Anthony Burgess

by Roger Lewis

Burgess, argues Roger Lewis, was the writer as faker and prankster who lived, like an actor, by deception and illusion. Tracking his quarry from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, Lewis assesses Burgess's struggles and grudges and uncovers the webs of truth and lies. This biography is populated with a cast of drunks, nymphomaniacs, egotists, famous 20th-century authors, and actors.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

480 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2002

Reviews

[Paul Bryant]

Imagine the horror - you're a number one fan of an artist, you get the commission to write a biography - after a year or two, you've fallen so far out of love with your artist you've fallen into hate. You're sick to your soul of him. You can't bear to think of him and his horrible work - that which in happier days you worshipped you now see as flimsy, derivative, superficial and meretricious. This precipitous love-into-hate happens hideously to hapless graduates writing their theses, and God knows this also happens to normal human beings in their romantic encrustations.

When it happens to the biographer he could return his advance to the publisher with an elegantly-phrased apology or he could turn in a 400 page manuscript which drips with bile and vicious resentment, which sneers and belabours and ridicules and insults with big words and with small, every page an outrage, every paragraph a little poison pen letter, and no apologies. I turned from this book feeling more than a little sick. I wanted to read it because I thought the bizarre premise of the biographer openly loathing his subject held great promise of a feast of black comedy, and the 60 page intro is pretty good at that. But after a while Jaysus Mary and Joseph, you just want to climb out of the weird psychological prison you can see Roger Lewis found himself in, and leave him to his frantic stabbing of the Anthony Burgess voodoo doll.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lewis’s exuberant and stifling performance is one of the most engaging and tormented biographies of a writer I have read. I hold Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange in high esteem as a work of musicality, linguistic invention, and dark satire, despite the brutishness of the author’s hand and the later filmic gaucherie. Apart from this, my forays into his other works have lead to sporadic pleasures (the sweltering Malayan Trilogy, A Vision of Battlements) and furious disapproval (the incoherent MF and racist The Right to an Answer). Lewis spends his bio re-emphasising how cold and unemotional a writer Burgess was and how words and language were the one source of love in his life (in as much as blustering Burge was capable of love), attributing this to his traumatic childhood. So far so obvious. His immersion in the mindset of Burgess is this bio’s strength and Lewis finds demons, spectres, beasts, and brutes a-go-go, and riffs on his subject’s arrogance, humorlessness, shiftiness, and tax-dodging effrontery, as well as performing astute (if overly sharp) dismantlings of Burgess’s oeuvre—one that suffers from its sheer weight and workmanlike production. A more inventive and ruthless bio of a monstrous literary figure this reader will be hard pressed to find.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this book; I'm no great fan of Burgess for quite a few of the reasons Lewis rails against him, but this book is difficult to read and Lewis is not ambivalent about Burgess. This was heading for one star until near the end when I realised how much of Lewis's life was bound up with Burgess and how the seemingly obvious hatred is maybe more over-familiarity. I think if I knew as much about Burgess as Lewis does I might feel the same way. The biographical detail is well-scattered and this is not traditional biography. I do wonder what I have gained from reading it. However, as I said there are odd flashes of inspiration from Lewis which hint at a deeper understanding and even empathy with his subject which made me change the star rating I have given it. Burgess himself was clearly rather unpleasant (especially in relation to the women in his life) and a blatant self-publicist. However I wonder if the real problem here is that Burgess is not the person Lewis wanted (or even once beleived) him to be.

[Velvetink · Rating 2 out of 5]

"I was cured all right ~ Alex"
— Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)

Biographers are sometimes said to fall in love with their subjects. Lewis did this with Burgess and then fell out of love with him. To compensate he tried to transform himself into a shallow copy of Burgess, minus the genius. Lewis can only do one thing - disparage everyone with caustic spittle including himself: (see - his autobiography - Seasonal Suicide Notes).

Readers expecting a straightforward Life of Anthony Burgess may find this book crapulous. (that's a word Burgess used and Lewis mimicked and the best I can say about Lewis is he's a good mimic of words.)

In Truth to Life: the Art of Biography in the Nineteenth Century, A. O. J. Cockshut says that the biographer has to:

"… submit his interpretations to the pressure of facts. The difficulty of biography as an art lies mainly in this tension between interpretation and evidence …"

Historians and biographers place great emphasis on distinguishing between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ sources. In essence, a primary source is a document written at the time to which it refers – a census return, a diary, a letter, a tax-form; while a secondary source is an interpretation of history – a newspaper, a history book, another biography.

A secondary source may be contemporary with the event it describes or it may be much later, and there are clearly gradations of value in secondary sources.

Lewis relies pretty much on Burgess's own novels for the sources, and hearsay. For Lewis all of Burgess's work is autobiographical and he takes the ideas and dialogue of the main characters as those of Burgess. His research is questionable, relying on his own rhetorical questions,
(is he impotent?- I think he was impotent), and when Lewis doesn't know the facts he makes them up out of his own prejudices & paranoia.

Unfortunately there are no clear rules for biographies. They can be moral or immoral. If biography can teach us how to live our lives or to open our minds to lives very unlike our own, then it has educational purpose. If biography is a form of scandal-mongering, then it is a low branch of the media and entertainment industry and has no moral or educational value. These two ideas on biography are not mutually exclusive, and the genre can veer between the two almost simultaneously. Between curiosity and inspiration blurring the distinction between high and low art forms. Lewis does it ad infinitum so much you want to strangle him. This is not a standard biography, it's a rant of the highest order. Vindictive, hateful. Elsewhere, having crapped all over Burgess's powers of invention, he tries to impress us with his own. Granted it's true, early on in the book some of Lewis's observations about Burgess are spot on, but reading the same petulant moan over and over gets tiresome and you have to wonder what particular axe Lewis has to grind. There is no development, no resolution.

Richard Ellmann, Lewis's literary tutor, counseled the would-be
biographer to show some kindness and humility: "I worry a little about your tone - outsmarting its subject... I'd like to feel that you were not above him patting him on the back." Sage advice, but it falls on deaf ears: Lewis has no more time for Ellmann (his kitchen sink "clogged with tea leaves and his daughters' draining knickers") than he has for Burgess. If Ellmann taught Lewis to revise, Lewis didn't listen.
There is unnecessary repetition throughout the book and I don't know why the publishers let him get away with it.

Lewis's main fault is that he regularly failed to validate his primary sources.He relied in many instances on secondary sources ie. hearsay and gossip and only those which validated his own personal opinions and grievances, not those necessarily the truth.

The 2nd major complaint I have of his work is that there is no real structure. He includes a basic timetime of Burgess's life at the beginning ina few pages, but immediately thereafter throws it to the
wind in reckless abandon. While I have no actual objection to flashbacks and time dislocations in narratives I do find it hard to take within the same paragraph or the same sentence.

Lewis mixes truth, wildly apocryphal rumors and comparative analysis - the result is a septic dogs breakfast. You learn more about James Joyce and the things that Lewis hates than of Burgess. Lewis may have intended this book as some kind of savage hommage, but it's just downright mean and badly executed at that.

If you hate footnotes you'll hate this book. Lewis included literally acres of footnotes, so the book is full of all these mock-scholarly footnotes because he said " Anthony Burgess was a great charlatan" - this was Lewis's attempt at humour. Many people dislike footnotes but I am not one of them but it takes the cake when there are 4 lines of text on a page and the rest is footnotes. Lewis studied literature at St Andrews and a little at Oxford. I'm just now learning to grapple with Harvard citations and I know what Lewis did with footnotes isn't kosher practically anywhere.

