Tales Of The City: Remembering Burgess
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Your support makes all the difference.So Anthony Burgess, contrary to popular mythology, was not after all a literary genius, a novelist of world-encompassing ambition, an essayist who assessed literary reputations with the final-word gravitas of a Recording Angel; nor was he a polymath and polyglot as we'd thought, a synthesiser of all mythologies, a walking compendium of modern thought, philosophy and theology, phrase and fable, a cigar-puffing, apoplectic Dr Johnson de nos jours, a monumental figure about whom it was said when he died in 1993, that (as Thackeray said about Swift) "thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling".
Nope, we were all wide of the mark. Don't you hate it when you get these things completely wrong? But Roger Lewis, the nation's most wayward and eccentric biographer, whose life of Burgess was launched yesterday at the Arts Club in Soho, evidently lost patience with the great man halfway through writing his 400-page book, and has filled the pages with a blizzard of disobliging revelations, put-downs, insults and complaints, grumbling away for 200,000 words like an irritable tapeworm.
Negative biographies are scarcely unusual (think of Michael Crick on Archer, JDF Jones on Van der Post, Tom Bower on just about everyone) nor very new (Richard Aldington wrote scathing Lives of DH and TE Lawrence in the 1950s), but it's not everyday that you encounter such a deliberate piece of reputation-crushing as Lewis's. Seen through his eyes, Burgess was a mendacious, drunken, impotent, vain, emotionless, puffed-up, talentless clown who neglected his first wife as she spiralled fatally into alcoholism, who lived abroad to avoid paying tax, and nursed a sentimental chip on his shoulder about not being sufficiently respected by the British establishment.
And yet, even after this onslaught by the prosecution, I cannot think of Anthony Burgess except with the utmost fondness. I didn't know him well, but we met on five or six occasions, twice for an interview, and from the moment I met him, I completely bought whatever pathetic, vainglorious self-mythologising performance he was (according to Lewis) indulging in at the time. I looked at his screwed-up eyes, the panatella he flourished like a wand, his nonsensical hairstyle, his querulously emphatic delivery, as if constantly arguing with himself, and I instantly fell for him.
In the presence of a genuinely great man, something odd happens to you – you feel older and wiser, worldlier and cleverer, and pleased with yourself just for being in his company. And Burgess's conversation was simply wonderful. He could bang on about Hegel or Mann, chasing the essence of their writing, connecting them both to, say, Marx or Kafka in his lordly classroom way (he was an inveterate teacher, magisterial in the classical sense) then switch to his admiration for Benny Hill or the tastiness of cow-heel pie in his native Harpurhey, north Manchester. If you got him on to his writing peers, he could be recklessly indiscreet. Once he told me that Graham Greene was having trouble with the husband of his new mistress, because the man had taken to walking past Greene's house in Antibes every evening and shouting "Salaud! Bastard!" through the front door. Greene got to hear what Burgess had said and a froideur kept them apart for months.
His second wife, Liana, sometimes sat in on his interviews, and Anglo-Italian banter flew between them. You rarely saw Burgess smile or laugh, but their overlapping antiphons of murmurous engagement suggested, pace Mr Lewis, a marriage of deep mutual attachment. Lewis complains that their conversations were one-way affairs, all transmit and no receive. He could never, I suspect, get over the fact that Burgess failed to find him terribly interesting as a reader, a writer or an intellect.
My last encounter with Burgess was at an arts centre in Brentford, where I interviewed him on stage close to his 75th birthday. After 90 minutes, he had the audience waving their arms like schoolkids, desperate to know his opinion: "I can just about understand Ulysses, but what is going on in Finnegans Wake?" asked one man. Burgess offered a brilliant précis of the great unsummarisable pun. "I know it's all about the past, but what is the actual point of A la recherche du temps perdu?" asked another. Burgess took this Monty Pythonish enquiry in his stride with another five-minute lecturette. Then, a lady waved a hand. "I believe you're an accomplished cook, Mr Burgess," she said. "What is the secret of a perfect tortilla?" Anybody else would have laughed at such an enquiry. Burgess merely puffed his Schimmelpennick and said: "The tortilla is, of course, merely a potato omelette, and the secret is to ensure that the cubes of potato are firm but not crisp, before they are engulfed in the ovigerous maelstrom..."
He was the sort of man who made you feel like cheering just because he existed, and there's nobody remotely like him around today. There are, unfortunately, more than enough Roger Lewises.
Must try harder
"He shows great originality, which must be curbed at all costs," an unknown beak at Westminster said in a school report about Sir Peter Ustinov.
"While cautiously holding out some hope of readmission, [we] suggested he seek counselling for his inability to take life seriously," wrote the Review Board at New York University about a neurotic freshman, Allen Stewart Konigsberg, aka Woody Allen.
"A bumptious, aggressive, difficult boy, too pleased with his own cleverness," was the considered opinion of the Eton form master about the 13-year-old AJ Ayer.
Goodness, how school reports level us all. However grand, well-connected and important you become, these scratchy little rectangular sheets of character assassination remain in your memory forever, playing hell with your self-esteem. A collection of the school reports of eminent women and men, entitled Could Do Better, has just come out from Pocket Books, and it makes you wonder if the course of people's lives was set by a few simple words on a page when they were young and impressionable.
Did the suave David Owen get that way because an unknown hand at Bradfield College noted he "can be a scruffy urchin". Does Michael Heseltine's imperviousness to criticism stem from the days at Shrewsbury when his House monitor summed him up as "rebellious, objectionable, idle, imbecilic, inefficient, antagonizing, untidy, lunatic, albino, conceited, inflated, impertinent, underhand, lazy and smug"? What dark secrets lurked in the psyche of Frank, later Lord, Longford when, according to his Eton report, "His whole life consists [of] a more or less elaborate pretence. His written work is indescribably filthy."
Even their behaviour in the nursery can seem significant to the lives of some of the great and good. Reading that, at six years and four months, "Michael has suddenly become a very noisy person and rather fancies himself as a humorist", one learns, with a shudder, the exact moment at which an ordinary child started to mutate into Michael Winner.
Right royal rumpus
I cannot quite believe how l'affaire Burrell has ramified, from being a quiet domestic tale of butler's pantry management and princessly generosity, into becoming an eye-wateringly sleazy epic featuring rent boys, anal rape, smuggled lovers, bitchy letters saying "trollop" and "harlot", stolen rings, secret tape-recordings, mental illness, legal cover-ups, and an allegedly witnessed scene of a royal personage illicitly entwined with a palace servant. This story has become so elaborate, there are at least six distinct narrative threads in which somebody is telling the truth and somebody is lying. It's all fantastically sordid stuff, of course, but one now tunes in to the morning and evening news genuinely avid for details. It will be gratifying to learn which young royal was caught having sex with the hired help. It will be even more gratifying to clock the sight – and it cannot be more than a few weeks away – of the Prince of Wales entering the witness box to give evidence...
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