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.

Trivia

Espionage

• Anthony Burgess had a long-term peeve of being confused with members of the Cambridge Five. This is partly because one of the members was called Guy Burgess, and another Anthony Blunt. Unfortunately, by the time they achieved notoriety, Anthony Burgess' 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 a print as "The spy, Anthony Burgess". The London 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"; and many other media articles in this not very authoritative but intriguing vein. It is speculated that he may have provided his superiors (the Colonial Office and perhaps the Kuala Lumpur-based British intelligence authorities, and later MI5) with information about any communist actions or sympathies, however trivial, among his colleagues and students and, after his return from the East, among the people he met and associated with. Since lives were at stake during the Malayan Emergency, this would not have been an unusual or exceptionable activity ? in fact it might well have been regarded as irresponsible not to assist in this way. The term used for an operative of this type and pay-grade was "ground observer".
• 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. Broccoli produced in 1977. It was turned down. Burgess wrote: "My script...was rejected, but my oil tanker (a camouflaged floating palace for the chief villain) was retained."

Food and drink

• Burgess was a Lancastrian, so it is no surprise that one of his favourite dishes, mentioned many times in his novels, autobiography and elsewhere, was Lancashire Hotpot. The journalist Auberon Waugh famously described Burgess's recipe for Lancashire 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, and of gin in later life. However, he did not drink as heavily as his first wife Lynne, who lost her life to liver cirrhosis. Burgess is thought to have cut his alcohol consumption to some extent in later life, often substituting tea.
• 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. He reveals in his autobiography that he was hoping after his Time For A Tiger was published to receive a complimentary case of Tiger beer from the manufacturer. 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."
• For his morning cup of tea, Burgess habitually suffused up to six tea-bags per small teapot. And when drinking tea from a mug at other times of the day, multiple tea-bags were also used.

Smoking

• Burgess smoked, by his own admission, up to 80 cigarettes, panatelas, cigars, cigarillos and/or cheroots per day. His preferred brand of cigar was Schimmelpenninck.
• Burgess was an occasional smoker of opium, which he described as "a fine drug", during both his Kota Bharu and Brunei years. But he was under no illusions as to the negative effects of the drug: "Later, abetted by an ailing liver, the bad visions would come," he wrote.
• 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. Speaking of young people in a BBC Omnibus documentary in the 1960s, he said: "They smoke their marihuana, which is an admirable thing in itself, but no end of anything..."

Finances

• Burgess made no secret of his determination throughout his career to thwart tax authorities worldwide, whom he described as "the fiscal tyrants".
• 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. His house in Bracciano was, he wrote, paid for "by smuggling dollar royalty cheques into the peninsula and paying them into the bank account of an expatriate American sculptor living near Rome".

Sex

• Burgess claimed that Holofernes was in Elizabethan times used as a slang word for penis .
• He prepared a translation of the pornographic poetry of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, but it was never published.
• 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.
• He enjoyed a miscellany of sexual partners from other lands, however, including Buginese, Japanese, Welsh, Malay, Algonquin, Chinese, Siamese, Italian and Singhalese women. And he wrote in the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (p. 386), that he had had sexual encounters "with Tamil women blacker than Africans, including a girl who could not have been older than twelve, but none with Bengalis and Punjabis". The vast majority of the encounters had been, as he put it, "sadly commercial".
• He claimed to have discovered the secret of controlling climax and prolonging pleasure during sexual congress. It was, he wrote, "a matter of reciting Milton only ? 'High on a throne of royal state...' (Paradise Lost, Book Two)."
• The comedian Benny Hill described Burgess as "the greatest living expert on sex".

Mischief

• 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.
• 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. The offending review, which was not at all commendatory, read in part: "This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals...and halitosis. It may well make some people sick....It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock."

Pop-culture influence

• Burgess's contempt for post-World War Two popular music was thinly veiled. Its proponents are merciliessly satirised in Enderby Outside, which features a lamentable rock band called Yod Crewsy and the Fixers who composed "emetic little songs".
• 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. And shortly after it came out in 1962, Mick Jagger indicated that he wished to take the role of Alex in a putative movie version. The other members of The Rolling Stones were to be his droogs.
• The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone at the cemetery in Monte Carlo includes a (possibly ironical) reference to the pop group Abba, who enjoyed huge success at a time ? the late 1970s ? when Burgess, too, had achieved world fame.

There has been a great deal pop-world plagiarism from Burgess. To take just three examples more or less at random:

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• 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.
• The German punk rockers Die Toten Hosen's album Ein kleines bisschen Horrorshow referred to the Nadsat term, and Poland's Myslovitz produced an album called Korova Milky Bar.

Early triumphs

• Burgess's first published work was an essay on Torbay for the children's section of the London Daily Express newspaper in 1928.
• Burgess was placed 1,579th after taking England's Customs & Excise test in 1928.
• One of Burgess's professors at Manchester University was A.J.P. Taylor. 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 an authoritative translation of Eliot's The Waste Land into Persian. It was never published, in Tehran or elsewhere. He also worked on an anthology of the best of English literature translated into Malay, which also did not achieve publication.
• 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-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. So the polyglot pair forged a compromise, deciding to conduct their lengthy, wide-ranging philological and literary conversations in Old Norse.

The Chinese restaurant affair

Burgess?s multilingual proficiency came under attack 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.

Related Topics:
Roger Lewis - 2002 - 1982

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There was a mixed response to the charge. For example, one critic appeared to accept the veracity of the claim, saying it ?had me laughing immoderately?, while another dismissed it as ?another of Lewis?s little smears?.

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The controversy was settled conclusively in Burgess?s favor, however, by a letter from David Wallace that appeared in the magazine of the London ??Independent on Sunday?? newspaper on 25 November 2002.

Related Topics:
25 November - 2002

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Wallace's letter read, in part: ??the tale was inaccurate. It tells of Burgess, the great linguist, 'bellowing Malay at a succession of Malayan waitresses' but 'unable to make himself understood'. The source of this tale was a 20-year-old BBC documentary.... that the director left the scene in, in order to poke fun at the great author. Not so, and I can be sure, as I was that director?. 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 . Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; it was the girls in question who did not.?

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Lewis may not have been fully aware of the fact that a quarter of Malaysia's population is made up of Hokkien- and Cantonese-speaking Chinese with little or no understanding of Malay.

Related Topics:
Hokkien - Cantonese - Chinese

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Health

• Burgess suffered from Daltonism or color-blindness.
• He was short-sighted, although reluctant to wear spectacles. He wrote that he once walked into a bank, lent against the counter and ordered a drink.
• He was afflicted by dyspepsia, constipation and flatulence during much of his life, difficulties that are dwelt on to comic effect in the Enderby cycle of novels.
• Burgess suffered a collapse in Brunei Town in 1959, apparently occasioned by overwork , indications of incipient (rather than chronic) alcoholism, and poor nutrition. He had to be airlifted to England for tests and treatment.
• He had high blood pressure, which caused problems with his arteries.
• Burgess was addicted to tobacco and died of lung cancer at the age of 76.

Names and namesakes

• Anthony Burgess was known to many people in Italy, where he lived for several years, as Antonio Borghese.
• Burgess also published under the pen-names John Burgess Wilson and Joseph Kell.
• Burgess considered the composer Derek Bourgeois to be his alter ego.
• There is a 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. He tended to contrast, in certain respects unfavourably or at least cynically, the camp of cradle Catholics, in which was included such writers as Belloc, Joyce, Braine, Lodge and himself, with that of converts such as Hopkins, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh and Spark. So it may be significant that his namesake Pastor Anthony Burgess's most important work is entitled Spiritual Refining: The Anatomy of True & False Conversion. Still regarded as useful, it remains in print, and is published by International Outreach Incorporated.
• Anthony Burgess was arguably as prodigious a creator of neologisms as Frank Gelett Burgess of blurb , bleesh, bromide and gloogo fame.

Birthplace

• Burgess's birthplace of Harpurhey offers a sharp contrast to Monte Carlo, where he spent most of his latter years. Harpurhey was described in a 2004 London Independent on Sunday article by Ian Herbert North as "the most miserable place in Britain". North reveals that two neighbourhoods in Harpurhey are classified by the UK government as among the five most deprived in the country.
• Harpurhey is home to Bernard Manning's World Famous Embassy Club. The English comedian Bernard Manning owns the venue, which is in Rochdale Road, very near Carisbrook Street where Burgess was born.
• The Little and Large comic duo started their careers in Harpurhey.

Memorial services

• Burgess delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for Benny Hill in 1992.
• 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 was among a select group of celebrity owners of the classic Bedford Dormobile (a campervan or motorhome of the Bedford marque, manufactured in England by Vauxhall Motors). He and his second wife spent, in the early years of their marriage, long periods on the road across western Europe, especially in France and Sicily, his wife driving the Dormobile while he wrote at a desk behind.
• Burgess wrote a full-length textbook in 1947 called The Young Fiddler's Tunebook. It was never published.
• One of Burgess's last speaking engagements was at England's Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1992. The subject of his address was 'translation', and Burgess quipped that he himself was 'shortly to be translated' (he died 13 months later).
• Burgess was pursued by English army MPs for desertion after overstaying his vacation away from Morpeth military base with his new bride Lynne in 1941.
• When he was repatriated from Borneo in 1959 after suffering a collapse, Burgess was treated by the neurologist Roger Bannister, who in his days as an athlete had been the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes.
• 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. You say your prayers five times a day. You have a tremendous amount of freedom, sexual freedom; you can have four wives. The wife herself has a commensurate freedom. She can achieve divorce in the same way a man can." 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 appears as a fictional character in A.S. Byatt's novel Babel Tower (1996) and in Paul Theroux's 'A. Burgess, Slightly Foxed: Fact and Fiction' (the New Yorker magazine, 1995).
• Burgess never learned how to drive a car.
• Burgess, along with Quentin Crisp, took the photographs included in the 1992 Overlook Press edition of Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone.

The Burgess tourist trail

Burgessians are recommended to follow the trail in a 1960s-era Bedford Dormobile. The principal Burgess sites, travelling south to north, are as follows:

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Brunei

• Bandar Seri Begawan: Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College (workplace 1958-1959)

Malaysia

• Kuala Kangsar, Perak: Malay College (workplace 1954-55); King?s Pavilion (residence, 1954-55; now a girls' school)
• Kota Bharu, Kelantan: Malay Teachers? Training College (workplace 1955-1957)

Malta

• Lija: residence 1968-1970; house confiscated 1974

Italy

• Rome: 16A Piazza Santa Cecilia (residence from 1971)
• Bracciano: Piazza Padella (residence from 1970)

Monaco

• Monte Carlo: 44 Rue Grimaldi, Condamine district (residence from 1976); 9 rue Princess Marie-de-Lorraine, Princess Grace Irish Library (co-founder)

France

• Callian, the Var, Provence: Rue des Muets (residence from 1976)
• Angers: 2, rue Alexandre Fleming (Anthony Burgess Center)

Switzerland

• Lugano: chalet residence from 1986

'Bedford'

• Dormobile: occasional residence from 1968 to early ]]1970s]]

England

• 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, Chiswick (terraced house, residence 1964-1968); 60 Grove End Road, St John?s Wood (Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth; deathplace 1993); Twickenham (house; date of purchase unknown but believed to be 1980s)
• Oxfordshire: Banbury, Banbury Grammar School (workplace 1950-1954); Adderbury, 44, Water Lane (labourer?s 2-bedroom cottage then named Little Gidding, residence 1950-54)
• Wolverhampton: Brinsford Lodge (Mid-West School of Education, 1946)
• Manchester: 91 Carisbrook Street, Harpurhey (birthplace 1917); Upper Monsall Street (St Edmund?s RC Elementary School 1923); Princess Road (Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Elementary School 1924); 21 Princess Road, Moss Side (tobacconist?s shop and residence 1924); 261 Moss Lane East (off-licence and residence 1924; Burgess said half a century later that it was ?turned into a shebeen before it was demolished?); 10 Tatton Grove, Withington (International Anthony Burgess Foundation); Oxford Road (Church of the Holy Name, attended by the young Burgess); Monsall Road (Isolation Hospital, where the young Burgess treated for scarlet fever 1928); Victoria Park, Rusholme (Xaverian College, from 1928; ?turned into a Muslim ghetto?, Burgess later said); Manchester University (from 1937)
• 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)

USA

• Austin: 21st and Guadalupe, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. Trove of Burgessiana, with papers dating from 1956 to 1997, the bulk being 1970s and 1980s
• Chapel Hill: writer-in-residence at University of North Carolina 1969
• Princeton: visiting professor at Princeton University 1970-1971
• New York City: apartment, West Avenue and Ninety-Third (from very early 1970s); workplaces: distinguished professor at City College of New York 1972; visiting professor at Columbia University 1972
• Buffalo: writer-in-residence, State University of New York 1976

Scotland

• Eskbank, near Edinburgh: Royal Army Medical Corps (joined 1940)