A talent to abuse
Philip Hensher
ANTHONY BURGESS by Roger Lewis Faber, #.20, pp. 418, ISBN 0571204929 Blimey. It's some time since I read a book so exhilaratingly lacking in any sense of human charity as this one, but it's worth remembering that vulgar abuse in the guise of biography has a long and distinguished history in English. The deathless classic of the genre is J. T. Smith's sublime life of the sculptor Nollekens — the poor man spent years of his life sucking up to the miserly old Regency git, only to find when his will was read that he'd been left £50 out of an estate of £200.000. Smith's unbelievably funny biography of his betrayer is an act of revenge on the grand scale. For the moment, literary abuse seems to have dropped a bit out of fashion, but this is a volume of flyting, to use the technical term, to rival any grumpy 15th-century Scotsman. It is a total corker.
The book takes care to tell its own story. In brief, it seems that Roger Lewis was once a fully paid-up fan of Anthony Burgess. In the course of writing this book, and researching more and more deeply into the novelist's life, his enchantment first waned, then turned to something not far from violent contempt and loathing. It is not an unfamiliar experience for biographers, to lose their initial interest in their subjects. Most put a brave face on it, and carry on. A very few — Ian Hamilton's admirable, ill-fated life of Salinger comes to mind — admit in passing that the experience has killed the writer for their own private enjoyment. This is a long, angry admission of love betrayed.
The milk of human kindness does not flow freely from Lewis. Burgess is first introduced via a casual, yelping response from John Wain, hearing that Burgess is on his way — 'Oh God! Oh Christ! Oh no! I'll leave you to it. then.' The celebrated coiffure is masochistically described:
The yellowish-white powdery strands were coiled on his scalp Like Bram Stoker's Dracula's peruke. What does it say about a man that he could go around like that? Though he was a king of the comb-over, no professional barber can be blamed for this [This biographer drew the line at traipsing around the Mediterranean to see if any coiffeur had a black and white 8x 10" of Anthony Burgess in the window and to ask if it was good for business.]
Burgess's 'fanatic pedantry has the quality of stage scenery'. In youth, he is 'straightforwardly and off-puttingly cocksure': in maturity, invited onto Call My Bluff. 'he was a disaster', feigning amazement that his opponents didn't know what `acroarnatical' meant.
On it goes. unstoppably. The book is being presented as a biography, but in no way could it be read as such. You could extract the general outlines of Burgess's life from the river of bile, but that is not the point of it. Rather, it looks like an extended and hostile commentary on Burgess's two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time, pointing out the errors, the selfdelusions, and drawing copious examples from Burgess's other writings and public life. I look forward to a conventional biog raphy, but this is not it. Lewis's vitriol is not reserved exclusively for Burgess. Richard Ellman's household arrangements are viciously skewered, and poor old Clive James comes in for it — 'a prat', tout court. But Burgess is at the centre of it, and a vast quantity of excrement is emptied over him, his pretensions, his writing, his universally derided music, without any respite from beginning to end. It is exhilarating, but — my God .. .
In a way, I understand where Lewis is coming from, as Californians say. Certainly, like him, I find that a youthful awe at Burgess's ingenuity has waned with time, and a degree of disillusionment has set in. There is no real need to explain at enormous length what exactly is wrong with Burgess; a single example will do. He once wrote a novel called ABBA ABBA. It is called that for various reasons, none of which, alas, has anything to do with the Swedish megastars. In the first place, it is the conventional description of the rhyming scheme of the octave of one sort of sonnet (the novel is partly about Keats). In the second place, it means 'Father, Father' in Aramaic and is thus what Jesus called on the cross. In the third place there is something going on here about Anthony Burgess, B A. Possibly. Now, all this is undoubtedly highly ingenious, but it does not get the reader very far. The novel itself, alas, is no good at all.
The rigid, external virtuosity is everywhere in Burgess, and often presents a real problem to the reader. A Clockwork Orange is exactly that, clockwork; the moral mechanism controls everything so closely that he might as well have written QED after the last page. In summary, it goes 'Alex is a thug. Alex also likes Beethoven. If you take away his freedom to be a thug, then you also take away his freedom to like Beethoven. If you give him back his freedom to like Beethoven, then he may choose not to be a thug. QED.' It is ultimately desiccated. Napoleon Symphony is quite an interesting idea — to write the life of Napoleon in accordance with the structures of the Eroica symphony — but it is enervatingly hard work to read, and (one suspects) was rather too easy to write, The examples could be multiplied endlessly, but to no purpose. It is a constant problem from beginning to end.
There is, too, the autodidact's tone of showing off, which is consistently unattractive, and not very convincing if you happen to know what he is talking about. Burgess certainly knew a good deal about some things, but I doubt that he could really cut it in the company of professional philolo gists or musicologists, two of his favourite subjects; those displays of learning are really performances intended to dazzle and not to enlighten. Lewis goes too far, and his abuse is sometimes oddly random: 'Burgess was activated by concealment and corruption, rage and bombast, and Malaya suited his disturbed equilibrium.' But there is a good deal of truth in what he says.
Burgess, however, doesn't deserve this. Along with everything that can be said against him, it must be agreed that he was a writer who enormously enlarged the intellectual possibilities of the English novel. He was, wrongly, very impatient with the virtues of the traditional, domestic English novel, Elizabeth Taylor, a wonderful writer, came in for a lot of criticism on the grounds of her lack of ambition. But if he himself could only occasionally produce the novel which lived up to the novel he said he'd written, there is always a sense of possibilities opening up. Enderby is stilted and largely unfunny, but one would much rather have a book like that, with the heavy undercurrents of Pelagius and Aquinas and the smell of eternal damnation wafting through English bohemian life, than a thousand lamentable campus comedies. Napoleon Symphony doesn't work at all, but it does show a completely original way of considering novelistic form, and many serious novelists have benefited greatly from thinking through its possibilities.
And, at the end, there is Earthly Powers, which is both an exact imitation of a great novel and, somehow, quite simply, a great novel. The playfulness is brilliantly amusing — the celebrated first sentence about the 81st birthday, the catamite and the archbishop, for instance, or the stunningly clever and funny pastiches of Betjerrian and Maugham and a hundred terrible writers and composers. It works so well because it is kept, just, under check, and because you feel that Burgess doesn't quite know the whole of what he is doing, that when the novel is at full stretch the instincts have taken over with splendid results. The account of the exorcism and the sudden authentic tones of the Devil himself show what a great novelist Burgess could be when he, for once, let his pen move faster than his mind could. There is no book of Burgess's without some interest, but Earthly Powers is and will remain his serious claim on our attention.
As for Lewis, I have to say that his book is deplorably enjoyable, even though it grows less and less convincing with the sheer volume of insult (the footnotes, randomly flailing mounds of abuse pushing up from the bottom of the page with increasing insistence, are particularly uncharitable). What one greatly looks forward to is a proper, researched, calmly judging biography of someone who really was a remarkable figure. If Lewis's book had achieved its aim, you would finish it thinking that Burgess doesn't merit one. But he will be worth it.
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