Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin School (SOAS) was three or four mildew-streaked buildings overlooking a concourse teeming with leering girls in figure-hugging blue skirts and scowling boys in songkoks and blurry charcoal moustaches. We lined up in front, smacking imaginary swagger-sticks into our palms. The children fell into regimental rows. The Brunei Darussalam state anthem blared from the speakers. The children moved their mouths, the girls ogling us from under their tudongs. Grey cloud loured overhead, ear-lobes of mist sweeping down over the rows, as if to catch each roar of national longing. Banana trees with crinkled slick fronds, like sections of green tinfoil, provided a wildly gesticulating audience for this doxological drama. When assembly finished, the air carried an odour of drains and ancient blood. As soon as I got back to the staff room, I was told I wouldn’t be needed there after all.
The Centre for British Teachers (CfBT), an organisation of bluff bearded men from Reading with bone-crunching handshakes, had other plans for me. I would spend two weeks loitering about its office while it decided what they were. This office was not what I was accustomed to; it brought to mind market assessors and flow-charts rather than ‘I packed my bag’ and declensions of the verb to be. There were work-spaces and desk units, a Conference room, water siphons and theatrically beautiful Chinese secretaries woodpeckering away at keyboards. I didn’t feel like a language teacher, I felt like an intern waiting for an interview or an actuary under a cloud. But I really should have known better. Brunei was one of the wealthiest oil states. It was run by ‘the richest man on earth,’ a youthful patriarch who felt his subjects must be spiritually enriched by a closer acquaintance with polo, Walker’s oat biscuits, snooker and British English. I may be doing it an injustice, but I am not sure that the CfBT was thinking of spiritual enrichment when it won the right to supply the last of these. EFL organisations, it has been said, are the post-imperial equivalent of the English East India Company. I sat around establishing solidarity with a Filipino tea-boy and watching an air-conditioning unit steam.
This place didn’t overlook some agreeable urban scene of bag-ladies providing Japanese tourists with colourfully phrased road directions, or youths in hoodies helping senior citizens through the traffic; it stared down on a patch of primeval jungle and a torrent of liquid the colour and texture of black portal blood. Nose pressed to glass, I watched rhesus monkeys tightrope-walking along branches, or strained my neck at rhinoceros hornbills passing overhead like steam-driven rolling-stock. Rain bucketed down, frothing water haemorrhaged out of a rice padi, palm fronds thrashed my soul. Like Byron’s Manfred brooding over Alpine wastes, I went out on to the fire-escape to apostrophise a tapang and consider the behaviour of the monkeys, one of whom I came to know, affectionately, as the Head Man. He did what he did continuously, with painstaking relish, even when the sex of his partner was questionable.
Eventually I was posted to Maktab Sains Paduka Seri Begawan Sultan—the Science College—which was chockfull of the flower of the nation’s youth and corpulent mute royalty. There was also one shockingly nubile girl who kept seeking private audiences with me in the Video room. Since this was located in a basement and had a barred and padlocked door, it was a matter of some urgency (or delicacy) as to how one got out. On one occasion the girl snatched the key and thrust it into her undergarments. 'Get it!' she insisted, with alarming belligerence. 'Zina,' a Dravidian colleague confided, 'is the Malayo-Arabic word for illegal sexual congress. It is punishable by deportation, at the very least, you cad.' 'Only,' countered a statistician from Chipping Wellwater, jabbing the Dravidian’s chest with the authoritative digit of one who has looked long and closely into such matters, 'if the girl is under the age of fifteen. If the girl is over the age of fifteen she is considered to have seduced you. You get off with a bollocking, mate. She has concrete poured over her.' 'Wouldn’t you know it!' spat a spike-haired Kentish maid in a power suit. 'It doesn’t matter where we are in the world, you find a way to dump on us.' Reading Lolita in Bandar Seri Begawan was, I was finding out, very much the thing to be doing.
