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Anthony Burgess biography
Burgess' dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange, is by far his most famous novel, and was adapted into a famous, if highly controversial, 1971 film by Stanley Kubrick. However, the author later dismissed it as one of his lesser works. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the much loved Enderby quartet, and his 1980 magnum opus, Earthly Powers. He was also a prominent critic, authoring acclaimed studies of classic writers such as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway.Aside from literature, Anthony Burgess was an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, amongst others, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.
Early life
He lost his mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, at the age of one. She was a casualty of the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic ("Spanish flu"), which also took the life of his sister Muriel. Elizabeth, who is buried in a Protestant cemetery in Manchester (the City of Manchester General Cemetery, Rochdale Road), had been a minor actress and dancer appearing at Manchester music halls such as the Ardwick Empire and the Gentlemen's Concert Rooms. Her stage name, according to Burgess (there has never been any independent verification), was "The Beautiful Belle Burgess".
Burgess described his father, Joseph Wilson, as descending from an "Augustinian Catholic" background, which probably refers to recusancy. Burgess père was among other things an army corporal, a bookie, a pub pianoplayer, a pianoplayer in movie theaters (accompanying the silent films of the era - see the novel The Pianoplayers), an encyclopedia salesman, a butcher, and a tobacconist. Burgess described Joseph, who remarried (to a pub landlady), as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father".
Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, and later by his stepmother. His childhood was in large part a solitary one. His home was rooms above an off-licence and newsagent's-tobacconist's shop that his aunt ran, and above a pub.
Burgess was schooled at St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School, and later at Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School in Moss Side. For some years his family lived on Princess Street in the same district.
Good grades from Bishop Bilsborrow resulted in a place at the noted Manchester Catholic secondary school, Xaverian College. It was during his teenage years at this school that he lapsed formally from Catholicism, although he cannot be said to have broken completely with the Church.
He entered the University of Manchester in 1937, graduating three years later with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, 2nd class honours, upper division, in English language and literature. His thesis was on the subject of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
He had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in physics then a requirement for the subject were deemed not high enough to qualify for a place on the program.
Burgess's father died of flu in 1938 and his stepmother of a heart attack in 1940.
Military
In 1940 Burgess began a wartime stint with the military, beginning with the Royal Army Medical Corps, which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth, Northumberland. During this period he sometimes directed an army dance band. He later moved to the Army Educational Corps, where among other things he conducted speech therapy.In 1942 marriage took place in Bournemouth between Burgess and a Welshwoman named Llewela Jones, eldest daughter of a high school principal. She was known to all as "Lynne". Although Burgess indicated on numerous occasions that her full name was Llewela Isherwood Jones, the name "Isherwood" does not appear on her birth certificate. Nor was Lynne related to the writer Christopher Isherwood as many people had believed. Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at Manchester University.
Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar, a territory at the southern tip of Spain that Britain has controlled since the Treaty of Utrecht, at an army garrison (see A Vision of Battlements). Here he was a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching German, Russian, French and Spanish, and he helped instruct the troops in "The British Way and Purpose". He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the UK Ministry of Education. During the blackout, his pregnant wife Lynne was raped and assaulted by four American deserters; perhaps as a result, she lost the child. Burgess, stationed at the time in Gibraltar, was denied leave to see her.
Early teaching career
Leaving the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, Burgess was for the next four years a lecturer in speech and drama, at the Mid-West School of Education near Wolverhampton, and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College (known as "the Brigg" and associated with the University of Birmingham), near Preston.At the end of 1950 he took up a job as a secondary school teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School (now defunct) in the market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire (see The Worm and the Ring, which the then mayoress of Banbury claimed libeled her). In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to supervise sports from time to time, and he ran the school's drama society.
The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life. Thanks to financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple were able to buy a cottage in the picturesque village of Adderbury, not far from Banbury.
Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time involving local people and students, including productions of T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes (Burgess had named his Adderbury cottage Little Gidding, after one of Eliot's Four Quartets) and Aldous Huxley's The Gioconda Smile.
