Polyglot, polymath and mythomane.

 

Polyglot, polymath and mythomane.
--
the Times of London, December 13, 1997

 

Anthony Burgess

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Fuller … has better claim to the title of polymath than any man since Leonardo.

 

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His main contribution would be his demonstration that it is still possible to be a polymath in 20th century.

 

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So Anthony Burgess, contrary to popular mythology, was not after all a literary genius, a novelist of world-encompassing ambition, an essayist who assessed literary reputations with the final-word gravitas of a Recording Angel; nor was he a polymath and polyglot as we'd thought, a synthesiser of all mythologies, a walking compendium of modern thought, philosophy and theology, phrase and fable, a cigar-puffing, apoplectic Dr Johnson de nos jours, a monumental figure about whom it was said when he died in 1993, that (as Thackeray said about Swift) 'thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling'. Nope, we were all wide of the mark. Don't you hate it when you get these things completely wrong?....Seen through [Lewis's] eyes, Burgess was a mendacious, drunken, impotent, vain, emotionless, puffed-up, talentless clown who neglected his first wife as she spiralled fatally into alcoholism, who lived abroad to avoid paying tax, and nursed a sentimental chip on his shoulder about not being sufficiently respected by the British establishment....In the presence of a genuinely great man, something odd happens to you - you feel older and wiser, worldlier and cleverer, and pleased with yourself just for being in his company....He was the sort of man who made you feel like cheering just because he existed, and there's nobody remotely like him around today. There are, unfortunately, more than enough Roger Lewises.

 

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Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.

 

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You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

 

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