But neither Zina nor Lolita was uppermost on my mind that morning at SOAS. I’d been lucky, everyone said so, bloody lucky. The pupils of SOAS were notorious for their diligence, conscientiousness and ingenuity. One over-enthusiastic teacher had been scalped during a fire-drill by a length of piano-wire. Another, already embarrassed by a cleverly staged soaking, had had the seat of his trousers incinerated when he sat on a chair sprinkled with potassium. A Welsh geographer had wound up in the Orthopaedic unit of the city hospital, as mummified and rolling-eyed as Bernard Bresslaw in a Carry On spoof. More to the point, the school was where one of Europe’s better-known novelists had suffered a nervous breakdown thirty years earlier. Under his given name, John Wilson, Anthony Burgess had been posted to SOAS in the late 1950s. He’d gone through the motions of imparting the benefits of Western civilisation for nearly two years, finally succumbing to the humidity (the fans were not working) while giving a history lesson. In the first part of his autobiography, or ‘confessions,’ as he calls it, Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess claimed rumours of a female cobra searching for its young in the corridor had had a hand in his collapse. It is possible that the creature was metaphorical.
A cobra crops up earlier in his narrative, next to his lodgings in the King’s Pavilion, Malay College, in Kuala Kangsar, Malaya, right beside the marital nest this time. It is tempting to pursue a tabloid journalism line of investigation. Lynne, Burgess’s first wife, could not have children, and if not actively searching for some, seems to have spent quite a bit of time plunging in and out of other men’s beds demonstrating her infecundity. At any rate, a few pages later, now speaking of his breakdown, Burgess implies that he was being pursued by the furies not only of exhaustion and illness, government suspicion and British Residential disfavour, but also of the homesickness, ill-temper and general despair of an alcoholic and religiously unfaithful spouse. (In view of his frequent allusions to it, Burgess’s own phrase for this wifely inclination, ‘philosophically unfaithful,’ strikes me as aphoristic only.) None of this was helped by the British reading public’s indifference to his literary productions—what he did get in royalties for the first two installments of his Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, didn’t encourage him to believe he could make a living out of writing. Burgess was also experiencing his first libel suit. The disfigured lawyer Hardman in the second volume, The Enemy in the Blanket, who converts to Islam and marries a wealthy Malay widow, had been based on a man Burgess knew when he worked in Selangor, during the Malayan episode. This individual, despite expressing unalloyed delight according to Burgess, when forewarned of the character’s provenance, had jumped on him as soon as the book appeared, demanding a large sum in damages. The novel was withdrawn from circulation.
As he often likes to tell his reader, Burgess was born on the wrong side of the tracks, and another obstacle to health, wealth and literary accolades was English class snobbery. When the final volume of the trilogy, Beds in the East, came out, it was sneered at by the loftier representatives of England’s ‘damnable class structure.’ Burgess seems to have been particularly stung by the epithet ‘coarse’ as used by the poet and reviewer Geoffrey Grigson… Thus it was that in one of SOAS’s ground-floor classrooms (just behind me that morning of hormonal patriotism and looming rain), Burgess had reached the end of his tether. He’d lain down on the floor in the middle of the Boston Tea Party and hadn’t budged till the Principal and a team of tentatively moustachioed form captains came to look at him. Word of this act still lingered during my own sojourn, forty years later. Before I was relieved of my own post, I made a point of examining the classroom floorboards. They were all made of splintery soft wood, much like those you find in old-fashioned cricket pavilions. There were corpses of flying creatures in the corners, emitting brassy flashes and chestnut gleams like spent cartridges, victims of the dangerously whirling overhead fans rather than the craniums they’d shot into. Centipedes lay coiled like exotic bracelets amidst the debris of sweet wrappers and squirrel droppings. It was inconceivable that anyone could have lain down on such a floor. For all sorts of reasons, this, I decided, had to be the pivotal moment in Burgess’s life.
Thereafter, on the pretext that he would soon die of an inoperable brain tumour, Burgess had devoted himself to the craft, typing out at speed and with monstrous energy no less than five full-length manuscripts in one year. Yet, when the Hour came and went, he didn’t let up, producing by the end of his days a bibliography of greater length and variety than any I have ever seen in my life, nor am ever likely to see again. An earlier fan (Martin Amis, probably) once compared Burgess to a hyperactive volcano regularly spewing out verbal and lexical ash, petrifying the surrounding countryside under layers of fiery text. It may be that Burgess first got into the habit of writing as much and as variously as he did—novels, short stories, non-fiction, children’s stories, book reviews, op-ed pieces, lectures, librettos, symphonies, poetry, football commentary, re-writes of Shirley Conran, TV and film scripts, anything really—to avoid the put-downs and fists of a brawling gin-soaked spouse, as he sometimes intimates, as much as to secure the future against mother’s ruin. On the other hand, if the ostentatious polymathy of his outpourings is anything to go by, he may just have simply wanted to prove himself to that larger, even less sympathetic audience of toffs that had so pounced upon and pronounced upon his first efforts at the novel. Resentment is not just a Marxian motor; it has roots in Nietzschean overdrive. Burgess often compared himself to Shakespeare and Joyce, two other wildly warbling over-achievers, also prone to coarseness and excessive erudition. But let us return to that moment on the floor.
