An acidic appraisal of a writer's life.

ANTHONY BURGESS

By Roger Lewis. Thomas Dunne. 434 pp. $27.95

Already the polymathic novelist Anthony Burgess is fading into the shadowy back corners of mid 20th-century British literature, as yet another seedy figure in a soiled ascot, a soggy Woodbine stuck between his teeth, a glass of Jameson within easy reach. There he slouches at the upright piano of some docklands pub, banging out "Bird in a Gilded Cage" while tirelessly reciting alliterative verse in Malay, Lallans or Provençal. His sad, nymphomaniacal first wife, Lynne, sloops on a barstool, drunk and blowsy, receptive to an offer of a fresh gin or an evening of what her husband once called the old in-out, in-out. This is the limbo of the not quite first-rate, the literary watering-hole of the semi-forgotten, and there in the smoky haze the sharp-eyed can descry Julian Maclaren-Ross, Patrick Hamilton and all those occasional contributors to Horizon or the London Review.

During his lifetime (1917-1993) Anthony Burgess was known for three things. First, in midlife, while a government educational officer teaching in Brunei, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a year to live; in that year he produced five novels to help provide for his future relict. To his surprise, he didn't die, and a new career was launched: the Manchester-born John Wilson became the cosmopolitan Anthony Burgess. Second, he wrote one famous, even notorious book that he came to dislike, especially after Stanley Kubrick filmed it: A Clockwork Orange (1962), the first-person story of thuggish Alex and his three droogs. Set down in a Russianized English, the futuristic novel asserted that freely willed evil was humanly better than mechanically or chemically imposed virtue. Third, following the death of Lynne in 1968, Burgess turned himself into a writing machine, producing screenplays ("The Spy Who Loved Me," "Jesus of Nazareth"), symphonies, book reviews, prefaces, coffee-table biographies, occasional journalism, studies of Joyce, music and linguistics; he taught in New York, gave talks in Ohio and Iowa, appeared on panels and TV talk shows, willingly discoursed anywhere on anything at any time -- for a fee, of course, preferably one paid out in crisp new banknotes. When not performing to underwrite an apartment in Monte Carlo, Burgess produced a stream of novels, some historical or futuristic (Napoleon Symphony, 1985, The End of the World News), several on biblical themes, nearly all of them stiffly programmatic, with the possible exception of the Booker-nominated Earthly Powers, about a Somerset Maugham-like author caught up in the artistic and historical currents of the 20th century.

While alive, Burgess (with the help of his second wife, Liana) was generally viewed as one of the world's great writers, possessed of a Nabokovian or even Joycean vocabulary, mentioned in the same breath as his Argentine homonym, Borges, whispered about as a possible Nobelist. Newspapers clamored for his prose -- after all, he met deadlines, would take any assignment and was invariably fun to read, a professional's professional. Little wonder that Oxford student Roger Lewis fell under the spell of such a sorcerer, and soon aspired to be his biographer. To Burgess, this well-educated enthusiast must have seemed perfect: a disciple, maybe even a keeper of the flame. Hadn't Auden scored a coup in choosing the brilliant but then little-known Edward Mendelson as his literary executor?

At university young Lewis studied with Richard Ellmann, author of magisterial lives of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. The first of these Burgess claimed to have read at least 20 times, but perhaps he neglected the second a little. For surely he ought to have remembered Oscar Wilde's mot about biographies: They are invariably written by Judas.

Not since Lawrance Thompson on Robert Frost has there been a more serious falling out between biographer and subject. The result this time, however, is one extremely lively book, an avalanche of factual revelation, vitriolic wit and personal disappointment that buries poor Burgess and then posts a sign, Hic Jacet. Lewis views the man as a fraud, a liar, a cold-fish self-mythologizer, a linguistic artificer rather than a true novelist; he sees him as sexually impotent, spiteful and abusively neglectful of Lynne as she steadily drank herself to death. Even Burgess's astonishing productivity he regards as an escape from the world rather than as an engagement with it: The writer didn't care about people, only about words. Nonetheless, sopranos complained that his lyrics were unsingable, and actors called his screenplays unspeakable. In short, he wasn't a man of letters, he was a mere showman of letters, and literary history is seldom kind to vaudevillians.

