The Confessions of Anthony Burgess: "Little Wilson and Big God, You've Had Your Time" (1986/1990)

:1:

It hadn't occurred to me before to take the two separate phrases that constitute the titles of the twin volumes of Burgess's memoir and run them together like that, but perhaps it makes sense. The 'you' would be plural not in the sense (as I first assumed) that it addresses all of us, Burgess included, as a sort of momento mori, but in the sense of folding together Burgess and the God of his Fathers, both at the end of their usefuls. In the preface to vol 1 Burgess declares 'I think I may predict, unless some miracle of renewed inspiration occurs, that the second volume of my memoirs will bring my writing career to a close' [LWBG, viii]. Not so! Three more novels followed You've Had Your Time, along with various other things. (He also says 'I foresee that the projected second and last volume will be as long, if not longer', which, its 400 pages set against the first installment's 460, shows that he was no prophet).

The declaration of retirement from writing may or may not have been meant genuinely. It could be ludic Burgess designedly casting a hue of terminal reflection over his lifestorytelling the better to combine pathos with a clearer perspective. After all, we're hardly going to trust a memoir that admits it is in medias res. How can the teller hope to recall his own wood when there are still so many trees about? Russell Brand, ten years my junior, has already published two volumes of autobiography; Katie Price is younger still and she has published four. Burgess was right to stress his own obsolescence.

He claims he was prompted by particular intimations of mortality. In America in 1985 he 'met young people in Minneapolis who were surprised to find me still alive. They had studied a book of mine in high school or college and assumed I was a classical author, meaning a dead one' [LWBG, 4]. Burgess, happy enough for his own reasons to go along with the conceit, orchestrates his life-story novelistically, which makes for a brilliantly entertaining read but which puts the absolute truth under question. 'As for truth,' he concedes, 'I might, through sheer shame at the banality of my life, be forced to distort it.' But he goes on:

Pontius Pilate's question has still not properly been answered, though he may well have given the only possible answer with his other great dictum: 'What I have written, I have written'. He is surely the patron saint of writers. [LWBG, 4]

I suspect this unpacks into something rather profound, actually. Truth is part of the issue, but there's another and it relates to the memoir's twin-title. Pilate, patron saint of writers, is the man who presided officially at the death of God. Burgess slyly concedes that 'following St Augustine and Rousseau' he is calling this work his Confessions, 'but without the promise of such basic spiritual revelations as they provide'. Quite the reverse. The story is not just that of little John Wilson, but also of the way his Big God has run out of time in the modern world. Not a Nietzschean crowing about God's death, but something more heartfelt and mournful.

That there is something tying together the otherwise (brilliant, but) centripetal mass of detail assembled into this book seems to me hard to deny. Contemporaries thought so too. Julian Barnes, reflecting in 1987 on how a literary career is never a smooth progression, but rather 'a matter of hops and starts, surprise promotions and seemingly unmerited stagnations' reflected that

Last year’s promotion of Anthony Burgess to official Grand Old Man was a case in point. After years of getting respectful, rather than ecstatic reviews, and of writing the sort of books which perhaps aren’t naturally suited to the British book-reader, Burgess suddenly turns 70 and produces an autobiography. Overnight, there he is: the Grand Old Man. But I bet he didn’t feel a gear-change inside.

Just desserts. Little Wilson and Big God is, simply, a superb piece of writing. Its best sections are the early ones, when Burgess's deft skill at bricolage recreates a vivid sense of growing up in a Manchester in the 1920s, a life somewhere between respectable and indigent. The writing combines snatches of popular songs from the time, advertising slogans, quotidiana, idiomatically recalled phrases from ordinary speech, lively details and somehow works the whole into a compelling narrative. The protagonist is mostly an Oliver Twist-y blank space, character-wise, as is best in such performances, especially when the supporting cast is so varied and Dickensianly grotesque; but there are two ways in which 'he' stands out. He is weirdly old and erudite for his age (and not backward about boasting of his intellectual, cultural and artistic accomplishments); but he is at the same time unusually gormless and ingenuous too. Other kids explain run-of-the-mill things to him. Hospitalised with Scarlet Fever he proves unable to use the bed pan: 'you were supposed to reserve dry defecation for it, micturating into a chill pot bottle', but Little Wilson 'performed both acts in the same vessel which regularly overflowed.' 'I was,' he says, 'hit by the ward sister' for his clumsiness in this [LWBG, 80]. At the other end of the scale we get this sort of thing, which I remember as my first encounter with the volume in 1986, since Private Eye (which I read regularly at that time) excerpted it and featured it prominently in their 'Pseud's Corner'. In the summer of 1927 he:

got through the whole of Don Quixote in the two-volume Everyman edition. Auden said that nobody had ever read the book through; here is one to say he was wrong. I have read it four times, the second time in Spanish. [LWBG, 76]

Ten years old! It would be fatal to the book if it weren't so ingenuously done. There's a fair amount of it, too: ‘I had composed one Sunday, in the intervals of reading Hemingway’s Fiesta in German, a setting of a song by Lorca–La niña del bello rostro–for a singer named Merita’ [LWBG, 307]. This happens later, when Wilson is stationed in Gibraltar during the war, and is actually less boastful than it seems. He is reading the book in German not to show-off his linguistic facility, but precisely because he doesn't speak German and is having to crash-course himself in order to follow orders and teach it to soldiers. The music, though, is a constant. One of the things Little Wilson and Big God does is flesh out Burgess's often repeated claim that he was a composer first, and a writer only after.

There's also loads of sex, from young-Byron-style seductions of the prepubescent Wilson by various housemaids and nurses, through to sex with Llewela or Lynne Jones, who was to become his wife; and thereafter many accounts of Burgess's numerous extramarital dalliances. He and Lynne met as undergraduates, at which point Lynne's sexual life was still dominated by a 'torrid' affair she had conducted for years with a man who had seduced her when she was 14. She decides to 'wipe out' sex with this man by having sex with Burgess, and also with many others. Her view was '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.' Mournfully, Burgess adds: 'she sustained this attitude throughout a long marriage' [LWBG, 211]. For himself, Burgess goes through the Augustinian confessional route of listing, it seems, his every sexual encounter specifically in order to generate a mood of disgust and revulsion. 'I engaged in erotic play in an alley, broke and spattered prematurely and was derided' [LWBG, 161]; Spattered. Derided. Married sex works no better: 'at night Lynne and I lay, me embarrassed, in her narrow bed. She dealt briskly with my engorgement' [LWBG, 331]. Ugh. Despite her promiscuity, Lynne doesn't seem to have enjoyed the actual sex very much: 'her view of sex was both sane and perilous. It was something you got out of the way so as to concentrate on the human essence of a relationship' [LWBG, 210]

This was a kind of madness but also an odd sort of sanity. ... Like H G Wells, she discounted the dangers of possessiveness. Sexual fulfillment does strange things, especially with women. It generates a fierce proprietoral sense, which is sometimes called love. With Lynne sex was altogether too casual. She would give it without getting anything out of it. Ça vous donne tant de plaisir et moi si peu de peine was one of her favourite aphorisms. The Dionysiac ecstasy had never possessed her. [LWBG, 211]

An individual who takes as a sexual slogan a phrase from Dostoyevsky's The Devils, of all places, is hardly on the royal road to sensual fulfillment. After a little over a decade of married sex, Lynne grows more permanently dissatisfied. The couple are now living in the Far East. 'My lovemaking was not good enough,' Burgess says, baldly. 'I was told it was not good enough. Of course, it never is after fourteen years of marriage' [LWBG, 412]. Not sure I agree with you there, Tony. Lynne, though had 'been given a new standard of lovemaking' by an unnamed Eurasian, 'short and [with] several teeth missing, but he was outstanding in bed.' Burgess adds, with plangently mournful understatement: 'no husband likes to be told of his sexual shortcomings ... and I was told too brutally and drunkenly' [LWBG, 412].

