Anthony Burgess, 1917-1993

Biographical Sketch

Anthony Burgess was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson on February 25, 1917, in Manchester, England. His mother and young sister died of influenza in 1919, leaving Burgess to a blue collar upbringing by his father--a cashier and piano player--an aunt, and later a stepmother. As a child, Burgess was made keenly aware of his Irish Catholic heritage. His education at the parochial Xaverian College instilled an interest in theological themes of good and evil, free will, and social authority which appeared in much of his writing years later.

At the age of 12, Burgess heard Debussy's L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune on a homemade crystal radio and it so inspired him that he began listening constantly to music, teaching himself to play the piano and improvise jazz, studying books on the history and theory of music, and analyzing scores by Debussy, Berlioz, Wagner, Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

A lack of opportunities for formal instruction in music combined with a headstrong insistence on doing things his own way resulted in his remaining self-taught. As he approached graduation from high school, Burgess insisted on taking the exam for distinction in music, and he passed (to the consternation of his headmaster and teachers, who were unaware of his solitary music studies).

Burgess entered Manchester University in 1936 with the intention of studying music. Poor grades in physics blocked his acceptance into the Music Department, so he chose instead to focus on composition and language in Manchester's English Department. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1940, he entered the Royal Army Medical Corps, later transferring to the Education Corps. In 1942 he married Llewela Isherwood Jones, who he first met when both were students at Manchester.

Burgess remained in the Army until 1946, serving in Gibraltar. After the war, he held teaching positions with Birmingham University, the Ministry of Education, and Banbury Grammar School. In 1954 he accepted a position with the Colonial Office teaching in Malaya and later Brunei.

While in Malaya, Burgess published his first novels, Time for a Tiger , The Enemy in the Blanket, and Beds in the East, using the pseudonym "Anthony Burgess" to avoid any repercussions from the Colonial Office. These works were republished as the compilation The Long day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (Norton, 1965) and again as Malayan Trilogy (Penguin, 1972).

In 1959 Burgess was sent back to England and released from the Colonial Office after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Troubled by the thought of leaving his wife without income, he wrote five novels in the next year and a total of eleven by 1964. These include The Doctor Is Sick, The Wanting Seed, A Clockwork Orange, Honey for the Bears, and Nothing Like the Sun. He also produced two works, One Hand Clapping and Inside Mr. Enderby, under the pseudonym Joseph Kell.

During the following years, Burgess continued to prove his doctors' prognoses wrong and claimed to write 2,000 words of fair copy per day. He supplemented the income from his novels with literary reviews and essays for numerous newspapers and magazines. He also produced non-fiction books on English literature, linguistics, and the works of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and William Shakespeare.

In 1968 Llewela died after years of poor health. Later that year Burgess discovered he had a four-year-old son by Liana Macellari, who he soon married. The three moved to Malta to avoid high British income taxes, and later to Italy and then Monaco. From 1969 to 1973 Burgess held a series of visiting instructor positions at the University of North Carolina, Columbia , Princeton, and City College in New York.

By 1970 Burgess was well known in Britain and Europe for his satirical style and linguistic inventiveness. In 1971 his notoriety grew in America with the release of the movie version of A Clockwork Orange. He continued to write throughout the next two decades, publishing over 30 novels including MF (1971), Napoleon Symphony (1974), Beard's Roman Women (1976), Earthly Powers (1980), The End of the World News (1983), The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985), and Any Old Iron (1989). He also edited literature text books, produced several translations, wrote screenplays for film and television, and continued with his "first love," music composition. Over the course of his life, Burgess wrote pieces ranging from small chamber works to symphonies, primarily as a means of relaxation and amusement.

Over the course of his life, Burgess wrote pieces ranging from small chamber works to symphonies, primarily as a means of relaxation and amusement. He stated that composition "was a temperamental necessity for me to cleanse my mind of verbal preoccupation by composing music. It no longer mattered whether the music would ever be heard: music was a kind of therapy. The mere physical act of ruling bar lines and setting down notes was a manual and visual relief from the long days at the typewriter. The struggle with words, their syntax and rhythms and referents, yielded to a concern with pure form." After publishing the novel Napoleon Symphony in 1974 he received a commission from the American University orchestra, and finally heard one of his orchestral works performed for the first time.

By the early 1990s Burgess had written more than 60 books, over 150 musical compositions, and continued to publish articles and reviews worldwide. He died in 1993 at age 76, thirty-four years after receiving his one-year terminal diagnosis.

Sources:

Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th edition (New York: Schirmer, 1992).

Little Wilson and Big God. Burgess, Anthony. (New York : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986).

This Man and Music. Burgess, Anthony. (London: Hutchinson, 1982)

You've Had Your Time. Burgess, Anthony. (London : Heinemann, 1990).

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