Anthony Burgess Newsletter 
Issue # 5, October, 2002
 Contents
Introduction (by Ben Forkner).	P. 1
Introduction to "Revolutionary Sonnets & 
Other Poems" (by Kevin Jackson). 	P. 3
Wind, Ham, Lewis: The Bad Art of Cacography
(by Douglas Milton). 	P. 12
Speech for the Anthony Burgess Symposium
in Angers (by Liana Burgess). 	P. 14
Critic's Prize: Burgess's Acceptance Speech for Kubrick's
A Clockwork Orange (with an introduction by Liana Burgess). 	P. 17
Notes on the Program: "A Clockwork Hour"
(by Maureen Turquet). 	P. 20
Burgess's Blooms (by Zack Bowen).	P. 21
Anthony Burgess, (Auto-)Biographer
(by John Fletcher).	P. 24
Notes on the BBC Donation for the ABC
(by Valérie Neveu). 	P. 33
Homage to Antonio Borghese: Poem
(by Martin Phipps). 	P. 35
Anthony Burgess Center
Université d'Angers
Maison des Sciences humaines 
2, rue Alexandre Fleming 
49066 Angers Cedex 01 (France)
Newsletter editor: Ben Forkner
Associate editor: Valérie Neveu

Introduction
by Ben Forkner 

Newsletter
Irritating delays can sometimes yield rich benefits. I was all set to write a lengthy, and somewhat sour history of academic research, university politics, and lost time, when two contributions to the Newsletter appeared on the same day last week. The history can thus be saved (and perhaps sweetened) for a later date, and we (I especially) can meditate on the strange blessings of waiting one more day.
The first contribution was sent by Kevin Jackson, who offers us his introduction to his selection of poetry by Burgess, Revolutionary Sonnets & Other Poems, to be published by Carcanet Press later in the year. As to be expected, Jackson's introduction is a fine blending of wit and expertise, and it can only be hoped that he will soon turn his attention to a longer study of the entire Burgess canon. The second contribution is a review by Douglas Milton of the biography of Burgess written by Roger Lewis (to be published by Faber in two weeks). There will be much more to say about the Lewis book, which seems to have been conceived more in the barking (but toothless) mad-dog style of a modern Grub Street pamphlet than as a serious work of biographical scholarship. I can certainly attest to the fact that Mr Lewis did not visit the collection of the Anthony Burgess Center, surely a betrayal of all the principles that Lewis's self-proclaimed mentor, Richard Ellmann, exemplified in every one of his superb biographies. 
The other contributions to this issue of the Newsletter have been in my hands for some time now, but are no less valuable for the long wait. Liana Burgess, generous as ever, and a goldmine of knowledge concerning the work of her husband, has given us three pieces to publish. The first is the written version of her recollections (delivered at the International Symposium, "The Avatars of A Clockwork Orange," held at the University of Angers in December 2001) on first reading A Clockwork Orange (and Inside Mr Enderby). The second is her introduction (also delivered at the Symposium) to the recording of Burgess's acceptance speech at Sardi's for the New York Critics' award to Kubrick for the film version of A Clockwork Orange. Liana Burgess had discovered the recording a few months before the Symposium. Everyone present at the Symposium will agree, I am sure, that the voice of Burgess improvising at will, and delighting the demanding audience in New York, was one of the highlights of the entire Symposium. Thanks to modern technology, and once again, to the generosity of Liana Burgess, all our readers can now read and hear the same speech, which has been transferred online to our site.
Another highlight of the Symposium was the concert" A Clockwork Hour" prepared by Maureen Turquet, and performed by Maureen on the piano, and Thomas Dubos on the bassoon, in the beautiful private theater of Bouvet-Ladubay in Saumur. I asked Maureen to write a short account of her choice of music, which appears here under the same title as her concert. Some enterprising recording company should leap at the opportunity, and beg Maureen and Thomas to record the music exactly as it was played on the night of December 8, 2001. The full program of the concert will be added to our site at a later date.
Three other important contributions grace the present issue. Two are original papers on Burgess sent by major literary scholars. Zack Bowen, specialist of Joyce and music, offers a personal reassessment of Burgess's Blooms of Dublin. I am sure Professor Bowen will not mind if I correct his lively review on two points: 1) Rejoyce and Here Comes Everyone are the same book on Joyce, the first the American edition, and the second, the British, 2) Liana Burgess confirms that Burgess's publisher compiled the glossary for A Clockwork Orange, not Burgess himself. 
John Fletcher, a pioneer in Beckett studies, has given us a thoughtful discussion of the role of autobiography and biography in Burgess. This is a fully revised version of the annual Burgess lecture delivered at the University of Angers by Professor Fletcher on November 13, 2001. 
Finally, Valerie Neveu, whom our readers should now recognize as the mindspring behind this site, lists the various items in the boxes of Burgess material donated to the Center by David Thompson of the BBC. His gift is by far the richest since the original donation of Burgess's personal library that Liana Burgess sent us to set up the Center at the beginning. 
The poem by Martin Phipps, "Homage to Antonio Borghese" concludes our Newsletter. Burgess would have been the first to praise a celebration in verse (see his own poetic homage to Vladimir Nabokov). Mr Phipps, who sent us his poem out of the blue, having discovered our site by chance, will I hope be an inspiration to the rest of our readers, waiting perhaps just for a nudge by fate to send us their own letters, comments, and poems. All unsolicited contributions are welcome.
For Liana Burgess
Some of our readers may not have heard that Andrew Burgess Wilson died suddenly in his home this summer. I am sure they will join me and all the other members of the Center in sending our heartfelt condolences to Liana Burgess. There is little that one can do or say to help in the wake of such a tragic loss, but our thoughts are with you, Liana, as always.
Introduction to Revolutionary Sonnets & Other Poems by Anthony Burgess
(edited by K. Jackson), Carcanet, 2002.

Anthony Burgess, 1917-1993: English poet.

Poet?

Well, many other things, to be sure: exuberantly fecund and original and various novelist; equally prolific composer of symphonies and ballet scores and musicals and quartets and fugues; witty, learned and much-published reviewer, biographer, journalist, critic; noted polyglot, skilled amateur of, and fervent advocate for popular education in, phonetics and other mysteries of linguistic science; inventor of primaeval languages (for Jean-Jacques Annaud's lavish caveman movie Quest for Fire) and of the Russian-based teenage sociolect "Nadsat" (for a short novel, his most famous, about juvenile thuggery, the basis for a film by Stanley Kubrick which has been distorting his popular reputation for three decades now); habitual world traveller; energetic teacher and lecturer; translator; pub pianist; showman and television celebrity; highly paid screenwriter; internationally recognised homme de lettres on a Johnsonian or Edmund-Wilsonian scale, and author of some sixty published volumes, including the two-volume Confessions, which rank among the most sublimely entertaining and endlessly re-readable autobiographies in English.

But, also, yes: poet:

`Wachet auf!' A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacon through the shires.
A martin's nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning: birds could not be liars.
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock,
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

(The "martin" is Martin Luther; the theme is the Reformation; the allusiveness typically Burgessian.)

Perhaps one should even say: first and last, poet. This claim might seem a perversely exaggerated one, since until this year, with Carcanet's publication of Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems, only one of those threescore books listed on Burgess's increasingly crowded "By the same author" pages was ever offered to the world as "verse"; and that lonely volume, the long narrative poem Moses, found few readers and fewer advocates.

Burgess himself was always somewhat diffident in putting himself forward as a poet, even though one of his acknowledged masterpieces, the superbly funny quartet of comic novels about his (partial) alter ego, the dyspeptic bard F.X. Enderby, is richly crammed with original poems - not a few of which, including that one about Luther, had previously appeared in print under the name of "Anthony Burgess", or (since Burgess's legal name, the name of his first four decades, was John Burgess Wilson) the initials "J.B.W."

Interviewed by the Paris Review in the 1970s, Burgess shyly admitted that he was sometimes tempted by the idea of publishing a volume of .Enderby's collected poems. "I can see the sense", he told his interviewer, "of pretending that some one else has written your book for you, especially your book of poems. It frees you of responsibility - `Look, I know this is bad but I didn't write it - one of my characters wrote it..." He went on to explain that his poetic ambitions, such as they were, would henceforward be confined to verse translations (he mentions Peer Gynt and "Tcheckhov's Chaika", neither of which appears to have been completed, as well as "a musical of Ulysses", which eventually emerged in time for the Joyce centenary as Blooms of Dublin). Poetry of the more conventional kind - lyrical, autobiographical - was not for him: "too naked, too personal."

Now, while not exactly disingenuous, these remarks do not quite tell the full story. It's true that the bulk of Burgess's work in metre - and that is a pretty sizeable bulk, since a Complete Poems of Anthony Burgess would easily run to several hundred pages - is written the more or less impersonal modes of epic, drama, and translation, both free and precise. Yet the publication record shows that Burgess, far from `knowing it to be bad', also took a touching pride in his slim body of highly wrought lyrics, and wanted it to be both read and valued. 

In fact, there is a perfectly straightforward sense in which our author may be described as a poet " first and last": he book-ended his career as a writer with lyrics. Apart from competition entries, letters to the editor and similar juvenilia, the very earliest literary productions of John Burgess Wilson were the short poems he published in Manchester University's student magazine The Serpent in the late 1930s. The last full-scale work Anthony Burgess completed, just months before his death, was the Byronic verse novel Byrne (published posthumously in 1995.) His valediction, a lovely and immensely readable display of self-delighting virtuosity, is an unmistakably Burgessian compound of new and old.

He chose to say goodbye to the fleshly world in a demanding form he had never practised before: Byrne is composed mainly in mock-Byrnic ottava rima, alternating with a modified Spenserian stanza, and it purports to be narrated by a self-confessed "poetaster" named Tomlinson. But some of Byrne is in other metres. There is, for example, an epigraph of three enigmatic quatrains which decode the song of birds:

`Prudence prudence,' the pigeons call,
`Serpents lurk in the gilded meadow.
An eye is embossed on the garden wall:
The running tap casts a static shadow'....

There is a light erotic conceit, in a different quatrain form:

I have raised and poised a fiddle,
Which, will you lend it ears,
Will utter music's model -
The music of the spheres	

And there are five rather cryptic, intellectually dense sonnets on the theme of revolution from Genesis to the Enlightenment:

Sick of the sycophantic singing, sick
Of every afternoon's compulsory games,
Sick of the little clique of county names,
He let the inner timebomb start to tick...

(The "He", it soon becomes plain, is Lucifer; and this minor public school is Heaven before the angelic rebellion.)

