Stolid, Solid: Interviewing the Famous: Anthony Burgess

Picture courtesy Burning Man

He had a blinding hangover the morning he met Anthony Burgess.

He was yet to work out that only the lowest of the low in terms of the pecking order of journalists got slotted in at 9am, so the interview with Anthony Burgess was slotted in for that un-Godly hour.

And thus it was that the famous author, in the midst of blinding pain, appeared before him in the foyer of one of London's many upmarket hotels.

Before Dubai, the Arabs were already transformed London into one of the world's money centrals. In the spiraling eighties it was generally assumed that anybody who was anybody ended up spending time in London. New York, with all its crassness, might claim to be the centre of the world, but that historic city by the Thames had class, class, class.

Burgess had just penned his book Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939; along with another in his Shakespearean series, the latest being Enderby's Dark Lady, or No End of Enderby.

Indeed, after he had waded through the Enderby series, there did indeed seem to be no end of Enderby.

At the time he shared the disdain towards Burgess held by some of the slower, less prolific writers in the English canon such as Al Alvarez, with whom he had taken to having long walks with on Hampstead Heath. He had gone out of his way to befriend the author of The Savage God, a contemplation on suicide and Sylvia Plath, ever since he had interviewed and got a very good run in the Australian Financial Review with Alvarez's 1983 book on the lure of gambling, The Biggest Game In Town.

It was just up "the Fin's" alley; and they ran it if memory served him correctly across a rare double page spread in their Friday review section.

The Savage God had been one of the bible's of his youth.

Back in the 1970s in the crowd with which he used to run, Sylvia Plath one of their genuine demi-gods.

Her early death at the hands of an oven simply made her all that more appealing.

We could quote lines from Plath's Daddy by wrote; and we weren't even at school:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.....

I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

"You do not do, you do not do, black shoe...you bastard I'm through" was some of our favourite lines.

"Slyvia Platitude" we had scrawled across the lounge room wall of that terrace in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Paddington which had seemed for a while to be the centre of everything.

Burgess's publication of Ninety-nine novels had predictably created a furore in literary circles, even promoting the publication of counter lists.


As quickly became evident when he asked Burgess about the sometimes excoriating commentary accompanying its publication, Burgess was hugely enjoying the controversy over which books should and shouldn't belong in a list of the 20th century's best fiction.

The criticism was water off a ducks back. He was already a multi-millionaire. Nothing could touch him but time itself. Critics were just mosquitoes as far as he was concerned; and he held what some would call a very healthy disdain for them.

Who would want to be a critic? he asked. Do these people sit in school and dream about their futures and think, yes, that's what I want to be, a critic. Is that all their dreams are made of?

As for the controversy, you have to start somewhere, Burgess shrugged. The book's promoted debate and that is what it was intended to do. And hopefully it's got people reading more books.

Although he hadn't enjoyed the Enderby books, wading through them dutifully in his preparation for the interview, he asked Burgess about hopefully what was to be the last of them, as No End of Enderby and the list were the two books then being promoted.

Burgess had already had breakfast in his room so unfortunately for him the famous author had no desire for any more repast.

While he could have done with a free coffee and some breakfast, the alcohol sweat making his clothes cling to his thin body even in the air conditioning of the hotel, the interview ended up being conducted on a couch in the foyer.

The PR bird sat perkily next to him throughout, occasionally trying to facilitate the conversation.

When the interview wound up after an hour which had seemed like an eternity he made his way across the football field of a foyer and out into the London streets.

He hadn't bothered to dress up for the interview, and didn't possess the clothes anyway, but the dank sweat coating him and his sick pallor from the city's nightclubs, made him look even worse than usual.

The sight of himself in the foyer's many mirrors did nothing to reassure him.

As he stepped down from the mezzanine level and headed towards the hotel's revolving doors, he saw Anthony Burgess and the public relations woman staring after him quizzically, and then burying their heads together.

Not that Burgess could talk. In the late 1950s he was dismissed from a position as a teacher in Brunei, and as an excuse claimed to have had a brain tumor; a tumor that was never found.

Burgess's story telling abilities were well known to extend to himself and as Wikipedia observers:

"Burgess' biographers attribute the incident to the author's notorious mythomania."

And as biographer Geoffrey Grigson wrote, Anthony Burgess was suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking and associated poor nutrition...of overwork and professional disappointment.

There was no air of disappointment about Burgess at the time he met him.

Indeed, Burgess could hardly have appeared wealthier, more solid, more stolid, more assured of himself.

And as he entered the over white light of the street, he had a stab not just of disorienting pain, but of envy for the workers in the street, the shop keepers behind their counters, the bus driver passing by, the legal secretaries with bundles of documents rushing to their offices, for everyone else but himself. He envied their solidity, stolidity, normality singleness of purpose. For their certainty in who they were and why they were. While Burgess prepared for another interview before heading back home to Monaco, he headed back to his life in the London squats, with his increasingly frustrated lover, to another night of pointless carousing and implausible excuses.