Anthony Burgess
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Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) a fost un romancier şi un critic englez, celebru pentru scrierea romanul său distopic Portocala mecanică, ecranizat de Stanley Kubrick. E de asemenea un compozitor britanic.
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[modifică] Note biografice
Personalitatea complexă a lui Burgess continuă să incite şi să deconcerteze. Romancier, dramaturg, compozitor, libretist, eseist, semantician, traducător şi critic, totul ţine la el de paradox. Literatura i-a adus succesul, dar Burgess ar fi vrut să fie privit mai curând ca muzician („Muzica e o artă mai pură pentru ca nu se leagă direct de peripeţiile oamenilor“). Pentru a rezista psihic în timp ce scria grozaviile din Portocala mecanică a trebuit sa se îmbete zdravan, altminteri se considera înainte de toate un autor comic. El însuşi a fost victima unei farse: în 1959 i se diagnostichează un cancer la creier, medicii îi mai dau doar un an de trăit şi, vrând să lase in urma ceva avere, scrie repede patru romane care au succes. Diagnosticul se dovedeste greşit, iar Burgess ramâne scriitor. În ciuda nonconformismului violent al Portocalei mecanice, în anii '70 îl gasim în America, unde joaca rolul unui distins profesor de literatură.
[modifică] Viaţa
[modifică] Copilăria
John Burgess Wilson se naşte pe 25 februarie 1917 la Manchester. N-o să primească cel de-al doilea prenume, Anthony, decât mai târziu, iar numele lui de pană bine cunoscut nu-l va adopta înainte de 1956.
La un an, din cauza gripei spaniole din 1918, îi moare mama care fusese o actricţă şi dansatoare minoră cunoscută, potrivit însuşi Burgess, sub numele de scenă The Beautiful Belle Burgess. Tatăl Joseph Wilson fusese, printre altele, ofiţer la armată, pianist, vânzător de enciclopedii etc. Se recăsătoreşte cu o cârciumăreasă. Burgess îl descrie ca "cel mai absent alcoolic care s-a vreodată pretins a fi un tată".
De fapt, Burgess a fost crescut de matuşa lui, iar mai târziu de mama vitregă. Copilăria a petrecut-o mai mult singur.
[modifică] Tineretea si studiile
Burgess şi-a început studiile la St. Edmund's Roman Catholic Elementary School, iar ulterior la Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial Roman Catholic Primary School din Moss Side. pentru câţiva ani, familia sa a locuit pe Princess Street din acelaşi district.
Good grades from Bishop Bilsborrow resulted in a place at the noted Manchester Catholic secondary school, Xaverian College. It was during his teenage years at this school that he lapsed formally from Catholicism, although he cannot be said to have broken completely with the Church.
He entered the University of Manchester in 1937, graduating three years later with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, 2nd class honours, upper division, in English language and literature. His thesis was on the subject of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
He had originally wanted to study music, but his grades in physics – then a requirement for the subject – were deemed not high enough to qualify for a place on the programme.
Burgess's father died of flu in 1938 and his stepmother of a heart attack in 1940.
[modifică] War service
In 1940 Burgess began a rather unheroic wartime stint with the military, beginning with the Royal Army Medical Corps, which included a period at a field ambulance station at Morpeth, Northumberland. During this period he sometimes directed an army dance band. He later moved to the Army Educational Corps, where among other things he conducted speech therapy at a mental hospital. He failed in his aspiration to win an officer's commission.
In 1942 the marriage took place in Bournemouth between Burgess and a Welshwoman named Llewela Jones, eldest daughter of a high-school headmaster. She was known to all as "Lynne". Although Burgess indicated on numerous occasions that her full name was Llewela Isherwood Jones, the name "Isherwood" does not appear on her birth certificate. Nor was Lynne related to the writer Christopher Isherwood as many people had believed. Lynne and Burgess were fellow students at Manchester University. Their marriage was childless, and, to put it mildly, tempestuous. She died of cirrhosis in 1968.
Burgess was next stationed in Gibraltar, a territory at the southern tip of Spain that Britain has controlled since the Treaty of Utrecht, at an army garrison (see A Vision of Battlements). Here he was a training college lecturer in speech and drama, teaching German, Russian, French and Spanish, and helped instruct the troops in "The British Way and Purpose". He was also an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces Education of the UK Ministry of Education.