How he was lying? Foetal fashion? Prone, as if pole-axed, eyes glassy with clairvoyance or opium? Or fantastically, inspirationally, with arms outstretched and ankles crossed? Was he aware of the bugs at all? Probably not. His eyes, he points out, were closed at the time. There is not much to see from a SOAS classroom floor, anyway: four overhead fans, whirling at nautical angles, rain-smeared window-panes, the pimply moon-faces of Form 2B, an investigative pencil point arrowing down. On the other hand, there is much to think on: How to get out of such a place? What sort of job to go for next? How to get by on writing alone? This, I have said, was the big one, the founding crisis, the turning-point. To succeed as an artist—or at least to fail spectacularly—one must do more than throw caution to the wind, one must lie down with the droppings. But there is much more to it than that. The whole thing is, as Andrew Bidwell argues in his workmanlike, robustly discreet biography (The Real Life of Anthony Burgess), a bit of a mystery. Perhaps, swinging our way through the trees with the Head Men of French literary theory, we might want to lick and spittle that judgement up a bit. Such an act constitutes, let us aver, a Foucauldian event, a Derridean aporia, a Deleuzian becoming and a species of Lacanian jouissance, occult and pregnant and completely unknowable—presaging and encapsulating our world, this world, the world of the hyperreal about to explode from the collective breast like that shrieking creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien. As he lay there, Burgess saw it coming, but on the back of a more innocent-seeming, subtly incendiary local image— ‘slowly, like a sampan on the horizon.’
Burgess saw lots of things coming. He saw JFK die in a dream, a month before it happened. He came face to face with his own brachiated Enderbyian destiny (he was a keen reader of Borges) one horrible crapulent morning in the bog in Brunei, a decade before he wrote it up. In one of his last books, he even saw the world end, following an encounter with a fizzing asteroid. This last eschatology he made no claims for. One thing he did make claims for was the indivisibility of lies and truth—though he salts this preposterism with an appeal to the way facts do violence to memory’s elective affinities: ‘Memories sometimes lie in relation to facts, but facts also lie in respect of memory.’
There is an intense symbiotic relationship between Burgess’s grasp of history and Burgess’s fictional capacity. His life, as he tells it, gives the impression of having been lifted straight from his novels, rather than the other way round. His account of the Malaya and Brunei days has the same characters (seven foot tall alcoholic soldiers, adulterous blonde wives, pompous English schoolmasters, credulous Australian road-menders, hopeful revolutionaries), appearing in exactly the same order and with the same noisy entrances as in the novels; it has the same crises and catastrophes; it even has the same snatches of dialogue and gags (what Burgess, proof-reading over my shoulder, would have called lazzi). The Malayan and Brunei passages in Little Wilson and Big God are direct cribs from The Long Day Wanes and Devil of a State respectively. Even the teaching aid English Literature: A Survey for Students, written during the Brunei passage, carries an air of incredulity and imposture. Of course, most life is drawn from fiction—it has elements of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, as anyone familiar with Celebrity Big Brother knows—but not much life is so often and so entertainingly fictional. In exceptional cases, such as that of Jeffrey Archer, it can be richly and unrelentingly fantastic (in compensation perhaps for the impoverishment of the fiction), but that’s another story.
