My Other Life (33 page)

Burgess was still in England then. I thought that he was living in Fulham or Putney, somewhere in the riverine suburbs of west London. We were fellow reviewers in London literary journalism, appearing in the weeklies and Sundays and selling our review copies at Gaston's. But after Lettfish inquired (he badly wanted to meet
Burgess privately), I discovered that Burgess lived in Brighton, "in the gull-clawed air."

"It must be Hove," Lettfish said. "Enderby lived in Hove"—naming a character from Burgess's novels. "Remember when Vesta Bainbridge visited him?"

It seemed to me that Lettfish was once again confusing art with life, but it turned out that he was right. I asked Burgess the next time I saw him at Gaston's, and he confirmed that he was indeed living in Hove on the south coast, but that he was planning to leave pretty soon.

"I hate the light here," Burgess said. "I need more sunlight. I can't work in this inspissated darkness."

He also hated paying English taxes. "I've been a fool long enough." He contemplated living in Ireland, but he was too Irish himself to be happy there. He left England for Malta, found it repressive and priest-ridden, moved to Monaco, then Italy, and traveled a great deal, teaching and lecturing in the United States with the reels of
A Clockwork Orange
in his luggage, which he showed to impress or amuse his audiences.

After Burgess left England Lettfish sought me out more often, precisely because Burgess was not around. I sometimes had a drink with Burgess when he passed through London, I occasionally bumped into him in New York, and once we presented a joint lecture in Strasbourg. By then our age difference did not matter. I had never been his protégé, only his acquaintance. He was a man with no intimates.

One of the characteristics of English writers was that they all spent time on Grub Street and many went on living there. They were generally hard-working and unsnobbish and entirely democratic and uncompetitive. A writer's life was harder but simpler there since writing was classless and essentially unprofitable. We read each other, we wrote about each other; even the grandest hacked at reviews. Everything was fine until an English writer struck it rich with a bestseller in America, or a movie; and then his money set him apart, and he was sneered at and envied and sniped at, and he became "the shit in the shuttered chateau," despised for having a good income and a life of ease.

Burgess was kind to me but he could be irascible, and the way he puffed his foul-smelling Schimmelpennick or held it in his trembly
fingers like a smoldering pencil made my eyes water. He loathed the English middle class and grew very cross at what he took to be manifestations of philistinism. Even in casual conversation he used his writing words—"vatic," "idiolect," "thaumaturge," "claudicate." He insisted on staying in the best hotels, always Claridges in London; and he pleaded poverty, perhaps because he was self-conscious about his hard work and his prolific output. Though he tried to be frugal, he was a lavish tipper, as people from humble origins often are, out of fear and sympathy, understanding the people who serve them, knowing how weak and envious they can be, the big tip a clumsy attempt to placate them.

"Does he drink?" Lettfish asked me. Lettfish was a cautious drinker—overalert, nursing his half pint of beer, always mistakenly calling it "bitters."

"A certain amount."

"I'll bet he's as bad as I am," Lettfish said. "I'm always swigging something."

In fact Burgess drank a great deal, but he was not a drunk. He was far too dedicated to his writing to coarsen or belittle it with booze. It was only after his day's work was done that he guzzled gin, swilled wine, hoisted glasses of beer. "Are you leaving that?" he once said to me in a London restaurant as I put down a glass of wine I could not finish. And then he drained it in a single gulp. He was a marvel to me, with an active mind. Alcohol gave him back his Irishness and made him forgivable. The few times I had seen him drunk he had a look of vulnerability and pathos that you see on the faces of some people who equate drunkenness with shame, a look of suffering and guilty surprise.

I never knew any writer who worked harder or was more generous. Of course he had his pick of the best of the week's books, while upstarts like Ian Musprat and I rummaged among his leavings. But it was only Burgess who was intellectually equipped and had the style and the confidence to review a new edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
or the
Oxford English Dictionary
or, as the sequence was published, the eleven volumes of Pepys's
Diary.
He still made time for students, for aspiring writers. He wrote an introduction to the French translation of a novel of mine,
Les Conspirateurs,
and as a joke signed himself "Antoine Bourgeois."

He kept at it, writing, and composing music. "As for writing
assignments, I accept all reasonable offers," he said, adding, "and many unreasonable ones." He was perhaps too restless and prodigious and impatient to be a great writer, but then greatness did not matter to him; he wished only to write well and be original. He was never cruel. There was wisdom in his generosity. I saw that as his greatest gift. That he could stand apart and see the value in someone else's effort.

"I tried to write a travel book once," he said. "We took a trip in our Bedford Dormobile to southern Italy—Calabria, actually. It was great fun, the food was wonderful, and every day I sat down and wrote about it."

"I'd love to read that book."

"Couldn't do it. After about two weeks I saw that everything I had written was rubbish," he said. "But I'll tell you something. I read your book,
Railway Bazaar,
once a year."

That was a Burgess compliment, and typically grand, but I knew he liked the book and now I had an inkling of why he liked me. I had written something that he had not managed himself. He had become my reader, too. But it was also the reason I admired him, and many other writers, because I saw myself as incapable of writing what they had. Not knowing exactly how a writer wrote a book, yet being fully aware of a brilliant writer's ability to enter the reader's soul: that was the key. How did they do it?

A reader might admire a writer, but only another writer saw the magic. I sometimes felt I was Burgess's only reader. That was why I was puzzled and amused by Lettfish, who because he collected Burgess's books felt he owned a piece of him. It offended me that Lettfish did not see the misery in a bright page of print. The presumption in his expression "I collect him" gave me the creeps.

I was in awe of all fine writers' achievements and was still trying to understand the mystery of their lives. I knew what few readers knew, that you had to be that particular writer in order to write that particular book. My admiration for their work grew out of my puzzlement: I could not imagine how they had done it. Such writers inspired me by first proving I was stupid, and then making me feel wise. A person reading a wonderful book is overwhelmed by feelings of inspiration and ignorance, bafflement and belief, and becomes a sort of dogged, dazzled apostle, limping after the priestly figure of the writer.

I knew how ordinary writers had produced their books. It was no secret. There was a fine carpentry, obvious to another writer, that was woodwork but not art; you knew all this joinery and how it was hinged. Nonwriters often recommended books to me. I would mention New York City and they'd say, "You should read..." and they named a current book. There was no way that I could explain to a nonwriter that such books might be energetic and newsworthy but that they were uninspired and overpraised. I looked at them and knew just how they were made. I did not mock, but I felt I could do the same—indeed, I had done it.

But so many other writers were brilliant that it made me love the act of writing and hope to be inspired and not intimidated. I never compared our work; I often compared our lives. I did not know a single writer who was any good who had had it easy.

Burgess had been hard up like me. The struggle had made him cranky and large-hearted and it had energized his books and made them live. His writing might look artless but it had vitality. He loved language too much for his books not to seem somewhat mannered, yet I saw that this extravagant wordplay was a handicap; not eloquence but clumsiness, more like an endearing speech defect, a lovable lisp.

I loved his work because it was not brilliant, and yet it disturbed me and seemed to defy gravity and, hovering, giving the illusion of concreteness, it contained enormous ambiguity, a floating pillow stuffed with impartial paradoxes—Burgess especially mingled good and evil. He was one of the handful of writers whose work I admired because, although I could not duplicate it, I saw how it was attainable. He had talent but not genius; that was another reason I read him closely, because I could understand and learn. These writers inspired me not to be like them but to be myself. They filled me with a desire to write my own fiction.

Burgess at last stayed abroad, for tax reasons, though he made Joycean noises about art and exile. Lettfish pursued me more than ever and became strident in his invitations, about half of which I accepted—for lunch, for drinks. It bothered me that I did not reciprocate. It did not bother him—rather, he seemed to enjoy the idea of my indebtedness. I wondered why I put up with him, and I decided that his collecting fascinated me, the appetite it showed, the
eye for detail, the patience, the need to acquire, most of all the wealth it illustrated.

