Word: burgess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Having written some 50 books during the past 30 years, Anthony Burgess has no urgent need to prove that he is prolific. Nevertheless, a scant three months after the U.S. publication of The Pianoplayers, his 29th novel, here comes the first volume of Burgess's autobiography. It is, the author admits in a preface, "longer than I intended, and I foresee that the projected second and last volume -- whose title will probably be You've Had Your Time -- will be as long, if not longer." Shortly after this promise to produce roughly 1,000 pages of printed prose about himself...
That statement hardly sounds like an inducement to rush out and buy Little Wilson and Big God. Yet writers' autobiographies are generally less interesting for the quantity of their experiences than for the quality of their remembering. By this standard, Burgess has plenty to tell indeed...
...that his life, or the first 42 years of it covered here, has been uneventful. In early 1919, around the time of Burgess's second birthday, his mother and older sister died of Spanish influenza. His father, on a furlough from the British army, walked into his Manchester lodgings on a horrid scene: "I, apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room." At the end of Little Wilson and Big God, on a Christmas holiday in 1959, the author is told that he has an inoperable brain tumor...
Between these two dramatic points, Burgess strings a panorama of impressions, both personal and pertinent to his age. John Burgess Wilson (his pseudonym came later) grew up Roman Catholic in a Protestant country, "more of a Celt than an Anglo-Saxon." He was neither the first nor the last Englishman to feel estranged from his native land while learning to love its language and literature, but his generation was cut off from the past by the arrival of radio, the cinema, "American world hegemony, the dissolution of Christendom." When he begins losing his Catholic faith, the author confers with...
Much of the remaining story reads like an Evelyn Waugh comedy, told from the point of view of the butt of the joke. The longer Burgess's education proceeds, the more unqualified he becomes for useful employment. He meets and later marries a spirited Welsh classmate at Manchester University who has an idiosyncratic notion of marital fidelity: "There were plenty of attractive people around and it would be a shame and a waste not to find out what they were like with their clothes off." World War II offers Burgess nearly six years of wasted time in uniform; he gets...