Devil of a State records the frustrated attempts of Frank Lydgate to extricate himself from the coils of his African mistress, the wiles of his Australian boss, Mudd, and the returning bosom of his fugitive and philosophically unfaithful Australian wife, Lydia. Readers of Little Wilson and Big God will now understand where the Australian road-builders and the ‘big-breasted Australian girl’ Burgess lusts after in the SOAS staffroom come from. The tale is set in the imaginary African state of Naraka—which name, so Burgess helpfully informs us (in his autobiography), is the Malayo-Arabic word for Hell. The country is modelled on Brunei Darussalam—which means Brunei, Abode of Grace (or Heaven), an embedded ironic inversion which Burgess doesn't inform us of. Lydgate, who has Burgess’s spindly legs and drink-habit, spends time in a bar called the Kool Kaffi (badly diffracted into the Snowman and OK bars in Burgess’s Brunei Town), which is also the resort of various expatriate and patriate characters that will recur in the confessions: a giant Mongolian woman and her flaccid English spouse, a transvestite (or ‘epicene’, in Burgess’s gaily PC-resistant grimoire), a fat Italian marble-cutter and his goatish son, various stiff-necked British officials. The comedy is anxious, desperate, grotesque, much like real life, much like, well, a true story or an autobiography, the funnies wobbling out of an inferno of black smoke. The ardour is set up, crafted and then, weirdly, sublimated at the point of sublimity.
In fact all Burgess’s novels are products of writerliness, craft, a form of mannered mimesis, onto whose walls the author sprays, he just can’t help himself, tidbits of elegantly phrased learning, arcane philology, sinister lore—not so much artful Tristram Shandyesque graffiti as coded appeals, crying out for something or someone beyond the red-faced teary-eyed reader. It is not just the odd unusual word (desquamation, obturator, monophthongal) or mysterious and incontrovertible erudition (Omar Khayyam’s trick of turning the word bam—dome—into jam—cup—that a Muslim theologian thinks of when viewing the golden dome of a new mosque) that grants this quality of appeal. The claim, inserted with equivalent arbitrariness into an account of his libretto Cyrano de Bergerac in the second volume of the Confessions, You’ve Had Your Time, that obscure words have the effect of arresting the reader’s joyless skimming, is the feeblest of extenuations. Perhaps he never got over his awe of Joyce, particularly the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, and flailed around in fitful iconoclasm ever afterwards. Perhaps it was always just a class thing—the Moss Side bookie’s lad with the flat vowels (he could write purple prose, but he wasn’t born into the purple), shouldering his way into the nobs’ scholarium he kept seeing on the other side of a bad review. It might also be that he wanted to matter to someone other than the dead mother he never knew or the father who never knew him. That is the key, let’s imagine, mattering, in the very special sense of being-in-the-world, but always tripping over into abyssal ipseity. Burgess writes on the brink of the deconstructive attitude, years before it became fashionable to teeter.
He picks up a word as if it’s just fallen off the back of a truck, the Manchester urchin scavenging for coals. You get the feeling that what he writes doesn’t come from him, or doesn’t belong to him; that he writes what he writes because someone else did it before him. Even his acerbity seems hand-me-down. This is not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong, this is a question of sensitivity to the cleavage between word and meaning, between sign and referent. Burgess writes the simulacrum, with a kind of sighing grandeur. Which is to say that he writes in a world just emerging from the darkness of the imperial past, that can no longer find succour in the Word—that now finds words swarming and stinging at its ears like so many angry cyber-bees. What he couldn’t bear, what he kept flinching away from, was the fact that the novel, which he conflated with Art (albeit reluctantly, after he couldn’t make a go of the Music), and which for him found its supreme embodiment in Finnegans Wake, was a product of a particular set of geo-historical forces, a particular geography, a particular history. What he wouldn’t do was write in the knowledge that what he wrote, in the post-imperial sunshine, was only fiction, anchored in a particular time and place, choric, factitious, borrowed, parochial, no longer Bardic and Literary, no longer subject to the polite applause of the loftier representatives of a damnable class structure. Had he done so, of course, we would not have got The Long Day Wanes, Nothing Like the Sun, A Clockwork Orange, Earthly Powers, the Enderby novels, or the wonderful, the unbelievable Little Wilson and Big God.
I read The Long Day Wanes for the first time in Brunei. I thought it was pretty good at showing the effects on tired or half-hearted marriages of expatriate life. Its domestic tedium and drunken longuers in Tea Gardens and chop shops and sexual and fiscal shenanigans everywhere else seemed to me very much on the money in the post-colonial world, where we British were just getting accustomed to being contractual employees or tourists, rather than residential officers, policemen and sahibs in solar topees, and our past was either an album of sepia photographs for blubbery wallowing or a rogues gallery. This was now a very different world, as Burgess himself points out, from the implausibly juicy one W. Somerset Maugham had squeezed dry in his hard-nosed little fictions. In Time for a Tiger and Beds in the East, you feel the heat and mess of post-imperial life, and it doesn’t matter at all that the main characters are British.
