Rollicking self-invention

When I was in the sixth form, I thought Anthony Burgess the greatest writer imaginable. The outlandish vocabulary, the fireworks, the bravura, the glorious showmanship — surely this was what literature was all about? Then I grew up and realised he was absolutely terrible — a cackling and grim caricaturist, pseudo-forceful and very dead.

Whilst it is true that few of his 60 or so books come off at all — and that his confidence in himself was never as great as he pretended it to be — I rather love the old rogue again now. There is something splendid and heroic about his boastful, mendacious personality (‘At the moment I’m working on a novel about the life of Christ’). I applaud the way he’d turn up on television and at literary festivals puffing a cigar and sounding off. He always sported a red silk handkerchief.

Who, for instance, can forget the look on Michael Parkinson’s face when Burgess, with a straight face, stated that the dome of St Peter’s Basilica ‘isn’t the breast of a supine woman but a great obscene testicle’? Or the look on Siân Phillips’s face when Burgess started speaking what he said was Welsh? She thought he’d had a stroke. As Richard Ingrams has rightly said, mentioning Burgess alongside such sages as Lord Hailsham and A.N. Wilson, ‘I have known a handful of intellectually very clever people and have noted how prone they are to make fools of themselves.’

To this day I don’t know to what extent Burgess was in on the joke about himself. The biblical epics he wrote for Lew Grade, a history of the stagecoach, musicals about Cyrano de Bergerac, novels about chaps going to seed in the Far East that are shameless rip-offs of Graham Greene: he was rollicking, he was shameless, and he was a self-invention.