The ‘lost’ novels that Anthony Burgess hoped would make him rich

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/19/anthony-burgess-lost-novels-clockwork-orange

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Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange who was born 100 years ago this year, described himself as “a graphomane”. When not composing music, he was indefatigably at work on many genres: novels, short stories, children’s books, plays, film scripts, poems and countless book reviews, many of them for the Observer.

Burgess was the hack’s hack, and also that creature now as fabled as the hippogriff, “a man of letters”. In 1961, for instance, he published no fewer than three novels. Once, he even reviewed one of his own books pseudonymously.

In a twist that Burgess himself might have relished, his manic productivity has now been trumpeted from beyond the grave. The Anthony Burgess Foundation has exclusively disclosed to the Observer a set of notes for three “lost” novels. The backstory to this discovery adds a new chapter to the writer’s fascinating afterlife.

After A Clockwork Orange (1962), Burgess planned a “George trilogy” about General George S Patton, George Gershwin and King George III, a manuscript which eventually morphed into The Fifth Gospel, a novel about the life of Christ written by one of his followers in an invented language based on Hebrew.

Burgess, who lived well, was always alert to new sources of income and instinctively at war with publishers about money. In 1972, he was feeling both hard-up and more than usually aggrieved.

Stanley Kubrick’s movie of A Clockwork Orange (1971) was enjoying worldwide acclaim, but its success had brought Burgess only meagre rewards. He knew he was bankable and was determined to cash in.

Enter Thomas P Collins, self-styled president of the (now defunct) Collins Corporation. This New York “book packager”, a mix of hustler and literary agent, had enjoyed some success approaching well-known literary “names” with promises of huge publishing contracts from established American houses.

Collins’s tempting overture persuaded Burgess to dash off, on his Smith-Corona electric typewriter, new synopses for the “George trilogy”, retitled “an American trilogy”, including The True Patton Papers, “a very concise novel, totally unwindy, well-written but admitting no literary flourishes”.

This would narrate the imaginary career of General Patton from D-Day until the moment when, “with the connivance of a dithering Eisenhower”, Patton would drive through Berlin and “plant the US flag on the Kremlin, fulfilling Churchill’s own mad dream”.

With a beady eye on the marketplace, Burgess boldly saluted “the cinematic possibilities” of this novel, speculating that George C Scott might reprise his Oscar-winning success in the 1971 film Patton. Burgess also projected The Rhapsody Man as a “not over-long novel” about George Gershwin that would be “highly entertaining as well as thoughtful and moving”. The Fifth Gospel would be narrated by “a simple Hebrew youth whose search for reality has led him into drugs” – a calculated allusion to A Clockwork Orange.

Typically provocative, Burgess asks: “If Christ were an emissary of the Devil, and rose on the third day, would we still believe in him? What, anyway, are the differences between God and the Devil?” On this note, Burgess signed off with hopes for a successful “appeal to a wider audience”.

In a letter reeking of opportunism and hustle, with references to the “buzz of our times”, and expectations of a “favourable” offer, Collins offered this trilogy to Robert Gottlieb, the renowned editor-in-chief of New York’s blue-chip publisher, Alfred A Knopf.

Speaking to the Observer, Gottlieb recalled that “Burgess was always on a money-fishing expedition — very rascally in his dealing with mere publishers.” He described Collins as “a shadowy packager”, but no longer remembers the details of “this three-book ploy”, which he rejected. He says that “Burgess floated out of my life as casually as he floated in. I liked him, and I admired him.” Once the writer appointed his wife, Liana, as his literary agent, Gottlieb withdrew from all future negotiations.

In this pitch to Gottlieb, Burgess had declared he would eschew both “tortuous syntax” and “wanton wordplay”. Andrew Biswell, director of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, is interested in Burgess’s flirtation with the American market: “At some point after 1972 he seems to have decided that his future as a writer lay in addressing a smaller, literary audience. The novels he published in 1974, The Clockwork Testament and Napoleon Symphony, were among his most experimental works. Perhaps he recognised that there was no future in trying to imitate the bestsellers of the day, such as The Exorcist and Jaws.”

Despite his rejection, Burgess’s material was never wasted. The musical element of the Gershwin novel surfaced in Napoleon Symphony (1974), and again in a later novel about Mozart.

In 1979 Burgess published Man of Nazareth, a more conventional novel about the life of Jesus, written in standard English. The following year, with Earthly Powers, for some readers his masterpiece, Burgess finally began to make real money.