The Real Life Anthony Burgess

The Real Life of Anthony Burgess. Andrew Biswell. Picador. [pounds sterling]20.00. ix + 435 pages. ISBN 0-330-48170-3.

Anthony Burgess is a writer who presents a particularly difficult conundrum to the literary biographer. Of course all artists use their own experiences in their work, but Burgess was an author who blurred the boundaries between fiction and autobiography to an unusual degree. In fact, he used his own experiences to such an extent in his novels that one suspects that they later became a source for his memoirs and who can blame him for this? Material that has been formed into narrative becomes so much more memorable than the chaotic primal matter of experience. One thinks of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's fictional alter ego, and his inability to understand how anyone copes who does not write: how do they make sense, he wonders, of the 'blizzard of daily events'?

A biographer, of course, must venture into the blizzard, and not settle for the well-formed version of a life that so often appears in memoirs. Burgess' life appears at first sight to have been particularly chaotic, especially in its early days, when his education progressed haphazardly, having a quality of the picaresque and at times the serendipitous that was to be reflected later in his continual travelling to places as diverse as Rome, Leningrad, Malta and Monaco. It was mere arbitrary circumstance that first set him on his wanderings: as part of a turbulent military career, he was posted to Malaya. What began as chance took a more deliberate form as he continued to wander, and to give his wanderings shape through his writings.

Yet these writings are, for the biographer at least, an alarming mixture of fact, fiction and fantasy. Perhaps the tendency for half-truths about himself is typified by 'Anthony Burgess', the nom de plume, invented in 1956, which makes his middle name his final name, and invents an entirely new Christian name. John Burgess Wilson, as he was christened, did not even bother to consult official records when he drew up a version of his family tree, which contained questionable connections to, among others, an illegitimate descendant of King James II. This was when he was preparing to write the first volume of what he called his 'confessions', Little Wilson and Big God. The term 'confessions' implies a truth that has been kept hidden, a revelation that will be total and absolute, but these autobiographical writings are as likely to mislead as they are to inform. In interviews also, Burgess laid any number of false trails for the historian to follow.

Mr Biswell is well qualified for the task of disentangling these threads: he has been publishing on and researching the life and works of Anthony Burgess for over a decade. In order to arrive somewhere near accuracy, he goes beyond the memoirs and interviews, and delves methodically into an impressive body of letters and diaries. To take one example of the challenge he faces: in dealing with the question of when Burgess wrote the first draft of A Vision of Battlements, based on his experiences in wartime Gibraltar, the author himself gives two dates: in his introduction to the 1965 edition, he claims he wrote it in 1949, while in Little Wilson and Big God, he gives the date of composition as the winter of 1953. In admirable detective style, Mr Biswell follows a clue: Burgess was suffering from mumps at the time. He then finds this illness mentioned in letters dated during the winter of 1951-52, concluding that the novel was probably begun around that time.

The absolute truth will never be known, but Mr Biswell approaches his task with humour and vigour, and what results is a readable and thorough work of literary biography.

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