You know, usually when we sit down to talk about
a writer for one of these deep dives, we have
a pretty clear, stable picture of who they are
in our heads. It's almost like a caricature.
It is. It's a shorthand. Right. If I say Hemingway,
you immediately picture the beard, the shotgun,
the bullfights, the terse sentences. Yeah. If
I say Jane Austen, you see the bonnet, the quill,
the drawing room manners. We like to put our
creative geniuses... In boxes. We do. It makes
them easier to understand. We like categories.
We like to know that this person does this thing.
It simplifies everything. Exactly. But today,
today we are looking at a figure who is so chaotic,
so prolific, and so utterly contradictory that
he feels less like a real human being and more
like a fictional character he might have written
himself. He just, he explodes every box you try
to put him in. That is actually the perfect way
to frame it. It is a fascinating case study in
how we categorize or often miscategorize creativity.
Because if I say the name John Anthony Burgess
Wilson to you, you might pause. I would, yeah.
You might blink and wonder if I'm talking about
a local politician. But if I shorten it to the
name The World Knows Him by Anthony Burgess,
what is the very first image that hits your brain?
Oh, it's immediate. It's visceral. It's a bowler
hat. It's a glass of milk. It's Malcolm McDowell
with his eyes clamped open. It's a clockwork
orange. Specifically for me, and probably for
99 % of the people listening, it's the Stanley
Kubrick movie. The movie. You just can't escape
that imagery. It's iconic. It is iconic. And
that is the tragedy and the triumph of Anthony
Burgess. He is forever tethered to that one dystopian
novella. It's the one hit wonder syndrome, but
applied to a literary giant who wrote dozens
of books. Exactly. And our mission for this deep
dive is to completely shatter that narrow view.
We need to move past the droogs and the milk
bars because the man behind the orange was a
true polymath. And I want to pause on that word
polymath. We throw that around a lot for anyone
who, say, writes code and also bakes sourdough
bread. But what are we actually talking about
here with Burgess? What's the scale? We aren't
talking about hobbies. We are talking about a
man who composed over 250 musical works. Wow.
Symphonies, concertos, operas, chamber music.
He didn't just dabble. He considered himself
a professional composer who just happened to
write novels to pay the bills. 250 works. I mean,
that is a career in itself. That's a life's work
for most people. It was his primary passion.
And on top of that, he spoke multiple languages
fluently, including Malay and Russian. He was
the guy Hollywood called when they needed to
invent a prehistoric language for a blockbuster
movie. Seriously? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And perhaps
most famously, and this is the hook that usually
gets people interested in the biography, he wrote
a massive chunk of his literary output in a frenzy
because he was told by a doctor that he had exactly
one year to live. The death sentence that launched
a thousand ships, or in this case, dozens of
novels. It sounds like a movie plot. It sounds
too perfect to be true. It does, doesn't it?
And as we go through the source material today,
which covers a comprehensive biographical overview,
his literary critiques, his musical archives,
and accounts of his time in the colonial service,
you're going to see that Burgess lived his life
at this intersection of high art, profound personal
tragedy, and what biographers call mythomania.
Mythomania. That is a great word. Yeah. So are
we talking about a compulsion to lie or just
to embellish? What does that really mean? It's
a compulsion to tell stories. I think that's
the best way to put it. Burgess loved to narrate
his own life. And sometimes the line between
what really happened in objective reality and
what he said happened gets a little blurry. He
is the ultimate unreliable narrator of his own
biography. I love a reliable, unreliable narrator,
especially when it's the author himself. It adds
a layer of mystery to everything we're about
to discuss. So let's look at the stack of sources
we have today. We're pulling from a massive collection
of data points to build this profile. And we're
going to find some incredible nuggets in there.
We'll unpack the brain tumor incident that kickstarted
his career. We'll look at the lost 21st chapter
of his most famous book, which changes the entire
meaning of the story, by the way. And we'll look
at his secret life as a serious classical composer.
Okay, let's unpack this. That started the beginning.
And for Burgess, the beginning wasn't just humble.
