Ian Penman · AB Fab: Anthony Burgess heads south

Earlier this year someone told me they’d seen ‘something online’ about Andy Burnham, back when he was mayor of Greater Manchester, appearing on Celebrity Mastermind and taking the life and works of Anthony Burgess as his specialist subject. It didn’t end well: Burnham came to grief on the sharp rocks at the foot of the sheer cliff-face of the gargantuan, labyrinthine, impossibly variegated Burgess canon. There is no way to ‘bone up’ on Burgess. Where do you establish a first hesitant foothold? His 33 works of fiction? His wide-ranging literary journalism? His screenplays for film and television? His works for piano, his chamber music and concertos? It would be easy to compile a Mastermind interrogation based solely on the history of his best-known book, A Clockwork Orange (1962).Why had I not stumbled across this cautionary tale before? Surely the tabloids would have pounced on any such evidence of Burnham hubris – it felt almost too good to be true. And so it proved. A quick search online turned up no mention of any such crisis of knowledge. Someone had chosen Burgess as their Mastermind subject, but it was the former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton. So: a TV quiz show, the world of British politics and three different people with the same initials. It looks like the result of some crazy algorithmic glitch. Or was something nearer mischief involved? Are AI bots making literary jokes now? Was this a moral fable about harried freelancers relying too much on the internet for background colour?Still, Burgess does seem a perfect fit for Burnham. Manchester? – check. Roman Catholic upbringing? – check. Read English at university? – check. And because, for a certain kind of northern man, Burgess has always been – for once the term is apt – something of an icon. A bit mouthy and contrarian. Not part of the self-regarding London literary establishment. A Big Canvas man, equally at home with Beethoven or Shakespeare. A tireless worker, an innovative stylist. One of our own, but adoptively and far-sightedly European. The local hero did have an Achilles’ heel, though. Burgess had to leave his birthplace early to find – or invent – himself. ‘It’s not always our fault if we desert the place that gave us our education and first love affair,’ he observed ruefully in ‘Manchester Made Me’, a piece from 1984. ‘Mancunians don’t take kindly to people leaving their city,’ he said in a documentary for BBC Radio 4 in 1989, ‘and I’ve already heard it said that I’ve become a “stuck-up, opinionated bastard” solely because I’ve left Manchester.’ Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Conquering the wider world may reflect some glory on the place you leave behind, but of necessity it means moving away – often to London. Perhaps, in the new AB-as-PM era, the move will be made in the other direction.John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born on 25 February 1917, and the chronicles of his childhood ring with the rough, crepuscular music of Manchester place names: Ancoats, Collyhurst, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Miles Platting, Monsall. Roll them around your mouth, savour the tang – vinegary, gutsy, tart. Was this young Burgess’s first experience of the enchantments of language, anticipating his discovery of James Joyce? Burgess was the child of Irish Catholic parents – Anthony was his confirmation name, after St Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things – and he attended the Bishop Bilsborrow elementary school in Moss Side before going on to Xaverian College in Rusholme, a Roman Catholic grammar school for boys. Xaverian is where Burgess wrote his first poetry in the early 1930s, and it is commemorated in the middle name of his fictional alter ego, the costive poet Francis Xavier Enderby.Burgess always liked to trumpet his Manchester bona fides, rhapsodising about a time when ‘beer was sixpence a pint in the saloon bar, and you could buy twenty Player’s for a shilling. I loved the pubs, which were gamy, even Rabelaisian, and I earned extra money by playing the piano in them.’ He would spin variations on this riff throughout his life; it’s very nearly ‘salt of the earth’ cliché, but Burgess gives it a note of outsider flair, soul, otherness. He always laid great emphasis on his Irish roots, as if he were by nature a rebel, a turncoat, an artistic recusant, joylessly exiled in the oppressive mainland kingdom. As his biographer Andrew Biswell – another AB! – puts it, ‘Burgess depicts Manchester before the Second World War as a Catholic city which is more Irish than English. His sentimental version of Lancashire is a place where the Reformation never really took hold. London and the South of England, by contrast, are snooty, puritanical places.’ Burgess’s North-South split isn’t just a matter of taste, happenstance, geographical locale, but something near metaphysical, a schism in his being.When Burgess was a guest on Desert Island Discs in November 1966, the book he chose to be cast away with was Finnegans Wake. The publisher Galileo has in the last few years steadily been serving up big calorific portions of the Burgess back catalogue, and Joyce’s fingerprints can be found all over it, not only in Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965) and A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1966). Joyce is a whispery phantom, haunting the unlikeliest places: pub, palazzo, ocean liner, oratory. From Joyce, Burgess learned that language isn’t simply a means of communication but a wild, disruptive pleasure in itself; Finnegans Wake is his book of books, his venerable codex, the hill he would happily die on. Burgess, king of blurbs, asserts that Finnegans Wake is ‘one of the most entertaining books ever written … one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page’ – mind, he says exactly the same thing about Ulysses – and that it ‘represents a sort of glorification of the pun, the ambiguity which makes us see a fundamental, but normally disregarded, identification in a burst of laughter or a nod of awe’. Here I must make a shameful confession. In all the attempts I have made down the years to crack Finnegans Wake – not a single LOL. I bow to no one in my love of a good (or bad) pun, but I find Joyce’s paronomasia very thin gruel, not at all the hotpot promised by Burgess. The polysemic gags lie there smug and inert on the page, provoking not riotous illumination but at most a half-hearted ‘Oh, OK. I see.’It never feels like humour when it has to be explained. Burgess was a born explainer, and between the ages of 26 and 42 a teacher is what he was, how he saw himself, earned a living. He worked for, inter alia, the Royal Army Educational Corps, the Ministry of Education, Birmingham University, Banbury Grammar School and finally the Colonial Service in Malaya and Brunei. He taught mainly speech and drama; his students remembered him for his infectious enthusiasm. Teaching is an ideal apprenticeship for a freelance writer or reviewer, demanding a combination of discipline and flexibility, plain speaking and verve. Teachers cannot have writer’s block. No excuses! Tomorrow you’re taking the second form for Latin or maths, drama or Bible studies, and you’d better be prepared. Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life (1964) – a ‘fictional biography’ of the young WS – is framed as a lecture given by ‘Mr Burgess’ to the students of a Malaysian college. His two books on Joyce and Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence (1985) are essentially primers, but thanks to a judicious scattering of personal detail you never feel lectured to. Here is Burgess describing Lawrence in what is also an undeclared sketch of his own first marriage:This meant not only writing but the house chores he had learned from his mother and father … He scrubbed, cooked, laundered, mended, while Frieda lay in bed smoking a cigarette or demanded to be amused. He was one of those writers rare and admirable in their work habits, demanding neither silence nor seclusion.Burgess enjoyed taking something arcane or specialised and making it accessible. People said of him that he was too clever by half, a show-off – swallowed a dictionary did we? But they weren’t taking into account that he was a dedicated educator. Burgess also enjoyed bringing together things that aren’t usually found in the same postcode. In his 1971 novel M/F – ‘novel’ seems too straightforward a classification – these things include Claude Lévi-Strauss and madcap farce, Bishop Berkeley and Oedipus, plus a whole carnival float of myths, puzzles and doubles. You don’t go to Burgess for cliffhangers, or really for plot at all, but when it’s there, there’s a lot of it: a mezze, a maze, a pantechnicon, a potlatch.Tremor of Intent (1966), my personal favourite of the reissues so far, is Burgess’s attempt to angry up the cold-blooded spy thriller of Ian Fleming or John le Carré with an ex-Catholic’s felt theology. The cover of the book’s first American edition had the subtitle An Eschatological Spy Novel – the Cold War figured as an ancient struggle between Good and Evil. Hillier, an MI6 agent on his last job, sails to the Soviet Union to retrieve the defecting scientist Roper, who is also his oldest friend. There is plenty of sex and violence and undercover malarkey, and the puppet-master Theodorescu is Burgess’s studied version of a Bond villain. (A decade later, Burgess would try to redeploy some of these characters when Cubby Broccoli asked him to write a script for The Spy Who Loved Me; his option was not taken up.) Burgess admires Fleming but cannot abide le Carré, dismissing him as humourless and self-important – ‘John the Square’. (This is uncharacteristic: as a reviewer Burgess was more often a booster than a tyrant; elsewhere only the Beatles provoked a similar fangs-out hostility.) Burgess has no interest in the precise details of tradecraft. What animates him are certain nagging perplexities. Can something be a crime, but not a sin? If