Book Review
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, by Andrew Biswell
Picador, £20.
Anthony Burgess was born, as Andrew Biswell observes on the opening page of The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, ‘just after the pubs opened’. In this fine biography the pubs are always open and Burgess is always standing by the bar, drink in hand, giving it some old chat – the “Big Music”, as the Irish say. Meanwhile the assiduous biographer, sipping on nothing stronger than a spritzer, is trying to untangle the fact from the fiction, whispering calmly in your ear, while you continue to relish the mischief-making and verbal pyrotechnics coming from the man with the shocking hair-do in the outrageous waistcoat and ginger tweed suit.
This biography, the product of ten years’ research by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Andrew Biswell, has been eagerly awaited since the stupefying disappointment of Roger Lewis’s vicious and self-indulgent work, Anthony Burgess (2002). As Biswell says, Burgess always preferred the Big Music to the truth. Far from making another biography redundant, Lewis’s book and Burgess’s own weighty volumes of autobiography (‘two of the best novels he ever wrote,’ said one critic) make this one all the more necessary.
The big job for any biographer of Burgess is to untangle the threads of the man’s own life not only from his published fiction, but also from his own reinvention of his life; his own myth-making, spreading of rumours, suggestions and, let’s face it, some bare-faced lies. This was something that Lewis’s book spectacularly failed to do – merely mixing in more layers of innuendo and speculation with its author’s splenetic opinions on everything from Rod Steiger’s acting to the cultural worthlessness of Clive James.
It is to Biswell’s credit that he doesn’t set out to dispel the myths surrounding Burgess so much as to lay the facts alongside the fiction and ask if we can spot the join. In some cases, it is clear that Burgess was bullshitting in fine style (‘bumming his load’, as one former teaching colleague memorably puts it). Burgess’s concocted family tree, in which he claimed descent, entirely without evidence, from Bonnie Prince Charlie and one of Shakespeare’s boy-players, is dismissed as ‘a characteristic Burgessian production…largely based on family legend, rumour, speculation and wistful sectarian yearnings.’ In other cases, as with Burgess’s supposed ‘medical death sentence’ in 1959, Biswell is candid enough to admit that the process of disentanglement is impossible. We understand a little more, but the cocktail of fact and fiction remains strong and heady. And who would have it any other way?
Biswell has assembled a dazzling array of sources, from some of Burgess’s most obscure writings, student doggerel, his abandoned manuscripts and marginalia, to his few remaining relatives and schoolmates, his drinking pals, colleagues, neighbours, agents and publishers, even his cleaner and taxi driver. They provide insights into Burgess’s life, sometimes hilarious, sometimes pathetically sad, but often surprising and contradictory. While there are plenty of testimonies to his rudeness, intellectual snobbery, drunkenness and sexual boasting, others talk about his exceptional kindness, generosity and sense of humour, of a ‘tender and sensitive side’, of his being ‘rather a gent where the ladies were concerned’. You don’t get much of this from Burgess’s autobiography. Neither do you get the impression that he was a popular and successful (if unconventional) teacher, which he clearly was, or that he wrote for eight hours a day without a break (weekends included). Burgess himself claimed that if he started early enough, he was in the pub by lunchtime.
One of the most poignant of these first-hand reflections comes from Moyna Morris, a fellow teacher at Banbury with whom Burgess carried on a sort of one-sided love affair for three years, and who was the model for Hilda Connor in The Worm and the Ring. Despite Burgess’s obsessive, passionate and intimate letters, Moyna claims their physical relationship consisted of no more a single kiss under the mistletoe one Christmas, an encounter which Burgess later fictionalised in Time for a Tiger. But Burgess seems to have convinced himself that he had a full-blown affair with Moyna. ‘They’re so sad,’ she says of the letters, ‘there’s this feeling that nothing can come of it, that it’s a lost cause…He often says in the letters how enduring his love will be, how he will love me for the rest of his life.’ Nevertheless, Burgess wrote Moyna out of his life when he wrote his autobiography thirty-five years later.
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess concentrates heavily on the four great formative experiences out of which Burgess moulded most of his fiction: his Catholic apostasy, the War, his “exile” in Malaya and his disastrous first marriage to Llewela Jones (known as Lynne).
Like his hero James Joyce, Burgess was a Catholic non-believer who could never escape, nor really wished to escape, from the cultural umbrella of the Roman Church, and sought in art a replacement for the faith he had lost. Burgess’s apostasy came early, aged 17, at the Church of Holy Name on Oxford Road, ‘the priest’s dead, white face wet with the perspiration of anger’. He later felt ‘rebuked’ by this church every time he passed it on his way to lectures at Manchester University. But it is typical of Burgess that he crafted Earthly Powers, arguably his greatest work, out of his anger at reforms to a church he had left almost fifty years earlier and his irrational but tenacious belief in one of its obscure theological doctrines. This was the distinction between the Augustinian notion of Original Sin, endorsed by the Catholic hierarchy, that man is ‘naturally predisposed towards evil’ and can be redeemed only by belief in a Christian God, and the Pelegian “heresy” that man is born ‘with an inbuilt proclivity towards goodness and charity’.
Biswell argues that this ‘germ of an idea outlined almost at random by a stranger in a Gibraltar drinking den’, and attributed to a “Captain Mendoza” in A Vision of Battlements, is one of Burgess’s most important themes, the ‘engine that drives Burgess’s mature imagination’. Despite his apostasy, Burgess ‘believed it totally’: he branded the reforming Pope John XXIII, the model for Carlo Campanati in Earthy Powers, a ‘Pelegian heretic’ and ‘an emissary of the Devil’.