The only time I actually encountered Burgess in Brunei was courtesy of the BBC world service. If it was an intermittent encounter, the tropical weather affecting reception, it was one hell of an an eye-opener. I can’t remember the programme, but Burgess spoke at length about himself, if ‘spoke’ is the right word for such booming pontification. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Listening to Burgess talking about himself was like listening to a Nuremburg Rally—the sensurround donner und blitzen adding atmospheric special effects. One felt girded up as if for a pincer attack on Russia. When two years later I heard that Burgess had died, I re-read the Malayan Trilogy and my nape hairs tingled again and I thanked the unearthly powers that such a writer had lived.
Burgess is very good at identifying small but evidently satisfying symmetries, sometimes between himself and other writers (Shakespeare, Joyce and Lawrence, all, like himself, backstreet boys), sometimes between his dreams and world events, sometimes between literary creations and their real-life associations. When, in You’ve Had Your Time, he writes about his move to Italy, to the northern town of Bracciano, he can’t resist mentioning the local Orsini family’s commemoration in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. He doesn’t mention the more obvious Duke of Brachiano in Webster’s The White Devil who abandons his mistress to painful death the better to preserve his own. Burgess seems to have missed a trick there, which is odd, as he knew the Jacobean dramatists so well and had written appreciatively of Webster’s plays. Why, one wonders? One might posit some unconscious motivation, and go on to prognosticate all manner of dark repressions based on Brachiano’s betrayal of Vittoria, but this is just gossip, the grim license of vulgar net-curtain twitching Freudianism. It’s much more interesting to wonder why he went for the Shakespeare association instead.
For Burgess, Shakespeare is the greatest of all writers. That’s why he begins and ends his autobiography with him. But what does it mean to think in terms of greater and lesser writers, to speak of ‘first rate’ and ‘the first rank’, etc.? It evidently meant a lot to Burgess, since he does it so often. We know he felt overlooked and discarded by the magisterial English. There’s a nice moment in You’ve Had Your Time, when he mentions his nomination for the Booker Prize (he'd missed out to William Golding): “I’d vaguely heard of it,” he sniffs. There are three kinds of writer—the first two are the iconolater and the iconoclast. Art is iconic. It represents the sacred. Iconoclasts relish Art as Word. Every copy of the original is a diminution, a dilution, so they have to re-write, go back, re-turn, pare things back down to the original icy breath of speech. Iconoclasts are preservationists. They comprise the vast majority of writers. Some random examples are Plato, Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Melville, Joyce, Tolstoy, both Eliots, both Lawrences, Beckett, Golding, Pynchon, Rushdie, Morrison, Sebald and Pamuk. Iconolaters are not so high-minded; they add to the icon, colouring it, copying it, distorting it, playing with it. Form is their metier, not content, synthesizers not acoustic guitars. Examples are Aristotle, Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, Wilde, Borges, Nabokov, Queneau, Kundera, Benabou. Burgess belongs to a third class. It's a sort of literary underclass, forever seeking admission to the first, while inhabiting, thunderously, with a slowly corrupting liver, the second.
Burgess lived in a shack-like dwelling across the road from Azahari, leader of the Party of Freedom, the Brunei government’s opposition. He formed an alliance with the man and claims to have been asked to translate his manifesto, Perang Yang Akan Datang (The Coming Battle) into Macauleyan English. Azahari’s house still stands. It is set in abundant overflowing jungle. It was called the Chinese Club for a while, and may have housed Dayak prostitutes in the 1970s. In 1989, you could play snooker there and drink copious quantities of Anchor beer. A year later, with a tougher version of Islam cutting a swathe through the land, it shut its doors. The beize turned brown and tatty. Monkeys lounged about the rafters. They had buzz cuts and bright lemon-yellow bottoms.
The stretch of land opposite, where Burgess’s house should have been, was treacly swamp. There, I spent an afternoon watching a solitary heron, blind in one eye, spearing fish.
