Anthony Burgess - Little Wilson and Big God

Contents

About the Author

Anthony Burgess achieved a worldwide reputation as one of the leading novelists of his day, and one of the most versatile. His writings include criticism, scripts and translations, and a Broadway musical, and he composed three symphonies which have been publicly performed in the USA. His books have been published all over the world and include A Clockwork Orange, The Clockwork Testament, Inside Mr Enderby, Enderbys Dark Lady, Earthly Powers, Abba Abba and The End of the World News. He died in 1993.

ALSO BY ANTHONY BURGESS

NOVELS

The Devils Mode (short stories)

AUTOBIOGRAHY

FOR CHILDREN

THEATRE

VERSE

NON FICTION

They Wrote In English (for Italian schools)

TRANSLATION

EDITOR

Time, in fact, is rather vulgarly dramatic; it is the sentimentalist of the dimensions.

Constant Lambert, Music Ho!

Being the First Part of the Confessions of

Anthony Burgess

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A Foreword to a reader is a hindword to an author. The author knows what has been written, the reader has yet to find out. The author, when he does not use his foreword to acknowledge help received in his completed labours, sometimes stands at the threshold which the foreword is, biting his nails and wondering whether a brief warning, an apology for inadequacy or excess, an avowal of mediocrity where he had intended brilliance, might not be a courteous gesture to the person who has had the kindness at least to pick up his book.

As far as acknowledgments of help are concerned, I have none to make. These memoirs, which chronicle my life from birth to the age of forty-two, are pure memories, unratified by the reminiscences of others or by documents other than maps and Sir Richard Winstedts remarkable EnglishMalay Dictionary (Singapore, 1952). Memories sometimes lie in relation to facts, but facts also lie in respect of memory. Sometimes a photograph, which pretends to record fact but in fact does not (fact cannot be removed from time and frozen into space), can at least seem to tell a truth more pungently than words, and I regret that, unlike many autobiographies, this has no supplement of visual records. When I lived in the Far East from 1954 until 1959, termites and damp heat destroyed any photographs I had of my family or own early life. The same has to be said of letters, school and army reports, newspaper clippings and the like. I know that the human brain is an inadequate storage and retrieval system, and I trust my own little, but still I trust it.

This first volume of what, following St Augustine and Rousseau, I call my Confessions without the promise of such basic spiritual revelations as they provide is longer than I intended, and I foresee that the projected second and last volume whose title will probably be Youve Had Your Time will be as long, if not longer. The delineation of oneself at such length must look like egocentricity, but an autobiography has to be egocentric. On the other hand, what do we mean by the ego? It is an existential concept, I believe, and the ego I examine is multiple and somewhat different from the ego that is doing the examining. Even the ego that began the book in September 1985 is not the one that has completed it in 1986. In other words, the book is about somebody else, connected by the ligature of a common track in time and space to the writer of this last segment of it, which cheats and looks like the first.

I write about this somebody else because I think he may stand for a great number of my generation those who were dimly aware of the muddled ethos of the twenties, were uneasy in the thirties, served their country in the forties, and had some difficulty in coming to terms with the postwar world the peace or prolonged truce that is still with us. He may stand also, but far more so in the as yet unwritten second volume, for those who have tried to earn a living from writing. And, as a Catholic of the North of England with Irish blood, he may stand for many who are termed English but have always had a dubious relation with their country of birth. In other words, this is allegory in the original Greek sense of speaking otherwise, presenting others in the shape of myself.