It was genuinely traumatic. He was born in 1917
in Manchester. Harper Hay, specifically, a suburb
of Manchester. Right. Harper Hay, Catholic background,
lower middle class. His parents were shopkeepers
selling tobacco and alcohol, which, considering
the Great Depression was looming in the distance,
was actually a pretty recession -proof business
to be in. True. People always need a drink and
a smoke, especially when things go south. But
the tragedy strikes almost immediately in his
life. He's just a baby. It does. To understand
Burgess's psychology, the darkness and the isolation
you see in his later books, you have to look
at the year 1918. He is... Just a baby. The Spanish
flu pandemic is sweeping the globe. And this
isn't just a bad flu season. This is a biblical
event killing millions. Right. And in the span
of just four days, Burgess loses his mother,
Elizabeth, and his sister, Muriel. Four days.
He's a year old. He's essentially alone in the
house with a grieving father. He wouldn't even
have memories of them, really. Not conscious
ones? No conscious memories. But that dynamic
with the father, Joseph Wilson, sets the tone
for his entire childhood. You might expect a
father in that situation to cling to the only
surviving child to become overprotective, but
Burgess grew up believing that his father actually
resented him. Resented him for surviving. Yes.
It's a terrible burden for a child to carry survivor's
guilt by proxy. The idea that I am here breathing
and eating, but the people he really loved are
gone. And every time he looks at me, he sees
their absence. God, that's heavy. It is. Burgess
described his childhood as incredibly solitary.
He used this heartbreaking phrase in his memoirs.
He said he was either distractedly persecuted
or ignored. Distractedly persecuted. That is
such a... specific and painful phrasing. It implies
he wasn't even worth a focused effort of bullying.
It was just casual, indifferent cruelty. Exactly.
It wasn't a grand vendetta. It was just that
he didn't fit. He talks about being targeted
by ragged boys in gangs who would pounce on him.
Now, you have to picture Manchester in the 1920s.
It's industrial. It's rough. It's smoky. Right.
And here is Burgess. He's well -dressed because
his father had a bit of money from the shop.
And crucially. He could read. So he's the smart
kid in the velvet suit in a gritty industrial
town. He's walking around with a target on his
back. He was a target. He went to a Catholic
elementary school where illiteracy was still
common, but Burgess was advanced. He was different.
And in that rough and tumble world of 1920s,
Manchester being the other, being the smart one,
the clean one, is dangerous. It's interesting
because you could already see the seeds of his
later work there. The isolated intellectual.
facing off against mindless, violent gangs. That's
the DNA of A Clockwork Orange right there, isn't
it? The fear of the pack. It connects directly
to the themes we see later in his dystopian fiction.
But this isolation also drove him inward. When
you don't have friends and you feel unwanted
at home, you build your own worlds. You retreat
into your mind. And for Burgess, that inner world
eventually became music. But not immediately,
right? I read in the notes that he was actually
indifferent to music until he had this specific,
almost spiritual moment. with a home -built radio.
This is the psychedelic moment, as he called
it. He's a teenager, tinkering with a crystal
radio set, very DIY, very much the tech of the
time. And suddenly, through the static and the
crackle, he hears a fleet solo. It's Claude Debussy's
Prelude à l 'après -midi d 'un faun. Prelude
to the afternoon of a faun. Now, for those who
haven't heard it, we should explain, this isn't
a catchy pop song. This isn't a marching band
tune. No, it's revolutionary. It's dreamy, drifting
impressionist music. It doesn't have a heartbeat.
It floats. And Burgess described it as sinuous,
exotic, erotic. He was spellbound. Wow. He said
it was a recognition of. Verbally inexpressible
spiritual realities. It wasn't just a song to
him. It was a doorway out of Manchester. It was
proof that a beautiful, magical world existed
somewhere else. And so naturally he decides,
I'm going to be a composer. He wants to live
in that world. He announces this to his family
and the reaction is... Well, it's brutally practical.
They told him there's no money in it. Of course.
Which, to be fair to his father and stepmother,
was generally true for a kid from Harpurhe. Classical
composition was a rich man's game. But Burgess
was stubborn. He taught himself the piano at
14. He didn't have formal lessons. He just sat
down and figured it out. That is the mark of
an obsessive mind. But here is the twist that
changes his life trajectory. He applies to university,
specifically the Victoria University of Manchester,
wanting to study music. This is his dream. This
is his escape plan. And it gets rejected. And
he gets rejected for the most bureaucratic reason
possible. Poor grades in physics. I have to ask,
what does physics have to do with composing a
symphony? I mean, I know sound is waves, but
still. Well, the music department at that time
required a physics qualification, presumably
for the acoustic side of things, understanding
how sound waves travel and interact. Burgess
didn't have the grades, so his path to being
a professional musician was blocked by a high
school report card. That is such a sliding doors
moment. If he passes physics, maybe he becomes
a famous conductor and we never get Anthony Burgess
the novelist. So he pivots. He pivots to English
language and literature. And he does well, but
even there you see this flash of his personality.
