Earlier​ this year someone told me they’d seen ‘something online’ about Andy Burnham, back when he was mayor of Greater Manchester, appearing on Celebrity Mastermind and taking the life and works of Anthony Burgess as his specialist subject. It didn’t end well: Burnham came to grief on the sharp rocks at the foot of the sheer cliff-face of the gargantuan, labyrinthine, impossibly variegated Burgess canon. There is no way to ‘bone up’ on Burgess. Where do you establish a first hesitant foothold? His 33 works of fiction? His wide-ranging literary journalism? His screenplays for film and television? His works for piano, his chamber music and concertos? It would be easy to compile a Mastermind interrogation based solely on the history of his best-known book, A Clockwork Orange (1962).

Why had I not stumbled across this cautionary tale before? Surely the tabloids would have pounced on any such evidence of Burnham hubris – it felt almost too good to be true. And so it proved. A quick search online turned up no mention of any such crisis of knowledge. Someone had chosen Burgess as their Mastermind subject, but it was the former Sky News political editor Adam Boulton. So: a TV quiz show, the world of British politics and three different people with the same initials. It looks like the result of some crazy algorithmic glitch. Or was something nearer mischief involved? Are AI bots making literary jokes now? Was this a moral fable about harried freelancers relying too much on the internet for background colour?

Still, Burgess does seem a perfect fit for Burnham. Manchester? – check. Roman Catholic upbringing? – check. Read English at university? – check. And because, for a certain kind of northern man, Burgess has always been – for once the term is apt – something of an icon. A bit mouthy and contrarian. Not part of the self-regarding London literary establishment. A Big Canvas man, equally at home with Beethoven or Shakespeare. A tireless worker, an innovative stylist. One of our own, but adoptively and far-sightedly European. The local hero did have an Achilles’ heel, though. Burgess had to leave his birthplace early to find – or invent – himself. ‘It’s not always our fault if we desert the place that gave us our education and first love affair,’ he observed ruefully in ‘Manchester Made Me’, a piece from 1984. ‘Mancunians don’t take kindly to people leaving their city,’ he said in a documentary for BBC Radio 4 in 1989, ‘and I’ve already heard it said that I’ve become a “stuck-up, opinionated bastard” solely because I’ve left Manchester.’ Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Conquering the wider world may reflect some glory on the place you leave behind, but of necessity it means moving away – often to London. Perhaps, in the new AB-as-PM era, the move will be made in the other direction.

John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born on 25 February 1917, and the chronicles of his childhood ring with the rough, crepuscular music of Manchester place names: Ancoats, Collyhurst, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Miles Platting, Monsall. Roll them around your mouth, savour the tang – vinegary, gutsy, tart. Was this young Burgess’s first experience of the enchantments of language, anticipating his discovery of James Joyce? Burgess was the child of Irish Catholic parents – Anthony was his confirmation name, after St Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost things – and he attended the Bishop Bilsborrow elementary school in Moss Side before going on to Xaverian College in Rusholme, a Roman Catholic grammar school for boys. Xaverian is where Burgess wrote his first poetry in the early 1930s, and it is commemorated in the middle name of his fictional alter ego, the costive poet Francis Xavier Enderby.

Burgess always liked to trumpet his Manchester bona fides, rhapsodising about a time when ‘beer was sixpence a pint in the saloon bar, and you could buy twenty Player’s for a shilling. I loved the pubs, which were gamy, even Rabelaisian, and I earned extra money by playing the piano in them.’ He would spin variations on this riff throughout his life; it’s very nearly ‘salt of the earth’ cliché, but Burgess gives it a note of outsider flair, soul, otherness. He always laid great emphasis on his Irish roots, as if he were by nature a rebel, a turncoat, an artistic recusant, joylessly exiled in the oppressive mainland kingdom. As his biographer Andrew Biswell – another AB! – puts it, ‘Burgess depicts Manchester before the Second World War as a Catholic city which is more Irish than English. His sentimental version of Lancashire is a place where the Reformation never really took hold. London and the South of England, by contrast, are snooty, puritanical places.’ Burgess’s North-South split isn’t just a matter of taste, happenstance, geographical locale, but something near metaphysical, a schism in his being.

