Blunt about Burgess
From Mr Roger Lewis Sir: Allan Massie (Letters, 4 December) asks by whom Anthony Burgess has been forgot- ten? By my publishers, for a start. Picador commissioned me to write the Magus of Monte Carlo's biography in 1996, and I never heard a word from them again until just the other day, when they asked for the advance back. 'Burgess's Jake's Thing is out of print in America,' it was unnervingly explained. Per- haps they meant Kingsley Amis's Clockwork Banana or Dame Iris's The French Lieu- tenant's Woman, the one where Mitzi Gaynor washes that man right out of her hair.
Secondly, whenever I've told people I'm working on Anthony Burgess, they think I' mean either Guy Burgess or Anthony Blunt and so talk to me about the whys and wherefores of espionage. Meantime, Andrew Lownie, who is writing a book about Guy Burgess, gets pestered by chaps lecturing him on Stanley Kubrick.
So it goes. I once published a book on Laurence Olivier. People under 40 thought he was the author of a mucky book on game- keepers, or maybe he was that queer in the 'Be prepared for Elton John.' desert played by Peter O'Toole. My publicity handmaiden at Random House had never heard of Kenneth Tynan, Buckingham to Olivier's Richard III. She thought I was going on about Kenneth Branagh.
Are these generational mistakes or are people simply plain bleeding ignorant, like the contestant on a television quiz show. recently who believed Albert Camus to be a French detective?
Roger Lewis Nunwell Priory, Bromyard, Herefordshire
Previous page
