Early life Burgess was born on 25 February 1917 at 91 Carisbrook Street in
Harpurhey, a suburb of
Manchester, England, to
Irish Catholic parents, Joseph and Elizabeth Wilson. He described his background as
lower middle class; growing up during the
Great Depression, his father and stepmother who became
tobacconists and owned
off-licences, were fairly well off as demand for tobacco and alcohol remained constant. He was known in childhood as Jack, Little Jack, and Johnny Eagle. At his
confirmation, the name Anthony was added and he became John Anthony Burgess Wilson. He began using the
pen name Anthony Burgess upon the publication of his 1956 novel
Time for a Tiger. Burgess believed he was resented by his father, Joseph Wilson, for having survived, when his mother and sister did not. After the death of his mother, Burgess was raised by his maternal aunt, Ann Bromley, in
Crumpsall with her two daughters. During this time, Burgess's father worked as a bookkeeper for a beef market by day, and in the evening played piano at a public house in
Miles Platting. By 1924 the couple had established a
tobacconist and
off-licence business with four properties. Burgess was briefly employed at the tobacconist shop as a child. Burgess attended St. Edmund's Elementary School, before moving on to Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Elementary School, both
Catholic schools, in
Moss Side. He later reflected "When I went to school I was able to read. At the Manchester elementary school I attended, most of the children could not read, so I was ... a little apart, rather different from the rest." Good grades resulted in a place at a
grammar school,
Xaverian College, which he attended from 1928 to 1936. Eight minutes later the announcer told him he had been listening to ''
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune'' by
Claude Debussy. He referred to this as a "
psychedelic moment ... a recognition of verbally inexpressible spiritual realities".
University Burgess had originally hoped to study music at university, but the music department at the
Victoria University of Manchester turned down his application because of poor grades in
physics. Instead, he studied
English language and
literature there between 1937 and 1940, graduating with a
Bachelor of Arts degree. His thesis concerned
Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus, and he graduated with
upper second-class honours, which he found disappointing. When grading one of Burgess's term papers, the historian
A. J. P. Taylor wrote: "Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge."
Marriage Burgess met Llewela "Lynne" Isherwood Jones at the university where she was studying economics, politics and modern history, graduating in 1942 with an upper second-class. Burgess and Jones were married on 22 January 1942. According to Burgess's own account, it was not from his wife that the alleged connection to Christopher Isherwood originated: "Her father was an English Jones, her mother a Welsh one. [...] Of Christopher Isherwood [...] neither the Jones father or daughter had heard. She was unliterary ..." Biswell identifies Burgess as the origin of the alleged relationship with Christopher Isherwood—"if the rumour of an Isherwood affiliation signifies anything, it is that Burgess wanted people to believe that he was connected by marriage to another famous writer"—and notes that "Llewela was not, as Burgess claims in his autobiography, a 'cousin' of the writer Christopher Isherwood"; referring to a pedigree owned by the family, Biswell observes that "Llewela's father was descended from a female Isherwood" ... "which means going back four generations ... before encountering any Isherwoods", making any connection "at best" "tenuous and distant". He also establishes that per official records, "Llewela's family name was Jones, not (as Burgess liked to suggest) 'Isherwood Jones' or 'Isherwood-Jones'."
Military service Burgess spent six weeks in 1940 as a
British Army recruit in
Eskbank in Scotland before becoming a Nursing Orderly Class 3 in the
Royal Army Medical Corps. During his service, he was unpopular and was involved in incidents such as knocking off a corporal's cap and polishing the floor of a corridor to make people slip. In 1941, Burgess was pursued by the
Royal Military Police for desertion after overstaying his leave from
Morpeth military base with his future bride Lynne. The following year he asked to be transferred to the
Army Educational Corps and, despite his loathing of authority, he was promoted to sergeant. During the
blackout, his pregnant wife Lynne was raped and assaulted by four American deserters; perhaps as a result, she lost the child. Burgess, stationed at the time in
Gibraltar, was denied leave to see her. At his stationing in Gibraltar, which he later wrote about in
A Vision of Battlements, he worked as a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching alongside Ann McGlinn in
German,
French and
Spanish. McGlinn's
communist ideology would have a major influence on his later novel
A Clockwork Orange. Burgess played a key role in "
The British Way and Purpose" programme, designed to introduce members of the forces to the
peacetime socialism of the
post-war years in Britain. He was an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the
Ministry of Education.
Early teaching career Burgess left the army in 1946 with the rank of
sergeant-major. For the next four years he was a lecturer in speech and drama at the Mid-West School of Education near
Wolverhampton and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College near
Preston. In late 1950, he began working as a secondary school teacher at
Banbury Grammar School (now
Banbury School) teaching English literature. In addition to his teaching duties, he supervised sports and ran the school's drama society. He organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time. These involved local people and students and included productions of
T. S. Eliot's
Sweeney Agonistes. Reports from his former students and colleagues indicate that he cared deeply about teaching. With financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple was able to put a down payment on a cottage in the village of
Adderbury, close to
Banbury. He named the cottage "Little Gidding" after one of Eliot's
Four Quartets. Burgess cut his journalistic teeth in Adderbury, writing several articles for the local newspaper, the
Banbury Guardian.
