A World in Ferment
On the centrality of pubs and drinking in Anthony Burgess's life and work.
It is perhaps too easy to say that Anthony Burgess was fond of a drink. His heroic capacity for consuming alcohol has been described by Martin Amis, Paul Theroux and Jonathan Meades, among others, but the legends of excess do not give a full picture of the centrality of pubs and drinking in Burgess’s life and work.
The archives of the Burgess Foundation in Manchester reveal a life that was shaped by the culture of pubs, off-licences and intoxication. Some of Burgess’s earliest memories were of the flat above the Golden Eagle in Miles Platting, north Manchester, where he lived with his father and stepmother. As a young boy in the 1920s, he often heard a cacophony of pianos and loud singing from the pub downstairs.
Burgess remembers his father, who played the piano in pubs and silent cinemas, drinking draught Bass, occasionally even at the breakfast table, with a slice of pork pie. The beer, he writes, was ‘conveniently sleeping in its barrel on the premises’, ready for when his father woke up.
As a schoolboy, he devoured modern literature, which was often infused with images of drinking. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which Burgess read in his teens, takes place in pubs, hotels and brothels, and many episodes refer to the deleterious effects of drinking, to which Joyce himself was no stranger. In the ‘Circe’ chapter, when Stephen Dedalus visits the red-light district of Dublin, he experiences terrifying hallucinations resulting from his habit of drinking absinthe. Another formative text for Burgess was The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, which contains a long dialogue seemingly overheard in a London pub.
When he became a published writer in 1956, it seemed natural for Burgess to represent drinking culture in his novels. In The Malayan Trilogy (published in the US as The Long Day Wanes), expatriate life in colonial Malaya is characterised by the characters’ lust for warm beer and gin. In Time for a Tiger, Burgess presents drink as an omnipresent feature of colonial life:
Fenella had not been sleeping all the time. She had on the bedside table a jug of tepid water which had, an hour ago, been ice. There was also a bottle of gin and a saucer containing sliced limes. She had a slight bout of fever, and the gin helped a little.
In his autobiography, Burgess recalls that gin was a staple part of the diet for colonial officers, and he remembers other drinks such as BGA (Brandy Ginger Ale), Dog’s Head stout and Anchor beer. In a later novel, Beard’s Roman Women, a former colonial officer drinks his gin with a ‘kichey drop of merah’, meaning a small drop of red Angostura bitters.
Other novels contain scenes which emphasise the tradition of British drinking. In The Right to an Answer, the narrator returns to Britain from Tokyo and visits a Midlands pub. He describes the establishment, its staff, and its regulars, who form part of a wider narrative about national identity:
The Black Swan was what was known locally as a 'Flayer's ace' (a house run by Flower's of Stratford-on- Avon, presumably). Most appropriately, the landlord was an Arden from a village not too far from Wilmcote where, of course, Mary Shakespeare, née Arden, had been a farmer's daughter. You only had to look at Ted Arden to see that William Shakespeare had got his face and forehead (if not what lay behind the forehead) from the Ardens. A strong breed, the Ardens, while the Shakespeares must have been as weak as water.
But the Black Swan does not live up to the landlord’s grand ancestry. It is ‘a tavern for dreary drinkers with loud mouths, the outside lavatories a fair walk in the rain, a reek of fish in the “best room” from the private quarters upstairs.’
The poet F.X. Enderby, protagonist of four Burgess novels, is a regular at a pub in Hove called the Neptune, where he drinks whisky and talks with elderly customers, one of whom is upset about pedantic barmen and landlords: ‘They say you can’t have the same again. But it is, in fact, precisely the same again that one wants. One doesn’t want anything similar.’ This scene is echoed in the second novel of the sequence, Enderby Outside, in which the poet, now an obsequious barman, finds himself asking a customer, ‘Similar, sir?’
Working behind the bar in a London hotel, Enderby invents a cocktail called the Crucifier, even though he believes that cocktail-making is an ‘inferior art’. The disgusting recipe is given in full:
He threw together Scotch whisky and British port-type wine, adding flat draught bitter beer, grenadine, angostura, and some very sour canned orange juice which the management had bought up cheap some months before. As the resultant colour seemed rather subfusc for a festive drink, he broke in three eggs and electrically whisked all up to a yellowy, pinkish froth.
If that sounds like too much trouble for the home mixologist, a later version of the Crucifier is much simpler: ‘whisky and port-style British wine diluted with warm water from the washing-up tap.’
While these novels describe the drinking culture of the 20th century, it is equally prominent in the historical novels. Nothing Like the Sun, set in Elizabethan England, is narrated by a college lecturer who is drinking rice wine and becoming more intoxicated as the novel progresses, and his depiction of Elizabethan London is soaked in booze. In a festive scene, Shakespeare and his company toast the completion of the Globe Theatre with song, laughter and copious amounts of red wine:
When the sun came out again the flagons were empty and the playhouse had been well-anointed with bloody iron-smelling wine, either straight from the flagon or, in more intimate libations, from the body’s wine-vessels.
Even when he was writing literary biography, Burgess could not resist dropping a cocktail recipe into his text. In Ernest Hemingway and His World, he describes ‘A Farewell to Arms’, a drink inspired by the title of Hemingway’s novel, which Burgess encountered in a bar in New Zealand. It is, he says, ‘a mixture of absinthe and champagne, not ineptly titled.’
These are just a few examples of the importance of drinking in Burgess’s novels and non-fiction. Yet his depictions of British pubs and Malayan kedais are not intended merely to celebrate gluttony and drunkenness. They are also a way of representing a social world which is textured, physical and realistic, a shorthand through which Burgess represents culture, society and history.
In case of a hangover, Burgess knew an ‘admirable’ cure, which he said was recommended by Evelyn Waugh: ‘a lump of sugar rolled in Angostura and red pepper, with champagne poured over. Each bubble carries a pepper-grain to the palate and this makes the drink, to use Waugh’s own words, “painfully delicious.”’
Find out more
An article about the collection of bottles in the archives of the Burgess Foundation.
Find out which pubs Anthony Burgess frequented when he lived in London.
Listen to our podcast about Malcolm Lowry, another writer inspired by his complicated relationship with alcohol.
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