Wikipedia

Anthony Burgess

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 81.131.180.109 (talk) at 03:23, 17 April 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (February 25, 1917 – November 25, 1993), better known by his pen name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer.

Life

Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester, England to a Catholic family, and was left motherless at two years old by the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. His father played the piano in silent movie theaters. Having some Irish blood – it is not clear how much – he was raised by his aunt, and later by his stepmother, in rooms above an "off-licence" (liquor store) and pub. He was educated at Bishop Bilsborrow school in Moss Side, at Xaverian College, and at the University of Manchester (graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, 2nd class honours, in English language and literature).

In 1940 Burgess began a six-year stint with the military, becoming a sergeant in the British Army educational corps, being stationed for a period in Gibraltar. He was an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education and a lecturer in speech and drama. Later he taught English literature, spending some years after World War II working at the highly regarded Banbury Grammar School, Oxfordshire (see the novel "The Worm and the Ring").

In 1954 Burgess and his first wife, the Welsh-born Lynn, left for Malaya (now Malaysia), where he was a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service. He was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar in Perak, teaching at the Malay College ("the Eton of the East"). In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a "housemaster" in charge of junior students who were housed at the building formerly occupied by the British Resident in Perak. This building had gained notoreity during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the "kempetei" (Japanese secret police). As his novels and autobiography document, the late 1950's were the time of the communist insurgency, a period known as "the Malayan emergency" when planters and members of the British community – not to mention many innocent Malays, Chinese and Tamils – were subject to frequent terrorist attack. Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, a dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife (they had an apartment in the building mentioned above), he was posted to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu in Kelantan, near the Siamese border. He attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written (the language was then rendered in Arabic script). During his Malayan years he spent much of his free time producing, and getting published, Time For A Tiger, "The Enemy in the Blanket" and "Beds in the East". These became known as "The Malayan Trilogy".

After some leave in the home country, Burgess took up a further eastern post, this time in Brunei, then part of British North Borneo. There he sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled "Devil of a State". But before long he had "collapsed" in a classroom. He is thought at this time to have been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time. However, this is disputed. Some accounts have him suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking, of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught" because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status. Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, he commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen."

Burgess was repatriated and spent some time in a London hospital undergoing cerebral tests which, as far as we can make out, proved negative. On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father, he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer. The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast; in a modest but charming semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham (just down the road from the residence in Burwash once occupied by Rudyard Kipling); and in a terraced town house in Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London.

Within a decade Burgess was once again living outside England, but in much grander accommodation (at his death he was to leave a considerable Europewide property portfolio). He lived in Malta, in Rome and finally in Monaco. After Lynn's death (their union was childless) he had remarried, to Liana, an Italian student and researcher, adopting the latter's son from a previous relationship. A lifelong heavy smoker, he returned to England to die of lung cancer in 1993.

Work

In a prolific career he published over 50 books covering a wide range of subject matter, including mainstream fiction such as the Enderby trilogy (about a reclusive poet), dystopian science fiction such as The Wanting Seed, and a guide to James Joyce, Here Comes Everybody.

His most famous work (or notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a controversial film adaptation) was the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife was assaulted by US army deserters, the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music that, besides violence, had been his other only pleasure in life.

Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic world-view remained strong in his work all his life - notably in the discussion of free-will in A Clockwork Orange and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Church due to what can be understood as Satanic influence in his novel Earthly Powers (1980).

Burgess had a considerable interest in music, and he composed regularly throughout his life. His music is infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio, including a musical based on James Joyce's Ulysses called The Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982). His Symphony No. 3 was premiered by the University of Iowa orchestra in 1975. He even modelled the structure of one of his novels, The Napoleon Symphony (1974), upon Beethoven's Eroica symphony.

His fluency in languages (he could speak Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian) was reflected in the invented teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (called Nadsat) and in the film Quest for Fire (1981), for which Burgess invented an entire prehistoric language for the characters to speak.

Burgess's literary and musical papers are currently archived in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bibliography

Fiction

Nonfiction

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Anthony Burgess.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anthony_Burgess&oldid=12416645"