A good poet must be a good hater, said Goethe; in Lewis's case Goethe was only partly right. Lewis can hate but to me he lacks something essential - depth of moral character, though his hate is deep enough to take you to hell. He hates nearly everything and everyone :Paul Theroux, Lady Antonia Fraser , Anthony Hopkins, Rosie Boycott, Clive James, Francis Bacon, Simon Cowell, Harold Pinter, Julie Myerson, V.S Naipaul, Stanley Kubrick, Mark Lawson, Alexander Walker, Andrew Roberts, Martin Amis and many many more including modern life. Lewis would make an awesome subject for the series "Grumpy Old Men". However it wouldn't be funny.

I think Lewis " doth protest too much" and I believe Shakespeare would say the same. There is no real substance to this biography, it's not a fair appraisal of Burgess's life or works. It's a spurious character assassination one cannot have faith in, as Lewis did not once visit any of the archives or museums holding Burgess's diaries and letters.
ie. ( Manchester, Angers, Austin, Ontario). Which is why I have said little about Burgess himself, because at this point in time, I really don't know what is true and what is a pack of lies. I've only read "A Clockwork Orange" and nothing else by Burgess. I'd really like to go to
the Manchester Museum and go through Burgess's things to find out the truth myself.

I could re-iterate Lewis's account, to make you guys happy, but meh! maybe I should urge you all read Lewis to make up your own minds. I know from checking out Burgess's bibliography he was outrageously prolific as a writer, and a thoughful critic and had an obsession with etymology, he was driven to write and after his death there were many works found in progress (still in possession of his 2nd wife). He was also a composer although it seems many didn't "get" his music many others did. Lynne his first wife had a problem with alcohol and died of it. She was his muse despite their unhappy marriage and she appears in various forms in all his works.I think what put me off Lewis so much was how brutal he was about Lynne's addiction and death. It made me realise that Lewis had no insight or compassion.

Basically I've read the dirt now on Burgess but am still clueless on his real grit. He wrote a book about Joyce that is supposedly outstanding. Perhaps I should read that before committing myself further.

In 2009 Lewis's book only sold 9 copies. That's a testament to how "crapulous" a biography it is.

The book infuriated me, disturbed my sleep, I wanted to phone a psychologist friend to get the low-down on Lewis's personality disorder.
My friend was away. I read on, while procrastination set in, I became lax with other work I had to do. I cannot give this book more than two stars although it obsessed me so. It is a travesty.




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$5 at Borders today....my surgeon took my stitches out today, thought I would celebrate. ;D I think this book is a major cue-jumper on my to-read pile.

[Drew Raley · Rating 1 out of 5]

After enduring Roger Lewis's caustic and doggedly bottom-feeding biography of Peter Sellers, a magnum opus of hate speech, I approached his latest screed with notions of dislike preconceived. Nothing, however, prepared me for this inept and frankly embarrassing catalogue of factual, textual, historical, interpretive, and analytical errors masquerading as an investigation of a major literary figure that, I assume, Mr. Lewis considers a proper piece of work.
The only piece of work on display is Mr. Lewis, who fails to approach even the remotest semblance of objectivity and responsibility. That which is on display here is purely subjective grudge-flogging, and of so little considered skill as to qualify for pulping. Or even better, remainder this trash, so that every time Lewis visits a quality used bookstore in his neighborhood, he can view piles of fresh copies of his work (a product of 20 years of sniffing his rotten ego), spines unbroken, pages crisp and unread. Then he can move a few rows down and observe dogeared copies of Burgess's, or anybody's works for that matter, all better than Lewis's own, all evidently thumbed-through. Even that great monolith, Finnegan's Wake, which has defeated too many adventurous readers to count (and is nicely disassembled and respectfully put back together by Burgess in his numerous studies of Joyce), would create greater reader-satisfaction than Mr. Lewis's cry to an unloving world. He channels his self-hatred through a supposed-reading of Burgess's ouvre, one which is composed of great works overpraised (A Clockwork Orange), underpraised (Earthly Powers), or obscured (Enderby), lesser works and more than a fair number of failures. But that ouvre covers some 50 books, two of which are volumes of autobiography of a frank and revealing nature that do a good job of revealing their subject's failings and inadequacies. Burgess's autobios (Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time) reflect a depth of self-knowledge and character, traits that Mr. Lewis allows to wither on the vine by substituting Burgess's life for his own. As biography, Lewis's book is a joke. As autobiography, we get a fair understanding of everything Roger Lewis hates and not much else. I guess he's just a hateful person.
It's fitting that Anthony Burgess is dead. Otherwise Roger Lewis would not have the opportunity to slather invective over him and those who enjoy both the highs and lows of his work. Take a look at Lewis's other bios. He picks cultural touchstones who are known to have had colourful lives and troubling antecedents, talented individuals who, like Olivier, Sellers and, yes, Burgess, sold their talents short more than a few times. That they are dead gives Lewis wings upon which to fly to crapulous heights.
In short: Roger Lewis would kick a cancer patient, but only after they expire, lest they retain enough strength to knock him senseless, so weak is his character and so cowardly and cheap his angle of attack.

[Jacob · Rating 1 out of 5]

An [seemingly] outrageous hatchet job of a biography. An attempt at character assassination. Some decent scholarship, with lots of projections from the author. There are moments of insight and it's not a bad read, but I would rather have a biographer be indifferent to his subject than one which openly subverts and pokes both his subject's corpse and corpus.

[Brent Legault · Rating 3 out of 5]

We must invent a new definition for a book like this because hatchet job just doesn't, ahem, cut it.

Roger Lewis hates Anthony Burgess, personally and artistically. It is his hatred that powers this bileography. Hatred is the engine and Burgess, the fuel. And after Lewis draws and quarters poor old Burgess, after he dismembers him and grinds him and his fifty plus books into gore and pulp and juice, after he fashions what's left of him into fist-sized pieces and tosses these pieces one by bloody one into his hell-fired furnace, we, the shocked and shamed reader -- we rubberneckers, we gawkers -- we are left with smoke: thick, black, greasy, human. It is the smoke of a lonesome holocaust.

It is an occasionally entertaining holocaust, even so. You've heard the phrase "acerbic wit." Lewis has that. You might say that's all he has. I don't understand why he wrote this book about a man he so strongly, so plainly detests. I don't know why his publisher published this anti-elegy, this hateiography. The thing itself seems to rob the atmosphere of light. It is a black hole on my bookshelf.

I am in awe of it.

[Jacob · Rating 1 out of 5]

*An [seemingly] outrageous hatchet job of a biography. An attempt at character assassination. Some decent scholarship, with lots of projections from the author. There are moments of insight and it's not a bad read, but I would rather have a biographer be indifferent to his subject than one which openly subverts and pokes both his subject's corpse and corpus.

*Mini-review of another edition.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book defies the laws of physics: it blows and sucks at the same time.

Andrew Biswell's biography, for all its occasional flaws, was much better.

[Dominic H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Consider:

'Burgess hated not to be grasped: "I like understanding from those who read my books", he once bellowed. "I don't get much from the people in England". Well, he's had plenty of understanding from me, fair play.'

and:

'He dared to become a genius, and this book has shown you how and why;'

2002 is a long time ago in literary terms and it's perhaps difficult now to recreate the mini controversy that Lewis's book created at the time*. I think Lewis himself ('fair play') would say he took Burgess, man and work, as he saw him and would not be the first biographer to find that his subject turned out to be so complicated as to be a different entity altogether than the one whose books first attracted him. Does he give Burgess 'plenty of understanding'? 'No' seemed to be the prevailing answer in 2002. I would say mostly 'Yes' now. He is absolutely spot on in my view in terms of his analysis of the invention of the person who went from 'John Wilson' to 'Anthony Burgess' (the 'English Borges'). He is probably right about the talent and the yawning gaps which remained, the lack of empathy and humour. He is fair too about what I suppose we must call the Burgess work ethic. He is not blind to the many flaws - e.g the repeated 'lectures', the absolute 'centrifugal incompetence' (Hans Keller's typically simultaneously withering and thrilling words quoted by Lewis) of the entire compositional oeuvre, the often borrowed unoriginality but yet there is affection and yes, respect here too.

Burgess is arguably not of course the main character of a book not short of characters (it starts breathlessly with Lewis waiting with Richard Ellmann for Burgess to arrive at Oxford railway station where they have time to bump into John Wain before Burgess arrives and doesn't let up for a minute in terms of the luxury casting that populates its 400 plus pages). Lewis himself has that honour. You are aware of him in every sentence and in the truly glorious footnotes, which are at least as compelling as the principal subject matter its appended to. (Yes, I avoided using 'narrative' for so many reasons but not least because it exists only very loosely, which works brilliantly. There is a highly informative and entertaining chronology at the start of the book and once that is done Lewis apparently and refreshingly takes the view that conventional biographical obligations have been discharged). He is a welcome presence, a very gifted writer, cultured, knowledgeable, highly intelligent, extremely funny and with whom one would no doubt get into a heated argument, if not fight, with, every time one accompanied him to the pub. The best analogy I can suggest to give you a feel for the book is to imagine Lewis as a nicer and more able Charles Kinbote (and yes, 'Pale Fire' dopes come up in the book)

I can't make up my mind if this book represents the apotheosis of the Lewis approach or if that description is better suited to 'Erotic Vagrancy' . Lewis might be a genius I think

Footnote
I'm extremely confident that Lewis would approve of me providing a footnote which rivals the main body of text in length. My secondhand copy contains a Faber press release dated 11 November 2002:

'...Roger Lewis's extraordinary biography exposes the lies and illusions that Burgess...built up around himself...He was self generated...his identity a matter of illusion and conviction.'

And so on. Apart from noting that even in 2002 Faber could not apparently afford someone to proofread Press Releases and prevent the infelicitous repetition of words such as 'illusion' I think it's fair to say that the House of Eliot had decided on the approach to be taken. The document goes on to say that 'Roger Lewis will be available for interview'. Who knows if he still is (on the subject of Burgess I mean as opposed to Burton and Taylor)? My opening gambit would be along the lines of 'What message do you think is conveyed when an apparently serious literary biography is given a bright orange monochrome wash?' alternatively, 'Why was this the only book of yours that Faber published?'

[Dave Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one long rant, but to be fair to Roger Lewis it does seem that Burgess was deserving of it. I'm just going to run through my takeaways.

It was Burgess's wife who told him about his supposed brain tumour, which seems to have been as fictional as anything in his books. Still, something went wrong to turn him from a pleasant (and inspiring) schoolmaster to a preening twit.

He never missed a trick to laud his allegedly superior intellect over others, but thought antibiotics would work against 'flu.

He could and did bore for England about being a Catholic, but he was also childishly superstitious. G.K. Chesterton would not have approved.

He disliked Jane Austen, who was a much better writer. That's probably why, then.

He confused homosexuality with pederasty, another example of him parading his Dunning-Kruger certainty about subjects he knew nothing about.

He mocked real heroes (p 241-242) in the same way Hemingway did, and for the same reason. (Jealousy.)

He said being interviewed by Emma Freud was "an honour". (Full disclosure: I've been interviewed by her too, and I have nothing against the woman but I don't think either of us would describe the encounter in such fulsome terms.)

The footnote on page 233 shows the arsing about that meant Burgess was only a parody of a great writer, which Lewis discusses in depth, for example on page 336: "the triumph of style over substance".

Burgess's Shakespeare novel seems, predictably and tediously, to have been like that movie wot Ben Elton wrote, in which we get the origin story of all the famous lines.

I take issue with Lewis's notion that Burgess might have made big bucks from the secret services (p 282-284), not least because who on earth would have employed this buffoon as a spy?

In Burgess's favour: he admired the work of Ford Maddox Ford. So he can't have been a complete tool.

[Elly · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could not finish this book. The start was ok, with a long chronological list of live happenings and published books, but the story part was almost unreadable.

[Raymonds009 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muddled and repetitive. Could have been cut by at least 100 pages. Some great information still.