Anthony Burgess

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Anthony Burgess (1986)

John Anthony Burgess Wilson (born February 25, 1917 in Manchester , † November 22, 1993 in London ), better known by his stage name Anthony Burgess , was a British writer and composer .

Life

Grave of Anthony Burgess (2009)

Burgess was born in 1917 into a Catholic home that broke up before he was three years old: in November 1918, his sister and mother died in quick succession from the then rampant Spanish flu . The boy was then initially placed with an aunt and only returned to his father's household when he had remarried in 1922. Burgess felt lonely and rejected by his father and dealt with books early on. When he started school, initially at St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School, he was amazed that the other children couldn't read at all. He was already an outsider there and even more later as a Catholic at the Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Elementary School in Moss Side . His good grades brought him to Xaverian College. The flute solo from Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Claude Debussy aroused in him the desire to become a musician. His family rejected this as a breadless art, yet he taught himself to play the piano. When his father died in 1938, Burgess did not inherit anything.

Not accepted to study music, Burgess studied English literature at Manchester University from 1937 to 1940 . He finished his studies as a Bachelor of Arts with a thesis on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus . In 1942, Anthony Burgess and Lynne Isherwood married. He then served initially with the Royal Army Medical Corps and then transferred to the British Army Education Corps. In Gibraltar stationed, taught the linguistically gifted Burgess German, French and Spanish. He was arrested in neighboring Spain for insulting Franco . His wife, who remained in England, suffered a miscarriage after being attacked by four deserted US soldiers during the blackout during the air raid raid .

Burgess left the military in 1946 as a sergeant major (Feldwebel) and taught for the next four years at the Mid-West School of Education near Wolverhampton and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College near Preston . In the late 1950s he worked as an English teacher at Banbury Grammar High School, where he led the school theater group. During this time and practically all of his life he wrote music, although most of the pieces were never published.

In 1954, Burgess accepted a position as a teacher with the British Colonial Service and went to Malaya . First he taught in Kuala Kangsar in Perak at the Malay College, called "the Eton of the East". After an argument with his superiors, Burgess moved to the Malay Teachers' Training College in Kota Bharu , Kelantan . When he became fluent in Malay after a short time , it earned him a raise in salary. In his spare time, Burgess wrote the novel trilogy The Long Day Wanes , which was not allowed to appear in Malaysia and is still considered undesirable there. His first published work was English Literature: A Survey for Students , which he also wrote during this period. After a short stay at home in 1958, Burgess accepted a position at Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei . This is where the first drafts of the book that was to appear in 1961 under the title Devil of a State were created . The location of Brunei was replaced by a fictional East African country, an alienated version of Zanzibar ; Burgess, and especially his publisher, wanted to avoid libel suits.

On Borneo, Anthony Burgess collapsed in 1959 while teaching history. The doctors informed him that they had diagnosed an incurable brain tumor and advised him to make good use of the remaining twelve months. Burgess decided to make writing a priority from now on in order to leave something personal to his wife (and published more than 50 books in the years that followed). He returned to Britain, officially for health reasons, but the colonial administration in Brunei was happy to get rid of the recalcitrant Burgess who had advocated articles for the Brunei People's Party calling for independence and who was friends with AM Azahari was, the leader of this rebellious party (three years later, the uprising of the People's Party failed and triggered a state of emergency that continues to this day).

At home in London, Burgess, who was believed to be terminally ill, was so thoroughly (and inconclusive) examined in neurology that he processed these experiences in a quickly written book called The Doctor is Sick . It contains numerous examples of slang that were already preparing the artificial youth language that would later play a role in his most famous work, Clockwork Orange . He now decided to only write, backed by an inheritance from his wife and the savings from six years abroad, until his books - above all the Clockwork Orange published in 1962 - proved to be a source of growing prosperity. Burgess began an affair in 1963 with the twelve years younger Italian Liliana Macellari, who gave birth to him in 1964. Burgess refused to leave his wife Lynne (who was now an alcoholic) in order not to expose her cousin George Patrick Dwyer, the Catholic Bishop of Leeds. It was only after Lynne died of cirrhosis on March 20, 1968 that he recognized the child as his and married Liliana. She translated a large part of his works into Italian.