When Burgess was a guest on Desert Island Discs in November 1966, the book he chose to be cast away with was Finnegans Wake. The publisher Galileo has in the last few years steadily been serving up big calorific portions of the Burgess back catalogue, and Joyce’s fingerprints can be found all over it, not only in Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (1965) and A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1966). Joyce is a whispery phantom, haunting the unlikeliest places: pub, palazzo, ocean liner, oratory. From Joyce, Burgess learned that language isn’t simply a means of communication but a wild, disruptive pleasure in itself; Finnegans Wake is his book of books, his venerable codex, the hill he would happily die on. Burgess, king of blurbs, asserts that Finnegans Wake is ‘one of the most entertaining books ever written … one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page’ – mind, he says exactly the same thing about Ulysses – and that it ‘represents a sort of glorification of the pun, the ambiguity which makes us see a fundamental, but normally disregarded, identification in a burst of laughter or a nod of awe’. Here I must make a shameful confession. In all the attempts I have made down the years to crack Finnegans Wake – not a single LOL. I bow to no one in my love of a good (or bad) pun, but I find Joyce’s paronomasia very thin gruel, not at all the hotpot promised by Burgess. The polysemic gags lie there smug and inert on the page, provoking not riotous illumination but at most a half-hearted ‘Oh, OK. I see.’

It never feels like humour when it has to be explained. Burgess was a born explainer, and between the ages of 26 and 42 a teacher is what he was, how he saw himself, earned a living. He worked for, inter alia, the Royal Army Educational Corps, the Ministry of Education, Birmingham University, Banbury Grammar School and finally the Colonial Service in Malaya and Brunei. He taught mainly speech and drama; his students remembered him for his infectious enthusiasm. Teaching is an ideal apprenticeship for a freelance writer or reviewer, demanding a combination of discipline and flexibility, plain speaking and verve. Teachers cannot have writer’s block. No excuses! Tomorrow you’re taking the second form for Latin or maths, drama or Bible studies, and you’d better be prepared. Nothing like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love Life (1964) – a ‘fictional biography’ of the young WS – is framed as a lecture given by ‘Mr Burgess’ to the students of a Malaysian college. His two books on Joyce and Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence (1985) are essentially primers, but thanks to a judicious scattering of personal detail you never feel lectured to. Here is Burgess describing Lawrence in what is also an undeclared sketch of his own first marriage:

This meant not only writing but the house chores he had learned from his mother and father … He scrubbed, cooked, laundered, mended, while Frieda lay in bed smoking a cigarette or demanded to be amused. He was one of those writers rare and admirable in their work habits, demanding neither silence nor seclusion.

Burgess enjoyed taking something arcane or specialised and making it accessible. People said of him that he was too clever by half, a show-off – swallowed a dictionary did we? But they weren’t taking into account that he was a dedicated educator. Burgess also enjoyed bringing together things that aren’t usually found in the same postcode. In his 1971 novel M/F – ‘novel’ seems too straightforward a classification – these things include Claude Lévi-Strauss and madcap farce, Bishop Berkeley and Oedipus, plus a whole carnival float of myths, puzzles and doubles. You don’t go to Burgess for cliffhangers, or really for plot at all, but when it’s there, there’s a lot of it: a mezze, a maze, a pantechnicon, a potlatch.

Tremor of Intent (1966), my personal favourite of the reissues so far, is Burgess’s attempt to angry up the cold-blooded spy thriller of Ian Fleming or John le Carré with an ex-Catholic’s felt theology. The cover of the book’s first American edition had the subtitle An Eschatological Spy Novel – the Cold War figured as an ancient struggle between Good and Evil. Hillier, an MI6 agent on his last job, sails to the Soviet Union to retrieve the defecting scientist Roper, who is also his oldest friend. There is plenty of sex and violence and undercover malarkey, and the puppet-master Theodorescu is Burgess’s studied version of a Bond villain. (A decade later, Burgess would try to redeploy some of these characters when Cubby Broccoli asked him to write a script for The Spy Who Loved Me; his option was not taken up.) Burgess admires Fleming but cannot abide le Carré, dismissing him as humourless and self-important – ‘John the Square’. (This is uncharacteristic: as a reviewer Burgess was more often a booster than a tyrant; elsewhere only the Beatles provoked a similar fangs-out hostility.) Burgess has no interest in the precise details of tradecraft. What animates him are certain nagging perplexities. Can something be a crime, but not a sin? If you do a good professional job of killing someone, does it obviate feelings of guilt? Can we ever tidily separate act from intention? How do we know whether an act’s repercussions will ultimately amplify good in the world, or evil? Hillier the lapsed spy ends the novel in Ireland, as a priest.