Lewis's book is way too long. It repeats the same half-dozen complaints about Burgess again and again, as if assertion alone were proof. "My suspicion now is that [Earthly Powers] was a pastiche of a great novel, rather than being a great novel. Burgess wants us to be aware of his effort. His voice is always heard -- that single psyche present." "His work sounds like a translation -- not quite alive." "Though his work demonstrates great versatility, the versatility is always the same." The novels are fundamentally charmless -- "there's no attempt to win us over." In every way, Lewis is pitiless, reminding us that Burgess was self-centered, repugnantly status-conscious (his dust jackets always proclaimed that his second wife was a contessa), obnoxiously compelled to one-up any scholar or fellow writer he happened to meet. He also libeled his friends in print, probably exaggerated his supposed brain tumor and spied for the government out East. Lewis digs into the official records, too, showing that there's no real evidence that Lynne was ever attacked by a gang -- the genesis for A Clockwork Orange -- and that she may well have simply fallen down a manhole while crapulous with drink. According to the birth certificate, Burgess's son Andrew was fathered by another man. And so it goes. It's hard to resist the barrage of analysis and fact brought to bear on the fallen idol, and Lewis, for the most part, makes his remorseless case. Burgess "found himself as a novelist by shutting himself off as a person." And he wasn't even a very good novelist.

Lewis crams his pages with digressions, speculations and verbal razzmatazz; he's a very personal, in-your-face writer. One long footnote reveals how people were always thinking he was at work on a biography of either spy Guy Burgess or traitor Anthony Blunt. He will tell you that Ellmann liked to be called Dick, seemingly oblivious to his students' embarrassment at the word. He fiercely compares and contrasts Burgess with Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis and V.S. Naipaul. In fact, nearly anything Lewis writes is either witty or shrewd or both; he's obviously yet another of those English journalist whiz-bangs. Here he is on the film of A Clockwork Orange:

"Despite what the liberal intelligentsia argued at the time, that the film is a critique of mindless violence and not a celebration of it -- it is a celebration of it. Violence is the only element in the entire one hundred and thirty-six minutes that's handled with style or panache, and it is [Malcolm] McDowell, a dandy in his bowler hat and single false eyelash, wielding a gigantic ceramic phallus, or putting the boot in with glee, whose personal energy holds the movie together. He's a sexy little Satan -- a sulky piece of rough trade. His body is pale and faintly translucent, like marble -- and as with marble, there isn't an inside, there's no emotion. He's a creature of basic drives and conditionings, whether purely cruel, at the start, or completely nauseated, after his treatment. He gives off a chill glow and he's the rebellious and demonic counterforce to Burgess the weak-eyed motherless swot who thought that being a bookworm would get him anywhere."

In the end, this former Burgess acolyte confesses that "discomfiture . . . is the chief feeling his work induces in me now." Yet as the merciless parade of charges mounts up, one starts to feel sorry for the poor grifter, clearly a recidivist who can't help himself. Research hasn't turned up any Cockney phrase about a "clockwork orange," the supposed origin of the famous title. Even Burgess's record choices for "Desert Island Discs" were utterly middle-class and conventional: Elgar, Walton, Vaughan Williams. The man was simply a fake. "I am convinced," says Lewis, "that those people who wrote his obituaries and delivered their eulogies and who allowed Burgess to retain his reputation as the great twentieth-century truly international master had never read his works." Can't get much plainer than that.

And yet, it's clear that somehow, deep down, Roger Lewis still kind of likes Burgess, and even as he shows us the pathetic little man behind the curtain, nonetheless retains a half-hearted admiration for the once great and terrible Oz. For all his fabrications and faults, Burgess must have been a charismatic figure in person and, as any impartial reader will vouch, an astonishingly gifted master of language. To be a novelist is not a calling to be a good or honest man.

I won't argue with Lewis or anybody else about most of Burgess's late work -- I've never read a worse novel than The End of the World News -- but think the first two Enderby books (about the artistic and erotic misadventures of a constipated poet) remain superbly odd period comedies; Nothing Like the Sun and A Dead Man in Deptford are plausible and surprisingly touching historical fictions (about Shakespeare and Marlowe, respectively); and Burgess's reviews and essays are still sharp, brazenly personal and rereadable. Not least, lies or not, the man's first autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, still seems to me a masterpiece of anecdotal and linguistic gusto.

Still, I'm convinced that Roger Lewis is largely right. There's too much dross and mere ingenious contrivance to Burgess's work, and before long it will almost certainly be forgotten -- though possibly rediscovered from time to time. And then forgotten again. Whatever their merits, even his best books aren't necessary ones, and the future only has time for masterpieces. •

Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.