Burgess' growing success led the couple to go abroad in the face of high taxes. At first they lived in Lija , Malta until 1970 , when problems with the censorship there drove them to Rome , where they bought an apartment. There were also residences in Bracciano and Montalbuccio, a villa in Provence and finally an apartment in Baker Street , London.

Burgess taught at Princeton University in 1970 and at City College of New York in 1972 , where he befriended Joseph Heller . He taught creative writing at Columbia University and was writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina in 1969 and at the University at Buffalo in 1976. He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975 . Eventually he settled in Monaco , where he co-founded the Princess Grace Irish Library in 1984. He also spent a lot of time in one of his houses in Switzerland, a chalet two kilometers outside of Lugano .

Anthony Burgess died of lung cancer in 1993 at the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in London . His ashes were buried in Monte Carlo.

plant

Anthony Burgess' work is shaped by the work of James Joyce , but also by his Catholicism . In England this is an outsider religion, whereby religious and social experience are not mutually exclusive, but rather form an alliance with one another, as can be found in other English Catholic writers such as Graham Greene , W. Somerset Maugham and Gilbert Keith Chesterton .

His best-known work - not least because of the film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick - is A Clockwork Orange (1962, German A Clockwork Orange or Clockwork Orange or Clockwork Man ) on the subjects of free will and morality . In addition to the experiences in the army, the roots of the book naturally also include the incident in which Burgess' wife Lynne lost her child and his lifelong love of music. In his autobiography You've Had Your Time , Burgess describes how he brushed up on his Russian ("started to re-learn Russian") for a planned voyage on the Alexander Radishchev of the Baltic line to Leningrad (which he converted into Honey for the Bears in 1963 ) ) and thus found the slang Nadsat of the book. He does not mention that in the Appendix Glossary of Nadsat Language of the American edition he declared himself obliged to the friendliness of his colleague Nora Montesinos and a number of correspondents for help with Russian.

In addition to his native English, Burgess said he was able to speak a number of other languages, including German, Spanish, Italian, Welsh (Cymrian) and Malay.

Burgess was increasingly annoyed at being reduced to the novel A Clockwork Orange , and shortly before his death declared that he would have preferred never to have written this novel (which he also owed his wealth to). This attitude becomes understandable when one considers the breadth of this extraordinary writer. It ranges from a formally experimental novel such as “Napoleon Symphony” to an eschatological agent novel “Tremor”, which is downright daring in its use of genre conventions. His most personal book is the novel "Beard's Roman Women" (Eng. "Rome in the Rain"), in which he tells of a screenwriter who, newly widowed, has started an affair with a young woman and is then confronted with the resurrection of his deceased wife .

The fact that religious events are also taken for granted in everyday life can be found in his main literary work, the 1980 novel "Earthly Powers" (Eng. "The Prince of Phantoms"). From the point of view of a Catholic homosexual writer named Toomey (whose model is William Somerset Maugham ), who is said to testify to a miraculous healing of the later Pope Gregory (whose model is the later Pope of the Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII ), Burgess describes in this Tour de Force through the 20th century, in which, from the Nazi atrocities to the mass suicide of the Jones sect of the 1970s, hardly a bloody scene is left out, in which its own witty language is a world far removed from God sunk in trivialities, in which it is paradoxically just now are the exaggeration and perfection of religious and political leaders who bring evil into the world. The novel received rave reviews and was nominated for the Booker Prize , but as Burgess wrote in the second part of his autobiography “You've Had Your Time”, published in 1990, he was not surprised that he did not get it: “It was evident for me, anyway, that my novel was no Booker material. It was hard reading for the jurors, and it smelt of the wrong properties, one of which was Catholic Europe ".

With its artful synthesis of diabolical entertainment and serious concerns in the literary world, Burgess remained an outsider, whose rich oeuvre is still outshone by the brilliant success "A Clockwork Orange".

What is less well known is that Burgess composed all his life. His works include, among others

  • Blooms of Dublin , Opera (1981)
  • three symphonies (1937, 1956 and 1975)
  • Concertino for piano and percussion (1951)
  • Concerto for piano and orchestra (1976)
  • Chamber music works
  • Songs

In 1981, Burgess developed a spoken language appropriate to Stone Age people and their palate for the film "In the beginning was the fire" (orig. La guerre du feu ) by director Jean-Jacques Annaud .

