Letter from America

In which Anthony Burgess receives a letter from a disgruntled American reader.

In July 1971, Anthony Burgess received the following letter (quoted verbatim, including typographical errors):

Mr.A.Burges:

Communist bastard, stay out of the U.S.A. Who wants you bastard and your theories about communal life? Communist bastard and the aditors of the N.Y.Times, scum of the earth, be damned for your theories of communal life, go to Russia bastard and be hapy thery with your communistic way of lify.

An Ex-American G.I.

P.S. Only the communist aditors of the N.Y.Times can give you space for the trush you writing, bastard Burges. Be damned communist bastard.

This letter was a response to an article by Burgess that appeared in the New York Times on 4 July 1971. Burgess’s piece is a review of Alexander Campbell’s book The Trouble with Americans, a critique of the inequalities in American society. Burgess responds in typically provocative form. He writes:

America, through her very self-righteousness, has laid herself open to the worst charge that can ever be laid against anyone – hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not a European disease. Europeans know they are wicked.

Americans, according to Burgess, are hypocrites because they present themselves as ‘decent and amiable’ but this ‘is the great American myth that has to be assaulted.’ Inspired by Campbell’s critique of American society, Burgess states the need for a rehabilitation of an ‘antiquated’ political system stating:

I am very ready to suggest now, that the sacrosanct Constitution be repealed, the Presidency be liquidated in favour of a British monarchical system (republics rarely work well), and that the South secede from the Union. Add to this program the total disarming of the country, and then genuine reform in other areas might begin.

It is easy to see how Burgess’s writing could inspire a furious missive like the one quoted above, and he realises that this sort of criticism of America from a foreigner must ‘sound dangerously like socialization’. Yet Burgess claims ‘attacks on America can be, and usually are, manifestations of concern and affection. Whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth’.

While this review is short, it reveals Burgess’s conflicted response to the American experience. Some of his most unvarnished opinions about the state of American politics and culture appeared in an interview he gave to Playboy magazine in September 1974. In the article, he reiterates his suspicion of the Constitution of the United States:

There’s something wrong with the American constitution. Under it, your president is not quite a monarch, but nevertheless a possible despot who functions not under the glamorous guise of despotism but with the voice of plain-spoken democracy.

These concerns should come as no surprise, as some of Burgess’s most celebrated fiction is preoccupied with the overreach of State powers, and the threat of potential autocratic regimes lurking within democratic systems. In much of his commentary on America, he returns to the idea that a president is ‘one more corruptible element in government’ and that a limited monarchy (preferably, he says, ‘Stuart’) would be a suitable remedy for this. It is questionable whether Burgess actually believed this or whether he was deliberately provoking his audience. It is useful to note that a member of the Stuart family upset his subjects so much that he started a civil war and was decapitated in front of a braying crowd.

Some of Burgess’s early novels, such as One Hand Clapping (1961) and Honey for the Bears (1963), are critical of American culture. In the latter his protagonist Paul Hussey worries that the joint influence of America and Russia will ‘make plastic of the world’. These novels were written before Burgess first went to the United States in 1966. Following this initial trip, his views on the country softened, even claiming he had fallen in love with New York, ‘city of, as Leon Trotsky called it, prose and fantasy’.

As this suggests, the experience of America mixed Burgess’s criticism with an abiding love for America and its culutre. The United States offered him many lucrative opportunities, from teaching posts at various universities including Princeton, City College New York and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to screenwriting in Hollywood and even a Broadway production of a musical.

Burgess felt the influence of America throughout his life, beginning when he was a child:

When I was a boy in Manchester, my image of America was inevitably gained from the movies I saw. In the 1920s, my great epoch of movie-going, I was dealt the dumb monochrome America consisting of five provinces: the Wild West, Southern California, Chicago, some generic university town and New York.

That city proved attractive to Burgess before he ever lived there and he remembers doodling the Manhattan skyline. ‘I knew New York’, he writes, ‘it lay in my pencil box’.

As with many non-Americans who grew up seeing the country through the romance of the cinema screen, Burgess could never quite shake these formative responses. While this idealism gave way to a more balanced view of American politics and culture, there is one aspect of the country that Burgess is much clearer about: the importance of the American novel. He writes, ‘American novelists seem to possess the courage to deal with big themes thrown up by contemporary history, whereas we in England tend to be too satisfied with provincial subject matter’. During the 1960s he defended two American novels against prosecutions for obscenity, making it clear that the authors in question had a distinctly American capacity to write about the reality of modern life. These novels, Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr., impressed Burgess because of their raw artistry when dealing with earthy subjects. Of the former, he writes: ‘Mr Burroughs joins a small body of writers who are willing to look at hell and report what they see’. He describes Selby’s novel as ‘a piece of twentieth-century naturalistic fiction [which] exhibits artistic virtues of a very high order’.

What America represented for Burgess was an imperfect artistic freedom. He admired many works of American literature for exploring dangerous new subject-matter, even as he found elements of American society puzzling. His attempts to compare European politics and lifestyles to those of America often inspired the sort of criticism that is characterised in the above letter, yet he continued in both his provocations and his attempts to make sense of these differences in public forums. While he was not completely successful in his desire to understand America, it is certain that the country and its culture offered him new ways to look at the world.

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Find out more

The Clockwork Testament by Anthony Burgess sees the poet FX Enderby travel to New York and is loosely based on Burgess’s experiences promoting the film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. Order the special Irwell Edition of the novel at Manchester University Press.

Listen to our podcast episode Anthony Burgess in America:

The latest episode of Ninety-Nine Novels, our podcast exploring Anthony Burgess’s favourite novels of the twentieth century, is about Life in the West by Brian Aldiss, a philosophical confrontation with Cold War politics. Novelist Adam Roberts is our guide:

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