Ironies and inversions: the art of Anthony Burgess - Cover Story

While it is true that Burgess wrote for a living, he also consciously employed language in serious play, to reconcile the opposites he perceived in a Manichaean "duoverse," instead of universe. Though one of his disingenuous narrators claims "It is not to my purpose to observe on good and evil, or right and wrong, since I have little skill in that kind of thinking" (Man of Nazareth,

1979), Burgess was often preoccupied with these issues and endeavored to debunk a too-optimistic Pelagianism and to warn against a too-deterministic Augustinianism in human, as well as fictional affairs. Reconciling the conflict between opposing forces does not, in Burgess's fiction, mean settling for a middle way. He preferred commitment, even to a mistaken ideal, to neutrality. In writing, he engaged in an ongoing comic, cosmic ritual. His career attested to the efficacy of ludic (playful) action, even though his vision, in the novels, was almost unremittingly pessimistic about the use of human endeavor.

In his autobiographies, Burgess indicated that he had recently returned to the church, although he had also made known his scorn for the reforms it had undergone since his apostasy. His last two novels were less overtly concerned than his previous books with the struggle between Pelagian and Augustinian impulses, and it is not clear how closely he adhered to the Manichaean heresy that undergirded so much of his fiction, though opposites clearly attracted him. In four decades' worth of novels, a reader has ample opportunity to explore the importance of these ideas to Burgess; in fact, they are impossible to avoid, as his critics John J. Stinson and Geoffrey Aggeler have demonstrated. Despite his aversion to didactic fiction, Burgess did not hesitate to instruct (and quiz) his readers on the Pelagian heresy and its bracing Augustinian antidote, discussed in more detail below.

The "kind of Catholic quality" that is so noticeable in Burgess's fiction comes not only from these interests, but from numerous episodes drawn directly from the life and opinions of John Burgess Wilson, a Manchester Catholic, raised by an Irish Catholic stepmother (who repelled him), educated in Catholic schools in the fashion of the 1920s and 1930s, who left the church as a teen-ager, either as a result of guilt about his sexual adventures, or through the too-convincing presentation of Martin Luther's views by a history master (or both). The best guide to Burgess's life is the two-volume autobiography, or confessions, Little Wilson and Big God (1986) and You've Had Your Time (1990). In the first book, Burgess describes his position as a college student: "There was no answer to the world's problems in communism, and no personal salvation in Anglicanism. The solutions probably lay with renegade Catholic liberal humanism." He adds that, fifty years later, he has not much changed this view. Despite years away from the church, including a time when he considered convening to the austerity of Islam, Burgess maintains, in the end, that "one can't throw away the Eucharist so easily." Both resentment of and respect for the institutional church come through in one of Burgess's comments on James Joyce's work, in his excellent introductory book ReJoyce (1965). He writes: "The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence." To simply ignore, take a neutral stance, or choose a less troubling substitute for the church does not occur to Burgess.