In April 2019 it was announced that an unpublished follow-up text to A Clockwork Orange with the working title “The Clockwork Condition” from 1972 and 1973 had been found in Burgess' estate , which “according to literature professor Andrew Biswell is not a novel , but rather an 'important philosophical treatise on the contemporary nature of man' ”. In addition, "the work ... deals with the outrage over Kubrick's film adaptation of his novel, but is in parts also an autobiography".

bibliography

Malayan Trilogy
  • 1 Time for a Tiger (1956)
  • 2 The Enemy in the Blanket (1957)
  • 3 Beds in the East (1959)
Enderby
  • 1 Inside Mr. Enderby (1963)
  • 2 Enderby Outside (1968)
  • 3 The Clockwork Testament, Or, Enderby's End (1974)
    • English: The clockwork testament. Translated by Walter Brumm. Heyne General Series # 5124, 1974, ISBN 3-453-00463-9 .
  • 4 Enderby's Dark Lady, or, No End to Enderby (1984)
  • The Complete Enderby (collective edition from 1–4; 1996)
Novels
  • The Wanting Seed (1956)
  • The Doctor Is Sick (1960)
    • English: The doctor went nuts: A grotesque story from London's underworld. With 10 illustrations by Karlheinz Gross. Translated by Inge Wiskott. Erdmann Verlag f. International cultural exchange, Tübingen and Basel 1968, DNB 456239650 . Also as: The doctor is broken. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-608-95026-5 .
  • The Right to an Answer (1960)
  • Devil of a State (1961)
  • One Hand Clapping (1961; as Joseph Kell)
    • German: one-hand clapping. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, 1980, ISBN 3-12-900511-0 .
  • The Worm and the Ring (1961)
  • A Clockwork Orange (1962)
    • German:
      • Clockwork Orange. Translated by Walter Brumm. Heyne General Series # 928, 1972.
      • The clockwork orange. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, 1993, ISBN 3-608-95742-1 .
      • Clockwork orange. Newly translated by Wolfgang Krege. Heyne General Series # 10496, 1997, ISBN 3-453-13079-0 .
      • Clockwork orange. With a foreword by Tom Shippey. Adapted to the version of the original text revised by the author in 1986 by Erik Simon. German translation of the foreword by Erik Simon. Translated and revised by Walter Brumm. Heyne SF&F # 8205, 2000, ISBN 3-453-16413-X .
      • Clockwork Orange: The original version. Edited with an afterword and annotation by Andrew Biswell. Translated by Ulrich Blumenbach . Klett-Cotta, 2013, ISBN 978-3-608-93990-3 .
  • Honey for the Bears (1963)
    • German: honey for the bears. Pen drawings by Karlheinz Gross. Translated by Dorothea Gotfurt . Erdmann Verlag f. International cultural exchange, Tübingen and Basel 1967, DNB 456239685 .
  • The Eve of Saint Venus (1964)
  • Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (fictional biography, 1964)
  • A Vision of Battlements (1965)
  • Tremor of Intent (1966)
    • German: Tremor. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-12-900521-8 .
  • M / F (1971; also: MF )
  • Napoleon Symphony (1974)
    • German: Napoleon Symphony: Roman in 4 movements. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-608-95079-6 .
  • Beard's Roman Women (1976)
    • German: Rome in the rain. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-608-95024-9 .
  • A Long Trip to Teatime (1976)
  • Moses (1976)
  • Abba Abba (1977)
  • 1985 (1978)
    • German: 1985: Ein Roman. Translated by Walter Brumm. In: Anthony Burgess: 1985. Heyne General Series # 5981, 1982, ISBN 3-453-01448-0 .
  • Man of Nazareth (1979)
  • Earthly Powers (1980)
    • German: The Prince of Phantoms. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-608-95215-2 .
  • The Kingdom of the Wicked (1980)
  • The End of the World News (1982)
    • German: Deliver us, Lynx. Translated by Joachim Kalka. Klett-Cotta, 1986, ISBN 3-608-95216-0 .
  • The Pianoplayers (1986)
    • German: The man at the piano. Translated by Joachim Kalka. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-608-95384-1 .
  • Any Old Iron (1989)
    • German: Belshazzar's Banquet. Translated by Joachim Kalka. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-608-95817-7 .
  • Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991)
  • A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)
    • German: Der Teufelspoet. Translated by Wolfgang Krege. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-608-93217-8 .
  • Byrne (1995)
  • Puma (2018)
  • The Black Prince (2018; with Adam Roberts )
Collections
  • 1985 (1978)
    • German: 1985. Translated by Walter Brumm. Heyne General Series # 5981, 1982, ISBN 3-453-01448-0 .
  • Two Tales of the Future (1980)
  • But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen? (1986)
  • The Devil's Mode (1989)
  • Future Imperfect (1994)
  • One Man's Chorus (1998)
Short stories

