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Anthony Burgess: A Biography, by Roger Lewis
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Interviewer: "On what occasions do you lie?" Anthony Burgess: "When I write, when I speak, when I sleep."
He was the last great modernist. Novelist, composer, librettist, essayist, semanticist, translator, critic, Anthony Burgess's versatility and erudition found expression in more than fifty books and dozens of musical compositions, from operas, choral works and song cycles to symphonies and concertos.
Here now is a kaleidoscope of a book--the culmination of twenty years of writing and research--about a man who remains best known for A Clockwork Orange, the source of Stanley Kubrick's ground breaking, mind bending and prescient film.
Tracking Burgess from Manchester to Malaya to Malta to Monte Carlo, the author assesses Burgess's struggles and uncovers the web of truth and illusion about the writer's famous antic disposition. Burgess, the author argues, was just as much a literary confidence man and prankster as a consummate wordsmith.
Outrageously funny, honest and touching, Anthony Burgess explores the divisions that characterize its irascible subject and his darkly comic, bleakly beautiful world of fiction.
- Sales Rank: #3038636 in Books
- Published on: 2004-03-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.52" h x 1.60" w x 6.36" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 480 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Lewis, who has chronicled the lives of Peter Sellers and Laurence Olivier, eschews the traditional chronological narrative for a highly stylized, psychodynamic reading of his subjects and their creative work. As it turns out, Anthony Burgess (1917-1994) is ripe for this sort of treatment. Best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was extremely prolific but generally regarded as a great writer who never wrote a great book. Instead, he spread his talents thin (the author of scores of books, he was also a composer, translator and critic) and actively cultivated the myth of his own genius. By this account bombastic, egotistical and sexually eccentric, he responded to even the most profound tragedies of his life with a characteristic intellectual remove and what Lewis terms a "robotic" love of words. Lewis contends that Burgess (born John Anthony Burgess Wilson) was, in fact, several people at once, a "pathological liar" who lived in his books and experienced the world through a refracting set of identities. In perfect schizoid imitation, Lewis captures the Burgess/Wilson kaleidoscope with dramatic tangents, first-person interludes, endless cultural references, overly long footnotes and a charming lack of reverence. While at times Lewis's approach is frustratingly insular, a linear biography could not do this cryptic, difficult figure justice. 8 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, emerges as a complex, somewhat disturbing personality in this entertaining account of the legendary polymath's life and work. Eschewing traditional biographical structures, Lewis, who knew Burgess well, opts instead for a digressive, garrulous, sometimes gossipy memoir in which he takes time to recount his own journey from youthful fan to sympathetic but hardly uncritical friend. But there is plenty of room left for Burgess' life, and Lewis covers it in remarkable detail. In quirky prose of near-Joycean abundance (full of parenthetical asides and buttressed by pages of sprawling footnotes), he describes Burgess' painfully accurate memory for bad reviews, his manifold sexual frustrations and obsessions, his methods of distancing himself from family and friends, and much more. While some Burgess devotees may be annoyed by the casually damning candor with which Lewis tells his story, they will be fascinated by the story itself. Trygve Thoreson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Not since Lawrence Thompson on Robert Frost has there been a more serious falling out between biographer and subject. The result this time, however, is one extremely lively book, an avalanche of factual revelation, vitriolic wit, and personal disappointment that buries Burgess, and then posts a sign, Hic Jacet."
- Michael Dirda, Washington Post
"One might also conclude from reading Roger Lewis' biography of Burgess, that he was less a genius than a charlatan... The result is a biography drenched in the corrosive acid of love-hate, of infatuation turned to disillusionment, which reads as a scathing attack on Burgess' work and an indictment of his life and character."
- Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times
"It is a romantic idea that we should identify with the biographical subject... [Lewis] has done nothing less than shatter the mold of the genre."
- Carl Rollyson had his own thoughts in the New York Sun
"Audacious... Lewis has resolved, or corralled, his evolving views of Burgess in this digressive, brilliant, self-indulgent biography, whose pages of text often float atop hedge-high footnotes. It's a bravura performance, an intentionally (let's hope) Burgessian turn: outrageous, probing, debunking, entertaining, sourly euphoric, snarky. "
- Tom Nolan, Boston Herald
"Aiming to situate Burgess in the grand scheme of English -language literary history, Lewis does so magisterially... Trenchant..."
- Kirkus Reviews
"A highly stylized, psychodynamic reading..."
- Publishers Weekly
"[An] entertaining account of the legendary polymath's life and work... Lewis covers [Burgess's life] in remarkable detail... Burgess devotees...will be fascinated by the story."
- Booklist
"A spiraling, kaleidoscopic biography... Lewis does bring forth Burgess and his creative demons."
- Library Journal
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"I have been stunned and baffled by Roger Lewis's vast biography of the stunningly baffling Anthony Burgess."
- Jan Morris, author of The Meaning of Nowhere
"The book abounds with such sublime moments of resurrection, on the wings of Lewis's mordant humor."
- Duncan Fallowell, author of A History of Facelifting
"Like his subject, Lewis is an intellectual showman, a connoisseur of the arcane, a collector of titillating trivia, but with this salient difference: Lewis has a large heart and a generous sense of humor, and he waves a beguiling intimacy with his readers. Fascinated with Burgess's consummate fakery and repelled by his control-freakery, Lewis nonetheless succeeds in humanizing this sacred monster."
- Christopher Silvester, author of Roll Over And Die and editor of The Grove Book of Hollywood
"The book abounds with such sublime moments of resurrection, on the wings of Lewis's mordant humor. The two of them wrestle for every page, and so do the main text and extensive footnotes which open like trapdoors into unexpected worlds. Is this fission or fusion? Either way the energy release is enormous."
- Duncan Fallowell, author of A History of Facelifting
"For good and bad, I learned a lot from Anthony Burgess...a bloody good read."
- Stephen Bayley, author of General Knowledge
"There are passages of such brilliance--especially when he rails against his subject, whom he has come to hate over the 20-year course researching this book--that I found it exhilarating...Lewis is a mad obsessive, more of a stalker than a biographer, but he certainly brings new life to what can otherwise seem a rather tame genre."
- New Statemen Books of the Year
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Hell hath no fury like a biographer scorned
By Christopher Moss
This is simply the strangest biography that I have ever had the misfortune to read. Rather than describe Burgess's life in any useful or even thoughtful way, it is instead a sustained exercise in hatefulness. All biographers either like or dislike their subjects, but good ones know them well enough to feel that they cannot be classified as wholly likeable or or detestable. This author has an axe to grind, though we are not told what it is about. He allows himself to use his book as a spiteful tirade against Burgess, a selfish exhibition of childishness and I am surprised that a publisher agreed to see it into print. It reads as if written by a spurned lover, rather than an intelligent observer of another's life. If you have any respect for Burgess's work, don't waste your time on this misbegotten temper tantrum.
Christopher Moss
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
A barrowload of bile
By Dark Knight
WHEN someone is obsessively abusive of another, the reason usually lies in one of two areas - jealously or money. Sometimes both.
The indigent routinely despise the rich. The untalented resent the gifted.
I don't know whether Anthony Burgess was richer than Roger Lewis, but for all his faults - and they were many and varied - it's a fair bet that he outstripped Lewis in the talent stakes by some considerable distance.
My suspicion is that Lewis is just another Oxford don who feels comprehensively overshadowed by an accomplished provincial.
Burgess began life as the unpretentious Mancunian John Wilson and effectively reinvented himself as the pompous polymath of popular renown. No-one pretends he was particularly likeable, especially in his later years. Nor do most deny that there were elements of fakery in his public persona.
Nonetheless, it would be hard to justify this outpouring of bile on critical grounds alone. Lewis is so dogged in his condemnation, so relentless in his quest to undermine Burgess's reputation, that the reader is left to wonder at his motives. What exactly is Lewis's agenda? For the sake of his own integrity as a biographer, I think we should be told.
This book is so repetitive, and therefore so predictable, that I was bored rigid less than 150 pages in. I kept going because I wanted to find out exactly what was bugging Lewis. After 285 pages, I gave up, having been forced to conclude that his immature bitchery was the product of professional envy, nothing more.
How sad and pathetic that Lewis should have devoted 20 years of his life in researching and writing this mean, nasty, trivial book. It is by some way the worst literary biography I've read. And that's really saying something!
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
An Atrocious Biography
By Tom Moran
Roger Lewis belongs to the Rufus Griswold school of biographers, and his motivation for being so is revealed in a footnote on page 227 of his new biography of Anthony Burgess. In comparing the subject of his book to the Nobel Prize winning V.S. Naipaul, he mentions Paul Theroux's controversial memoir of Naipaul, "Sir Vidia's Shadow." He quotes the London Magazine's verdict on Theroux's spiteful book: "I wonder if the author was conscious of how much he was giving away about himself?" and then claims of it that "It is so much more rich and fascinating than any conventional biography of Naipaul could have been."
And there you have it. Lewis's book, which is obviously no "conventional biography," is clearly intended by its author to be as "rich and fascinating" as "Sir Vidia's Shadow," and as obviously an attack on its subject. What is really is, regrettably, is a sordid exercise in perverse psychology - only the psychology on display is not that of the book's putative subject, but of its author.
I've read dozens if not hundreds of biographies in the past 35 years or so, but I have never read one where the author had such obvious, odious and ill-concealed contempt for its subject than this one. "Lazy sod" is just about the only epithet that Lewis affixes to Burgess that Amazon will allow me to print here ("Burgess was not a generous man, financially, spiritually or morally" is one of his kinder comments). But open the book just about anywhere at random, and you are sure to spot some quotable calumny. According to Lewis, Burgess is pretentious, callous, a phony, pathological, cheap and solipsistic - in short, an all around jerk. He also claims, on the basis of a conveniently anonymous source, that Burgess didn't even write the book for which he is best known, "A Clockwork Orange."
The trouble is, the more Lewis makes clear how much he despises Anthony Burgess, the more clearly you realize what a mini-masterpiece of projection this book really is. The intention is to make the reader believe that Lewis is a far cleverer boy than Anthony Burgess ever was - and if that is its intention, the book must be considered a miserable failure. For all his lust for invective, his superficial cleverness, and his near-total disdain for his subject, Roger Lewis has succeeded in demonstrating in his 396 pages of text (excluding appendices and index) only two things: that he loathes Anthony Burgess, and that he will never write a book as good as any of Burgess's works if he lives to be a thousand.
Ironically, all his abuse of his subject has the reverse effect of the one intended - it makes you feel sympathy for the person being so endlessly (and pretentiously) abused. If Anthony Burgess was a flawed human being, so what? Many great writers are deeply flawed, even personally obnoxious, human beings. That usually has little if nothing to do with their art. And at least it can be said that Burgess spent his life devoted to literature, not squatting in his own bile, like his biographer. If I were you, I would track down one of Anthony Burgess's novels (I would recommend the superb "Earthly Powers") and leave this vicious little piece of tripe alone.
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