Burgess on Burgess: A Vision of Battlements
Anthony Burgess on the first novel he completed, a wartime satire set in Gibraltar.
A Vision of Battlements is the first full-length novel completed by Anthony Burgess. He wrote it when he was working as a school teacher in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and had reluctantly abandoned his first ambition to become a composer.
The novel was written in 1952, but it did not find a publisher until 1965, when it was issued by Sidgwick and Jackson, with comic illustrations by Edward Pagram.
Set in Gibraltar during the Second World War, and inspired by Burgess’s own wartime experiences, A Vision of Battlements follows the fortunes of Richard Ennis, an Army Education instructor and incipient composer, who dreams of creating great music and building a new cultural world after the end of the war.
Following the example of his literary hero, James Joyce, Burgess takes the structure of his book from a classical epic, in this case Virgil's Aeneid. The result is, like Joyce's Ulysses, a comic rewriting of an epic original, whose critique of the Army and the postwar settlement is sharp and assured.
In this essay from 1992, Burgess recollects the gestation of his first novel.
’Beginnings’ by Anthony Burgess (1992)
In the 1930s I was a published poet of modernist tendencies. In 1940 I won a large prize for a short story. Nevertheless, my ambitions were never really literary. I wanted to be a great composer.
This ambition continued until 1951, when, as an English master at Banbury Grammar School, I had a few musical works locally performed but no hope of national acclaim. Devising the libretto for a possible opera, I discovered a capacity for writing dialogue which went beyond the strictures of musical form. It induced me to write a novel; this did not indicate a switching of ambition: it was merely a relief from the scratching of musical notes.
At that time I rather admired the work of Graham Greene. He was published by William Heinemann, and so it was to Heinemann that I sent the typescript of this first full fictional effort. To my surprise, I received a letter from Roland Gant, the Editor in Chief of the establishment, inviting me to visit him. Schoolmasters in those days were so badly paid that I could not raise the rail fare to London. But it happened that at the time I had applied for a post in Malaya and was summoned to a meeting at the Colonial Office. I was sent a travel warrant and so was able in the same day to confront two new futures — one as a colonial officer, the other as a published novelist.
Gant liked my novel. He found it funny. This rather surprised me, as I had always seen myself as a creature of gloom and sobriety. He said, however, that it was not suitable as a first novel: it had the quality of a second novel. Would I now kindly go home and write a first novel and present it for the consideration of Heinemann?
I did this. The novel was entitled The Worm and the Ring; it had a dank Midlands setting and was suffused with Catholic guilt. Gant was extremely annoyed and very reasonably rejected the novel. As there was to be no first novel from my pen, there was to be no second novel either. Both typescripts were doomed to languish.
The fictional ambition was not to be fulfilled then, but the colonial one was. I went to Malaya as an education officer but had the novelistic ambition newly thrust upon me. Malaya had to be recorded before the British abandoned it to self-rule. I felt that Somerset Maugham had never done this adequately and not even Joseph Conrad had known the inner working of the Malay mind sufficiently well to delineate it. I got down to the planning and plotting and eventual composition of my Malayan Trilogy, later to be entitled, following Tennyson, The Long Day Wanes. Heinemann was the publisher. That original contact had borne fruit, though of an unexpected tree.
When I was invalided out of the colonial service in late 1959 I was forced into being a professional novelist in order to keep my wife and myself. With the kind of novels I wrote, and still write, this was not easy. My advances were much the same as what D.H. Lawrence had received in 1912, and my royalties were negligible. It was necessary to write much and to publish much in order to attain an income of something like £300 a year. It was inevitable that I try to publish those two rejected novels. The typescript of The Worm and the Ring was grossly disfigured by its tropical residence, so I retyped it and daringly submitted it to James Michie at Heinemann. This time it was greatly liked; Roland Gant thought it was masterly.
There remained the other novel, the genuine first. This was entitled A Vision of Battlements, and its setting was wartime Gibraltar. The title had a double reference. It meant the great Rock itself; it also meant one of the symptoms, according to a family medical dictionary, of migraine. I suffered from migraine throughout my army service, but medical officers never considered it a genuine ailment. I suffered it especially in Gibraltar — something to do with the heat of the sun, the stress of duty, above all sexual frustration.
A Vision of Battlements could have been autobiographical, but was not. Its hero is an army sergeant named Richard Ennis, who resembles his creator only in his army rank and his musical ambition. In North Carolina in 1969, a university professor gave a learned lecture on this book (now, evidently, published) and discovered that the name of my hero was a palinlogue: R. Ennis is sinner backwards. It signified the load of Catholic guilt which I have never been able wholly to eliminate from my work. But this was entirely unconscious wordplay: I had chosen the name Ennis because it was Celtic for an island and stood for isolation; it was also as close as I could get to the name of Virgil’s hero Aeneas.
In fact, I had followed James Joyce in using a classical matrix to support my first lengthy exercise in fiction. The Virgilian references were often merely facetious. In the very first paragraph Ennis announces himself as belonging to the ‘Arma Virumque Cano Corps’, instead of the Army Vocational and Cultural Corps, a thin disguise for the Army Educational Corps. Ennis has to have a love affair with a Gibraltarian Dido, widowed in the Spanish Civil War. He has to pay a visit to hell, which is Franco’s La Línea. As Aeneas has his faithful Achates, Ennis has his faithful Agate, a homosexual ballet dancer. The Virgilian references are not all pure fancy. Aeneas the Trojan has the task of founding the Roman empire. The Catholic and half-Irish Ennis has two tasks — one imposed upon him by the British Army, the other springing out of his own musical ambition. In an age of chaos he wishes to create great music that mirrors the cosmos. The army tells him to teach the troops how, through freshly developed democratic techniques, to build a Utopia.
This is not a bad novel. Written at the age of thirty-five, with a background of wide reading and a certain verbal talent, it had to have some virtues. Why then did I not rush it into the hands of Heinemann and request its publication as my nth novel? Well, I was overloading Heinemann with freshly minted fiction, from The Doctor Is Sick to A Clockwork Orange and old stuff had to be nudged out. In 1965 I sold A Vision of Battlements to Sidgwick and Jackson whose fiction list at the time was very skimpy. It was proposed that the Victorian custom of publishing illustrated fiction should be revived, and my novel appeared with comic illustrations by Edward Pagram. This turned out to be not a good idea: the text was diminished by the drawings and the book not taken seriously. It was never paperbacked and so failed to reach a genuine reading audience.
The situation in the United States was different. There the book appeared without illustrations and was taken seriously by Time magazine. It reached a paperback audience and ended up as a subject for university dissertations. I was in New York last December and found copies of the work around. In Britain it was permitted to sink like a stone.
I should very much like to see the book back in print. Indeed, there are a number of books of mine that I should like to have introduced to new audiences. Roman poets like Horace could, when they wrote, boast of having achieved something aere perennius — more lasting than brass. In Shakespeare’s sonnets we find the same proud blazon. Nowadays an author of any seriousness accepts that his/her work must be liquidated in order to make room for the mere phantom books of Jeffrey Archer, Barbara Cartland, and those devisers of best-selling adjuncts to television commercials. This is unjust, and injustice can be partially remedied by the occasional reprint. My wartime vision still has something to say to the world.
© International Anthony Burgess Foundation
Find out more
A Vision of Battlements by Anthony Burgess
Andrew Biswell on A Vision of Battlements at the Burgess Foundation website
Listen to music from the novel on Spotify (free account needed):