He graduates with a Bachelor of Arts, upper second
class honors. But there's a famous anecdote about
one of his term papers being graded by the famous
historian. A .J .P. Taylor. Oh, I saw this quote
in research. It is absolutely brutal. Taylor
wrote on his paper, bright ideas insufficient
to conceal lack of knowledge. Ouch. That is a
burn that lingers for a lifetime. It is, but
it also captures Burgess perfectly. He was always
overflowing with bright ideas. Sometimes the
scholarly discipline, the dry fact -checking,
came second to the flash of brilliance. Yeah,
that makes sense. But the key takeaway from this
period is his self -perception. Even while studying
English, even while writing essays on Marlowe's
Dr. Faustus, he viewed himself as a composer
who was forced to write words. He never let go
of that identity. He was a musician in exile
in the land of literature. So we have a frustrated
musician studying English, living in the shadow
of a tragic childhood. And then history intervenes.
World War II breaks out. Burgess joins the military.
Now, usually this is the part of the biography
where we talk about heroism and camaraderie and
bands of brothers. But Burgess. He wasn't exactly
Captain America, was he? Far from it. He served
in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Army
Educational Corps. But by all accounts, he was
deeply unpopular with his peers and his superiors.
Why? Was he just arrogant? Was he aloof? He was
a prankster, but in a way that feels a bit malicious,
or at least deeply antisocial. For example, he
once polished a corridor floor specifically to
make people slip and fall. That's not a playful
prank. That's setting a trap. That's something
a cartoon villain does. Exactly. He also knocked
the cap off a corporal. He had this deep -seated
loathing of authority. He saw the military as
this machine that crushed individuality, which
is a very consistent theme for him. He hated
being a number. He hated being told what to do
by people he considered intellectually inferior.
That makes perfect sense for the man who would
write a clockwork orange. The anti -authoritarian
streak runs deep. He's basically acting out.
He is. He even got pursued by the military police
for desertion at one point because he overstayed
his leave to be with his future wife, Lynn. And
later, when he was stationed in Gibraltar, he
was actually arrested in a neighboring Spanish
town for insulting General Franco. Insulting
a fascist dictator while on a day trip in Spain.
You have to give him credit for that one. That
takes nerve or maybe just a lack of impulse control.
It shows his reckless streak. But his time in
Gibraltar is actually very important for his
development. He worked as a training college
lecturer, but because he had this incredible
flair for languages, he got pulled into intelligence
work. Ah, so this is where that comes in. Yeah,
he participated in debriefing Dutch expatriates
and free French refugees. This is the polymath
showing up again. He wasn't just learning textbook
French or Spanish. He was dealing with real people
in a war zone. trying to extract information.
Exactly. He was absorbing the nuances of language
under pressure. And he was also involved in a
program called the British Way and Purpose. It
was designed to introduce soldiers to the peacetime
socialism that was expected in postwar Britain.
The idea was to prepare them for the welfare
state. Which is interesting because Burgess himself
wasn't exactly a socialist, was he? No, far from
it. He described himself later as a Catholic
Jacobite imperial monarchist with anarchist tendencies.
That is a word salad of political ideologies.
Jacobite imperial monarchist. What does that
even mean in the 20th century? Basically, he
was a traditionalist who hated the modern bureaucratic
state. He romanticized the old ways, kings and
queens, but he also hated rules, hence the anarchism.
He thought socialism was ridiculous, though he
did support socialized medicine, surprisingly.
