(Dr. Edwin Spindrift has been sent home from Burma with a ...)
Dr. Edwin Spindrift has been sent home from Burma with a brain tumor. Closer to words than to people, his sense of reality is further altered by his condition. When he escapes from the hospital the night before his surgery, things and people he hardly knew existed outside of his dictionaries swoop down on him as he careens through adventures in nighttime London.
(In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, wher...)
In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom.
(A sharply written satire, Honey for the Bears sends an un...)
A sharply written satire, Honey for the Bears sends an unassuming antiques dealer, Paul Hussey, to Russia to do one final deal on the black market as a favor for a dead friend's wife.
(Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in...)
Anthony Burgess draws on his love of music and history in this novel he called “elephantine fun” to write. A grand and affectionate tragicomic symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte that teases and reweaves Napoleon’s life into a pattern borrowed―in liberty, equality, and fraternity―from Beethoven’s Third “Eroica” Symphony, in this rich, exciting, bawdy, and funny novel Anthony Burgess has pulled out all the stops for a virtuoso performance that is literary, historical, and musical.
(In this unflinching portrait, Anthony Burgess explores He...)
In this unflinching portrait, Anthony Burgess explores Hemingway's fatal contradictions: his arrogance and self-doubt, his machismo and vulnerability. He reveals a man who was as much a creation as his books yet who, even at his worst, reminds us that to engage literature one has first to engage life.
(Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; ...)
Kenneth Toomey is an eminent novelist of dubious talent; Don Carlo Campanati is a man of God, a shrewd manipulator who rises through the Vatican to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood. These two men are linked not only by family ties but by a common understanding of mankind's frailties. In this epic masterpiece, Anthony Burgess plumbs the depths of the essence of power and the lengths men will go for it.
(A futuristic account of the world's end is composed of th...)
A futuristic account of the world's end is composed of three narrative strands presented as if viewed simultaneously, featuring historical and fictional figures, and shifting from New York, to Vienna, to outer space
(Enderby is a poet, social critic and Catholic. He may be ...)
Enderby is a poet, social critic and Catholic. He may be found hiding in the lavatory where much of his best work is composed, or perhaps in Rome, brainwashed into respectability by a glamorous wife, aftershave and the dolce vita. Whether he is pursuing revenge and inspiration in Morocco, expounding on his notorious sex film on a TV chat show, or writing a hit musical based on the life and work of Shakespeare, Enderby emerges triumphant.
Anthony Burgess was a prolific British writer, who produced a large number of novels, plays, biographies, screenplays, criticism, and articles. His best-known novel is a dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was also an outstanding composer of over 250 musical works. He created classical pieces and scores for television, film, and theater.
Background
John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born on February 25, 1917, in Manchester, United Kingdom to a lower-middle-class family of Joseph and Elizabeth Wilson. His mother and sister died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 when Anthony was only a year old, thus the boy was raised by his maternal aunt, Ann Bromley. Burgess reconciled with his father when the latter married for the second time in 1922. Joseph Burgess established a successful tobacconist and off-license business with four properties, but at the time of his death in 1938, he left no inheritance to Anthony. Burgess’ stepmother died two years after her husband.
Education
Burgess attended St. Edmund's Elementary School, Bishop Bilsborrow School and Xaverian College. During this time Anthony began demonstrating talent as a writer, artist, and musician. He studied the violin and taught himself piano as well as musical notation at the age of about 14, hoping to study music at university. His first symphony was composed at the age of 18. But when the music department at the Victoria University of Manchester (now the University of Manchester) turned down his application because of poor grades in physics, he began studying English language and literature there, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts.
Later in life Burgess took honorary degrees from St Andrews, Birmingham and Manchester universities.
In 1940, Burgess spent six weeks as an army novice in Eskbank before he was enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was very unpopular during this time and was resented by many of his peers. In 1942, however, despite all the antipathy, he was promoted as a sergeant and transferred to the Army Educational Corps.
From 1943 to 1946 he was a training college lecturer in speech and drama on Gibraltar. During this period he composed a Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor (1945), which is his earliest surviving musical work.
Afterwards he held a variety of teaching positions including member of the Central Advisory Council for Adult Education in the Armed Forces, Birmingham, 1946-1948, teacher of phonetics, drama, and literature for the Ministry of Education, Preston, Lancashire, 1948-1950, and teacher of literature, phonetics, Spanish, and music, Banbury Grammar School (now Wykham Park Academy), Oxfordshire, 1950-1954.
In 1954 he joined the Colonial Service as a lecturer in English in Malaya, initially stationed at Kuala Kangsar in Perak. Here he taught at the Malay College (now Malay College Kuala Kangsar – MCKK), modeled on English public school lines. A variety of the music he wrote there was influenced by the country, notably Sinfoni Melayu for orchestra and brass band, which included cries of Merdeka (independence) from the audience.
In 1957 Burgess became an educational officer and English language specialist, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. It was as an observer of these politically and socially complex cultures that Burgess began his writing career. His first published novels, Time for a Tiger (1956), Enemy in the Blanket (1958), and Beds in the East (1959) are set in Malaya. Devil of a State (1961) is set in Borneo. He took the name Anthony Burgess because he thought his superiors would disapprove of his writing fiction.
In 1959 Burgess was ill and returned to England. He was told he probably had a brain tumor and would survive only a year. Luckily, this was a misdiagnosis. But the prospect of death prompted him to turn fulltime to writing, and during this "terminal year" he completed The Doctor Is Sick, Inside Mr. Enderby, The Wanting Seed and One Hand Clapping.
The five novels that Burgess completed during his "terminal year" proved a fitting overview of themes he would return to frequently throughout his career. Once recovered from his misdiagnosed illness, Burgess continued writing novels. Among the most acclaimed were three that followed F.X. Enderby, a poet misplaced in society who was introduced in 1963's Inside Mr. Enderby. Those three books were Enderby Outside (1968), The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End (1974), and Enderby's Dark Lady (1984). When Enderby died in The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End, readers were so dismayed that the author "resurrected" him in Enderby's Dark Lady.
Other of Burgess' well-regarded works include Nothing Like the Sun (1964), a story about William Shakespeare, and Napoleon Symphony (1974), a fictional biography of Napoleon structured to follow the form of Beethoven's Eroica. Burgess' most famous, though not his favorite, novel was A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a movie. Its violent anti-hero, Alex, is subdued when he undergoes behavior modification treatment administered by the state. The novel haunted Burgess throughout his life because his publisher, W.W. Norton, dropped a final chapter in which Alex remained reformed. Instead, the book was published with Alex returning to a life of crime, and when Stanley Kubrick made the film version of the novel in 1971, he adhered to the publisher's ending.
Burgess also published other books during this time, including The Novel Now (1967), Shakespeare (1970), and two studies of James Joyce: ReJoyce (1965) and Joysprick (1973).
Discontent with life in England, and particularly with excessive taxation, Burgess and his second wife, Liliana Macelli, moved with their son to Malta and then lived in Italy and Monaco. Burgess visited the United States and taught at the University of North Carolina (1969), Princeton (1970), City College, New York (1972), the University of Iowa (1975) and the University at Buffalo (1976).
Eventually he settled in Monaco in 1976, where he was active in the local community, becoming a co-founder in 1984 of the Princess Grace Irish Library, a centre for Irish cultural studies.
Burgess published two volumes of memoirs, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You've Had Your Time (1990). While both volumes were generally well-received by critics, some complained that they spent too much time on abstract thought, and not enough on the author's life.
In addition to over 30 novels, Burgess produced biographies, plays, screenplays, criticism, and articles. His translation of Cyrano de Bergerac had a successful run at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, in 1971 and on Broadway in 1984. For television he wrote Jesus of Nazareth, based on his novel Man of Nazareth (1979), and AD. Even in 1993, when he was suffering from a long illness, Burgess published two works: Dead Man in Deptford and A Mouthful of Air: Languages, Languages—Especially English. He was also a regular contributor to periodicals, such as Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review.
Burgess also composed more than 200 musical works, stimulated in this activity by the 1975 performance of his Symphony in C by the University of Iowa. He wrote the lyrics for the award-winning Broadway musical Cyrano. His ballet suite about the life of William Shakespeare, Mr WS, was broadcast on BBC radio.
Burgess wrote a song cycle based on his own poems, The Brides of Enderby, along with musical settings of texts by T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Blooms of Dublin, his musical adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, was broadcast on BBC radio in 1982. He also provided new libretti for Scottish Opera’s Glasgow production of Oberon in 1985 (revived in Venice in 1987), and for the English National Opera’s 1986 production of Carmen.
Anthony Burgess’ reputation rests on his exclusive, futuristic works and his repertoire of music. During his lifetime, he produced over thirty novels and indulged in the studies of language, films, opera librettos and Shakespeare. Apart from writing his own works, he produced several translations of the works of a number of other authors in languages including Russian, Indonesian, Gaelic, Swedish and French. Some of his best-known works include ‘A Clockwork Orange’, ‘Earthly Powers’, ‘The Right to an Answer’ and ‘One Hand Clapping’. He was honored with a number of accolades and was also an inductee of the Royal Society of Literature.
Anthony Burgess was raised in an Irish Catholic family. Ironically, he lost his faith at Xaverian but considered himself "a lapsed Catholic," never completely free of his background.
Politics
Burgess was a Conservative and Monarchist, harbouring a distaste for all republics. He believed that socialism for the most part was "ridiculous".
Views
Burgess was acutely sensitive to evil in modern life. He called himself a "Manichee," a believer in the duality, the inter-connection of good and evil, of reality. Typically, his protagonists represent relatively decent people caught in the conflicts and absurdities of their environments. They confront chaos, as in the Malayan trilogy, espionage, as in Tremor of Intent (1966), and authoritarian institutions, as in The Wanting Seed, A Clockwork Orange, and Honey for the Bears (1963). Burgess distrusted government. The socialized state which "cures" Alex destroys his free will. Other novels, such as the Enderby books, The Right to an Answer (1960), One Hand Clapping (1961), and Beard's Roman Women (1976)—about Hollywood—satirized materialism, corruption, and vacuousness in contemporary culture.
People, too, are seen as evil. One of Burgess' interests was the conflict between Pelagias, who believed man is ultimately perfectible, and Augustine, who believed man is irredeemably sinful. In novels such as Earthly Powers (1980), Augustine generally prevails. There are characters, however, who learn and grow and artistic ones who create order from chaos and suggest hope.
Burgess' comic style softened his pessimism. Characters lurch from outlandish adventure to adventure. Farcical figures, surreal coincidences, and inventive allusions to history and fiction supplement his novels. Language—puns, poetic images, distorted syntax—distance one from the gloom. Nothing Like the Sun was written in Elizabethan style. For A Clockwork Orange Burgess invented a dialect. Some books are considered more intellectually than emotionally stimulating, rendering illustrations of theses and complicated reading puzzles. Consequently, Burgess' vitality and originality were widely admired.
Quotations:
"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone."
"Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist."
"Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?"
"We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it."
"When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."
"The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities."
"To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world."
"But what I do I do because I like to do."
"I see what is right and approve, but I do what is wrong."
"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen."
"Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man."
"Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?"
Membership
Anthony Burgess was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Personality
Burgess was a brilliant polymath, a composer, and a man for whom chaos and creativity, fact and fiction, existed in a complex and unique balance.
Quotes from others about the person
"Nothing like the sun and the Enderby books prove that Burgess is as clever as he seems. His utopian satires, of which 1985 is yet another, mainly just seem clever. At a generous estimate there are half a dozen ideas in each of them." - Clive James
"...a creation of Kubrick....a lesser English novelist until Kubrick came along with that film....the book was more or less forgotten until Kubrick made the film....Thanks to the film [Burgess was] transformed into a personality." - James B. Hemesath
"Though in life Anthony Burgess was amiable, generous and far less self-loving than most writers, I have been disturbed, in the last few years, to read in the press that he did not think himself sufficiently admired by the literary world. It is true, of course, that he had the good fortune not to be hit, as it were, by the Swedes, but surely he was much admired and appreciated by the appreciated and admired." - Gore Vidal
"He has become the most prolific as well as most gifted and versatile novelist of his generation. Not one member of it approaches his fluency, energy, inventiveness, effrontery....For sheer intelligence, learning, inventiveness, imaginative capacity, writer's professional cunning - no English novelist comes near him." - Martin Seymour-Smith
"Burgess's tarty charlatanry was central to his genius." - Jonathan Meades
"Anthony Burgess had an ego as big as Hyde Park." - Dave Wood
Interests
Writers
Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Norman Mailer, L. P. Hartley, Russel Hoban
Connections
Burgess married twice. In 1942 he married his first wife, Llewela (Lynne) Jones, in Bournemouth. She died of pscerosis of the liver as a result of severe alcoholism in 1968. Burgess then married Liliana Macelli, a linguist. At the time he was having an affair with Liana, he was still married to Lynne. Liana had given birth to their son Paolo four years before Llewela's birth.
Father:
Joseph Wilson
Joseph Wilson died on April 18, 1938 from cardiac failure, pleurisy, and influenza at the age of 55, leaving no inheritance to his son despite his apparent business success.
Mother:
Elizabeth Burgess
Elizabeth Burgess, was a singer and dancer on the music-hall stage in Glasgow and Manchester.
Stepmother:
Margaret Dwyer
Sister:
Muriel Wilson
Muriel was Anthony's only sister. She died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
ex-wife:
Llewela (Lynne) Isherwood Jones
Burgess and Lynne Jones were married at the Register Office in Bournemouth on 28 January 1942 while he was visiting her on leave from the army. This first marriage was followed by two more: a Welsh Protestant wedding in the winter of 1942 to satisfy Lynne's parents, and a Manchester Catholic ceremony the following summer to keep the peace with Burgess's remaining relations.
Wife:
Liana Burgess
Liana Burgess (born Liliana Macellari, September 25, 1929 – December 3, 2007) was an Italian translator and literary agent. Macellari played an important role in Burgess's later literary career, negotiating film rights and acting as his European literary agent, and translating his novels.
Anthony Burgess: A Biography
Tracking Burgess from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Roger Lewis assesses Burgess's struggles and uncovers the web of truth and illusion about the writer's famous antic disposition.
