Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 2, March, 2000
 
Contents
Introduction  (by Ben Forkner) 	P. 1
A Glass of Milk (by Liana Burgess). 	P. 6
The Time of His Life: Making The Burgess Variations
(by Kevin Jackson). 	P. 11
Anthony Burgess as Fictional Character in Theroux
and Byatt (by John S. Stinson). 	P. 21
Symphonic Shakespeare (by Paul S. Phillips)	P. 28
Burgess and Beethoven, Part I (by Lord Birkett). 	P. 45
Burgess and Beethoven, Part II (by Anthony Wilkinson). 	P. 48
Burgess and Bohuslav Martinu (by Anthony Wilkinson). 	P. 51
Musical Notes (by M. Turquet & P. Phillips). 	P. 55

Anthony Burgess Center
Université d'Angers
Maison des Sciences humaines  
2, rue Alexandre Fleming  
49066 Angers Cedex 01 (France)
Newsletter editor: Ben Forkner
Associate editors: Valérie Neveu & Dominique Lemarchal

Introduction
By Ben Forkner
"New Online Format"
For those of you who have followed the Anthony Burgess Center online from the beginning, you will have noticed (particularly during the past few weeks) several changes in the original presentation, all intended to improve the clarity and readability of the Center's various activities, including the Newsletter. These changes are all the inspired work of Valérie Neveu, who in addition to her tasks as chief librarian of special collections at the University Library has been willing to devote her considerable skills and time to our website. She deserves far more than this brief tribute, of course, but as editor of the Newsletter, I would like to emphasize how much I, and all the other active members of the Center, appreciate her efforts. By the way, please note that all email messages to me and to the Center should be addressed to Valérie Neveu. Since the Center is based in the University Library, and since we will increasingly need to transfer messages and Newsletter articles directly to the website, we think it best to have a single address for all correspondence.
"Anthony Burgess Society"
In the first issue of the Newsletter I mentioned the movement to found an Anthony Burgess Society. I am pleased to announce that the Society has now been officially created, and legally registered with the French authorities. Jean-Jacques Annaud, the French film director who worked with Burgess on La Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire) is president, and Umberto Eco is one of the vice presidents, along with Liana Burgess and Patrice Monmousseau, director of the Society's sponsor Bouvet-Ladubay, well known wine-makers in Saumur, a few miles upriver from Angers. A number of Burgess friends and admirers have already joined the Society as Honorary Members: Seamus Heaney, A.S. Byatt, Gore Vidal, Martin Scorsese, Malcolm McDowell, Riccardo Muti, and John McGahern, to mention only a few. More details on the Society can be found by turning to the Anthony Burgess Society page on our website. There you will also find a registered form to be printed, filled out, and sent along with your membership fee to the address in Saumur. I encourage all of our regular correspondents, and all interested readers, to do so as soon as possible. The Society is a non profit organization, and will need a large body of individual supporters in order to thrive. Members will receive a printed version of the Newsletter published annually as a single-volume Anthony Burgess Journal. Members will also receive regular mailings of the Society's activities. The Society was announced locally last December 19 with a wonderful concert of Burgess music chosen and performed by pianist Maureen Turquet (our musical counsellor) and soprano Amanda Broome. See the “Musical Notes" at the end of the Newsletter for more details. The official announcement of the Society will be made in Saumur this April 15 and 16 during the Salon du Vin et du Livre, a remarkably libertarian gathering of French writers and artists celebrating the spirit of Rabelais, native of the region, and patron saint of all such celebrations. Burgess of course greatly admired Rabelais, and may very well have sent off the hyperborean signals to help arrange the creation of the Society in Saumur. It is good to think of them together, Rabelais and Burgess (and their friends), smiling down celestially at the ceremonies There will be a round table discussion of Burgess to be televised by a French national channel, and a number of special tributes. More details will be given in our next Newsletter. Again, I urge all of you to join the Society as soon as possible.
"Six Essays"
I am delighted to report that the first issue of the Newsletter seems to have made quite an impact worldwide. We have received hundreds of messages, many asking for more information about the Center, and virtually all praising the quality of the first three essays. From the beginning, I had no idea about the number of pieces to expect from our correspondents during a single year. The three original essays in the first issue seemed to suggest that we might reasonably hope for at least three more this time. Apparently, as far as the bounty of Burgess is concerned, ordinary editorial caution and reason should not be too surprised when hope is generously overpaid by experience. This has now happened twice. Actually, I have received more than these six essays over the past few months. And there are several more now being written, including an essay by Frank Kermode on the novel MF that we will publish in the next issue. At any rate, the Anthony Burgess Newsletter seems to be well on its way to becoming something more than the modest literary newsletter we had aimed for at the beginning, as readers of these six new essays will be able to judge for themselves. In every case, the essays are fully original appreciations, increasingly rare in the academic world today, and in every case they add to a better understanding of the man and his work. Liana Burgess leads off with an account of her recent speculations on A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed inspired by the cover on the new Penguin edition of A Clockwork Orange in England. Kevin Jackson’s essay on the making of the BBC documentary mentioned in the last issue of the Newsletter is somewhat of a Burgessian feat of heroic concentration in itself. I can confirm that it was written all at once early one morning in January, a bitterly cold morning if I can judge from the barely thawed vocal chords of the writer when he called me at 9 a.m. to tell me he had finished. This is a wonderfully witty and informative story of an outstanding documentary, one of the best literary biographies I have seen on television. It was shown on BBC 2 on December 26 and 27, and I hope will be made available soon in other countries. John Stinson’s essay on Burgess as a fictional character in recent works by Paul Theroux and A.S. Byatt is another original, informed, and razor-sharp study, to be expected by the author of one of the few full-length books on Burgess, Anthony Burgess Revisited (Twayne Publishers: Boston, 1991). I would be more than happy to have (and to print) Paul Theroux’s reply, perhaps after he goes back and rereads his own interview with Jorge Luis Borges in The Old Patagonian Express. Paul Phillips returns to the Newsletter with his second essay on Burgess’s music, an analysis of Burgess’s Third Symphony in the light of its major literary source, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Paul Phillips, the Center’s musical correspondent in the United States, is in the midst of writing a book about Burgess’s music. With these two essays as evidence, I firmly believe the finished work will profoundly affect all future evaluations of Burgess, as a composer, of course, but also as a novelist whose music is essential to an understanding of his literary art. The role of Shakespeare in Burgess’s life brings us to the two-part essay written by Lord Birkett and Anthony Wilkinson, both of whom worked with Burgess on a never-to-be-made film on Beethoven and his nephew. For me, and I expect for other readers, the Birkett-Wilkinson-Burgess collaboration is a complete revelation. I do not remember reading about it in any of the standard sources, including either of the two Burgess autobiographies. I want to thank Lord Birkett for his delightful recovery in print of a lost episode in Burgess’s life, and also for putting me in touch with Anthony Wilkinson who has been kind enough to add to his Beethoven reminiscences an account of the film on Bohuslav Martinu he made for the BBC in the late 1960s, with Burgess as the writer of the script. We are hoping to arrange for Mr Wilkinson to present his film at a special showing for the Burgess Society in Saumur, sometime next year.
"Plans and Projects"
Plans are now underway for the Center to organize a symposium on Burgess at the University of Angers in November or December, 2001. The symposium will concentrate on the different versions of A Clockwork Orange: the two published versions of the novel, the Kubrick film, and the theatrical adaptation (with music) written (and composed) by Burgess several years after the film. More details on the symposium will be available on the website in several weeks. Should readers have ideas or suggestions, please send them to the Center via email to Valérie Neveu's address.
Plans are also being considered to organize a large international Burgess colloquium a year or so after the Clockwork Orange symposium. We have not yet decided on a general theme, though I would like to propose something along the lines of Burgess and Elizabethan England. Again, suggestions are welcome.
It has been suggested that the Center publish on the website old articles on Burgess and interviews, that are not easily available, or that have never appeared in English. Again, I would like to know what our readers and correspondents think about the idea.
"Other News"
The annual schedule for the two issues of the Newsletter has been changed. From now on, the Newsletter will appear in October and in March. Thus, the next issue of the Newsletter will appear in October, 2000.
The second annual Anthony Burgess Conference will take place on April 11 at 6 p.m. at the University of Angers. Sponsored by the English Department, directed by John Cassini, this year's Conference will be given by Paul Phillips from Brown University, familiar to our readers as our music correspondent from the United States, and author of two articles on Burgess’s music in the Newsletter.
The next meeting of the Anthony Burgess Center will be held in the Anthony Burgess Room of the University Library on the morning of April 11, at 10:30. All interested readers are invited to attend.
Readers from French universities will know that the annual congress of the SAES, the French national association for university teachers of English, will take place in Angers this year on May 19-21. The Anthony Burgess Center has been asked to open the Anthony Burgess Room in the University Library during the congress, and to present the Center's activities to all interested members of the SAES. We all look forward to welcoming these members to Angers, and to discussing with them our various projects for the future.
Finally, I would like to repeat my apologies in the first Newsletter to the effect that I have been unable to answer all the generous email messages of support. With the help of the other members of the Center, I will do my best to answer the most urgent. But please keep the messages coming. Whether or not you receive a timely answer, they will have done me timeless good. I also would like to invite anyone wanting to send an article for the next Newsletter to write to me with the proposed topic via the Center's email address. Ideally, we would like to have received all articles by mid-September 2000.

