A novelist’s name is writ in water, and come a drought may be reduced to a wisp of spume. In his day Anthony Burgess was a very big fish in the literary pond, most famous, or infamous, for the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, written in a wonderfully clever Russo-English patois of the author’s invention. The book was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, who later suppressed the film because of its perceived infatuation with or even encouragement to extreme violence.
A Clockwork Orange was not Burgess’s best work, though it was the one that made his reputation beyond the world of books and bookmen. He was extraordinarily productive. He wrote more than 30 novels, along with short stories, poetry, children’s books, two volumes of autobiography, lives of Shakespeare, Hemingway and DH Lawrence, books on linguistics, on music, two studies of Joyce, translations, scores of introductions to the work of others, and countless reviews, a selection of which were published in book form under the apt title Urgent Copy.
And then there was music. It was his first love, 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 all the weight of his prodigious energies.
Burgess’s full name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson, and he was born in Manchester on 25 February 1917. His paternal grandmother was Mary-Ann Finnegan, an illiterate immigrant from Tipperary. Her 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. The rackety world in which the young 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 died within days of each other, victims of the influenza pandemic of that year, which killed many millions worldwide. Later, when Burgess was five, his father married a widow, Margaret Dwyer, another illiterate of Irish descent. Burgess hated Maggie Dwyer, as the family called her, and took his revenge by basing the figure of the disgusting and noisome stepmother on her 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 himself exude the perfumes of Araby.
Burgess attended university in Manchester, and then was called up to the army. He served 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 liberated. 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. One of his biographers, Andrew Biswell, reports him at the age of 50 losing four of his lower front teeth in a pub fight in Chiswick with an 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 as a schoolmaster by the British Colonial Office. He prepared for the job by teaching himself Malay. His time there inspired his first serious fictional enterprise, The Malayan Trilogy.
In September 1959 Burgess collapsed in the classroom and was taken to hospital in Brunei, where he was diagnosed, mistakenly, as suffering from a brain tumour. This supposed brush with death spurred him to an extreme of literary production that is positively Shakespearian, in quantity, at least. A stream of books flowed from his pen, as well as music, journalism and screenplays. His aim was to ensure that Lynne would have money to live on after his death.
However, it was Lynne who died, prematurely, in 1968. Burgess had already embarked on a love affair with an Italian translator and divorcée, Liliana Macellari, the daughter of actor Gilberto Macellari and the wonderfully named 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 began a peripatetic life, moving from London to Lugano to Malta to Monaco. Then, in October 1992, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and this time there was no mistake about it. He died in London just over a year later.
There have been two biographies of Burgess, Biswell’s The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, published in 2006, written in part, it would seem, as a corrective to Roger Lewis’s Anthony Burgess (2004). Lewis presents Burgess not as a fraud but certainly as a fake – there is a subtle but clear distinction between the two: an artist can be an innocent and a fake, but frauds always know what they are about.
[See also: Anthony Burgess’s boundless curiosity]
Certainly Burgess was a literary showman, a maker of masks, a striker of poses. He wrote too much, too quickly. He saw himself as a neo-Elizabethan, a direct descendant of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, though there are some who would liken him more to Shakespeare’s minor rival Robert Greene. Not all of Burgess’s books are first-rate, but what writer has not written a few duds? If genius is a flame, talent can be a firework. At his best, however, Burgess burned brighter than did most of his contemporaries.
One of his finest novels is Napoleon Symphony, published in 1974 and still in print. By some accounts, Burgess got the idea from conversations with Stanley Kubrick, who had wanted to make a movie about Napoleon, and had written a screenplay, but could not secure the finance for the project. In the novel, an awesomely inventive, word-struck, musically inspired and frequently hilarious excursus on the life of the Corsican skyrocket, all of Burgess’s intellectual passions are fused into an incandescent display before which the dazzled reader can only stand and wonder.
