BOOK OF THE MONTH
Anthony Burgess
by Roger Lewis
Faber and Faber (0571204929)
Reviewer: Gordon Milton — Bibliographer, Lindsay and Croft
"I sighed and put the paper into the typewriter. 'I'd better start' I said. And I did. Meaning that, unemployable since I had less than a year to live, I had to turn myself into a professional writer"
This being the first paragraph of the second part of the confessions of Anthony Burgess it is apparent that the author did not succumb to a suspected brain tumour in 1960, moreover he went on to become one of the most respected and prolific English-language writers of the 20th century with more than 30 novels, 20 books of literary criticism, a number of (mainly un-filmed) screenplays and countless pieces of journalism. He was also a composer, librettist poet, linguist and translator. Don't you just hate him? Well Roger Lewis certainly does.
Anthony Burgess is presented as a biography but is more of a vitriolic character assassination. The book opens with an apparently verbatim account of a 1985 meeting between Lewis, Burgess and a few Oxford worthies. Lewis is immediately struck by Burgess's "gaunt, wan features ... waxy and pallid, long deprived of the sun. And how are we going to describe his hair? The yellowish-white powdery strands were coiled on his scalp like Bram Stoker's Dracula ... king of the comb-over (did the clumps and fronds emanate from his ear-hole?) ... however the nicotine-stained fuzzy bush at the summit of frame served to distract from the ugliness of the rest of his face ... unnaturally long lower teeth, the colour of maize, and no upper set to speak of, the top of his mouth or lip having become elongated to conceal his gums, like a baboon."
I could go on in this vein but Lewis is just getting into his stride and we are only on page 11.
Roger Lewis, journalist and biographer, seems to have been an ardent admirer of Burgess in his youth but over a period of 20 or so years he grew up and saw the error of his ways and thus the impression of "egotistical sublimity and vividness" became "essentially a fake", "a lazy sod" and "a complete f****ng fool". This torrent of bile is often very amusing — Lewis writes with complete conviction and much of his criticism of Burgess's writings are astute, but most of the ire is reserved for the man himself. Unfortunately, the main thrust of the book is concerned with nit-picking at "pathological liar" Burgess's memoirs: the story of Father coming home to find the two-year old "apparently, chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room" is triumphantly disproved by death certificates proving they died four days apart — interesting, but Burgess obviously didn't believe the story anyway: "I should have been howling for food"; accusations of neglect towards Lynne, Burgess's alcoholic first wife are readily admitted: "I had condoned her slow suicide".
As well as being unscholarly, some of the accusations are just plain bizarre. Much is made of the fact that Burgess was also a spy, working for MI5 and participating in CIA mind control experiments. This is on the authority of a 'retired security official' who approached Lewis and told him A Clockwork Orange is riddled with secret code names and locations. He can offer no other evidence.
The problem with this basically entertaining book is that most of the main points did not need to be made. Anyone who has ever read any of Burgess's fiction, or who remembers his television appearances would agree that he gave the impression of being exceedingly pompous. This is a man who gloried in the use of arcane words such as acroamatical and apotropaic, was self-assured enough to write fiction about the lives of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, and arrogant enough to make Joyce more readable in A Shorter Finnegan's Wake. Burgess was, as Lewis puts it "a pretentious pr*ck" but we all knew this anyway and it in no way detracts from the enjoyment of his writing. If Lewis's book is intended as a kind of satire then maybe the whole Burgess persona is too. Surely no man of his obvious intelligence could fail to realise what a ridiculous figure he cut with his swagger and verbosity. Many of his comic characters are largely based on himself, notably the flatulent poet Enderby with whom he shares many experiences and some hilariously bad verse. Can we really say that this is a man who takes himself too seriously?
Personally I will always remember Burgess fondly, with the image of a brilliant, if unworldly man trundling about Europe in his dormobile promoting his books and insulting people on television. In the end his legacy is in his fiction and Lewis may be correct in believing it will be largely forgotten. Most is long out of print and I suspect that A Clockwork Orange, which Burgess disliked, will be all that remains due to the notoriety of Stanley Kubrick's film. This is sad, but Burgess never did produce a 'great' novel and although his writing is always witty it does give the impression of being too carefully constructed, a bit too 'cold'.
If Burgess never wrote from the heart, this is certainly not true of Roger Lewis. If you can navigate round (or perhaps ignore) the voluminous footnotes then you will be rewarded with a passionate, amusing and truly caustic read.
