John Wilson.  Great Writer.

The Pianoplayers a novel by Anthony Burgess.  Arbor House.  208 pages.  ****

Anthony Burgess is one of my great literary heroes.  Born in 1917—the same year as my father—he was a middle-aged itinerant teacher[1] who had done some writing on the side (he’d actually published four novels; only for Burgess would that be considered a sideline) when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a year to live.  Married to an alcoholic and rather hopeless woman (so the story goes; I suspect other motives[2]), he decided to crank his literary career into overdrive in the hope of providing for her.  In that year he wrote five and a half novels, including his most famous title (because it was made into a movie) A Clockwork Orange, only to discover that the doctor had made a false diagnosis.  Within a few years, in fact, it was his wife who died.  But he went on to a long and active career as a writer and musician, producing a huge variety of work, and died at age 76, still furiously working.

It is tempting to look back on a career like that and ask, What is his great, indispensable work?  A few months back, in fact, someone did ask a question like that, on Facebook (what is your favorite Burgess novel, aside from A Clockwork Orange?  Weirdly for a Burgess fan, I’ve never read that book), and it was tempting to answer with his largest work, Earthly Powers, a huge novel about a Somerset Maugham-esque novelist; I read that book when it came out and enjoyed it immensely.  It occurred to me eventually that my favorite work was actually a series, the Enderby novels, about a hapless poet who suffers from severe intestinal distress; there are four in all (though the fourth was a late entry).

But with Burgess, the great thing is the whole life’s work, and unlike other prolific people like Simenon and Wodehouse, the books are not all the same; they’re actually wildly different from one another, even those first five (and a half).  A number of his books are experiments in language, as A Clockwork Orange apparently was, and he was an obsessive linguist, obsessed in particular with James Joyce.  I read recently that at the end of his life he had been hoping to translate Finnegan’s Wake into Italian, just for the fun of it (not my idea of a good time).  But he was just such a Mind, with so many interests (including composing music).  It seems petty to separate out one thing and say that is the best.

Burgess was a particular inspiration to me because, when I was 53 and had taken a job at Duke University because we needed for the money, I thought my writing career might be over; I’d always written in a deliberate plodding way (rapid drafts that I worked over endlessly).  I had just read the second volume of his autobiography, in which he talked about his strategy during that fateful year: he would compose 1500-2000 words per day, and work them over as much as he wanted that day, but no longer; the next day he would produce that many again.  That seemed impossible when I read about it.

Then I thought, what if it’s that or nothing?  Also: I’m 53 years old.  If I haven’t learned to write a sentence at this point, I might as well quit.  Using that method, I was able to compose a shortish book during the course of a summer, and subsequently wrote three novels, followed by a memoir, then another novel.  (Only two of the novels have been published, but that’s not my fault.)  And now, a year older than Burgess ever got to be, I’m writing about books and movies with the same kind of enthusiasm he brought to it, to his dying day, apparently (he kept asking magazines for assignments).  It’s never seemed like work to me.  It’s a great way to live.

I reviewed The Pianoplayers for USA Today in 1986, the year it came out.  I know that because the little card making the assignment is still paper-clipped to the back book jacket.  500 words, due on October 5^th.  I loved writing for that paper, because it taught me to shrink reviews to their essence (a talent that I have lost since, obviously).  It taught me what book reviewing really was.

There was another harrowing medical trauma in Burgess’ life, though perhaps not in his memory.  In 1918, his whole family was infected by the flu epidemic.  His mother and sister died (at one point he, at the age of one, was left alone in the house with the two corpses).  His father fortunately did not die, but Burgess believed the man had some resentment of the fact that his son had lived, and not the others.  Burgess was raised by an aunt for a while, before reuniting with his father once he had remarried.  His father worked in a public house owned by the woman he married and played the piano at the place in the evening.  Burgess in this novel goes back to that time, but makes piano playing the father’s only means to make money; he also, in the kind of shift that Burgess (and one of his favorite artists, Shakespeare) does rather casually, makes himself a girl.

I suspect that, on the cusp of 70, Burgess wrote this novel in order to reconnect with that period of his life, not just the succession of crummy flats that he lived in, but also the food, which he details endlessly (it’s no wonder that Enderby, and Burgess himself, had intestinal difficulties), and the whole texture of life.  Ellen’s father Billy, whose weaknesses are alcohol, bad food, and women, at first plays at silent movies, where he more or less invents the score as he goes along.  He gets into various scrapes at work, moving from theater to theater, some far better than others.  At one job he teaches his daughter to play, and on one occasion she subs for him (one gets the impression people weren’t there for the music).  Eventually, of course, the talkies come along and he’s out of work altogether.

Ellen in the meantime, all alone much of the time and trying to make her way as best she can, supplements their living by taking money for sex, with an older man whose wife has recently died.  She understands what’s going on when he asks her back to his flat, but she’s curious, and she and her father could really use the money (she wants her own room in the boarding house, because she’s in her early teens).  All this seems mildly unlikely as I write it, but not as I read it; the older man who hangs around the girls’ school isn’t all that unusual a figure, and his approach to Ellen wasn’t threatening.  She knew she could handle him.  And she wanted that room.

The apotheosis of Billy’s music career comes when an entrepreneur persuades him to take on the task of a marathon concert, 30 straight days with only two two-hour breaks per day.  Whether anyone ever did such a thing I have no idea (sounds like a dance marathon), and—spoiler alert—he doesn’t make it, but people come to pay admission especially as things get difficult for him; they like seeing the man suffer.  He took the job because he didn’t have another prospect, also because he was hoping to acquire a nest egg so that he and his daughter could travel to America, where he thought he could sell a system he had invented for teaching children the violin (much like the Suzuki method that later became so successful).  He doesn’t get there, but the list of songs he resorts to while he is playing is mammoth and hilarious.  Eventually he composes his own opera, also other kinds of music; people who were there at the end said his music had become sublime.  But he didn’t make thirty days.  He didn’t get particularly close.

After that we focus on Ellen’s career, which she mentioned as the novel opened; perhaps because of her early experiences, she becomes a common—actually a rather uncommon—prostitute.  At first she works at a house in France that caters to those who want young women, then moves to a place that caters to all kinds of men.  She doesn’t go into detail, but seems content with the work.

Eventually she decides that men know nothing about making love to a woman—who needs to be played like a sensitive musical instrument, a piano in particular—and starts a School for Love, along with some other former hookers.  She moves back to Great Britain for that, and of course it’s right on the edge of being illegal; it’s more like what we think of nowadays as sexual surrogates.  That works out well for her, and for the men as well.  By the end of the story she has retired to Provence and is living a life of leisure.

I do wonder what I made of this novel 39 years ago, with the 500 words I had to devote to it.  In the larger oeuvre of a man like Burgess, it’s a diversion, something to keep him writing (he could knock this off in a matter of weeks).  It’s largely a feast of language, as all of his books are; the plot is secondary (and doesn’t bear terribly hard scrutiny).  But the Burgess shelf is full of books like these, deftly written, highly imagined, with just a little corner of experience from his own life.  It’s never a mistake to pick up a Burgess novel.

His real name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson.  His pen name was a good career move.

[1] Many years later, he made his way to my current home state.  Back in the nineties, I taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina for a couple of semesters, and a party around that time I mentioned I was doing that to a guy I’d just met.  “I took that class,” he said.  “I had Anthony Burgess for that class.”  I asked how he was.  “Great,” he said.  “He was drunk, but he was great.”

[2] I have a feeling that Burgess’ terminal diagnosis, however little credence he gave it, spurred his creativity and ignited his career.