The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  Not all of this works, of course, but there is a sense of genuine transport here, as if the language were trying to find its own rhythms, independently of Burgess’s often hectic orchestration.

  Is intense writing B or can it be A too? Many A novelists have done extraordinary things with language and they didn’t do them by accident. Burgess cares about his prose and works hard on it. Every sentence is sure to contain some oddity or other – frequently as a result of will, you feel, rather than of inspiration or even of appropriateness. Burgess starts a sentence, puts another clause in, ends it just like that, without the courtesy of an and. He is prone, also, to a kind of paraded muscularity, a needless vividness (‘Seven came back … to gobble a hunk of yesterday’s bread’; ‘Belli grabbed his hat … and slammed it on his black locks’) which is often quite at odds with the mood of the page – ditto his horribly Hopkinsian neologisms and ‘kennings’. But the best paragraphs in the book show how the A novelist’s material can be animated by the B novelist’s preoccupations. Personally I’ve always believed in the indivisibility of form and content, and subscribe to the Nabokovian view that there is only one type of writing – that of talent. Well-written A novels are always B novels too. Abba Abba, again, is a bit of both.

  New Statesman June 1977

  1985 by Anthony Burgess

  London was certainly hard on the nerves in 1976 – the year, I’m sure, when Anthony Burgess’s futuristic new fiction was conceived. During that equatorial summer England seemed to be boiling up, partly with crisis, partly with rage. The pound was pitiably weak: every time Callaghan sneezed the quid shed another dime (‘Buddy, can you spare a pound?’ ran the caption of a popular cartoon). The oil-state Arabs had begun their colonization of the capital; their desert costumes were to be seen everywhere in the streets – ‘like the white gowns of a new and suddenly universal priesthood of pure money’, in V.S. Naipaul’s phrase. Inflation had cancelled out the Wilsonian prosperity of the working classes; the ‘social contract’, the Government’s deal with the unions on wages, was being called the ‘social con-trick’; strikes, claims, prices – everything seemed ready for the terminal lurch. It was in several senses a sweaty time for all of us here. It was class war: everyone felt it.

  Burgess is a novelist who knows he is also a critic, and a critic who knows he is also a novelist. As critic, he knows that when a novelist writes about the future he is really writing about the recent past (the past being all there is to write about – the present is never around for long enough). As novelist, he knows too that when he sees the future, it will not work – he will automatically be creating a ‘dystopia’ (no one creates utopias any more: even the utopias of the past now look like dystopias). Pretty well inevitably, the speculative novelist becomes a satirist; he looks around, and he makes it worse.

  Something in Burgess, however, and it is neither the novelist nor the critic, wants his projection to be a helpful, illuminating and, above all, accurate one. Well, how is he doing so far? Burgess encourages such literal-mindedness, and it is anyway tempting to wonder what the author thinks of England in 1978. I bet he is depressed by our recovery, however partial and temporary it turns out to be. I bet he wishes things were just a little more cataclysmic. The reading public would clearly be more sympathetically prepared for his book if the pound had now reached parity with the United States nickel, the police riot had just entered its second month, and mosques were being erected in Berkeley Square. It hasn’t happened, though; 1985, and 1984, suddenly look quite close, and not very terrifying.

  London wasn’t easy on the nerves in 1948 either, and 1948 is what 1985 says 1984 is all about. 1985 is half fiction, half criticism. By this I do not mean that it is a mixture of the two like some of Burgess’s recent novels, which try to tease and anticipate literary criticism in a sub-Nabokovian way. I mean that it is split down the middle. The first half is a critical launching-pad for the following fiction. It is an audacious scheme, involving many fresh dangers, and the book is an unexpected half-success. That is, the first half is reasonably good, the second half unconscionably poor.

