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.

Life

Childhood

Anthony Burgess was born on February 25, 1917 in Harpurhey, a northeastern quarter of Manchester, England, to a Catholic family. He was left without a mother at one year old by the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic ("Spanish flu"), which also took the life of his sister Muriel.

Related Topics:
February 25 - 1917 - Harpurhey - Manchester, England - Catholic - 1918 - 1919 - Influenza - Pandemic

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His mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, who was a Catholic convert, had been a minor actress and dancer appearing at such theaters as the Manchester Ardwick Empire. Her stage name was "The Beautiful Belle Burgess".

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His father, Joseph Wilson, whom Burgess described as descending from an "Augustinian Catholic" background (which probably refers to recusancy), died in 1948. Burgess père was among other things a bookie and a pianist in movie theaters, accompanying the silent films of the era (see the novel The Pianoplayers). Burgess described his father, who remarried to a pub landlady, as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father".

Related Topics:
1948 - Bookie - Pub

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Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother. Christened John Burgess Wilson, he was known as "Jack". His childhood was in large part a solitary one. His home was rooms above an off-licence and newspaper-tobacconist shop that his aunt ran, and above a pub.

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Youth and education

Burgess was schooled at St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School, and later at Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School in Moss Side. For some years his family lived on Princess Street in the same district. Good grades from Bishop Bilsborrow resulted in a place at the noted Manchester Catholic secondary school, the Jesuit-run Xaverian College.

Related Topics:
Moss Side - Xaverian College

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He 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. His thesis was on the subject of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.

Related Topics:
University of Manchester - 1937 - Bachelor of Arts - Marlowe - Doctor Faustus

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He had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in physics ? then a requirement for the subject ? were deemed not high enough to qualify for a place on the program.

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Burgess's father died of flu in 1938 and his stepmother of a heart attack in 1940.

Related Topics:
1938 - 1940

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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. During this period he sometimes directed an army dance band. He later moved to the Army Educational Corps, where among other things he conducted speech therapy at a mental hospital. He failed in his aspiration to win an officer's commission.

Related Topics:
1940 - Royal Army Medical Corps - Morpeth - Northumberland - Army Educational Corps

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In 1942 the marriage took place in Bournemouth between Burgess and a Welshwoman named Llwela Jones, eldest daughter of a high school principal. She was known to all as "Lynne". Although Burgess indicated on numerous occasions that her full name was Llwela Isherwood Jones, the name "Isherwood" does not appear on her birth certificate. Nor was Lynne related to the writer Christopher Isherwood as many people had believed. Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at Manchester University. Their marriage was childless, and she died of cirrhosis in 1968.

Related Topics:
1942 - Bournemouth - Christopher Isherwood - Manchester University - Cirrhosis - 1968

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Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar, a British territory at the southern tip of Spain that Britain has controlled since the Treaty of Utrecht, at an army garrison (see A Vision of Battlements). Here he was a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching German, Russian, French and Spanish, and he helped instruct the troops in "The British Way and Purpose". He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the UK Ministry of Education.

Related Topics:
Gibraltar - Spain - Treaty of Utrecht - A Vision of Battlements - Ministry of Education

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Early teaching career

Leaving the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, Burgess 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), near Preston.

Related Topics:
Sergeant-major - 1946 - Wolverhampton - University of Birmingham - Preston

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At the end of 1950 he took up 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 libeled 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.

Related Topics:
1950 - Secondary school - Banbury Grammar School - Banbury - Oxfordshire - Mayoress

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The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life. Thanks to financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple were able to buy a cottage in the picturesque village of Adderbury, not far from Banbury.

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Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time involving local people and students, including productions of T.S. 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.

Related Topics:
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets - Aldous Huxley

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It was in Adderbury that Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the Banbury Guardian.

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The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, especially one called The Bell, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time.

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Malaya

In January 1954 Burgess was interviewed by the British Colonial Office for a post in Malaya (now Malaysia) as a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service. Several months later he and his wife travelled to Singapore by the liner Willem Ruys from Southampton with stops in Port Said and Colombo.

Related Topics:
January - 1954 - Colonial Office - Malaya - Malaysia - Singapore - Port Said - Colombo

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Burgess was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar, the royal town in Perak, in what were then known as the Federated Malay States. Here he taught at the Malay College, dubbed "the Eton of the East" and now known as Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK).