Yeah. But being forced to teach this socialist
curriculum gave him a very close look at state
-sponsored ideology. He saw how the government
tries to mold the minds of its citizens using
pamphlets and lectures. Again, this fuels his
later dystopian writing. Now we have to talk
about the darkest moment of this. period we mentioned
his wife lynn this is the event that truly shadows
his life and his work and warning to listeners
this is heavy yes it happened during the blackout
in london burgess was stationed in gibraltar
but lynn was back in england she was pregnant
during the blackout she was robbed and brutally
assaulted by four american deserters god it was
horrific and as a result of the trauma she lost
the child To make matters worse, Burgess was
denied leave to come home and see her. He was
stuck in Gibraltar while his wife was going through
this unimaginable physical and psychological
trauma. He was completely helpless. That helplessness
must have been eating him alive. To know the
person you love is suffering and you are stuck
on a rock in the Mediterranean. It was a defining
trauma. Lynn eventually developed serious alcoholism,
likely as a coping mechanism, and died of liver
cirrhosis years later. But for Burgess, That
violence, specifically the randomness of it,
became the core of A Clockwork Orange. Right.
It wasn't a calculated crime. It was four men
attacking a woman in the dark just because they
could. It changes how you read the book, doesn't
it? Because usually people think A Clockwork
Orange is just about youth violence in the abstract.
But for Burgess, Alex and his droogs weren't
just abstract concepts. They were the monsters
who hurt his wife. And yet what makes the book
so complex and so disturbing is that Burgess
turns the camera around. He doesn't just write
a revenge fantasy where the bad guys get killed.
He writes a book about the morality of free will.
Yes. He asks, is it better to be a man who chooses
to be bad than a machine that is forced to be
good? He takes his personal pain and turns it
into a philosophical inquiry about the state's
role in controlling violence. It's a staggering
creative transmutation to take the worst thing
that ever happened to your family and turn it
into a debate on moral choice. Most people would
just want revenge. It is. And it explains the
darkness at the heart of his work. It wasn't
performative. It was personal. He was wrestling
with his own demons on the page. So after the
war. Burgess moves into the next phase of his
life. He joins the colonial service. This is
the 1950s. He's teaching in Malaya, which is
now Malaysia and Brunei. This was the era of
the expatriate writer. Think Graham Greene or
Somerset Maugham. The British Empire is winding
down, but there are still Brits out there administering
the colonies. Burgess wanted to be the true fictional
expert on Malaya. He wrote what became known
as the Malayan trilogy books like Time for a
Tiger. And he wasn't just a tourist. He went
all in on the culture. He didn't just hang out
at the British club drinking gin and tonics.
No, he really didn't. He learned the language
fluently, including the Jawi script, which is
Malay written in Arabic characters. That is not
easy to do. Not at all. He immersed himself.
He even wrote a symphony, the Sinfoni Malayu.
There's a great detail where during a performance
of the symphony, the audience actually shouted
Merdeka, which means independence. He's writing
music. that gets the locals shouting for independence
from the very empire he's serving. That is irony
on a high level. It is. He was very sympathetic
to the local culture, often more so than to the
British administration. But the crucial moment,
the pivot point of his entire career happens
in 1959. He's in Brunei. He's teaching a history
class. And suddenly he collapses. Just drops
to the floor. Flat out. He's rushed to the hospital.
He's flown back to London for neurological tests.
And the diagnosis comes back. inoperable brain
tumor. And the prognosis? One year to live, maybe
less. This is the legend, the death sentence
catalyst. It is. Burgess is sitting there thinking
he has 12 months left on this earth. He has a
wife, Lynn, who is struggling with alcoholism
and has no income of her own. He is terrified
that he's going to leave her penniless. So he
makes a decision. He is going to write. And write?
And write. He is going to write as fast as humanly
possible to build up an estate for his widow.
It's the ultimate deadline. Literally. He starts
churning out novels at a breakneck pace. He writes,
The doctor is sick. Inside Mr. Enderby, the worm
in the ring. He is writing thousands of words
a day, driven by the belief that the Reaper is
standing right behind his chair. He's trying
to outrun death with a typewriter. But. Here's
the twist. He doesn't die. He does not. He lives
for another 33 years. So what happened? Was the
diagnosis wrong or was there something else going
on? This is where we get into that mythomania
we talked about. Later in life, Burgess claimed
that there never was a tumor. He said he was
driven out of the colonial service for political
reasons. Political reasons, like he was too radical.
He claimed he was supporting the Revolutionary
Opposition Party in Brunei. He even told a wild
story that his wife, Lynn, had said something
obscene to the Duke of Edinburgh during a royal
visit, and the authorities used the tumour excuse
to get rid of him quietly without a scandal.
