Anthony Burgess by Roger Lewis

When a biographer detests his subject, can we trust the result? Paul Bailey has his doubts

"I was in Russia when Ernest Hemingway died," announced Anthony Burgess in 1961, not comprehending in his vanity that his whereabouts at the moment of Hemingway's decease had no relevance to the man and his books. Seven years later, when Burgess's tribute was reprinted in the collection Urgent Copy, Geoffrey Grigson quoted that absurd self-aggrandisement in a review Burgess would never forget. "I suspect this reviewer's anxiety to convince himself (perhaps more than others?) that an insatiable liking for words amounts to an ability to use them well and to distinct purpose," Grigson observed. "Only such literary anxiousness coupled with energy could explain writing on and on with a badness at once so surprisingly defiant and so exceedingly obvious."

Roger Lewis frequently echoes those judgements in his typically capricious and opinionated biography. No one, not even his dearest friends, could charge him with being disinterested. He makes it glowingly clear that he considers his subject a verbose buffoon with the most bizarre haircut on the planet. Burgess, according to Lewis, was in possession of more warts than a warthog – or Phacochoerus aethiopicus, as the booming novelist, ever the pedant, might have said. Burgess was an inconsiderate husband to his first wife, Lynne, and a hopelessly inadequate stepfather for the scarred son of his second, the irrepressible Liliana. Lewis has no qualms when it comes to stating, as undeniable fact, that Burgess caused Lynne's descent into nymphomaniacal alcoholism. He was often too drunk to notice how drunk she was, and – for all the sexual boasting – he was the lousiest and least caring of lovers. Lewis believes, and writes much to support that belief, that he was impotent.

It is his contention that John Wilson's assumption of "Anthony Burgess" as a pen-name led him to create a monstre sacré. People who remembered Wilson as a young schoolteacher told Lewis he was a bit eccentric but likeable, and sometimes shy in the company of women. His passion for James Joyce and arcane language was already evident. His need to remind everyone of his brilliance as a linguist was in its early stages, the bombastic show-off ("My Persian is rusty") of his maturity yet in embryo.

As soon as "Anthony Burgess" achieved publication, his verbal sluice-gate opened, issuing forth an unstoppable torrent of archaisms for over three decades. The author of Language Made Plain, Lewis records with glee, was incapable of tossing off an article without shoving in words like hallucal, allotrope and epigone. Literary editors – many of whom adored him because he always delivered his copy well in advance – seldom tinkered with his "bejewelled vocabulary". Perhaps they had neither the time nor aptitude to consult a dictionary. Or perhaps they didn't wish to appear stupid, since everyone knows that hallucal, a coinage dating from 1889, means "of, or relating to, the big toe".

The Anthony Burgess of Lewis's imagination is a comic grotesque, with the orotund vocal mannerisms of the actor-managers he must have seen on the stage in Manchester as a boy. He was cocooned in the Edwardian era, with his Blimpish views on the young, on the modern movement in art and music, on blacks, on homosexuality. Yet he elected to live abroad to avoid taxes, in a fine right-wing tradition. It pained him to stand a round of drinks.

Is Lewis's portrait unfair and unbalanced? Probably – but only partly so, I should think. It had me laughing immoderately, especially when the polyglot, bellowing Malay at a succession of Malayan waitresses, was unable to make himself understood. The scene is preserved in a television documentary. The director refrained from cutting it, realising its hilariousness. The great joke is that, had he spoken English, the girls would have brought the food to the table straight away.

This entertaining book ought to have been edited with a scythe. There are several allusions too many to the Carry On movies, and an excess of footnotes concerned with Lewis's startling talents as an Oxford undergraduate. The side-swipes at Clive James, Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael and Gore Vidal are funny (if you agree), but shamelessly self-indulgent. And Lewis, who accuses Burgess of both laziness and fraudulence, reveals himself to be something of a lazy fraud in his own right.

Late in the repetitive and haphazard narrative, he mentions Giuseppe Berto, and writes, in the millionth footnote: "I'm afraid I can't find anything on him, unless he's Enrico Bertoia (1915-78), who became Harry Bertoia, a sculptor and designer from San Lorenzo, Italy, who taught painting and metal-craft in America. You'd recognise his slender metal chairs with their wire-mesh seats if you saw them." This is piffle. If Lewis had glanced at any reliable guide to 20th-century Italian literature, he would have discovered that Giuseppe Berto (1914-1978) wrote the acclaimed novel The Sky is Red, an international bestseller in 1948.

Burgess's reputation is dependent on his fiction, not the journalism and film scripts he churned out for money. It certainly doesn't depend on the music he composed, as those of us who have heard the odd sample will aver. Lewis finds human qualities in the Malayan Trilogy lacking in later, more ambitious novels. He shares my loathing of that overblown concoction Earthly Powers, which now looks dated and contrived. Of the critics who reviewed it in 1980, only Nigel Dennis, in a brilliant piece for the New York Review of Books, got its bogus measure. Lewis seems unaware of this elegant and lucid essay, preferring to dwell instead on the acting ability of Robin Askwith, star of the seminal movie Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

Lewis's conclusion is that Burgess was a great writer who failed to write a great book. In 400 pages, he provides little evidence to back up this claim. Apart from praising Burgess's entry on "The Novel" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he deems most of the output derisory, and self-centred at the core. I finished Anthony Burgess hoping that his biographer is a model of truthfulness, a devoted husband, and a man aware of the insecurities and doubts of other, less fortunate human beings. I hope so fervently, since the Anthony Burgess he accounts for had none of these necessary virtues, it would appear. Another Life might take a different, kinder view.

Paul Bailey's new novel is 'Uncle Rudolf' (Fourth Estate)