Anthony Burgess

John Anthony Burgess Wilson
Pen name	Anthony Burgess, John Burgess Wilson, Joseph Kell
Occupation	novelist, critic, composer, librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist, educationalist
Nationality	British
Period	1956–1993
Genre	Historical fiction, philosophical novel, satire, epic, spy fiction, horror, biography, literary criticism, travel literature, autobiography
Subject	exile, colonialism, Islam, faith, lust, marriage, evil, alcoholism, homosexuality, linguistics, pornography
Literary movement	Modernism

John Burgess Wilson (25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) — who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess — was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is by far Burgess' most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works. It was adapted into a highly controversial 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick; which Burgess says is chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers. He was a prominent critic, writing acclaimed studies of classic writers such as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.

In 2008, The Times placed Burgess number 17 on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Burgess was an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.

Biography

Early life

Burgess was born John Burgess Wilson on 25 February 1917 in Harpurhey, a suburb of Manchester, to Catholic parents. He was known in childhood as Jack Wilson, Little Jack, and Johnny Eagle. At his confirmation, the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson. He began using the pen name Anthony Burgess on publication of his 1956 novel Time for a Tiger.

His mother Elizabeth died at the age of 30 at home on 19 November 1918, during the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic. The causes listed on her death certificate were influenza, acute pneumonia, and cardiac failure. His sister Muriel had died four days earlier on 15 November from influenza, broncho-pneumonia, and cardiac failure, aged eight. Burgess believed that he was resented by his father, Joseph Wilson, for having survived the incident. After the death of his mother, Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, Ann Bromley, in Crumpsall with her two daughters. During this time, Burgess' father worked as a bookkeeper for a beef market by day, and in the evening played piano at a public house in Miles Platting. In 1922 Joseph Wilson married the landlady of the public house he worked at, Margaret Dwyer. Burgess was later raised by his stepmother. By 1924, Joseph and Margaret Wilson had established a tobacconist and off-licence business with four properties. The profits from the business paid for Burgess' education.

File:Main Quadrangle University of Manchester by Nick Higham.jpg

Manchester University, where Burgess was a student of literature 1937–1940

He said of his largely solitary childhood: "I was either distractedly persecuted or ignored. I was one despised ... Ragged boys in gangs would pounce on the well-dressed like myself". He attended St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School before moving on to Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Elementary School in Moss Side. He later reflected: "When I went to school I was able to read. At the Manchester elementary school I attended, most of the children could not read, so I was ... a little apart, rather different from the rest". Good grades resulted in a place at Xaverian College (1928–1937).

Burgess wrote that as a young child he did not care about music, until he heard on his home-built radio "a quite incredible flute solo, sinuous, exotic, erotic" and became spellbound. Eight minutes later the announcer told him he had been listening to Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Claude Debussy. He referred to this as a "psychedelic moment ... a recognition of verbally inexpressible spiritual realities". Burgess announced to his family that he wanted to be a composer. They objected as "there was no money in it". Music was not taught at his school, and at about age 14 he taught himself to play the piano.

On 18 April 1938, his father died from cardiac failure, pleurisy, and influenza at the age of 55. Intestate, Burgess' father left no inheritance.

Burgess had originally hoped to study music at university, but the music department at the Victoria University of Manchester turned down his application due to poor grades in physics. Instead he studied English language and literature at the Victoria University of Manchester from 1937–1940, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. His thesis was on the subject of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and he graduated with an upper second-class honours which he was disappointed about. One of his professors at the University was A.J.P. Taylor; grading one of Burgess' term papers, he wrote: "Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge". Burgess met Llewela (Lynne) Isherwood Jones at Victoria University of Manchester where she was studying economics, politics and modern history, graduating in 1942 with an upper second-class. Burgess and Jones were married on 22 January 1942.

Military service

Burgess spent six weeks in 1940 as an army recruit in Eskbank, before becoming a Nursing Orderly Class 3 in the Royal Army Medical Corps. During his service, he was unpopular, and was involved in incidents such as knocking off a corporal's cap and polishing the floor of a corridor to make people slip. In 1942 he asked to be transferred to the Army Educational Corps, and despite his loathing of authority he was promoted to sergeant. During the blackout, his pregnant wife Lynne was attacked by four GI deserters, and as a result she lost the child. Burgess, stationed at the time in Gibraltar, was denied leave to see her.