[modifică] Early teaching career
Burgess left the army with the rank of sergeant-major in 1946, and was for the next four years a lecturer in speech and drama at the Mid-West School of Education near Wolverhampton and at the Bamber Bridge Emergency Teacher Training College (known as "the Brigg" and associated with the University of Birmingham) near Preston.
At the end of 1950 he took a job as a secondary school teacher of English literature on the staff of Banbury Grammar School (now defunct) in the market town of Banbury, Oxfordshire (see The Worm and the Ring, which the then mayoress of Banbury claimed libeled her). In addition to his teaching duties Burgess was required to supervise sports from time to time, and he ran the school's drama society.
The years were to be looked back on as some of the happiest of Burgess's life. Thanks to financial assistance provided by Lynne's father, the couple was able to put a downpayment on a cottage in the picturesque village of Adderbury, not far from Banbury.
Burgess organised a number of amateur theatrical events in his spare time. These involved local people and students and included productions of T.S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes (Burgess had named his Adderbury cottage Little Gidding, after one of Eliot's Four Quartets) and Aldous Huxley's The Gioconda Smile.
It was in Adderbury that Burgess cut his journalistic teeth, with several of his contributions published in the local newspaper the Banbury Guardian.
The would-be writer was a habitué of the pubs of the village, especially The Bell and The Red Lion, where his predilection for consuming large quantities of cider was noted at the time. But he and his wife are believed to have been barred from one or more of the Adderbury pubs because of their riotous behaviour.
[modifică] Malaya
In January 1954 Burgess was interviewed by the British Colonial Office for a post in Malaya (now Malaysia) as a teacher and education officer in the British colonial service. He was offered the job and accepted with alacrity, being keen to explore Eastern lands. Several months later he and his wife travelled to Singapore by the liner Willem Ruys from Southampton with stops in Port Said and Colombo.
Burgess was stationed initially in Kuala Kangsar, the royal town in Perak, in what were then known as the Federated Malay States. Here he taught at the Malay College, dubbed "the Eton of the East" and now known as Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK).
In addition to his teaching duties at this school for the sons of leading Malayans, he had responsibilities as a housemaster in charge of students of the preparatory school, who were housed at a Victorian mansion known as "King's Pavilion". The building had once been occupied by the British Resident in Perak. And the edifice had gained notoriety during World War II as a place of torture, being the local headquarters of the Kempeitai (Japanese secret police).
As his novels and autobiography document, Burgess's late 1950s coincided with the communist insurgency, an undeclared war known as the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) when rubber planters and members of the European community – not to mention many Malays, Chinese and Tamils – were subject to frequent terrorist attack.
Following, but not necessarily consequent upon, an alleged dispute with the Malay College's principal about accommodation for himself and his wife, Burgess was posted elsewhere – the couple occupied an apparently rather noisy apartment in the building mentioned above, where privacy was supposedly minimal. This was the professed reason for his transfer to the Malay Teachers' Training College at Kota Bharu, Kelantan. Kota Bharu is situated on the Siamese border; the Thais had ceded the area to the British in 1909 and a British adviser had been installed.
Burgess attained fluency in Malay, spoken and written. The language was still at that time rendered in the adapted Arabic script known as Jawi. He spent much of his free time engaged in creative writing, "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it". He published his first novels, Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. These became known as "The Malayan Trilogy" and were later to be published in one volume as The Long Day Wanes. During his time in the East he also wrote English Literature: A Survey for Students, and this book was in fact the first Burgess work published (if we do not count an essay published in the youth section of the London Daily Express when Burgess was a child).
[modifică] Brunei
After a period of leave in Britain in 1959, Burgess took up a further Eastern post, this time at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In Brunei Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be entitled Devil of a State. Although the novel dealt with Brunei, for libel reasons the action had to be transposed to an imaginary East African "sultanate" the like of Zanzibar.
About this time Burgess "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom while teaching history. He was expounding on the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party at the time. There were reports that he had been diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumour, with the likelihood of only surviving a short time, occasioning the alleged breakdown. This turned out to be wrong. He was, however, suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking (and associated poor nutrition), of the often oppressive Southeast Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status. He may also have wished for a pretext to abandon teaching and get going full-time as a writer, having made a late start in the art of fiction.
Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration". But he gave a different account to the British arts and media veteran Jeremy Isaacs in 1987 when he said: "I was driven out of the Colonial Service for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons."
[modifică] Repatriate years
He was repatriated and relieved of his position in Brunei. He spent some time in a London hospital (see The Doctor Is Sick) where he underwent cerebral tests that, as far as can be made out, proved negative.
On his discharge, benefitting from a sum of money Lynn had inherited from her father together with their savings built up over six years in the East, he decided he had the financial independence to become a full-time writer.
The couple lived successively in an apartment in the town of Hove, near Brighton, on the Sussex coast (see the Enderby quartet of novels); in a semi-detached house called "Applegarth" in the inland Sussex village of Etchingham, just down the road from the residence in Burwash once occupied by Rudyard Kipling; and in a terraced town house in Chiswick, a western inner suburb of London, conveniently located for the White City BBC television studios of which he was a frequent guest in this period.
A cruise holiday Burgess and his wife took to the USSR, calling at St Petersburg (then still called Leningrad), resulted in Honey For the Bears and inspired some of the invented slang for A Clockwork Orange.
[modifică] European exile
By the end of the 1960s Burgess was once again living outside England, as a tax exile. It was in grander accommodation this time; indeed, at his death he was a multi-millionaire and left a Europe-wide property portfolio of houses and apartments numbering in the double figures.
He lived in a house he had bought at Lija, Malta, for a time, but problems with the state censor prompted a move to Rome. He maintained a flat in the Italian capital and a country house in Bracciano, and a property in Montalbuccio. There was a villa in Provence, in Callian of the Var, France, and an apartment just off Baker Street, London, very near the presumed home of Sherlock Holmes in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University (1970) and as a "distinguished professor" at the City College of New York (1972), and teaching creative writing at Columbia University. He had also been writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1969) and at the University at Buffalo (1976). He lectured on the novel at the University of Iowa in 1975.
Eventually he settled in Monaco, where he was active in the local community, becoming a co-founder in 1984 of the Princess Grace Irish Library, a centre for Irish cultural studies (http://www3.monaco.mc/pglib/). He spent much time also at one of his houses, a chalet, in Lugano, Switzerland.
After Lynne's death in 1968 at the age of forty-seven of liver cirrhosis (see Beard's Roman Women), he had remarried, to Liliana Macellari, an Italian translator, adopting the latter's son from a previous relationship. An attempt to kidnap the boy, called Paolo-Andrea, in Rome is believed to have been one of the factors deciding the family's move to Monaco.
[modifică] Death
Burgess once wrote: "I shall die somewhere in the Mediterranean lands, with an inaccurate obituary in the Nice-Matin, unmourned, soon forgotten." In the event he was to die in the country of his birth. He returned to Twickenham, an outer suburb of London, where he owned a house, to die on November 22, 1993. He was 76 years old. His actual death (of lung cancer – he was a lifelong heavy smoker) occurred at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in the St John's Wood neighbourhood of London. He is thought to have composed the novel Byrne on his deathbed.
It is believed he would have liked his ashes to be kept in Moston Cemetery in Manchester, but in the event they went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo.
The epitaph on Burgess's marble memorial stone, behind which the vessel with his remains is kept, reads "Abba Abba", which has several denotations: (1) the Hebrew for "Father, father", that is, an invocation to God as Father (Mark 14:36 etc.); (2) Burgess's initials forwards and backwards; (3) the pop group ABBA, which achieved world fame in the 1970s when Burgess was himself at the height of his powers; (4) part of the rhyme scheme for the Petrarchan sonnet; (5) the last words Jesus uttered, in Aramaic, from the Cross; and (6) the Burgess novel about the death of Keats, Abba Abba.
Burgess's stepson Paolo-Andrea survived him by less than a decade, dying aged 37 in 2002.
[modifică] Achievement
[modifică] Novels
With the Malayan trilogy (Time For A Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East), his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate experience of Malaya). It joins a family of such Eastern fictional explorations, including George Orwell's Burma (Burmese Days), E.M. Forster's India (A Passage to India) and Graham Greene's Viet Nam (The Quiet American). Burgess thereby continues in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.
Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese, necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi, having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay. This linguistic command results in an impressive verisimilitude and understanding of indigenous concerns in the trilogy.
Burgess's repatriate years (c. 1960-69) produced not just the Enderby cycle but the neglected The Right to an Answer, which touches on the theme of death and dying, and One Hand Clapping (to which the director Francis Coppola has recently acquired the film rights), partly a satire on the vacuity of popular culture. This era also witnessed the publication of The Worm and the Ring, which was withdrawn from circulation under the threat of libel action from one of Burgess's former co-workers.
A product of these highly fertile years was his best-known work (or most notorious, after Stanley Kubrick made a motion picture adaptation), the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Inspired initially by an incident during World War II in which his wife Lynne was allegedly robbed and assaulted in London during the blackout by deserters from the U.S. Army (an event that may have contributed to a miscarriage she suffered), the book was an examination of free will and morality. The young anti-hero, Alex, captured after a career of violence and mayhem, is given aversion conditioning to stop his violence. It makes him defenceless against other people and unable to enjoy the music (especially Beethoven, and more especially the Ninth Symphony) that, besides violence, had been an intense pleasure for him.
Then came Nothing Like the Sun, a fictional recreation of Shakespeare's love-life and an examination of the (partly syphilitic, it was implied) sources of the bard's imaginative vision. It won critical acclaim and placed Burgess in the front rank of novelists of his generation.
By the 1970s Burgess's output had become highly experimental, and some critics see a falling-off in quality in this period. MF (1971) showed the influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. Beard's Roman Women is considered by many to be his least successful novel (plea of mitigation: it was written entirely while on the road in his Bedford Dormobile campervan). But it is revealing on a personal level, dealing with the death of Burgess's first wife, his bereavement, and the affair that led to his second marriage. Napoleon Symphony contains among many other things a superb portrait of an Arab society under occupation by a western power (Egypt by France).
There was a triumphant return to form in the 1980s, when religious themes began to weigh heavy (see The Kingdom of the Wicked and Man of Nazareth as well as Earthly Powers). Though Burgess lapsed from Catholicism early in his youth, the influence of the Catholic "training" and worldview remained strong in his work all his life. This is notable in the discussion of free will in A Clockwork Orange, and in the apocalyptic vision of devastating changes in the Catholic Church – due to what can be understood as Satanic influence – in Earthly Powers (1980). That work was written in the first instance as a parody of the blockbuster novel.
He kept working through his final illness, and was writing on his deathbed. The last works include Any Old Iron, a generational saga about two families (one Russian-Welsh, the other Jewish) that encompasses the sinking of the Titanic, WWI, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, and the early years of the State of Israel (as well as the imagined rediscovery of King Arthur's Excalibur). A Dead Man In Deptford, about Christopher Marlowe, is a kind of companion volume to his Shakespeare novel Nothing Like The Sun. The verse novel Byrne was published posthumously.
He won few honours in his own country – his masterpiece Earthly Powers, for example, famously failed to win the Booker Prize for fiction – though he took honorary degrees from St Andrews, Birmingham and Manchester universities and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He did better on the European continent, where he garnered the "Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres" distinction of France and became a Monagesque "Commandeur de Merite Culturel".
[modifică] Criticism
Burgess began his career as a critic with a well regarded text for newcomers to the subject, English Literature, A Survey for Students, which is still used in many schools today. He followed this with The Novel Today and The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction.
Then came the Joyce studies Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader (also published as Re Joyce), Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce, and A Shorter Finnegan's Wake.
His Encyclopædia Britannica entry The Novel of 1970 is regarded as a classic of the genre.
Burgess has written full-length critical studies of William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence. His Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 remains an invaluable guide, while the published lecture Obscenity and the Arts explores issues of pornography.
[modifică] Linguistics
Burgess was a polyglot, with a command of Malay, Russian, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Welsh in addition to his native English, as well as of some Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish and Persian.
"Burgess's linguistic training," write Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, "is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronunciations and the niceties of register."
His interest in linguistics was reflected in the Anglo-Russian invented teen slang of A Clockwork Orange (called Nadsat) and in the film Quest for Fire (1981), for which he invented a prehistoric language for the characters to speak.
The hero of The Doctor is Sick, Dr. Edwin Spindrift, is a lecturer in linguistics. He escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech".
Burgess, who had lectured on phonetics at the University of Birmingham in the late 1940s, investigates the field of linguistics in Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air.
[modifică] Journalism
Burgess produced journalism in British, Italian, French and American newspapers and magazines regularly – even compulsively – and in prodigious quantities. Martin Amis wrote in the London Observer in 1987: "...on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid – and there is a Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500."
"He was our star reviewer, always eager to take on something new, punctilious with deadlines, length and copy," wrote Burgess's literary editor at the Observer, Michael Ratcliffe.
Selections of Burgess's journalism are to be found in Urgent Copy, Homage to QWERT YUIOP and One Man's Chorus.
[modifică] Screenwriting
Burgess wrote the screenplays for Moses the Lawgiver (Gianfranco De Bosio 1975, with Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quayle and Ingrid Thulin), Jesus of Nazareth (Franco Zeffirelli 1977, with Robert Powell, Olivia Hussey and Rod Steiger), and A.D. (Stuart Cooper 1985, with Ava Gardner, Anthony Andrews and James Mason).
He devised the stone-age language for La Guerre du Feu (Quest for Fire) (Jean-Jacques Annaud 1981, with Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nicholas Kadi).
He penned many unpublished scripts, including one about Shakespeare which was to be called Will! or The Bawdy Bard. It was based on his novel Nothing Like The Sun.
[modifică] Symphonies
As Burgess put it, in the way that others might enjoy yachting or golf, "I write music." He composed regularly throughout his life.
His works are infrequently performed today, but several of his pieces were broadcast during his lifetime on BBC Radio. His Symphony (No. 3) in C was premiered by the University of Iowa orchestra in 1975. Many of his unpublished compositions are listed in This Man and Music.
Sinfoni Melayu, characterised by the Burgess biographer Roger Lewis as "Elgar with bongo-bong drums", was described by Burgess, its composer, as an attempt to "combine the musical elements of the country into a synthetic language which called on native drums and xylophones".
The structure of the novel Napoleon Symphony (1974) was modelled on Beethoven's Eroica symphony, while Mozart and the Wolf Gang (1991) mirrors the sound and rhythm of Mozartian composition.
Burgess made plain his low regard for the popular music that has emerged since the mid-1960s, yet he has been called "the godfather of punk" as a result of the nihilist future world he created in A Clockwork Orange.
When Burgess was heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Desert Island Discs radio programmme in 1966, he made the following choice: Purcell, Rejoice in the Lord Alway; Bach, Goldberg Variations No 13; Elgar, Symphony No.1 in A flat major; Wagner, Walter's Trial Song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Debussy, Fêtes; Lambert, The Rio Grande; Walton, Symphony No.1 in B flat; and Vaughan Williams, On Wenlock Edge.
[modifică] Opera and musicals
Burgess produced a translation of Bizet's Carmen which was performed by the English National Opera.
He created an operetta based on James Joyce's Ulysses called Blooms of Dublin (composed in 1982 and performed on the BBC), and composed the music for the 1971 Minneapolis production of his Cyrano de Bergerac translation, adapting the Rostand play for Broadway.
His new libretto for Weber's Oberon was performed by the Edinburgh-based opera company Scottish Opera.
[modifică] Volume publicate
- Timpul pentru Tigru (1956) (Volumul 1 din trilogia Malayană , Ziua cea lungă piere)
- Inamicul din pătură (1958) (Volumul 2 al trilogiei)
- Beds in the East (1959) (Volumul 3 al trilogiei)
- Dreptul la un răspuns (1960)
- Doctorul e bolnav (1960)
- Viermele si inelul (1960)
- Devil of a State (1961)
- Aplauze cu o mână (1961)
- Portocala mecanică (1962)
- Sămânţa doritoare (1962)
- Miere pentru urşi (1963)
- Înăuntrul domnului Enderby (1963) (Volumul 1 din ciclul de romane Enderby cycle of novels)
- Ajunul de la St. Venus (1964)
- Nimic nu e ca soarele. O poveste a iubirilor lui Shakespeare (1964)
- O viziune a bataliiilor (1965)
- Tremurat intenţionat: un volum de spionaj eschatologic (1966)
- exteriorul lui Enderby (1968) (Volumul doi din ciclul Enderby|Enderby]] )
- Un 'Finnegans Wake' pe scurt (1969) (editor)
- M/F (1971)
- Sofocle' Oedip rege (1972) (traducere si adaptare)
- Simfonia lui Napoleon (1974)
- Testamentul macanic sau sfârşitul lui Enderby (1974) (Volumul 3 of din ciclul Enderby )
- O excursie lunga la vremea ceaiului (pentru copii) (1976)
- Moise: O poveste (1976) ( poem amplu)
- femei cu barbă romană (1976)
- Dorinţă şi testament : Fragment dintr-o biografie (1977)
- Abba Abba (1977)
- 1985 (1978)
- Omul din Nazaret: un roman (1979) (pornind de la scenariul musicalului Jesus of Nazareth (film) )
- Ţara unde creşte îngheţata (pentru copii) (1979)
- Puteri pământeşti (1980)
- Sfârşitul stirilor globale: un amuzament (1982)
- Doamna bruna a lui Enderby, sau nici un final pentru Enderby (1984) (Volumul 4 al ciclului Enderby)
- Regatul celor mincinoşi (1985)
- Cyrano de Bergerac dupa Rostand(1985) (traducere si adaptare scenică)
- Trecutul si prezentul lui Oberon (cu J.R. Planche) (1985)
- Cântăreţii la pian (1986)
- Bobocii din Dublin: O piesa muzicală bazata pe romanul Ulise al lui James Joyce's Ulysses (1986)
- Carmende Bizet, libret (1986) (traducere)
- Portocala mecanică: o piesa cu muzica (1987)
- Orice fier vechi (1988)
- The Devil's Mode and Other Stories (1989) (short stories)
- Mozart si banda lupilor (1991)
- Mortul din Deptford (1993)
- Byrne: un roman (poem) (1995)
- Sonete revoluţionare si alte poeme (2002)
[modifică] Non-fiction
- Literatura engleză: Manual pentru studenţi (1958)
- Romanul la zi (1963)
- Limba pe şleau (1964)
- Re Joyce(1965),
- Era Marilor Excursii (1966) (co-editor cu Francis Haskell)
- Romanul azi: Un ghid pentru studenţii ficţiunii contemporane (1967)
- Copie urgentă: studii literare (jurnalism) (1968)
- Romanul (eseu pentru Encyclopædia Britannica ) (1970)
- Shakespeare (1970)
- 'Ce e pornografia?' (eseu) in Perspectives on Pornography, ed. Douglas A. Hughes (1970)
- Joysprick: O introducere in limbajul lui James Joyce (1973)
- Obscenitatea si arta (1973)
- New York vazut de Anthony Burgess (1976)
- O reţetă de Crăciun (1977)
- Ernest Hemingway şi lumea sa (1978), se mai numeste si Ernest Hemingway
- Scrissero in Inglese (1979) (versiunea in engleza, Au scris in engleza, publicată in 1989)
- Acest om şi muzica (1982)
- Merg la culcare (1982)
- 99 de romane, cele mai bune scrise vreodată in limba engleza din 1939 încoace, o opţiune personală (1984)
- Flacăra în viată: Viaţa şi opera lui D.H. Lawrence (1985)
- Micul Wilson si marele Dumnezeu, prima parte din confesiunile lui Anthony Burgess (Autobiografie, Partea 1) (1986)
- Eseu despre cenzura (letter to Salman Rushdie in verse) (1989)
- Ai trăit ceva, a doua parte din confesiunile lui Anthony Burgess (Autobiografie, Partea a 2 a ) (1990)
- Despre Mozart: Un pean pentru Wolfgang, fiinţa unui colocviu celest, un libret de opera, un scenariu de film, un dialog schizoid (1991)
- Gura plină cu aer: Limba si limbi, in special cu referire la limba engleză (1992)
- (Copilăria dupa Anthony Burgess (Penguin 60s) (1996)
- Un cor de o persoană: scrieri recuperate (jurnalism) (1998)
- Spania: cele mai bune călătorii publicate de New York Times (2001) (section)
- Excursie înapoi la tango (antologie din materialul publicat in revista Translation ) (2003)
