William Boyd, an admirer, said they were among the best novels that Burgess ever wrote. In two huge volumes of "confessions" (Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time) Burgess wove a vast tapestry of his life. He was proud of his Lancashire recusant Catholic stock, mixed with Irish and Scottish. He was born John Burgess Wilson, in Manchester in 1917, the only son of a pub-piano-playing book-keeper and a music-hall artiste. He also wasn't "Anthony Burgess" and - once he had adopted this pseudonym in 1956 - didn't pretend otherwise, whatever other pretences there may have been in his life. Though Burgess always quickly acknowledged his allegiance to Shakespeare and to James Joyce, he was no sort of copyist. When I heard some played at Burgess's memorial service in 1994, it struck me as an odd but quite pleasant blend of Mahler and Elgar. Throughout his life he wrote much symphonic music, chamber music, operas, songs, musicals. I found him affable, mock-pedantic, nicely opinionated.Īs well as being a hugely prolific writer, he was (though I didn't know it at this time) a copious musical composer. And he appeared, at about the same time, in an early BBC2 books programme I was presenting, Writers' World. He wrote regularly for the Listener, while I was literary editor there later in that decade. We had met in the early 60s, in the George, a pub near Broadcasting House. And all this from a writer who hadn't even published his first novel until he was 39.Īnd yes, I did know him. Well, he had already taken to poetry, though Larkin couldn't be expected to know it: the "borborygmic" verses of the pseudonymous Enderby novels later on, there were his cheeky imitations of the 19th-century Roman sonneteer Belli in Abba Abba much later still, a year after Burgess's death in 1993, his epic verse novel Byrne, written mainly in ottava rima, was published.Īs for how prolific Burgess was, that was certainly apparent by 1966: not just the wholesale book-reviewing but, much more importantly, 16 novels in 10 years, as well as many other books. Do you know him? He must be a kind of Batman of contemporary letters. He reviews all new books except those by himself, and these latter include such jeux d'esprit as 'A Shorter Finnegans Wake' and so on.
at the moment is being written by Anthony Burgess.
Among his morsels was: "The whole of English Lit. In August 1966, while I was away in Libya for a couple of years, Philip Larkin wrote a letter keeping me up with gossip on the home front, as it were.
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