Great stuff. Thanks for effort and execution. My historical minded self wanted to see the unedited interview. But watching I stated thinking you most probably did us a favor. Thanx 👍
Greetings. The unedited interview is knocking around on TH-cam somewhere but it's hard to watch because Burgess keeps being interrupted - in that irritating way they have - by an overeducated but ignorant and shallow woman TV presenter.
Burgess is so much fun as a critic. Some of the novels are magnificent, the others may well be also, but they are out of my reach, for one reason and another.
@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess Right?! I wonder what the problem is with EP. I have friends who are major readers who have heard of the book and just know of Burgess from “A Clockwork Orange “. Perhaps this is only true in the US (where I live). Anyway I certainly appreciate commenting with someone else who has read the book. My regards!
@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess Critics! They were probably annoyed that they had to read (partly read?) and review a 600 page book. I checked out the Booker Prize nominations for fiction published in 1980-- EP is a better novel than the shortlisted ones, most of them I read and many I thought were quite forgettable. "Midnight's Children" won that year and a good case can be made for that, but I still think EP is a better book. "Ragbag" indeed!
Moby dick could definitely be called proto modernist but it came out in 1851 and the prose is still very much of the nineteenth century. Great Gatsby is definitely of the modernist era but isn’t pointed to perhaps as much as being a ‘modernist’ text because it’s story and prose is relatively conventional in comparison to Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf.
For instance, he claims somewhere, I think in his autobiography (much of the content of which is fabricated; it is the best novel he ever wrote) that in Gib, some officer found a copy of Finnegans Wake in Sgt-Maj Wilson's effects and thought it might be some kind of code book. Incredible to a ludicrous degree, but amusing.
It was supposed to have happened when he was 15. He travelled to France in order to procure a copy of Ulysses. He smuggled it back into England 'cut up into sections and distributed all over my body'. The customs officers at Dover, having not the slightest interest in banned literature, must've said to each other, 'Here's a total crackpot' and told him (to his disappointment), 'On your way, feller.'
The opportunity to become a prisoner of conscience came up again, in La Línea de la Concepción. Burgess was ready this time. He would not be denied. He made sure to be thrown into jail for the offence, he explains in his autobiography, of ‘upholding the democratic philosophy’ in a bordello. (Speaking for myself, when I visit a brothel, political questions are not uppermost in my mind, but there it is.) Burgess delivered a lengthy speech inside the bagnio, and continued it, even more loudly, outside in the street. (He was hog-whimpering drunk.) During the course of his address to the people - of La Línea in particular and of Spain in general - he described the Caudillo and President of the Government of Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, as, among other things, a dirty great ’cabrón’ (lit. billy-goat).
Superb. Thank you for sharing this.
Classic Anthony Burgess! A tidal wave of words, and at the end, you say "What have I just heard? I'm not sure what that was all about."
Classic indeed!
Bang on
Agreed.....and that's why he hated Maugham.
A well read man. He dips in andvout of so many subjects.
Is that a good thing?
Great stuff. Thanks for effort and execution. My historical minded self wanted to see the unedited interview. But watching I stated thinking you most probably did us a favor. Thanx 👍
Greetings. The unedited interview is knocking around on TH-cam somewhere but it's hard to watch because Burgess keeps being interrupted - in that irritating way they have - by an overeducated but ignorant and shallow woman TV presenter.
Bely's 'Petersburg' is a monumental joy. Happy to hear it mentioned by one of my favorites.
👍🏻
Touche, Anthony!
An excellent little summary of the modernist movement!
The discourse reminds me of many a night at the Dog and Duck in Accrington during my youth.
Burgess is so much fun as a critic. Some of the novels are magnificent, the others may well be also, but they are out of my reach, for one reason and another.
He is indeed great fun.
of whom Rupert Brooke was one... so let's have a Wilfred Owen pic...
His magnum opus "Earthly Powers" is one of the great novels of the 20th century and seems so little regarded.
Very well said.
It never palls, does it, that novel? I don't think I've ever read anything so absorbing, so entertaining, so instructive, or so wildly funny.
@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess Right?! I wonder what the problem is with EP. I have friends who are major readers who have heard of the book and just know of Burgess from “A Clockwork Orange “. Perhaps this is only true in the US (where I live). Anyway I certainly appreciate commenting with someone else who has read the book.
My regards!
@@deirdre108 The problem with EP? The critics didn't like it. It was judged to be too much of a 'ragbag'.
@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess Critics! They were probably annoyed that they had to read (partly read?) and review a 600 page book. I checked out the Booker Prize nominations for fiction published in 1980-- EP is a better
novel than the shortlisted ones, most of them I read and many I thought were quite forgettable. "Midnight's Children" won that year and a good case can be made for that, but I still think EP is a better book. "Ragbag" indeed!
Modernism never reached America? What about the two most popular novels to come from it, Moby-Dick and the Great Gatsby?
Moby dick could definitely be called proto modernist but it came out in 1851 and the prose is still very much of the nineteenth century. Great Gatsby is definitely of the modernist era but isn’t pointed to perhaps as much as being a ‘modernist’ text because it’s story and prose is relatively conventional in comparison to Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf.
@@earthlimited212I don’t read much old stuff, but Moby Dick was one of the easiest reads I’ve encountered. And I’m referring to the language.
Walking bandy-legged through customs with contraband stuffed down your trousers...don't try this at home.
Tee-hee! 😂 Actually I think Burgess made that up anyway.
For instance, he claims somewhere, I think in his autobiography (much of the content of which is fabricated; it is the best novel he ever wrote) that in Gib, some officer found a copy of Finnegans Wake in Sgt-Maj Wilson's effects and thought it might be some kind of code book. Incredible to a ludicrous degree, but amusing.
It was supposed to have happened when he was 15. He travelled to France in order to procure a copy of Ulysses. He smuggled it back into England 'cut up into sections and distributed all over my body'. The customs officers at Dover, having not the slightest interest in banned literature, must've said to each other, 'Here's a total crackpot' and told him (to his disappointment), 'On your way, feller.'
A opportunity to be a prisoner of conscience, and he fluffed it!
The opportunity to become a prisoner of conscience came up again, in La Línea de la Concepción. Burgess was ready this time. He would not be denied. He made sure to be thrown into jail for the offence, he explains in his autobiography, of ‘upholding the democratic philosophy’ in a bordello. (Speaking for myself, when I visit a brothel, political questions are not uppermost in my mind, but there it is.) Burgess delivered a lengthy speech inside the bagnio, and continued it, even more loudly, outside in the street. (He was hog-whimpering drunk.) During the course of his address to the people - of La Línea in particular and of Spain in general - he described the Caudillo and President of the Government of Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, as, among other things, a dirty great ’cabrón’ (lit. billy-goat).
Burgess: "in sum, as you can see, there is nothing I don't know. The white genius's burden."
Omniscience.
Polymathy.