Ben Forkner, Director
Anthony Burgess Center

A Glass of Milk
By Liana Burgess
A Clockwork Orange's new cover for the series The Modern Classics published by Penguin displays on one of its two editions a glass of milk against a brilliant silver background. I was sent it last October, together with a number of other covers for the new classic series and I was immediately elated by the variety and the vision of these new presentations of old literary masterpieces: dazzling new images for one's own household titles is, admittedly, nowadays, an extremely rare pleasure. Some brilliant mind and eye was at work and one attributed the miraculous "new, antidumbing-down look" to a rare conjunction of the art, the sales and publicity departments, under the benevolent eye of one or more literary editors. My delusion was shared by the first-class play and comic writer Keith Waterhouse (Geoffrey Bernard is Unwell) who thus commented in the Daily Mail "Other treats in store are Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Flann O' Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Colette's Gigi And the Cat, three Ronald Firbanks, half a dozen Evelyn Waugh... But who pronounces them classics? I had imagined a learned panel of the great and the good of English literature. Not at all. The titles seem to have been selected on a whim, possibly during a good lunch or two, on the basis that you know a classic when it comes up and grabs your enthusiasm." This outburst follows an interview released by one of the Publisher's editors to the Literary Editor of the Independent. However, be as it may, the image is brilliant and I hope it will be displayed around the bookshops adequately, albeit this, as yet, does not seem to be the case, even if the film by Stanley Kubrick, bearing the same title, will be shown in U.K. (which for cinematic purposes includes, I suppose, Scotland, Wales and the two Irelands), for the first time in thirty years, let me repeat: thirty years...
 I have not been able, until very recently, to locate the person who thought of the milk image and am not even sure of what it stands for. For me, right away, there was no doubt, but when I asked Andrea or Andrew, our son, what was his first associations, his immediate response was: "Drugs". Now, that's the opposite of what I thought, although, literally speaking, Andrew is absolutely correct. I thought "Innocence," right away, and was left very perplexed by Andrew's reaction. I will try to explain why I have not changed my mind since last October. 
Alex is fundamentally innocent, that is "politically" innocent, in a way that his drooghi are not, and to support my point I will mention that I remember how pleased Anthony was when Kubrick put a bottle of milk on the doorstep of the cat lady's house and Alex subsequently is blinded by it, when they all come out and his mates fling it in his face before fleeing, thus leaving him behind as the only culprit. If I remember correctly, Anthony, who was sitting next to me at the private show in U.K. before we left for the United States and New York (where he was to pick up his position as Distinguished Professor at NYUC, a position formerly held by Ralph Ellison and Joseph Heller - it must have been in 1971), gasped with admiration and approval, because he himself had not thought about it and Kubrick had gone one step ahead in the right direction. I seem to remember his exclaiming under his breath "My God, he got it right!" (Whereas the presence of the serpent is totally supererogatory and even contradictory since the snake is traditionally a symbol of wisdom or knowledge but in this instance the only point of being there seems to be that of shocking the audience in general for its probably Christian-generated herpetophobia and Malcolm Mc Dowell in particular, since he has horror of snakes).
Alex's innocence, then, is a political one. He is certainly a disaffected member of the polity, no matter how streetwise shrewd:
"And we are your enemies?" said the Minister, while all the gazetta vecks went scribble scribble scribble. "Tell us that, my boy".
"All who do me wrong," I said, "are my enemies."
"Well," said the Int Inf Min, sitting down by my bed. "I and the Government of which I am a member want you to regard us as friends. Yes, friends. We have put you right, yes?... We never wished you harm, but there are some who did and do... There are certain men who wanted to use you, yes, use you for political ends. They would have been glad, yes, glad for you to be dead, for they thought they could then blame it all on the Government... There is a man," said the Intinfmin, "called F. Alexander, a writer of subversive literature, who has been howling for your blood." All through the film Alex remains not only innocent but indifferent to the political manipulations of the opposite political parties.
In this respect the book complementary to A Clockwork Orange is The Wanting Seed and I wish that one day it will appear in one volume, as it has been done instead, wrongly I think, with 1985.
The pointing out of a writer as a subversive element in the society is a strong evidence that we are in the presence of a totalitarian government, never a great lover of art unless safely hitched to the political chariot of the moment. The subversive writer labels the opposing Government "evil and wicked" and in chapter 5, part 3, we learn that we are in the interregnum that precedes the general elections ("you can be a very potent weapon, you see, in ensuring that this present evil and wicked Government is not returned in the forthcoming election. The Government's big boast, you see, is the way it has dealt with crime these last months" says the humanistic liberal writer. "...Recruiting brutal young roughs for the police. Proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning... Before we know where we are we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism.") I personally suspect that the outcry about the violence of both book and film has something more to do with political clarity of vision than violence. The book was written in the annus mirabilis '59-60, but could not find a publisher before 1962. "Pornography of violence" was the editorial verdict. In that language? Nadsat! Not of immediate access! As to the film, how can we forget that the years that saw its coming out (1971-1972) saw also Sam Peckinpah's Stray Dogs, Ken Russell's The Devils that filled the screen with the most sumptuous images of a black-and-white nun (Vanessa Redgrave) masturbating with a crucifix, and pierced our eardrums with the screams of the tortured of Loudun? If Huxley had not been safely dead, the film drawn from his book with the aim of fostering religious tolerance would certainly had given him a heart attack.
In The Wanting Seed, (splendidly translated into French with the title La Folle semence) we live in a future where, because of a shortage of foodstuff, the right to have children is strongly limited to one or a couple and the heroes of the period or the personalities most likely to ascend the political echelon are the homosexuals. (In a futuristic greater London posters are displayed everywhere IT IS SAPIENS TO BE HOMO.)
Tristram Foxe, the hero or antihero of the novel, is a history teacher married to a dangerously fertile and healthy-looking Beatrice-Joanna, now pregnant again after the death of the last legitimate, rationed, as it were, child. Tristram's brother, Derek, high in the hierarchy of power, is a blatant homosexual (in effect no homosexual at all since the twins that Beatrice-Joanna carries are, in effect, his).
Tristram's history lessons are the interesting point: they illustrate a theory of the alternation of governments, from permissive-liberal (Pelagian) to authoritarian-repressive (Augustinian), based on a theological notion of the nature of man. It provides, in effect, the backdrop to A Clockwork Orange story.
Pelagius was the British monk who believed in the essentially good and redemptible nature of man. Whenever this perspective prevails the government which rules the society for the time being is permissive, but, as permissiveness in the long or short run creates disorders and disaffection a sterner socio-political view prevails and we have a repressive government supported by a strong police body which detains citizens without compunction. At the beginning of ACO the national jails are overcrowded and the Minister of Interior or Inferior is coming up with a solution suggested by technocrats (in themselves "uncovenanted"), which may help his party win the coming elections. The Augustinian phase, which is the present one of the book, incidentally, comes from St Augustine's view of man as irremediably tainted by the original sin. The milk without vellocet (served with vellocet in the Korova milk bar) stands for the milk of human kindness and innocence which flows inside the ruffian Alex.
Another reflection: I think that Anthony Burgess likes to snowball multiple and at the same time contradictory pointers into a single, polyvalent, entity, thus the Lodovico technique would stand not only as a nudge toward "Ludwig Van" (Beethoven) as Blake Morrison says in his introduction to the book, but (because, where does the Italian language all of a sudden come from?) towards Nicolò Macchiavelli as well. The Old Nick, the devil, the man who knew everything about - and taught Europe - the nature of political power and how to gain it and the natural wickedness of man ("Gli uomini sdimenticano prima la morte del padre che la perdita del loro patrimonio.") Calling it Nicolò technique would have been too obvious. But, Ludovico is also Ludovico Ariosto, author of Orlando Furioso, his long poem of knights in arms and also a tragedy by Robert Green performed in February 1592 at the Rose. Ariosto, Ludovico, was well known to the Elizabethans (and Anthony's heart is with the Elizabethans) because Elizabeth the 1st had condemned Sir John Harington (inventor of the water-closet) to translate the whole of the poem as a punishment for having circulated among her "Glories" a series of ribald octaves extrapolated from it and dealing with a very indiscreet (and most delicious) erotic adventure.
Liana Burgess

