Anthony Burgess, best known for his novels, particularly A Clockwork Orange, is also remembered as a composer, biographer and critic, and occasional television personality. The novels were products of later life; five written in the space of twelve months when he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. He lived, however, for another thirty-three years, filled with passionate intensity, and continued to produce works at almost the same rate. He wrote scripts for radio, television and film, as well as numerous musical compositions.
Before finally settling on the pseudonym Anthony Burgess, he also wrote under his full name John Burgess Wilson, as well as under the pseudonym Joseph Kell, the name that appears in the original Mr. Enderby book Inside Mr. Enderby (1963). His novel The Wanting Seed (1962) gained attention and was quickly followed by his most famous and controversial book, the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), which Stanley Kubrick was going to film in 1971. Both the book and the movie were widely condemned. for its violence and sexual content: to the point that Kubrick withdrew the film from circulation. Burgess said that he hated the film anyway.
The years 1962/1963 were something of a turning point in British social history and Burgess fit the mood of the time. There was a backdrop of nascent violence during the Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 threatened a nuclear war between the US and the USSR. President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 by a man who had lived in the Soviet Union and was married to a Russian. (Lee Harvey Oswald had lived and worked in Minsk, the capital of present-day Belarus.) In London, Defense Minister John Profumo was found to be sharing a mistress with the Soviet naval attaché. Sex was in the air after Penguin Books’ judgment of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (written in 1927 and published in the UK in 1960).
Burgess had a long-standing interest in Russian language and literature, and visited Saint Petersburg in 1961 (known as Leningrad 1924-1990). One account claims that he observed a street gang of stilyagi (style boys) who gave him the idea for A Clockwork Orange. Burgess claimed that he and his wife were violently assaulted by a street gang in Gibraltar, causing his wife to have an abortion.
Shortly after his visit to Petersburg, the heavyweight Soviet literary magazine Noviy Mir published an extraordinary novel by an unknown writer named Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (Nobel Prize for Literature 1970). One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is set in a prison camp and is largely written in Russian slang. Its subject matter and language were as shocking to conservative Russians as Lady Chatterley was to conservative Britons.
A Clockwork Orange makes use of Russian slang, an invented nadsat (na desyat’) or adolescent language. Burgess anticipated the youth revolution of the 1960s. The main character Alex (perhaps named after Solzhenitsyn?) is a juvenile delinquent who describes scenes of violence as blinding in informal street slang.
Alex is imprisoned and undergoes a form of aversion therapy called the Ludovico Technique to cure him of the violence. When he is released, he can no longer defend himself and becomes a victim of violence. The plot is circular and reflects the historical theory of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) on which Joyce drew for Finnegan’s Wake, a book in which the last word is the first.
Burgess went on to explain these ideas in his Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965). The title is a reference to HC Earwicker, from Finnegan’s Wake, and his family dreaming The Wake in three stages corresponding to Vico’s Age of Gods, Age of Heroes, and Age of Men.
A Clockwork Orange is set at the turn of the cycle when the Age of Men has turned decadent and is returning to bestiality. Religion has been lost. Money is the only good. Technology has produced a new form of slavery and men live crowded together in cities where they isolate themselves from each other out of fear.
Earthly Powers (1980) opens in Malta with a very memorable line: “It was the evening of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the Archbishop had come to see me.” The reader receives cameos from 20th-century writers, none of whom are flattered.
His latest work was a return to his first extended writing piece. At Manchester University he had written a thesis on Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) which he revived for A Dead Man in Deptford (1993). The author of Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta was killed in what may have been a pub fight over a drinks bill or possibly murder.
Burgess was a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer at the age of 76. He continued to smoke on the grounds that the medical profession had declared him a dead man in 1960.
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