Malaya in
Kuala Kangsar, Perak, where Burgess taught 1954–55 In 1954, Burgess joined the
British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer in
Malaya, initially stationed at
Kuala Kangsar in Perak. Here he taught at the
Malay College (now
Malay College Kuala Kangsar – MCKK), modelled on
English public school lines. In addition to his teaching duties, he was a housemaster in charge of students of the
preparatory school, who were housed at a
Victorian mansion known as "King's Pavilion". A variety of the music he wrote there was influenced by the country, notably
Sinfoni Melayu for orchestra and brass band, which included cries of
Merdeka (independence) from the audience. No score, however, is extant. Burgess and his wife had occupied a noisy apartment where privacy was minimal, and this caused resentment. Following a dispute with the Malay College's principal about this, Burgess was reposted to the Malay Teachers' Training College at
Kota Bharu, Kelantan. Burgess attained fluency in
Malay, spoken and written, achieving distinction in the examinations in the language set by the
Colonial Office. He was rewarded with a salary increase for his proficiency in the language. He devoted some of his free time in Malaya to creative writing "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it," and published his first novels:
Time for a Tiger,
The Enemy in the Blanket and
Beds in the East. These became known as
The Malayan Trilogy and were later published in one volume as
The Long Day Wanes.
Brunei After a brief period of leave in Britain during 1958, Burgess took up a further Eastern post, this time at the
Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien College in
Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In the sultanate, Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled
Devil of a State and, although it dealt with Brunei, to avoid libel the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African territory similar to
Zanzibar, named
Dunia. In his autobiography
Little Wilson and Big God (1987), Burgess wrote: About this time, Burgess collapsed in a Brunei classroom while teaching history and was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour. He alluded to this in an interview with Don Swaim, explaining that his wife Lynne had said something "obscene" to the
Duke of Edinburgh during an official visit, and the colonial authorities turned against him. He had already earned their displeasure, he told Swaim, by writing articles in the newspaper in support of the revolutionary opposition party the
Parti Rakyat Brunei, and for his friendship with its leader
Dr. Azahari. and relieved of his position in Brunei. He spent some time in the neurological ward of a London hospital (see
The Doctor is Sick) where he underwent cerebral tests that found no illness. On discharge, benefiting from a sum of money which Lynne Burgess had inherited from her father, together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided to become a full-time writer. The couple lived first in an apartment in
Hove, near Brighton. They later moved to a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in
Etchingham, about four miles from Bateman's where
Rudyard Kipling had lived in
Burwash, and one mile from the
Robertsbridge home of
Malcolm Muggeridge. Upon the death of Burgess's father-in-law, the couple used their inheritance to decamp to a terraced town house in
Chiswick. This provided convenient access to the
BBC Television Centre where he later became a frequent guest. During these years Burgess became a regular drinking partner of the novelist
William S. Burroughs. Their meetings took place in London and
Tangiers. A sea voyage the couple took with the Baltic Line from
Tilbury to
Leningrad in June 1961 resulted in the novel
Honey for the Bears. He wrote in his autobiographical ''You've Had Your Time
(1990), that in re-learning Russian at this time, he found inspiration for the Russian-based slang Nadsat that he created for A Clockwork Orange'', going on to note, "I would resist to the limit any publisher's demand that a glossary be provided."
Liana Macellari, an
Italian translator twelve years younger than Burgess, came across his novels
Inside Mr. Enderby and
A Clockwork Orange, while writing about English fiction. The two first met in 1963 over lunch in
Chiswick and began an affair. In 1964, Liana gave birth to Burgess's son, Paolo Andrea. The affair was hidden from Burgess's
alcoholic wife, whom he refused to leave for fear of offending his cousin (by Burgess's stepmother, Margaret Dwyer Wilson),
George Dwyer, the
Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds. Liana died in 2007. (He would go on to fictionalise these events in
Earthly Powers a decade later. Burgess was also motivated to move to the
tax haven of Monaco, as the country did not levy
income tax, and widows were exempt from
death duties, a form of taxation on their husband's estates. The couple also had a villa in France, at
Callian, Var, Provence. Burgess lived for a number of years in the United States, working as writer-in-residence at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969, as a visiting professor at
Princeton University with the creative writing program in 1970, and as a distinguished professor at the
City College of New York in 1972. At City College he was a close colleague and friend of
Joseph Heller. He went on to teach creative writing at
Columbia University, lectured on the novel at the
University of Iowa in 1975, and was and at the
University at Buffalo in 1976. Eventually he settled in
Monaco in 1976, where he was active in the local community, becoming a co-founder of the
Princess Grace Irish Library, a centre for Irish cultural studies, in 1984. In May 1988, Burgess made an
extended appearance with, among others,
Andrea Dworkin on the episode
What Is Sex For? of the discussion programme
After Dark. He spoke at one point about divorce: Although Burgess lived not far from
Graham Greene, whose house was in
Antibes, Greene became aggrieved shortly before his death by comments in newspaper articles by Burgess and broke off all contact. he returned to die in
Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, where he owned a house. Burgess died on 22 November 1993 from
lung cancer, at the
Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in London. His ashes were inurned at the
Monaco Cemetery. The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, reads: "Abba Abba", which means "Father, father" in Aramaic, Arabic, Hebrew, and other Semitic languages and is pronounced by
Christ during his agony in
Gethsemane () as he prays God to spare him. It is also
the title of Burgess's 22nd novel, concerning the death of
John Keats. Eulogies at his memorial service at
St Paul's, Covent Garden, London, in 1994 were delivered by the journalist
Auberon Waugh and the novelist
William Boyd.
The Times obituary heralded the author as "a great moralist". His estate was worth US$3 million and included a large European property portfolio of houses and apartments. == Writing ==