf ear to his efforts. Writing, therefore, was for him a second-best career, which did not, however, prevent him from applying to it the full weight of his prodigious energies. The list of his writings is immense, and the Burgess bibliography will most likely never be complete. In his new biography, Andrew Biswell fills nearly a dozen pages with what can be no more than a survey of Burgess titles.
Burgess was a tireless logodaedalus - a term he might well have applied to himself, for he was a connoisseur of big words - producing novel after novel, each one completed in a matter of months or even weeks. Between books he would busy himself with a film script or an opera libretto or a novel-length poem; a scholarly, or cod-scholarly, book on Joyce or Shakespeare or Mozart; a handbook on linguistics; and always, of course, the book reviews: the dealer Eric Korn once toyed with the idea of opening a special section of his shop dedicated entirely to volumes carrying commendations from Burgess on their jackets. On one occasion Burgess even reviewed a book of his own, which he had published under a pseudonym; the Yorkshire Post, where the review appeared, was indignant, despite the fact that Burgess had given the book a decidedly unfavourable notice.
When it came to work Burgess was entirely democratic, or, to put it another way, he had no shame. No subject was too humble, no commission too outrageous, no fee too small. Biswell tells us that Burgess, with the help of his wife, devoted much of the second half of 1962 to writing London and the CLRP: A Centennial Tribute to the City of London Real Property Company Ltd, 1864-1964, for which he was paid £3,000, a tidy sum in those days; piece-work this volume may have been, but its author, according to his biographer, managed to turn it into a "lively historical narrative".
Half a year seems long for Burgess to have spent on anything, and no doubt he produced many additional pieces in the time that he was hacking out London and the CLRP. He wrote at remarkable speed, even by the standards of Grub Street. When in the late 1980s the previous literary editor of this newspaper commissioned from him a reassessment of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the copy - measured, perceptive and immaculately typed - arrived in the post from Monaco two days after the initial phone call.
There has been another recent biography of Burgess, which showed him to be an inveterate liar, especially in the matter of his background and early life. Presumably Andrew Biswell was determined to set the record straight, as his title suggests, but he too lifts the stone of Burgessian assertion to reveal a squirming mass of inventions, exaggerations and convenient memory lapses. Yet Biswell, whose somewhat sombre prose style would have been sighed over by his incandescently gifted subject, seems fond of Burgess, and certainly tolerates his less appalling lapses. The artist who emerges from this portrait is lavishly gifted, though prodigal of his gift, and not so much a liar as a fabulator - the novelist, after all, spends his time making up plausible lives, so is it any wonder that he might be driven to invent a past for himself?
Biswell begins in lively fashion, telling us that Burgess, whose real name was John Burgess Wilson, "was born in Manchester at midday on Sunday, 25 February 1917, just after the pubs had opened". His paternal grandmother was Mary Ann Finnegan from Tipperary, "wholly Irish and wholly illiterate". Mary's husband, John Wilson, kept a pub, and his son Joe, Burgess's father, was a sometime encyclopaedia salesman, a tobacconist, a soldier and a piano-player, this last a term, Biswell remarks, "rich in its seedy associations - half a world away from the drawing-room or concert hall respectability of the 'pianist'." Joe's wife, Elizabeth, from a family of Scots Protestants, was "a professional singer and dancer - or, in the language of the time, a 'soubrette'." The rackety world in which Burgess grew up was richly evoked in his rambunctious 1986 novel, The Pianoplayers.
In 1918, when Burgess was not yet two years old, his mother and sister both died within days of each other, victims of the flu pandemic of that year, which killed millions worldwide. Later, when Burgess was five, his father married a widowed Irish Mancunian named Margaret Dwyer, née Byrne, another illiterate, something for which her stepson could never forgive her. Burgess hated Maggie Dwyer, as the family called her, and took his revenge by basing on her the figure of the disgusting and noisome stepmother in a series of fictionalised autobiographical novels the protagonist of which is the costive poet FX Enderby, who, as Beckett's Molloy has it, does not exude the perfumes of Araby himself.