The purpose of all this, I assume, is a kind of public self-abasement. In the preface to You've Had Your Time, Burgess notes with a sort of self-satisfied asperity, that 'the personality revealed' in Little Wilson and Big God 'did not please'. Reviewers denounced Burgess 'as if I were a priapic monster or, at best, unforgiveably indiscreet'. Burgess not only doesn't deny this, he doubles-down on it:

It is never the object of confession, at least in the Catholic tradition, to present oneself as a likeable character. One seeks not admiration but forgiveness. [YHYT, vii]

The startling thing about this is not that it in effect situates us, the reader, as priest, but rather that it calls down forgiveness at all. From where? From a God in which Burgess no longer, quite, believes? After all the priest in the confessional is not himself the source of the forgiveness on offer; he is, rather, a conduit for divine grace. The crucial question here is not 'forgiveness for what?', with its tabloid-journalist lubriciousness of interest in Burgess's many delinquencies, themselves often sexual, and all laid out here with a clarity so pitiless it rather implies that they have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. No: the crucial question, surely, is: 'forgiveness from whom?' Not me, I suppose; and not, dear reader, from you either. John Carey, reviewing the book for the Sunday Times, put his finger on something important: 'these two works together,' he said, 'constitute a picaresque novel, the chaotic adventures of a cross-grained near-genius who surely cannot realize what an impossible figure he cuts, but who keeps you on his side by the stubborn innocence with which he spills it all out.' I think this is right, and it entails a further question: who is authorised to forgive the lapsed Catholic whose greatest fault, implied throughout his memoir if never quite spelled out, is his catastrophic innocence?

Of the breakdown in marital sex that occurred when Lynne so brutally told him of his erotic inadequacy, Burgess says: 'the telling did not kill love, which is above sex, but it killed desire' [LWBG, 412]. If we, as readers, never quite believe in this love, as written in these two volumes, it may be because such emotional connection is personal to the people concerned and cannot by its very nature be easily captured in words. Alternatively, it may be that it simply isn't there. Certainly Burgess does nothing to render his words-on-a-page Lynne loveable, or even likeable. That he doesn't spare himself either hardly justifies this. What comes across is not the much-repeated sense of her being a wild-living Celt 'like Dylan Thomas or Brendan Behan' [LWBG, 437], so much as a woman profoundly unhappy and self-destructive. She was surely 'difficult', but Burgess really does appear to have thought that simply staying married to her was as far as his duty to make her happy extended. Actually, no: that's not fair to him. It's more that he portrays her as somebody for whom happiness was an impossibility, somebody governed by an irrationality his masculine limitedness could never satisfy. To encounter Lynne, Burgess claims, was 'to learn about women's irrationality' [LWBG, 210]. 'I am,' he adds, 'still learning, though irrationality only means contempt for irrational laws.' This is so naked a non sequitur we are right to be suspicious. What these books actually make plain is that Lynne's 'irrationality' manifested in self-destruction so determined she drank herself to death, and a commitment to being deeply unhappy when the raw materials for constructing happiness lay all around her.

'Like God,' Burgess says, slipping into aphoristic mode, 'women prefer love to art. They will accept art [only] as a means of their own beautification or as a testimony to their power.' [LWBG, 213]. Even by the standards of 1986 this is startling nugget of sexism, airily dismissing the very possibility that women might themselves actually produce art (indeed, might be very good at doing so) and locking the verbal image of Lynne the books create into a Man-Does-Woman-Is shaped cage. But there's a crucial clue here too, I think: the elision of womankind and God. Where does forgiveness come from? Only, says Catholicism, from the latter, and therefore (says Burgess) only from the former. Lynne, being dead, can never forgive him. As far as absolution goes, he's had his time. Oh, but is there a get-out clause? Big Woman/God prefers love, but Little-Man-Wilson can always revert to art. He is artful, and his memoirs are supremely so.

