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You've Had Your Time: Second Part of the Confessions
The author describes his struggle to earn a living--writing novels, film scripts, television series, and articles--after being told he was terminally ill, discussing the obligations of sudden celebrity and his emotional and psychological rebirth
403 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
7 people are currently reading
251 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Burgess
360 books4,254 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).
He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 20, 2022
Punchy (often literally; Burgess never seemed far away from another dust-up, outside a pub, at an airport), rambunctious, bizarre, deeply unconventional, at times deeply sad, eloquent as all get out and entirely entertaining.
November 10, 2021
Probably the best book about being a writer - and staying one - come hell or high water.
It is also scabrously funny.
It is also scabrously funny.
July 19, 2010
This is one of the most illuminating and honest pieces of self-examination I've ever read. I'm just into it but utterly entranced. I picked this book off my bookshelf on a whim and read deep into the night. I'm convinced of his brilliance and will read far deeper into his output than I already have (two novels). The guy was a workhorse and a lover of language and, faced with a death sentence, a terribly productive author.
February 26, 2021
Loved the first half of this, found the second half interesting. A writer's memoir which actually examines the writer's work, the writing, the publishing, the reviews and the money in detail is to be celebrated. The grift involved is openly discussed. Agents and publishers. Success and failure. The realities of trying to make it pay. Along the way Burgess seems to tick off each of Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise - reviewing, journalism, scriptwriting, family... Every impediment was lovingly caressed. I read the second half bemoaning the time wasting of the film and television industries. Words put down on pages never to be read. When he might have been writing novels. It is a warning and encouragement to others. But most of all it's a pleasure to read.
October 31, 2019
Anthony Burgess, during his lifetime, was the best living writer in the English language, and his two-volume autobiography is every bit as readable and enjoyable as any of his considerable fiction, from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE to EARTHLY POWERS.
I did not read the second volume through to the very end, but I know it came November 25, 1993, because the New York Times obituary is clipped and inserted in the frontspiece of the book.
I did not read the second volume through to the very end, but I know it came November 25, 1993, because the New York Times obituary is clipped and inserted in the frontspiece of the book.
January 30, 2022
A long time ago I have read the first part of his auto-biography. In my memory I liked it a lot but I only gave it 3 stars and no review. Something must be wrong. So when I found this second part in a second-hand bookstore I was very curious.
Does anyone still read Burgess? I ask because he tells us that he tried to buy a novel by Thomas Wolfe (at the beginning of the 70s) and people in the bookstore thought he meant Tom Wolfe. Now apparently Burgess is not forgotten, since he has nearly 4000 followers here on GR. Which is not bad. Not in the Stephen King league but not bad at all. (Why do people follow dead writers? Maybe to show they like them. Tom has 2300, Thomas 900.) So he is popular, but then maybe it is mostly on the strength of one novel, Clockwork Orange (and maybe only because of the film?) with 650000 ratings (and an amazing 4.0 average) whereas his other books are popular if they have about 3000 ratings.
But I digress before I even started this review. (Maybe I will dwell on the subject some other time.)
I liked the book. What a great man. He wrote so many books on so many topics. And he seemed to have had an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature. (Anyone having read and apparently understood Finnegans Wake must be rather clever.) He was witty and not afraid to have unpopular, and even bizarre, views. He was for example of the opinion that it was a crime to go for the decimal system. He thought that farthings and shillings and guineas are to be preferred because somehow they match the twelve hour system or something like that. He thought that Latin should be revived and become the second language of every European. He thought that teaching literature courses about people who have nothing in common but the color of their skin (black) was just as ridiculous as teaching about people who have a moustache. (That was thirty years ago, but I guess he would be brave enough to hold this view even today.) Unfortunately I cannot find the passage again. The index of the book while existing is - miserable.
He had left England for tax reasons mainly (complaining all the time how little money he made from his books) lived in Malta, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland. And of course spoke all the languages. Even Anglo-Saxon (and to prove it he includes a conversation with Borges: “Nu we sculan herian heofenrices weard...”) Naturally he was fluent in German. All the more I am pleased to report that there is a spelling mistake right at the beginning of the book (following what I call Liedzeit’s law: In every English book with at least one German word there is at least one mistake.) One of the translations of his The Doctor is sick was Der Doktor ist Üpbergeschnappt (sic) Which is quite nice, especially since later in the book when he talks about his Earthly Powers he mentions that the narrator claims to know German but makes Schloss (Kafka) maskulin. That had made critics think that he, Burgess, was ignorant. But no, it was just the character.