The Time of His Life:
Making the Burgess Variations
By Kevin Jackson
On 28 November 1966, Anthony Burgess was given the accolade which comes, sooner or later, to every British subject who has achieved the appropriate level of distinction or notoriety: he was invited to appear on the long-running BBC radio programme "Desert Island Discs", in those days hosted (if I'm not mistaken) by its creator Roy Plomley. For the benefit of those readers unfamiliar with this pillar of Anglo-Saxon culture, I should perhaps explain the show's simple but satisfying format. Every  week, a guest is invited to imagine him- or herself magically transported  to a remote but presumably agreeably tropical island, where the facilities will include a fully working record player (its source of power an eternal mystery) and eight pieces of specially requested music. There will also be a small bookshelf, containing the King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, plus one other volume of the guest's choice; and a single luxury item.
For the record, as it were, here are Anthony Burgess's chosen discs: Purcell, "Rejoice in the Lord Alway" (Alfred Deller/Deller Consort/Oriana Concert Orchestra/Deller); Bach, Goldberg Variations No 13 (George Malcolm, harpsichord); Elgar, Symphony No.1 in A flat major (Philharmonia Orchestra/Barbirolli), Wagner, "Walter's Trial   Song"   from   Die   Meistersinger   (Sandor   Konya/Berlin Philharmonic/Kraus),  Debussy, "Fêtes"  (Orchestre  de  la  Suisse Romande/Ansermet);   Lambert, "The  Rio  Grande"  (Philharmonia Orchestra /Lambert); Walton, Symphony No.1 in B flat minor (Philharmonia  Orchestra/Walton);  Vaughan  Williams,  "On  Wenlok Edge" (Alexander Young/Sebastian String Quartet). His book choice was Finnegans Wake (not too hard to guess; that, or Ulysses would be the obvious selections) and his luxury "music manuscript paper, pencils and an India-rubber" (also not that hard to guess).
I mention this musical list not only because it was one of the more interesting minor discoveries that we made in the early days of pre-production on The Burgess Variations, or because it may one day be the germ of a Ph.D. thesis, but because I, like thousands of others who will guiltily admit to liking the old show, have often played the game of wondering which pieces of music I would plump for, and particularly which book would best complement the Bard and King James as my insular reading. The answer varies, but in recent years I have often found myself mentally confiding to Sue Lawley (who has inherited the late Mr Plomley's chair and microphone) that I would like my island equipped with a copy of You've Had Your Time, by Anthony Burgess.
There are many reasons for this choice, not least that the book is (of course) wonderfully funny and enjoyable; but, as I shall explain to Ms. Lawley, the most compelling reason for wanting that book on my island is that I should like to have something to remind me of the life l had left behind in England -- the life of the jobbing freelance writer, with all its interests and anxieties and rages and weird working hours -- and it seems to me that there is no book half so acute and evocative on the subject of what it is  actually like to be a professional writer, whether as exalted as Anthony Burgess or as marginal as... well, me. The deadlines, the fifteen simultaneous projects to be kept spinning in the air, the obtuse or sneering reviews (and, let me tell you, the ones you receive are often just as bad), the countless time-wasting proposals for radio or television programmes that die the second they are put in front of the channel controller... It's all there, every last gory detail of the Life of Writing, put down for posterity in Burgess's uniquely compelling prose and I know, God help me, how much I would miss it when wading in my private lagoon.
But there are other, more immediate reasons why I find myself thinking of You’ve Had Your Time as I type these words rapidly in the early hours of a wet Monday morning, nervously aware that I am stretching my editor's proposed deadline to snapping point. When he asked me to provide a short sketch about the process of making The Burgess Variations, I agreed readily enough, confidant that there was plenty of suitable material in the large buff-coloured notebook I had kept throughout the months of production. Alas: I just opened that notebook a few minutes ago and found, instead of the carefully dated journal and ready-cooked anecdotes, a few pages of barely comprehensible scribbles ("Fine lady" = "Fiennes lady"; "Jacques Tati's Playtime" and "i. e. not a toy" are among the more lucid jottings), followed by reproving blankness.
In short, I find myself obliged to reconstruct 20 months or so of work and play relying pretty much on memory alone, and am appalled to find how many of the key moments and encounters, let alone their nuances, have grown faded and mangled beyond recovery. Yet another good cause, then, for being so awed by Burgess, who could recall with such piquant vividness and apparent ease the flavour of his life for the past seven decades. Much as I would have liked this article to read as a small hommage to You've Had Your Time, then, I’m afraid it’s really just a strip cartoon version of some of the times we had. It falls into three main panels:
Act One: Pre-Production
The first entry in my patchy production diary reads "2/3 May 1998: compile  chronology  of  Burgess's life,"  This  document,  largely gutted from Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time, proves even more useful than expected when it comes to giving the programme its basic shape, (Old British Army maxim: "Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted,") Much of the early work on the film is done in the basement flat of my old friend David Thompson, who is to produce and direct -- and who, indeed, managed to persuade the BBC to revive the idea of a major Burgess documentary, which had originally been mooted not long after the author's death in 1993. David stresses that we need to come up with some kind of device  to  keep  us  from  falling  into  the  dull  and dutiful  chronological jog-trot of some other arts documentaries we could both mention. (Neither David nor I can now quite remember when the musical conceit of "theme and variations" first came up -- and in either case, we will happily admit to the inspiration of a fine Canadian film about Glenn Gould, constructed after Bach's Goldberg Variations. Perhaps that Desert Island Discs list had something to do with it, too.)
For the next few months, our agreeable task consists of two main forms of research. The first is simply watching and listening to hour after hour of Burgess's contributions to radio and television from the early sixties onwards. Since there is no footage of the first forty-odd years of Burgess’s life, and hardly any photographs (destroyed by the damp and insect life of the tropics, readers will recall),  one  of  the  challenges  for  us  will  be  to  create  the impression or illusion or such footage. Fortunately, Burgess often discussed his early days, and on a number of occasions went back to his old haunts from Manchester to Malaya with camera crews in tow, so we have something to be going on with.
The other research is a matter of finding the people who knew Burgess at various stages of his life. The index pages of his autobiographies are a big help; so is the industry and diligence of our researcher, Jane Bywaters (only with us for a limited time, as she will shortly be whipped back to another department as the researcher for a series of films about blondes). Sheer luck plays a part, too. I've happened to meet the publisher Richard Cohen a year or so earlier at the memorial service of a mutual friend, and know that he has some good anecdotes and better insights to offer from his time as Burgess's editor. A chance remark by the lodger at my London flat puts me on the trail of another publisher, David Burnett, who in his salad days at Heinemann was often designated to go drinking with Burgess and his terrifying first wife, Lynne.
Over the next few weeks, David Thompson and I do some rather more discreet drinking of our own, as we spend our extremely slender hospitality budget on taking potential contributors out to lunch. One of them, the poet, translator and publisher James Michie begins by telling us about the time when Lynne, with little or no prior warning, leaned over and bit his ear (he enjoyed submitting the expenses claim for the plaster he bought to patch it up) and ends by refusing to be filmed on the grounds that he is not sufficiently telegenic.  Another,  the  classicist  Peter  Green  --  who  does eventually contribute to the film, and very wittily too -- regales us with fascinating stories not only about Burgess but about his academic research into Greek and Roman magic. Had he ever been tempted to try them out,  I ask. Oh yes,  he replies, and they worked: he once put a curse on a boat, which sank in harbour...
Our  list  of  telephone  numbers swells  to  the  size  of  a  small directory; we have an  on-again-off-again arrangement with Gore Vidal for an interview at his Italian house; David has to keep one eye on his other main project (a film about Rogers and Hart), and I make radio programmes  about the likes of Holderlin and Camoes, file articles to The Independent, finish writing one book and worry about finishing another. Eventually, it is time to start filming. Since  the  budget  has  been  cut  from  its  original  £260,000  to £196,000 (and my own fee halved in the process; sic semper) we only have 16 days of shooting and must use them carefully.
Act Two: Production
Filming comes in two main phases, since David has to disappear to New York for several months to polish off Rogers and Hart, though he manages to squeeze in some interviews for the Variations there, notably with Erica Jong, (It's just as well that David conducts this particular interview, since there's a faint chance that Ms Jong still bears a grudge about an insufficiently reverent profile I wrote for a magazine a few years ago). David is also on his own for filching interviews in Banbury and Adderbury, since I am laid up for a couple of weeks with excruciating pains in my lower back -- brought on, I like to tell him from time to time, by helping David transport some bulky files from his office to his flat.
For the most part, the interviewing goes smoothly and well, with David's flat doing service as a studio. We film the veteran TV director Christopher Burstall here, watching the Monitor film he and  Burgess  made  about  Joyce  and  reminiscing  about  their collaboration; and,  once the crew have set up a short set of tracks, we film Professor Anthony Clare, listening intently to the searching interview he did with Burgess for the Radio 4 programme In the Psychiatrist's Chair   -- David has come up with a witty "reveal"  shot,  in  which  the  camera  gradually  shows that the inhabitant of the facing chair is not Burgess himself but a bulky ree1-to-reel tape recorder.
Our other interviews are mainly conducted at the homes of novelists -- A.S. Byatt, William Boyd, Nigel Williams -- or in carefully chosen locations. We hire a screening room at the British Film Institute as a suitably cinematic venue for our encounter with Jean-Jacques Annaud, the director of Quest for Fire, who proves to be a dream interviewee: funny, richly anecdotal, and a lively mimic. Since the BFI is just around the corner from Fitzrovia, where Burgess and his first wife spent so many hours and pounds drinking, we are well placed for our meeting with David Burnett, who we've asked to yarn away about boozy Fitzrovian nights while propping up a bar. Though a far more diffident performer than M. Annaud, David also has some good stories to tell, and is one of the few people to have some moderately  friendly  words  to  say  for  Lynne,  even  though  she apparently goosed him late one night as they walked through a church yard. David speaks fondly, too, of a Christmas he spent with them, when Burgess read a seasonal passage from Dickens.
Our long-postponed encounter with Gore Vidal is not quite such plain sailing. He’s finally agreed, for a sum I shan't disclose here, to bestow his world-weariness on us at his hotel room near the  American  Embassy.  I  am  daunted  by  the  prospect  of  being verbally Gored, to put it mildly, and then disappointed: Vidal must have been on television so many times now that he simply switches on the autopilot, and he seems to regard me and the crew as a pack of ignorant fools. (I can't protest on my own behalf, but this is grossly unfair on the others.) I realise that I ought to try to coax something slightly less perfunctory from the great man, and find my chance when Vidal ends a sentence by referring to Burgess as a Magister Ludi.
"Not a good novel", I reply, since I recall that Magister Ludi is the American title of a book by Hermann Hesse, much loved in hippie circles, and known to British readers as The Glass Bead Game. Vidal refocuses his eyes on me, mildly surprised at my presumption in venturing an opinion of my own. Within a second or so he has caught the reference and lobbed it neatly back: "I am not my Hesse's keeper." "Bravo", I grovel, and the interview resumes at a slightly more animated pace. When we look back at the rushes, weeks later, Vidal is (as we should have known) fine, and David ends up using one of his sound-bites at the very beginning of the first film.
Since our budget no longer stretches to the global odyssey we'd originally fantasised about (Malaya! Brunei! Malta! Rome! New York!), our only extended trip has been trimmed down to a long weekend in Angers. It’s a busy but enjoyable jaunt. While David and the crew take shots of the nascent Burgess study centre in the University compound, I while away several happy hours browsing through the book collection that Liana Burgess has rescued from their Maltese house and donated to the Centre. I discover all manner of delights, including the scruffy exercise book which contains Burgess’s first autodidactic ventures into Russian, and -- a great thrill, this -- the typescript of an article about The Anatomy of Melancholy for which I've been searching vainly for months.
We also meet, break bread and file interviews with Liana Burgess and Ben Forkner, neither of whom need further introduction here (especially since Professor Forkner has already made an uncredited appearance in my opening paragraphs as the supernaturally patient editor). Nor is there much need to account for the rest of the weekend, since a good part of it -- including the private piano recital of Burgess's fugues -- ended up in the completed programme. It would be churlish, though, not to put on record our gratitude for the many and varied acts of hospitality we enjoyed in Angers.
By now, save for a last-minute interview-cum-music lesson with Paul Phillips, the American conductor and composer who is currently dedicated to bringing Burgess's music to a wider public (and who rashly suggests to me that we should collaborate on a musical; I promise not to hold him to this when he has second thoughts), the shooting is over, it is time for editing.
Act Three, Post-Production
Our budget allows for eight weeks of editing, which if you haven’t ever made a film may sound a lot but, believe me, isn't. On many of the other films I’ve been hired to write, I’ve tended to have very much a hands-on role in the editing process, but David prefers to keep me at (mixed anatomical metaphor coming up) arm's length in the early stages. My main job for now is to go through Burgess's fiction to find the passages which will fit into the pattern that's evolving.
I suggest to David that we should approach the actor John Sessions to read our extracts, not only because he is a brilliant mimic and exceptionally  literate,  but because  I know  him  to be  a major Burgess fan. Back in the early 1990s, when I was the editor of a cultural review programme on Channel 4 television, I had asked Sessions to discuss You've Had Your Time and he had been splendid. A call to his agent reveals that Sessions is busy acting in the BBC's  much-vaunted  drama  series  Gormenghast,  adapted  from  the novels by Mervyn Peake (which Burgess admired: I seem to recall that he wrote an introduction  for the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Titus Groan). When he hears about the Burgess film, though, Sessions is so keen to take part that he makes a gap in his work schedule and cheerfully accepts the rather trifling sum we can pay him. His performance is, as I had predicted, excellent.
Soon, the film is in good enough shape to show to our Executive Producer, Roger Thompson (no relation), who nods encouragingly and says that he will back us in any difficulties we may run into -- this latter remark being a nod to our growing anxiety about whether we will be allowed to show clips from A Clockwork Orange under the standard legal clause which says that such extracts are permissible for the purposes of serious criticism. The BBC lawyer seems fairly sanguine about it all, but we continue to fret until the moment of broadcast, especially when we hear that Warners have plans to re-release the film early in 2000.
Plenty  of  directors  say  that  editing  is  the  most  creatively fascinating part of film-making, and by and large -- leaving aside the moments when you howl with anxiety or moan in despair -- this seems to me a fair observation. I’ve long been amazed at how images can be transformed by being cut in a certain rhythm, or set against particular words or music, and this sense comes back to me again and again during the later stages of editing, especially when I see how some rather dull and grimy shots of Manchester (inherited from a French programme about Burgess as part of a co-production deal in which  we  had  no  part)  become  lyrically  melancholic  with  the appropriate orchestral setting.
Thus  far,  I  have been careful  not to  make  too  much of David Thompson’s directorial talents, and I'll stick to that discreet policy with this single exception; his choice of music for The Burgess Variations is  quite  inspired:  Purcell's  King  Arthur, Elgar’s "Sospiri", Holst's "St. Paul's Suite", Mozart's "Adagio for Glass Harmonica", Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas (for the Malayan section), Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto (for flatulent Mr Enderby) and, of course, the thirteenth "Goldberg" variation. I wish we could issue the soundtrack on CD.
By  the  time  it  comes  to  write  and  record  my  commentary,  the programme is so coherently structured that the task is all but effortless. The last hurdle to be jumped is to gain Mrs. Burgess's approval. She comes, she sees, she approves -- with certain small qualifications and  suggestions that  she  doesn’t insist  on  our implementing. We spend the last shreds of our hospitality budget on lunch, and go away to other projects; David to a new film about Poulenc, me to cut the text of my new book down to acceptable lengths. Now we just have to wait for the controller of BBC2 to decide when she's going to show it. Our dread is that it will be dumped out in the early hours of the morning alongside the Open University programmes.
But our luck is in: she sees the first film, likes it and -- some months later -- says that it will be ideal for the BBC's Christmas schedules. Neither David nor I quite believe this, since those schedules are notoriously subject to change right up to the last minute, and we remain sceptical until the Radio Times goes to press and the timing -- barring the outbreak of global thermonuclear war or the death of the Queen Mother -- is set in stone.
Christmas 1999 proves to be a sort of unannounced David Thompson festival: while the man himself goes on a well-earned holiday to Cyprus, the BBC screens, in rapid succession, his Poulenc film, his Rogers and Hart film and the two parts of The Burgess Variations. Not having looked at the tape for many months, I am able to watch with a reasonably fresh eye, asking myself "would I be enjoying this if a stranger had made it?," and for the most part thinking that I probably would.
The response is, an the whole, warm. On his return from Cyprus, David is able to read lots of cards, letters, e-mails and post-its all saying how good they thought it was, and hears that it was well spoken of in the BBC's internal review board. The press coverage is varied, from a rave in the Scotsman so ecstatic that I can’t bring myself to quote it, to a slam in the Guardian, who thought it was all so much schedule filler, and objected to the nasty  things  that  wicked  old  Catholic  man  said  about  poor Protestants. The nationally up-market Sundays ran decidedly odd reviews, broadly favourable to the films but flip and condescending about Burgess's hair and clothes. Apart from the Scotsman, not one of them mentions the film's structure; why did we bother?
Still, no real complaints on my part, either then or now, on this late January morning as the sun is coming up and my final paragraph heaves into sight. As so often, the most telling responses to the film came from unexpected quarters. A week or so after Christmas I was in my local darkroom printing up same photographs, and fell into chatting with one of the other regulars, a lady of fifty or so who does something in graphic design or illustration or some such.
She asked me if I'd seen that programme about Anthony Burgess over Christmas: "What an amazing man. I had no idea he had done so many things." I wish I could say that I was modest enough not to reveal that I had anything to do with the programme, but I'm afraid that I owned up, and accepted her compliments. The writer's life is an uncertain one, but it has its small rewards now and then.