:2:

The received wisdom is that the first volume is the better of the two because it is much more like a novel. The second is less eventful, less effectively and various characterised, and increasingly becomes a list of the stuff Burgess wrote. Still, You've Had Your Time is much funnier and less boastful than I remembered from my initial read-through, and full of stuff. 'My novels de facto failures, I became the least fatigable of journalistic hacks'. It's also madder than I remembered: I'm thinking for instance of the bit where Burgess swears he foresaw the Kennedy assassination in a dream. 'I had to believe,' he says, 'in the capacity of dreams to tear the veil of the future' [YHYT, 86], although had to imports too great an inevitability into the process. Burgess's own account makes clear that this dream was actually prompted by reading El Cid before bedtime 'to improve my Spanish'. The Wilsonian subconscious shifted to the USA: 'there was an automobile procession ... "The Kid! The Kid!" the crowd cried.' After the fact of JFK's assassination meaning is retrofitted. The blitheness with which Burgess moves from this, via a quick reference to J W Dunne's An Experiment With Time, to declaring himself a sort of über-Freud ('I find few of my own dreams to be Freudian. Indeed I sometimes dream of a Freud who is puzzling out the meaning of the dream in which he is embedded') would be provoking if it didn't so clearly work so well as comic exaggeration. 'I often find,' he notes rather haughtily, 'that it is enough to wait perhaps months to find the source of [a dream's] images in future time'. We get a little nearer the truth a couple of paragraphs later:

Tough minded readers who either do not dream or see dreams as discardable waste matter, exhaust fumes of the brain, are not entitled to feel superior to persons who, like myself, feed on dreams and are sometimes violently shaken by them. For literary creation is much like the dreaming process and dreams fuel all the arts

I have doubts about this, as a general statement; and doubts too that Burgess intended it, in good faith, as the universal he styles it as here. In part this is because my own personal experience as a writer has found little use for actual dreams. I dream a lot, often vividly, and have occasionally even been shaken by my dreams. But they rarely if ever filter through into what I write.

The 'dreams' thing is interesting, though. It has sometimes occurred to me that the conceit of art as solidified dream is less about the 'actual' transfer of images or emotions from the dream-state to the artwork, and more about the curious status 'dreams' have in terms of their authorship. My dream is mine. One cannot, outside of a Philip K Dick story, dream anyone's dream but one's own. Accordingly it makes sense to think of myself as the author of my dream. At the same time we're all familiar with the way dreams appear to have a will that is not ours: they way they move in odd, unexpected and even unwanted directions. From this we intuit a sense that our dreams are somehow not ours; that something other than we is writing them. This is behind Freud's sense not only that 'who we are' is radically divided, but that 'we' don't have proper access to the other us, the one that authors our dreams.

This question of authorship is quite separate from the matter of 'meaning' in dreams, What's significant about Burgess's interpretation of his own El Cid dream as literally prophetic of the Kennedy assassination is not its truth but its form: it projects his own dreams onto the outer world as a whole, and therefore invests him with the power to in some sense author world-historical events. When you put it like that, it brings out (I think) the point at which Burgess's claim becomes ludicrous; and it has nothing to do with J W Dunne's theories concerning time.

There's a James Wood essay on Knut Hamsun, collected in The Irresponsible Self (2004) that seems to me relevant here. Wood summarises a characteristic Hamsun episode where a young man brags to a blind old man that he lives in a part of town much too expensive for him. The old man asks after the address and the name of his landlord, and when the youngster invents a name ('Happolati') the old guy nods and says he knows him. The young man invents increasingly improbable fictions about his landlord, and the old man continues to nod with recognition. The young man grows angry, but instead of accusing the old fellow of being a dupe he 'does the opposite and bizarrely accuses him of not believing his stories' ('Perhaps you don't believe that a man with the name of Happolati exists! What obstinacy and wickedness in an old man!') The old guy, frightened, moves away. Woods comments:

