Books
More than a bloody fool. Michael Ratcliffe on a "malevolent assault" on a maverick talent
Published 18 November 2002
Anthony Burgess
Roger Lewis Faber and Faber, 434pp, £20
ISBN 0571204929
In the course of this malevolent assault on the reputation and character of Anthony Burgess, the writer describes him as a charlatan, a puritan, "a bloody fool", "a lazy sod", and a fake. "Shifty", "shitty", boasting, "berserk" . . . the charges roll on. We are in a morals court, but the case for the prosecution is conducted with a violence variously suggesting a pub brawl, an auto-da-fe, and a parrot whose nightcloth has gone missing. A miasma of puritanical disapproval hangs over the entire proceedings: Burgess is not only a bad writer but a dishonourable man. He put people he knew into his novels and made them do things they hadn't actually done.
Come the hour, come the biographer. The age of envy, prurience and the Mail on Sunday has brought forth Roger Lewis, who combines the disciplines of nanny and thug. Nanny is judgemental, the thug thumps. Lewis - a favoured pupil of Richard Ellmann, the literary critic; a former magazine showbiz profiler; and fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford - is a hybrid who has established himself as a "controversial" biographer of the fairly famous and seriously screwed - Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and Charles Hawtrey, the depressive Carry On elf. The choice of subjects - Lewis calls them his "characters" - results in plenty of coverage and maximum grief to the survivors. The dead always lose out because statements reach beyond proof. If it can be suggested that Burgess may possibly have had sex with 12-year-old girls in Malaya, the MoS will take 1,500 words from Lewis (even though the possibility was raised in the writer's own memoirs 15 years ago); if he didn't, then Burgess is a pathological show-off and liar - and probably impotent, too.
Lewis can't leave a bad idea alone. "If he'd had a daughter," he muses, during Burgess's years of teaching teenagers at Banbury Grammar School, "would he have pounced on her? An impossible speculation - who can say?" (p167). Who indeed, so why ask? But by page 339, mere wimpish speculation is forgotten, and Lewis's mind made up: "We must be glad that Liana arrived with a boy and not a girl. Burgess would have gone to prison." Punto. Liana Macellari was Burgess's second wife and ferocious protector. She is now his widow. The boy was Paolo-Andrea, later Andrew, who died earlier this year. Lewis here declares categorically that he was not Burgess's biological son: he has found the birth certificate but no trace of the man named thereon. Did "Roy Lionel Halliday" ever exist? He sounds like a character out of Nabokov.
There are plenty of questions worth asking in a first biography of Anthony Burgess, such as how on earth did he write so much and read so fast? How close are the Enderby novels to his own life? In what ways is he unique/ridiculous/great? But Lewis whips up a muddying nightmare of gossip and litcrit in which the life often seems to stand in for the work and the work for the life, the last thing a biographer of Burgess - always revealing, always concealing - should do. There are mysteries enough, and Lewis creates more. He says Burgess worked for MI5, and must have been well paid for it, but he offers no proof. A Curzon Street spook tells him that parts of A Clockwork Orange were written by the CIA, and that the college pennants on Alex's wall encrypt the HQ location of something called the psychotronic warfare technology. A Burgessian joke? If so, it is told with a hand far heavier than would have been used by the Mercutian fantasist himself.
There are two kinds of failure in this book: critical and tonal. The critical failure is that Lewis damns Burgess for all his well-known weaknesses: over-simplified characters and relationships, sometimes detached emotions and awkward sex scenes. He almost never connects with the elegist, superb communicator and great comic novelist Burgess actually was: buoyant, playful, furious, a romancer of words for whom language itself becomes a dynamic character. I can't remember a time when the compulsively over-productive Burgess was not thought of by the British literary and media establishment as more ambitious and curious than any English writer needed to be, and to these crimes of ambition and curiosity Lewis now adds the supplementary charge of failing to acknowledge Jeffrey Bernard on Old Compton Street.You can't get more shitty than that.
Lewis's tonal failure is one of a combined anger and facetiousness that bar him from a sustained, lucid analysis of anything. So determined is he to get his man that he himself displays several of the failings thrown at the accused: puritanism, resentment, inability to spot a joke, a closed mind.
That he would write a life of Burgess was first mooted by Ellmann and the Burgesses nearly 20 years ago, when Lewis was a big fan. He wrote an excellent obituary for the Independent in 1993. What went wrong? Critics change their minds, but Lewis does so like someone ending a long affair: "He knew you weren't his equal, and I find this an insult." (But you weren't his equal, dear. None of us was. There's no cause to feel insulted.)
And the footnotes! Far from supporting and documenting what is being said, the footnotes offer a derailment of the narrative in two particular ways. These are: a babbling discursiveness - on beds, oranges, espionage, Whitman, Leningrad, Burt Lancaster, Bulwer Lytton, The Lady Vanishes, people called Wilson in the DNB - and plain old mugging. Among the mugged are Jorge Luis Borges, Ava Gardner, V S Naipaul, Laurence Durrell and Oliver Reed. The two paragraphs I sent to Lewis, at his request, on Burgess at the Observer in the early Nineties, are reprinted in full, albeit as another example of some poor fool taken in by the preposterous pontificator. (Others include Ellmann, Nigel Lawson, colleagues and pupils from Banbury, and an American sculptor who knew the Burgesses outside Rome.)
And still he's not done. Among three appendices is one last ponderous attempt to prove that Burgess was a "genuine fake" because he wrote a novella about the dying John Keats without being able to write like Keats. (Huh?)The truth is simpler: Abba Abba (1977) is a tender and loving sketch of artists braving mortality with word-spinning in High Romantic Rome. It is clever, to be sure, but full of heart and never cold. It may be read purely for pleasure.
Faber should be ashamed of themselves. There is small evidence of serious editing, no snipping the endless repetitions, no attention to grammatical errors, no one on hand keeping Lewis to the point. Instead, there is every sign that publisher and author were keen only to publish before the competition - Andrew Biswell, at Picador - whatever the cost. They've succeeded.
"Frankly," writes Nanny Lewis crisply, in a footnote, at one point on a Burgess book for children, "it's a fucking farrago." Yeah, well.
Michael Ratcliffe is a former literary editor of the Observer
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