This is also the key to unlocking Burgess’s mixed-up politics, which blended conservatism and nostalgia with high-minded liberalism, internationalism and anti-racism. As an outsider who loathed class snobbery and most forms of authority he could never embrace the conservative establishment. But with his Augustinian outlook he could have little faith in liberal democracy or socialism. The Augustinian/Pelegian distinction also lies behind the alternative endings of A Clockwork Orange. Correspondence unearthed by Biswell reveals that Burgess dithered over whether to include the “Pelegian” final chapter, in which Alex, the teenage thug anti-hero, appears redeemed not by faith in God but by the prospect of marriage and family life. Despite his later protestations, Burgess seems to have willingly acquiesced in his American publisher’s decision to drop the chapter and it was the “Augustinian” ending, with Alex bent on resuming his career of ultraviolence, that was used in the American edition and in Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film.
As with most men of his generation, writers or otherwise, the Second World War provided much of the Big Music of Burgess’s life. He never did any actual fighting but Burgess’s wartime experiences will be familiar to anyone with a father or grandfather of similar age: war is a ridiculous situation in which to place human beings and the army ‘a fundamentally absurd institution’ filled with people who are incompetent, sadistic or both. Biswell recounts how Burgess spent his own ‘phoney war’ first in a concert party, and later as a kind of teacher-cum-journalist in the Army Educational Corps. Napoleon Symphony, Burgess’s 1974 novel loosely based around Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ symphony, is rooted in his own army experiences: the grumbles of soldiers are always the same, and Burgess’s Napoleonic troops bear a strong resemblance to the British Tommies of the 1940s.
Burgess was not the only writer of his generation to be a Catholic apostate, nor to experience the numbing pointlessness of war, nor to live the uncomfortable life of a British ex-pat in the dying embers of the British Empire. But he was the only one to be married to Lynne Wilson. One of the successes of Biswell’s biography is to make clear, in a way that Burgess himself never quite could, Lynne’s absolutely central role in his development as a professional writer.
Failed marriages are a constant theme in Burgess’s fiction (as Biswell observes, ‘only the homosexual couples are happy’) and the Wilson’s marriage was, by any standards, a spectacular failure, emotionally ruinous to both parties. Lynne was ‘a suicidal alcoholic’, an affliction hardly likely to be assuaged by living with Burgess (an astonishing 12 bottles of Gordon’s gin were delivered every week to the couple’s house in Etchingham during the 1960s), and she was wilfully unfaithful. While Burgess tried to conceal his affairs, real and imagined, from his wife, Lynne couldn’t be bothered and Burgess often enjoyed amiable relations with the men she was shagging (they could scarcely be called lovers). During his time in Malaya, Burgess once returned to the house to hear Lynne ‘loudly copulating’ with the couple’s driver. It was a typical incident, about which Burgess seems to have been completely undisturbed.
The Malayan Trilogy, Burgess’s first published fiction, was ‘a remarkably melancholy and self-critical portrait of AB’s own marriage’, with Lynne’s unhappiness projected ‘onto the bored, seedy, desperate character of Fenella Crabbe’. But it also contains ‘painfully honest disclosure of Burgess’s shortcomings as a husband’, with Burgess’s role taken by Fenella’s husband Victor. ‘There is a total lack of connection between Victor and Fenella,’ says Biswell. ‘As the words fly back and forth, it clear that nothing heartfelt, nothing of any value or significance, is being said on either side.’
Biswell writes movingly of Burgess’s ‘deep-seated horror and fear of Lynne’s illness’ and of his grief, guilt and rage at her slow death from cirrhosis. He uncovers three macabre stories written by Burgess for obscure magazines while Lynne was in the process of dying: in each a frustrated male character murders his wife. One is bluntly entitled ‘I Wish My Wife was Dead’. With Lynne’s final passing there is an almost palpable sense of relief, although Burgess is initially wracked with grief: ‘I had murdered a woman and had to be punished for it.’ But as Biswell rightly points out, there was more to this marriage than drunken mischief and illicit sex: In ‘a small civilisation of two’, Lynne was a loyal companion and very much a partner in Burgess’s literary endeavours. ‘Without Lynne Wilson, perhaps there would have been no Anthony Burgess.’
Like Lewis, Biswell skips quickly through the last 25 years of Burgess’s life in little more than 50 pages. This final part of the book is really a series of short essays (including an excellent crisp exposition on Earthly Powers) connected by anecdotes. Much of Burgess’s later work is discussed earlier in the book, at the point when the ideas behind it began to form in his mind or when the event which he developed and embroidered actually happened. Nevertheless, readers may feel they are being hurried here and get the sense that there is nothing much to say about Burgess’s life after Lynne’s death.
Biswell’s rejects Lewis’s claim that Burgess’s best work was all done by 1968, but it is true to say that the experiences which formed Burgess’s fiction mostly took place before that date. If Burgess’s work was just as interesting after 1968, his subsequent life as an itinerant and increasingly wealthy ex-pat was less so.
Real Life does not close the book on Burgess, and Biswell is already working on an extended paperback version. ‘We’re still in the process of sifting,’ as Melvyn Bragg tells the author. And Burgess is still talking loudly, banging his glass on the bar and demanding another pint. With this lucid and often highly-entertaining biography, we are good deal closer to understanding what he’s saying and a bit nearer knowing who the hell he is.
© Craig Ryan 2005
First published on www.anthonyburgess.com, November 2005.