If Tremor of Intent is a jeu d’esprit – as Burgess claimed – it’s a gruelling one. There is a long section about the Nazi death camps which is manifestly not parody or send-up. The ambience is bleak, feverish, high-complexioned. Deadly sins play a big part in the book’s machinations: lust, pride, sloth, wrath. There is a duel by gluttony which mirrors the book’s own mood – the reader may finally feel glutted rather than sated. Tremor of Intent is sui generis – a pulp theology of sex and booze and ponerology – which only Burgess could have conceived or would have wanted to write. Graham Greene divided his own novels, like sheep from goats, between ‘entertainments’ and markedly more serious theological meditations. But why not both?

Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984) feels scattershot and waywardly contrarian, even for him. (He claimed it was originally written in two weeks for a Nigerian publisher.) You could also read it as a sly manifesto or disguised self-portrait. His dream was to secure a mainstream readership without sacrificing his experimental inclination. Popular fiction is well represented on the list: Fleming, Nevil Shute, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, Erica Jong. But we also find Chinua Achebe and R.K. Narayan, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Nadine Gordimer, Muriel Spark (two selections) and Flannery O’Connor. The ‘disguised self-portrait’ is there, perhaps, in the form of Robertson Davies, Alasdair Gray, Russell Hoban, Thomas Pynchon.

If critics too often reach for the same adjectives when describing Burgess’s work – comic, satirical, Swiftian, Rabelaisian – it’s because Burgess himself started rolling the ball in that direction. But to classify him as primarily a ‘comic’ writer invites more questions than it answers. He is not comic in the same manner as Evelyn Waugh, say. Closer perhaps are two authors Burgess includes in the Ninety-Nine: Flann O’Brien and John Kennedy Toole. His funniest creation is undoubtedly Enderby, who, from cramped beginnings, expanded into a fourfold epic: Inside Mr Enderby (1963), Enderby Outside (1968), The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby’s End (1974) and Enderby’s Dark Lady, or No End to Enderby (1984). I love the Enderby saga but it has to be said: it is literary Marmite (Burgess might say tripe or cowheel pie).

Burgess’s most concerted attempt at a beach-read blockbuster was Earthly Powers (1980; its original and preferred title was The Prince of the Powers of the Air), but it was overshadowed by A Clockwork Orange, which has never been out of print since Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was released in 1971. The Penguin paperback of A Clockwork Orange was one of a handful of titles passed around the back seat of my school bus in the early 1970s, along with Dennis Wheatley, Richard Allen and Sven Hassel; it has had the sort of extended cultural life most writers can only dream of, from early plans to involve the Beatles or the Stones in a potential movie, to Kubrick’s film, to Blur’s video for ‘The Universal’ and Lana Del Rey’s ‘Ultraviolence’. The novel is a strange mix of kitchen-sink sci-fi, Russian slang, applied social psychology and rousing gusts of classical music; the film is an ice-cool cartoon for adults, which now forever calls up the memory of Malcolm McDowell’s leering eye. Revenge of the media: images win out over words every time. ‘The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate,’ Burgess wrote in Flame into Being. ‘Knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die.’ It’s exactly the kind of killing irony that might bring low a Burgess character. Indeed a similar fate attaches to Enderby, who has his prettily recondite sonnets stolen and maliciously repurposed as pop lyrics. Mass popularity can be a mixed blessing.

Burgess had an uneasy relationship with the emerging pop media: appalled by this flashy new dispensation, but equally and easily seduced. On the evidence of his own account in You’ve Had Your Time (1990; his second book of ‘confessions’, three years after Little Wilson and Big God), he secretly rather liked this rave new world of liberated young women and discreet gifts of ‘kif’. Elsewhere, he plays the Grumpy Old White Guy to perfection – especially on American university campuses, where he finds disturbing premonitory signs of dumbing down, special pleading, levelling out.

Gore Vidal, who knew both politics and Burgess, said of him that ‘to the extent [he] has any political ideas at all, he’s deeply reactionary.’ A bit of a fogey or small-c conservative, but not someone like Kingsley Amis or John Osborne who started out on the left only to move right and then keep on going. In You’ve Had Your Time there are a few blimpish remarks to do with race and evidence of an intermittent ethnocentric crabbiness; his sketches of Black students are never vicious but are woefully cartoonish. This is not ‘exaggeration for comic effect’: it’s the only time his writing displays a second-string laziness. At times his virtues and flaws become indistinguishable. In the mid-1970s his second wife, Liana, lost patience with his feverish inability to turn down work, whatever it was. ‘I was up to my neck in show business, and show business had never done me any good. She threatened divorce … and I feebly countered with “If I don’t do it, who can?”’ The ‘show business’ gig in question was Jesus of Nazareth.