At his stationing in Gibraltar, which he later wrote about in A Vision of Battlements, he worked as a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching alongside Ann McGlinn in German, French and Spanish . McGlinn's communist ideology had major influence on certain parts of A Clockwork Orange. An important role was the help he gave in taking troops through "The British Way and Purpose" programme which was designed to reintroduce them to the peacetime socialism of the post-war years in Britain. He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the Ministry of Education. Burgess' flair for languages was noticed by army intelligence, and he took part in debriefings of Dutch expatriates and Free French who found refuge in Gibraltar during the war. On one occasion in the neighbouring Spanish town of La Línea de la Concepción, he was arrested for insulting General Franco. He was released from custody shortly after the incident. In 1941 Burgess was pursued by military police of the British Armed Forces for desertion after overstaying his leave from Morpeth military base with his bride Lynne.

Early teaching career

Burgess left the army in 1946 with the rank of sergeant-major, and 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 near Preston.

In late 1950 he worked as a secondary school teacher at Banbury Grammar School now Banbury School, teaching English literature. In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to occasionally supervise sports, and he also ran the school's drama society. He organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time. These involved local people and students and included productions of T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes.

With financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple was able to put a down payment on a cottage in the village of Adderbury, close to Banbury. He named the cottage "Little Gidding", after one of Eliot's Four Quartets and Aldous Huxley's The Gioconda Smile. He wrote several articles for the local newspaper, the Banbury Guardian.

Malaya

The Malay College in Kuala Kangsar, Perak, where Burgess taught in 1954–55, an experience that formed the basis of the novel Time for a Tiger.

In 1954 Burgess joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer in Malaya. He was initially stationed at Kuala Kangsar 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). In addition to his teaching duties, 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". According to Burgess' "This Man & Music" he wrote some music there under the influence of the country, notably Sinfoni Melayu for orchestra and brass band, which included cries of Merdeka (independence) from the audience. No score of any, however, has been delivered to posterity.

Kota Bharu, Kelantan. Burgess was an education officer at the Malay Teachers' Training College here between 1955 and 1958.

After a dispute with the Malay College's principal over his accommodation, Burgess was posted elsewhere. He and his wife had occupied a noisy apartment where privacy was supposedly minimal, and this caused resentment. This was the professed reason for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan.

Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written, achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the colonial office. He was rewarded with a salary increment for his proficiency in the language.

He devoted some of his free time in Malaya to creative writing "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it" and 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 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.

Borneo

After a brief period of leave in Britain during 1958, Burgess 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 the sultanate Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State. Although it dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African territory the like Zanzibar, named Dunia. In his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God, Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (1987) Burgess writes:

This novel was, is, about Brunei, which was renamed Naraka, Malayo-Arabic for hell. Little invention was needed to contrive a large cast of unbelievable characters and a number of interwoven plots. Though completed in 1958, the work was not published until 1961, for what it was worth it was made a choice of the book society. Heinemann, my publisher, was doubtful about publishing it: it might be libelous. I had to change the setting from Borneo to an East African one. Heinemann was right to be timorous. In early 1958 'The Enemy in the Blanket' appeared and this at once provoked a libel suit.

The Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque in Bandar Seri Begawan. Burgess was a teacher at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in 1958–59, and the mosque forms the centrepiece of his Brunei novel Devil of a State

About this time Burgess "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom while teaching history. He reports that he was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour. Burgess claimed that he was given just a year to live, prompting him to write several novels to get money to provide for his widow.

He gave a different account to Jeremy Isaacs in a Face to Face interview on BBC The Late Show 21 March 1989: "Looking back now I see that I was driven out of the Colonial Service. I think possible for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons." He alluded to this in an interview with Don Swaim, explaining that his wife Lynne had said something "obscene" to the UK Queen's consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, during an official visit, and the colonial authorities turned against him.. He had already earned their displeasure, he told Swaim, by writing articles in the newspaper in support of the revolutionary opposition party the Parti Rakyat Brunei, and for his friendship with its leader Dr. Azahari.

Repatriate years

Burgess was later repatriated and relieved of his position in Brunei. He spent some time in the neurological ward of a London hospital (see The Doctor is Sick) where he underwent cerebral tests that proved negative. On his discharge, benefiting from a sum of money his wife had inherited from her father, together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided to become a full-time writer.

The couple lived first in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton. They later moved to a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in Etchingham, approximately a mile from the Jacobean house where Rudyard Kipling lived in Burwash, and one mile from the Robertsbridge home of Malcolm Muggeridge.