Kevin Jackson is a freelance writer and broadcaster based in London and Cambridge. He is the author of, among other books, The Language of Cinema (1998), Invisible Forms (1999) and A Ruskin Alphabet (2000) -- this last (admittedly a fairly slim volume) being written at breakneck speed in the six days before filing his article on The Burgess Variations, since his working life is even more chaotic than that piece suggests. He has been deriving instruction and delight from the writings of Anthony Burgess for almost thirty years.

Burgess as Fictional Character in Theroux and Byatt
By John J. Stinson
Burgess has lived on after his death in 1993. He lives on, of course, in his artistry generally, but his continuing presence has also been manifested in the posthumous publication of three significant books: A Dead Man in Deptford (London, 1993; New York, 1995) the fictional presentation of the life of Christopher Marlowe; Byrne (London, 1995; New York, 1997) the rollicking novel in verse; and One Man's Chorus (1998), the previously uncollected essays. The year 1996, however, gave us other embodiments of Burgess: he appears as a character in two highly discussible works of fiction. 
My Other Life (1996), by Paul Theroux, intentionally blurring the boundaries between memoir and fiction, could be discussed (elsewhere) from philosophical, ethical, and, yes, I would certainly think, although I am no lawyer, legal standpoints. Those of you who recall the piece in the August 7, 1995 New Yorker titled "A. Burgess, Slightly Foxed: Fact and Fiction" will catch on immediately. The piece strongly suggested itself as fact to most readers, even sophisticated ones of my acquaintance who asked me if I knew that Burgess was unbearably rude and condescending, a nasty drunk, a man of the prickliest disposition, and the like. Readers who had previously known nothing about Burgess as a person now felt that they did know him or, rather, -- unlikeable as they "found out" he was (in Evelyn Waugh-like guise) -- they were thoroughly glad they had never known him. 
In both the New Yorker piece and the story in My Other Life, Theroux, a longtime acquaintance of Burgess, knows a lawyer who is also a book collector and one of Burgess's biggest "fans," as the collector puts it himself. This man, Lettfish, begs Theroux to introduce him to Burgess. Theroux finally accedes to Lettfish's pleas and invites, on short notice (against the objections of Mrs. Theroux) Lettfish and Burgess to dinner at his home. Burgess arrives late, drunk, and surly, and thoroughly, although not cleverly, insults and humiliates the previously worshipful lawyer who leaves "heartbroken," as Theroux sees it. 
The New Yorker piece is followed by a note in an italic font smaller than the text, which reads, "Author's note: My dinner with Anthony Burgess took place on November 14, 1981. Or perhaps it didn't." Did many readers put this coy caution together with the "Fact and Fiction" of the subtitle to deduce, correctly, that they had just read about a fictional "Anthony Burgess" and a fictional "Paul Theroux"? It is doubtful. On page 65 there is a half-page photograph of the very real Anthony Burgess, taken by Helmut Newton in Monaco in 1985. Moreover, the fictional Burgess has written the same books as the real one, and so too has Theroux. 
Observations reported to me suggest that most readers, understandably enough, thought that what they had read about Burgess in the New Yorker was essentially "true." The ex-Mrs. Paul Theroux correctly realized what people were thinking too. About six weeks after the "A. Burgess Slightly Foxed" piece was published, the "In the Mail" column of the New Yorker led with a clear, concise, but seemingly anxious and flat denial by Anne Theroux, writing from London, that Burgess had ever been a dinner guest at the house she lived in with her then-husband: "I was dismayed to read in your August 7th edition a story called 'A. Burgess, Slightly Foxed (Fact and Fiction),' by Paul Theroux, in which a very unpleasant character with my name said and did things that I have never said or done'." She continues by writing that not only did she never say that she was not a Burgess fan, but that "I have been a Burgess fan for as long as I can remember. In 1980 (the year before the event in the story), I interviewed him (Burgess) for the BBC World Service about his superb novel Earthly Powers ... I would have been delighted to have Burgess to dinner at my house, but, alas, it didn't happen." Another letter in the same issue of the New Yorker expresses the writer's dismay after reading "the revealing portrait of Anthony Burgess," noting how "Theroux ends the essay by describing, in excruciating detail, a series of deliberate small cruelties that Burgess took pleasure in inflicting upon a sincere, if unbearably enthusiastic fan." One assumes that this writer saw the letter of Anne Theroux immediately above her own, and found it restorative of her admiration for Burgess. I, however, know several people who missed the Anne Theroux letter and confidently retain the impression that they have the inside story on how Burgess gave some rudely dismissive treatment to a fan named Lettfish one evening at the Theroux home in London.
The objections of Anne Theroux were apparently vehement enough to cause Paul to make some changes when the Burgess piece went into book form. Chapter Six of My Other Life, titled "The Writer and His Reader," is identical to the earlier New Yorker piece save for a few minor changes. The Mrs. Theroux present at the dinner is now called Alison, not Anne, and references to her working at the BBC have been removed. No photograph appears, either of a real or imagined Burgess. Then, too, the "real" Theroux chooses (perhaps after some legal prompting?) to include a prefatory "Author's Note" intended to serve as a general disclaimer, but it is couched in enough double-talk to preserve the fun and games and the feeling that what we are reading might well be ninety-nine per cent true. Theroux writes:
This is the story of a life I could have lived had things been different -- an imaginary memoir ... these characters do not exist outside this intentionally tall story ... There are some names you know --Anthony Burgess, Nathan Leopold, Queen Elizabeth II, and more-- but they too are alter egos, other hes and shes. As for the other I, the Paul Theroux who looks like me, he is just a fellow wearing a mask. It is the writer's privilege to keep some facades intact and use his own face in the masquerade. I was the only area in which I took no liberties. The man is fiction, but the mask is real.
What is it that Theroux is really trying to do? Several things, of course. Skeptics might say --and they might not be entirely wrong-- that Theroux's blurring of the line between fact and fiction is more a transparent (and successful) effort to drive up sales than it is any serious extension of the postmodernist enterprise. They might even allege that the taking of gross liberties by the merging of fact and fiction has long been the practice of the trashiest tabloids of Britain and America as they "report" on the lives of celebrities. 
Fictions that raise epistemological issues or incorporate matters more traditionally discussed in philosophy have been common now for the last thirty-five years or so, with some antecedent texts going back a hundred years, and a few even beyond that. Certainly, themes involving the personae that we all develop, (public selves, and private selves) have absolute universality yet are even more central and compelling in our own day than ever before. Theroux seems implicitly to claim that his approach to these themes is both playful and radical, teasing yet deeply illuminating. And, yes, authors, maybe even more than public figures, often do have several personae. Burgess would, at times, seem to be playing self-scripted roles in his fictions, non-fiction writings, and public performances such as public lectures and live television appearances. Enderby in The Clockwork Testament, for example, is surrounded by circumstances that correspond closely to Burgess's own during the year of his City College of New York stint, yet Enderby represents only a small part of his creator: Burgess's humor is self-deprecating. As another example, Andrew Biswell, in the first issue of the Newsletter rightly points to the persona Burgess created for himself as a television critic. And Ben Forkner begins his introduction to One Man's Chorus by noting "the multitude of different voices Anthony Burgess could apparently summon at will." 
Then again, too, Burgess himself wrote fictionalized biographies of Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Marlowe. Furthermore, scholarly theory that underlies a number of disciplinary areas has insistently reminded us in the last thirty years of the shifting and subjective nature of "truth." Still, one asks, should Theroux not have engaged himself in greater ethical introspection before he began his project? Does his ironically deprecatory representation of himself, in My Other Life, provide full sanction for his treatment of an Anthony Burgess only recently deceased, or a Prince Philip, still alive? Heated discussion of these questions is almost certain to ensue if others follow Theroux in the deliberate knocking down of the boundaries between biography and fiction. (James Joyce, whom Burgess greatly admired admittedly did something similar to what Theroux did, but we might remember that Reuben J. Dodd, Jr. eventually won a legal judgment in the Ulysses case, albeit against the BBC.) 
The appearance of Anthony Burgess in another 1996 book, A. S. Byatt's 600-page novel Babel Tower, is not likely to give rise to controversy since readers will be certain from the very beginning that they are reading a work of fiction, in fact, Byatt's next novel after the enormously successful Possession. Like Anne Theroux, Antonia Byatt had interviewed Burgess for British television (an "ICA Guardian Conversations" program). It is difficult to ascertain from the interview itself whether the scholarly and widely-read Byatt had any really deep or extensive knowledge of Burgess's oeuvre, but it can be discovered that she wrote an enthusiastic and discerning review of The Clockwork Testament for the Times (London) back in 1974. In Babel Tower Byatt does not really come close to any direct use of the interview material, but she does employ Burgess's concept of the alternating cycles of Augustinianism and Pelagianism, the issue of theological debate that serves as a basic metaphor and thematic underpinning for a number of Burgess's novels. In the Times review Byatt knowledgeably discusses the Pelagian/Augustinian debate as it appears in The Wanting Seed and The Clockwork Testament. 
The Anthony Burgess who appears in Babel Tower is, I think it safe to say, recognizably the man himself. Here he writes a characteristically perspicacious review (which we are given in its entirety) of a 1960s deSadean sort of novel, and, as a result, he is called as a witness in a trial prosecuting the book for alleged obscenity. Byatt's impersonation of Burgess's voice, first, his writerly voice as a reviewer, and then his public speaking voice as a witness at a celebrated trial, is deft and highly accomplished. The Burgess who appears in front of the court is vividly and convincingly realized: "Anthony Burgess is the next witness; his voice is round and beautifully produced. He praises Babbletower (sic: the book within the book) in musical terms: brio, appassionatta, fugue" (539). Burgess gives his testimony with characteristic pith and departs. 
Byatt's reputation as a serious literateur is deservedly greater than Theroux's, and comparisons might seem forced. Still, in their very self-conscious merging of fact and fiction they are doing something similar, although they approach it from different directions. Whereas Theroux conveys the idea of providing fact before stirring in elements of fiction, Byatt, a writer very much aware of the fictiveness of fiction -- at least a borderline metafictionist -- clearly signals that she has added generous measures of self-reflexiveness and game playing. Nonetheless, she stays very close to the recognizably "real" world. Such large chunks of minutely realistic detail are present in Babel Tower that the reader will often be disposed to think that s/he is reading an old-fashioned, solidly realistic novel, in this case one that provides a sharp evocation of the England of the 1960s. This realism, however, rubs up against and often conjoins typical postmodern concerns as the characters pursue at length questions about the nature and adequacy of language; the shape, function, and possibilities of the modern novel; literature and truth; even the teaching of English. 
Babel Tower does not have the sort of "organic unity" valued by the New Critics. The book raises, though, questions worth thinking about even if they seem occasionally ponderous or slightly stuffily academic. While virtually no one objects to a writer's writing about what she or he knows best, some find it improper for the novelist, unless an avowed neo-naturalist, to drop in big slabs of material, when they are not personally refined, into her work, even when the sources are scrupulously acknowledged. As one example from Babel Tower, do the sections in the novel on literature and obscenity read too much like the stuff of symposia? Do they properly belong in the novel? Is our judgment in the matter affected by knowledge that Byatt was one of the participants in "Obscenity and the Arts: A Symposium with Anthony Burgess, Clark Glymour, A. S. Byatt, Marina Warner, Richard Eyre, Melvyn Bragg, and Mary Lefkowitz? (See TLS, Feb. 12, 1998, n. 4, 428, p. 159 (3)) On the other hand, why judge it ill-advised for a novelist to attempt a microcosmic history of cultural, social, and intellectual matters at a certain period in time? 
Burgess, then, appears as a character in two highly interesting works of fiction that can, and probably will, be explored more fully, more vigorously, and more theoretically. Neither book by itself is likely to have any significant influence upon Burgess's final reputation. The two authors obviously decided to make him a part of their fictions because they remembered him as a powerful presence whom they knew in life, and whose work they admired. It seems ironic that Theroux, whose book is generally damaging to Burgess, was really himself a Burgess fan. In fact, Theroux wrote, in 1975, that he, after reading Inside Mr. Enderby twelve times, had committed to memory those sections that describe Enderby's stepmother, because he considered them so marvellously done. The fictional Theroux of My Other Life says of "Burgess," "I never knew any writer who worked harder or was more generous" (217). Here, it seems, the real life and the fiction perfectly coalesce. Babel Tower can remind readers that Burgess was a most trenchant and prolific book reviewer, one of the very best literary journalists of our time. It reminds us too that in person Burgess was engaging, formidable, imposing yet friendly, amusing, and, of course, wonderfully articulate--very much, in his own phrase, a "word boy." Each book, especially Theroux's, is in some ways "troubling." Today, of course, that is more a recommendation for them than anything else. We valorize the disruptive, the marginal, the transgressive, and the unruly with the expectation that our encounters with them will yield cultural, political, and psychoanalytic insights more important than aesthetic pleasure alone. Burgess, a man on the margin in several ways, would probably be prone to agree in some ways with these sentiments, and also to disagree vehemently. The two books discussed would have interested him. His comments would have interested us. 
John J. Stinson 
SUNY College at Fredonia