His confessional duology is a bravura performance; Burgess easily persuades you he has held nothing back. Subsequent research – the scrupulous Andrew Biswell, the vulturous Roger Lewis – unearthed a web of half-truths, bare-faced fibs, well-polished exaggerations. For Burgess, fiction is autobiographical and his autobiography a kind of fiction. His apparent candour conceals a carefully lit and stage-managed performance. The consistent specificity of his recollections is, on the face of it, superhuman. Did he keep detailed logs? It’s hard to imagine Burgess keeping a diary; or rather, it’s hard to imagine he had the time or the temperament to jot down a few limpid pensées at the end of a long day’s slog. Then there is this, from Christmas 1974:

There had been a number of strikes of electricity workers, matching strikes in other fields, and, because of brief absences, I was not aware that some frozen Brussels sprouts in the deep freeze had thawed, decayed, refrozen, thawed, decayed, refrozen. Being the sole true northerner of the family, I ate these with the Christmas turkey while the others ate fresh spinach. Then death seemed to announce itself.

Here is Burgess’s own grotty equivalent of St Augustine’s pears, in which he casually enshrines his own unholy trinity of marriage, death and the North.

At the heart of You’ve Had Your Time is a haunting portrait of his first marriage to Lynne (née Llewela Isherwood Jones), which lasted 26 years before death did them part. In 1988 Burgess appeared on the Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark, and made some piercing observations about the blessed institution:

A marriage, say that lasts twenty years or more, is a kind of civilisation, a kind of microcosm – it develops its own language, its own semiotics, its own slang, its own shorthand … sex is part of it, part of the semiotics. To destroy, wantonly, such a relationship, is like destroying a whole civilisation.

‘To destroy, wantonly’: the dutiful ex-Catholic is taking a potshot at divorce, but you have to wonder. The abiding mystery remains Lynne’s self-destruction – she drank herself to death over an extended period – and Burgess’s apparent helplessness before this willed self-erasure. Was he what we would now call an enabler? Burgess doesn’t stint on the details: the cases of gin, the local pubs they were banned from, the gouts of blood vomited by Lynne. It reads like a bittersweet sitcom about the claustrophobia of co-dependency, a bohemian Steptoe and Son or a book-world Bottom: bibulous, crapulent, knockabout. And it’s Lynne who invariably does the knocking about, handy with her fists, always with the needle, taking offence, stirring it. Dauntingly clever in her own right, she didn’t do easeful social chitchat. Many reasons have been suggested for the couple’s abrupt departure from Burgess’s final posting in the Far East: a misdiagnosed brain tumour, poisonous office politics, the expat’s ‘unhealthy lifestyle’. My own preferred explanation is that it was the consequence of Lynne’s having said ‘something obscene’ to the Duke of Edinburgh during a royal visit.

Burgess’s musical tastes tended towards Delius, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, but when I think of him I hear the Beatles (‘It’s a thousand pages give or take a few/I’ll be writing more in a week or two’) and the Stones (‘When I’m riding round the world/And I’m doing this and I’m signing that’). Burgess came into his own during the pivotal moment in which Grub Street was giving way to ‘the media’. A Clockwork Orange was published the same year Marshall McLuhan introduced the image of a ‘global village’ in The Gutenberg Galaxy. When Burgess was first starting to write, a broadcaster was a nice chap in a suit who spoke with Received Pronunciation; in 1972, promoting A Clockwork Orange, he was interviewed by a radio presenter he didn’t take to at all. ‘The anchorman of the programme was a former disc jockey named Jimmy Savile. He had been noted for bipartite hair dyes and his love of the young.’ One moment he was scraping by selling off review copies, the next he was mixing it with Sir Lew Grade (‘Lads, we’re going to do Jesus’) and Franco Zeffirelli.

Burgess​ may have incubated various germs of guilt – the loss of his faith, Lynne’s death, not giving his son a settled life – but he was definitively without shame. He seemed to take every opportunity to stress his brisk indifference to literary norms. In September 1985 he appeared on Wogan, promoting his new book, The Kingdom of the Wicked; his fellow guests were June Whitfield, Midge Ure and the ‘celebrity divorce lawyer’ Marvin Mitchelson. In 1992 he delivered a eulogy at the memorial service for Benny Hill, whom he called a ‘comic genius’, ‘one of the great artists of our age’.

