Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Bob Dylan says:
Anthoney Burgess was told by U.K. Army doctors he only had five years to live around 1959 or so. In order to make enough money to support his wife after he was gone, he started churning out novels at a rate of three or four per year. This period of activity gave us several of his enduring masterpieces: “Clockwork Orange”, “A Wanting Seed”, and “Nothing Like the Sun”. Latter Burgess came to realize that he was not going to die, not too soon anyway. He slowed down and started producing longer, arguably better novels. But this period of productivity stands as a remarkable example of what a great artist might do if he thinks he is soon to die.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta 02/15 at 08:31 AMWow...as Johnny Carson might have said: “I did not know that.” Glen, I appreciate you posting this story and I think I may delve further one day soon to write about it. Just the kind the thing that fascinates me.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 02/15 at 09:54 AMdid anyone see zimmerman’s interview on 60 minutes, under the aegis of viacom for his book publishing party
there was an ad for a cellular company that featured one of the band’s songs, the night they brought old dixie down
the god of the invisible world, indeed
Posted by necramericanomicon on from 02/15 at 01:19 PMDidn’t see 60 Minutes but heard about it. Yeah, the longer Dylan hangs around, the less Dylan he is.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 02/15 at 01:52 PMMickey Z, I’m not sure you’ll even notice this comment down here on this old post, but I wanted to give you the heads up (or perhaps its the heads down in this case) about an Burgess bio by a very disturbed character named Roger Lewis who has also written books about Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier. The point is that if you really “delve further” into stuff written about Burgess you will discover that according to Lewis the story I told you about Burgess is “a lie”, along with pretty much everything else Burgess ever said about his own life. In fact, Lewis hates Burgess with a passion I have seldom seen in what appears, at least on the surface, to be a serious literary biography. Since publication “Anthony Burgess: A Biography” has been pretty much discredited. Reading this terrible book at face value paints a pretty disturbing picture of Burgess, who is in my not really all that humble opinion one of the best writers of the last half of the 20th Century. He is also one of the great thinkers of his generation. However, according to Roger Lewis he is one of the most disreputable men who ever dared to breath air. Here is a quote: “Burgess...was essentially a fake. I mean, he’s a fictional character. He’s a fabulous animal. He doesn’t exist. Being Burgess was a bogus business, and I can’t believe that he himself was really taken in,” and that’s just in the prologue. A few hundred pages in, Burgess appears to be a man of pure evil comparable to Hitler, if not George W. Bush. It is hard to figure out why Lewis would bother to write a 400 page book about someone he seems to despise so passionately. Some critics have suggested that Lewis’ book is some sort of Burgessesque parody of the sort of biography that Burgess himself might write about someone he really hated. Nevertheless, I don’t buy it. Burgess could be over the top. He could be mean, but he would never waste so much time on a topic he obviously believed was a waste of time. My theory is quite different. Lewis spent something like 15 or 20 years writing this book. He began working on the book when he was a mere graduate student. I believe that when he approached Burgess at some point during the first five or ten years of research, Burgess must have hurt the poor boy’s feelings, and Lewis decided to dedicate years to getting even. He waited conveniently until after Burgess was dead, so that he would not be subject to a lawsuit. Burgess was often pompous. He was often arrogant, but he was so much the intellectual giant, it is hard to blame him. There are few writers in the post-Joyce era who come as close to the greatness of the master, and Burgess knew this as well, maybe better than anyone. Yet, Burgess was not the petty, dishonest, fake that Lewis so insanely wants to make him out to be. I am sorry to bore you with all this, but I really wanted to warn you about this unpleasant biography before you found it yourself. If you really want to read about Burgess’ life read his two-part autobiography. Volume one is called “Little Wilson and Big God”. Volume two is called “You’ve Had Your Time”. There is also a nice little critical study of Burgess’ early novels I have around here somewhere. When I dig it out of the book mound that is my room I will tell you the title.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 02/26 at 08:03 PMHey Glen,
I get an e-mail every time someone posts here (announcing that, of course, makes me liable for not responding to everything...oh well). I have given thought to the Burgess story you told me but have had zero time to explore it further. Thanks for the head’s up. I must admit, you have also made curious about this Lewis bio, too. You know, to read it as fiction of a sort.
MZ
Posted by Mickey Z. on from 02/26 at 08:10 PMYes, I figured my lengthy attempt put Mr. Lewis out of his misery would probably have that effect. I have no doubt created new Burgess haters out here on the left, which would be too bad, though funny. There is a recent HBO film called “The Life and Times of Peter Sellers” which is the name of Lewis’ Sellers bio, so Lewis might be doing quite well for himself these days without my help. I love Peter Sellers so I have been afraid to read the Lewis biography and I could not watch the HBO thing and forgot to check the credits to see if it was actually based on the book, so as you see I am just a fountain of half-truths and guesses this morning.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 02/27 at 01:28 AMThe critical study of Burgess I promised to dig up before is Samuel Coale’s “Anthony Burgess” published by Frederick Ungar in 1981, as a part of Philip Winsor’s Modern Literature series. The series also includes good studies of Chester Himes, Freidrich Durrenmatt, Julio Cortazar, Camus, S.Y. Agnon, Borges, Anais Nin, and many others. Coales book is a very common out of print book and anyone interested should have no problem finding a cheap copy at their local used books store. If that does not work go on line to Abebooks.com and there are a bunch of copies available for under $10 (I just checked). Amazon has copies for even less but I personally try to avoid Amazon because they seem so ubiquitous that they cannot be healthy for the book world. Plus according to Eric Alterman (who is not someone necessarily to be trusted) they are a “red company” (ie a company that donates heavily to the Republican Party). Anyhow, I always find Coale’s Burgess study to be useful when I return to the early works of Burgess. Unfortunately, since it was published in 1981, the last book covered is “Earthly Powers” (which is by the by an often overlooked masterpiece) so there is nothing about such late, great Burgess titles as “The End of the World News”, “The Kingdom of the Wicked”, “Any Old Iron” and “A Dead Man in Deptford”. Burgess wrote so very much (and yet is mostly known as the author of one famous book) that it will perhaps be years before he gets the critical attention he requires.
I apologize for going on at such length about all this, but this is a subject I care very much about. I hope someone out there is interested. I hope you are too, Mickey.
Posted by Glen Thrasher on from Atlanta, GA 02/27 at 04:32 AM
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