Wait, he claimed his wife insulted the Duke of
Edinburgh? That sounds very Burgess. It does.
It sounds like a scene from one of his books,
but biographers tend to lean toward a more mundane
explanation. Burgess was drinking heavily. The
climate in Southeast Asia was oppressive. He
was overworked and disappointed professionally.
It's very likely the collapse was due to the
effects of long term alcohol abuse and exhaustion.
And the brain tumor was either a misdiagnosis
or. A dramatic exaggeration that Burgess embraced
because it gave him an excuse to retire and write
full time. That makes sense. I have a brain tumor
is a much better exit strategy than I'm burnt
out and drinking too much. Exactly. And whether
it was a medical error, a political conspiracy
or massive hangover, the result is the same.
It unlocked him. It turned him from a teacher
who wrote on the weekends into a literary machine.
Precisely. That dying year created the work ethic
that defined the rest of his life. He never really
stopped writing as if he was running out of time.
And in the midst of this frenzy, he writes the
book, A Clockwork Orange. 1962. And from what
I understand, he wrote it incredibly fast. He
wrote it in just three weeks. Three weeks? That
is insane. I struggled to write an email in three
weeks. He needed the money. He later called it
a jus d 'esprit. A playful witticism, something
knocked off quickly. He actually spent a lot
of his later life resenting the fact that this
little book overshadowed his massive, serious
novels like Earthly Powers. Absolutely. He felt
like a chef who spends days cooking a banquet,
but everyone only wants to talk about the sandwich
he made in five minutes. It's the classic creator's
curse. The thing you spent the least time on
becomes the thing everyone loves. But we need
to get into the controversy of the book itself,
specifically the ending. Because the book I read
in college might not be the book someone else
read, depending on where they bought it. This
is a critical point. The original manuscript
had 21 chapters. Burgess was very specific about
this number. 21 was the age of majority, the
age you became an adult in the UK at that time.
The structure of the book was symbolic. So what
happens in chapter 21, the missing chapter? In
chapter 21, Alex, the narrator, the violent Gug,
grows up. It's a few years later. He meets an
old friend who has settled down, and Alex realizes
that violence is boring. It's childish. He voluntarily
decides to abandon his life of crime and thinks
about having a son of his own. It is a redemption
arc. It suggests that moral growth is possible.
But that's not the ending in the movie. And I
recall reading the American version of the book,
and that chapter wasn't there. No. When the book
was sold to a U .S. publisher, the editors thought
the ending was too soft, too British. They wanted
the gritty, unrepentant ending where Alex reverts
to his old self. So they cut Chapter 21. And
Burgess just let them. He needed the money. He
was still in that I'm going to die any minute
mindset. So he agreed. So the American version
of the book ends with Chapter 20. Which ends
with Alex basically saying, I was cured all right,
implying he's going back to ultraviolence with
the state's blessing. It's a cynical, cyclical
ending. And crucially, Stanley Kubrick based
his film on the American edition. So the movie,
The Cultural Phenomenon, tells a fundamentally
different story than the one Burgess intended.
It changes the entire moral argument. Burgess
wanted to say that people can grow out of evil,
that maturity is the cure for youth violence.
The movie and the US book says that evil is a
permanent state and that the only cure is state
control, which is just another form of evil.
Which he hated. He hated that his book was used
to glorify violence. He felt the film made sex
and violence look cool, which led to misunderstandings
that pursued him until his death. It's fascinating
that he actually wrote a follow up about this,
right? Nonfiction analysis. Yes. In 2019, they
discovered a manuscript in his archives called
The Clockwork Condition. It's a nonfiction philosophical
sequel where he tries to analyze the condition
of modern man and address the controversy. He
never published it, but it shows how much this
misunderstanding gnawed at him. He felt responsible
for how the culture misinterpreted his work.
And we can't talk about clockwork without talking
about the language. Nadsat, this wasn't just
gibberish he made up. No, it's a brilliant invention.
It's a teen slang based on Russian. My Russian,
of all languages. Inspiration struck during a
trip to Leningrad in 1961. He was relearning
Russian and realized that merging it with English
created a weird alienating effect. But the purpose
wasn't just to be clever. By using this made
-up slang for the violent acts, he forces the
reader to work to understand what is happening.