Burgess attended university in Manchester, and then was called up to the army, serving stints in Gibraltar and with the Entertainments Section of the Royal Army Medical Corps, where he played the piano and wrote original band tunes. In 1942 he married Llewela, or Lynne, Jones, tempestuous, intelligent and sexually liberal. One night in 1944, when Burgess was in Gibraltar, Lynne was attacked and possibly raped in blacked-out London by a gang of American soldiers, an event which brought on a miscarriage and seems to have been one of the causes of her later heavy drinking and premature death. The Burgesses' marriage was a raucous affair. Lynne was a public drunk, and often got into fist-fights in pubs or on the street. Her husband too was no slouch when it came to roughhousing: Biswell reports him at the age of 50 losing "four lower incisors in a pub-fight in Chiswick with a bald Irishman who had insulted his dog".
In the mid-1950s Burgess and Lynne embarked for Malaya, where Burgess, through a typically farcical process (he believed he was being offered a job on the island of Sark), had been appointed to a teaching post by the Colonial Office. He prepared for the job by teaching himself Malay. His time in the East inspired his first serious fictional enterprise, the Malay Trilogy, which made him a figure of some stature in the literary landscape of London.
In September 1959 Burgess suffered a collapse in the classroom and was taken to hospital in Brunei, from where he was sent straight home to England, along with Lynne, who had been given a sealed envelope containing X-ray plates of her husband's skull and a confidential letter to specialists at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London. This letter, since lost, apparently diagnosed a brain tumour. In later years Burgess was to give a number of different versions of the story of his illness. Pointing out that there is no firm, independent medical evidence to go on, Biswell writes:
In the years after 1959, the events which he referred to as his "medical death-sentence" and "terminal year" became part of the performance that he could be relied on to deploy for the benefit of interviewers - but the details of what he said on these subjects are far from consistent. The disappearing tumour was simply absorbed into Burgess's extensive series of half-reliable anecdotes, and the process of its fictionalization would bear comparison with the wildlyconflicting accounts that he gave of his family history.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Burgess's brush with death, even if it was largely imaginary, spurred him to an extreme of literary production that is positively Shakespearian, in quantity, at least. A stream of books, fiction and non-fiction, flowed from his pen, as well as music, journalism and screenplays. A visit he and Lynne paid to Leningrad in the summer of 1961 was the seed for his most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, a futuristic account of the violent adventures of Alex and his three droogs, or sidekicks, written in a macaronic blend of English and Russian, which was later to be turned into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess's insistence that he had sold the movie rights to the novel for "the laughable sum of $500" and earned nothing more from the film is less than accurate: by June 1985, Biswell reveals, Warner Brothers had paid Burgess royalties of $713,081.
By the time Lynne died in 1968, Burgess had already embarked on a serious affair with an Italian translator and divorcee, Liliana Johnson, daughter of Gilberto Macellari, an actor, and the Contessa Maria Lucrezia Pasi Piani della Pergola. Burgess and Liliana had a son, Paolo, whose existence Burgess kept secret until after Lynne's death. Burgess and his new wife, with whom he seems to have been happy, began a peripatetic life, moving from London to Lugano to Malta to Monaco. As Burgess aged, and his health began to fail, his productivity soared. There were more novels, symphonies, librettos, stage musicals, essays, reviews, in a seemingly unstoppable flood. Then in October 1992 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and this time there was no ambiguity. He died in London just over a year later.
What of his reputation now? It has sunk, as do the reputations of so many writers in the decade or so after their deaths, yet a later posterity may come to value him more than we do. Certainly he wrote too much, too quickly. He saw himself as a neo-Elizabethan, direct descendant of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, though there are some who would liken him more to Shakespeare's minor rival, Robert Greene.
He allied himself artistically with another Greene - Graham - considering himself to be also an essentially Catholic writer, a champion of Augustinian pessimism against the wishy-washiness of Pelagius's heretical doctrine of original innocence; almost all of Burgess's mature work is set against the ongoing battle with Pelagianism. His books are vivid and endlessly energetic, pungent, accommodating, funny and inventive. Yet, as the poet and biographer Andrew Motion said of his work, "for all its brilliant technique, it is not always easy to see where the centre lies". Some at least of his books will surely live, for instance his music- inspired novel Napoleon Symphony and his brilliant fictionalised life of Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun. Time washes away the silt to reveal the precious remains, and no doubt these and other Burgessian jewels will survive.
John Banville's The Sea (Picador) won this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess By Andrew Biswell Picador, 434pp. £20