  People say ‘It’s like 1984’ when they see new airports. Actually, there’s nothing science-fictional about the London of Airstrip One, or so Burgess argues, using his memory as well as his wit. Nearly everything in the London of 1984 had its counterpart in the London of 1948 – in the London of postwar depression. Everything was in decay, and nothing worked. Life was characterized by puritanism and inefficiency. The buildings were Victorian ruins; there were never any razor blades; cheap socks deliquesced beneath your feet. Orwell’s intrusive ‘telescreen’ was an extrapolation from the arrival of ordinary television sets in middle-class homes (people used to switch them off when they got undressed). Even the ubiquity of the Big Brother posters had its precursor: The Bennet Correspondence College, Burgess tells us, widely billboarded a sign saying, ‘LET ME BE YOUR BIG BROTHER.’ And ‘Room 101’ – the place where, in 1984, the worst thing that can happen to you happens to you – was the room in the BBC where Orwell used to broadcast to India. Nothing too bad happened to Orwell in this room, so far as we know, but you get the idea, more or less.

  Where is the idea taking us? It takes us as far as a self-evident satirical dictum (though it is one that leads Burgess into many baffling contradictions later on): ‘Novels are made out of sense data, not ideas, and it’s the sensuous impact that counts.’ It then takes us, as the critical preface expands, into a capacious hold-all for the author’s sociopolitical musings. With informality and inconoclasm, and a pleasant knack of engaging several cultural registers simultaneously, Burgess inspects, from various angles, the myth of perfectibility: he looks at the modern utopian tradition (Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World), derides the behaviourists B.F. Skinner and Arthur Koestler (who would burn out man’s antisocial, non-perfectible drives), and gives a brief history of anarchism, with a funny, contemptuous account of its creaky reincarnation among the youth cultures. What is perfectible? Man isn’t, but the speculative novel might be. Throughout Part One, the reader’s appetite has been subtly sharpened for Part Two, where, the suggestion is, we will find a projection not only free of the literary flaws noted in others but also devastatingly humane, ameliorative, true.

  The promise becomes explicit in Part One’s final chapter, a curious item entitled ‘The Death of Love’. Here Mr Burgess does what the logic and momentum of the whole section demand – though it still comes as a startling move. He ‘rejects’ 1984. Orwell’s novel, says Burgess sadly, is ‘Not prophecy so much as a testimony of despair … a personal despair of being able to love.’ Much as he tried, Orwell could not ‘love the workers’; and he neglected to exalt sexual love as a passable alternative. It is ‘a monstrous travesty of human possibility’, Burgess decides, settling Orwell’s hash with his closing line: ‘1984 is not going to be like that at all.’

  Presumably, then, it’s going to be like this, one thinks, turning the page to see the bold announcement: ‘Part Two: 1985’. And suddenly one realizes the extent of Mr Burgess’s nerve, or his nervelessness. There is nothing wrong – though there is plenty that is futile – about rejecting a proven classic; there is nothing wrong, I suppose, about rejecting the source of one’s inspiration. But Burgess goes a stage further: the novelist in him rejects the critic. Orwell wasn’t really ‘forecasting the future’, Mr Burgess has said at the outset; and art, anyway, ‘is morally neutral, like the taste of an apple’. Some apples, of course, are more morally neutral than other apples. When the time comes to clear the decks for the fictional 1985, Burgess dismisses 1984 for the very reasons that, as critic, he exalted it earlier on. He dismisses it for not forecasting the future and for not being morally neutral. Yet Burgess must know, whichever hat he happens to be wearing at the time, that novels do not fail for these reasons. They fail only when talent fails. ‘Part Two’ fails.

  Burgess’s 1985 is, unsurprisingly, a stoked-up 1976. ‘Tucland’ is nearing anarchy. Kumina gangs
(that’s Swahili for ‘teenage’) roam the streets, a-robbing and a-raping. Holistic syndicalism – whereby the firing of a supermarket cashier brings the Army out on strike – has strangled the economy. Thirteen-year-old girls masturbate indolently in front of television porno shows. London is dotted with teetotal hotels called the Al-Dorchester and Al-Klaridges, plus various Al-Hiltons and (steady) Al-Idayinns. People talk Worker’s English (‘you was’, ‘he weren’t’, etc.) and use unisex pronouns (‘zer’, ‘heesh’, etc.). Schools teach only trade-union history, and culture-starved punks rebel by seeking out learning at the Underground University. I can see it all now.