To most of Burgess's admirers, these seven short poems were, are, at once recognisable as vintage F.X. Enderby. Quite a few readers would have recalled that he had also published them outside the Enderby books - notably in the autobiographical Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time, as well as in various small-circulation magazines. Now, a man who set scant if any store by verses he had composed more than thirty years earlier would hardly have troubled to embed them so prominently and so firmly in his envoi. (Burgess also enjoyed pointing out that T.S. Eliot, no less, had marked out "Prudence prudence" and two other poems for special approval in a polite rejection note from his editor's chair at the Criterion.) However reluctant he was about laying claim to the grand title of "poet", Burgess clearly cared a great deal for these miniatures, and did his best to see that they would be remembered.

I do not think he was mistaken in this. Without wishing to make inflated claims for his future place in the history of English poetry, I believe that, especially when judged as a whole, Burgess's poetry is (among other, not always fashionable virtues) not merely skilled but at times brilliantly inventive, not merely pyrotechnical but thoughtful, thought-provoking and, above all, richly entertaining. At the very least, he is - above all in his stage work - surely one of the funniest "serious" poets of the last century, worthy of a place in the pantheon somewhere near, say, Richard Wilbur - and not too far away from those American verse entertainers like Ogden Nash, whom he once saluted in appropriate form:

I have never in my life said anything other than laudatory
Of the work of Ogden Nash, whose innivations were chiefly auditory,
Meaning that he brought a new kind of sound to our literary diversions
And didn't care much about breaking the poetic laws of the Medes and the Persians...

"Literary diversions" is a happy phrase: Burgess seldom forgot the Johnsonian wisdom that one of the two main obligations of the writer (better to enjoy life, better to endure it) is to give the reader pleasure.

I'd also like to underline the extent to which poetry was a major presence in much, if not almost all of his work as a novelist - an oeuvre, which, incidentally, teems with poet-characters. Apart from the mock-heroic Enderby, there are the godly likes of Shakespeare (in Nothing Like the Sun), Christopher Marlowe (A Dead Man in Deptford), Keats and Belli (ABBA ABBA) representing the art at its most sublime, and, at the other extreme, a whole regiment of ghastly poetasters from Enderby's arch-enemy Rawcliffe, author of a single dud lyric "in all the anthologies" via the twittering idiocies of Dawson Wignall and Val Wrigley in Earthly Powers to the artless Lloyd Utterage, splenetic advocate of Black Power and sullen attender at Enderby's creative writing class in The Clockwork Testament:

It will be your balls next, whitey...

Even some of Burgess's most minor creations often give vent to some kind of lyric, as though Burgess simply could not keep the poetry from busting out at the seams of his narrative.

Nor, at times, could he. As most readers will know, Burgess was always a "poetic" writer in his novels - not, perish the thought, in the hack reviewer's sense that he wrote swooning purple passages, but more exactly because he exploited all those resources of syntax, diction, ambiguity and even punctuation (he was one of the twentieth century's grand masters of the parenthesis) that his more plodding contemporaries in the art of fiction usually neglected.

In this, he obviously took some cues from the modern novelist he most admired, James Joyce (his two introductory books on Joyce's use of language are outstanding, and his abridged version of Finnegans Wake a godsend for students). Less obviously, he had also paid attention to Ezra Pound - a poet he greatly respected, and could quote by heart even after a long evening of alcoholic refreshment. Pound had proposed that the three defining qualities of poetry were melopoeia, phanopoeia and logopoeia: the music of verse, the casting of images on the visual imagination, and "the dance of the intellect among words". Burgess, who suffered from poor eyesight, is a less phanopoetic writer than many, but in melopoeia and logopoeia he excelled. Sometimes, as in Napoleon Symphony (based on Beethoven's Eroica) or parts of Mozart and the Wolf Gang, he took the Paterian aspiration towards the condition of music about as far as intelligibility permits:

The squarecut pattern of the carpet. Squarecut the carpet's pattern. Pattern the cut square carpet. Stretching from open door to windows. Soon, if not burned, ripped, merely purloined, as was all too likely, other feet would, other feet would tread.He himself, he himself, he himself trod in the glum morning. From shut casement to open door and back, to and to and back. Wig fresh powdered, brocade unspotted, patch on cheek new pimple in decorum and decency hiding, stockings silk most lustrous, hands behind folded unfolded refolded as he trod on squarecut patterns softness...

(Compare Mozart's K.550, first movement.) That, no doubt, goes a little too far; but there are many other occasions when a wedding of extravagantly melliflous phrasing with dark matter comes off triumphantly well - for those, at any rate, with a taste for a prose thickened with allusion and made tart with all the resources of Burgess's famously hypertrophied word-hoard. A sample, chosen more or less at random, from the final chapter of Nothing Like the Sun,written in an allusive, punning hybrid of the language spoken by the subjects of Elizabeth I and that familiar to Elizabeth II's people :

Let's swell a space on the irony of a poet's desperately wringing out the last of his sweetness while the corrosives closed in. It was she, though, the goddess, unseen as yet but stirring and kicking like a foetus, that dictated the titles, for this was indeed much ado and that what they willed and the other as they liked it. Meanwhile that bud I carried opened like a pomegranate, the roseate macules and papules blossomed and later grew to a hint of delectable copper - coins over my body, the hint of a leopard's (not a tiger's) 	hide. When it left, it left a stain as of dirty eaters. All my parts must be hoarse parts (thou wilt make a ghost yet, see if though wilt not, that is a very graveyard voice)....

Not to everyone's taste, this heavy stew? Decidedly not: Burgess was often accused of schoolboyish or schoolmasterly showing off, just as Enderby was routinely patronised or declared hopelessly passe by the critics. ("Enderby's addiction to the sonnet-form proclaims that the 'thirties are his true home....") Those of us who do warm to it are responding to its qualities of zestful excess, of Burgess's word-man's relish for the "delectable" flavours in which fine language may dress and make piquant the most sordid subject matter (syphilitic sores), of a composer manque's ambition to use the full orchestral resources of English rather than just the odd squeak or toot of piccolo or cello.

Yoked together with this astonishing vitality is, almost always, an exacting sense of medium. In one of his rare moments of self-assertion, Enderby says "I stand for form and denseness. The seventeenth-century tradition modified." Though Enderby does not spell out the allegiance at greater length, it is clear that he wishes to be numbered alongside the generation of poets who, taking their cue from Eliot, were enraptured by the recently revived Metaphysicals, and wished to apply the tunes and conceits of Donne and Herbert to contemporary experience. Put another way, Enderby is, toutes proportions gardees, something of a William Empson, with perhaps a jigger or two of Robert Graves (the goddess mythology) and W.H. Auden for good measure.

The Eliotic/Empsonian strain remained deep in all of Burgess's lyrics until he was well into his forties. With fame came the possibility of new kinds of public voice: hence Burgess the poetic editorialist, treating readers of the New York Times and other publications to metrical musings on the Apollo project or the State of the Union; Burgess the composer of verse letters; Burgess the dabbler in epic. In all of this public verse, he becomes a much more eighteenth- than seventeeth- century figure, preaching the virtues of reason and tolerance in an age of violence and the widespread worship of irrationality. For the most part, alas, these poems are more polished than memorable.

But fame, and more mature years, brought on two great liberations in his verse writing. The first was more or less accidental: marriage to an Italian wife, and residence in Rome, brought him in touch with the extraordinary work of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791-1863), whose thousands of sonnets in Roman dialect - many on sacred themes - are an astonishing, and all but untranslatable combination of scatology and lyricism. Burgess set himself to translating some 70 or them, and then (for it is hard to make money from poems, and Burgess was a professional writer, one who writes for pay) composed a short novel in which they could be sold on the open market. Had he written no other verses but his Belli translations, Burgess would have been worthy of consideration as a poet of exceptional gifts.

The other liberation was a happy by-product of his fame. The better-known Burgess grew, the more the invitations poured in - not only to write articles or give lectures, but to write screenplays, to translate and adapt for the stage (operas and musicals as well as classical dramas such as Oedipus the King), to dream up original plays of his own. This flood of commissions helped sharpen two of his already keen skills. First, it honed the kind of metrical dexterity which allows the jobbing lyricist to fit words to pre-existing music with consummate neatness - to rewrite, for example, Freude, Schone Gottefunken both straight -

Joy, thou glorious spark of heaven,
Daughter of Elysium...

And not-so-straight:

Do not be a clockwork orange,
Freedom has a lovely voice.
Here is good, and there is evil -
Look on both, then take your choice....

Smart enough work for most, but still not quite smart enough for Burgess, who from his youth had been a keen admirer of all manner of popular songs (his mother had been in the music halls, his father played the piano in cinemas during the silent era), but above all a devotee of the great American wits and dandies of the form: Irving Berlin, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and, supremely, Lorenz Hart. Burgess's admiration for Hart was sincere, profound and enduring; he loved the sheer audacity with which Hart could conjure a rhyme from an apparently rhymeless phrase, or cram more internal rhymes into a couplet than might seem humanly possible - "beans could get no keener re-/ception in a beanery", and the like.

In his memoir of a lifetime as a Sunday composer, This Man and Music, Burgess offers a small tribute to Hart in the form of some ryhmes on the unrhymable word "fugue":

A concert, Hugo?
By all means you go,
But the very first note of a fugue o-
presses me, like all polyphony.
I'd rather have a diamond from Tiffany.

Burgess's translations for the stage - Cyrano, Carmen, Oberon and all the others are chock-full of such inner rhyming and false rhyming, and amount to compact anthologies of audacious, or sometimes outrageously corny, tricks of sound:

Warm full-blooded life:
Women as shining as goddesses
Under the bustles and bodices,
Scent you could cut with a knife.
Warm full-blooded life:
Frilly silk drawers that have legs in them,
Omlettes with five hundred eggs in them,
Sherry and cream in the trif -
Le.

(Blooms of Dublin , Act One.) 
If William Empson is the presiding spirit of early Burgess, then Lorenz Hart rules over his later work for the stage; and Burgess would surely have growled at any literary snob who felt that there was something bathetic in that progress. (One hastens to add that he was not an inverted snob, either: among the most vile of his poetasters is the loutish "Yod Crewsy" - loosely modelled on John Lennon, and, curiously, the victim of a mock assaination attempt on the page almost two decades before Mark Chapman squeezed his trigger outside the Dakota). Burgess's position was that a true lover of language will know how to find the joy in any skilled manipulation of its formal properties, whether mandarin like Empson's or popular like Hart's.

Pleasures both demotic and recondite abound in the pages of Revolutionary Sonnets; again and again in the course of editing I found myself unexpectedly smiling, chuckling and sometimes laughing out loud at some new felicity or feat. The point is central enough to be worth stressing again: thanks in part to the discipline of the market, Burgess never forgot that it was his job to entertain a reader or a listener who might be bored, distracted, careworn; and it is clear that he also wrote to entertain himself, keeping his own demons (they were many) at bay through the exercise of virtuosity. Was he a great poet? In the final analysis, perhaps not; I leave the verdict to others. But I have no doubt that he was a great entertainer and a wonderful writer. His gift for poetry was an essential part of that wonder.

