January 4: there is a robbery in the office below their Rome apartment. The thieves used guns and knives. He notes that the police arrive "unshaven and hippyish", a mode of appearance, he comments, that is intended "to assimilate them into the criminal classes".
January 5: he lies in bed all morning doing the Telegraph crossword. "I think that I must stop writing and ACT," he records. Then he adds: "ACT at what?"
By January 6 he comes up with a startling career change.
Having cooked "beef and Queen of Pudding", having moreover "achieved a meringue competence", he longs for "a big kitchen to cook all day". He is contemplating, he confides in his diary, the possibility of abandoning writing altogether, in order to "advertise for a job as a chef".
If the International Anthony Burgess Foundation seems a trifle odd — flaky, even — it is nonetheless an apt memorial to the great man's capricious energies. Stories of his shaky integrity abound. The novelist and Booker-prize chairman Martyn Goff, for example, wrote a nice novel about Russia, which Burgess panned. The two met not long after the harsh review, and Burgess, with characteristic gall, admitted that he had not actually read Goff's book, but that he could not afford to praise it, as he had a book of his own on Russia in the pipeline.
I have my own minor example of his review antics. It was 1989. Burgess had just reviewed a book of mine in The Observer where he chided me for failing to inform the world that the saintly Pope John Paul I (predecessor to John Paul II) was a paedophile. A paedophile pope! Thrilled by a potential exposure of the century, I phoned Burgess in his Monaco apartment, where he claimed to be making a risotto ai funghi in the echoing kitchen. Vocal cords fried by his favourite cigarillos, he croaked: "True. Oh yes, most definitely, old boy, although I can't recall the precise evidence at this moment. Oh God, the funghi! Ciao!" Questioning Burgess on this (till he blocked the calls) was like picking up soap in the shower. He was to take the papal kiddy-rape evidence to his grave.
What comes across in the Manchester archive, with its drifts of music scores, proof copies, faded cuttings, carbon copies of long-forgotten reviews, is a sense of his astounding capacity for hard work. He had a philosophy for it: "Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness," he would opine grandly (and, if propping up a bar, barely standing), "there is no excuse for being idle now." His memoir hints at a typical day, when he dropped in on Iowa State University on a US book tour. Delivering lectures followed by Q&A seminars in both the literature and music departments, he found time to rehearse a performance of one of his own symphonies, while knocking off a film treatment for his mate Burt Lancaster (in the audience that evening), then treating students to a four-hour extempore piano recital to accompany an uncut showing of Metropolis (his rendering, he proclaimed, rivalled anything done by Mahler. Naturally). One assumes (for such was his 3,000-words-a-day habit of a lifetime) that he also found time to phone in copy for at least one of his regular stints (TLS, The Observer, Country Life, The Listener, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Die Zeit, New York Times, Yorkshire Post) as well as getting down to some serious work during the remainder of the day, or night, on the three or four books he was concurrently writing.
But it was the impression of adult attention-deficit disorder with hyperactive component that robbed Burgess, some might say mercifully, of the gravitas of a Nobel winner. Like a manic hybrid — of, say, Frankie Howerd-Jonathan Ross-David Starkey — there was, for all the surface brilliance, a tendency to flakiness confirmed by the exposé, outclassing even the Goff incident, that he once reviewed, most enthusiastically, one of his own books in the Yorkshire Post under the pseudonym Joseph Kell. Hence his stock — a mad mix of show-off, buffoon and impressive literary talent — sank rapidly when he faded from our screens and newspaper columns.
His posthumous reputation was further shaken two years ago by the publication of arguably the nastiest biography ever written. Roger Lewis, a former Burgess fan, spent 20 years researching the writer's life, only to tip a silo of excrement over his idol. Burgess, he concluded, was "essentially a fake"; a "pretentious prick"; a crummy writer of "pastiche"; a "compulsive liar" who fabricated the entire published account of his life (Little Wilson and Big God, and You've Had Your Time). Lewis's allegations range from the empty boasts of Burgess's sexual potency, his false claims for the paternity of Liana's son, Andrew Wilson (who died two years ago), and even the fabrication of the famous Burgess cerebral tumour that got him started in earnest.
A central, albeit shaky, buttress of the Burgess literary legend was that in the space of one year, 1960, he wrote three novels believing he was about to die of brain cancer. It was essential that he leave money for his first wife, Lynne, who suffered from alcoholism. In the event, Lynne predeceased him by almost 30 years owing to cirrhosis of the liver. According to Burgess's neurologist, Sir Roger Bannister (the four-minute-mile man), the story of the brain tumour was duff gen. Lewis has also challenged the story that Burgess's first wife, Lynne, had been raped by four GIs in the London blackout, causing permanent injury and the loss of a baby. The attack, according to Burgess, had been the basis for the rape of the writer's wife in A Clockwork Orange. Lewis claims that in her cups she merely fell down a manhole in the blackout.
But despite the allegations, and the evidence of genuine bogusness permeating much of his autobiography and journalistic capers, despite moreover the virtually universal opinion that his musical compositions are crap, Burgess's literary stock appears to be on the up. Leslie Gardner, his literary agent, says many of the novels are coming back into print, and sales for Clockwork are booming. She suggests that Lewis's biography, for all its abuse, got readers interested again.
But there have also been serious critics ever faithful to the late old veck's reputation. Professor Sir Frank Kermode of Cambridge University praises the novel MF and its coded exploitation of the anthropology of Levi-Strauss. Professor John Carey of Oxford University tells me: "What I found awesome about Burgess was the sheer bravura and the scope of his mind. He makes me think of Whitman: ÔI contain multitudes.'" Carey says he returns, even more than to A Clockwork Orange, to End of the World News. "It manages to pack into the same novel the life and death of Freud, the Russian revolution, with Trotsky stirring up workers in New York, and the destruction of life on Earth by tidal waves caused by Planet Lynx, leading to the departure of the spaceship America with representatives of the human race going off to found utopia elsewhere. Who else could imagine on such a scale?" Carey has judged Burgess "a giant... a cross-grained-near-genius, who surely cannot realise what an impossible figure he cuts, but who keeps you on his side by the stubborn innocence with which he spills it all out".
