Abstract
This chapter introduces Burgess’s prolific literary, journalistic and musical achievements, and lays out the challenges for critics attempting to comprehend the scale of his oeuvre. It reveals how Burgess’s earliest critics were led by the author himself into considering his work in light of an obscure and inaccurate theological model, and challenges this consensus by introducing the importance of aesthetics and the artistic process as a persistent theme in his work.
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Notes
- 1.
“Researchers find 20 unpublished Anthony Burgess stories”, Stephen Bates, The Guardian, 11th May 2011; retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/11/unpublished-anthony-burgess-stories-manchester, 18th April 2012.
- 2.
The Burgess Variations, episode one, dir. David Thompson, BBC, first aired 27 December 1999.
- 3.
- 4.
Andrew Biswell (Real Life, 310–311) notes that Burgess had a habit of “talking up the reputations of literary friends” in his reviews.
- 5.
“The Manicheans”, Anthony Burgess , in Times Literary Supplement, 3 March 1966, pp. 154–155.
- 6.
Anthony Burgess ’s Mythopoeic Imagination: A Study of Selected Novels (1956–1968), Kenyon Lewis Wagner, Doctoral Thesis, Texas Tech University, 1974, p. 59.
- 7.
A third archive exists at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.
- 8.
“Finally, my thanks to Anthony Burgess for clearing up some biographical questions in the Ratskeller of the Nittany Lion Inn and talking with his usual fine candour” (Boytinck, xxxvi).
- 9.
“With his sexuality, I think, as with everything else, the distinction between life and fantasy was completely blurred […] I think an awful lot of him was self-invented. If you have that sort of fertile mind, maybe self-invention is the most satisfactory way of being.” Deborah Rogers in Real Life, 306.
- 10.
“Burgess—histrionic, loquacious, with deep voice and furrowed brow, often putting the emphasis on unexpected words—behaved just like a slightly hammy actor playing the part of Anthony Burgess .” from “Don’t Laugh: Comedians and Novelists”, in The Tony Years, Craig Brown, London, Ebury Press, 2006, p. 176.
- 11.
Paul Phillips, A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess , Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010.
- 12.
In his four volume study of Nietzsche, especially volume 1, The Will to Power as Art (1979, originally written in German, 1936–1940 and published 1961).
- 13.
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987, orig. pub. in German as Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwülfe Vorlesungen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985).
- 14.
In Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism (1989).
- 15.
In Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961).
- 16.
In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1986, orig. pub. as Nietzsche et la philosophie, 1962).
- 17.
“Apollo and Dionysus” (1969), in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971).
- 18.
In an interview with Samuel Coale he once perceptively described Bergson and Nietzsche as the antecedents of George Bernard Shaw in an aside. See Conversations, 126. The only mention of Nietzsche in Burgess’s fiction appears in his final work, the posthumous Byrne, where Nietzsche is one of the luminaries in the EU’s Strasbourg-based House of Euroculture, from which Shakespeare has been excluded. Visitors to the House are greeted with a recording which states “‘Cogito ergo sum’ or ‘God is dead.’” (Byrne, 111).
- 19.
“There are no raucous pubs as in London (which must count, for the Swedes, as a very southern city, a positive Naples). On the other hand there is a highly sequestered drink problem, the consequence of having the Dionysian element in all human nature suppressed by the Apollonian state.” “Going North”, (One Man’s Chorus, 1998, p. 22).
- 20.
A rare example of a pseudonymous character is the aspirant intellectual rock star Yod Crewsy, a thinly veiled John Lennon, from Enderby Outside.
- 21.
The Public Personage as Protagonist in the Novels of Anthony Burgess , Anthony Levings, doctoral thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 2007.
- 22.
“As with many of Burgess’s biographical opuscules (Hemingway , Keats , Orwell , Shakespeare, and Joyce of course), the actual subject is Burgess himself, and the mood can be a bit swaggering and self-congratulatory, too.” (Lewis, 9).
- 23.
“Anthony Burgess ’s fictional biographies: romantic sympathy, tradition-oriented modernism, postmodern vampirism?”, Aude Haffen in Roughley, Modernity, 132.
- 24.
As late as 1735, according to Peter Kivy: Once-Told Tales, Peter Kivy, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2011, p. 12.
- 25.
Théophile Gautier, Preface, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Helen Constantine, London: Penguin, 2005.
- 26.
See the “True Illusions: Friedrich Nietzsche” chapter of The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton, Wiley-Blackwell, London, 1990.
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Clarke, J. (2017). Introduction. In: The Aesthetics of Anthony Burgess. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66411-8_1
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