Upon the death of his father-in-law, he and his wife used their inheritance and decamped to a terraced town house in Chiswick. This provided convenient access to the White City BBC television studios in which he later became a frequent guest. During these years Burgess became a regular drinking partner of the novelist William S. Burroughs. Their meetings took place in London and Tangiers.

A trip Burgess and his wife took with the Baltic Line from Tilbury to Leningrad, resulted in Honey for the Bears and, as he wrote in his autobiographical "You've Had Your Time" (1990), in "re-learn[ing] Russian" and hereby finding inspiration for the Russian-based slang "Nadsat" used in A Clockwork Orange. According to "You've Had Your Time" Burgess resolved: "I would resist to the limit any publisher's demand that a glossary be provided." But at least the American edition, omitting the placatory last chapter, had one, stating: "For help with the Russian, I am indebted to the kindness of my colleague Nora Montesinos and a number of correspondents."

Liana Macellari, an Italian translator 12 years younger than Burgess, came across Burgess' novels Inside Mr Enderby and A Clockwork Orange while writing about English fiction. The two first met in 1963 over lunch in Chiswick. They began an affair and in 1964, Liana gave birth to Burgess' son, Paolo Andrea. The affair was hidden from his now alcoholic wife, with Burgess refusing to leave her for fear of offending his cousin George Patrick Dwyer, then Catholic Bishop of Leeds. Lynne Burgess died from cirrhosis of the liver, on 20 March 1968. Six months later, in September 1968, Burgess married Liana. He then acknowledged the four year old boy as his own, although the birth certificate listed Roy Halliday, who was previously Liana's companion, as the father.

An attempt to kidnap Paolo-Andrea in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors influencing the family's move to Monaco. Paolo Andrea (also known as Andrew Burgess Wilson) died in London in 2002, aged 37.

Tax exile

To avoid the 90% tax the family would have incurred due to their high income, they left Britain. During their travels through France and across the Alps, Burgess wrote in the back of the van as Liana drove. In this period, he wrote novels and produced film scripts for Lew Grade and Franco Zeffirelli.

Malta, where Burgess encountered problems with the state censor. After he left the island his house was confiscated for tax evasion

His first place of residence after leaving England was Lija, Malta (1968–70), where he bought a house. Problems with the Maltese state censor later prompted a move to Rome. He maintained a flat in the Italian capital, 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, very near the fictional home of Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.

Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1970), where he helped teach the creative writing program, and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York (1972). At City College he was a close colleague and friend of Joseph Heller. He went on to teach creative writing at Columbia University. He was also a writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969) and at the University at Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.

Monaco. Burgess was based here from 1976

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 centre for Irish cultural studies.

Burgess spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet two kilometres outside Lugano, Switzerland.

Politics

Burgess was a conservative Catholic and Monarchist, harbouring a distaste for all republics. He believed that socialism for the most part was "ridiculous" but did concede that socialized medicine was "a priority in civilized country today."

Death

Burgess died on 22 November 1993 from lung cancer, at the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in London. His ashes went to the cemetery in Monaco.

Le Columbarium au Cimetière de Monaco . The resting place of Anthony Burgess

The epitaph on Burgess' marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, reads "Abba Abba", being

• "Father, father" in Aramaic (Arabic and in Hebrew as well as in other Semitic languages), that is, an invocation to God as Father (Mark 14:36 etc.)
• Burgess' initials forwards and backwards
• part of the rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan sonnet
• the Burgess novel about the death of Keats, Abba Abba
• the abba rhyme scheme that Tennyson used for his poem on death, In Memoriam

Eulogies at his memorial service at St Paul's, Covent Garden, London in 1994 were delivered by the journalist Auberon Waugh and the novelist William Boyd.

At his death he was a multi-millionaire, leaving a Europe-wide property portfolio of houses and apartments.

Achievement

Novels

File:Lewisbio.jpg

Photograph by Helmut Newton on the cover of the 2002 Roger Lewis biography (Faber and Faber)

His Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes was Burgess' first published venture into the art of fiction. Its three books are Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. It was Burgess' ambition to become "the true fictional expert on Malaya". In these works, Burgess was working in the tradition established by Kipling for British India, and Conrad and Maugham for Southeast Asia.

Conrad, Maugham and Greene made no effort to learn local languages. But Burgess operated more in the mode of Orwell, who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese (necessary for Orwell's work as a police officer) and Kipling, who spoke Hindi (having learnt it as a child). Like his fellow English expats in Asia, Burgess had excellent spoken and written command of his operative language(s), both as a novelist and speaker, including Malay.