KJ, 29 July 2002.
Wind, Ham, Lewis: The Bad Art of Cacography

By Douglas Milton

Anthony Burgess, by Roger Lewis (Faber £20)

One knew, roughly, what to expect. There had, after all, been that quote in the Books & Bookmen column of Private Eye: "I'm going to write a hatchet job". Then there was a nasty article in the Daily Mail (that Völkischer Beobachter for the English home counties) which accused Burgess of being, inter alia, a wrecker of other peoples' careers and a paedophile. One's hopes for Roger Lewis's book were not, to put it mildly, all that high. But even so, surely nobody could have anticipated quite how spectacularly it would live down to expectations. This is, beyond a doubt, the worst biography I have ever read. And yes, I've read Andrew Field's VN.

It starts off blandly enough, with a chronology of Burgess's life which is only offensive inasmuch as it's littered with errors. Then we're into the 'Prologue' which is a self-serving memoir about an encounter between Lewis, Burgess and Richard Ellmann in Oxford. Lewis was one of Ellmann's students, and obviously went off the rails fairly early. He was supposed to be writing a doctorate about Ezra Pound, but ended up writing 'not one word'. Instead he turned to showbiz biographies. He's best known for his life of Peter Sellers, although I prefer the recent book about Charles Hawtrey. It's hard wholly to dislike a man who loves the Carry On films as much as Lewis. But quite what possessed him to tackle someone of the stature of Anthony Burgess is beyond me. He's massively out of his depth, and what's more he seems to know it, and compensates with a combination of bluster, cheek and sheer bloody dishonesty.

He's got a thesis, of sorts, and here's how it goes: Burgess's best work (although Lewis is pathologically incapable of praising anything from Burgess's hand) was all done while his first wife Lynne was still alive. Once she died, and he married Liana, he became a writing machine, whoring for Hollywood and the popular press, churning out cerebral novels like MF and Napoleon Symphony, 'deliberate, industrious, and a little bit dead.' Anybody who's read Burgess's later work will know that this is complete rubbish, and indeed Lewis himself seems to be uncomfortably aware that his attempts at denigration ring a little hollow. He's very chary of venturing an opinion about, say, A Dead Man In Deptford or Byrne, both of which were highly acclaimed by the critics and would give the lie to his nonsense about Burgess having given up the ghost around 1968. On the one hand, all of Burgess's novels, even the pre-'68 ones, are supposedly no good, apart from A Vision of Battlements – talk about a back-handed compliment. (His music's rotten too by the way, although Lewis gives not one sign of being musically literate. Still, that's no reason why he shouldn't dismiss Burgess's 3rd Symphony as being 'Elgar with bongo bongo drums'. Which gives you an idea of the general level of criticism in this lamentable book.) On the other hand, Burgess was self-pitying, brooding over a bad review for decades while ignoring the thousands of positive notices his work received from specialist and popular press alike. Thousands of wilfully wrong-headed reviews, one can only assume, given that AB's novels were supposedly so duff. At one point Lewis asserts that Burgess's scholarship, command of languages etc, only impressed the second-rate – real academics weren't fooled and felt nothing but embarrassment on Burgess's behalf.
 Ah yes, all those second-raters, let's have a roll call… Christopher Ricks, John Carey, George Steiner, Frank Kermode, David Lodge, A S Byatt…fakers all of course, and no match for Lewis's brimmingly potent critical powers. What a shame Lewis never finished that Oxford doctorate – perhaps they could all have benefited from his instruction.

This awful book really amounts to nothing more than one long jeer. Of course it won't harm Burgess's reputation in the least, because it actually has very little of lasting interest to say about his life or work and gives us instead a fascinating tour of the weird and wonderful mental world of Roger Lewis. He is, it has to be said, a distinctly odd fish. Hard research doesn't seem to be much in his line – he obviously hasn't deigned to visit any of the many well-stocked Burgess archives such as the one at the University of Texas, for example, which could have saved him from many toe-curling errors of fact. He gives grudging thanks to the Université d'Angers in the introduction then makes a slighting comment about the Anthony Burgess Centre towards the end, likening it to some sort of Goon Show appreciation society. Odd sort of insult from the biographer of Peter Sellers, but let us move on, move on. I've read this rotten thing three times, and counted at least two errors on every page. Here are some instances, picked at random out of hundreds. He tries to imply that Burgess was in the pay of MI5. Three thousand quid goes into AB's bank account, supposedly for writing the history of a great London corporation. Lewis excitedly asserts that there had been no such book, and that the money came from the Security Services (there were, apparently, clandestine Le Carrésque meetings with Burgess's controller outside Trumper's hairdressers on Curzon St, which might, perhaps, explain the elaborate Burgess coiffure, but no, one is still not convinced). Well, the book ( a history of the City Of London Real Property Company) does exist, and Andrew Biswell (Burgess's real biographer) tracked down the original manuscript after just a few phone calls. This is typical dereliction of duty on the part of Lazy Sod Lewis.

I use that locution deliberately. Lewis has obviously read deeply of the Amis/Larkin Letters and seems to think that phrases like lazy sod, piss, pretentious prick etc are legitimate items of critical currency. By offering up a phrase like 'lazy sod' as a hostage to fortune he's really asking for it. OK Roger, had you been a little less lackadaisical yourself you wouldn't have made the following balls-ups. Xaverian College wasn't run by Jesuits, but by a secular order. Burgess didn't write that line in Moses the Lawgiver about 'I am circumcised of lips' – that was Burt Lancaster's daft improvisation. He didn't attempt to cover up the fact that the story about Shakespeare inserting his name in Psalm 46 was derived from Kipling's Proofs of Holy Writ – see page 337 of You've Had Your Time, for God's sake, if you're going to boast about having read everything Burgess ever wrote. You say Major Meldrum never married – he did, and had two daughters. Burgess didn't 'shout at Malay waitresses' in the documentary A Kind Of Failure. They were Chinese, and Burgess was making a point about the Chinese having always been a sort of master-race in Malaya and not needing to learn the native language. Incidentally, Lewis is at pains throughout to cast doubts upon Burgess's linguistic abilities. According to the Herefordshire polyglot, Burgess's skills were limited to greetings and asking for directions. Well, throughout the 1980s I saw AB on French, German and Italian TV, and he acquitted himself very well in those languages (I was watching with native speakers who were able to confirm this.) Obviously I can't speak for his Malay, although the fact that he passed the various Civil Service exams in record time, and with record grades would seem to indicate that he was rather gifted in that line. Lewis, by the way, gives no indication of knowing any languages apart from bog-standard French.

So far I've just been sparring. If I wasn't so reluctant to bore you all, I could list about three hundred errors of fact and at least fifty malicious distortions. Given that life's too short, let me try and sum up just why this book is so dire. Lewis goes to pathological lengths to slag off Burgess's writing and character. Big deal. He's entitled to his opinions, he's punching well above his weight and Burgess's reputation will easily survive. So far, one pities Lewis rather than Burgess. But then he makes some very unpleasant insinuations, of a nastiness quite unusual even in these post-Kitty Kelly times, and with the best will in the world I don't think they're forgivable. Lewis sneers at the idea that Lynne was assaulted and raped during the blackout , scoffing that she probably fell down a manhole during the blackout while drunk. He goes on to cast serious doubts on whether Burgess was the real father of Paolo-Andrea. Now Andrew is, tragically, no longer with us, but one has to ask – did Lewis even attempt to contact him and warn him of the bombshell he was about to drop? Or reflect for a moment that a man's name – any man's name – was a sensible thing to have on a birth certificate in the not-so liberal England of 1964? Especially if the real father were still married to someone else? My guess would be no. Then there's some mad stuff (obviously written with an eye to the sensationalist Sundays) about how A Clockwork Orange was funded by the CIA to soften up the public about brainwashing. Well if that's the case, one can only give a low whistle and say boy, did they ever get the wrong novel. Some of his assertions are frankly libellous. It would seem very unwise to state en passant that Georges Belmont (Burgess's wonderfully gifted French translator) was a 'Hitler Youth leader' (he wasn't), or that Burgess had an adulterous affair with Diana Gillon. Both of these people, while getting on a bit, are very much alive and kicking, although Lazy Sod Lewis probably didn't bother to check. One hopes they're litigious. These examples of Lewis's haplessness are picked at random, but I could go on and on. As the reader may have gathered by now, we're dealing with a terrible book, a non-book, the sort of black-hole, anti-book that Borges would have assigned to one of his most deluded characters; poorly written, badly researched and moreover one which provokes some hard questions. 

First of all, what the hell's gone wrong with Faber? They used to have a reputation. No longer, it seems. Their only motive for publishing this malicious tripe must be the hope that they might make a quick buck, as if they needed it. Well, they won't. I can't imagine many people shelling out £20 for an anti-Burgess rant. If they like AB they won't want to, and if they don't, well they already know that, don't they? So everybody loses. Secondly, what on earth was going through Roger Lewis's head? He has a habit of coming out with these scurrilous books and then disowning them. I still remember hearing him on Radio 4's arts programme Kaleidoscope after the Sellers biography appeared, wilting in the face of some probing questions about his motives, urging listeners not to buy his 'terrible, awful!' book. I suspect he already feels the same way about this one. A friend of a friend at a Dutch press agency has just sent me a copy of an interview Lewis gave to an Amsterdam paper a few weeks ago. In it, he breaks down in the face of a stern inquisition from someone who seems to have got his number, and admits that he actually loves and admires Burgess and that the whole biography was an attempt to come to terms with the admiration, tempered with exasperation, that he feels for him. The last couple of paragraphs of his book would seem to bear this out. Lewis deliberately evokes the magnificent coda of Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing, along with a dash of Molly Bloom's monologue, and seeks to achieve some sort of posthumous bonding with the great man. That Lewis finally realised he wasn't fit to unlatch Burgess's shoes may be some sort of tragedy, but not one that need delay us for very long. Fortunately for all of us who read and revere Burgess still, whatever his venal faults (and who shall 'scape whipping?) 2003 will see the publication of Andrew Biswell's own biography, The Fictionist. From what little I've seen of it, it seems to be the best commemoration Burgess could have hoped for, witty, scholarly, sympathetic, and packed with all sorts of fascinating discoveries. In the meantime, one might as well delve deep into our reserves of pity and just pass over Roger Lewis's tragic waste of time. By the way, the great man implies that he spent some twenty years researching and writing this. Sorry, but I just can't see it. It reads more like something dashed off over the past year in order to enable the author to meet a deadline and trouser the advance.

