Carisbrook Street
John Burgess Wilson was born on 25 February 1917 at 91 Carisbrook Street in Harpurhey, north Manchester, to Joseph and Elizabeth Wilson. His father played piano in the music halls and his mother, whom Burgess called the Beautiful Belle Burgess, was a singer and dancer on the same circuit. His sister Muriel died of influenza on 15 November 1918, aged eight. His mother followed four days later. Burgess later wrote that his father came home on leave to find them both dead, with the baby chuckling in his cot in the same room. The dates say otherwise, but it is the story he chose to tell. His father spoke little of her afterwards, though he gave fragments: her voice, her hair, her ankles. He was taken in by his mother's sister, Ann Bromley, in Crumpsall, and grew up there with her two daughters until his father remarried in 1922.
Joseph Wilson's new wife, Margaret Dwyer, was a publican who ran the Golden Eagle in Miles Platting. The boy grew up above pubs and off-licences, surrounded by drink but kept at a distance from affection. By 1928 the family had moved to Moss Side, where he wrote his earliest published poems and stories. He described his background as lower middle class, though the reality was more complicated than that. The family had enough money. The Depression barely touched them, because demand for tobacco and alcohol stayed constant regardless of what the economy did. But warmth was in short supply. He was known as Jack, Little Jack, Johnny Eagle. He would not become Anthony Burgess for another four decades.
Xaverian and Manchester
He enrolled at Xaverian College in Victoria Park in September 1928, a Catholic school run by the Xaverian Brothers. He was a bright, awkward, combative student who read voraciously and taught himself music. He completed his Higher School Certificate in 1935 and wanted to study music at university, but was told his lack of physics ruled out a science degree, and music was grouped with the sciences at the University of Manchester. He took English Language and Literature instead. It was the making of him as a writer, though he never quite forgave the system for keeping him from the conservatoire. He graduated in 1940 with his degree and an unshakeable conviction that he was, fundamentally, a composer who happened to write prose.
The war took him immediately. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and then the Army Educational Corps from 1940 to 1946, posted to Gibraltar among other places. It was in the army that he met Llewela Jones, a Welsh graduate from the University of Manchester whom everyone called Lynne. They married in January 1942 at Bournemouth Register Office while he was on leave, then again in a Welsh Protestant ceremony that winter to keep her parents happy, and a third time in a Manchester Catholic church the following summer to satisfy his remaining family. Three weddings for one marriage. It set the tone.
In 1944, while Burgess was stationed in Gibraltar, Lynne was attacked in London by a gang of American army deserters. She was pregnant and lost the child. They never had children. The assault haunted Burgess for the rest of his life and would surface, barely disguised, in the most notorious scene in A Clockwork Orange. Once you know this, the novel reads differently.
Malaya, Brunei, and the Diagnosis
After the war he taught at Brinsford Lodge near Wolverhampton, then from 1948 as a lecturer in Speech and Drama at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College near Preston, and from 1950 in Banbury. He wrote in his spare time but published nothing. In 1954, the Colonial Office posted him to Malaya, where he taught at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar and later at the Malayan Teachers' Training College in Kota Bharu. He drank, he argued, he wrote. His first published novel, Time for a Tiger, appeared in 1956 under the name Anthony Burgess. He was thirty-nine. It was followed by The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) and Beds in the East (1959), completing the Malayan Trilogy, a sharp, funny, deeply informed portrait of a colonial society coming apart at the seams. After a brief return to the UK in 1957, he took a post at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Brunei Town in January 1958.
In 1959, he collapsed in his classroom. He was sent back to England with what was thought to be an inoperable brain tumour and told he had a year to live. Whether the diagnosis was genuine or Burgess embellished it has been debated ever since; the Foundation calls it a mysterious illness, and Burgess himself later described the collapse as willed, born of boredom and frustration. Either way, he wrote as if he believed it. He sat down and wrote at a furious pace, determined to leave his wife Lynne enough royalties to live on. He later claimed he had aimed for ten novels and managed five and a half. The Doctor is Sick, Inside Mr Enderby, The Wanting Seed, One Hand Clapping, and The Worm and the Ring all came out of that period. Two of them he published under the pen name Joseph Kell, which led to the finest embarrassment of his career.
"He wrote as if he believed he was dying. He later claimed he had aimed for ten novels and managed five and a half."
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962. It sold poorly. Most reviewers were baffled by the language and disturbed by the violence. The story of Alex, a teenage delinquent in a dystopian Britain who is subjected to state-sponsored aversion therapy, was told entirely in Nadsat, a slang Burgess had invented from a base of Russian, Cockney rhyming slang, and Romany. The word itself comes from the Russian suffix for teen. Burgess had learned basic Russian before a visit to Leningrad in 1961, and the language clicked into place. He later said the novel was meant to work as a brainwashing primer, that by the end the reader should find themselves in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary without effort and with surprise.
Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation made the novel famous and Burgess furious. The film used the American edition of the book, which omitted the final twenty-first chapter, the one in which Alex grows up. Without it, the story became a stylish celebration of violence rather than a moral argument about free will and redemption. After copycat crimes and death threats, Kubrick withdrew the film from UK distribution in 1973. It was not legally shown in Britain again until after his death in 1999. Burgess spent much of the rest of his life trying to reclaim the novel from Kubrick's vision, insisting that the book was about the importance of moral choice, not the glamour of brutality. He largely failed. The film was too powerful, too iconic, too Kubrick. But Burgess was right, and the full novel, with its final chapter restored, proves it.
Everywhere and Nowhere
Nothing Like the Sun (1964) reimagined the life of Shakespeare. By then Burgess had begun a relationship with the Italian translator Liliana Macellari, known as Liana, and they had a son, Paolo Andrea, later known as Andrew. Lynne's health was failing, destroyed by years of heavy drinking, and the marriage was falling apart. She died in 1968 of liver failure. Burgess married Liana the same year and the three of them left England. They lived in Malta, then Rome, then Monaco, then Lugano. He never settled. He wrote constantly, everywhere, on everything. Earthly Powers, published in 1980, was a vast novel spanning the twentieth century through the eyes of an elderly writer. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and lost to William Golding's Rites of Passage. Many critics still consider it his masterpiece. The Pianoplayers (1986) drew directly from his father's world, a novel about the silent cinemas and music halls of 1920s Manchester.
He wrote the screenplay for Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth in 1977, and the scripts for Moses the Lawgiver and A.D. Anno Domini. In 1981, he invented an entire prehistoric language for the film Quest for Fire. He reviewed books for The Observer at a rate that suggested he read them on the bus. He composed over 250 pieces of music, including three symphonies, a piano concerto, and works for full orchestra. His novel Napoleon Symphony was structured entirely around Beethoven's Eroica. He spoke Italian, French, Malay, German, Spanish, Welsh, Japanese, and Russian with varying degrees of fluency. He was, by any measure, one of the most formidably gifted English writers of the twentieth century, and one of the most restless. He could not stop. He would not stop. Writing was what he did instead of grieving, instead of settling, instead of standing still.
Harpurhey's Boy
Anthony Burgess died of lung cancer on 22 November 1993 at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London. He was seventy-six. He had outlived his death sentence by more than three decades. He left behind a body of work so large and so varied that no single reader could claim to have absorbed all of it. Thirty-three novels. Twenty-five works of non-fiction. A two-volume autobiography. Screenplays, translations, journalism, and a catalogue of music that would have been a respectable career on its own.
In 2003, Liana established the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. She died in 2007, before the Foundation moved into its permanent home at Chorlton Mill on Cambridge Street in Manchester's university quarter around 2010. A few minutes' walk from Oxford Road station, it holds his books, his manuscripts, his musical scores, and his papers. His Bösendorfer piano sits in the building and still gets played. The Foundation hosts readings, screenings, and performances. It keeps his work alive in the city he left and never really came back to, the city that shaped everything he wrote even when he was writing about Malaya or Naples or Napoleon.
He was born John Wilson in a terraced house in Harpurhey, the son of a music-hall pianist and a singer who died before he could remember her. He became Anthony Burgess, one of the most prolific and linguistically inventive writers in the English language. He invented a vocabulary, scandalised a generation, composed symphonies, wrote screenplays for the life of Christ, and never once stopped moving. Manchester made him. He spent the rest of his life proving it.