Anthony Burgess and Sigmund Freud
In which Sigmund Freud submits to deep analysis by Anthony Burgess.
Anthony Burgess was fascinated by the life and work of Sigmund Freud. As a writer and composer, he often returned to the founder of modern psychoanalysis in his creative works. The list begins with the novel MF, a consciously Freudian updating of the Oedipus myth, with a contemporary American setting.
This was followed by a bold stage adaptation of Oedipus the King for the Guthrie Theater in 1972, in which Burgess added new scenes and violent episodes which were not present in the original Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Strange music and chants in an invented language were provided by the composer Stanley Silverman.
In 1977 Burgess was commissioned to write the script for a six-hour drama about the life of Freud, intended for broadcast on Canadian television, but the series did not go into production. He redeployed his material into a Freud novel, which eventually formed one of the three narratives in The End of the World News (1982). The novel follows the narrative line of the unpublished TV scripts very closely. When the Freud family goes to the theatre in the novel, they witness a performance of Burgess’s own translation of Oedipus the King.
The Burgess Foundation’s book collection contains several volumes of Freud’s works, including lectures on psychoanalysis, editions of his letters, a book of photographs of his house in Vienna (visited by Burgess as part of his research), and a number of biographies, including The Life of Sigmund Freud by Ernest Jones. His other source, mentioned in the autobiography but not present in the archive, was the Freud film script written by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Among Burgess’s other Freudian writing projects was Schreber, originally a film script based on one of Freud’s case histories. Daniel Paul Schreber was a German high court judge who believed he was an angelic being whose mission was to repopulate the world. Although Freud and Schreber never met, Freud made a close study of Schreber's autobiography — Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, written in a psychiatric hospital — and based his analysis on this published document. Freud himself makes a brief appearance in Burgess’s script, giving his diagnosis to an audience of doctors in a Viennese lecture theatre.
In a pitching document for the film, Burgess described his Schreber story as ‘a disturbing motion picture of high quality.’ He completed his script, under the title ‘The Brain Killers’, on 13 August 1975. Later in the same year, Burgess discussed the film with Burt Lancaster in Iowa City. The two men had become friends after Burgess co-wrote the script for Lew Grade’s epic Moses the Lawgiver, which starred Lancaster in the title role. Lancaster was in the audience when Burgess’s Symphony in C was premiered in Iowa on 22 October 1975.
Burgess mentions the Schreber project in the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, published in 1990, but he misremembers Schreber’s name as ‘Schroeder’ (this looks like a Freudian slip). After the script was discovered in Burgess’s abandoned house in Bracciano, it joined the other manuscripts in the Foundation’s collection. Following the successful production of Burgess’s Oedipus the King on BBC Radio 3 in February 2017, the same production company — Naked Productions — took on the challenge of translating Burgess’s vision into a radio drama. Schreber was adapted for radio by Jeff Young. The distinguished cast was led by Christopher Eccleston, an admirer of Burgess’s work, who grew up in the city of Salford, close to Burgess’s birthplace of Manchester. The radio version was first broadcast on 22 March 2020.
‘I, for one, can never have enough of Freud,’ Burgess wrote in 1990. As a fellow cigar-smoker and coffee-drinker who was also, like Burgess, a prolific writer, Freud must have seemed congenial. On the penultimate page of his autobiography, Burgess announced his intention to retire from literature so that he could devote himself to a new opera.
This opera was to have been about the life of Sigmund Freud, and Burgess proposed to write a libretto in Viennese German. ‘I do not know whether this can be done,’ he wrote. ‘It will be hard to find a baritone willing to stop singing halfway through because Freud’s voice has been stilled by cancer of the jaw. Anna Freud, soprano, takes over from him and, in a final fantasy before death, he recovers the tones of a denouncing prophet to smash the tables of the law upon cowering Jung, Adler, Rank and Ferenczi. It seems to me that here we have a golden opportunity to use atonality and profound dissonance to represent the workings of the unconscious, while conscious action can be conveyed through the tonalism of Mahlerian music, café waltzes, bands in the park. Perhaps it will never be done.’
It was never done. Sadly, Burgess died three years later without having completed his opera. Although he did make some notes towards a libretto, none of the music seems to have been composed, because he was working on Byrne and other musical projects.
Given the wealth of available material, it is unlikely that we have heard the last about Burgess and Freud. It is likely that a selection of Freudian projects from the archive will be published as part of the Irwell Edition.