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| Birth Name(s) : Joseph Kell |
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Full Joseph Kell Biography
Anthony Burgess (February 25, 1917 – November 22, 1993) was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also active as a librettist, poet, pianist, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, linguist and educationalist.
He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage; scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen; invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire; and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.
Burgess described his father, Joseph Wilson, as descended from an "Augustinian Catholic" background. Burgess's father had a variety of means of earning a living, working at different times as an army corporal, a bookmaker, a pub piano-player, a pianist in movie theaters accompanying silent films, an encyclopedia salesman, a butcher, a cashier and a tobacconist. Burgess described his father, who later remarried a pub landlady, as "a mostly absent drunk who called himself a father". The adjective he used to describe the relationship he had with his father was "lukewarm". Burgess's grandfather was half-Irish.
Burgess was to a large degree an autodidact but was nevertheless fortunate, in view of the straitened circumstances in which he grew up, to receive a formal education of a high standard.
In 1940 Burgess began a wartime stint with the military, beginning with the Royal Army Medical Corps, which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth, Northumberland. During this period he sometimes directed an army dance band.
Burgess left the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, and was for the next four years a lecturer in speech and drama at the Mid-West School of Education near Wolverhampton and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College (known as "the Brigg" and associated with the University of Birmingham), which was situated near Preston.
Eventually he settled in Monaco, where he was active in the local community, becoming a co-founder in 1984 of the Princess Grace Irish Library, a centre for Irish cultural studies.
Although Burgess lived not far from Graham Greene, whose house was in Antibes, Greene became aggrieved shortly before his death by comments in newspaper articles by Burgess, and broke off all contact. Gore Vidal revealed in his 2006 memoir Point to Point Navigation that Greene disapproved of Burgess's appearance on various European television stations to discuss his (Burgess's) books. Vidal recounts that Greene apparently regarded a willingness to appear on TV as something that ought to be beneath a writer's dignity. "He talks about his books", Vidal quotes an exasperated Greene as saying.
Describing himself as "a belated father", Burgess adopted as his stepson Liana's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.
Burgess had delivered the eulogy at the memorial service for Benny Hill in 1992; the eulogies at his own memorial service at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden, London in 1994 were delivered by the journalist Auberon Waugh and the novelist William Boyd.
Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text designed originally for use outside English-speaking countries. Aimed at newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students is still used in many schools today. He followed this with The Novel To-day and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction.
He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called Will! or The Bawdy Bard. It was based on his novel Nothing Like The Sun.
Encouraged by his novel Tremor of Intent (a parody of James Bond adventures), Burgess wrote a screenplay for The Spy Who Loved Me. It was rejected. Burgess's plot featured Bond's identical twin 008 and revolved around an organisation called CHAOS (Consortium for the Hastening of the Annihilation of Organised Society). CHAOS has accumulated enough money to achieve its plans and is now concentrating on power for its own sake. It blackmails international figures into humiliating themselves by terrorism. During Burgess's proposed opening sequence, an airliner full of passengers is exploded as it takes off, CHAOS's response to the Pope's refusal to personally whitewash the Sistine Chapel. Bond discovers a plot to implant 'micro-nukes' in appendectomy patients, the aim being to blow up Sydney Opera House during a visit by international royals and presidents (this atrocity being in response to the US President's refusal to masturbate on live TV). In You've Had Your Time, Burgess commented that the only idea that survived from his screenplay was that the villains' hideout was a ship disguised as an oil tanker.
He created an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982 and performed on the BBC), and wrote the book for the 1973 Broadway musical Cyrano, using his own adaptation of the Rostand play as its basis.
A few of the memoirs and other books in which Burgess is discussed:
- Michael Mewshaw, 'Do I Owe You Something?', Granta No. 75 (2001)
- Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (1993)
- Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open (1999)
- Kingsley Amis, Memoirs (1991)
- D.J. Enright, A Mania for Sentences (1983); Man Is An Onion (1972) |
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