Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Anthony Burgess 1917–93

About eleven months ago in Edinburgh, so I have just been told by a friend who was there, Anthony Burgess turned to the audience he was addressing and said quite calmly, “I have only a year left to live.” There was a shocked silence and then Anthony, apparently, carried on without a care in the world.

I knew, we knew, that he was not in good health latterly, but the last time I saw him he did not seem much changed. He was smoking, inevitably, and we had a drink or three. He was participating in whatever book business had brought him to London with his usual heroic energy and benign composure, and, for all I know, was writing a novel, a book review and a concerto in his idler moments. All the same, the news of his death comes as a huge shock perhaps because one always thought that, having cheated the grim reaper once, Anthony’s prodigious energy would continue to defy mortality as long as he felt it was worth it.

I refer, of course, to the now legendary moment in 1959 when Anthony was diagnosed as suffering from an inoperable brain tumour and was told he would be dead before a year had run its course. In the time he had left remaining to him, or so he tells it, to provide some sort of legacy for his soon-to-be widow, he wrote four novels, non-stop, one after the other. And when the diagnosis blessedly proved to have been false he carried on working with that same restless creativity. From the outside it seemed as if Anthony’s artistic momentum was indeed a kind of life force, sustaining and vivifying, and that as long as he was there working he would outlive the lot of us.

He was an exemplary writer in many senses. He was the towering example, for instance, to all late starters, not writing his first novel until he was in his forties. He was an intellectual, a polymath, at home in many languages, with a cultural sweep that was awe-inspiring, but at the same time he avoided all pretension and elitism, equally happy to let frivolity and fun — in the form of movies, soap operas, TV, chat shows, beach blanket best sellers or whatever — benefit from his shrewd and enthusiastic evaluation. And he worked hard, worked hard for his living, writing novels and criticism, screenplays and libretti, almost anything he wanted to do and could turn his pen to.

In this sense he seems to me to be a very British writer. If there is one thing that characterizes the British writer, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is that by and large he or she writes a lot, is very productive, is professional. Writing is both a serious calling and a serious career, and Anthony, in the twentieth century, embodied that attitude with more style and panache and consistent high standards than anyone else I can think of. But in many other senses he regarded himself as something of an outsider. A cradle Catholic, a northerner, non-Oxbridge, with a working life spent largely abroad, he considered himself, I believe, beyond the pale of the metropolitan literary world. And so much the better for him: he is the perfect example of the non-parochial in British literature. If ever the British novel is described as being cramped and confined by this cramped and confined little island Anthony Burgess can provide the flourishing counterpoise.

I remember on the occasion of his seventieth birthday celebrations him saying cheerfully on television that he never expected to be honoured by his native country. “You have to be a footballer or a jockey to be recognized by the establishment in Britain,” he said. And of course it is the usual matter of shame and a sad reflection on our inherent philistinism that someone as special and worth celebrating as Anthony should have been ignored. But he would know, as would any person of sense, that what matters in the end is the work done rather than any bauble conferred, and the work will continue to fascinate and beguile in all its multitudinous facets. Amongst the thirty-odd novels he wrote the consensus would probably be that Earthly Powers is his masterpiece and it is hard to argue against its huge and confident sweep. But my own particular favourites, the ones I re-read, are the Enderby novels, Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, which are about the life and extraordinary times of a minor English poet — wonderfully rich and funny novels. I first read these books twenty years ago at university and read them again when I had the chance to meet Anthony many years later. Enderby, eccentric, unworldly, insouciant, obsessed by his art, but fully caught up in the physical pleasures of this world, brings Anthony’s unique and vital spirit forcefully to mind. I shall go and read them again now, and think how lucky I was — how lucky we all were — to meet and know their remarkable creator.

1993