Can you give us an example for anyone who hasn't
read it? Sure. Instead of saying blood, he says
crawvy. Instead of head, he says Gulliver. Instead
of good, he says horror show from the Russian
Koro show. So when Alex describes beating someone,
he's using these alien words. It creates a distance.
You aren't just consuming violence, you are decoding
it. It's like a filter. It is. It makes you a
participant in the decoding, which makes you
complicit in a way. You're learning the language
of the murderer. Exactly. And he famously refused
to include a glossary. He said he would resist
to the limit any request for a glossary. He wanted
you to be brainwashed by the language as you
read it. He wanted you to learn it by context,
the way a child learns a language. But they put
one in anyway eventually, right? Of course. Publishers
eventually added glossaries anyway, which annoyed
him. Okay, so that's the clockwork phenomenon.
But, as we promised, we are moving beyond the
orange. Let's look at Burgess the polymath. Because
this guy was doing... Polymath is the only word
for it. Let's go back to the music. We mentioned
the 250 works. This wasn't a hobby. He wrote
a symphony for the University of Iowa. He wrote
an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called
Blooms of Dublin. And he even structured his
novels musically. This is the part that blows
my mind. How do you structure a book like a symphony?
This is where the expert in me gets excited.
Take his novel Napoleon Symphony. It is structured
exactly like Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. The
Eroica has four movements, each with a different
tempo and mood. Burgess wrote the book in four
sections to match those moods. So if the music
is fast and aggressive... the writing style changes
to match. Exactly. The prose itself changes.
The sentences might get shorter, more staccato.
And if the music is a slow funeral march, the
prose becomes heavy and slow, more descriptive,
more mournful. And in Mozart and the Wolfgang,
he mirrors Mozartian composition. So he's trying
to make you hear the book. He was trying to fuse
the two art forms. He wanted the reader to hear
the structure of the novel. He was pushing the
boundaries of what a novel could even be. And
they're still finding this stuff. It's not like
we know everything he wrote. Correct. In 2023,
they found a string quartet in his archives that
nobody knew existed. It premiered that same year.
He was composing right up until the end. Music
was his first love and his last love. Then there's
the linguistics. We talked about Nadsat, but
he also invented a language for a Hollywood blockbuster.
Quest for Fire. The 1981 movie about early humans.
The director, Jean -Jacques Anod, needed a language
that sounded prehistoric but had structure. He
didn't want the actors just grunting. So he calls
Burgess. That's amazing. He calls Burgess. Burgess
created Ulam. He combined roots from various
ancient languages, Indo -European, Native American,
to create something that sounded primitive but
had a consistent grammar. So when the characters
are speaking in the movie, they're actually speaking
a functioning language. That is some serious
nerd cred. And he translated huge works too,
right? Yes, he translated Cyrano de Bergerac
and Carmen, but there was a bit of controversy
about his linguistic skills. A biographer claimed
that in a BBC documentary, Burgess was shown
speaking Malay to locals, but they didn't understand
him. The biographer used this to suggest Burgess
was a fraud, that he faked his fluency. Was he
a fraud? That fits the mythomania idea. Well,
the director of the documentary actually came
out and refuted this. He clarified that Burgess
was speaking perfect Malay, but the waitresses
he was talking to were ethnic Chinese who didn't
speak Malay. Ah, so it was a cultural misunderstanding.
It was a scene highlighting the ethnic divisions
in Malaysia, not Burgess's incompetence. So the
mythomania accusations sometimes went too far
the other way. It seems like controversy just
followed him. And on the flip side of high art,
he was writing screenplays for franchises. He
wrote Jesus of Nazareth, the famous miniseries,
which is very respectful and orthodox. But then
he wrote a screenplay for James Bond, The Spy
Who Loved Me. No way. Burgess wrote Bond. He
did. And it was wild. It featured a supervillain
organization called Sea Aeos. And the plot involved
a plan to bomb the Sydney Opera House with surgically
implanted bombs. That sounds incredible. Why
didn't they make it? It was rejected as being
a bit too outrageous. One critic described it
as a medley of sadism and acupuncture. But you
know the massive submarine silo in the final
movie? The one that swallows ships? Yeah, the
supertanker. That idea survived from Burgess's
script. So a little bit of Burgess DNA is in
the Bond franchise. That is amazing. So we have
the writer, the composer, the linguist. Now let's
talk about the man himself in his later years.
