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Rating: 
Summary: Enderby at bay.
Review: A 400 page screed of unwavering hate, envy, and malice, for a while Roger Lewis' book is something of a guilty pleasure to read. If the opera-queen-bitchy physical description on p.10 of the 30 page Prologue doesn't put one off altogether, it might be taken on as a kind of faux Nabokovian prank--a "real life of Burgess" effort, chock-a-block with the Lewis agenda and the grandiose Lewis ego (familiar from his efforts on Peter Sellers and Lawrence Olivier). But the incessant, wildly intemperate Burgess-bashing becomes tiresome after a while. He is apparently out to prove that, were there justice in the world, Lewis would have made a much better job of being Burgess. Everything for which Burgess is faulted is replicated in Lewis; it seems, in fact, a contest to match Burgess point-for-point as to ultra-comprehensive general knowledge, for enthusiastic unwillingness to let the tiniest slight go un-noted, unforgotten, or unanswered, for the uttermost in picayune Arcanum, for cane-swinging, arm-thrusting mountebankism. Even AB's prolixity is, in itself, to be condemned since "He wrote to keep back his thoughts, and not (particularly) to articulate them." (p.63) Lewis' ultimate weapon is his 1930's-never-tentative Freudian certainty matched with an apparent deficiency of humor--as well as a deep-seated confidence in his own cuteness. (What can be said of a man who sees nothing funny in the dying declaration AB ascribed--maybe apocryphally--to his father? "What does bloody God think he's bloody playing at?" ) This is actually a prosecution, as if Burgess were a war criminal guiltily in absentia. (Lewis even occasionally makes to call him out with taunts from the lectern.) No minor belch ever eructed is left unexplored, but is magnified, parsed, and AB damned roundly for it. No scrap of knowledge Lewis himself ever acquired is not thrust anywhichway into the text. Burgess a Polymath, indeed! I'll show you polymath! There are endlessly long foot-notal asides for the reader who may have missed out on the entirety of the last two centuries' history, or whose belief in Lewis' brilliance may have flagged since the last endlessly long foot-notal aside. This volume may have some value as an artifact of obsession, of fixation, of donnish spite, but it is certainly not a biography. And such a vituperative assault hardly seems necessary for a perhaps not-quite-first-tier minor writer whose star, according to Michael Dirda anyway, has all but faded. On the other hand, it makes a perfect gift for someone you really despise.
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Rating:
Summary: When Hacks Attack
Review: Early on, mention is made that this book is "the culmination of twenty years' work." One might suggest that Roger Lewis find a more suitable occupation - on the face of it, biography doesn't look to be cutting it. What we have here is not the life and work of author Anthony Burgess, but rather an ill-written, hate-filled tantrum. That it goes on and on and on only adds to the degree of failure achieved here. Were it published as something along the lines of memoir, then a reader might be compelled to elicit a certain amount of sympathy for Lewis - 'poor man harbors undo amount of personal shortcomings' - but that he's taken to venting his spleen in someone else's direction leaves a nasty taste in one's mind. The ironic thing about a book this poorly written (and it is bad - did Lewis edit this thing himself?) is that it's projected at one of, if not the, finest writers in the English language. Has anyone ever researched a connection between the excessive use of footnotes and mental illness? Anthony Burgess was one of the greatest late 2oth Century writers. Not just the author of lasting fictional classics (NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, ENDERBY, EARTHLY POWERS), valuable non-fiction works (A MOUTHFUL OF AIR, REJOYCE, ENGLISH LITERATURE: A SURVEY FOR STUDENTS), and endless amounts of some of the best collected journalism ever (URGENT COPY, BUT DO BLONDES PREFER GENTLEMEN), he also happens to have penned what may be the greatest of all contemporary autobiographies (LITTLE WILSON & BIG GOD). In the face of all this, perhaps Lewis just gave up. One can only wish that Anthony Burgess were still with us to pen the response.