  Though it is neither likely nor disturbing, there’s no demonstrable reason why Burgess’s projection fails to interest, let alone terrify. It could be argued that the utopian novel gains force and cohesion to the extent that the imagined society mirrors the human mind. In The Republic, for instance, we are told that the highly unattractive society envisaged by Plato is no more than an image of human wisdom: disciplined, hierarchical, rigidly selective about art. Similarly, the dystopia gains logic from its analogy to the pathological mind: Big Brother is the psychosis possessing Airstrip One, the Party merely the instrument of his paranoia, Winston Smith the weak, fluttering voice of sanity, quickly crushed. Burgess’s 1985 is too chaotic to be a metaphor for anything but chaos – but, then again, this does not quite ‘explain’ its inertness. Alas, the failure is, (vexingly, boringly, ineffably) a failure of language.

  Burgess’s recent prose is characterized by professional haste and a desire to be a stylist. The result is a knotted, cadenced, bogus lustiness: every sentence, every phrase, is sure to contain some virile quirk or other: ‘He scribbled something on a message pad, tore, folded, gave’ and “ ‘G-Gay?” puzzled Bev’ are fair examples of Burgess’s gimcrack contortions. And the dialogue is impossible. ‘No need to tell me precisely where he sits on his revolving chair and watches the mineral fatness gush,’ says Bev chattily of some oil-rich interloper. The workers, by the way, are presented throughout as the usual snarling, snivelling brutes, and Burgess recklessly admits in a postscript that he has been almost as unfair to them as Orwell was. So much for the failure of love. Where does this leave 1985 in relation to 1984? Hanging on to its ‘probability’, I imagine, and looking sillier every month.

  1985 contains a little apology to 1984. In a facetious passage, Bev explains that Orwell was killed in the Spanish Civil War, just as he was about to write Homage to Catalonia. Thus Orwell never wrote 1984 and, without its lessons, 1985 is allowed to turn out as Burgess says it turns out. This makes amends of a kind, but points to a further fallacy. Novels don’t care whether they come true or not, and Orwell has withstood the test of time in quite another sense. Still, it reminds you of a good reason for reading 1985: it makes you reread 1984.

  New York Times Book Review November 1978

  Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

  There are two kinds of long novel. Long novels of the first kind are short novels that go on for a long time. Most long novels are this kind of long novel, particularly in America – where writers routinely devastate acres of woodland for their spy thrillers, space operas, family sagas, and so on. Long novels of the second kind, on the other hand, are long because they have to be, earning their amplitude by the complexity of the demands they make on writer and reader alike.

  Earthly Powers is a long novel of the second kind, which makes it doubly remarkable. In Britain, the long novel was a fatal casualty of World War I; Anthony Burgess belongs to this culture, but he has always been a natural expatriate and nomad, spurning England not because of the usual constraints (i.e. sexual and fiscal) but because its artistic caution was uncongenial to his own talent. He has become a subversive interpreter of fictional conventions, developing freely under the lax and spacious influences of Europe. Earthly Powers also owes something to the neo-Victorian vigour of the modern American novel: it has the reckless scope of, say, Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance (note the bashful nods to Tolstoy and Proust) together with the tangled, page-by-page intelligence of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift and Augie March.

  Even at 600 pages, however, the book feels crowded, bursting with manic erudition, garlicky puns, omnilingual jokes. The narrator of Earthly Powers is 81-year-old Kenneth Toomey, homosexual, Roman Catholic and bad novelist. In the course of this peripatetic and thickly peopled novel, which meshes the real and the personalized history of the twentieth century (more earnestly and intimately than E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime or Tom Stoppard’s Travesties), Toomey visits Paris, Rome, New York, Los Angeles, Malta, Monaco, Malaya, Berlin, Barcelona and Algiers, and duly tangles with the likes of Hemingway and Hesse, Jim Joyce, Morgan Forster, Ruddy Kipling, Tom Eliot, Willie Maugham and Plum Wodehouse. Typically, the young Toomey is seduced by George Russell (the writer ‘AE’) on the very day when, according to Joyce, Russell was meant to be playing his part in Ulysses.