In a closing “Epistle to the Reader”, composed in knockabout though closely rhymed iambic pentameter, the author defines the work as a comic novel – “and it must/Be read as such, as such deemed good or bad –/A thousand versts away from Tolstoygrad” – thus shielding himself from accusations of overweening pretension, not to say impertinence. He has aimed low, he insists, though his aim is not low comedy, but high. His protagonist is Napoleon, but Napoleon as Prometheus, “Promethapoleon”, and his model is of course the Third Symphony of Beethoven – Beethoveus? – nicknamed the Eroica, which was dedicated to the would-be unifier of Europe until he crowned himself emperor, after which the composer in a rage scratched the upstart’s name from the title page.
“This, then, is what the novel is about:
Its key is E-flat, its form pseudo-symphonic,
Ending upon a forte major tonic,
Napoleon triumphant –”
However, the reader will spot this mock humility for what it is. Burgess’s vaulting literary ambitions are nowhere more evident than in this work, and they come within a crotchet of fulfilment.
It is not an easy book. It might have been written not in the 1970s but in the 1920s, that decade of unprecedented experiment and innovation in all the arts. Burgess is consciously measuring himself against the masters of modernism, Joyce in particular. Indeed, Joyce’s voices resound along the vermiform corridors of this most cunningly contrived work of art masquerading, like Ulysses, as an exercise in Rabelaisian slapstick.
New readers of Burgess’s symphony of words should not be daunted by the early pages, a medley of monologues spoken by a bewilderingly mixed chorus of characters. Here are the opening chords on the introductory fugue:
“Tallien pressed his old royal watch and it chimed a new republican nine. ‘An hour late already.’ Ventôse siffled in from the rue d’Antin and flapped the candle flames. There was a faint odour of scorched varnish from the wooden leg of the acting registrar asleep by the fire.”
And we are off, into a brilliant exchange of varying harmonies and tempi. Josephine is there, moodily awaiting the return of her hero from the wars. She is not exactly trilling at the prospect – “I might as well go home.” But then the conductor rises up on to his toes and summons a tremendous closing chord:
“He strode in. ‘Wake up. Get your leg out of the fire.’ He gave her two excruciating love-pinches, one on each lobe, and cried: ‘Begin!’”
The Bonaparte portrayed here is one of Burgess’s most glorious creations, matched only by his Shakespeare in the early novel Nothing Like the Sun (1964). Bonaparte is at once great and petty, commanding and self-pitying, demonic and comic. One of the secondary characters says of him shrewdly: “I’d say, at a venture, that the new thing is lui, Bonaparte. What I mean is, he doesn’t express any separable idea – you understand me? He’s not there to personify some new notion of absolutism or democracy or what you will. He’s there to turn the age into himself.”
Is this the Hegelian Weltgeist, the world-spirit on horseback, Schopenhauer’s Ding-an-sich, or Nietzsche’s raw will-to-power? It is all of these, and more. Burgess loves Bonaparte, his Bonaparte, and glories in his wolfish appetite for food, wine, people, armies, countries, continents. At the same time, he never loses an opportunity to pull the rug from under him and put on display the dusty soles of his dainty little feet. Nor has he any illusions about the kind of tyrant he is and the even greater monster that he could be:
“‘Consider, for instance, the efficient annihilation of a whole disaffected city. The unventilated room crammed with subjects – we must not think of victims, prisoners, the terms being emotive – and the introduction, by a simple pumping device, of some venomous inhalant.’”
The style of the closing section of the novel is a wicked parody of Henry James at his most costive and mincing. There seems no discernible reason for this bravura exercise in pastiche, and in the “Epistle” the author denies any parodic intention. It hardly matters. At one level Napoleon Symphony is a hugely enjoyable romp, at another it is a highly serious, but never solemn, affirmation of the spirit of life in all its creativity, destructiveness and simple joy. On the last page the last word is: “Rejoice.”
Napoleon Symphony
Anthony Burgess
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[See also: Tirzah Garwood’s English satires]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024