Burgess's death provoked such a plethora of grief, not least from those critics who hadn't felt able to be generous enough when Burgess was still alive, that some sort of backlash was inevitable. Well, here it is, and pretty shabby too. Useful, probably, to get all the bile contained in one disposable volume. His reputation is, of course, unassailable. Halfway through writing this, in the grey hours of a rainy Paris dawn, I opened The Doctor Is Sick for the nth time in twenty-five years and responded in a way Lewis seems to have forgotten. I laughed.
Speech for the Anthony Burgess Symposium in Angers
By Liana Burgess
 
Dear friends of Anthony Burgess
First of all my deeply felt thanks to all the people, teachers, professors, musicians, who have made this our first meeting possible.
I hope that this personal note of mine may add to the interest of the public in general and also of the narrower circle of specialists and biographers.
In 1962 A Clockwork Orange was the first book I read by our author, almost at the same time as I read the first book, Inside Mr Enderby, by a writer called Joseph Kell. I was beside myself with joy when I read both these works because my task was to write for the Bompiani Literary Almanack a panorama of the literary output covering a year in English language. I remember that the average number of titles appearing yearly was 32,000, out of which I had to choose and discuss a handful. I had discovered two, so I thought, masters, comparatively unknown, although ACO was shortly to become an underground cult book and the nadsat was going to be spoken by the aficionados the world over.
In the first case I was "carried away" as the saying goes, by the beauty of the language and did not stop to analyze the meaning, rather as one doesn't when one reads the mighty lines by Marlowe: "In Naples did I learn to poison flowers" or "And ride in triumph through Persepolis."
In Trieste, in 1987, Prof. Carla Sassi, put this feeling this way: 
"In A Clockwork Orange, la musicalità della prosa, l'elemento del suono e del rumore hanno spesso la prevalenza sul momento descrittivo, e poiché si tratta di racconto auto-diegetico, oltre a conferire una qualità lirica al testo, tali elementi contribuiscono a caratterizzare in maniera incisiva la figura del narratore-protagonista. Alex viene infatti principalmente definito attraverso il suo uso "musicale" della lingua e il suo rapporto con il mondo della musica, rapporto che di volta in volta ne sottolinea, o addirittura ne provoca, pensieri ed azioni, e ne segue l'evoluzione nel corso del racconto."
In A Clockwork Orange the musicality of the prose, the elements of sound and noise are often more prominent than the descriptive passages and since here we are dealing with an autodiegetic tale, apart from giving to the text a lyrical quality, they contribute to define very clearly the character of the story-teller-protagonist. Alex indeed is defined mainly through his 'musical' usage of the language and his relation with the world of music. This relationship from time to time emphasizes, or even provokes, his thoughts and actions and follows his development throughout the spinning of the tale.
I didn't particularly want to see anything. I did not read with my eyes: I was happy to hear and puzzle out those remarkably shaped words which, unknown but vaguely familiar at first, began to yield a sense and/or convey a feeling, as one went on.
"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry."
The six adjectives/nouns in apposition to 'evening' convey a sweeping sense of the totality of the scene outside, a beckettian bareness.
"The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto".
We may wonder what a mesto is but whoever has even a passing association with a Latin language links the word with melancholic. An absolute barren hardness outside, a melancholic feeling inside.
"Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom...which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights burning all over your mozg."
Veshch we don't know but it sound something very strong, moloko is milk mentioned two lines above, and Bog surrounded by Angels and Saints must be God. But the beauty of it is that Bog is God in Russian, Bogu Bogova, "give to God what belongs to God" , but it's also "a spongy ground of decomposing vegetation" that peat that for Seamus Heaney ("Bogland") is the symbol of Ireland.
The scene is set for action and horrors to come but we do not see the horrors: "We fillied round what was called the backtown for a bit, scaring old vecks and cheenas that were crossing the roads and zigzagging after cats and that. Then we took the road west. There wasn't much traffic about, so I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti. Soon it was winter trees and dark, my brothers, with a country dark, and at one place I ran over something big with a snarling toothy rot in the headlamps, then it screamed and squelched under..." Yes, something big has been run over. We don't see it; our attention is being held by the mechanical but the "screaming and squelching" belongs definitely to the animal world, and jolts us.
The linguistic duplicity takes away from the photographic horror.
Anthony himself says that one of the uses of the nadsat was to act as a screen between the reader and the event. But once you have images it is very difficult to remove them and go back to the purely aural.
One type of innocence is lost.
Then, in the book, the story unfolds to the end and Alex coming out of his violent life, relinquishing it, appears to be the 'recapitulation' in the musical sense, of what has preceded it, that is 'the repeating of earlier themes when forming the final section of a movement in sonata form'. When the music critic of The Kansas City Star (the newspaper for which in his youth Ernest Hemingway was a reporter) analysed the book as if it were a musical composition Anthony felt understood. I leave to the scholars here the task of retracing the article.
In this case, the case of the book as a whole, the problem of the extra chapter, the famous 21, does not exist because the "I was cured all right" and the brilliant re-start of lustful hybris makes sense visually only.
We go back to the beginning, as if nothing had changed inside Alex...
Inside Mr Enderby was completely different, describing a completely different character, full of concern for the "beady-eyed greedy creatures", the seagulls whom Enderby the poet feeds every day, and full of solicitude for the old cronies, men and women, who spend their leftover lives in one pub or different pubs, comparing, complaining, exhibiting wounds and diseases. Being stubborn, sometimes arrogant, distrustful, like the major-general who calls Enderby a liar, misinterpreting Enderby's enunciation of his rank. (' "I shall look up the Army List this afternoon." He never did. A motorist, irritable and jumpy with a seasonal hangover, knocked him down as he was crossing Nollekens Avenue. Long before spring, the major-general was promoted to glory .') (p.25) But all these people whom many would call irritatingly useless are followed in their peregrinations and observed with charity and empathy. And then, as a lighter element, we have the eroticism of 'Arry the cook who tries to convey his amorous message to Thelma under shape of especially prepared dishes to be accompanied by Enderby lyrics, such as 'The Music of the Spheres'.
When Anthony saw the film, he found that Malcolm Mc Dowell was his Alex, a mancunian like himself, and the cast of actors was admirable, Steven Berkoff great and so was the examining policeman. The snake was unnecessary and Anthony wondered at what he was doing there. The use of the milk as a way of temporarily blinding Alex he found a stroke of genius because Alex is, fundamentally, politically innocent and this he told me more than once.
He was also relieved, and so was I, at the stylization of the multiple-love-making, ballet-like scene. Having seen Ken Russell's film drawn from Huxley's book, titled, I believe, The Devils of Loudun, we were, in comparison, reassured by the lack of gratuitous violence.
Then the film appeared in Venice and we didn't see it, although we were invited to the Festival, if I remember correctly, because we were on our way to New York sailing from Naples. In the end I would say that Anthony has been more supportive than supported. Even across the Atlantic the amount of charges and abuses conveyed by telephone at all hours of night and day was very tedious. Kubrick was equally persecuted in England, so he stopped the film and he still could go on 'crying all the way to the bank'. Thirty years of nagging from journalists can be wearisome. So Anthony wrote a play and composed the music that I was hoping to hear here. And turned the book into a cabaret show.
Liana Burgess, 2001
Critic's Prize: Burgess's Acceptance Speech for Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange 

1. Presentation of the Sardi Speech by Liana Burgess
I wasn't present, but when Anthony came back from Minneapolis and New York, he was still talking effervescently about the trick that the Minneapolis Theatre, Tyron Guthrie, that is, and Warner Bros. had played on him. He was then involved with a project that he had much at heart, but of whose outcome he was doubtful: this was a translation on to the stage of his rhyming version of Cyrano de Bergerac, but this time it was to be a musical of it, and the venture was creating endless problems since Christopher Plummer, great actor though he was, should have played the lead the previous year in the 'straight' theatrical version, and didn't because he was otherwise engaged and a substitute had to be found. Anyway, he was no great singer or easy, as a singer, to get along with. But now he was to play the lead in the musical version of the play and sing the lyrics written by Anthony to the music of a delightful Welshman, Michael Lewis, who had, however, no sense of English prosody, stressing an article as if it were a word, as I, an Italian, would do: example:
'Le donne, i cavalier, l'armi, gli amori, le cortesie, le audaci imprese io canto che furo al tempo che passaro i Mori d'Africa il mare e tanto si die vanto. ..' (This is the opening of the Muslim Moors' occupation of Europe, if anybody is interested, sung by Ludovico Ariosto): LE, I, L'A, GLI, LE, LE I, IL.
A very serious problem arose: the lyrics already written by Anthony had to be scratched and he now had to rewrite them to this music. So, instead of having a musician setting the lyrics to music according to the Broadway tradition, we had a writer setting the music to lyrics; rewriting lyrics that would 'fit'.
I think that the year was 1971, the month January, when Anthony discovered that he was contractually obliged to go to Minneapolis to assist in the production, and that the producer Richard Gregson, the one formerly married to Natalie Wood, of West Side Story glory, had no intention of relenting from exacting his rights. Anthony was unwilling to go because he feared the cold, after all his years spent in the tropics, and Minneapolis in January was a place where impulsive dogs yelped when they lifted a leg because their urine froze midway, and one dog was, in Anthony's words, 'ligatured to the wall by an icicle.'
For reason still not clear to me, Anthony, in order to show his independence, paid his own air fare, out of his own pocket, only to discover at the Roman airport that he was to travel first class, as arranged by Warner Brothers, who later had his cheque returned, and to land in New York at Kennedy airport, because they, The Brothers, --under Kubrick's instructions most likely,-- wanted to boost with the presence of an eminent writer and the great Malcolm McDowell the film A Clockwork Orange which had just opened in New York.
With things in Minneapolis coming to a sort of deadlock and the producer fighting with the director (until the title appeared in Variety announcing: 'Another director bites the dust', and we knew where we stood and that the producer, that is, had gained the upper hand), Anthony announced to the producer, Gregson, that he was going to go to New York or would resign altogether from being involved with the musical.
Permission was granted: a Miss Solomon of the Tyrone Guthrie staff saw Anthony off at the Minneapoli-St Paul International Airport, bound for La Guardia. "At La Guardia," says Anthony, "it was she who awaited me. I nearly collapsed. Then all was explained --the charming Misses Solomons were identical twins, and the one at the New York end worked for Warner Brothers while the other was on the Tyron Guthrie staff... Warner Brothers put me up at the Algonquin Hotel" (of the Round Table and The New Yorker prestigious literary figures fame) "and Malcolm McDowell into the Pierre." Anthony went with McDowell to a public show of A Clockwork Orange and various interviews, while "Kubrick went on paring his nails in Borehamwood". Episodes of violence occurred which were blamed on Malcolm McDowell and Anthony. (See You've Had Your Time pp. 252 ff. London: Heinemann, 1990)
"Kubrick" [to quote Anthony] "went on paring his nails, even when it was announced that he was to be given two New York Critics' awards. I had to collect those at Sardi's restaurant and deliver a speech of thanks. Kubrick telephoned to say what I was to say. I said something rather different."
The something rather different is what we are going to hear now.
© Liana Burgess 2001

