Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was an English novelist and critic. He was also active as a composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator and educationalist. Born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe. His 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 story of Shakespeare's love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange, and the panoramic Tolstoyan saga Earthly Powers. He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and turned out large quantities of journalism in various languages. He translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen for theater, scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen, and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.

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. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya) to set alongside George Orwell's Burma (Burmese Days), E.M. Forster's India (A Passage to India) and Graham Greene's Viet Nam (The Quiet American), and continuing in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.

Related Topics:
George Orwell - Burmese Days - E.M. Forster - A Passage to India - Graham Greene - The Quiet American - Rudyard Kipling - Joseph Conrad - W. Somerset Maugham

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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, and this is reflected in the verisimilitude and interest in indigenous concerns that marks the trilogy.

Related Topics:
Urdu - Burmese - Hindi - Malay

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His repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just the Enderby cycle but the neglected The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping (to which the director Francis Coppola has recently acquired the film rights), partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. 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' former co-workers.

Related Topics:
Enderby - Francis Coppola - The Worm and the Ring

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A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a controversial film adaptation), the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynne was allegedly robbed and assaulted in London during the blackout by US army deserters (an event that may have contributed to a miscarriage she suffered), the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more especially the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.

Related Topics:
Stanley Kubrick - Controversial film adaptation - A Clockwork Orange - 1962 - World War II - Anti-hero

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By the 1970s Burgess's output had become highly experimental, and some critics see a falling-off in quality in this period. MF (1971) showed the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. Beard's Roman Women is considered by many to be his worst novel (plea of mitigation: it was written entirely while on the road in his Bedford Dormobile campervan). But Napoleon Symphony, though flawed, contains among many other things a superb portrait of an Arab society under occupation by a western power (Egypt by France).

Related Topics:
Claude Lévi-Strauss - Arab - Egypt

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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).

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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 – notably in the discussion of free will in A Clockwork Orange and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church due to what can be understood as Satanic influence in Earthly Powers (1980), which was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.

Related Topics:
Catholicism - Catholic Church - Satanic - Earthly Powers - 1980

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He won few honours in his own country - his masterpiece Earthly Powers, for example, famously failed to win the English "Booker" prize for fiction, although he took honorary degrees from St Andrews, Birmingham and Manchester universities and was a Fellow of England's Royal Society of Literature. He did better on the European continent, where he garnered the "Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres" distinction of France and became a Monagesque "Commandeur de Merite Culturel".

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Criticism

Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text for newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students, which is still used in many schools today. He followed this with The Novel Today and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction.

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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.

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His Encyclopædia Britannica entry The Novel, the for 1970 is regarded as a classic of the genre.

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Burgess has written full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. His Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 remains an invaluable guide, while Obscenity and the Arts explores issues of pornography.

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Linguistics

Burgess was polyglot, with a command of Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian.

Related Topics:
Malay - Russian - French - German - Spanish - Italian - Welsh - English - Hebrew - Japanese - Chinese - Swedish - Persian

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"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 pronounciations and the niceties of register."

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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.

Related Topics:
Slang - Nadsat - Quest for Fire - 1981 - Invented

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The hero of The Doctor is Sick, Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is a lecturer in linguistics. He escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech".

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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.

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Journalism

Burgess produced journalism in American, Italian, French and British newspapers and magazines regularly ? even compulsively ? and in prodigious quantities. Martin Amis wrote in the London newspaper the 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."

Related Topics:
Goulash - Fiat 500

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"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 London Observer newspaper, Michael Ratcliffe.

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Selections of Burgess's journalism are to be found in Urgent Copy, Homage to QWERT YUIOP and One Man's Chorus.

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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).

Related Topics:
Moses the Lawgiver - Jesus of Nazareth - A.D.

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Burgess 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).

Related Topics:
La Guerre du Feu - Quest for Fire

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He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called Will! or The Bawdy Bard. It was based on his novel Nothing Like The Sun.

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Symphonies

As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He composed regularly throughout his life.

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His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio. His Symphony (No. 3) in C was premiered by the University of Iowa orchestra in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in This Man and Music.

Related Topics:
BBC Radio - University of Iowa - 1975

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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".

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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.

Related Topics:
1974 - Beethoven - Eroica symphony - 1991

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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.

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When Burgess was heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation?s 'Desert Island Discs' radio programme in 1966, he made the following choice: Purcell, 'Rejoice in the Lord Alway'; Bach, Goldberg Variations No 13; Elgar, Symphony No.1 in A flat major; Wagner, Walter's Trial Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Debussy, Fêtes; Lambert, 'The Rio Grande'; Walton, Symphony No.1 in B flat; and Vaughan Williams, 'On Wenlock Edge'.

Related Topics:
Purcell - Bach - Elgar - Wagner - Debussy - Lambert - Walton - Vaughan Williams

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Opera and Musicals

Burgess produced a translation of Bizet's Carmen which was performed by the British company English National Opera.

Related Topics:
Carmen - English National Opera

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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.

Related Topics:
Operetta - James Joyce - Ulysses - Blooms of Dublin - 1982 - Cyrano de Bergerac

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His editing and revision of the libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based opera company Scottish Opera.

Related Topics:
Oberon - Scottish Opera

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