It was in Adderbury that Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the Banbury Guardian.
The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, especially one called The Bell, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time.
Malaya
In January 1954 Burgess was interviewed by the British Colonial Office for a post in Malaya (now Malaysia) as a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service. Several months later he and his wife travelled to Singapore by the liner Willem Ruys from Southampton with stops in Port Said and Colombo.Burgess was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar, the royal town in Perak, in what were then known as the Federated Malay States. Here he taught at the Malay College, dubbed "the Eton of the East" and now known as Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK).
In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a housemaster in charge of students of the preparatory school, who were housed at a Victorian mansion known as "King's Pavilion". The building was once occupied by the British Resident in Perak. This edifice had gained notoriety during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police).
As his novels and autobiography document, Burgess's late 1950s coincided with the communist insurgency, an undeclared war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) when rubber planters and members of the European community not to mention many Malays, Chinese and Tamils were subject to frequent terrorist attack.
Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, an alleged dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife, Burgess was posted elsewhere – the couple occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was supposedly minimal. This, at any rate, was the reason given for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan. This is located on the Siamese border; the Thais had ceded the area to the British in 1909 and a British adviser had been installed.
Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written (the language was still at that time rendered in the adapted Arabic script known as Jawi). He spent much of his free time engaged in creative writing, "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it". He published his first novels, Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. These became known as "The Malayan Trilogy" and were later to be published in one volume as The Long Day Wanes. During his time in the East he also wrote English Literature: A Survey for Students, and this book was in fact the first Burgess work published (if we do not count an essay published in the youth section of the London newspaper the Daily Express when Burgess was a child).
Brunei
After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, he took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State . Although the novel dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African "sultanate" similar to Zanzibar.About this time Burgess collapsed in a Brunei classroom while teaching history (he was explaining to his Bruneian students the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party). He is thought about now to have been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. However, this is disputed. Some accounts have him suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status.
Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration". But he gave a different account to the British arts and media veteran Jeremy Isaacs in 1987 when he said: "I was driven out of the Colonial Service for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons."
Repatriate years
He was repatriated and spent some time in a London hospital. There he underwent cerebral tests which, as far as can be made out, proved negative.On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he found he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.
The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby tetralogy); in a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham, just down the road from the residence in Burwash once occupied by Rudyard Kipling; and in a terraced town house in Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London, conveniently located for the White City BBC television studios of which he was a frequent guest in this period.
A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to Russia, calling at St Petersburg (then Leningrad), resulted in Honey For the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang for A Clockwork Orange.
Tax exile
By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a tax exile. It was in grander accommodation this time; indeed, at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of multiple houses and apartments, numbering in the double figures.He lived in a house he had bought at Lija, Malta, for a time, but problems with the state censor prompted a move to Rome. He maintained a flat in the Italian capital and a country house in Bracciano, and a property in Montalbuccio. There was a villa in Provence, in Callian of the Var, France, and an apartment just off Baker Street, London, England, very near the presumed home of Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1970) and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York (1972), and teaching creative writing at Columbia University. He had also been writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969) and at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.
Eventually he settled in Monaco, where he was active in the local community, becoming a co-founder in 1984 of the Princess Grace Irish Library, a center for Irish cultural studies. He spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet, in Lugano, Switzerland.
After Lynne's death in 1968 at the age of forty-seven of liver cirrhosis (see Beard's Roman Women), he had remarried, to Liliana Macellari, an Italian translator, adopting the latter's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.
Death
A lifelong heavy smoker, Burgess returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, England, where he owned a house, to die of lung cancer on November 22, 1993. He was 76 years old. His actual death occurred at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in the St John's Wood neighborhood of London. He is thought to have composed the novel Byrne on his deathbed.It is believed he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Moston Cemetery, Manchester, England, but in the event they went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo.
The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, reads "Abba Abba", which encapsulates six things in one: (1) the Hebrew for "Father, father", that is, an invocation to God as Father (Mark 14:36 etc.); (2) Burgess's initials forwards and backwards; (3) the pop group ABBA, which achieved world fame in the 1970s when Burgess was himself at the height of his powers; (4) part of the rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan sonnet; (5) the last words Jesus uttered, in Aramaic, from the Cross; and (6) the Burgess novel about the death of Keats Abba Abba.
Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade.
Writing
With the Malayan trilogy (Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East), his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya) to set alongside George Orwell's Burma (Burmese Days), E.M. Forster's India (A Passage to India) and Graham Greene's Viet Nam (The Quiet American), and continuing in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.
Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese, necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi, having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay, and this is reflected in the verisimilitude and interest in indigenous concerns that marks the trilogy.
His repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just the Enderby cycle but the neglected The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping (to which the director Francis Coppola has recently acquired the film rights), partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. This era also witnessed the publication of The Worm and the Ring, which was withdrawn from circulation under the threat of libel action from one of Burgess' former co-workers.
A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a controversial film adaptation), the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynne was allegedly robbed and assaulted in London during the blackout by US army deserters (an event that may have contributed to a miscarriage she suffered), the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more especially the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.
By the 1970s Burgess's output had become highly experimental, and some critics see a falling-off in quality in this period. MF (1971) showed the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. Beard's Roman Women is considered by many to be his worst novel (plea of mitigation: it was written entirely while on the road in his Bedford Dormobile campervan). But Napoleon Symphony, though flawed, contains among many other things a superb portrait of an Arab society under occupation by a western power (Egypt by France).
There was a triumphant return to form in the 1980s, when religious themes began to weigh heavy (see The Kingdom of the Wicked and Man of Nazareth as well as Earthly Powers).
Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic "training" and worldview remained strong in his work all his life notably in the discussion of free will in A Clockwork Orange and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church due to what can be understood as Satanic influence in Earthly Powers (1980), which was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.
He won few honours in his own country - his masterpiece Earthly Powers, for example, famously failed to win the English "Booker" prize for fiction, although he took honorary degrees from St Andrews, Birmingham and Manchester universities and was a Fellow of England's Royal Society of Literature. He did better on the European continent, where he garnered the "Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres" distinction of France and became a Monagesque "Commandeur de Merite Culturel".
Linguistics
Burgess was polyglot, with a command of Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian.
"Burgess's linguistic training," write Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, "is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronounciations and the niceties of register."
His interest in linguistics was reflected in the Anglo-Russian invented teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (called Nadsat) and in the film Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language for the characters to speak.
The hero of The Doctor is Sick, Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is a lecturer in linguistics. He escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech".
Burgess, who had lectured on phonetics at the University of Birmingham in the late 1940s, investigates the field of linguistics in Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air.
Journalism
Burgess produced journalism in American, Italian, French and British newspapers and magazines regularly even compulsively and in prodigious quantities. Martin Amis wrote in the London newspaper the Observer in 1987: "...on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid and there is a Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500."
"He was our star reviewer, always eager to take on something new, punctilious with deadlines, length and copy," wrote Burgess's literary editor at the London Observer newspaper, Michael Ratcliffe.
Selections of Burgess's journalism are to be found in Urgent Copy, Homage to QWERT YUIOP and One Man's Chorus.
Screenwriting
Burgess wrote the screenplays for Moses the Lawgiver (Gianfranco De Bosio 1975, with Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quayle and Ingrid Thulin), Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli 1977, with Robert Powell, Olivia Hussey and Rod Steiger), and A.D. (Stuart Cooper 1985, with Ava Gardner, Anthony Andrews and James Mason).
Burgess devised the stone-age language for La Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire) (Jean-Jacques Annaud 1981, with Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nicholas Kadi).
He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called Will! or The Bawdy Bard. It was based on his novel Nothing Like The Sun.
Symphonies
As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He composed regularly throughout his life.
His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio. His Symphony (No. 3) in C was premiered by the University of Iowa orchestra in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in This Man and Music.