Related Topics:
Kuala Kangsar - Perak - Federated Malay States - Malay College

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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". The building was once occupied by the British Resident in Perak. This edifice had gained notoriety during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police).

Related Topics:
Housemaster - Preparatory school - Victorian - Kempeitai

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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 attack.

Related Topics:
Malayan Emergency - 1948 - 1960

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Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, an alleged dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife, Burgess was posted elsewhere – the couple occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was supposedly minimal. This, at any rate, was the reason given for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan. This is located on the Siamese border; the Thais had ceded the area to the British in 1909 and a British adviser had been installed.

Related Topics:
Kota Bharu - Kelantan - 1909

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Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written (the language was still at that time rendered in the adapted Arabic script known as Jawi). 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". He 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 newspaper the Daily Express when Burgess was a child).

Related Topics:
Jawi - The Long Day Wanes

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Brunei

After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, he took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State . Although the novel dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African "sultanate" similar to Zanzibar.

Related Topics:
1959 - Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College - Bandar Seri Begawan - Brunei - Borneo - 1888 - 1984 - 1961 - Zanzibar

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About this time Burgess collapsed in a Brunei classroom while teaching history (he was explaining to his Bruneian students the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party). He is thought about now to have been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. However, this is disputed. Some accounts have him suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status.

Related Topics:
Boston Tea Party - Brain tumour

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Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration". But he gave a different account to the British arts and media veteran Jeremy Isaacs in 1987 when he said: "I was driven out of the Colonial Service for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons."

Related Topics:
Jeremy Isaacs - 1987

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Repatriate years

He was repatriated and spent some time in a London hospital (see The Doctor Is Sick). There he underwent cerebral tests which, as far as can be made out, proved negative.

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On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he found he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.

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The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby tetralogy); in a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham, just down the road from the residence in Burwash once occupied by Rudyard Kipling; and in a terraced town house in Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London, conveniently located for the White City BBC television studios of which he was a frequent guest in this period.

Related Topics:
Hove - Brighton - Sussex - Etchingham - Burwash - Rudyard Kipling - Chiswick - London - White City

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A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to Russia, calling at St Petersburg (then Leningrad), resulted in Honey For the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang for A Clockwork Orange.

Related Topics:
Russia - St Petersburg

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Exile

By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a tax exile. It was in grander accommodation this time; indeed, at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of multiple houses and apartments, numbering in the double figures.

Related Topics:
1960s - Tax exile

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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. He maintained a flat in the Italian capital and a country house in Bracciano, and a property in Montalbuccio. There was a villa in Provence, in Callian of the Var, France, and an apartment just off Baker Street, London, England, very near the presumed home of Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.

Related Topics:
Lija - Malta - Rome - Bracciano - Montalbuccio - Provence - France - Baker Street - Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle

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Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1970) and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York (1972), and teaching creative writing at Columbia University. He had also been writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969) and at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.

Related Topics:
United States - Princeton University - 1970 - City College of New York - 1972 - Columbia University - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 1969 - State University of New York at Buffalo - 1976 - University of Iowa - 1975

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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 center for Irish cultural studies (http://www3.monaco.mc/pglib/) He spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet, in Lugano, Switzerland.

Related Topics:
Monaco - 1984 - Princess Grace Irish Library - Lugano - Switzerland

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After Lynne's death in 1968 at the age of forty-seven of liver cirrhosis (see Beard's Roman Women), he had remarried, to Liliana Macellari, an Italian translator, adopting the latter's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.

Related Topics:
1968 - Liver cirrhosis - Liliana Macellari

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Death

A lifelong heavy smoker, Burgess returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, England, where he owned a house, to die of lung cancer on November 22, 1993. He was 76 years old. His actual death occurred at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in the St John's Wood neighborhood of London. He is thought to have composed the novel Byrne on his deathbed.

Related Topics:
Twickenham - Lung cancer - November 22 - 1993 - Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth - St John's Wood

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It is believed he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Moston Cemetery, Manchester, England, but in the event they went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo.

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The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, reads "Abba Abba", which encapsulates six things in one: (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; (3) the pop group ABBA, which achieved world fame in the 1970s when Burgess was himself at the height of his powers; (4) part of the rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan sonnet; (5) the last words Jesus uttered, in Aramaic, from the Cross; and (6) the Burgess novel about the death of Keats Abba Abba.

Related Topics:
Mark - ABBA - 1970s - Petrarchan sonnet - Jesus - Aramaic - Abba Abba

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Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade.

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