What you make of this sort of thing will be an imprecise matter of taste, temperament and generation. Graham Greene, for one, was appalled. It wasn’t just that Burgess appeared on television – graceless enough in itself – but that he talked about his books. What Greene perhaps didn’t perceive was that ‘Anthony Burgess’ was itself a liberating fiction, adopted as a pen name in 1956 for his first novel, Time for a Tiger. It was Burgess’s equivalent of the spy’s ‘legend’, and he did everything possible down the years to maintain his cover.

Burgess liked appearing on TV and was good at it, despite possessing what used to be called ‘a face made for radio’. Like many men of that time – Harold Wilson, Bobby and Jackie Charlton, 99 per cent of comedians – he looked as if he’d been born middle-aged. He clicked on the small screen because he was instantly memorable, a near caricature of himself: the comb-over hair an abandoned bird’s nest; the eyes pillbox slits; a complexion like night décor glimpsed in sunlight, with the texture of those thawed sprouts. Today, there is no conceivable equivalent. Who is tonight’s guest on the One Show, plugging their novel about the birth of Christianity?

In my late twenties I was most impressed by Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986), a madly catholic selection of Burgess’s reviews and journalism. I read it as something like a self-help manual – as if spreading yourself thin might be an ennobling form of spiritual masochism. Why not work simultaneously on screenplays about James Bond and Jesus Christ? He was an omnivorous polymath to the end, relentlessly curious, a true freelance mind. A typical day began thus: ‘Over my morning mug of tea (six tea bags), I try to emulate Bach and compose at least a fugal exposition.’ He sets out to learn Japanese and read Hebrew. He writes about Yves Saint Laurent for the New York Times, comments on the World Cup for Time, and turns a beady theological eye on the papacy for the Milan newspaper Il Giornale Nuovo. He cannot settle on a single discipline or a forever home. A happy exile, he weaves around Southern Europe, working in hotel rooms and lobbies, airports, taxis, trains. Composing minuets in his Bedford Dormobile, a camper van Beethoven. His two spouses were Welsh and Italian, his North and South. If a marriage is a civilisation, it is also a weather system. Burgess saw that staying in Britain might turn him brittle, bitter, chippy. A polite novel every two years, indifferently reviewed, the occasional whimsical/emetic Diary for the Spectator. Instead he became Anthony the Cosmopolite.

He liked the idea of the North but in real life plumped for the more copacetic reality of Southern sun, strolls, tax breaks; by the end of his life he had a portfolio of tony properties spread throughout Europe. In the home stretch of You’ve Had Your Time, written in a chalet in Switzerland (‘I am in Ticino, south of the Alps, a few kilometres away from Lugano’), he grows wistful:

I am still a child of cold England, but only in the sense that I love its language and its literature. I cannot go back there to live, and, on brief visits, I see myself as an outsider. The rift of religion, region and class should have been healed a long time ago, but it is not. Like a colonial, I have a sense of exclusion, a chip on the shoulder.

I give in to reverie and imagine a commemorative statue of Burgess being raised in his home town. A creature from another time: triple gin in hand, panetela aflame, tweedy suit, comb-over, chip engraved in shoulder. And for its legend, carved in stone, this line from You’ve Had Your Time: ‘Writers are essentially Mancunians.’

It’s hard to judge Burgess’s current standing. He doesn’t seem a likely candidate for a revival. I’ve heard him dismissed as sexist and homophobic, a relic. He is a strange mix of the old-fashioned and the modernist – an old-fashioned modernist – typified by two of the figures he devoted studies to: Joyce and Lawrence. Of the latter he remarked: ‘Another view, and one towards which my own career as a writer bids me incline, is that it is wrong to judge Lawrence on single works, and obligatory to swallow, or reject, his entire output as one massive literary utterance.’ Which is, once again, AB dropping clues about the right way to read AB: the life’s achievement rather than any single, perfect, fussily crafted work.

Born in Manchester, he died in St John’s Wood and his ashes reside in the columbarium of Monaco Cemetery, overseen by the inscription:

ABBA
ABBA

Why the double palindrome? Ruling out a deathbed conversion to Europop, it may refer to an elementary rhyme scheme, as it does in the title of Burgess’s novel from 1977 about John Keats and Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. Or to Christ’s utterance in the garden of Gethsemane (‘Abba, Father’). And it does of course contain four ABs, whichever way you look at it. First and last, beginning and end. A bookend.