Hamsun founded the kind of modernist novel which largely ended with Beckett—of crepuscular states, of alienation and leaping surrealism, and of savage fictionality. He took from Dostoevsky the idea that plot is not something that merely happens to a character but that a really strange character leads plot around like an obedient dog. He took from Strindberg the idea that the soul is not a continuous wave but a storm of interruptions ... [Hamsun's characters] are epistemological brawlers, always challenging meaning to a fight. They invent the scenes through which they move, and thus invent themselves fresh on every page. Yet like escaped convicts, these heroes erase their tracks as they proceed, and this seems to be hapless rather than willed. They seem only to be escaping themselves. [Wood, 'Knut Hamsun's Irresponsible Selves', The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Cape 2004), 97]

They invent the scenes through which they move is the very definition of the autobiographers' art, and the tension in 'The Confessions of Anthony Burgess' (which very often include crepuscular states, alienation and leaping surrealism) is the sense that Burgess is both the author of his life and the character in a story—'Life'—written by somebody else entirely. That he is both agent and patient. The hinge of the two novels locates the origin of his actual career as an author in an act of wilful passivity: teaching a class in a Brunei school he is overwhelmed by unhappiness. ''I had done my best; I could do no more: let other agencies take over. I lay on the classroom floor and closed my eyes' [LWBG, 440-41]. This is eccentric, even Hamsunic behaviour in a schoolteacher, but it yields results. Burgess, having felt out of control, reasserts it with this aggressive non serviam. The result is a shift from teaching to writing which culminates, for our purposes, with the book we are presently reading. What is the 'meaning' of Anthony Burgess? How pugilistically does the author brawl with his own epistemology.

Burgess is aware that he is simultaneously creating his life's shape and meaning, and that this shape, adventitiously or Providentially, is something imposed upon him from without. It's the dialectic of these two things that puts the whole question of how how much of this is made-up and how much is 'true' in its context. Dreams, similarly, are typically full of the most outrageously improbable and fantastic gubbins; yet Freud was adamant that dreaming articulates powerful truths of which regular discourse is incapable. And this ambiguity as regards authorship speaks of the Confessional too. Step into a Catholic confessional box and tell your story to the priest. Who is the author of this confession? Well in a crucial sense you are, and must be: unless you are confessing of your own free will the exercise is worthless. But in another sense, equally crucial, you are not: the story you are telling is impelled not by you (not the best you) but by your sins, for which you are heartily sorry, which is to say, from which you distance 'yourself'. But then again, these sins are not some external third party, imposed upon you: you have chosen to sin this way and that's why you're here. But yet again, the 'you' authoring this story is a you bent out of shape by your sin, and the function of the story is to access the grace that will restore you to who you should be. The authorship of a confession is a genuinely complicated matter.

Burgess' title, in part, is taken from Augustine's Confessions, the very first words of which concern the bigness of God ('magnus es, domine, et laudabilis valde'). Similarly You've Had Your Time ends with a peroration to literary beauty: 'a conviction that the manipulation of language to the end of pleasing and enlightening is not to be despised' [YHYT, 391]. This is also Augustinian: Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam; Late I have loved you, O Beauty forever old and forever new! Late I have loved you! And, look, you were inside me, and I was out of myself, and that was where I searched for you. [Augustine Confessions 10:27]. Burgess makes beauty in a literary, textual sense, and is here writing a book about the writing of books. Think of Augustine's tolle lege, tolle lege, perhaps the most famous phrase in the whole of his Confessio. But we need to be careful: 'From you, God, I had learned,' says the Saint in Book 5, 'that because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.' Truth and falsity are very complex and difficult. Roger Lewis 2002 hatchet-job biography is largely an exercise in going through Burgess's own memoirs and rubbishing the veracity of the data they contain. This would be massively point-missing even if it weren't, as Lewis's book is, motivated by such a ferocious personal animosity.