It was another of Lettfish's expressions of power that he included in his collection insignificant and high-priced articles of Burgess's life because they were so scarce. Lettfish owned one of Burgess's old passports, a pewter mug from Kota Bharu presented by the Sultan to Burgess, a leather satchel once owned by Burgess, a paper napkin Burgess had doodled on—not words or sketches but notes and lines of music—a Russian-English dictionary with Burgess's bookplate, an airline ticket (London—New York) in Burgess's name.

Lettfish did not boast about these items. "I'm always buying these crazy things!" If he had been a collector and no more than that, I would not have agreed to see him. But he was a reader. He had read everything that Burgess had written. Knowing the work was as important to him as owning it. He could quote whole paragraphs verbatim, he could repeat dialogue, he knew the characters, what they ate, how they dressed, their reactions. We were in a restaurant where the service was slow. "I know what Victor Crabbe would say at a moment like this." In a pub, Lettfish turned and said of the barman, "He looks like Paul Hussey," naming another Burgess character. It pleased me when Lettfish said that Burgess's work gave him a sensitivity to language and a feel for geography—the Russia of
Honey for the Bears,
the England of
Enderby,
the Malaya of
The Long Day Wanes.

"Does the Africa of
Devil of a State
ring true?" Lettfish asked me. "You've lived there."

"It's all made up. Burgess set the novel in Africa so that he wouldn't be sued for libel. It's really about Brunei."

"Mind not doing that?"

I was puffing my pipe. I palmed it, inwardly raging, insulted at having to carry out his order.

"What was I talking about?" Lettfish asked.

"I haven't the slightest idea." I stared at him.

Lettfish sniffed and said, "So that country Dunia doesn't exist?"

"
Dunia
means 'the world' in Malay and, I think, in Arabic."

Such trivia made me seem knowledgeable, and so he ended up valuing me.

I'm kind of a little Burgess myself,
Lettfish had said when we first met. What did he mean by that? I supposed that he identified with
the Burgess antihero, how he was always victimized by women, and drank too much, and complained of ill health, and was overcharged and snubbed. Burgess's men were in constant physical discomfort, they were romantics, they tended to be well read, they always wore badly fitting dentures. They felt out of place in big cities, especially American cities. They were frightened by crime, by young thugs, they traveled a great deal, yet they hated it. They were morally strong, often indignant, but they were physical cowards. They ended up disabled and broke rather than dramatically dead. They were self-mocking. Even the dimmest of them were able to speak several languages.

They were, in short, all of them Anthony Burgess.

Burgess's books were Lettfish's education. They simplified his adjustment to living in England, and because Burgess was expert at describing the discomforts of London and his uneasy sense of Englishness—a provincial, a Catholic, who had earned his literary stripes in the colonies—Lettfish was vindicated in his own London uneasiness.

At one of our lunches, Lettfish—who was always the host—asked me how I liked living in London. I told him the truth: I was happy here. Afterwards I pondered the happiness, the way that sometimes on a tube train I looked at the face of a lovely woman, scrutinizing her nose, her eyes, her hair, her skin, her lips, her legs: what element, or combination of them, accounted for this beauty?

My London happiness was my big brick house, the quiet street, the way my desk faced Victorian windows, the giant sycamore outside, the backwater of south London. It was my family most of all. I hardly thought about living in London. The city was outside the window, beyond the sycamore and the garden wall: the glimpses of wet roof slates, the black streets, red buses—and everything in the foreground was private, personal, safe, lighted with love and warmth, fragrant with flowers and food. That was my London—my house.

Burgess's books helped Lettfish like England better. They gave him a certain style—that is, he saw that his own style was quite good enough. Burgess's characters were flawed human beings, like the writer himself. And beneath the surface of Burgess's writing, where mockery became fondness, was an affection for Americans and a resentment of England. Burgess was one of those class-hating
and reluctant Englishmen who was happier among Americans, because they were generous and didn't judge, and yet perversely he kept a sneering stiff upper lip only when he was talking to Americans.