2. Burgess's Speech
Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you are entitled to call me a colleague. I was a film critic many years ago. Indeed, I was a film critic on the oldest European newspaper The Gibraltar Chronicle, which in 1943-44, when I worked for it, was the only non-fascist newspaper in continental Europe, even though it was run by the British army. We soldiers in this fortress had been informed, through Washington, by your great, dead president, President Roosevelt, that we had a duty to perform, and that was to protect the Rock. On behalf of a very large American insurance company... We were told that if we let this rock fall into fascist hands, the future of the American civilisation would be in jeopardy. And as an earnest of this American civilisation that was in jeopardy, we were allowed to see many American B films. It was my... It was my task to criticize these films, or praise them. I was rather bored with the job, and went to very few of them and ended up by inventing my own films, my own cinemas. The Rock is a very cavernous place, and there may be the odd cinema lurking somewhere in St Michael's cave in the water, not like anybody had had actually ever been to, but thought they might someday. You know, I was fired from this job, and never did film criticism again.
In 1966, which was my Annus Mirabilis, for the benefit of any drama critics who may be present, a wonderful year. I had many jobs: I was drama critic for The Spectator, and simultaneously I was opera critic for Queen, a great... great heterosexual magazine. I was television critic for a magazine, ironically called, The Listener. And I was food and wine critic for a left-wing paper that eventually folded up. It was generally recognised that I couldn't do all these jobs efficiently at the same time; and I noticed one night at a particular theater during the first act there were other critics who'd been deputed by their newspapers to sit behind me and see if I genuinely walked out after the first act. My normal procedure was to see one act of a play, the second act of an opera, and have some food and wine afterwards. It was assumed by everybody that I would never get up early enough to see films, so I never became a film critic.
Now as for my connections with the cinema, this is equally tenuous: my father was a cinema pianist. He played in those days which most of you are too young to remember, when there was no sound track, and the accompaniment had to be provided by an orchestra in the evenings, by pianists during the day for matinees. My father never saw any films before he accompanied them. He did it all by ear, memory, instinct, intuition, and he had a very much foreshortened view when he accompanied. He told me on one occasion that he worked in a cinema for six months, where the piano didn't work above middle C, so all the music was somewhat Wagnerian. He was fired from this job because, without his knowing it, the film he was looking up at one afternoon, foreshortened, was a religious film; and he saw what looked like a scene of great festivity among men proceeding, and he started playing "Hail, hail, the gang's all here!" This turned out, of course, to be the Last Supper. I'm sorry I've been allowed a blasphemous note to intrude; but this is, after all, a New York Sunday!
If I... If I continue just for a second with a blasphemy, I suppose my own relationship with this film is that of primal creator with ultimate interpretor, which finds its most megalomaniacal, if I may use the term, or a most mythical metaphor in, say, the relationship between God and Cecil B. DeMille, or maybe the other way round. God wrote a marvellous book, best-seller --marvellous title called The Old Testament. I don't think he's ever received a penny's royalties for it; but God is a spirit, and I am merely a consumer of spirits. In my case, rather than God's, this masterpiece, which I think will make a lot of money, is somewhat different. As far as Kubrick is concerned, I knew little about him. I was told over the telephone that Stanley Kubrick wished to make my book A Clockwork Orange into a film; and I would get no money from it. Well, I said: I'm not ignorant, I know this already; you needn't tell me! But he said: "Would you rather he made it and get no money, or somebody else make it?" Well, I had a vision of Ken Russell making it, so I said I was prepared to pay Kubrick to make the film. It turned out to my surprise that Kubrick didn't actually need the money at the time. Kubrick reappeared in my life, or very nearly (he hadn't really appeared at all, had he?) He reappeared by name, very nearly, when I was in Australia. And I was summoned to London to see Kubrick because of two lines in the book. He wasn't sure whether it was a copyright or not, whether they were quotations of an existing song, or whether I had actually written them. So I rushed from Australia to New Zealand, to Hawaii, San Francisco, New York, eventually I ended up in London and appeared for lunch at that old English tavern called Trader Vick's. After a couple of old English noggings of mai-tai, Kubrick did not turn up.
Then Kubrick used the Australian vernacular and nearly gave birth to a set of diesel engines, when he discovered that the British edition of the book was different from the American edition. Indeed, the American edition, if anyone is interested, has twenty chapters, whereas the British edition has twenty-one. There's a cartoon in the British Daily Express which shows a man and a woman leaving the cinema, having seen Kubrick's film, and saying: George, dear, I do hope they don't make Son of A Clockwork Orange. Well, this is no joke because chapter 21, in the British edition, is precisely that: it's the account of the son of A Clockwork Orange, and anybody who wishes to make this movie as a follow up is welcome to see me afterwards.
Well, as you know he doesn't travel, God --I mean, Kubrick doesn't travel, and he is stuck there in Boreham Wood, about two miles from Pinewood Studios outside London, and if I may use again a dramatic allusion, it was no question of Boreham Wood coming to Dunsinane, Dunce is here. So all I can say now is that I know you're a little droogie, a little malenky droogie back there in Boreham Wood, we'll shmeck down to his very keeshkas or even his yarbels, and then I'll place this horrorshow peguylok into his rookers.
On his behalf, ladies and gentlemen, I say thank you for your generosity, on his and my behalf I say thank you for your perspicacity, on my own behalf, my fellow writers, I say thank you for your hospitality .
© Burgess Estate 2001
A Clockwork Hour
By Maureen Turquet
"A Clockwork Hour" by Maureen Turquet, piano and Thomas Dubos, bassoon
Program presented on December 8th 2001 in the theatre of Bouvet-Ladubay,
seat of the Anthony Burgess Society, for the University of Angers Symposium
"The Atavars of a Clockwork Orange"
Notes on the program:
The idea was to concoct a program of exactly 60 minutes of music, a "clockwork hour", introduced by the prelude of Burgess' play version of A Clockwork Orange and escorted out by its finale. In addition to performing compositions of Burgess' own hand, I wished to offer a glimpse of the musical scores he possessed. These pieces, few and very selective, I found among his personal library collections at the Anthony Burgess Center of the University of Angers. 
The introductory prelude, with its omnipresent theme from Beethoven's 9th Symphony, slipped naturally into an excerpt from Beethoven's last piano sonata, and then led on to other selections from Burgess' personal library : Bach, Wagner, Chopin, Poulenc, Warlock and Debussy, especially his Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un faune, Burgess' veritable "mascotte" piece. 
Burgess declared that, adolescent, falling upon this melody quite by accident while fiddling around with a homemade radio, he experienced such a tremendous sensorial shock that he thereupon decided to be a composer. This decision did result in a certain frustration since later, Burgess stated "It was, I suppose, a doubt about the capacity of music to provide me with a language that drove me to the craft of the novel." (In This Man and Music, 1982) 
So, using this wonderful Debussy melody as a "leitmotif" sung by the bassoon, we also introduced selections by Errol Garner, Thelonius Monk and Percy Grainger in honor of Burgess' eclectic musical interests and his capacity to improvise in popular and jazz mediums. 
Burgess' library contains no less than three complete editions of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and he himself composed 24 preludes and fugues under the modest self-jesting title The Bad-Tempered Electronic Keyboard (1985). I chose eleven preludes and a fugue from this volume, his "Tango for Piano" (1984), and then played with Thomas Dubos an arrangement for bassoon and piano of "Rhapsody" and "Mister Coale's Maggotte" (1993) before concluding with "The Third Sonata for Great Bass Recorder (or bassoon) and Piano" (1993), one of Burgess' very last compositions. 
The Finale from A Clockwork Orange again gives first place to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, but it contains a wonderful "clin d'oeil": over and above the piano's "Ode to Joy" theme floats the melody of "Singing in the Rain!"
Burgess' Blooms
By Zack Bowen
 
Anthony Burgess had a career-long fascination with James Joyce, especially in bringing Joyce's opaque works to a popular audience. He devoted five books to the cause: Joycesprick, Rejoyce, Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader, A Shorter Finnegans Wake, and the lesser known published libretto to his "musical play" based on Ulysses, Blooms of Dublin. Burgess mentions working on "a musical of Ulysses" as early as 1973, but a full scale radio production was first put on for the Dublin Joyce Centenary in 1982. Liana Burgess has asked me if I would say a few words about this play, one I would call a musical comedy instead of its more generalized "play," in the subtitle.
Intrigued by Joyce from the beginning of his career, Burgess was also indebted to other serio-comic writers from Sterne, through Swift and Nabokov, to Waugh and Fleming in his stylistic variations, his experimentation, and his satiric approach. But he seldom paid any of his other models the homage he did to James Joyce. He shared a lot of things with Joyce, including primarily an ingenious sense of comedy as well as a penchant for popular culture, and a certain indignation at hypocrisy. But there was also another similarity: they both were semi-professional musicians, and included their love for and familiarity with music in their works. Burgess had perhaps more formal training in composition and instrumental performance, and his Napoleon Symphony, especially, indicated his virtuosity in integrating musical orchestration and structure into a fictional text. 
Burgess has admitted publicly that he thought of himself as a comic writer, and he had a comic sensibility that was congenial with Joyce's. But Burgess was more of a professional teacher than Joyce, and I think Burgess could not let obtuse material remain unexplicated to the extent that Joyce did, despite Burgess' own protests to the contrary; hence, for instance, Burgess' Russian/English glossary appended to A Clockwork Orange. He never especially wanted to write esoteric puns/jokes for people who wouldn't be able to understand them.
Burgess believed that music could both augment the tragic and turn the ordinary as well as the sensational into comedy, depending on its mode, tempo, and lyrics, and the way in which it is interpreted by its composer, performer and audience. Joyce included in Ulysses only two fragments of his own musical notation: one a line of Gregorian chant, and the other a hand-written melody for the "Ballad of 'Little Sir Harry Hughes'" that Stephen sings to Bloom in Ithaca. But all the rest of the more than 850 song references in Ulysses were attached to existing melodies, most of which were eminently familiar to 1904 Dublin audiences. Many were performed during the course of Bloom's day by the characters in the Sirens episode, and a few elsewhere. However, the song references often appear in the thoughts of characters, and just as often as not in terms of their tunes as well as lyrics. Let me offer an example: Bloom remembers not only the words but the music of Molly's rendition of a line from "The Young May Moon." The secret is in the spelling: "She was humming. The young May moon she's beaming, love... Glowworm's la-amp is gleaming love." (8:588-89) The hyphen in "la-amp" indicates that the one syllable word is split between two musical notes. There are dozens of other mental musical performances of the same sort, such as Bloom's rendition of the last line of "Love's Old Sweet Song" : "Comes lo-ove's old..."
Burgess has his own musical fish to fry. As I listened to Blooms of Dublin I waited in vain for a full rendering of "Love's Old Sweet Song," and for "The Seaside Girls." The former was missing altogether, and the latter, which had been popular on both the British and Irish stages, was represented by an entirely new Burgess composition in both lyrics and melody. The reason for interspersing Joyce's musical verbiage with new tunes and lyrics composed by Burgess himself was, I think, two-fold: first, to offer a new essentially comic twist to the text to call attention to its already comic and musical tone (a little like Oliver, the musical version of Oliver Twist); and secondly to afford Burgess the pleasure of participating in an artistic collaboration with Joyce himself in creating a new Ulysses somewhat different from the original, but intended more for a popular audience. Blooms of Dublin is really an ingeniously creative textual explication which conveys a strong sense of the presence of the explicator (Burgess) as well as the author. A prime example of this in Blooms of Dublin is Stephen's final scene in the production; his last lines are taken up with his speculation regarding a proposed sea story he has twice previously mentioned that he might write. As he leaves Bloom--without entering 7 Eccles Street--he begins composing the lines which actually introduces Bloom in Calypso: "Mr Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup... etc." Burgess thus makes Stephen the putative author of the Homeric parody. Although a lot of Joyce critics might agree, it is not something most would care to assert unequivocally.
A second example of Burgess bringing a substantive psychological interpretation to the original occurs in the brothel scene of the musical, in which Bella assumes the dominant role over Bloom because, as she intuits, "the missus is master. Petticoat government." I am not so sure that masochism is necessarily identical with hen-pecked husbandry. Throughout Blooms of Dublin Burgess explicates/answers Joyce's ambiguities with his own interpretations of actions and speeches, and the answers Burgess provides are plausible but a little too simplistic for the far more complex/opaque Joyce I read in the novel.
Burgess's earlier attempt at this sort of joint authorship collaboration in his shorter version of the Wake met with some harsh criticism, and he was wounded by fundamentalist Joyce scholars who saw every profanation of the divine text as a sacrilege. Joyceanism, which is a literary religion to its believers, can demand a textual purity in which, Burgess believed, even Joyce probably would not insist. Purist Joyceans are given to epic battles over commas in different editions and tend to greet anything like radically new versions of the original with the same apoplexy as fundamentalist-creationists encountering Darwinism.
Thus, professional Joyce scholars are prone to offer a standard textual orthodoxy as justification for condemning what is changed, excluded, or modified in Blooms of Dublin. I admit to being shaken by the blasphemy of Deasy's appearing in the tower, and the near absence of Stephen's Proteus/beach metaphysics (only briefly alluded to in another section of the musical). Lotus Eaters and Scylla may be gone, but they would not be forgotten by the Joyce critics; and there are other Burgess changes to no seeming aesthetic end, like Lenehan's story of Bloom collecting on the horse, Throwaway, being put in Hyne's mouth.
The play is a Joyce/Burgess production and should be experienced as a new separate identity, certainly, but it is hardly one that can be dissociated from the original novel. While Burgess' scenes are largely Joycean prose, variations sometimes jar the ear, and it is impossible not to make comparison. If the play were the first thing one experienced, it certainly might be thought of as some sort of an introduction to Ulysses, rather than an independent statement of itself. But to understand every word of the lyrics and dialogue, an uninitiated audience would still need a lengthy series of annotation.
Burgess's big contributions are the thirty-seven songs, musicalizations, overtures, recitatives, etc.--all the operatic paraphernalia of musical comedy. The music is Burgess' own as well as the orchestration. While all but a few of the ideas come from the novel, Burgess has contributed their transition into poetry and song with hybrid adaptations of Joyce's language intermixed with Burgess's own prose and interpretations.
The songs, for the most part, are lively, quick and funny, replete with multisyllabic and internal rhymes in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. There are duets, contrapuntal motifs, trios, quartets, and expansive choruses which lend a comic majesty to the proceedings. The kinds of comic songs sung by Mulligan, the citizen, or Boylan and Molly are as rollicking as might be expected, and there are moments of pathos from Bloom and Stephen, and great comic choral commentaries during the Cyclops and Circe proceedings. The scenes are mostly bundled in expanded staged public gatherings, such as adding Deasy to the tower crowd in the opening, and featuring such sites as the newspaper office, the pubs, the brothel--in short wherever a chorus gathers.
It is impossible to do justice to merits of Blooms of Dublin, without hearing it. I had never seen or heard the work performed, and so naturally interpreted the printed libretto differences with its Ulysses model perhaps too literally, failing to appreciate them aesthetically in terms of the production. Now that I have heard the recorded version I have a far higher appreciation of what Burgess was trying to do and how well he managed to pull it off. The play is not Shakespeare, God/Bloom knows, but it was an act of extraordinary and painstaking homage by Burgess to write the music and orchestration for the production, and by and large I think it was a daring and rewarding experience both for Burgess and his audience. The music is something of a cross between Broadway musical comedy and Dublin bawdy. The chorus numbers in Cyclops and Circes are splendid, and Circe, with its theatrical staging already provided, is as good as musical comedy gets. The comedy basis of life which I think Joyce tried to convey is more fully and blatantly represented by Burgess's music, and I, for one, am grateful to him for writing it.
 
Zack Bowen, University of Miami
Anthony Burgess, (Auto-)Biographer
by John Fletcher

I always think Pontius Pilate has had a bad press. To my mind (and I am not alone in thinking this: Anthony Burgess makes the same point in Little Wilson and Big God), Pilate's famous question, 'what is truth? raises an issue of far-reaching importance. Even academic historians now take the matter seriously. They have to: there are people out there who claim that historiography is a kind of fiction, that no 'history' can be entirely truthful (especially --feminist critics would argue-- if it ignores 'her-story'). So historians of the Holocaust --to take an example-- must confront head-on this seemingly innocent proposition (that historiography is fiction), lest they fail to halt a slide down a slippery slope that can end up in what is called 'Holocaust-denial', the refusal to accept that the mass-murder of Jews during World War II occurred at all.

In the case of Anthony Burgess, Pilate's question raises interesting issues which I explored in the fourth annual Anthony Burgess lecture on 13 November 2001 and in subsequent discussions and follow-up seminars. The present essay is a more formal, less discursive and more detailed presentation of my argument, which in essence is that the three related genres which Burgess practised so well --autobiography, literary biography and fictionalised biography-- are but different shades on a colour-spectrum that merge into each other sans solution de continuité: that they are different kinds of fiction, different kinds of truth. What I was arguing in Angers (picking up something said by Stanley Gontarski of Samuel Beckett) was that memories are not historical but fictive --selected, reordered, re-emphasised versions of past events-- and that in Burgess's case this remains essentially true whether autobiography, literary biography or fictionalised biography are concerned.

The autobiographies are Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You've Had Your Time (1990), which fill out and complement the more purely musical biography, 'Biographia Musicalis', included in This Man and Music (1982).

The literary biographies are contained in the books on Shakespeare (1970), Joyce (especially Here Comes Everybody, 1965), D .H. Lawrence (1985) and Ernest Hemingway (1978), and in the profile of Samuel Beckett published in The Times in 1986.

The fictionalised biographies are on Shakespeare (Nothing Like the Sun, 1964), Christopher Marlowe (A Dead Man in Deptford, 1993), Keats and Belli (ABBA ABBA, 1977), and Somerset Maugham (Earthly Powers, 1980).

The Autobiographies
 
In the preface to the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, Anthony Burgess says that like St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau before him, he is writing "confessions", but "without the promise of such basic spiritual revelations as they provide". He is setting down "pure memories", he tells us, but warns that while "memories sometimes lie in relation to facts" (it being "difficult to draw a boundary between the remembered and the imagined"), "facts also lie in respect of memory". In this he is following Marcel Proust, albeit without naming him. He does, however, record at least one Proustian experience: the heating grilles in Manchester's Free Trade Hall, he says, "gave off a strange musty smell which I was to meet again in Fraser and Neave"s tonic water in Singapore' (MM, p.16). In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust famously demonstrates that what he calls "involontary memory" --the sort that is triggered by sensations like the smell of tonic water-- purveys and conveys more truth than any other form of registering the past; or, as Burgess puts it, "the truth is fabled by the daughters of memory". As for reliability, "the human brain is an inadequate storage and retrieval system", Burgess concedes, with a sidelong glance at the CD Rom, an invention which would have intrigued Proust greatly had he known it. Nevertheless, though "I trust my own [brain] little," Burgess goes on, "still I trust it". And as for the worth of the autobiographical undertaking, "any life will serve as a type of all lives...the autobiographer provides the raw material for the social historian, demonstrating what it was like to be imprisoned in a particular segment of time". His book, he maintains, "is about somebody else, connected by the ligature of a common track in time and space to the writer of this last segment [the preface]", and that this "somebody else" can represent others of his generation and background.

He decided to write his autobiography, he informs us, to pre-empt two attempts to write his life for him, one by a "Canadian academic", the other by "a well-regarded literary hack". To date there is, indeed, no book-length literary biography of Anthony Burgess in print, so that there is no objective, external check on what he is telling us, which may therefore, he admits, have been distorted by factors such as "sheer shame at the banality of my life", the inescapable circumstance that "autobiography has to be egocentric", and the fact that "a good deal of real life has got into my fiction; I forbear to unscramble it all, though I have unscrambled some".

Interestingly, this last point --that "the novelist siphons his inner life into the work he has already published"-- was picked up by David Lodge (a novelist and critic almost as distinguished as Burgess, and a great admirer of his work), in his review of Little Wilson and Big God. "The novelist works his effect," Lodge wrote, "partly by concealing the seams that join what he has experienced to what he has researched or invented. To publish one's autobiography is an invitation to literal-minded readers to unpick the stitching. We can only salute the mysterious process by which [Burgess's often] negative experience can be turned to positive account in artistic creation" (Times Literary Supplement, 27 February 1987, pp. 203-4 ). Lodge was clearly thinking here of the infamous assault on Lynne Burgess fictionalised in A Clockwork Orange: in the autobiography (John Sutherland noted later in his review of You've Had Your Time), the traumatic event "is dealt with so cursorily as to suggest that forty years on, the episode was still unbearable" (Times Literary Supplement, 26 October 1990, p. 1143). This is how, in Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess recalls the attack on his wife:

'Major Meldrum....seemed to me to have little justice in his inventory. Nor any compassion. There is no resonance in the term "compassionate leave", for which I was now driven to apply. That was in April of 1944. I received a letter from Sonia Brownwell, later to become Sonia Orwell, who was an occasional drinking friend of Lynne's. The letter was about Lynne, and Lynne was too ill to write it herself. Lynne had been working late at the Ministry of War Transport on the scales of victualling for the small craft of Operation Overlord. Leaving the office at midnight she had been set upon by four men who, though in civilian dress, were evidently GI deserters. Their accents were southern. The attack was not sexual but in the service of robbery. The four snatched her handbag and one of them tried to pull off her tight gold wedding ring. He was prepared to break or even cut the finger. Lynne screamed to no response of help. Her screams were stilled by blows. She remembered being kicked before losing consciousness. She was pregnant and she aborted. She was sick now with perpetual bleeding glossed as dysmenorrhoea. If had been concerned about not receiving letters from her, here was the reason. My response need not be described. I went at once to Meldrum and demanded home leave. He would not grant it. So, I said, it is more important to keep up this farce of Army Education than to fly to the bedside of a desperately sick wife? That is how the Army sees it. God fuck the army. You're a bad officer, sir. I demand a posting. You will not get it. I already have one posting on my hands.' (LWBG, p. 301; my italics)

The short sentences, together with the omission of speech marks in the heated exchange between Burgess and his commanding officer, add considerably to the dramatic impact of this reminiscence, so fertile in later developments. But the sentence which I have italicised is, in the present context, even more interesting. It implies not just that the author's feelings need not be described, but that they cannot be described: i.e., that fiction does it a lot better than autobiography, and that fiction, in the shape of A Clockwork Orange, did so, triumphantly. So we should not take too seriously --trop au pied de la lettre-- this throw-away remark in Flame into Being, the biography of D.H.Lawrence (a book which I shall come to in a minute):
"It is unfortunate that the name D.H. Lawrence should, in the common mind, be associated with only one book, and that one [Lady Chatterley's Lover] far from his best. We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for [A Clockwork Orange], or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence."
(FiB, p. 205)

The crime against Lynne was not witnessed by Burgess, nor indeed by anyone else. He got his information at third hand, from Sonia Brownwell, who presumably got hers partly from Lynne and partly from the police and hospital authorities (understandably, Burgess cannot be bothered to go into that kind of trivial detail where such a painful subject is concerned). In the case of an occurrence to which he referred several times in the course of his life (not just, of course, in A Clockwork Orange), he was not drawing on personal recollection, on what he calls the "retrieval system" of his own memory. So there could be an element of distortion here. "Is Burgess aware of distortion?" John Stinson wonders. I am sure he was. But there are other kinds of distortion, not attributable to imperfections in the transmission of information to which the autobiographer is prone. If we are honest, we will all admit that we are occasionally guilty of editing, embroidering, embellishing, even distorting a good story to make it better, more effective, in the retelling. I myself freely own up to doing so, and I gave an example in the lecture.

The writer, however, is a professional teller of tales, a fabulator, a person who makes up stories for a living. Burgess was well aware of this: "I was a faker, a patcher, something of a showman", he admits (MM, p. 33), and some of his stories do seem like tall ones. Are we having our leg pulled, for instance, when we are informed, pince sans rire, that the drummer in Burgess's army band was called "Styx" Williams (MM, p. 28)? He was undoubtedly called "Sticks", as an electrician on a building site is called "Sparkie" and a carpenter "Chippie". But "Styx"? This is a pun of Joycean proportions, and I take leave to doubt whether the members of the Entertainments Section to which Burgess was posted had ever heard of the river in Hades across which Charon ferried his passengers for a fee. My suspicions about having my leg pulled are further increased when Burgess tells me, again with a completely straight face, that chemistry --"an essential subject", as he rightly says-- had ceased to be taught in his Manchester school "after the blowing-up by a disaffected South American pupil of the chemistry laboratory". I sense that Burgess made this up so that he could kid us that, in order to take the "highly competitive" examination for recruitment to a government department, that of Customs and Excise, he had to learn chemistry "from a book and set up experiments in the lab of my mind" (MM, p. 22). Pull the other one, Anthony, I am tempted to say...

Carol Dix reminds us that Vladimir Nabokov (he of such serious literary jokes as Pale Fire) was one of the few writers whom Burgess envied or emulated, and Nabokov's own autobiography, Speak, Memory , is a fascinating illustration of my theme. The complex issues involved here have been well analysed by another critic, John Stinson, who explains that in telling his life story Burgess, aka Wilson, is

"aware of, and admits to, playing a kind of game with the reader and with himself. His awareness that the boundaries between fiction and biography are nebulous is sophisticated…The "Wilson" that we meet is, like a character in a complex, ironic, modern fiction, one that is both rich and elusive. ...Burgess is frequently concealing even as he seems to be revealing, an unsurprising phenomenon given that irony is his usual métier in fiction. He knows that "objectivity" is impossible; one's own "truth" will shift and change. Fact and myth, past actuality and memory, often blur…We learn a very great deal about Burgess in Little Wilson and Big God, most of it as accurate as the material in any usual, good autobiography, but we are also reminded that [like Nabokov] he knows how to play some cunning games". (JSS, pp. 12-13)

The Literary Biographies

Anthony Burgess makes no bones about the fact that his biographies are second-hand. He is quite open in acknowledging the extent of his debt to Richard Ellmann in a range of writings on James Joyce, for instance, and to Carlos Baker in the case of the little book on Hemingway. But no-one goes to a Burgess biography for information not already in the public domain; one reads him for a fresh, personal slant on a great writer (and he only bothered with authors of the first rank) and for literary criticism of a high order. His approach --and that is our loss-- is now rather old-fashioned. He uses the life to illuminate the work, and vice-versa, a critical sin against which anathemas were first hurled by Marcel Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve (anathemas since repeated ad nauseam by every earnest scholar convinced --as they now all seem to be-- that works spring into being ex nihilo through a kind of literary parthenogenesis). He is also old-fashioned --and again, that is our loss-- in being quite uncomplexed about his willingness to make value judgements. Not for him the current fad of assuming that everything a writer produces is of equal aesthetic value, or worse, that it is de mauvais goût to claim that Shakespeare has greater cultural significance than soap-opera or that Mozart counts for more, sub specie aeternitatis, than the Beatles. (As I write this, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the world's media over the death of George Harrison, whose ashes have been scattered at no small expense in the River Ganges; it reminds me that Mozart was given a pauper's funeral and lies in an unmarked grave; but there can be no doubt, pace the regnant cultural egalitarians, whose music will still be listened to a hundred years from now. )

I do not cite the names of Shakespeare and Mozart at random; Burgess has written enlightening criticism on both. "His Shakespeare" (1970) --writes Geoffrey Aggeler in The Dictionary of Literary Biography (vol. 14, p. 186)-- "is an entertaining biography, full of fanciful conjecture, and useful to the beginning student." I find that an uncharacteristically perfunctory judgement on the part of Professor Aggeler, imposed upon him no doubt by the DLB format. Shakespeare is in fact replete with insights, not least this one, about the magpie nature of every great writer, a "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles":

'The writer needs a scrap of psychoanalytical terminology: he does not have to read the whole of Freud; he merely has to filch something from a paperback glossary or a learned man on a bus…You may know the fiction-writer by his library, whose contents flatter neither the eye nor the owner's capacity for systematic reading. Instead of phalanges of rich uniform bindings, there are old racing guides, dog-eared astrological almanacs, comic periodicals, secondhand dictionaries, unscholarly history books, notebooks full of odd facts picked up in lying-in hospitals or taxidermist's shops. When Shakespeare achieved a library, if he ever did, we can be sure it was not like [Francis] Bacon's.' 
(S, p. 39)

This reminds me of something the great Ibsen scholar, James McFarlane, once told me. Ibsen, he said, had a great respect for Nietzsche, but he did not read him in the original, let alone in the Gesammelte Werke. He picked up all he needed to know about the German philosopher from Norwegian periodicals, particularly from what we would now call "literary supplements". I am sure Burgess is right that Shakespeare acquired all the learning he possessed in a not dissimilar manner. All great writers do. What would be considered sloppy scholarship in an academic is perfectly acceptable in a creative writer (after all, how many academics have become great writers?).

If Burgess revered Shakespeare, he worshipped James Joyce ("hero-worship" is nearer the mark), to the extent of becoming, Gore Vidal has said, "a one-man Joyce industry". Burgess's enthusiasm for the great Irish writer is perfectly understandable. They were both cosmopolitan polyglots --the reverse of narrowly provincial minds-- effortlessly taking their place in the great European tradition which they embraced with uncomplicated enthusiasm, indeed took completely for granted. Joyce, while immortalising Dublin, "turn[ing] it into an archetypal city, eventually into a dream city" (HCE, p. 34), was not interested in Erse or Celtic Twilight (except to pun on both in Finnegans Wake). "His aim" --Burgess remarks wittily, with a characteristically refreshing disdain for political correctness-- "was to be a European artist rather than a bard-senator [sc. W.B.Yeats] of a backwater republic [ sc. Eire]" (HCE, p. 33). Similarly, Burgess, while never repudiating his Mancunian and Lancastrian roots --on the contrary, he celebrated them-- was a man of the world in the literal sense of the term, to the extent of mastering languages, like Malay, which even Joyce did not attempt to learn.

But the most significant thing which Joyce and Burgess had in common, of course, was their former Roman Catholic faith. As Christopher Burstall (the dedicatee of Here Comes Everybody) says, it is difficult to disentangle the two writers: "Burgess had a feeling of kinship for the whole undertow of Catholicism, exile and cunning in Joyce, who summed it all up for him in the famous hell-fire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". In this assessment (written while Burgess was still alive), Geoffrey Aggeler puts the matter well:

'With regard to religion, Burgess still maintains a "renegade Catholic" stance that is oddly conservative in some respects. He despises liberal Catholicism [of the Vatican II variety], which seems [to him] to have become another religion in the process of gaining acceptance in the modern world. The ecumenical movement repels him, as do the liturgical changes and the use of the vernacular: " ...when I say that I am a Catholic now, I mean solely that I have a Catholic background, that my emotions, my responses are Catholic, and that my intellectual convictions, such as they are, are very meagre compared with the fundamental emotional convictions. Certainly, when I write, I tend to write from a Catholic point of view -either from the point of view of a believing Catholic, or a renegade Catholic, which is I think James Joyce's position. Reading Ulysses, you are aware of this conflict within a man who knows the Church thoroughly and yet has totally rejected it with a blasphemous kind of vigour".'
(DLB, p. 167)

The vigorous blasphemies in Ulysses were very much to Burgess's taste, and he quotes them with relish in Here Comes Everybody (such as the parodies of the Credo, "they believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth, and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast, born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried...", and of the Ave Maria, "Hail Mary, full of grease, the lard is with thee...", HCE, p. 31). But Burgess is far too intelligent not to perceive that

'Joyce's rejection of Catholicism was far from absolute...the disciplines and, in a tortured renegade form, the very fundamentals of Catholic Christianity stayed with him all his life...As Buck Mulligan says of Stephen Dedalus [and as we might say of Anthony Burgess], he has the Jesuit strain injected the wrong way…All through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake we catch echoes of the liturgy in parodic form, but we also meet learned chunks of theological speculation, as well as close Thomistic reasoning. It is typical of Joyce that, creating a religion of art to replace his Catholicism, he has to formulate his aesthetic in the terms of the schoolmen, and that his very premises come out of Aquinas. He cannot slough the Church off, he can never become completely emancipated. In Ulysses he is obsessed with the mystical identity of Father and Son; in Finnegans Wake his only real theme is that of the Resurrection.'
(HCE, p. 31)

Certainly, despite the modest disclaimer in the Foreword to Here Comes Everybody ("my book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce's work but has been scared off by the professors"), this volume must rank as one of the best critical studies of Joyce ever written. It covers the entire opus, from the earliest pieces of juvenilia to that "book of dreams", Finnegans Wake , and it is not afraid to show (as I suggested above) that parts of that opus --the verse and the play Exiles in particular-- are not worth much. But if Burgess can see what is weak, he perceives with even greater clarity what is strong. After a masterly analysis of Molly Bloom's "Penelope" monologue (in which Odysseus, in the guise of Leopold Bloom, "kill[s] all the suitors"), Burgess concludes with the "classic quotation" which is "incapable of being wearied or staled by repetition", and says of it --as all will agree who, like me, have willed that it be read at their secular funeral-- "there is noting in all literature more joyous";

'and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes' (HCE, p. 176)

Chapter 12 of Here Comes Everybody is a masterly essay which sums up Joyce's achievement in Ulysses. Firstly, Burgess says, "Ulysses is a great comic novel"; and secondly, it "is one of the most humane novels ever written". Joyce is "no Wellsian optimist", and for him "history is a mess", but his book "accepts the world as it is" and "relishes man's creations", in art, science, and above all, language. In a mere six pages (177-182), Burgess writes more sense about Ulysses than some of the "professors" in six hundred.

