Word: burgess
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...well-known story that Anthony Burgess began writing in earnest in 1959, when a doctor in Malaya told him he had a brain tumor and barely a year to live. In order to leave his ailing wife some kind of security, he returned to England and wrote five novels in one year. There was no tumor, but even after he heard the good news, Burgess never stopped working-or moving around. Disgusted by high taxes and public indifference, he left London after his wife died, continued his hectic pace in Malta, Rome, and this year Princeton...
...Burgess originally planned to be a composer. He is now halfway through writing music and lyrics for a musical version of Ulysses. He could not resist, either, printing in MF the music Miles hears in Castita-the same tune, successively done as a ballad, an anthem and a wedding march. He has completed two movie scripts and is itching to get behind a camera. "So much to learn," he mutters dejectedly, but he is investing in movie-tape equipment, and heaven knows who or what will be shot on the playing fields of Princeton...
Surprisingly, Princeton has not proved a congenial place to work. Students are slothful and in search of a father figure, he says. Parents are#151;well-parental. (One frantic couple from Detroit beseeched Burgess to convince their son that he must relinquish his dream of becoming a poet and join the family business.) Burgess and his new young wife, a linguist named Liana, sublet sight unseen a tiny faculty apartment from a large Chinese family, which left them a vast quantity of chopsticks but no flatware-and little place to write...
...Also, Burgess loathes snow. "It petrifies me," he complains. "It's un-alive, the negation of everything...
Snow or not, room or not, Burgess tries to write at least 1,000 words a day. His deepest regret is that he is already 54; he has at least 20 ideas for novels. Among them is a story about a Maugham-like novelist writing a book about a wicked Pope who ruined the church. The wicked Pope is, of all people, John XXIII. Burgess, who comes of a North England family that has been Catholic for centuries, regards John as a historic disaster. An outspoken anti-ecumenist, he thinks John's popularizing destroyed "the intellectual integrity and dignity...