The Maltese Affair
When Anthony Burgess moved to Malta, his books were burnt and his house was confiscated by the government.
Fifty years ago, in 1974, Anthony Burgess received a letter from the Maltese government, informing him that his house on the island had been confiscated. But what had he done to deserve this ill treatment?
Burgess moved to Malta in 1968, a few weeks after marrying his second wife (the Italian translator Liana Macellari) and making the decision to leave England for good. This marked the beginning of a 25-year period of expatriation, which lasted until a few months before his death in 1993.
The journey to their new home was undertaken by road, in a Bedford Dormobile driven by Liana. As they headed south through Europe, Burgess sat in the back of the motor-caravan with his typewriter. Later he wrote:
I look back to the autumn of 1968 as one of the healthiest, most productive, most essentially human episodes in my career. I was not wholly free, for I had the duty of hammering away at my typewriter every day, but what I wrote carried the breath of the open road.
The journey took them through France and Italy, and they sailed for Malta from Sicily. They eventually took up residence at 168 Main Street, Lija — a town about six miles outside Valletta — in November 1968. Throughout this period of transit, Burgess maintained his literary activities. Speaking in a television interview, he said:
The peculiar nature of the writer’s life is that he is not anywhere. He’s not like the sculptor who needs his big studio and settles down there with his big masses of stone. He’s a man with a typewriter and a wad of paper, and wherever he is, he wonders why he is there, wonders why he is not somewhere else. And this tendency to wander is one of the results of leaving England and going into exile.
Burgess wrote newspaper articles and book reviews while he was on the road and, when he arrived in Malta, he settled down to longer works. Among the novels, film scripts, and stage plays that he wrote between 1968 and 1974 were: an unproduced Hollywood musical about William Shakespeare; a Shakespeare biography; the novel MF; a translation of Oedipus the King by Sophocles; and the novel Napoleon Symphony, dedicated to Stanley Kubrick. He also began to write the epic novel Earthly Powers while living on the island.
The influence of Malta can be seen in MF, published in 1971. The novel is about a young American student who embarks on a quest to discover the works of the legendary Caribbean poet and novelist, Sig Legeru. The island of Castita (meaning ‘chastity’), where the characters end up, is a fictionalised version of Burgess’s surroundings in Malta. He took this opportunity to comment on aspects of Maltese life, including the large cathedral in the centre of the capital city, and the juxtaposition of religious processions in the streets and hell-raising sailors in bars near the harbour. The framing narrative of Earthly Powers is more clearly set on the island.
This happy and productive period of life in Malta did not last long. Within a year, Burgess’s frustration with the strict censorship laws grew more acute. His first experience of this was in 1969, when his books and other possessions arrived on a cargo ship from England. The books were inspected by employees of the Maltese Post Office, who were responsible for state censorship. Forty-seven books were confiscated, of which 43 were driven to the hospital under police escort and thrown into an incinerator.
The officials provided a list of the confiscated books, which survives in the archive of the Burgess Foundation. After lodging appeals with the censorship panel, Burgess managed to retrieve four titles, including The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis. Books by Angela Carter, D.H. Lawrence and Dennis Wheatley were among those which were destroyed.
A year later, when Burgess visited New Zealand to take part in a literature festival, he gave an interview to a newspaper in which he denounced the strict censorship regime in Malta. This interview was quoted at length in the Malta News, and Burgess was attacked in editorials, and on the letters page. He was accused of being a meddling foreigner and a ‘sixpenny settler’, a reference to the low rate of income tax in Malta, which was six pence in the pound.
When he returned to Malta to work on a new novel, Burgess encountered further trouble with review books from the Sunday Times being confiscated, along with a French translation of his own novel, Tremor of Intent. Annoyed by these developments, he accepted an invitation from the Censorship Reform Group of the Malta Library Association to give a public lecture. His proposed titled was ‘Obscenity and the Arts’.
This was one of the first occasions when pornography and obscenity had been openly discussed in Malta. The lecture was delivered at the University of Malta on the evening of 10 June 1970. Burgess argued the case that literary merit was far more important than concerns about obscenity and pornography. He referred to contentious passages in the Bible and in the works of Virgil, Dante, Rabelais and Shakespeare. Listening intently among the 1000-strong audience were priests and government officials. The anthropologist Desmond Morris, who was in the audience, later recalled this episode in his autobiography, Watching:
The day of the lecture arrived. Burgess was a famous figure and the turn-out was impressive. Three hundred Maltese clergy settled down to listen to him in the main lecture theatre of the university. They may have been hoping for a few choice literary gems, but instead they found themselves on the rack. Burgess castigated them at great length for their prudery and for their narrow-mindedness. He berated them for allowing the Maltese people to be treated as children and, reaching his climax, informed them that, if you treated people like naughty children, they would behave like naughty children. ‘It is no wonder’, he stormed, ‘that when the Maltese emigrate to England they become the brothel-owners of Soho.’
According to Morris, Burgess’s lecture ‘was met with stony silence throughout, followed by a politely subdued mass exit.’ The politeness did not last long. Immediately after the lecture, and over the next few weeks, the Sunday Times of Malta published a series of letters in which Burgess was attacked – and defended by his friends and those resisting literary censorship. Some commentators regarded Burgess as a neo-colonialist who was trying to impose foreign values on a pious citizenry. To others, he was a champion of free speech who had found the courage to speak out against the dominance of the Catholic Church over free expression in Malta.
Burgess’s peaceful life of creative endeavour in Malta was over, but it wasn’t until 1973, when his lecture was transcribed from a recording and published as a pamphlet, that his troubles intensified. The publication of Obscenity and the Arts, brought Burgess’s inflammatory speech to a larger audience, and hastened his departure from Malta.
In the spring of 1974, Burgess returned from a visit to Italy to discover that his home had been confiscated by the Maltese government. He suspected foul play, and took the story to the Guardian, where it appeared as front-page news. He also contacted the New York Times and was quoted in the edition of 11 April:
The Maltese claim I've abandoned the property and have ordered me to surrender possession and the keys. This is a totally vindictive act — a naked confrontation between the state and the individual. I see this as an example of the anti‐British attitude now prevailing in Malta.
This adverse publicity persuaded the Maltese authorities to de-confiscate the house, but the damage was done. Liana Burgess decided that she could no longer live under the government in Malta. The house at 168 Main Street was rented out to the Australian ambassador, and the Burgess family moved to Rome. Their extensive collection of books and furniture remained in Malta until Liana sold the house in 1998.
The controversy of 1974 found its way into a novel. In Earthly Powers, the protagonist Kenneth Toomey is living out his twilight years on Malta. After an extended trip to Italy to visit a dentist, he receives a letter from the Maltese government informing him that, since his property in Lija has clearly been uninhabited for some time, he is to surrender the keys to the Department of Housing.
In the novel, Toomey gives up his house and returns to his hometown of Battle in East Sussex to resume his retirement. For Burgess and his family, their departure from Malta was the beginning of a new chapter in their international adventures.
Find out more
Obscenity and the Arts by Anthony Burgess (affiliate link)
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess (affiliate link)
Listen to an extract from Obscenity and the Arts, read by Paul Barnhill:
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