He came to the tropics in 1954 as a teacher and a former military man named John Wilson and returned to the UK as Anthony Burgess. A late bloomer, he was just shy of 40 when his first novel was published, after which he quickly began to make up for lost time. He was startlingly prolific, committed to writing 1,000 words a day, seven days a week, completing the pages in the morning so he could head to the pub, and turning out 33 novels in 36 years.Among these was his hefty 1980 masterpiece Earthly Powers, a satirical reworking of the Arthur Hailey “blockbuster” novels, which was nominated for the Booker, but lost out to William Golding’s Rites of Passage. There was also vast quantities of journalism, musical composition, teaching, linguistic studies (which included devising the language for the film Quest for Fire), Joyce scholarship, broadcasting, and numerous other labours.He often related an incredible story about how he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and had only a year left to live. Hoping to leave behind a reasonable legacy for his family, he banged out novel after novel on his typewriter, allegedly writing The Doctor is Sick in six weeks (according to his amusing two-part Confessions). When his year was up, he was summoned by a neurologist and as he explained in You’ve Had Your Time, “My failure to turn up seems to have been translated into a negative report from the laboratory, for I received a letter from Sir Alexander Abercrombie informing me that the protein content of my spinal liquor had gone down dramatically and I was now kindly allowed to live.”
This personal narrative sounds a bit fishy but, if even half-true or outright false (as suggested by recent biographies), it remains as delightfully picaresque as many of his novels, as do the bold claims that he bedded hundreds of women. As his second wife Liana, who passed away last December explained, “I fell in love with the work. Anthony was never a good-looking man.” But he did die a millionaire, courtesy of some adept tax dodging and the skillful business negotiations of the much-feared Liana. (Interestingly, the copyright of his large essay collection, Homage to QWERT YUIOP, is in Liana’s name.)
Posthumous acclaim, however, has not been much in evidence since Burgess’s death in 1993. While he garnered a slot on a recent list of the 50 greatest postwar writers (bested by the likes of Ian Fleming) and is remembered for A Clockwork Orange, Burgess currently occupies the outer fringes of recent literary memory. … more>>
05/02/2008...2:08 pm
Burgess’s powers are still strong
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