Happy Birthday, Anthony Burgess
On what would have been his 108th birthday, we celebrate Anthony Burgess's varied and unpredictable career in literature.
This week we have been celebrating the birthday of Anthony Burgess. Born into a theatrical family on 25 February 1917, he became one of the most celebrated and prolific British writers of the twentieth century. While A Clockwork Orange brought him worldwide fame, his achievement cannot be reduced to a single novel. He wore many other hats: musician, comic novelist, creator of dystopian futures, writer of historical and experimental fiction (sometimes in the same book), literary critic, screenwriter, poet, Broadway lyricist. The range of his interests stemmed from his deep curiosity about the world and the variety of people and languages within it.
His work remains highly relevant, and his reputation is very much a current one. Since his death in 1993, readers have returned to his dramatization of the conflict between individual freedom and the state in A Clockwork Orange, and his depiction of the end of empire in The Malayan Trilogy. In 2025, when papal conclaves are in the news, following the film adaptation of Robert Harris’s book, we should remember that Burgess addressed the same subject in a novel. The fictional papal election in Earthly Powers is a valuable companion piece to the Oscar-nominated film, Conclave.
Thirty-two years after he died in London, Burgess’s reputation has never been higher. More of his books are in print today than at any time since 1993, and enthusiasm for his work continues to grow as his books are rediscovered by new generations of readers. At the foot of this newsletter, we have listed some of the Burgess-related projects currently in development, including new publications and performances of his music.
It is only right, on such an occasion, that Burgess himself should have the last word. The article below is one of three that Burgess wrote under the title ‘Why I Write’. One of these has been published in The Ink Trade, a volume of his selected journalism, and the other two typescripts are in the Burgess Foundation’s archive. In this uncollected piece, Burgess examines his motivations as a writer, and suggests interesting connections between his creative life as a writer and as a composer.
‘Why I Write’ by Anthony Burgess
Biographically speaking, I write because, at the age of forty-two, I could find no other way of earning a living. I was working as a colonial functionary in Borneo and, having fallen one day in a sudden faint, I was suspected of harbouring a cerebral tumour. Dismissed from the colonial service, sent back to London, I was told that the tumour was inoperable and that I had exactly a year to live. I had to earn my bread and that of my wife during this terminal twelvemonth, but nobody would give employment to a man whose future was so negative. Consequently I wrote. I wrote six books in that year, as well as many stories and articles. At the end of it I was still alive. Perhaps the stress of cerebral labour had killed the tumour. Twenty-six years later I am still writing and the tumour has not been reborn. I am writing because, by sheer accident, this became my profession, the only profession I could practise.
But there is another reason for writing — aesthetic rather than commercial. I was born with an artistic instinct. For the earliest part of my life I tried to express this in the form of pictorial art, but my ambition to be a new Cézanne was frustrated because I discovered I was colour-blind. I then tried to become a composer of music, but frustration came out of a comparative lack of talent. I still write music, but no longer with the ambition of becoming Britain’s Beethoven. Writing fiction is for me a kind of substitute for writing symphonies. I like sounds, musical or verbal, and I like organising them into patterns. I like shapes, forms, structures, and I find satisfaction in fashioning these in the only extended literary form that we have — the novel.
None of this, of course, is quite enough. To be a novelist one has to be interested in human character and in what human characters say and do. I have this interest, but no more than the non-novelist. I don't want to create a new Don Quixote or Anna Karenina, but I do want to make human characters of moderate interest into the pieces of formal patterns — chess-games that are also symphonies. It is the novel itself as an artistic entity that concerns me more than the humanity of its components. For the rest, I have no ideas and little interest in philosophical thought. Words are to me not a vehicle of propaganda but rather complex sound-patterns flawed by meaning (alas, a necessary component of language) ready to be organised into the complex formal patterns I call novels.
Of course, I still write in order to earn my bread. I can be neither a Joyce nor a Mallarmé, subsidised by a job or a patron and free to conduct uncommercial literary experiments. I have to compromise, giving readers what they think they want while I do more or less what I want to do. My patron saint is William Shakespeare, a very commercial playwright who give his public more than they asked for. He died a gentleman but also a great artist. It is difficult for anyone nowadays to be both, but I go on trying.
© International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 1985
Find out more
Last week saw the welcome release of two new paperback editions of Burgess’s novels by Galileo:
Nothing Like the Sun, a rich and bawdy novel about Shakespeare the lover, has an introduction by the author and Shakespeare critic, Robert McCrum (affiliate link).
Honey for the Bears, first published in 1963 and subtitled ‘an Anglo-Russian comedy’, has been unavailable in Britain since 1986. The novel contains an introduction by biographer Andrew Biswell and presents a memorable portrait of Leningrad under the chaotic regime of Nikita Khrushchev (affiliate link).
These books will be followed by paperback editions of Tremor of Intent, One Hand Clapping, Napoleon Symphony and A Shorter Ulysses, Burgess’s abridged version of James Joyce’s great novel.
The Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess will present scholarly hardback editions of Inside Mr Enderby and The Worm and the Ring — the first new printing of this important novel for 55 years.
In March 2025, Manchester University Press will publish Anthony Burgess in America, a substantial critical book by Christopher W. Thurley.
Burgess is also being remembered in the worlds of broadcasting and live theatre. On 30 March, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a 45-minute feature about Burgess and music, drawing on the BBC archives, and with contributions from an international panel of experts.
The Stanford Philharmonia and the Mela Guitar Quartet will present the world premiere of Burgess’s Concerto Grosso for Guitar Quartet and Orchestra in A minor in California on the evening of Friday 28 February.
The winners of this year’s Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism will be announced in May. Each year since 2013 the prize has awarded £4000 to new critics and reviewers, in celebration of Burgess’s 30-year association with the paper as its lead critic. The closing date for this year’s prize is today (28 February) at 11.59pm UK time. Enter here.
We are looking forward to new translations of Burgess’s work into French, German, Serbian, Polish, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. There will be audio books in Italian and French — and in the autumn we will launch a new research project with a focus on Burgess and translation, in collaboration with the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester.