How is Anthony Burgess remembered these days? In his own mind, he was a composer by nature and a fiction writer by default; one day, he hoped, his musical works would be as well known as A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers. There were also plays, screenplays, poems and excursions in linguistics. But what he excelled at was literary journalism. He was a master of op-ed features and book reviews.

In the hierarchy of forms, literary journalism comes near the bottom. Its practitioners are hacks, whose domain is Grub Street and who produce mere copy. Despicable rats, Burgess called them, and his fiction reinforces this impression. In Inside Mr Enderby, the eponymous poet-protagonist is lured into writing for a women’s magazine with disastrous consequences. Radio and television should be avoided, too, Burgess thought, though for a time he interviewed novelists for the BBC (Paul Scott and Arthur Koestler among them) and when Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange came out, he went on a lot of chat shows. One of these was hosted by Jimmy Savile, presciently described in Burgess’s memoirs as a man “noted for bipartite hair dyes and his love of the young”. The experience left Burgess wishing “to inflict GBH on Savile” and vowing never to appear on a chat show again.

Anything that distracts you from your writing is to be avoided, he said. Offered a post as distinguished professor, he turned it down, fearing acceptance would make him an “extinguished novelist”. But journalism was the great Satan, and Burgess’s memoirs show a peculiar desperation to devalue the part it played in his life. In the index, there’s not a single entry for the Observer (for which he wrote for many years), though there are several for the Yorkshire Post, where he began his reviewing career. The implication is clear – that his own trajectory was the opposite of the typical hack, not downwards but upwards, and ending in international celebrity, with Hollywood producers and Broadway theatre directors desperate to avail themselves of his talents.

But Burgess was a prodigious literary journalist. For the Guardian and Observer alone, he wrote more than 400 pieces. For the Yorkshire Post, in a two-year spell as fiction reviewer, he reviewed more than 350 novels. Then there was the Daily Mail, the press in Italy, France and the US, and in the last years of his life, the newly founded Independent. At university, under the initials ABW, he’d published poems and reviews in a student magazine. And after a break from journalism during his 20s and 30s, he resumed with a vengeance: during one manic period in the mid-1960s, he was simultaneously drama critic for the Spectator, opera critic for Queen and television critic for the Listener, as well as contributing unsigned reviews to the TLS. He paced himself more slowly after that, but still wrote at an extraordinary rate and continued till the end of his life – indeed, even beyond it, since three book reviews composed while he was dying appeared in the Observer on successive Sundays after his death.

He cared about reviews. Time and again in his memoirs, he quotes from the notices he received for his books, often at some length, and often from the most negative ones. Reviewing mattered to him. And he was good at it – in the national press awards of 1979, on the strength of his Observer book reviews, he was named critic of the year (the award was presented by Mrs Thatcher). Even before that, his publishers thought well enough of his literary journalism to collect it in a book called Urgent Copy. Though Burgess’s preface to that book is characteristically disparaging – requiring “an apologetic grimace, tinged with irony, on behalf of a whole profession” - he was obviously pleased to see his journalism between hard covers, because he allowed it to happen again in a second collection, Homage to Qwert Yuiop.

At the Observer, for which I worked in the 1980s, he was on a lucrative retainer, which precluded him from writing for rival broadsheets. Not that Burgess was there to put on circulation, but he was undoubtedly an asset – quick, reliable, authoritative, a good name to have associated with your pages. By the mid-80s, he was getting £600 for each 1,000-word piece (almost as much as the New Yorker’s legendary rate of a dollar a word) and writing up to 40 reviews a year. The fee is well above average even today, and back then it was a considerable sum. But Burgess was worth it. You’d post a book to him in Monaco or Lugano on a Wednesday, and by the following Monday the review would be back; sometimes it seemed the review had come in even before the book had been sent out. Once there was a muddle over two books that were being dispatched – the novel that should have gone to Burgess went to our China expert, the book on China to Burgess. The China expert called to alert us to the mistake – but not before Burgess had filed his copy.

In his early days as a reviewer, living in Sussex and writing for the Yorkshire Post, Burgess’s chief motive was financial. He supplemented his meagre freelance income by selling review copies to a bookseller – every Monday, he’d stagger to the local station carrying two suitcases, catch the train to Charing Cross and proceed to Simmonds bookshop in the Strand, where he’d be given money to spend on “cigars, cognac and gentleman’s relish”. The arrangement worked well until the first of his Enderby novels was published, under the name Joseph Kell, and he made it the lead in a batch review. The review was no rave. “This is in many ways a dirty book,” it said, “and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.” But his emphasis on the novel’s interest in sex was a come-on – a way of praising it with faint damns. And when the truth came to light, Burgess was sacked from the paper.

