THERE AIN'T HALF BEEN SOME CLEVER BASTARDS - AN OCCASIONAL SERIES

PART ONE:  ANTHONY BURGESS

I'm currently reading part 1 of Anthony Burgess's two-part autobiography. I thought I'd already read the first part, and found a paperback copy already on my bookshelf after ordering both volumes online, but only a few pages in realized I had not, or if I had, had forgotten all of it. I've read most of his novels, having been introduced to "Inside Mr Enderby" back in Paris by an erudite and fatherly colleague.  Quite a challenge, with much vocabulary requiring a good English dictionary close to hand, but a master storyteller.

Born in 1917 into a lower middle class Catholic family near Manchester, he had no support, moral or financial, from his parents for his education, and attended regular Catholic schools, his smarts earning him a place at an elite Catholic college and then Manchester University where he studied English language and literature.  He was fascinated by language and linguistics and over the years learned French, Spanish, German, Russian, Persian and Malay. A self-taught pianist, he saw himself primarily as a musician and composer until his early 40s when he wrote The Malayan Trilogy as an amusement. Between the war (which he sat out pretty much as a nursing orderly and then as an education officer for the troops, a period he describes with scathing cynicism for the authorities) and his stint as an education officer with the Colonial Office in Malaya and then Brunei (1954-59) he was a lecturer in speech and drama, and then teacher of English literature in a grammar school.

Pretty much a functioning alcoholic for most of his life, in 1958 he was mistakenly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, whereupon he turned to writing full-time. The first sentence of his novel "Earthly Powers" is for my money the greatest opening of any book I have ever read:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

Everybody who read it looked up the word "catamite". I went further and based my purchase of a good English dictionary on a list of obscure words taken from Burgess's novels. The dictionary that had the most won - the Collins, purchased reverendly from Foyle's in Tottenham Court Road, pipped the others on "numinous".   I still have it today.

The autobiography is wordy, as you'd expect - after 100 pages we are only up to his early teenage years - with the occasional obscure or arcane word which I no longer look up in the dictionary as I used to with his novels.  It gets more interesting when he becomes an educator in the army, and his rebellious character comes to the fore.  He deplores the level of education of the average squaddie, without vaunting his own intellect, which he downplays considerably. He paints a smoke-stained and stale beer-smelling picture of seedy postwar Soho, a world that my father knew well, and pub crawls with the likes of Dylan Thomas, and occasionally George Orwell.

He was so bloody clever he wrote a novel about Napoleon that mirrored the structure of Beethoven's Eroica symphony.  In total he composed some 250 musical pieces.   But he will be forever remembered as the author of "A Clockwork Orange" (1962), a novella written in three weeks inspired by the rape and beating of his wife in London by American GIs during the Blitz, resulting in a problematic miscarriage, and abysmally misinterpreted by Stanley Kubrick in his highly controversial 1971 film. 

He eventually died of lung cancer (he was also a heavy smoker) aged 76.  His headstone was inscribed in Aramaic.  Obviously.