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Liar, liar, pants on fire....the man was a liar....To be true means to be grounded at your core, and Burgess never was....The habitual bending of the truth for ulterior motives had important consequences for Burgess's art. Cavalier liars think that anything will do. The idea of revising something to make it more true never occurs to him. Yet this inner truth is the essence of great art....Burgess told me that fecundity as a writer was a parallel of erotic freeing-up and that careful writers were not sexual people. He was clearly boasting that what made him a prolific author also made him a great lay. Not so....Burgess thought he was Cervantes, but in fact he is Don Quixote. There is no Burgess book that gives the impression you are reading something entirely grown-up. That a book might be brooded over or lived was alien to him. Instead he gluttonised on nicotine, booze and stimulants....He was not at all vindictive - how rare in the literary world! His kindness and warmth, which showed in his face as well as his conduct, were doubtless among the reasons Graham Greene disliked him (Greene was unnerved by spontaneous personalities; only he was allowed to be spontaneous)....what Burgess put up with from his first wife makes him a saint....how enthusiastic Burgess was with the inner-city kids he taught in New York, endlessly patient with their rudeness and fatuity. Burgess was a cranky charmer who could sound off on anything to fabulous effect - and he wasn't a bully in conversation....He was a terrific journalist. Couldn't write a dreary column to save his life.
--
Duncan Fallowell in the London Sunday Telegraph, 30 Oct 2005

 

Anthony Burgess

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Not many people know this, but on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid - and there is Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500. 'Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.' Even today, at seventy, and still producing book after book, Burgess spends half his time writing music. He additionally claims to do all the housework.

 

Martin Amis

 

...Burgess' chief themes...a Catholic sense of sin and a social sense of disaster, a fascination with the polymathic and polyglot artist and the strange and often gross and unbidden sources of art. Nor had Burgess taught languages or studied Joyce for nothing, though where Joyce sought the final consolation of form he sought those of prolixity; he was also a very effective literary critic, obsessed with language and punning....was happy to describe himself as a craftsman and not an aesthetician of writing; he is a Joycean without the formalism or indeed the restraint....inventive prolixity...gifts of linguistic and technical discovery; Burgess is a great postmodern storehouse of contemporary writing, opening the modern plurality of languages, discourses and codes for our use.

 

Anthony Burgess

 

Ultimately, Anthony Burgess's emphasis on the multiplicity of meanings latent in the text of Shakespeare's life foregrounds his own appropriation of Shakespeare … Clearly this is not an inconsistency on Burgess's part but a deliberate pointer at the inevitability of appropriating any given text, particularly that most irresistible one of Shakespeare's life.

 

William Shakespeare

 

Burgess's Shakespeare is not a patient empire builder or visionary, but rather an unhappy man caught in an unenviable position, at the midlife crisis age of forty-six. … Burgess's point may well be that literary quality is not always recognized during one's lifetime … due to an ill-advised display of his wit in the presence of the king, Shakespeare is currently out of favor. … Particularly ingenious in Burgess's story is the way Shakepeare even hides his name in the text of the psalm. As he is forty-six years of age, he chooses Psalm 46; he counts to the forty-sixth word, replaces it by "shake"' then he starts at the end, counts forty-six words backwards (leaving out of the account the cadential "selah"), and changes that word into "speare." The surprising thing is, that the evidence shoring up this highly unlikely scenario is in itself authentic: in Psalm 46 AV, the forty-sixth word really is "shake", the forty-sixth word from the end (not counting "selah") being spear.
Although Burgess's Shakespeare revises the psalm for wholly selfish ends, out of defiance and sinful pride, he does not thereby lose our sympathy. Unlike Kiping's self-confident sahib, he is not a superman that can lead nations; rather, in his everyday struggle with political realities, an unhappy marriage, and uncomprehending neighbors, he is a modern antihero whom we cannot begrudge his one moment of triumph. … For Burgess, art is the result of suffering between the hammer of what is and the anvil of what should be. He projects that vision on Shakespeare, whose drive for self-realization, impeded by his surroundings, finds an outlet in this act of creativity.

 

William Shakespeare

 

Burgess had been a schoolteacher (like William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies) and evidently sensed a stirring of revolt among the youth of his country and elsewhere in the West, a revolt with which—as a deeply unconventional man who felt himself to be an outsider however wealthy or famous he became, and who drank deep at the well of resentment as well as of spirituous liquors—he felt some sympathy and might even have helped in a small way to foment. And yet, as a man who was also deeply steeped in literary culture and tradition, he understood the importance of the shift of cultural authority from the old to the young and was very far from sanguine about its effects. He thought that the shift would lead to a hell on earth and the destruction of all that he valued....Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant.

 

Anthony Burgess