Imitation, as is well known, is the sincerest form of flattery, and Burgess does not hesitate to copy the master who stretched the English language "to the limit" in providing a "heroic background for an advertising canvasser who is also a cuckold" (HCE, p.182). Spindthrift's quest for his faithless wife in The Doctor is Sick (1960) "parallels the quest of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses[; this] novel, like a number of Burgess's others, structurally parallels Joyce's masterpiece…Burgess builds deliberately upon mythic frames and, like his master Joyce, even reveals some mythopoeic tendencies[, so that many] of Burgess's characters are ironically modified archetypes" (DLB, pp. 172, 181). This is notably the case (as David Lodge noted in the Times Literary Supplement review cited above, and as Ben Forkner pointed out in a discussion at Angers), with A Vision of Battlements (1965), the narrative of which is based on the Aeneid.

In writing about Joyce Anthony Burgess was discussing a writer with whom he felt a deep personal rapport, founded largely, as I have said, on a shared religious background (Burgess point outs that he and Joyce were "cradle Catholics", unlike latter-day converts such as Graham Greene, who was more of a "Jansenist" anyway, and Evelyn Waugh, who snobbishly pined after "an unbroken tradition of English Catholic aristocracy", HCE, p. 31). When it came to writing the "centennial tribute" to D.H.Lawrence, Burgess was well aware that they were very dissimilar people, but he admired the Nottingham writer for "penetrating into the heart of life". Burgess generously concludes --but then generosity towards other authors characterised all his critical writing-- that notwithstanding Lawrence's "hit-and-miss" literary technique and a "diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it", "to read him is to feel oneself in contact with a personality which has broken through form and rhetoric and confronts one in a kind of nakedness" (FiB, pp. ix, x, 4, 9).

The book on Hemingway is notable chiefly for demonstrating --on the basis of such excellent illustrations as a facsimile of the holograph manuscript of the first page of A Farewell to Arms-- that his prose is "artless-looking while being the product of very cunning art" (FiB, p. 8), a "highly-wrought verbal artefact in which meaning resides wholly in the rhythms of the language" and "in the very shape of sentences which...cannot resist a dying fall". "The Hemingway tune", Burgess perceptively concludes, "is elegiac even when it most celebrates joy" (EH, pp. 56, 116). As always, in support of his point, he chooses an apt quotation:

Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind. The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains blew in the bright light. All the distances were short now since we had been in the mountains.
(EH, p. 116)

Burgess wrote less about Samuel Beckett, though it is clear that he admired him greatly. He reviewed the prose works Malone Dies and No's Knife on publication, and bestowed generous praise on a couple of critical studies, including my own book, The Novels of Samuel Beckett ( 1964 ). In fact his piece on it reveals something of his working methods as a literary critic. On page 42 of my chapter on Murphy I reproduce a sample of Beckett's poetic writing as proof of what I call his "ability to fix in striking images the beauty of natural things":

'The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.'

Burgess was clearly as impressed with this sentence as I was, since he quoted it several times, the last in his London Times profile of Samuel Beckett, published on the occasion of the author's eightieth birthday in 1986. Oeuvre de circonstance though it is, the article, like the book-length biographies I have been discussing, ably relates Beckett's biography to his work and his theme that life is "a wretched grey Saturday [which] has to be lived through" (a vivid phrase which Burgess uses more than once in discussing this writer). And as with his evaluation of Joyce and the others, his general conclusion about Beckett's significance can hardly be bettered:

'Beckett is not an attractive author, whatever that term means, but he is immensely important. He has dared to incarnate everybody's true suspicions about the real nature of the universe, and to do this he has turned his back on the richness of his own literary inheritance and forged a highly personal language out of [French], a tongue not his own .' 
(The Guardian, 24 July 1964, p.9)

The Fictionalised Biographies

These are racily written, highly entertaining novels, with the added spice that they are partially, even largely, "true" (to return to my starting point). In his 1982 Foreword to Nothing Like the Sun, Burgess admits that some of his views about Shakespeare's love life are speculative --particularly that the "dark lady" of the Sonnets came from the East Indies-- but claims that "the known history of Shakespeare's life has not been tampered with: the exterior biography is probably correct, and the interior, or invented, biography does not conflict with it."

"The virtue of a historical novel" (Burgess wrote in what was to be virtually his last book, A Dead Man in Deptford) "is its vice - the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact" (pp. 271-2). He was well aware that in writing fictionalised biography he was mining a fascinating literary seam, full of the rich potential inherent in the "affirmation of possibility as fact" .Why else would he have devoted such a large part of his total oeuvre to life-writing? After all, one of the best-loved books by Somerset Maugham --who is the subject of Earthly Powers, a Burgess novel which starts with a brilliant pastiche of a Maughamesque "arresting opening"-- is The Moon and Sixpence, a fictionalised account of the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. And so one could go on. As Burgess did, right up to the end. 

John Fletcher, University of Kent at Canterbury.
A Major Addition to the Angers Burgess Collection: 
D. Thompson's gift from the files of "The Burgess Variations"
By Valérie Neveu

David Thompson (with Kevin Jackson) produced and directed the BBC documentary on Anthony Burgess's life and works, "The Burgess Variations," shown for the first time in Great Britain in December 1999 (Kevin Jackson, in the 2nd issue of the Anthony Burgess Newsletter, retraced the various steps and stages in the origins and in the making of the film. Work on the actual film itself began in earnest in 1998 and included a week-long trip with the entire BBC crew to the newly opened Burgess Center). 

David Thompson had taken care to keep and store all the documents, tapes, and rushes used in "The Burgess Variations," and early last summer (2001) decided to give them to the Anthony Burgess Center. The boxes containing this material arrived at the University Library at the end of the summer. A detailed and complete inventory is not yet possible, since the numerous tapes and recordings will require a great deal of time to classify and transcribe. However, the following brief survey should give our readers a general idea of the wealth of new material this generous donation has brought to the University Library and to our Center: 

Audio Recordings: 
There are several recordings of BBC radio programs written by Burgess (" A Meeting in Valladolid" and a dramatic version of A Clockwork Orange) or devoted to his life and work (" An Airful of Burgess"). In addition, there are several recordings of Burgess reading from his own work (Enderby, The Eve of St Venus, Nothing Like the Sun, A Clockwork Orange) or from the work of other writers (T.S. Eliot, for example). As far as Burgess's music is concerned, there are recordings of his musical version of Joyce's Ulysses, The Blooms of Dublin, and of various concerts (directed by Paul Phillips). There are several other recordings that remain to be heard and identified. 

Video Tapes: 
During the 1970s Burgess appeared on a number of British television shows ("The Late Show," "Arena," "The Book Game," etc.). Many of these are included in the donation. There are also several television documentaries devoted to Burgess in other countries and in other languages, including one made for the French series, "Un siècle d'écrivains." Finally, there are several recordings of Burgess's own work for the television, the cinema, and the theatre, together with a little-known dramatic version of A Clockwork Orange performed by a British company (The Northern Stage Ensemble). 

Rushes from "The Burgess Variations" 
The various sequences of material filmed for the documentary are contained in over fifty video cassettes (Betacam and VHS). There are thus many hours of film, much of which was not used for the final version, now on deposit at the Center, and available for Burgess scholars. These cassettes are accompanied by full transcriptions (on paper or on floppy disks) of the interviews and conversations recorded for the documentary: interviews with J.J. Annaud, Gore Vidal, A.S. Byatt, William Boyd, and others (including the Angers interviews with Liana Burgess, Ben Forkner, and Maureen Turquet). 

Printed Documents (Newspaper and Magazine Articles) 
In making the documentary, David Thompson gathered together a great number of newspaper and magazine articles on Burgess, going back to the beginning of his literary career, and up to his death in 1993. One of the most interesting series of these articles concerns the reaction to the film version of A Clockwork Orange. There are also several examples of Burgess's early writing, including the poems he published in the journal The Serpent. Noteworthy too is an article by Burgess on the James Bond novels. 

Photographs, Photocopies, and Miscellaneous Personal Documents 
There are several large-size photographs of Burgess (and of his two wives), as well as several photocopies of photographs. Among the photographs is a very interesting series of portraits taken of Burgess in Malaya. Finally, there are photocopies of private and professional correspondence, and a dossier on the school in Banbury and the legal action taken against the novel The Worm and the Ring. 

The Anthony Burgess Center would like to express its gratitude to David Thompson for a valuable and generous gift. These documents enrich our permanent collection immensely, and will provide a unique source of information for Burgess scholars in the years to come. Thanks to the kind permission of David Thompson, all this material can be freely consulted in the University Library. Any other use of these documents must be authorized by the BBC. 

On a personal note, I would like to add that the Thompson archives have already allowed me to discover a number of the items I used in setting up the Clockwork Orange exhibit during last December's colloquium. Obviously, there is much more waiting to be explored and brought to light, and I invite anyone interested to contact me and arrange for a visit. 

Valérie Neveu 
Translated by Ben Forkner
Homage to Antonio Borghese
Poem, by Martin Phipps

Burgess, purge us of our sins,
We pray: Antonio, Grub Street
Grandmaster, the doors of deep
Dream open, and let us in.

We churchless scriveners seek
The spell disbelief suspends,
Rounded sleep like Finnegan's,
Not the flat earth of the meek.

Teach us to write like devils,
And drink like priests, and re-voice
(As we watch, pray, and readjoyce)
Shakespeare's now-ended revels.

Martin Phipps
Victoria, BC Can.