Rating:
Summary: When Hacks Attack
Review: Early on, mention is made that this book is "the culmination of twenty years' work." One might suggest that Roger Lewis find a more suitable occupation - on the face of it, biography doesn't look to be cutting it. What we have here is not the life and work of author Anthony Burgess, but rather an ill-written, hate-filled tantrum. That it goes on and on and on only adds to the degree of failure achieved here. Were it published as something along the lines of memoir, then a reader might be compelled to elicit a certain amount of sympathy for Lewis - 'poor man harbors undo amount of personal shortcomings' - but that he's taken to venting his spleen in someone else's direction leaves a nasty taste in one's mind. The ironic thing about a book this poorly written (and it is bad - did Lewis edit this thing himself?) is that it's projected at one of, if not the, finest writers in the English language. Has anyone ever researched a connection between the excessive use of footnotes and mental illness? Anthony Burgess was one of the greatest late 2oth Century writers. Not just the author of lasting fictional classics (NOTHING LIKE THE SUN, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, ENDERBY, EARTHLY POWERS), valuable non-fiction works (A MOUTHFUL OF AIR, REJOYCE, ENGLISH LITERATURE: A SURVEY FOR STUDENTS), and endless amounts of some of the best collected journalism ever (URGENT COPY, BUT DO BLONDES PREFER GENTLEMEN), he also happens to have penned what may be the greatest of all contemporary autobiographies (LITTLE WILSON & BIG GOD). In the face of all this, perhaps Lewis just gave up. One can only wish that Anthony Burgess were still with us to pen the response.
Rating:
Summary: An Atrocious Biography
Review: Roger Lewis belongs to the Rufus Griswold school of biographers, and his motivation for being so is revealed in a footnote on page 227 of his new biography of Anthony Burgess. In comparing the subject of his book to the Nobel Prize winning V.S. Naipaul, he mentions Paul Theroux's controversial memoir of Naipaul, "Sir Vidia's Shadow." He quotes the London Magazine's verdict on Theroux's spiteful book: "I wonder if the author was conscious of how much he was giving away about himself?" and then claims of it that "It is so much more rich and fascinating than any conventional biography of Naipaul could have been." And there you have it. Lewis's book, which is obviously no "conventional biography," is clearly intended by its author to be as "rich and fascinating" as "Sir Vidia's Shadow," and as obviously an attack on its subject. What is really is, regrettably, is a sordid exercise in perverse psychology - only the psychology on display is not that of the book's putative subject, but of its author. I've read dozens if not hundreds of biographies in the past 35 years or so, but I have never read one where the author had such obvious, odious and ill-concealed contempt for its subject than this one. "Lazy sod" is just about the only epithet that Lewis affixes to Burgess that Amazon will allow me to print here ("Burgess was not a generous man, financially, spiritually or morally" is one of his kinder comments). But open the book just about anywhere at random, and you are sure to spot some quotable calumny. According to Lewis, Burgess is pretentious, callous, a phony, pathological, cheap and solipsistic - in short, an all around jerk. He also claims, on the basis of a conveniently anonymous source, that Burgess didn't even write the book for which he is best known, "A Clockwork Orange." The trouble is, the more Lewis makes clear how much he despises Anthony Burgess, the more clearly you realize what a mini-masterpiece of projection this book really is. The intention is to make the reader believe that Lewis is a far cleverer boy than Anthony Burgess ever was - and if that is its intention, the book must be considered a miserable failure. For all his lust for invective, his superficial cleverness, and his near-total disdain for his subject, Roger Lewis has succeeded in demonstrating in his 396 pages of text (excluding appendices and index) only two things: that he loathes Anthony Burgess, and that he will never write a book as good as any of Burgess's works if he lives to be a thousand. Ironically, all his abuse of his subject has the reverse effect of the one intended - it makes you feel sympathy for the person being so endlessly (and pretentiously) abused. If Anthony Burgess was a flawed human being, so what? Many great writers are deeply flawed, even personally obnoxious, human beings. That usually has little if nothing to do with their art. And at least it can be said that Burgess spent his life devoted to literature, not squatting in his own bile, like his biographer. If I were you, I would track down one of Anthony Burgess's novels (I would recommend the superb "Earthly Powers") and leave this vicious little piece of tripe alone.
