On This Day in 1917

On this day in 1917, Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester, England.

He grew up a cradle Catholic in England, wanted to be a classical musician, didn't get in to music school, and majored in English literature instead. Then he joined the army. He resented authority, was not very well liked by his peers, and did things that got him in trouble. Once, he did not report back from leave on time, and the British military police hunted him down, treating him as a deserter. Still, he did well in the army and rose through the ranks. He was good at languages, and he held important positions in military intelligence and as an instructor.

After the army, he got a job with the British colonial service, and was posted to Malaysia. He taught in a boys school, became fluent in Malaysian, published some books of literary criticism, and wrote novels for pleasure on the side. At the time, he thought of fiction writing as a "gentlemanly hobby," expecting to make no money from it.

From Malaysia he went to a teaching post in Borneo. He started to get headaches, and then one day he collapsed in front of the classroom while giving a history lecture. The Colonial Service flew him back to London, checked him into a neurological ward, and doctors proclaimed that he had a brain tumor — an inoperable one — and that he had one year to live. He also no longer had a job.

He might have spent his terminal year traveling, but he didn't have any money. In fact, he was determined to make money for his future widow, and decided he would do this by writing at a furious pace. He wrote five novels in the year following his diagnosis. It turns out that he did not have a brain tumor, and he did not die. He kept writing at a furious pace, though, outliving his wife by many years and eventually dying of lung cancer (he was a heavy smoker) in 1993, more than 30 years and 30 books later.

His wrote his most famous book, A Clockwork Orange, in just three weeks in 1962, but it was based on something that happened when he was in the army during World War II. He was newly married, and his wife was pregnant. One night, while he was at the army base, his wife was mugged by four young U.S. Army deserters in London. After the attack, his wife miscarried their child.

A Clockwork Orange is set in futuristic England and features a teenage anti-hero named Alex who leads his gang of friends on acts of random violence. Originally, the book had 21 chapters. He chose the number carefully, he said, for "21 is symbol of human maturity, or used to be, since at 21 you got to vote and assumed adult responsibility." But the American publisher didn't like the last chapter, the one where the anti-hero Alex — as Anthony Burgess himself describes it — "grows up and realizes that ultraviolence is a bit of a bore, and it's time he had a wife and a malenky googoogooing malchickiwick to call him dadada. This was meant to be a mature conclusion, but nobody in America has ever liked the idea."

Burgess was desperate for money, and he didn't really think his book was all that good. He actually thought the American publisher was "being charitable in accepting the work at all." So he accepted the cutting of the final chapter for the U.S. edition.

And then Stanley Kubrick bought the film rights, and it was the American version of A Clockwork Orange that he used as a basis for the movie --- the one without the final chapter of Alex's maturation and redemption. Kubrick's movie made Burgess' book a big best-seller. Burgess was grateful that Kubrick made him rich, but was sorry that his book "became known as the raw material for a film that seemed to glorify sex and violence. ... The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die." He said, "The implied view of juvenile violence as something to go through and then grow out of is missing ... and this reduces the book to a mere parable, whereas it was intended to be a novel."

Burgess was a bit of a polyglot and a prolific literary critic. He invented a slang language for A Clockwork Orange. He is also one of the few critics up to the task of making James Joyce more accessible, writing Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965, also published as Re Joyce) and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973). He made selections for and published in 1969 an abridged version of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Rather than writing and rewriting drafts of a book, he finished revising one page completely before moving on to the next page. For his novels, he didn't do a whole lot of plotting — he would usually come up with a list of character names and a rough synopsis. When an interviewer asked him if he did something like write the big scenes first, Burgess replied, "I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop." He thought it was important not to overplan, and that it was important to trust in the act of writing itself.

He wrote long hours. Unlike many writers who swear by morning or late-night writing sessions, he preferred the afternoon best of all. He said: "It's a quiet time. It's a time when one's body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive — the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness."

He once said that his ideal reader is "a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age."