The point-missing may proceed from a non-Catholic perspective on a Catholic sacrament (even, as here, in semi-secularised, lapsed-Catholic form). Adam Kotsko has some interesting things to say about the fetish for 'honesty' in social discourse, more broadly conceived. He's right, I think, that there's an increasing tendency to sugar-coat unethical behaviour by 'fessing up and claiming the 'at least I'm being honest' high ground. ('Sure, I have racist thoughts. I’ve crossed the street to avoid a black man sometimes, but only at night. I mean, at least I’m honest about it, though, right?'). Kotsko glosses:

In reality, the “at least I’m honest” gesture is a foreclosure of ethics, a short-circuit by which being true to one’s own authentic shittiness becomes an ethical obligation in itself. It is the last stillborn offspring of the Christian critique of hypocrisy — a critique that was originally intended to shame people into living up to their stated ethical ideals, much as Christian confession (“being honest with yourself”) was a first step toward ethical transformation and made no sense outside of a process of conversion. In the “at least I’m honest” worldview, by contrast, ethical aspiration as such is already the hypocrisy that must be rooted out, and the only possible outcome of confessing one’s shittiness is to remain authentically, honestly shitty.

I suspect, though I don't have space to go into it here, that this scales up: it speaks to the cultural dominance of 'grimdark', the supercession of Tolkien's idealised pre-raphaelite Middle Earth by G R R Martin's horrible, violent and relentlessly man-is-wolf-to-man world of Westeros. Lurking behind this somewhere is an implicit 'yeah, it's ghastly: but at least it's honest'. It's not, of course; or to be precise, it's no more honest than Tolkien. And in one key sense its considerably less honest, because it refuses to countenance precisely the possibility of redemption, of conversion. To convert is to change oneself and doing that necessarily superposes a new 'you' over an old one. Such doubling of personhood might look like hypocrisy to some, but it is less dishonest than a stubborn attachment to oldness for the sake of oldness. We don't have to carry on being shitty.

The broadest trajectory of Burgess's Confession is one out of misery into happiness: volume 2 is considerably less grim than 1, and not only because it covers the period when its subject became a world-famous writer. The hinge is Lynne's death, which though it provokes misery and even suicidal thoughts in Burgess frees him up to marry again and move into the sunshine. Reunited with Lynne postwar, the unhappy Burgess has an affair with an unnamed Jewish girl, with whom (it's clear) he enjoyed happiness and the possibility of more.

I should have married this girl, but, though I had good enough grounds, I could not now seek a divorce. Moreover her Judaism was reinforcing my Catholicism and making the notion untenable. And my wife was turning herself into my poor wife, sick, lonely, neglected. Guilt, guilt and then the leap of the hungry dark forces in a hotel bedroom smelling of breadcrumbs. There is no poetry for such transports, except perhaps in the Song of Solomon. Physical appetite is no mere metaphor. [LWBG, 344]

The Old Testament Judaicised arousal; the New Testament interdiction on divorce. Lynne is less and less an actual human being, here, more and more the embodiment of the Church, and God, whose time is not for Wilson-Burgess to abbreviate. He is the patient: the Church uxorian is the agent. Who was it who said that hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous? Why, Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself in his own Confessions. Of course.

:3:

You've Had Your Time ends with an Epilogue that provides a snapshot of Burgess in 1990: in Switzerland, in his study, putting the final touches to the memoir we have been reading. 'Am I happy?' he asks, and immediately answers: 'probably not.' [YHYT, 387]. The epilogue begins:

You and I have both had enough of the time I have had, whose back I loaded with words for sale. Enough of the Nacheinander; let us dwell on the Nebeneinander.
[YHYT, 377]

He doesn't explain this reference, or translate the German; but it's from Ulysses. Of course it is.

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read ... Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick.

From the Proteus chapter. Nacheinander and nebeneinander mean, respectively, 'in succession' and 'side by side'. German, because the allusion is to Lessing's comparison of the non-successive art of sculpture (specially, The Laocoön) and the successive art of narrative poetry, Vergil's account of the death of the Trojan priest in Aeneid, Book 2. The two arts ought not to try to emulate each other, was Lessing's conclusion. But I take it that Burgess's meaning here is more ambiguous. A life is lived diachronically but contemplated synchronically, after all. And the Dantean maestro di color che sanno means both 'master of those who know' and 'master of the known colours'. The one thing this blogpost has not been able to capture is the sheer colour of Burgess's memoirs: the life, the vitality, the hilarity and crunchiness of it. It's not all glum. Crack, crick, crick.