Burgess' repatriate years (c. 1960–69) produced not just Enderby but The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping, a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. The Worm and the Ring (1961), had to be withdrawn from circulation under the threat of libel action from one of Burgess' former colleagues.

In 1962 his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange was published. 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 deserters from the U.S. Army (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 music that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him. In the non-fiction book Flame Into Being (1985), Burgess described A Clockwork Orange as "a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die."

Burgess followed this with Nothing Like the Sun, a fictional recreation of Shakespeare's love-life and an examination of the (partly syphilitic, it was implied) sources of the bard's imaginative vision. The novel, which made use of Edgar I. Fripp's 1938 biography Shakespeare, Man and Artist, won critical acclaim and placed Burgess in the front rank of novelists of his generation.

M/F (1971) was listed by the writer himself as one of the works of which he was most proud. Beard's Roman Women is considered to be his least successful novel. Burgess has frequently been criticised for writing too many novels and too quickly. All the same, Beard was revealing on a personal level, dealing with the death of his first wife, his bereavement, and the affair that led to his second marriage.

In another ambitious modernist fictional expedition, Napoleon Symphony, Burgess brought Bonaparte to life by shaping the novel's structure on Beethoven's Eroica symphony. The novel contains a portrait of an Arab and Muslim society under occupation by a Christian western power (Egypt by Catholic France).

In the 1980s, religious themes began to feature heavily (The Kingdom of the Wicked and Man of Nazareth as well as Earthly Powers). 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. This is notable 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).

He kept working through his final illness, and was writing on his deathbed. A late novel was Any Old Iron, a generational saga about two families, one Russian-Welsh, the other Jewish. It encompasses the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the early years of the State of Israel, as well as the imagined rediscovery of King Arthur's Excalibur.

A Dead Man in Deptford, a novel about Christopher Marlowe, is a companion volume to Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life. The verse novel Byrne was published posthumously.

Criticism

Burgess began his career as a critic. Aimed at newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students is still used in schools today. He followed this with The Novel To-day and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction.

Then came the Joyce studies Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (also published as Re Joyce) and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce. Also published was A Shorter 'Finnegans Wake', Burgess' abridgement.

His 1970 Encyclopædia Britannica entry on the novel (under "Novel, the") is regarded as a classic of the genre.

Burgess wrote full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. His Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 remains a useful guide, while the published lecture Obscenity and the Arts explores issues of pornography.

Linguistics

"Burgess' linguistic training," wrote Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, "is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronunciations and the niceties of register."

His interest in linguistics was reflected in the invented, Anglo-Russian teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (Nadsat), and in the movie Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language (Ulam) for the characters to speak.

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."

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.

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).

He 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).

Burgess was co-writer of the script for the TV series Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (1980).

He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare entitled Will! or The Bawdy Bard based on his novel Nothing Like The Sun.

Among the motion picture treatments he produced are Amundsen, Attila, The Black Prince, Cyrus the Great, Dawn Chorus, The Dirty Tricks of Bertoldo, Eternal Life, Onassis, Puma, Samson and Delila, Schreber, The Sexual Habits of the English Middle Class, Shah, That Man Freud and Uncle Ludwig.

Encouraged by his novel Tremor of Intent (a parody of James Bond adventures), Burgess wrote a screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. It was rejected.

Music

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

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 Iowa City in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in This Man and Music.

Sinfoni Melayu 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".

The structure of Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony, while Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition, among other things attempting a fictional representation of Symphony No.40. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 features prominently in A Clockwork Orange (and also in Stanley Kubrick's film version of the novel).

When Burgess was on the BBC's Desert Island Discs radio programme in 1966, he made the following choices: 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.

For a list of some of Burgess' musical compositions, see under List of Burgess' works.

Opera and musicals

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

He created an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982 and performed on the BBC), and wrote the book for the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano, using his own adaptation of the Rostand play as its basis.

His new libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based Scottish Opera.

Work methods

He revealed in Martin Seymour-Smith's Novels and Novelists: A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980) that he would often prepare a synopsis with a name-list before beginning a project. But Seymour-Smith wrote: "Burgess believes overplanning is fatal to creativity and regards his unconscious mind and the act of writing itself as indispensable guides. He does not produce a draft of a whole novel but prefers to get one page finished before he goes on to the next, which involves a good deal of revision and correction."

