Quote of the Day (Anthony Burgess, on His Ideal Reader)

“The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.”—Anthony Burgess, interviewed by John Cullinan, “Anthony Burgess, The Art of Fiction #48,” The Paris Review, Spring 1973

This is the second consecutive instance when the “Quote of the Day” comes from a man of letters I saw, only a couple of years before their deaths, in the early 1990s.Yesterday’s post featured Robertson Davies, a Canadian journalist-playwright-essayist-novelist. I saw Anthony Burgess — the subject of this post, born on this date in 1917— in December 1991, one of a series of authors who came to the Teaneck, NJ, campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Like the other writers I saw at that venue during this time (who, besides Davies, included Tom Wolfe, Jay McInerney, Thomas Flanagan, Edna O’Brien, Tim O’Brien, Mary Gordon, and Shelby Foote), the British author, most famous for A Clockwork Orange, was introduced by the Southern, mellifluous moderator of FDU’s Literary Society, Dr. Gene Barnett.

Burgess’ voice was distinctly different: sly and dry (rather like today’s quote), canny about entertaining an audience, as you might expect from the son of a mother who was a singer-dancer and a father who played the piano in music halls and silent cinemas. It was also the voice of someone unillusioned about life but ready to get on with it, as you might expect of someone whose mother and only sibling perished in the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, and who himself, four decades later, was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor.

That tumor, Burgess said to those of us in the audience, had spurred his productivity, as he felt the need to provide for his wife (and presumed widow) in the event of his death. Within three years he had written seven novels under his own name (including A Clockwork Orange); two more under a pseudonym; translated three more French novels in collaboration with his wife; and begun to write screenplays.

After all this activity, it eventually became apparent that he had been misdiagnosed, Burgess observed. But the self-discipline needed to write his steady stream of books remained.

Born a Catholic, Burgess fell away from the Church in early adulthood, largely because of its attitude toward sex. Yet, like James Joyce (whose Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man impressed him greatly), he could not efface all aspects of the theology he rejected. Above all, Burgess said on the night I saw him, he was left with a belief in free will. That manifested itself, surprisingly enough, in A Clockwork Orange.

The original U.K. edition of this dystopian novel includes a concluding chapter missing from the American version: 18-year-old narrator Alex has a vision of domestic bliss, involving a wife and son, far different from his previous thuggishness. (Burgess’ American publisher evidently felt the writer was unable to face the possibility of unregenerate evil, so the material was deleted.)

One final note, so to speak: Burgess’ reference to a “failed musician.” The novelist viewed with irony the arc of his career--he had composed more than 250 musical works over six decades, but is best known for his fiction. Well, perhaps his readers have been spurred to listen to the classical music he returned to almost obsessively throughout his written work.