1967:

  • A Pair of Gloves (1967, in: Herbert van Thal (Ed.): Lie Ten Nights Awake )

1968:

  • An American Organ (1968, in: Alex Hamilton (Ed.): Splinters )
  • The Muse (1968)

1979:

  • The Land Where the Ice Cream Grows (1979; with Fulvio Testa)

1989:

  • The Most Beautified (1989, in: Anthony Burgess: The Devil's Mode )
  • Murder to Music ( Sherlock Holmes story, 1989, in: Anthony Burgess: The Devil's Mode )
theatre
  • Oberon Old and New (1985; with JR Planche)
  • Blooms of Dublin: A Musical Play Based On James Joyce's Ulysses (1986)
  • A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music (1987)
Non-fiction
  • The Novel Today (1963)
  • Language Made Plain (1964)
  • Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965)
    • English: A man in Dublin named Joyce. Translation into German: Gisela and Manfred Triesch. Gehlen, Bad Homburg vdH, Berlin and Zurich 1968, DNB 456239677 . Also called: Joyce for Everyone: An Introduction to the Work of James Joyce for the Simple Reader. Translated by Friedhelm Rathjen . Frankfurter Verlag-Anstalt, Frankfurt [Main] 1994, ISBN 3-627-10239-8 .
  • Coaching Days of England (1966)
  • Urgent Copy (1966)
  • Age of the Grand Tour (1967; with Francis Haskell )
  • The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967; also: The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction , 1971)
  • Shakespeare (1970)
    • English: Shakespeare: Eine Biographie. Quotes translated by Dieter Schamp. Translated by Eugen Schwarz. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1982, ISBN 3-546-41599-X .
  • Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)
  • A Christmas Recipe (1977)
  • New York (1977)
    • German: New York. With photos by Dan Budnik. Translated by Ute Seesslen. Time-Life International, Amsterdam 1976, ISBN 90-6182-266-1 .
  • Ernest Hemingway and His World (1978)
    • German: Ernest Hemingway. Translated by Joachim A. Frank. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-455-08831-7 .
  • On Going to Bed (1982)
    • German: cradle, bed and chaise longue: a brief cultural history of lying. Translated by Bernd Weyergraf. Südwest-Verlag, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-517-00889-3 .
  • This Man and Music (1982)
  • The Heritage of British Literature (1983; with Elizabeth Bowen , David Cecil , Graham Greene, and Kate O'Brien )
  • 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984)
  • Flame into Being: The Life and Work of DH Lawrence (1985)
  • Homage to QWERT YUIOP (1986)
  • On Mozart (1991)
  • The Book of Tea (1992)
  • A Mouthful of Air (1992)
  • Re Joyce (2000)
Autobiography
  • Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confession (1987)
  • You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (1990)
radio play

Filmography

script
Literary template
Linguistic advice

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.pgil.mc/
  2. ↑ http://accidentalrussophile.blogspot.com/2006/03/anthony-burgess-clockwork-orange-and.html
  3. ↑ Continuation of “Clockwork Orange” discovered , deutschlandfunkkultur.de, published and accessed on April 25, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Burgess, Anthony
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilson, John Anthony Burgess (real name); Wilson, John Burgess (alternative spelling); Kell, Joseph (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer and composer
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Manchester , UK
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1993
Place of death London , UK