Linguistic gifts

Burgess' multilingual proficiency came under discussion 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 waitresses at a restaurant where they were filming. It was claimed that the documentary's director deliberately kept these moments intact in the film in order to expose Burgess' linguistic pretensions. A letter from David Wallace that appeared in the magazine of the London Independent on Sunday newspaper on 25 November 2002 shed light on the affair. 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 ... [The suggestion was] 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' point was that the ethnic Chinese had little time for the government-enforced national language, Bahasa Malaysia [i.e. Malay]. Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; it was the girls in question who did not." 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. However, Malay had been installed as the National Language with the installation of the Language Act of 1967. By 1982 all national primary and secondary schools in Malaysia would have been teaching with Bahasa Melayu as a base language (see Harold Crouch, Government and Society in Malaysia, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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 a translation of Eliot's The Waste Land into Persian. It was never published. He also worked on an anthology of the best of English literature translated into Malay, which also failed to achieve publication. Published translations include Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.

Honours

• Burgess garnered the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres distinction of France and became a Monégasque Commandeur de Merite Culturel.
• He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
• He took honorary degrees from St Andrews, Birmingham and Manchester universities.
• Earthly Powers was shortlisted for, but failed to win, the 1980 English Booker Prize for fiction (the prize went to William Golding for Rites of Passage).

Selected works

Main article: List of Burgess' works

Novels

• Time for a Tiger (1956) (Volume 1 of the Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes)
• The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) (Volume 2 of the trilogy)
• Beds in the East (1959) (Volume 3 of the trilogy)
• The Right to an Answer (1960)
• The Doctor is Sick (1960)
• The Worm and the Ring (1960)
• Devil of a State (1961)
• (as Joseph Kell) One Hand Clapping (1961)
• A Clockwork Orange (1962; 2008 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award)
• The Wanting Seed (1962)
• Honey for the Bears (1963)
• (as Joseph Kell) Inside Mr. Enderby (1963) (Volume 1 of the Enderby quartet)
• The Eve of St. Venus (1964)
• Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964)
• A Vision of Battlements (1965)
• Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966)
• Enderby Outside (1968) (Volume 2 of the Enderby quartet)

• M/F (1971)
• Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (1974)
• The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974) (Volume 3 of the Enderby quartet)
• Beard's Roman Women (1976)
• Abba Abba (1977)
• 1985 (1978)
• Man of Nazareth (based on his screenplay for Jesus of Nazareth) (1979)
• Earthly Powers (1980)
• The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982)
• Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End of Enderby (1984) (Volume 4 of the Enderby quartet)
• The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)
• The Pianoplayers (1986)
• Any Old Iron (1988)
• Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)
• A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
• Byrne: A Novel (in verse) (1995)

References

Footnotes

Notes

Bibliography

• Burgess, Anthony (1982). This Man And Music. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-008964-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• David, Beverley (1973). "Anthony Burgess: A Checklist (1956–1971)". Twentieth Century Literature. 19 (3). Hofstra University: 181–188. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Lewis, Roger (2002). Anthony Burgess. Faber and Faber Limted. ISBN 0-571-20492-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)

Further reading

Biographies

• Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (2005)

Selected studies

• Carol M. Dix, Anthony Burgess (British Council, 1971)
• Robert K. Morris, The Consolations of Ambiguity: An Essay on the Novels of Anthony Burgess (Missouri, 1971)
• A.A. Devitis, Anthony Burgess (New York, 1972)
• Geoffrey Aggeler, Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist (Alabama, 1979)
• Samuel Coale, Anthony Burgess (New York, 1981)
• Martine Ghosh-Schellhorn, Anthony Burgess: A Study in Character (Peter Lang AG, 1986)
• Richard Mathews, The Clockwork Universe of Anthony Burgess (Borgo Press, 1990)
• John J. Stinson, "Anthony Burgess Revisited" (Boston, 1991)
• Paul Phillips, "The Music of Anthony Burgess" (1999)
• Paul Phillips, "Anthony Burgess", New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (2001)

Collections

• Many of Burgess' literary and musical papers are archived at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Withington, Manchester.
• The largest collection of Burgessiana is held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
• Burgess scholars will find much of interest at the Anthony Burgess Center of the University of Angers, with which Burgess' widow Liana (Liliana Macellari) is connected.

External links

• International Anthony Burgess Foundation
• The Anthony Burgess Center, at the University of Angers
• Burgess reads from A Clockwork Orange
• Anthony Burgess at Open Letters
• Anthony Burgess Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
• The Paris Review interview
• Second International Anthony Burgess Symposium – "Selves and Others" at Liverpool Hope University
• Anthony Burgess at Find a Grave
• Anthony Burgess at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database