Anthony Burgess

From Philosopedia

Burgess, Anthony (25 February 1917 - 22 November 1993)

Burgess was born in Manchester, England. The author of 50 books, he is best known for his novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971.

An admirer of Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Evelyn Waugh, Burgess once wrote,

• I was brought up a Catholic, became an agnostic, flirted with Islam, and now hold a position which may be termed Manichee. I believe the wrong God is temporarily ruling the world and that the true God has gone under. Thus I am a pessimist but believe the world has much solace to offer: love, food, music, the immense variety of race and language, literature, and the pleasure of artistic creation.

Llewela Isherwood Jones, a distant relative of Christopher Isherwood whom he married in 1942, was assaulted during World War II in London, an attack which resulted in the loss of their expected child. Burgess once stated that the brutality depicted in A Clockwork Orange stemmed in part from the assault upon his wife. The novel is the story of a murderous, Beethoven-loving teen-age gang leader in a complacent and conformist society in the near future.

“In this welfare state,” critic Herbert Mitgang has written of the novel which was made into a movie, “roving bands of delinquents fight, steal, and rape to assert their freedom against the conformity of a clockwork society. The novel is written in a dialect of the author’s own invention. Its language, called nadsat, is a mixture of English and American slang, Russian, Gypsy talk, and odd bits of Jacobean prose.”

He was educated at a Catholic college and graduated from Manchester University in 1940. He joined the British Army Education Corps, which entertained troops in Europe, and was stationed in Gibraltar. He taught after the war, and was a distinguished professor at the City College of New York, 1972-73.

"The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read," he told The Paris Review in a 1973 interview.

Paul Theroux has written that he valued his friendship with Burgess because

• I felt that I somewhat resembled him. We had both been raised Catholic, in the age of the Latin Mass, and, as the liturgy had become folksy and English-speaking, with show tunes played after the Consecration instead of the Agnus Dei, and all that hugging and hand-holding, he had lapsed and so had I. But the Church had done its work, and we both still regarded our souls as stained indelibly with sin.

In a 1991 The Economist, Burgess wrote,

• I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of as a novelist who writes music on the side. Music is a purer art because it has no direct relationship to human events. It’s totally outside the field of moral judgment. That’s why I prize it.

In the same article, he was quoted as fearing “the coming darkness,” adding that he seesawed between feelings of self-indulgence and belief. “I don’t think there’s a Heaven, but there’s certainly a Hell. Everything we’ve experienced on Earth seems to point toward the permanence of pain.

Among Burgess’s sixty-five musical compositions are “The Blooms of Dublin,” an operetta based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and A Clockwork Orange 2004, a musical stage version of his novel. Burgess also was translator, critic, and librettist.

Burgess died of lung cancer. In 1994 at his memorial service at St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, eulogies were delivered by journalist Auberon Waugh and novelist William Boyd.

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