Of course he has met a zillion people. Like Mick Jagger (“I admired his intelligence, if not the art, of this young man and considered that he looked the quintessence of delinquency.”) Of course he did not like the music. Because in addition to his other talents he was a classical composer. He even had some of his pieces performed. Whenever he felt like it he made musicals out of any subject imaginable. He did write music for John Sebastian. No not the John Sebastian, but his father who was an organist and understandably not pleased about the success of his son.
Some people he liked, like William Conrad or Groucho, or Grace Kelly. But about Graham Greene, for example, he says that he was like a murderer being annoyed at being called a shop-lifter. The barrier between them, he explains, was that of the cradle Catholic and the convert.
It took me a while to understand that being a Catholic really meant something to him. He prayed to St. Antoninas of Padua to get a lost passport back but conceded that the good man would probably have no idea what a passport was. But Catholicism was no joke for him. In the final chapter he admits that he was afraid of hell “and even of purgatory, and no amount of reading rationalist authors can expunge it.” (p. 388)
His catholicism probably made him stay with his first wife till her death. I said that I think Burgess was great, but I am not sure that I would have liked him on a personal level. And the way he talks about his first wife and also his son makes me think that probably not.
On the other hand, how can you dislike a man who said that he wished he had written Life of Brian? And I loved the summary of the script he wrote for the James Bond franchise. The Spy who loved me. Hilarious. As is his recollection of the time he was a juror at Cannes. Or when he says that he once hold the position as a “Distinguished Professor” in New York (same job Bertrand Russell had) which consoled him of the fact that he was an extinguished writer at the time.
In the final chapter, having reached the prescribed biblical age, he tries to learn Japanese and to read Hebrew. But, he says, it is to late. And then he asks the ultimate question, which prompts me to grant five stars:
“How can one fade out in peace, carrying vast ignorance into a state of total ignorance?"
Does anyone still read Burgess? I ask because he tells us that he tried to buy a novel by Thomas Wolfe (at the beginning of the 70s) and people in the bookstore thought he meant Tom Wolfe. Now apparently Burgess is not forgotten, since he has nearly 4000 followers here on GR. Which is not bad. Not in the Stephen King league but not bad at all. (Why do people follow dead writers? Maybe to show they like them. Tom has 2300, Thomas 900.) So he is popular, but then maybe it is mostly on the strength of one novel, Clockwork Orange (and maybe only because of the film?) with 650000 ratings (and an amazing 4.0 average) whereas his other books are popular if they have about 3000 ratings.
But I digress before I even started this review. (Maybe I will dwell on the subject some other time.)
I liked the book. What a great man. He wrote so many books on so many topics. And he seemed to have had an encyclopaedic knowledge of literature. (Anyone having read and apparently understood Finnegans Wake must be rather clever.) He was witty and not afraid to have unpopular, and even bizarre, views. He was for example of the opinion that it was a crime to go for the decimal system. He thought that farthings and shillings and guineas are to be preferred because somehow they match the twelve hour system or something like that. He thought that Latin should be revived and become the second language of every European. He thought that teaching literature courses about people who have nothing in common but the color of their skin (black) was just as ridiculous as teaching about people who have a moustache. (That was thirty years ago, but I guess he would be brave enough to hold this view even today.) Unfortunately I cannot find the passage again. The index of the book while existing is - miserable.
He had left England for tax reasons mainly (complaining all the time how little money he made from his books) lived in Malta, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland. And of course spoke all the languages. Even Anglo-Saxon (and to prove it he includes a conversation with Borges: “Nu we sculan herian heofenrices weard...”) Naturally he was fluent in German. All the more I am pleased to report that there is a spelling mistake right at the beginning of the book (following what I call Liedzeit’s law: In every English book with at least one German word there is at least one mistake.) One of the translations of his The Doctor is sick was Der Doktor ist Üpbergeschnappt (sic) Which is quite nice, especially since later in the book when he talks about his Earthly Powers he mentions that the narrator claims to know German but makes Schloss (Kafka) maskulin. That had made critics think that he, Burgess, was ignorant. But no, it was just the character.