Symphonic Shakespeare
By Paul Schuyler Phillips
	On a Wednesday evening twenty-five years ago in Iowa City, Iowa, one of the most exciting events in Anthony Burgess's life took place: the premiere of his Third Symphony. In The New York Times, he succinctly described the thrill of the performance: "I had written over 30 books, but this was the truly great artistic moment." Performed on October 22, 1975 by the University Symphony Orchestra of The University of Iowa School of Music under the direction of conductor James Dixon, the symphony’s premiere marked the first time that any of Burgess’s orchestral compositions had been played in the Western hemisphere. Burgess had desired such an opportunity for decades and despite the imperfections of a performance by a student orchestra, he found the experience exhilarating. "Some things went wrong, of course… But it worked. The work worked. I was, and remain, overwhelmed. I had written those noises. That was me, that great web of sonorities being discoursed by those hundred handsome kids under that big man on the rostrum." The sense of accomplishment resulting from the performance caused Burgess’s musical confidence to surge, leading him to compose a vast amount of music during his remaining eighteen years.
Burgess’s life was a balancing act between his passions for literature and music, and setting words to music was a vital way for him to bind together the two halves of his creative self. He set texts by many writers he esteemed, including John Dryden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, but the two authors with whom his work was most closely connected were Joyce and Shakespeare. Burgess composed small- and large-scale works based on both their works, including song settings of verses by both authors. He composed a musical, Blooms of Dublin, based on Joyce’s Ulysses, and made Shakespeare’s life the subject of his ballet Mr W.S. He wrote the script and music for a never-made film called Will! (originally The Bawdy Bard) about the amorous adventures of the great playwright, a project that was abandoned by Hollywood once the studio concluded that a film about Shakespeare in love could never be successful. His books about both of these writers address many subjects, including the relationship of music and literature. Shakespeare, a sumptuous biography by Burgess published in 1970, includes these remarks on Shakespeare and music:
I feel that in the last years he took music more seriously than he had been able to in his working days. He had known musicians like Thomas Morley, who had set some of his play-lyrics and, indeed, been his near neighbour in Bishopsgate, but that craft so close to his own had been something of a mystery. Now was the time to learn more about it.
He had, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, composed a musical theme of six notes and given it to Holofernes. Curiously, no musician has ever taken that theme up and developed it. C D G A E F -- it is suitable for a ground bass; it can be extended into a fugal subject. If we repeat it a tritone higher or lower, we have a perfect twelve-tone Grundstimmung for a serial composition. We are still waiting for Variations on a Theme by William Shakespeare.

Five years later, Burgess took up his own challenge, basing the finale of his Third Symphony on this musical theme. With the addition of vocal soloists in the last movement, he set texts from Love’s Labour’s Lost, including the lines of Holofernes in which the theme is quoted. The aim of this essay is to examine these texts, but first, a general overview of the symphony is in order.
The commission for the Third Symphony came about as a result of Napoleon Symphony. James Dixon had read the book and was deeply impressed by Burgess’s attempt to create a synthesis of music and literature by basing the structure of the novel on a symphony, Beethoven’s Eroica. Knowing that Burgess was a composer, Dixon took action to nurture an idea that he strongly supported, that an artist could excel in more than one field, and so in 1974 he wrote to Burgess asking if he had any compositions that Dixon's orchestra could perform. The University of Iowa would see to the copying of the orchestra parts and all other details related to the preparation of the performance; all Burgess had to do was write the score. This was the opportunity that Burgess had long desired but never been offered -- to have one of his compositions played by a full symphony orchestra -- and he declared that it "seemed too good to be true." He promptly accepted, promising to compose a symphony for Maestro Dixon and his orchestra. 
Earlier in his career, Burgess had written two symphonies, but regarded neither work (both lost) with much affection by the time he composed the third. Of his First Symphony, written in 1935 while in his teens and never played, he wrote "I shudder at the memory of its Vaughan Williams folkiness"; it "is so 'English' as to make even me sick." The Second Symphony, titled "Sinfoni Merdeka" and composed in Malaya in 1957 to celebrate that country’s independence, received one performance -- a chaotic affair that ended in a brawl! Burgess dismissed the work with a curt remark: "the less said about that the better." The Third Symphony represented a fresh start, "an attempt to see if -- after 20 years spent on the strenuous manipulation of words -- I could compose something for large forces on a largish scale that should not be total musical nonsense."
	Burgess’s method of composition was to proceed directly to full score, in ink, without benefit of sketches, rough drafts, or testing out the music at the piano. To compose without the aid of a piano is not unusual for composers who have absolute or "perfect" pitch, since they are able to hear the notes in their mind’s ear. Burgess, however, did not possess absolute pitch, which makes his achievement in composing a symphony away from a keyboard exceptional. For any composer, with or without absolute pitch, to proceed straight to the full score without first writing preliminary drafts is highly unusual. Most composers of orchestral music work out their ideas in short score (a stave usually of 2-4 lines of music written out for piano). They orchestrate from the short score, determining which instruments will play which parts, and subsequently write out the full score with complete instrumentation. As in his literary writing, Burgess preferred to bypass the middle step, proceeding directly from conception to finished work. His method of writing orchestral music differed little from the way he wrote novels: produce a modest number of finished pages each day until the work, written in order from beginning to end, was complete.
The chapter titled "Let’s Write a Symphony" from his book This Man and Music supplies a detailed musical analysis of Burgess's Third Symphony along with observations about symphonic music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Sibelius and others. The curious thing about the analysis is that the musical examples, handwritten by Burgess, do not quite match the music in the score, the original of which remains in the collection of the University of Iowa Libraries. Rhythms, meters, even the notes themselves, differ in significant ways from the music in the manuscript, indicating that Burgess did not keep a copy of the score after the Iowa performance or at least no longer had one at his disposal when writing This Man and Music in 1982. The fact that he misstates the number of bars in one of the movements and the number of pages of the score is further evidence that he penned the analysis without benefit of score, a remarkable though flawed achievement.
Additional information about the Third Symphony is found in three writings by Burgess. His program note for the Iowa premiere includes a brief description of the music along with a summary of the compositional history of the Third Symphony, while his The New York Times article "How I Wrote My Third Symphony" contains information about the writing of the symphony plus comments about composers and music in general. An account of the symphony’s genesis is also found in You’ve Had Your Time, the second part of Burgess’s "confessions". These three accounts differ in some details but agree on the general outline of the symphony’s creation.
In December 1974, Burgess bought himself a half-hundredweight of scoring paper and started composing the symphony. According to the Iowa program note, Burgess started writing the symphony in Siena, while the article in The New York Times asserts that he began it in Rome, then continued it in Siena. The Times article indicates that he had written about half of the first movement by late December, judging by Arabic swear words in the score! Burgess recalls that the page with the Arabic obscenities "was evidently composed drunk, probably on Christmas Day," and since they appear on page 30 at bar 215, approximately halfway through the 412-bar, 53-page first movement, this indicates how far he had progressed by that date. But according to a passage in You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess was further along than that, having almost completed the first movement by Christmas, which he recollects as the day on which he ate rotten Brussels sprouts that gave him a near fatal case of food poisoning. His response to not dying was to write a processional for the dead. "Recovered, I composed the slow movement, which was a funeral march…The scherzo was merely fast and noisy." In the Iowa program notes, Burgess states that he composed "a good half of the work" during the tour, which included appearances in Florida, California, and British Columbia. This would mean that the last movement, which takes up slightly more than the final third of the full score, was written entirely in North America. In late February, Burgess embarked on a lecture tour of the US 	and Canada, continuing to work on the symphony in hotel rooms and airport waiting areas while working on a draft script for the James Bond film called The Spy Who Loved Me. He completed the symphony in early April 1975 "in a Holiday Inn bedroom in a small town in Georgia (U.S.A.)" and sent the finished score to James Dixon from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, "without (his) having checked a note of it aurally (Holiday Inns have muzak but no pianos)." 
The symphony is mainly tonal, with keys, themes, and a traditional four-movement symphonic structure. The first movement is in sonata form with contrasting themes, including one that Burgess describes as "a very ‘English’ pendent theme which suggests a jig gone wrong." The second movement is a lively Scherzo in G major whose jocund spirit is indicated by the tempo marking Allegro molto giocoso. Elegiac in spirit and modal in harmony, the slow third movement was dedicated by Burgess to the memory of the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who died on August 9, 1975, two and a half months before the premiere. In the finale, tenor and baritone soloists join the orchestra to sing the texts from Love’s Labour’s Lost which serve as literary and musical sources of the movement.
The play from which Burgess drew his texts is arguably Shakespeare’s wittiest comedy -- a work whose "intense preoccupation with language" has given rise to numerous textual studies. Love’s Labour’s Lost has been compared to music, for dialogue which "has always the controlled energy of fine musical phrasing," and conventions which, like opera, must be accepted "at the outset if we are not to be merely bewildered and antagonized by their apparent unreality…It is this musical quality, evident in both construction and language, that gives the play its buoyancy, its coherence, and its feeling of release." Disparaged for three centuries (for some 235 years, from 1604 to 1839, there were no known productions of the play!), its reputation experienced a remarkable turnaround during the past century, with one scholar declaring that one of the main achievements of twentieth-century stagings "has been to establish Love’s Labour's Lost as one of Shakespeare’s major plays." Ironically, Burgess was not among its admirers. In his Shakespeare biography, he refers to it as "one suety comedy" and, comparing it to The Taming of the Shrew, had this to say about the play:
Another comedy, and a far inferior one, must certainly have been composed solely for a well-bred audience. This was Love’s Labour's Lost, which probably dates from late 1593. Shakespeare had been taking note of John Lyly’s plays, written for the Children of the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s -- highly refined and rather charming comedies, full of euphuistic word-play (Lyly, with his novel Euphues, had already shown himself well-qualified to purvey that). These little dramas were not for the public playhouses: their delicate petals would wilt under the garlic blasts of the groundlings. They were performed before the Queen and in private houses. Southampton’s circle probably liked them or affected to like them. In the ‘nineties some of them were published -- Galatea, Midas, Campaspe, Endymion: all good classical themes -- and the honeyed language and ingenious conceits could be examined at leisure. Shakespeare examined them, and then proceeded to a refined and courtly comedy of his own, full of witty quibbles, big words, and allusions to foreign travel. Love’s Labour’s Lost is almost painfully aristocratic.
The plot concerns Ferdinand, King of Navarre, and his lords Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain, who take an oath to abstain from the company of women for three years in order to devote themselves to study. The arrival of the Princess of France, accompanied by her ladies Rosaline, Maria and Katharine, who have journeyed to the court of Navarre on a diplomatic mission, leads all four men to break their vows, as each falls in love with a different lady: Ferdinand with the princess, Berowne with Rosaline, Longaville with Maria, and Dumain with Katharine. The secondary characters include Holofernes (schoolmaster), Sir Nathaniel (curate), Costard (clown), Dull (constable), Jaquenetta (dairymaid), Don Adriano de Armado  ("a fantastical Spaniard") and Moth (Armado’s page), all of whom contribute to the complexity of the plot and fanciful quality of the play’s language. The suitors’ efforts to woo their ladies fall short of matrimony, thus giving rise to the play’s title: Love’s Labour’s Lost. 
The portions of text set to music are a half dozen lines of Holofernes from Act IV and the final passage from Act V, which contains the song of Spring and Winter. The texts as they occur in the symphony are as follows:
Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra ruminat, and so forth. 
Ah, good old Mantuan!  I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice:
Venezia, Venezia, 
Chi non ti vede non ti prezia.
Old Mantuan, old Mantuan! Who understandeth thee not, loves thee not.  
Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa.  
(Act IV, scene ii, lines 89-95)
Enough of this!  Will you hear instead the dialogue that we two learnèd men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo?  
This side is Hiems, Winter; this Ver, the Spring: the one maintained by the owl, the other by the cuckoo.  Ver, begin!