By the 1980s, when he was living abroad, reviewing fulfilled a different purpose – not as a source of income but as a way of staying in touch with life and literature in the UK. His energy was inexhaustible and his range of interests incomparable. The Tarot pack, The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry, Princess Grace (the Monaco connection), Nadia Boulanger, the ethics of human biotechnology, the origins of analytical philosophy, monastic writings of the 12th century – all were grist to his mill. He’d review a biography of Orson Welles one week and one about Robert Graves the next. A history of pagans and Christians, then a history of British musical theatre. Language always interested him – a dictionary of the Khazars, a dictionary of Yiddish. And biographies, of course, no matter who the subject was – the Pope, Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, St Anselm, Boris Pasternak, Saddam Hussein.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anthony Burgess in 1973. Photograph: Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

He was choosy about the fiction he reviewed, or we were choosy in what we sent him – Greene, Naipaul, Golding, Umberto Eco, Muriel Spark. Mostly he reviewed his seniors or contemporaries, but there were a couple of exceptions. He reviewed David Lodge’s Nice Work and Martin Amis’s Money, for example, acclaiming Lodge as one of our finest living novelists, while ticking Amis off not just for failing to make the narrator likable but for allowing him 386 pages “when half of that might well have been more than enough”. He rarely reviewed poetry but his review of Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems in 1990 had astute things to say. “Some day we will talk of his greatness,” he said, disallowing greatness to the living.

He didn’t go in for hatchet jobs. Literary editors tend to like them, as do readers – it’s what Karl Miller called “the attraction of detraction” – but Burgess discovered their pitfalls as a student at Manchester University in the late 1930s, with a splenetic review of Graves’s Collected Poems. Graves had visited the university the previous year, and Burgess’s review included a portrait of Graves as a “burly six-foot-two red-faced farmer … flicking cigarette ends into the fire” and invariably missing the target – just as the poems did, said Burgess. That was too ad hominem for Graves, who wrote a letter in protest.

The experience taught Burgess to be less intemperate as a reviewer (though as a novelist he was always incurring libel suits). He also learned how hard it is to write even a bad book, with all the “untold misery” entailed (“tobacco-addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and Dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence”). Least of all did he feel able to attack fellow novelists, for fear of being accused of jealousy. The jealousy sometimes creeps in subtextually, between the lines, when he’s writing about those more praised than they deserve to be (ie, more than he is). With John le Carré for instance, whose merely “competent novels of espionage” suggest he has never heard of James Joyce; or with William Golding, to whose Rites of Passage Burgess lost out for the Booker prize in 1980 and whose “banal” next novel, The Paper Men, is judged to disprove his publisher’s claims for his greatness.

Burgess was sparing about including personal material in his reviews, so that when he does it carries more weight. A biography of Joseph Conrad led him to contrast the pampered life writers used to enjoy (valets, butlers, maids, gardeners, chauffeurs, etc) with his own: before sitting down to read it, he says, “I shopped in the supermarket, dragged three bags up three flights, peeled potatoes, cleaned brussels sprouts, put the joint in the oven, washed yesterday’s dishes, made the beds [and] swept the floor”. It was probably no exaggeration.

At the Observer, most of our contact with him was by phone. The hope was that he’d answer if you called him, but usually his wife, Liana, picked up and that would usually mean some sort of harangue from her about how poorly we were paying Burgess or how hard we were overworking him, and never mind that all this had been agreed with his agent. Eventually, Burgess would wrest the phone from her, and after a moan or two about his health or the uselessness of publishers, he’d agree to review whichever book we had in mind. I can’t ever remember him saying no.

I sometimes wonder if reviews didn’t fill a space for him that other novelists fill with short stories; incisiveness is required in both forms. Or perhaps it was the theatrical side of Burgess (as a teacher he directed plays) that his journalism expressed – a love of performance. Sometimes reviews fed directly into his work: struggling to finish Earthly Powers, he was sent a book about the life of St Nicholas of Bari, and its themes of betrayal and humiliation helped to clarify what happens to his protagonist. Book reviews exposed him to new ideas and writers. They also imposed a discipline that – aside from A Clockwork Orange, the most heavily drafted and edited of his works – his fiction often lacks. Unlike his novels, his journalism is largely free of lavatorial humour, literary self-absorption and what Kingsley Amis called “facetious seriousness”.

The literary-journalistic world in which Burgess flourished seems remote now. Today’s is more pluralist and fragmented – busier, too, with online reviews and blogs as well as book pages. Burgess claimed that the only response he ever had to the many reviews he wrote for the Yorkshire Post was from a woman disputing a passing claim he had made that British orchids have no smell. Reviews have little effect, he concluded, though a New Statesman review of one of his books once came in handy, by implying he was homosexual. At the time, a lady dentist who was treating his teeth had been making advances; when she proposed they make love in her surgery, he showed her the review, to prove she’d be wasting her time.

In an article in the spring of 1993, after the James Bulger murder in Liverpool, the man who’d written A Clockwork Orange performed a remarkable volte face and mea culpa, deciding that violent films and books can have a corrupting influence. It was a typically thought-provoking cultural intervention. Six months later he was dead. But even the most ephemeral of his writings survive (along with his death-mask) in the archives of the Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. They show him to be what Carlyle called a “professor of things in general”, a man who knew everything or aspired to know everything or carried off a brilliant pretence of knowing everything, and who did this best in his literary journalism. “We have our uses,” he said of book reviewers, if only for the conviction that “nothing is as important as the Box of Organised Knowledge, which is acronymised into Book.”

• The Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism will be announced on 26 February.