Anthony Burgess and 99 of the best

Press, 4 May 1984, Page 15

Anthony Burgess and 99 of the best

Anthony Burgess, one of Britain’s most respected men of letters, is also one of the most prolific and versatile. His output includes more than 40 works of fiction and criticism and a number of screen plays. He also writes music, satisfying an early ambition to be a composer. Now 67, he still produces two or more books a year. PETER LEWIS, a contributor to “The Times” and “The Mail on Sunday,” looks back on his career.

That most redoubtable British champion of the novel, Anthony Burgess, has jus published his choice of the 99 best examples of the craft written in English in the last 45 years. He adds the rider: “If you disagree violently with some of my choices, I shall be pleased. We arrive at values only through dialectic.”

It was because he disagreed violently with a list of “the best novels of our time” nominated by Britain’s Book Marketing Council (he called its choice “woeful and eccentric”) that he made his own selection. It appears under the title “Ninety-nine novels: The Best in English Since 1939.” There is probably no practising English novelist and critic whose choice would be listened to with more respect. He springs two surprises. Alongside the inevitable Huxley, Waugh, Greene and Amis, he lists out-and-out popular writers such as Raymond Chandler (“an original stylist, creator of a character, Philip Marlowe, as immortal as Sherlock Holmes”). He includes a James Bond adventure (“lan Fleming raised the standard of the popular espionage story through good writing”), Neville Shute’s “No Highway” (“a novel firmly based on the world of technology”) and Len Deighton’s “Bomber” (“only 10 when the war broke out, his achievement is to convince us that he was there in the midst of it”). Burgess also spreads his net well beyond the insular shores of

Britain and the United States, including many Commonwealth writers, for example Chinua Achebe, the hard-hitting Nigerian novelist for “A Man of the People” (“probably the best book to come out of West Africa”) and Nadime Gordimer for “The Late Bourgeois World” (“a brief, taut masterpiece dealing with the realities of life in present-day South Africa”). He says that R. K. Narayan “sums up much of what modern India is about” in “The Vendor of Sweets.” He includes the Canadians, Mordecai Richler and Robertson Davies (the latter for his recent “The Rebel Angels”), and says that Davies is “without doubt Nobel Prize material.” The Australian Nobel winner Patrick White is included, of course, as is V. S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian writer of Indian blood — for his novel about an African dictatorship, “A Bend in the River.” Guyana-born Wilson Harris (“probably the best of the Caribbean novelists”) is listed for “Heartland” (his work is “on the border between logic and magic”).

Burgess has included none of his own works, although he is one of the most prolific as well as one of the most versatile serious novelists of his generation. He achieved this despite a late start, at about the age of 40, when he was an education officer in the British Colonial Service in Malaya and Borneo, before independence. In 1959, he was invalided home with a suspected brain tumour and given a year to live. He spent it writing five novels in order to pay the rent and leave something for his widow. Fortunately he did not believe the diagnosis. He now has more than 40 books of fiction and criticism to his credit as well as more than 60 pieces of music (he originally intended to be a composer) and many screen plays. There seem to be no bounds to his ambition, energy, and inventiveness. For subjects he has taken the lives of Jesus of Nazareth and Moses (both of these became television series), Shakespeare and Napoleon. He has written novels in verse, in Elizabethan speech, and in an invented language, such as he

irony was that while he got his novels published with ease, he could rarely get his music performed.

His list of compositions includes, besides three symphonies, the incidental music for productions of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland,” and an operetta based on “Ulysses,” which was broadcast by the 8.8. C. for James Joyce’s centenary. But his music for the “Moses” television series was rejected by Sir Lew Grade, who produced it; and the film about Shakespeare, for which he also wrote the songs, was never made by Warner Brothers. Nevertheless, after more than 40 books, he still claims: “I rather despise the craft I practise because it is not the craft of a-musician. I would have loved to have been a film composer.” In other ways, too, Burgess is an exception to the usual pattern of literary figures. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, living over a public house in Manchester and attending Manchester University, he says he has never felt really at home in England. “I have always found it difficult to conform to a Protestant culture and that is one of the reasons I do not live in England,” he explains. After periods in Malta and Italy, where he married an Italian translator after his first wife’s death, he now lives in Monte Carlo — “not because I am rich but because I am poor.” Ironically, the film that first

used in “A Clockwork Orange” and for the Stone Age film “Quest for Fire.” In “Napoleon Symphony” he sought to find the prose equivalent of Beethoven’s musical language in the “Eroica.” He often publishes two, or even more, books a year. In March, his latest novel, “Enderby’s Dark Lady,” a revival of one of his most successful comic characters, was published. And the third of his trilogy of television films on religious themes is currently being made under the title of “A.D.”. It takes over where “Jesus of Nazareth” left off, beginning on the day after the Crucifixion and following the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire. He has also written the musical score. The son of a music hall pianist, who also accompanied films in the silent cinema days, Burgess thought of himself primarily as a composer, although one who was self-taught. His spare time as a teacher was spent composing “unplayable, or certainly unplayed, chunks of music.” Literature came a poor second as a hobby, but. the

made his name known, “A Clockwork Orange,” was made without his help by Stanley Kubrick from one of his earliest books. He resents the notoriety it brought him in the early 19705. “I was made responsible for a good deal of the violence, mayhem, and rape that was supposed to have resulted from its? being shown,” he complains.

He regards film as an inferior form to the novel. He argues: “It leaves out the most important part — what is going on in the character’s mind. I maintain that no great book has ever been successfully transferred to the screen. But great films have been made out of mediocre books — ‘Gone with the Wind’ is an example.” However, he still hankers to see his screenplay “Will,” a biographical picture about the life of Shakespeare, realised.

If one of his own novels were being chosen as the 100th Best, it would probably be, by general consent, “Earthly Powers,” his largest work, which ranges brilliantly over the events of six decades of the twentieth century in a study of the forces of evil. He has still greater ambitions. He says: “I am going to do more big novels from now on. At the moment only the Americans do them. It is about time English writers did some again.” He is at work on a Tolstoyan novel of 1000 pages, as always scorning modest ambitions. — London Press Service.