SPRING
When daisies pied and violets blue
	And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo buds of yellow hue
	Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
Cuckoo, cuckoo. O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
	And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
	And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he:
Cuckoo, cuckoo. O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

WINTER
When icicles hang by the wall,
	And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
	And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
Tu-whit, tu-whoo.  A merry note, 
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
	And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
	And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
Tu-whit, tu-whoo. A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. 

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.  You, that way; we, this.
(Act V, scene ii, lines 875-76 and 880-920)
What distinguishes Love’s Labour’s Lost from Shakespeare’s other, generally more highly regarded plays is that it contains a tune, one written and perhaps even sung on stage by the bard himself, for which reason Burgess based the symphony on this particular work. The last of Holofernes’ six set lines is the essential one, presenting the tune "Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa" in solmization (solfeggio syllables that stand for specific musical pitches). Burgess believed it to be the only melody by Shakespeare in any of the plays.
In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, the pedant Holofernes, who was probably played by Shakespeare himself in the first presentation of the comedy, has a very interesting speech, in which he praises the old poet Mantuan, quotes a line from him, sings a snatch of Italian song -- "Venezia, Venezia, chi non ti vede non ti prezia" -- and also warbles the notes do re sol la mi fa. This snatch is, I believe, the only tune that Shakespeare wrote, and it has been unaccountably neglected by Shakespeare scholars. My finale pays homage to Love’s Labor’s Lost by basing itself on that brief Shakespeare motif -- forward, backward, and upside down -- and setting the Venezia words to an appropriate Adriatic- or Neapolitan-type melody, corny, full of schmalz, and with a mandoline tinkling away in the background.

The six-note phrase is used very effectively by Burgess as a musical theme, although to demonstrate this musically is beyond the scope of this essay. He is mistaken, however, in accounting it the only example of Shakespearean solmization. In King Lear, Edmund utters a four-note phrase following his brother Edgar’s entrance in Act I, scene ii:
My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam. -- O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.	(Act I, scene ii, lines 131-133)
Holofernes’ brief speech is a rumination that occurs while the parson Sir Nathaniel peruses a letter just handed to him by the illiterate dairymaid Jaquenetta. As Nathaniel silently studies the missive, which turns out to be a love letter from Berowne to Rosaline, Holofernes pretentiously prates on before asking the curate to inform him of the contents of the letter. Holofernes, a self-important bore based on the commedia dell-arte figure of the Pedant (and possibly named for Gangantua’s tutor in Rabelais), incessantly fills his longwinded utterances with strings of redundant synonyms and snatches of Latin and Italian, impressing only the curate Nathaniel, whose pretensions to erudition are even more ludicrous than the schoolmaster’s. 
In these lines, Holofernes quotes in three Italianate languages -- Latin, Italian, and musical solfeggio. He begins with the opening line of the first eclogue by Mantuan: "Fauste, precor, gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra ruminat," which George Turbervile’s sixteenth-century translation rendered as, "Friend Faustus, pray thee, since our flock in shade and pleasaunt vale doth chewe the cudde." Variously known as Baptista Spagnolo, Battista Spagnoli, Battista Spagnuoli, Baptista Mantuanus, and Mantuanus, Mantuan was a poet and Carmelite monk who lived from 1448-1516. He was a respected philosopher and orator, a noted theologian learned in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and an extraordinarily prolific poet said to have published more than 55,000 verses! His eclogues (pastoral poems often in dialogue form), modeled on those of Vergil and Petrarch, were first published in 1498 and used as a Latin textbook in Italy, France, Germany and England for nearly two hundred years thereafter. Shakespeare, like any well-educated person of his day, would have studied Latin by memorizing the eclogues of Mantuan along with Turbervile’s translation. 
Holofernes then addresses an apostrophe to the poet he has just quoted: "Ah! good old Mantuan. I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice: "Venetia, Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia." The Italian quotation is the first part of a familiar adage "Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia, ma chi ti vede ben gli costa." This proverb appeared in Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Frutes (1591), books by John Florio that were popular bilingual texts for teaching Italian to Englishmen and English to Italians. Florio’s books included popular phrases contained within dialogues about everyday activities, similar to many language textbooks today, and were regarded as combined manuals of polite conversation, handbooks for self-improvement, and digests of popular journalism. Florio, the son of an Italian emigrant to London, achieved distinction as the author of an Italian-English dictionary, translator of Montaigne’s Essais into English, secretary to the Earl of Southampton, and tutor to Prince Henry, the son of James I. He may well have been an acquaintance of Shakespeare. William Warburton, an eighteenth-century literary scholar, proposed in 1747 that Florio might have been the prototype for the character of Holofernes. After quoting the beginning of the epigram, Holofernes goes on to complete his thought: "Old Mantuan! Old Mantuan! Who understandeth thee not, loves thee not," analogizing roughly with the proverb, which means "Who sees thee not, esteems thee not."
	With his next utterance, "Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa" (which, according to a stage direction, he sings), Holofernes displays his learning once more, this time with solfeggio. In Shakespeare’s day, the instruction of children in singing was of prime importance, and a schoolmaster like Holofernes would likely have been a singing master as well. Initially the line seems not to refer to Mantuan, but it does, obliquely. The use of solfeggio syllables originated early in the eleventh century, when Guido d’Arezzo noted that each phrase of the hymn Ut queant laxis began on a successively higher tone of the scale, beginning with Ut on C: 
UT queant laxis
REsonare fibris,
MIra gestorum
FAmuli tuorum:
SOLve polluti,
LAbii reatum,
Sancte Johannes. 
The hymn, attributed to Paul the Deacon and dating from about 774, celebrates the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (June 24), wherein lies the connection with Mantuan. The poet’s full name was Johannes Baptista Spagnolo; the solfeggio syllables, even out of order, refer back to this important hymn for the saint whose name Mantuan bore. That Shakespeare intended this pun there can be little doubt, but whether Burgess was aware of it is unknown, although it seems likely that he would have mentioned it if he were. What is certain is that such a pun, however subtle, is entirely fitting in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Linguistic complexity abounds in this comedy to a greater degree than in virtually any other play by Shakespeare, with nearly every character continually engaging in his or her own particular kind of wordplay.
The sunny atmosphere of Love’s Labour’s Lost changes abruptly in Act V when the messenger Marcade arrives with the grim news that the King of France has died. Marcade’s entrance interrupts the pageant of the Nine Worthies, a theatrical entertainment presented by Don Armado for King Ferdinand and his court. Costard, Sir Nathaniel, Holofernes, Moth, and Don Armado portray Pompey the Great, Alexander, Judas Maccabeus, Hercules, and Hector of Troy, respectively, before the festivity is halted by Marcade’s appearance. The Princess, now Queen, announces that she will return to France immediately with her entourage, causing the separation of the ladies from their suitors. In conventional Elizabethan comedies, lovers marry at the end of the play, but not in Love’s Labour’s Lost, leading Berowne to grumble, "Our wooing doth not end like an old play: Jack hath not Jill." For breaking their oaths, the suitors are assigned year-long acts of penance by their ladies, who agree to return in "a twelvemonth and a day," to which Berowne retorts, "That’s too long for a play."
At this point, Don Armado proposes to King Ferdinand a resumption of their previous entertainment with two songs that "should have followed in the end of our show." He asks the King to "hear the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo." The masque replaces the wedding ceremony as a way of bringing merriment and closure to the play’s conclusion.
The songs, deceptively simple on the surface, contain witty contradictions and multiple levels of meaning, like so much of what has come before. Spring is a time of warmth, color, and rejuvenation, as reflected in the list of brightly hued flowers that "paint the meadows with delight": "daisies pied," "violets blue," "lady-smocks all silver-white", and "cuckoo buds of yellow hue." It is a season of shepherds and farmers: the former "pipe on oaten straws", the latter rise at dawn each day with the larks, who "are ploughmen’s clocks". To ready their warm weather clothing, "maidens bleach their summer smocks."
But spring has its negative side. A season of life, it is also a time of sexual activity that "mocks married men." It is the season "when turtles tread", i.e. when turtledoves (read "lovers") mate, and the cuckoo "on every tree" sings his "word of fear": "cuckoo, cuckoo".  Married men are reminded of that fear not just by the sound of the cuckoo, but by the flowers in the field: "cuckoo buds", "lady-smocks" (synonym for cuckoo-flower), and "violets", since "blue had come in the Middle Ages to symbolize infidelity, cuckoldry and folly." 
Winter is the season of cold, discomfort, and illness, but also a time of merriment and wisdom. The song contains images of cold throughout the first stanza: "icicles hang by the wall," "Dick the shepherd blows his nail" (blows on his finger nails to warm his hands), "milk comes frozen home in pail." The cold causes discomfort: "blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul," while "Marian’s nose looks red and raw." It also causes illness which brings "coughing (that) drowns the parson’s saw" (sermon). In winter’s fierce weather, "all aloud (extremely loudly) the wind doth blow" and "birds sit brooding in the snow."
Yet winter has a positive side which inversely mirrors the negative aspect of spring. Fire brings warmth and the pleasure of hot food. To deliver fuel for the fire, "Tom bears logs into the hall." Mouths water "when roasted crabs (crab-apples) hiss in the bowl" and hot liquids cook properly "while greasy Joan doth keel the pot" (cool by stirring or some other method to keep from boiling over). Winter nights are serenaded by "the staring owl", a symbol of wisdom who sounds "a merry note," with sexual punning on "Tu-who" ("To who?") and "Tu-whit" ("To it!").
	In Burgess’s setting, the tenor begins, singing the first verse of Spring, followed by the baritone singing the first verse of Winter to a different melody in a new key and slower tempo. The second verse of Winter is given over to the tenor, who sings it as a variant of the tune used in the first verse of Spring. Before the tenor finishes his last two lines, the baritone enters with the second verse of Spring, singing it to the melody of the first verse of Winter. The last two lines of both verses are sung in counterpoint by the soloists, with the orchestra remaining silent until the singers reach their final notes. Burgess explains it this way:
They deliver the two songs that end Love’s Labor's Lost, using the two main chunks of musical material already presented, and allow winter and spring, the owl and the cuckoo, to become mixed together, to appear -- to use a Holofernian kind of pedanticism -- synchronically instead of, what nature decrees, diachronically. Which is absurd. But the singers do not mind.
The line that follows -- "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo" -- can be interpreted in two ways. "The words of Mercury" can be taken to mean the "harsh" news of the French King’s death as delivered by the messenger Marcade, while "The songs of Apollo" refer to the courtiers’ sonnets of Act IV. The simpler and more convincing explanation is based on the association of Mercury, messenger of the gods, with sophistry, and of the Greek god Apollo with song. What Don Armado seems to be saying is "No more clever talk! After the sweet song of Spring and Winter, speech would be discordant." The invocation of Mercury and Apollo is Shakespeare’s way of saying that there is no need of further wordplay after song; in other words, the play is ended.
	The play’s final line -- "You that way. We this way." -- also has more than one possible meaning. Don Armado could be addressing the members of the audience, indicating that they exit in one direction, the actors in another. He might also be addressing the Princess and her ladies, who are about to leave for France "that way" while he and the King’s entourage go off "this way". (Burgess leaves off the final "way".) Armado could even mean both at once, but here there is no problem with ambiguity; all possibilities are equally valid. Burgess has the baritone speak these last two lines during a grand pause for orchestra in the penultimate bar. Once the baritone finishes his words, the orchestra blasts a final loud C major chord to end the symphony. One has to smile at Burgess’s description:
Having sung, they wish to finish the proceedings as quickly as possible, so the movement ends as Love’s Labor's Lost ends -- with these spoken words: "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo." The orchestra plays a single fortissimo chord of C major, and everybody goes off for a drink.