Yeah. Because he didn't stay in Manchester. He
became a tax exile. This was the 1960s and 70s.
Britain had an incredibly high tax rate for high
earners, up to 90%. Burgess, finally making money
from his books and film rights, refused to pay
it, so he left. And he didn't just fly first
class to a villa. He did it in a van. A Bedford
dormobile, basically a camper van. He toured
Europe with his second wife, Liana. She drove
and he sat in the back writing novels on a typewriter.
That is a romantic image. The writer on a run,
clacking away in the back of a van, traversing
the Alps. It sounds romantic, but the reality
was chaotic. They lived in Malta for a while
until the government confiscated his house. Why?
What did he do? He gave a lecture that offended
the Catholic priests there. Burgess had a knack
for offending religious authorities. Then they
moved to Italy, but they had to leave because
of the mafia. The mafia. There were rumors of
a plot to kidnap his son, Paolo Andrea, so they
fled to Monaco, which was safe and tax -free.
We need to touch on his personal life here because
it explains the chaotic movement. We mentioned
his first wife, Lynn, died. But he remarried
very quickly. Very quickly. He married Liana,
an Italian translator, just six months after
Lynn died. But here's the soap opera twist. He
had been having an affair with Liana while Lynn
was still alive, and they already had a son,
Paolo Andrea. So he had a secret family. He kept
the affair and the child secret. Why? Because
he didn't want to offend his cousin. Who was
his cousin? The prime minister? The Catholic
bishop of Leeds. Of course he was. You can't
make this stuff up. Burgess was terrified of
the scandal, so he lived this double life until
Lynn passed away. Then he married Liana and adopted
his own biological son to legitimize him. It's
like a plot from one of his novels, Catholic
Guilt, Secrets, and Complex Family Dynamics.
He also seemed to have a knack for feuds. I read
about a falling out with Graham Greene. Oh, yes,
Graham Greene, the titan of literature. They
were neighbors in Antibes. But Greene cut him
off. Why? Because Burgess appeared on television.
That's it. Because he was on TV. Green believed
that appearing on talk shows was beneath the
dignity of a writer. He thought a writer should
be read, not seen. Burgess, who loved the spotlight
and was a natural performer, did all the shows.
Green thought it was vulgar and stopped talking
to him. That is such a specific, old -school
literary beef. You're too famous, I can't talk
to you. It speaks to Burgess' character. He wasn't
an elitist in that sense. He wanted to engage.
He appeared on a show called After Dark discussing
sex and divorce alongside Andrea Dworkin. He
was fearless in that regard. So we come to the
end. The man who was supposed to die in 1959
makes it all the way to 1993. He died of lung
cancer in London, which is ironic because he
wrote that he expected to die unmourned in the
Mediterranean. But he came back to London in
the end. And he's buried in Monaco. And his epitaph.
It's just two words. Abba. Abba, Abba. It's Aramaic
for father, father. Is that a religious plea?
It's a reference to Christ in Gethsemane praying
to God. But in true Burgess fashion, it is also
a literary reference. It's the title of his 22nd
novel, which was about the death of the poet
John Keats. Ah, of course. So even on his tombstone,
he is blending the spiritual with the literary.
He never turned it off. That is perfect. It's
the ultimate Burgess move. So what does this
all mean? We started by saying we wanted to move
beyond the orange, and I think we have. We see
a man who is driven by a desperate need to create,
whether it was music, language, or stories. A
man who turned trauma into art and a medical
death sentence into a 30 -year career. And here
is where it gets really interesting to consider
the legacy. Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange
in three weeks. He wrote symphonies that took
years. He wrote epic biographies. And yet the
three -week project is the one that defines him.
It raises a huge question. Do creators get to
choose their legacy or does the audience decide
what matters? I think Burgess would have hated
the answer, but the audience always decides.
However, the beauty of a deep dive like this
is that we can reopen the case. We can look at
the rest of the iceberg. Exactly. So here is
my final thought for you listening. Don't just
watch the Kubrick movie again. Go find earthly
powers. Or better yet, go online and search for
his music. Listen to the Sinfonia Maleu or that
string quartet. Hear the man as he wanted to
be heard as a composer. Absolutely. There is
a whole universe of Burgess out there waiting
to be discovered. You just have to look past
the bowler hat. Thanks for diving in with us.
We'll see you in the next one.