is partially what he states in the second volume
of his auobioraph: the critics, I never understood. Not having yet read the biographee yet , nothing to say.
LRB Colin Burrow : Not Quite Nasty: "Not Quite Nasty
Colin Burrow
The Real Life of Anthony Burgess by Andrew Biswell: Picador, 434 pp,20.00(pounds)
"There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached this state 'unfashionable', and usually throw such stuff away without thinking any more about it. Everyone sees a 1960s sideboard or a 1980s haircut as dated, and, beyond an embarrassed smile at our folly for ever having admired such cheesy horrors, these things rarely give rise to any thought."
This biography sounds like a wonderful corrective to that dreadful book by Roger Lewis, which was 'funny' in it own
perverse and mean-spirited way (for instance, Lewis begins by meeting with Burgess and Richard Ellman, at Oxford, with Ellman playing teacher biographer to Lewis), as well
as being reductive of Burgess and his life. Which doesn't mean everything in it was not true... But that is another story. Hagiographies, biographies, blogographies.
photo of Burgess from
http://bu.univ-angers.fr/EXTRANET/AnthonyBURGESS/diaporamaAB.html
"Andrew Biswell’s new biography, which generously allows Burgess’s friends and enemies to speak in their own voices, flushes out the worst aspects of Lewis. It presents Burgess’s life with a sobriety and care that are at once admirable and slightly chilling. Burgess’s life was always one of the main sources of his fiction, so much so that his two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You’ve Had Your Time (1990), make it very hard to work out where life ends and art begins. Many of the central events of his life became stories, which were retold in different versions on talkshows and in novels. How much time did his father really devote to playing the piano in the local cinema in Manchester, as against his less glamorous day job as a tobacconist? Was his mother really a music- hall starlet known as the Beautiful Belle Burgess? Biswell kindly remarks that no lady of that name appears on any of the playbills he’s examined. "
It sounds as fun as reading the master Burgess himself, and his many legendary selves of learning and fictionalizing. For instance, the story of having written a master's thesis about Marlowe. Who has ever seen this?
Everyone knows writing a dissertation, while bombs are
falling overhead is not possible, now is it?
O dear O fictions of Popes and Ropes
Read on O Writer Reader Reader Writer
Re-Compose thy selves and Drafts