	A complete appreciation of the Third Symphony naturally requires study of the music, but to fully understand any work by Burgess that combines words with music, it is essential to look for the meaning in each and the relationship between the two. In the case of the Third Symphony, an excellent starting place is with the words, especially since they come from Shakespeare. The fruits of such a lovely labour will never be lost.

Paul S. Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of Orchestras & Chamber Music at Brown University (USA) and Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony. On December 6 & 7, 1997, he conducted performances of Burgess's Third Symphony with the Brown University Orchestra in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Apart from the premiere in 1975, these are the only performances that Burgess's Third Symphony has received to date. 

Burgess and Beethoven, Part I
By Lord Birkett
My friend Anthony Wilkinson is a talented film director and also a considerable musician. It was not surprising, then, that a few years ago he asked me to collaborate, as producer, on a movie about Beethoven. His treatment was very far from the birth-to-death biographies so beloved of Hollywood. It was a very spare, intense story about Beethoven's last years. Almost a three-hander, about Beethoven, his nephew Karl, and Karl's mother. When Beethoven's mother died, he made Beethoven the guardian of young Karl. Beethoven had profoundly disapproved of his brother's marriage and thought his wife little better than a loose woman.
He therefore took every step he could to prevent her seeing her son, lavished a jealous and obsessive affection upon Karl, and so traumatised the young man that eventually Karl attempted suicide. Unsuccessfully as it turned out. Friends and family were so distressed at the turn of events that they procured a commission in the army for Karl, in order to send him away from the tyrannical behaviour of his uncle. When Beethoven's final illness came on him, Karl was sent for but never saw his uncle again. He could not reach the house because the streets of Vienna were too densely blocked with vehicles. It was Beethoven's funeral procession.
This would not have been a very musical film. Not many scenes of inspired composition. Because the battle over Karl seems rather to have traumatised Beethoven as well. His flow of compositions all but dried up. When it came again it was of transcendental majesty : the late piano sonatas, the late string quartets, and the Missa Solemnis.
We thought that this film would need two elements to get it off the ground:
1. A major star to play Beethoven. From a rather cynical, even patronising, view of public perception we thought the two attributes needed were a blunt, almost square, build, and immense charisma. We thought of Richard Burton and Rod Steiger. Burton didn't seem interested. Steiger, on the other hand, was highly intrigued.
2. An utterly compelling script. And here we reckoned that Beethoven by this time was profoundly deaf, highly eccentric, both feared and admired by everybody from royalty and aristocracy to charcoal-burners and chestnut-sellers. So we thought he ought to speak with a unique voice and in a unique idiom. In other words a language all of his own. Quite intelligible, on the surface, to all and sundry. But carrying hints and echoes and resonances which would somehow bridge the gap between his everyday needs like groceries and the sublime sounds in his head.
Very few authors in any age have been able to invent languages. Bocaccio perhaps, Swift perhaps. In our own time the most compelling example was "A Clockwork Orange". This vicious Russian orientated slang seemed a long way from Promethean agonies of Beethoven ("Ludwig Van" and the unholy distortions of the ninth symphony are irrelevant here.) But as prophetic utterance Anthony Burgess's private language of the Droogs was of unparalleled virtuosity. What's more Burgess was known to be a prolific and highly skilled composer. And even more, he was known to be an admirer, an informed and scholarly admirer, of Beethoven. Lastly he was already a friend of Anthony Wilkinson's.
The next step was obvious. Would Burgess be interested? There was no money available for the project, so don't do any work, we said. If you are interested we'll put together a pre-production package, and then hopefully commission a first draft script, etc. etc. We could not have been more candid.
Imagine our dismay (and not a little excitement) when only a matter of weeks later a thick script came thudding through the letterbox. As an old-fashion film producer I was aghast. I hadn't negotiated a fee, and hadn't any funds to pay out even if I had. I hadn't even hinted that the author should write a line. I hadn't had a briefing meeting. I hadn't invoked an agent, etc. etc. But here was a full-scale full-length script, signed Anthony Burgess.
Another problem was this: the script was full of amazing perceptions and inventions, but they didn't seem to coincide very much with our perceptions and inventions. Had we perhaps not been very clear, even in our "are you interested" message? Had our message been all too clear and been magisterially overruled by Burgess? A meeting was obviously called for, and duly took place on his next London visit.
We all had a friendly and enjoyable lunch together. I had not met Burgess before, though he and Wilkinson were old friends, so the early courses of lunch were not productive. Burgess was cagey and defensive. I was nervous and deferential. It wasn't until lunch itself was over and we decided on a little malt whisky, "to round it off", that I became explicit and Burgess became expansive. The interregnum was all too short, so we wound up on the most affectionate terms, but with almost nothing decided or agreed.
That wasn't the end of it, though The Two Anthonys, Burgess and Wilkinson, swapped ideas and treatments and scripts on Beethoven long after my diplomacy had been forgotten.
One day Anthony Wilkinson will tell you of it.

Lord Birkett, former director of the National Theatre (successor of Sir Laurence Olivier), and former director of the Art's Council in London.

 Burgess and Beethoven, Part II
By Anthony Wilkinson
 
My friend Lord Birkett's colourful memories of Anthony Burgess and the distant beginnings of our 'UNCLE LUDWIG' (Beethoven) film project has stirred colourful memories of my own.
The 'two Anthonys' - Burgess and Wilkinson - did indeed swap ideas and drafts. Following that memorable lunch Burgess asked me to send my own original draft screenplay (he had. previously seen only a skeleton story-outline draft), was both flattered, yet concerned, when Burgess's next draft was far too close to my own, abandoning many of his more imaginative passages. In the end we finally produced a version that was a combination of the best of both.
With characteristic generosity, he also provided a hand-written title page, complete with musical quotation, together with a bold Anthony Burgess signature, but placed my own name in first position.
Lord Birkett, who by this time had to leave the project to take up the demanding position of arts supremo at the G.L.C. (Greater London Council), played diplomat once more in this stop -- furnishing an introduction to his friend, Rod Steiger, perfect casting for the Beethoven role. In short order I found myself at Steiger's ocean-side residence in Malibu, where I met with him for several intense script sessions, which I recorded on a small Philip's dictating machine.
"Mr Anthony Burgess, Mr Anthony Wilkinson, I respect you both as artists...", the great actor began, and followed with a critical and detailed analysis of character motivations, dialogue and so forth. The sessions were as bizarre as they were illuminating. What I most remember now, many years later, were the large number of expletives -- and how Steiger's eyes turned huge and black and evil as he acted out one of Beethoven's rages (leaving me wondering how as prospective director I would best survive such a tantrum should it turn personal on the set!) -- and also the moment when Steiger announced that he would expect me to keep the cameras running at the end of a take, as it was his style to improvise, often something quite unexpected!
And, by golly, the unexpected then did happen! Discussing a scene in which Beethoven was to upturn a tureen of noodle soup over a hapless maid-servant, the actor suggested that by take three he might not follow the script as regards the soup, but might rise and hurl the table at the girl. Upon which, Steiger, in his own living room in Malibu, picked up his marble coffee table and hurled it across the room! I can still hear Lord Birkett laughing down the phone when I reported back to him: "That's Rod for you!"
With Steiger's participation, interest from Warner Bros. and Colombia Pictures followed -- both waiting to see the final draft screenplay resulting from my sessions with the star. I returned hot foot from California with my collection of precious tapes.
A new secretary had recently joined my film company, and the first task I entrusted her with was to prepare a transcript of the Steiger tapes. This seemed very slow in coming. Several days later four thin sheets were put on my desk. The text was almost indecipherable. It began okay with "Mister Anthony Burgess, Mister Anthony Wilkinson. I respect you both as artists..." but soon any semblance of text was interrupted by sequences of dot-dot-dot, asterisks, and lines of dashes. Finally on page four, in capitals: I'M SORRY - I CAN'T TYPE ANY OF THOSE WORDS. She was a Born Again, and Steiger's language was more than she could cope with,
And then suddenly it was all too late. Production of a rival Beethoven film was announced, to be made by Andy Warhol's director, Paul Morrissey. That put paid to our project for the time being -- the fate that befalls many of us who dabble in the public domain,
But the story is by no means over, though the most distinguished of the Anthonys is sadly no longer with us. The surviving Anthony was in the process of moving back to London after eight years in Hollywood, when he heard the sad news of Anthony Burgess's death.
The rival Beethoven film had by now been confined to movie history and as a tribute to the memory of our friendship and collaboration. I determined to make another attempt to revive the fortunes of our 'Uncle Ludwig'. The story of Beethoven's relationship with his nephew is a savage, even distasteful, episode in the life of a composer whose music has brought such joy and inspiration to many people's lives. Re-reading our final draft I felt that the screenplay demanded further work to resolve certain dramatic issues, and to win greater audience sympathy for a flawed hero.
Before starting work I approached the agent of the star that I now felt most appropriate for the role of Beethoven, another Anthony, Sir Anthony Hopkins. The agent read the existing draft script, and impressed that it had Anthony Burgess's name attached to it, more than encouraged me to undertake the re-write for his client -- saying that Colombia Pictures had agreed to back any Beethoven movie that Anthony Hopkins wanted to make.
I began work at once on what I thought would be a relatively simple and quick re-write. But change one scene in a screenplay, many changes seem to follow. Nine weeks later, and within ten pages of completion, I took a call from a First Assistant Director I knew, who had just returned from Prague, What had he been working on? "'Immortal Beloved', he replied. "A film with Gary Oldman playing Beethoven." Once again the devil of the public domain had hurled a large spoke into the wheel of our fortune.
But 'Immortal Beloved' is now five years into movie history -- and perhaps it is time to try again. Your Newsletter has fortuitously put me in touch with Lord Birkett once more. He is presently reading the final draft of the script. And who knows!
Anthony Wilkinson 

Burgess and Bohuslav Martinu
By Anthony Wilkinson
 
I first met Anthony Burgess in 1967. An already established 'great writer' he was establishing a further reputation as an erudite television performer, a frequent contributor to the BBC2 evening revue programme, 'Late Night Line Up'. I responded to his entertaining and informed view of the arts world, and was aware of his great knowledge and love of music.
I was in the final stages of completing a dramatised film of the life of the then little known Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinu, who had been born at the top of a church tower in Bohemia. Because of ill-health he rarely left the tower until he was six years old, and then only for violin lessons. From these inauspicious beginnings Martinu won a scholarship to study in Prague, played with the Czech Philharmonic before suddenly abandoning his homeland to study composition with Albert Roussel in Paris. With the onset of war he moved further west, to exile in New York. He finally returned to Europe, not to his occupied homeland, but to live out his final years in Switzerland. My film, shot on the locations where he lived, was told in a patchwork of dialogue scenes in the appropriate language, first Czech, then French, and some English. It required an insightful narrative commentary for the English-speaking audience to know what was going on.
Watching Anthony Burgess one night on 'Late Night Line Up', I thought that he was just the writer for the job: someone who had experienced exile, and written about artists in exile -- and little did anyone know that he himself would soon return to a further life in exile. The film on Martinu was appropriately titled 'Music of Exile.'
The production was already in fine cut stage by the time Burgess first saw it, watching a small flickering image on a noisy editing machine in the cutting room.
I explained the story, and the precise moment in the film where I thought commentary would be appropriate, and, where the dialogue, or musical sequences should take over from his narrative. Anthony took notes of the timings of various in and out points, and we retired to the club for a drink. On parting he said he would get back to me very quickly. I suggested he shouldn't start to write until a fee had been agreed, and as BBC policy very sensibly kept creatives a safe distance from the negotiating of contracts, that he should wait for a call from the business affairs department in the course of the week.
By lunch time the next day Burgess arrived hot foot with a dozen typed pages. A few drinks later we found our way to the cutting room to try reading his words against picture. I remember it as something of a farce. As soon as the first image was on the screen he was away, like an over eager race horse bolting from the starting gate, getting faster and faster as it ran away from the pack... and he wouldn't stop even as I tried to rein him in! He finished reading the entire narration for this 60 minute film, while we were still at the top of the hundred and ninety eight steps of the church tower of Martinu's youth.
When the dazzling flow of words eventually stopped, we both took deep breaths and then applied ourselves for the remainder of the working day to going over words and pictures in the minutest detail, with Burgess making copious notes (more on this later!) for the re-write. We celebrated with a further drink before he went off home, promising a quick response.
It came mid morning the next day! Living at that time just down the Goldhawk Road he beat me to the BBC cutting room in Shepherds Bush. When the first image hit the screen, he was silent -- a musical sequence: fade music: narration began, and finished miraculously as the next music began. Fade out to narration: precision stuff... And so it went throughout the sixty minutes. Perfection born out of yesterday's chaos. Wonderful.
And the critics thought so too: "'The Music of Exile', wrote Henry Raynor in the Times of Oct. 9th 1967, "investigated the life and work of Bohuslav Martinu through a script in which Anthony Burgess found in a strangely romantic life story the genesis of many of Martinu's works. This method is extremely suspect nowadays (because in the past it was often applied to composers to whom it is totally inapplicable), but Mr. Burgess's urgent exposition made it entirely valid"
For a while afterwards I went to Anthony's home for a drink at least a couple of times a month. Thursdays come to my mind. His small dark room, at least what I remember was a dark, if not black room, dominated by a large black bar. The room was lightened by his sparkling conversation.
One visit, in an act of generosity, and friendship, Anthony gave me the originals of his first and second drafts, adding (no doubt with first hand knowledge of this fickle business) that McGill University collected his original manuscripts if I ever found myself in need.
Four years later, after I left the BBC for a three picture deal with MGM which didn't seem to be bearing fruit, I was one evening in my study, contemplating my library of books, worrying about mortgage payments and school fees and seriously considering having to pack everything and move. My eye came to rest on Anthony's drafts, and McGill University came to mind.
I had no idea of the value of the manuscripts - just that Burgess had received £ 50 for writing them. Photocopying was not readily available in those days, so I wrote to McGill with a description of the drafts. That Anthony Burgess's signature measured five and three-quarter inches. That the first type-written draft was thirteen pages long, and contained numerous hand-written notes. That the second draft - with equally bold signature - was just eleven pages and contained no hand written notes at all. There was a response by return. Yes, MacGill were interested, How much did I want?
I'd never thought about "how much' -- so I visited a mature and wise writer friend just down the road, the distinguished Leo Lehmann. "Ask a thousand" he advised. "Pounds" he said. But I bottled out. 'A thousand dollars', I responded. 'Yes' flashed back the reply. Take them to Bernard Rota in London for authentication, and there would be a cheque waiting.
That cheque saved my house, and I lived there, and worked happily in my study until 1995 -- when the house was sold to another writer, Penny Vincenzi.
I met with Anthony Burgess from time to time sometimes in Monte Carlo, or when he visited London (he gave a memorable talk about Stravinsky at the South Bank complex). I came clean once, and told him that I had parted with his manuscripts, and has made several times more than he had received for writing them. He shrugged, and told me about 'A Clockwork Orange'.
Anthony had once assigned to me the rights to make a film of 'A Clockwork Orange' -- a Thursday night present in that dark room down the Goldhawk Road. But I readily gave them up when he telephoned to say that the celebrated Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film of it.
Sorry to say, I didn't much like the film. Not sour grapes, but Burgess's book was so much better -- and I felt no emotion during the film when that dreadful lobotomy took place (in Burgess's original it was one of the great achievements in all literature). And I was even more sorry when Burgess told me that he had been paid only 'a thousand' (pounds I hope, not dollars) for it, whereas the esteemed director was reputed to have made a fortune counted in millions from it. The way of the world!
Thank you, Les Amis d'Anthony Burgess, for this chance to salute a giant among writers, and a man generous in kind and in spirit.

A musician, writer and director, Anthony Wilkinson has enjoyed an active career in many branches of the media: drama, documentaries, music and arts, commercials, television, radio and theatre. He has directed major productions for several international networks including the BBC, ITV and Channel Four in Britain; NBC, ABC and PBS in the United States; CBC in Canada; and TF1 in France. 

Musical Notes
An Introduction to the Music of Anthony Burgess
By Maureen Turquet
On December 19th, 1999, the newly-founded "Anthony Burgess Society" reunited with the members of the Anthony Burgess Center of the University of Angers for a pre-inauguration dinner and concert at the Relais-Château "Le Prieuré" in Chênehutte-Les Tuffeaux.
Liana Burgess was guest-of-honor at this evening hosted by Patrice Monmousseau, director of the sponsoring Bouvet-Ladubay wine corporation, and his assistant, Jean-Maurice Belayche.
Mr Monmousseau joined Benjamin Forkner, director of the Burgess Center, to evoke future projects, including Society-Center collaborations.
"An Introduction to the Music of Anthony Burgess" was the title of the concert of compositions selected and performed by pianist Maureen Turquet, musical counsellor for the Center, with soprano Amanda Broome featured in four Burgess songs. Burgess's "Tango for Pianoforte" opened a program devoted largely to preludes and fugues from his "Bad-tempered Electronic Keyboard". Also included in the concert was a sonatina dedicated to Burgess by his composer son, Andrew Burgess Wilson.
Mr Monmousseau has proposed the theatre at the Bouvet-Ladubay Center in St-Hilaire St-Florent for public performances in the future.
 
"Mr W.S."
By Paul Phillips
The U.S. premiere of Burgess's ballet score "Mr W.S." took place on October 23, 1999, performed by the Pioneer Valley Symphony conducted by Paul Phillips at a concert in Greenfield, Massachusetts (USA). This was the first time it was played in its entirety (there are nine movements) and the first concert performance. (Parts of "Mr W.S." were recorded in 1994 by the BBC Scottish Symphony for radio broadcast only.)