About eleven months ago in Edinburgh, so I have just been told by a friend who was there, Anthony Burgess turned to the audience he was addressing and said quite calmly, “I have only a year left to live.” There was a shocked silence and then Anthony, apparently, carried on without a care in the world.
I knew, we knew, that he was not in good health latterly, but the last time I saw him he did not seem much changed. He was smoking, inevitably, and we had a drink or three. He was participating in whatever book business had brought him to London with his usual heroic energy and benign composure, and, for all I know, was writing a novel, a book review and a concerto in his idler moments. All the same, the news of his death comes as a huge shock perhaps because one always thought that, having cheated the grim reaper once, Anthony’s prodigious energy would continue to defy mortality as long as he felt it was worth it.
I refer, of course, to the now legendary moment in 1959 when Anthony was diagnosed as suffering from an inoperable brain tumour and was told he would be dead before a year had run its course. In the time he had left remaining to him, or so he tells it, to provide some sort of legacy for his soon-to-be widow, he wrote four novels, non-stop, one after the other. And when the diagnosis blessedly proved to have been false he carried on working with that same restless creativity. From the outside it seemed as if Anthony’s artistic momentum was indeed a kind of life force, sustaining and vivifying, and that as long as he was there working he would outlive the lot of us.
He was an exemplary writer in many senses. He was the towering example, for instance, to all late starters, not writing his first novel until he was in his forties. He was an intellectual, a polymath, at home in many languages, with a cultural sweep that was awe-inspiring, but at the same time he avoided all pretension and elitism, equally happy to let frivolity and fun — in the form of movies, soap operas, TV, chat shows, beach blanket best sellers or whatever — benefit from his shrewd and enthusiastic evaluation. And he worked hard, worked hard for his living, writing novels and criticism, screenplays and libretti, almost anything he wanted to do and could turn his pen to.
In this sense he seems to me to be a very British writer. If there is one thing that characterizes the British writer, from the eighteenth century onwards, it is that by and large he or she writes a lot, is very productive, is professional. Writing is both a serious calling and a serious career, and Anthony, in the twentieth century, embodied that attitude with more style and panache and consistent high standards than anyone else I can think of. But in many other senses he regarded himself as something of an outsider. A cradle Catholic, a northerner, non-Oxbridge, with a working life spent largely abroad, he considered himself, I believe, beyond the pale of the metropolitan literary world. And so much the better for him: he is the perfect example of the non-parochial in British literature. If ever the British novel is described as being cramped and confined by this cramped and confined little island Anthony Burgess can provide the flourishing counterpoise.
I remember on the occasion of his seventieth birthday celebrations him saying cheerfully on television that he never expected to be honoured by his native country. “You have to be a footballer or a jockey to be recognized by the establishment in Britain,” he said. And of course it is the usual matter of shame and a sad reflection on our inherent philistinism that someone as special and worth celebrating as Anthony should have been ignored. But he would know, as would any person of sense, that what matters in the end is the work done rather than any bauble conferred, and the work will continue to fascinate and beguile in all its multitudinous facets. Amongst the thirty-odd novels he wrote the consensus would probably be that Earthly Powers is his masterpiece and it is hard to argue against its huge and confident sweep. But my own particular favourites, the ones I re-read, are the Enderby novels, Inside Mr Enderby and Enderby Outside, which are about the life and extraordinary times of a minor English poet — wonderfully rich and funny novels. I first read these books twenty years ago at university and read them again when I had the chance to meet Anthony many years later. Enderby, eccentric, unworldly, insouciant, obsessed by his art, but fully caught up in the physical pleasures of this world, brings Anthony’s unique and vital spirit forcefully to mind. I shall go and read them again now, and think how lucky I was — how lucky we all were — to meet and know their remarkable creator.
1993
The Galapagos Affair
One lucent September morning in 1928, two Germans, a man and a woman, and their worldly possessions, were landed on the beach of Floreana, an uninhabited island in the Galapagos archipelago. The man, Friedrich Ritter, was small, blond and wiry, a doctor and an amateur philosopher with a bent for bizarre, male-supremacist metaphysics. The woman was his lover, Dore Strauch, equally small, dark and somewhat self-consciously bohemian in dress and manner. She adored and venerated Friedrich.
Friedrich and Dore had planned their new life with Teutonic thoroughness. In Berlin during the course of their affair they accumulated a vast supply of stores and provisions and, when the time came for them to leave, they arranged a dinner party and introduced their astonished, respective spouses to each other and told them of their plans. Friedrich suggested to Herr Strauch that, as he was being deprived of a wife, perhaps it might soften the blow if his wife, Mrs Ritter, came to live and work for Herr Strauch as his housekeeper. This completely bizarre proposal was deemed a very satisfactory arrangement by all parties and so Friedrich’s wife duly moved in with Dore’s husband.
Having sorted out their abandoned spouses, Friedrich and Dore travelled halfway round the globe to this small island in the Pacific, their tropical Eden, where they planned to live out their days, far from the corruption and clamour of Europe.
Beyond the jagged lava beach Floreana was and is a lush and plentiful tropical island. Friedrich and Dore struggled up from the shore through the thickly forested slopes of the dominant mountain (Dore with some difficulty, her arthritis had left her with a pronounced limp but Friedrich’s stern philosophy forbade him from giving her a helping hand) until they found a clearing by a stream where they decided to build a house and a garden (designed and laid out upon strictly philosophical lines). They called the house, rather sweetly, “Friedo” and soon they had a rather ramshackle dwelling erected and a garden that was producing sufficient vegetables and fruit for their complicated diet. All, so far, was well.
The mistake Friedrich and Dore had made was to talk about their plans to journalists while they were waiting in Ecuador for passage to the Galapagos. Their story inspired and inflamed other troubled souls who, spurred on by Friedrich and Dore’s example, decided that there was room to spare in this particular earthly Paradise. Soon the first of a series of new arrivals on Floreana took place.
The first to come were an innocuous petit bourgeois family, also German, the Wittmers — Heinz and Margret with their young son Rolf. The Wittmers built their camp a mile away from Friedo and, although there was candid resentment between the two women, the Floreana settlers seemed to coexist with reasonable harmony.
But that equilibrium was soon to be seriously and fatally disturbed by the arrival of the third party of settlers to the island. The Baroness Eloïse Wagner de Bosquet could have stepped straight out of a film noir thriller directed by Erich von Stroheim. Sexually licentious, a peroxide blonde, gun-toting and with a murky and dubious past, the Baroness spoke French and German with an Austrian accent and claimed her great uncles were Liszt and Wagner. She had with her two lovers, a Frenchman, Rudolf Lorenz, and a well-built young American called Robert Philippson. She too had been inspired by Friedrich and Dore’s Edenic dreams but she planned to imbue them with a more practical thrust. She set about constructing what she described as a luxury hotel, to be known as the “Hacienda Paradiso.” Its clientele was to be the many millionaires cruising the Pacific in their yachts. It never really got beyond planning stages and Lorenz appeared to be the one paying for everything. He was completely in thrall to the Baroness and had sold his shop in Paris in order to finance the venture. Initially all three of them slept together in a large bed, but Lorenz soon became the victim of sadistic games played upon him by the Baroness and Philippson and took to spending more time visiting the Wittmers or up at Friedo with Dore and Friedrich. Dore felt particularly sorry for the young man and grew close to him. Lorenz’s abuse provoked in her a violent hatred for the Baroness, who she was convinced was entirely evil.