Burgess versus the Jackal
In which Anthony Burgess takes aim at Frederick Forsyth.
The death of Frederick Forsyth at 86 has deprived British readers of one of their best-known writers. A prolific newspaper columnist and novelist, Forsyth became internationally famous after the publication of commercial thrillers such as Day of the Jackal (1971) and The Odessa File (1972).
Looking into the archives of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, we have been surprised to find a large amount of commentary on Forsyth, not all of which is entirely favourable.
Burgess shared a publisher with Forsyth in the 1970s and 1980s, and it seems that some of his views arose from the conviction that writers of popular fiction were wrong to chase money rather than trying to extend the possibilities of the novel as an art-form.
In the history of the novel that he wrote for the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1975, Burgess has this to say about best-selling fiction:
A novel in which a topical subject — like the Mafia, or corruption in government, or the election of a new Pope, or a spate of aircraft accidents — is treated with factual thoroughness, garnished with sex, enlivened by quarrels, fights and marital infidelities and, above all, presented in non-literary prose, is likely, given lavish promotion by its publisher, to become a best-seller. It is also likely to be almost entirely forgotten a year or so after its publication.
Writing in the introduction to Ninety-Nine Novels, Burgess demonstrates that he was a voracious consumer of popular fiction, but it did not represent the full range of his tastes: ‘I am an avid reader of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett and other practitioners of well-wrought sensational fiction.’
In an interview with John Cullinan from 1973, Burgess made a spirited defence of Ian Fleming, who is sometimes said by other critics to be an inferior prose stylist: ‘I don’t play bridge, but I find the bridge game in Fleming’s Moonraker absorbing — it's the emotions conveyed that matter, not what the players are doing with their hands.’
In March 1984, Burgess flew into London to promote his new novel, Enderby’s Dark Lady, published by Hutchinson. He was met at the airport by the firm’s head of publicity, who informed him that they had printed 25,000 copies of Forsyth’s latest thriller, The Fourth Protocol. Burgess’s own novel had enjoyed a rather smaller print-run. We can date Burgess’s antipathy to Forsyth to this episode, and it manifested itself in various ways over the years that followed.
Asked for his opinions of popular writers in another interview, Burgess was specific about what he was trying to achieve in his own preferred kind of writing. Once again he used Forsyth as a counter-example:
I think it's possibly an unworthy feeling, an unworthy conviction, that in fiction, or in any kind of verbal art, words should be one of the characters. Words should be characters, language should be a character in itself. I’m not suggesting that what I write is superior, God forbid, to what Freddie Forsyth writes, but it’s two different ways of writing. Freddie Forsyth gives you a transparent language; you can look though it and get at the action itself. Whereas with me the language is more opaque.
He went into more detail in a conversation with Alice Thomas Ellis in 1987. In the course of a 70th birthday interview, Burgess offered some thoughts on the Century Hutchinson group, who were his main publishers after 1975:
Century was a downmarket firm, wasn’t it? Romances. You never saw their books reviewed – it’s always a bad sign – but they had a lot of money. They must have spent a lot of money when they bought Hutchinson and their main aim is to produce 600 books a year. I feel myself very small in that number. They’ve got two moderately quality writers, that’s Kingsley Amis and myself. Who else have they got? Oh, they’ve got Freddie Forsyth and that sort of thing. They must have a lot of trash coming out, I should think, to make up the numbers.
Here we can see his doubts about the commercialisation of literature. If a company is publishing 600 books every year, how much space will there be for what he calls ‘quality writers’?
Burgess returned to the attack in another essay, ‘Thoughts on the Thatcher Decade’, written in 1989 and published less than a year before Margaret Thatcher was voted out as Prime Minister by members of her own party. ‘Mrs Thatcher’, he wrote, ‘is a notorious philistine. She is never to be seen at concerts, plays, or operas. She reads best-sellers. She recently confided with a kind of pride that she had just re-read The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsyth. She is unintellectual. There is no poetry in her. She has absolutely no sense of humour.’
His final judgement on Forsyth appears in a lecture delivered in 1992. On this occasion, Burgess returns to a familiar theme, no longer taking the trouble to hide his contempt for Mrs Thatcher as one of the enemies of culture:
In a sense it is quite impossible to review a novel by Frederick Forsyth, because it achieves perfectly what it sets out to do. The Fourth Protocol is perfection, as our last Prime Minister affirmed by reading it at least twice. The perfection depends on limitation. It does not dare the properties which we find, say, in William Shakespeare — complexity of character, difficulty of language, the exploitation of ambiguity.
Offering this defence of writers such as Shakespeare — and, presumably, himself — Burgess shows that he is strongly in favour of difficult and ambiguous writing. It is the curse of popular writers, as he said more than once, to enjoy great fame and wealth during their lifetimes and then to be forgotten when they are no longer alive. He cited the examples of Margaret Kennedy and A.S.M. Hutchinson (author of the best-selling novel of 1922) as writers who were highly praised in their own time and completely overlooked by subsequent generations.
Despite not having found a mass readership for the majority of his 33 novels, Burgess was sustained by the conviction that literature is news that stays news, whereas best-selling fiction is here today and gone tomorrow.
Find out more
Anthony Burgess enjoyed popular fiction, and he included a few best-selling titles in his list of Ninety-Nine Novels. Listen to the episodes about popular novels: