Books
Out of gear. George Walden on a writer whose sympathies were too broad to be constrained by the cliquishness of English life
Published 14 November 2005
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess
Andrew Biswell Picador, 434pp, £20
ISBN 0330481703
Those who never rated Anthony Burgess in the first place will be unsurprised to learn that, since his death in 1993, no one has ventured to issue a collected edition of his works, that a mere handful of his novels is in print, or that his poetry is unread and his music unperformed. Similarly unmoving will be the thought that it is improbable that we shall see his like again. A Manchester tobacconist's son today would not easily secure a grammar-school education, still less have his brain cells prematurely engorged with antique literary knowledge. Any musical promise would be unlikely to be stimulated by visits to the Halle orchestra at the age of 12 (Burgess's father tinkered at the piano), or by a Reithian BBC. Nor would a contemporary lapsed Catholic retain his interest in religion. Any gift of tongues of the sort that made Burgess a kind of out-of-control Nabokov who dreamt up Nadsat, the Anglo-Russian slang in A Clockwork Orange, would not be nurtured by years of teaching in multilingual colonial Malaya. Nor would it any longer be acceptable for a major literary figure (especially one from modest origins) to have no pronounced (and predictable) political stance.
So what would have become of a present-day John Burgess Wilson? Deprived of literary, intellectual, musical and transcendental stimuli, rather than be labelled a "mardarse" (Mancunian for sulky or solitary), as he was, it is a fair bet that the occasional performer at the pub piano and inventor of crapulously entertaining lyrics would have been sucked into the circumambient culture and found an outlet for his talents as a pop composer. Which would be ironic, because the real Burgess once devised a hellish torture for pop fans: that their teeth be hollowed to the nerve and tiny transistors inserted, blaring 32 radio stations endlessly into their sinuses, to ensure they got their satisfaction 24/7, through all eternity.
To describe him as a one-off product of his time would be a contradiction, but then a bigger contradiction than Burgess would be difficult to imagine. No modern writer's ass has been so terminally out of gear. How the drunken polymath got his words on to the page or his notes between the staves is a miracle of will over the elements, and of mind over alcoholic vapours. Should his concentration waver, three Dexedrines washed down with a pint of gin and tonic, plus a couple more smokes (he averaged 80 a day), would get him pounding his typewriter again.
What Andrew Biswell has done in this truly excellent biography is to show that almost everything to do with Burgess - his family, his first wife Lynne, his finances, his clothes, his religion and a goodly chunk of his work - was a more or less disastrous, more or less brilliant muddle. The same applies to his memory: his mind was so soused in knowledge heightened by invention that he tended to mislay the facts about who he was. He didn't just make himself up as he went along; he made up a fair bit of his past as well. Consequently, his life became a chaotic docu-drama to which the judicious Biswell brings order of a sort - though, our biographer being a wise and discerning fellow, not too much.
Burgess has been described as a busker, an unkind judgement of his work, perhaps, but not of his personality - though buskers at least bring in the coppers, whereas before Burgess hit the big money his poverty (some of it due to late recognition, some of it his own fault) was awesome. Rarely has a man of so many parts earned so very little or drunk so very much. With the Malayan trilogy and other novels under his belt, he would save up for train tickets to London, a place too grand for him to do more than visit from his squalid quarters in the Sussex village where he taught. In the capital, the master would appear in raggedy clothes topped off with a pudding-bowl haircut effected by his wife, to save pennies that were better spent on booze.
And invariably it was doubles for two. Biswell's account of Burgess's marriage to Lynne is at once brutally and delicately done. The facts are relentlessly catalogued: how she breakfasted on G and Ts, how she would start fist fights in the street or, out of her mind with drink and associated lust, force their house guests - the classicist Peter Green among them - to lie with her. Though they were in a semi-permanent state of warfare or drunken collapse, their partnership endured for many a year. Why? Because Lynne suited him. An educated woman who acted as his literary assistant, she cared for him domestically and provided additional income (her family were comfortable, and she worked off and on) as well as a perverse intellectual companionship. "Perhaps without Lynne Wilson", Biswell writes, "there would have been no Anthony Burgess." Sometimes he wished her dead, and felt guilty about it, though murmurings about homoeroticism (he banged on a bit about it in his work, visited Tangier and got to know William Burroughs and his crew) should not detain us, and do not detain his biographer long.
Biswell, an English lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, is to be commended for many things. Chief among them are his astute appreciations of Burgess's work and his refusal to succumb to a provincial perspective by puffing the Mancunian made good beyond his already remarkable merits. Equally, he declines to "expose" his subject. Taking the lid off Burgess is a waste of time, if only because anything the debunkers can do was done better by the artist himself.
It is a measure of Burgess's eclecticism that the heroes he hoped to emulate were James Joyce and Somerset Maugham: Joyce for his explosive originality (aspired to by Burgess in Earthly Powers), Maugham for his cosmopolitanism (the Malayan trilogy). In the event, with the exception of A Clockwork Orange, the most lasting things he did were the most naturalistic: the Malayan books and his splendidly unreliable memoir Little Wilson and Big God (his best novel, it has been said). His fictional themes (murder, violence, deviant sex) could be excessively exotic and overwrought, and the agglutinated wordplay of his prose sometimes heavy-going. But when they shot out sharp and clear, the fireworks were spectacular. The bawdiness could also be tiresome, but then he had a public to serve: the puritanical Brits endlessly begging to have their sensibilities buggered.
Unlike his fellow emigre Graham Greene, whose antinomian posturings would have been a perfect fit in English literary society, the only real place for Burgess was abroad. So that was where he spent much of his later life, not simply because of Labour's 90 per cent super- tax, or because his new wife, Liana, was Italian. He was also a refugee from a writerly establishment whose pumped-up celebrities (Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis) never accepted him as their equal, largely because he was in so many ways their superior. Like D H Lawrence, his mind and his sympathies were too broad to be constrained by paro- chial political sentiment, or the strangulating cliquishness of English life.
Biswell rightly makes much of Burgess's residual religion, notably his horror of Pelagianism, the English heresy that denied original sin and thereby opened the door to moral and social progress, a mindset responsible in his eyes for the perkily sentimental optimism of English socialism, not to speak of the larger disasters of Soviet Russia and the United States. His observation that English Catholics took their faith more seriously than the French or Italians, and were therefore unduly obsessed with sin, could be applied to himself: the result was a preoccupation in his work with vice and evil, made palatable by a Rabelaisian enjoyment of profanity and sexual grotesquerie.
Without a trace of mawkishness, Biswell manages to convey his uniquely engaging personality. I met him only a couple of times, but the many who knew him better agree that the shambolic figure in the food-stained clothes was a genial cove (somehow the dated expression fits), a good talker and a generous reviewer. As a writer he fed the world into his linguistic scrambler before regurgitating it in a vast uneven flow. Today Burgess is often seen as a spent force in literary terms. But what a force.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