  As Toomey recounts the story of his life, we notice that terrible things keep happening to him – or near him, anyway. His brother-in-law is chopped up by Chicago gangsters; his closest friend is wasted by the voodoo of a Malayan warlock; his nephew is the victim of the bitter pill in a Jonestown-style massacre. Toomey inspects the elaborate severity of nature, experiences the neuroses and hysterias of his various host nations (censorship, Prohibition, the rise of Mussolini), staggers through liberated Buchenwald – ‘what was the smell? All too human … it was the smell of myself, of all humanity.’ The ultimate moral, or theological – or theodicean – irony (whereby divine intervention preserves the life of the future cultist mass-murder) is stark and ferocious; it is the kind of challenge that the literary Catholic enjoys throwing out to the world, as if to testify to the macho perversity of his faith. Graham Greene did it in Brighton Rock, Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust; but Burgess is more vehement than either.

  To compound his difficulties, Toomey is a homosexual, and he sees this sinful state as one of entrapment, a denial of free will. Toomey, so to speak, does not like what he likes, and he resents God for his condition. The various thieving, foul-mouthed catamites with whom Toomey tarries will no doubt offend many sectors of homosexual orthodoxy. Accustomed to police persecution for his shame, Toomey lives to see a homosexual marriage blessed by an archbishop; but very little hope is held out for man plus man. (After all, to quote the Rev. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority: ‘God created Adam and Eve in that garden – not Adam and Steve.’) His one satisfactory love affair is entirely platonic, and quickly aborted by the powers of evil. ‘The only way out of homosexuality is incest,’ Havelock Ellis tells Toomey. Sure enough, and inevitably, Toomey’s chaste but erotic relationship with his sister Hortense is the only bond that survives the novel.

  What affirmation is possible, in Toomey’s determinist world? Burgess sees artistic creation as man’s only god-like act, which is appropriate in a book whose twin themes are art and evil. Toomey, of course, is the most sterile kind of artist – pretentious and pitifully transparent – and Burgess has great parodic fun with his efforts: lush period epics, doomed libretti, catchy doggerel for stage musicals, a sentimental homosexual rewrite of the creation myth, even a theological work on the nature of evil (written in collusion with his relative Carlo Campanati, a Vatican high-up who later ‘makes Pope’). As Toomey begins the act of creation, he experiences a divine confidence; as the work takes shape, he feels himself already falling short, as earthly compromise and contingency closes in on the pristine dream. What is intended as radical and pure becomes tainted and familiar.

  In a sense, though, Earthly Powers belongs to Toomey as well as to Burgess, It is a considerable achievement, spacious and intricate in design, wonderfully sustained in its execution, and full of a weary generosity for the errant world it recreates. As a form, the long novel is inevitably flawed and approximate; and this book contains plenty of hollow places beneath its busy verbal surface. But whatever its human limits it shows an author who has reache
d the height of his earthly powers.

  New York Times Book Review December 1980

  Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess

  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.

  The first volume of the Burgess autobiography is only 450 pages long. Accordingly one would expect it to end when the author is about five. In fact, we follow him to the halfway mark, to early middle age, just as his writing career was getting into its gallop. Between then and now he has produced a further fifty-odd books. He was born Jack Wilson; Anthony Burgess is a nom de plume – probably one of many.

  We begin to get the hang of things when Burgess reveals that he first read Don Quixote at the age of ten: ‘I have read it four times, the second time in Spanish.’ When it came to scholarships, ‘I won them all.’ At eleven he was published in the Manchester Guardian (a drawing) and in the Daily Express children’s corner (an essay); but these ventures, like his passion for chemistry and the stage, were just exploratory sidelines. At thirteen ‘I decided that I was to be a great composer’. Although he liked the ‘simple tonalities’ of Handel and early Beethoven, he ‘rather despised these diatonic harmonies as all too easy to anticipate’. His music ‘was to be “modern”, like Stravinsky or Schoenberg’.

  Not that the thirteen-year-old modernist fell too far behind in his reading, coolly tackling Ibsen and Schopenhauer: