You've Had Your Time: The Second Part of the Confessions

Burgess is best known for fiction--Clockwork Orange--but his memoirs and his nonfiction were extraordinary. Read these, as well as his tribute to James Joyce, Re Joyce, and your life will be enhanced. Honest.

Burgess first great ambition was to be a composer of classical music. His success, fame and reputation however came largely through the writing career he began only when diagnosed with a condition which told him he only had a year to live. In that year in order to provide his first wife with some kind of financial security he wrote five novels. He also was cured of the tumor and went on to become one of the most prolific, energetic, and linguistically inventive novelists and critics of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this second part of his biography he tells the story of his writing life and career, of his second marriage, of the birth of his son , of the innumerable travels, meetings and connections which he makes in the course of his extremely productive life. The book is written with his usual verve and linguistic inventiveness. It is an interesting and even breathtaking at first but it eventually wore me down with its multiplication of meetings and deals and new characters and events. In truth I was looking for something deeper and more reflective, something which would too give a more insightful look into Burgess' sense of his own art. With all this I would say it provides a great deal of information and incident about one of the most inventive writers linguistically of the latter half of the century. It is certainly worth a read.

I stumbled across Burgess's autobiography in a mail-order catalogue of remaindered books. _You've Had Your Time_ cost half as much as the shipping and handling, and was read with the kind of joy and guilt one feels when finding a stray twenty-dollar bill in an empty parking lot. What struck me about Burgess on Burgess is his delight in words---utilitarian words, pretty words, obscene words, latinates, any combination thereof (among his favorites: micturate). He called his art a craft, and loved to show the clockwork behind prose-tricks, how even the most magical books depend heavily on sleight-of-hand. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of his autobiography is how sketchy it is on the author's life and how detailed it is on words. For him, at least, the two are inseparable. Anthony Burgess, aspiring composer, is told at 35 that he has an inoperable brain tumor---he will die within a year. He cranks a sheet of paper into a typewriter. Jump a few decades ahead. In 1989 we find him reflecting on Joyce's anniversary, on conversations in Saxon with Borges, on Kubrick's version of _A Clockwork Orange_, and on a bitter scene from a childhood he can't quite call his own. He wrote over thirty novels, and also adapted, translated, and commented on a dizzying array of subjects. He was very, very funny. He was at his funniest when writing on his life. And yet there is this terrible, self-inflicted sense of failure when he looks back: The last line in his book is both defiant and defeated---time is creeping up on him, he says, and his attitude is not that of a complacent man of letters, but rather that of someone with an awful lot of unfinished business. Here's the punchline: In-between the completion of the memoir and his death he wrote an additional six books. The last one, a novel in verse, has just come out. Burgess cheated death at the beginning of his literary career and has done so again.