Rating:
Summary: An Atrocious Biography
Review: Roger Lewis belongs to the Rufus Griswold school of biographers, and his motivation for being so is revealed in a footnote on page 227 of his new biography of Anthony Burgess. In comparing the subject of his book to the Nobel Prize winning V.S. Naipaul, he mentions Paul Theroux's controversial memoir of Naipaul, "Sir Vidia's Shadow." He quotes the London Magazine's verdict on Theroux's spiteful book: "I wonder if the author was conscious of how much he was giving away about himself?" and then claims of it that "It is so much more rich and fascinating than any conventional biography of Naipaul could have been." And there you have it. Lewis's book, which is obviously no "conventional biography," is clearly intended by its author to be as "rich and fascinating" as "Sir Vidia's Shadow," and as obviously an attack on its subject. What is really is, regrettably, is a sordid exercise in perverse psychology - only the psychology on display is not that of the book's putative subject, but of its author. I've read dozens if not hundreds of biographies in the past 35 years or so, but I have never read one where the author had such obvious, odious and ill-concealed contempt for its subject than this one. "Lazy sod" is just about the only epithet that Lewis affixes to Burgess that Amazon will allow me to print here ("Burgess was not a generous man, financially, spiritually or morally" is one of his kinder comments). But open the book just about anywhere at random, and you are sure to spot some quotable calumny. According to Lewis, Burgess is pretentious, callous, a phony, pathological, cheap and solipsistic - in short, an all around jerk. He also claims, on the basis of a conveniently anonymous source, that Burgess didn't even write the book for which he is best known, "A Clockwork Orange." The trouble is, the more Lewis makes clear how much he despises Anthony Burgess, the more clearly you realize what a mini-masterpiece of projection this book really is. The intention is to make the reader believe that Lewis is a far cleverer boy than Anthony Burgess ever was - and if that is its intention, the book must be considered a miserable failure. For all his lust for invective, his superficial cleverness, and his near-total disdain for his subject, Roger Lewis has succeeded in demonstrating in his 396 pages of text (excluding appendices and index) only two things: that he loathes Anthony Burgess, and that he will never write a book as good as any of Burgess's works if he lives to be a thousand. Ironically, all his abuse of his subject has the reverse effect of the one intended - it makes you feel sympathy for the person being so endlessly (and pretentiously) abused. If Anthony Burgess was a flawed human being, so what? Many great writers are deeply flawed, even personally obnoxious, human beings. That usually has little if nothing to do with their art. And at least it can be said that Burgess spent his life devoted to literature, not squatting in his own bile, like his biographer. If I were you, I would track down one of Anthony Burgess's novels (I would recommend the superb "Earthly Powers") and leave this vicious little piece of tripe alone.
Rating:
Summary: Hell hath no fury like a biographer scorned
Review: This is simply the strangest biography that I have ever had the misfortune to read. Rather than describe Burgess's life in any useful or even thoughtful way, it is instead a sustained exercise in hatefulness. All biographers either like or dislike their subjects, but good ones know them well enough to feel that they cannot be classified as wholly likeable or or detestable. This author has an axe to grind, though we are not told what it is about. He allows himself to use his book as a spiteful tirade against Burgess, a selfish exhibition of childishness and I am surprised that a publisher agreed to see it into print. It reads as if written by a spurned lover, rather than an intelligent observer of another's life. If you have any respect for Burgess's work, don't waste your time on this misbegotten temper tantrum.
Christopher Moss
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