Like "nadsat", the Russian-based slang created by Anthony Burgess for his novel A Clockwork Orange, the reputation of Burgess has faded. So whatever happened to the posthumous stature of that force of nature, the literary giant known as Anthony Burgess, author of Nothing like the Sun, Earthly Powers, MF, End of the World News, Inside Mr Enderby, and a prodigious librettist, translator, autobiographer, poet, columnist and insatiable media celeb?
On TV chat shows, he would interrupt his host's generous introduction with a sidelong squint of injured merit and argue that he was really a composer — neglected in Britain, but widely performed and celebrated throughout Europe. And whatever happened to the memory of the garrulous genius, most unjustly passed over for the Nobel prize for literature and, worse, deprived of due honours as the living equal of Elgar? Disillusionment, it seems, set in swiftly after his demise in 1993; his memory, like his sardonic "litzo", sank like a shocking dream in the light of day. But now there is a scheme to place him in the pantheon of greats where, he always testily insisted, he eminently belonged.
Due to open imminently in his native Manchester is the grandiloquently titled International Anthony Burgess Foundation, a shrine containing a quantity of reclaimed Burgess knick-knacks, whatnots and the contents of his wastepaper baskets. Although, in truth, he was no more a Mancunian than Alfred Hitchcock was an East Ender. Liana, his Italian widow and second wife, who lives in Monaco, where they settled in the 1970s, says: "It is time to bring Anthony back into prominenza. It is only right that the foundation should be housed in Manchester, for he was a northerner and all your readers think that English writers come from Bloomsbury."
Yet do not envisage, deluded gentle reader, a noble pile in the city's centre. I was advised by the foundation's executive director, Dr Alan Roughley: "Tell the taxi driver it's just around the corner from the Red Lion pub." The International Anthony Burgess Foundation is situated in an end-of-terrace house in a scruffy district, Withington. Its exhibits are at first sight more akin to the contents of a house-clearance skip than an archive fit for an immortal genius — yet, on reflection, the holdings and their setting may be more apt than their founders intended.
Dr Roughley, cigarette dangling from his "groobers", gives me the guided tour. Each room in the modest redbrick house, which has no links with Burgess's sojourn in that city, is lined with rows of the writer's old review copies and dog-eared paperbacks of the car-boot-sale variety. Melvyn Bragg's Cumbrian Trilogy, marked down in pencil to £1.50, rubs spines with le Carré's coffee-stained Little Drummer Girl and grubby editions of works by Joyce, Svevo and Calvino. There's the spinet (minus keyboard) on which Burgess conjured unperformed, and mostly unperformable, symphonic masterpieces, and three knackered manual typewriters on which he pounded out a billion words. In one room there's a utilitarian upright piano and a pretentious imperial-style bust of Burgess by Milton Hebald (Hebald, I understand, had been trying to track it down for years). There are some outlandish pieces of furniture: a heavy sideboard, a settle with two duck-head ends proclaiming the bizarre taste of its deceased owner. There are tins of the genius's cheroots (mostly unsmoked) and, for gruesome comparison, x-rays of the lung cancer that killed him. He became, by his own admission, an 80-a-day man. Alas, poor Antonio!
Burgess, whose real name was John Burgess Wilson, was born in 1917 into a Catholic family in Harpurhey, Manchester. His mother and only sister died in the flu epidemic of 1918. He was brought up by an Irish stepmother, living over an off-licence, and educated by religious brothers at Xaverian College. After reading English at Manchester University (for a lifetime he stirred the juices of his envy of Oxbridge graduates), he was conscripted in 1940 but not awarded a commission (another cause for lifelong acidulous loathing). He spent much of the war in Gibraltar working in army education and then became a teacher, ending in Malaya as a colonial-service education officer. His last foreign teaching post, before collapsing in class with a suspected brain tumour, was in Brunei. Back in England, he embarked in earnest on a writing career.
The collection in Manchester, for all its outlandishness, conveys far more of the presence of the literary dervish than the sanitised archives of the Anthony Burgess Center at Angers University, or the Burgess collections at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, where most of his official manuscripts and correspondence are held. In dust-laden haphazard grocer's boxes there are typescripts of films never made and TV series rejected; yellowing sets of first-pass galleys, a typescript of his long-neglected musical Cyrano. There's a statement of his accounts, at least the declared ones, for 1969, a year in which he allegedly earned a mere £23,004 in sterling (you could have bought four London town houses with that) and spent £6,660 18s 2d in legitimate expenses (four times what I earned as a London secondary-school teacher). Of special interest is a lurid postcard correspondence with the fleshy comedian Benny Hill, who regarded Burgess as "the greatest living expert on sex". Which from Hill was a very weird compliment.
Left to my own devices in the "reading room", I find some golden nuggets amid the dusty chaos: a bunch of old diaries. Among the odd notes, never intended for publication, Burgess comes alive in a way he never did in his novels and autobiographical writings. No serious diarist, Burgess had a habit of starting a journal on January 1 and stopping a week later, giving the remaining pages over to working notes — plots for short stories, titles for books, scraps of poetry, and odd memoranda, for example the precise symptoms of syphilis: "incubation... secondary... tertiary..." Or attempts at a poetic conceit: "The clouds took the sun like a pill. It wouldn't digest though..." Then: "The sun lassoes the dome, turning it over to become a cup that fills with wine..." Early 1966, a lazy year in which he only published one novel, a collection of poetry and a translation of a Berlioz opera, we find him hazarding plots for short stories: "The Pet Beast — woman pregnant, comes to a village late at night, to be delivered of a half-human half-bull."
Rarely does he simply chronicle the events, thoughts and feelings of the days. But here's the opening for 1974, where we find him gloomily preoccupied with apocalypse, self-doubt, culinary strivings, Italian power cuts and severe mother-in-law trouble.
January 1: "New Year in Rome and, one might suppose, year one of the New Age — an age uneasy about its past terrene exploitations: fuel rationing, whiff of encroaching ice cap."
January 2: "Today to our house in Bracciano [their country house north of Rome] through cold and rain, where the mains keep overloading on very little... I read a book about transatlantic liners and feel depressed about work. Am writing silly article for encyclopaedia on New Literary Forms, of which of course there are none. Andrea [his son by Liana] angry because colour slide shown of his backside. Sullen and behaved badly. Made a late stew of leftover capon with an improvised custardy caky pudding. La Nonna [his mother-in-law, Contessa Lucrezia Pasi della Pergola, no less] ate heartily."
The next day, January 3, we find him back in Rome cooking a "whole young lamb" with potatoes and broccoli. Again, "La Nonna ate heartily". Liana, he records, went to Vatican City "to get a good exchange rate on dollars" from the Vatican bank. There's another "infernal row" between mother and daughter, la Nonna screaming "assassina" at Liana. Burgess thinks it best to keep "out of the way, not cooking, not confronting La Nonna". "I am confirmed," he writes, "in my belief that prose is more difficult than poetry." He adds: "The world is breaking down," a token of which is the fact that "the mail is taking two months from the US".