Sinfoni Melayu, characterised by the Burgess biographer Roger Lewis as "Elgar with bongo-bong drums", was described by Burgess, its composer, as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".
The structure of the novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony, while Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition.
Burgess made plain his low regard for the popular music that has emerged since the mid-1960s, yet he has been called "the godfather of punk" as a result of the nihilist future world he created in A Clockwork Orange.
When Burgess was heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s 'Desert Island Discs' radio programme in 1966, he made the following choice: Purcell, 'Rejoice in the Lord Alway'; Bach, Goldberg Variations No 13; Elgar, Symphony No.1 in A flat major; Wagner, Walter's Trial Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Debussy, Fêtes; Lambert, 'The Rio Grande'; Walton, Symphony No.1 in B flat; and Vaughan Williams, 'On Wenlock Edge'.
Opera and Musicals
Burgess produced a translation of Bizet's Carmen which was performed by the British company English National Opera.
He created an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982 and performed on the BBC), and composed the music for the 1971 Minneapolis production of his Cyrano de Bergerac translation, adapting the Rostand play for Broadway.
His editing and revision of the libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based opera company Scottish Opera.
Anthony Burgess books in order
Time for a Tiger (1956)
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
Beds in the East (1959)
The Right to an Answer (1960)
The Doctor is Sick (1960)
The Worm and the Ring (1960)
Devil of a State (1961)
One Hand Clapping (1961)
A Clockwork Orange (1962)
The Wanting Seed (1962)
Honey for the Bears (1963)
Inside Mr. Enderby (1963)
The Eve of St. Venus (1964)
Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964)
A Vision of Battlements (1965)
Tremor of Intent: An Eschatological Spy Novel (1966)
Enderby Outside (1968)
M/F (1971)
Sophocles' Oedipus the King (1972)
Napoleon Symphony (1974)
The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974)
A Long Trip to Tea Time (for children) (1976)
Moses: A Narrative (1976 long poem)
Beard's Roman Women (1976)
Will and Testament: A Fragment of Biography (1977)
Abba Abba (1977)
1985 (1978)
Man of Nazareth: A Novel (1979)
The Land Where The Ice Cream Grows (1979)
Earthly Powers (1980)
The End of the World News: An Entertainment (1982)
Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End of Enderby (1984)
The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)
Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1985)
Oberon Past and Present (with J.R. Planche) (1985)
The Pianoplayers (1986)
Blooms of Dublin: A Musical Play Based On James Joyce's Ulysses (1986)
Bizet's Carmen, libretto (1986) (translation)
A Clockwork Orange: A Play With Music (1987)
Any Old Iron (1988)
The Devil's Mode and Other Stories (1989) (short stories)
Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)
A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
Byrne: A Novel (poem - 1995)
Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems (2002)
Non-fiction
English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958)
The Novel To-day (1963)
Language Made Plain (1964)
Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)
The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967)
Urgent Copy: Literary Studies (journalism - 1968)
Novel, The (Encyclopædia Britannica essay - 1970)
Shakespeare (1970)
Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)
Obscenity and the Arts (1973)
New York (1976)
A Christmas Recipe (1977)
Ernest Hemingway and his World (1978)
Scrissero in Inglese (1979)
This Man and Music (1982)
On Going To Bed (1982)
Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984)
Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence (1985)
Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)
Little Wilson and Big God, Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Autobiography, Part 1 - 1986)
An Essay on Censorship (letter to Salman Rushdie in verse - 1989)
You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Autobiography, Part 2 - 1990)
On Mozart: A Paean for Wolfgang, Being a Celestial Colloquy, an Opera Libretto, a Film Script, a Schizophrenic Dialogue, a Bewildered Rumination (1991)
A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)
Childhood (1996)
One Man's Chorus: The Uncollected Writings (journalism - 1998)
Spain: The Best Travel Writing from the New York Times (2001)
Return Trip to Tango (2003)
Source and additional information: Anthony Burgess