Of course he has met a zillion people. Like Mick Jagger (“I admired his intelligence, if not the art, of this young man and considered that he looked the quintessence of delinquency.”) Of course he did not like the music. Because in addition to his other talents he was a classical composer. He even had some of his pieces performed. Whenever he felt like it he made musicals out of any subject imaginable. He did write music for John Sebastian. No not the John Sebastian, but his father who was an organist and understandably not pleased about the success of his son.
Some people he liked, like William Conrad or Groucho, or Grace Kelly. But about Graham Greene, for example, he says that he was like a murderer being annoyed at being called a shop-lifter. The barrier between them, he explains, was that of the cradle Catholic and the convert.
It took me a while to understand that being a Catholic really meant something to him. He prayed to St. Antoninas of Padua to get a lost passport back but conceded that the good man would probably have no idea what a passport was. But Catholicism was no joke for him. In the final chapter he admits that he was afraid of hell “and even of purgatory, and no amount of reading rationalist authors can expunge it.” (p. 388)
His catholicism probably made him stay with his first wife till her death. I said that I think Burgess was great, but I am not sure that I would have liked him on a personal level. And the way he talks about his first wife and also his son makes me think that probably not.
On the other hand, how can you dislike a man who said that he wished he had written Life of Brian? And I loved the summary of the script he wrote for the James Bond franchise. The Spy who loved me. Hilarious. As is his recollection of the time he was a juror at Cannes. Or when he says that he once hold the position as a “Distinguished Professor” in New York (same job Bertrand Russell had) which consoled him of the fact that he was an extinguished writer at the time.
In the final chapter, having reached the prescribed biblical age, he tries to learn Japanese and to read Hebrew. But, he says, it is to late. And then he asks the ultimate question, which prompts me to grant five stars:
“How can one fade out in peace, carrying vast ignorance into a state of total ignorance?"
June 27, 2022
This second half begins with arguably the most important years of AB's life, where he made his reputation as a "personality". Lynne finally finishes the work of dying, and Liana (notice the similarity?) the italian translator reappears in his life with a son by him. The tale is one of wandering trips through Europe as a british tax exile, teaching and lecturing in America, and defending Kubrick's film while he "pares his nails".
Maybe, as he argues at the end of the book, he was not happy, not completely, or not all the time. A "literary life" as AB argues, is not as glamorous and exalted as one would think. He still had 6 more years to live when he completed this book, but he'd had his time.
Maybe, as he argues at the end of the book, he was not happy, not completely, or not all the time. A "literary life" as AB argues, is not as glamorous and exalted as one would think. He still had 6 more years to live when he completed this book, but he'd had his time.
October 13, 2018
The second part of his "Confessions" is perhaps not quite as entertaining as the first part, but Burgess left a high benchmark.
At times possessed of critical insights (almost genius at times), fantastic (and frequently hilarious) streams of consciousness prose and plenty of laugh out loud moments, this memoir is of a decent length yet pacey.
Burgess lived a fascinating and eclectic life. Reading this autobiography is a must for Burgess fans, or those interested in his work.
At times possessed of critical insights (almost genius at times), fantastic (and frequently hilarious) streams of consciousness prose and plenty of laugh out loud moments, this memoir is of a decent length yet pacey.
Burgess lived a fascinating and eclectic life. Reading this autobiography is a must for Burgess fans, or those interested in his work.
December 8, 2021
Burgess expected this to be longer than its prequel. But his heart wasn't in it, and it shows, not just in its length. To be fair, it charts an astonishingly busy life but one that is less differentiated than previously. Here Burgess is constantly on the move, but constantly writing. What you do learn through his comments on his works is how even more erudite they are than you would ever have known when reading them.
January 3, 2022
Interesting, if you are an Anthony Burgess fan, and a must-read if you’ve read the first part of his autobiography and want to know if he died or not.
July 3, 2022
Entertaining, honest, irreverent
October 21, 2023
A great addition to the first volume and very entertaining , witty and informative from a writer and time, the like of not to be seen again.
February 19, 2025
Second Volume of ...
... the best autobiography I ever read. Kept my attention every minute. Too bad he wasn't as good at novels.
... the best autobiography I ever read. Kept my attention every minute. Too bad he wasn't as good at novels.
March 9, 2025
Excellent autobiography covering 1960 to 1981
June 29, 2008
Tried to get into it...just wasn't happening.
September 18, 2016
No doubt insufferable in person, the great polymath was also a great comic writer.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews