Burgess Rebooked

Some heart-warming news for an Anthony Burgess fan :

Beautiful Books has announced that in the autumn it will be reissuing three out-of-print Anthony Burgess titles: Tremor of Intent, 1985 and One Hand Clapping. They will be produced as if they were new works, with a full marketing and publicity blitz. The publisher Simon Petherick is very excited. “Ever since I had to look up the word ‘catamite’ when I read that famous first line of Earthly Powers in 1981,” he says, “I have been a Burgess fan.”

More here on the publisher's website.

Burgess' 99 Novels

Usually the buah tangan you take along to a party is something edible or drinkable, or maybe some flowers.  All such niceys are gratefully received.  But the friend I like best is the one who always brings me the gift of some second-hand books, things he's picked up a various flea-markets. 

On Saturday night we had a little get-together for friends, and he turned up with his customary bag of books that he felt sure I'd like, and one of the books he brought was a total winner as far as I was concerned -  99 novels : The Best in English since 1939 by Anthony Burgess, written in 1984.  I love books about books, full of  reading suggestions, and Burgess, of course, feels like an old friend.

You can find the whole list here. And the fascinating introduction to the book is here.  Here's what Burgess says about what the novel should be :

I believe that the primary substance I have considered in making my selection is human character. It is the godlike task of the novelist to create human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with free will. This free will causes trouble for the novelist who sees himself as a kind of small God of the Calvinists, able to predict what is going to happen on the final page. No novelist who has created a credible personage can ever be quite sure what that personage will do. Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of action on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temperament with which you have endowed them. At best there will be a compromise between the narrative line you have dreamed up and the course of action preferred by the characters. Finally, though, it must seem that action is there to illustrate character; it is character that counts.

The time and space a fictional character inhabits ought to be exactly realized. This does not mean that an art novelist need, in the manner of the pop novelist, get all his details right. Frederick Forsyth would not dream of making the Milan Airport out of his skull, but Brian Moore, in his recent ''Cold Heaven,'' equips Nice Airport with a security check system that it does not possess. This is not a grave fault, since the rest of the C^ote d'Azur is realized aromatically enough. Many novelists rightly consider human probability more important than background exactitude. It often happens that a created background, like Graham Greene's West Africa in ''The Heart of the Matter,'' is more magical than the real thing. It is the spatio-temporal extension of character that is more important than public time and location - the hair on the legs, the aching eyetooth, the phlegm in the voice. It is not enough for a novelist to fabricate a human soul: There must be a body as well, and an immediate space-time continuum for that body to rest or move in.

The management of dialogue is important. There is a certain skill in making speech lifelike without its being a mere transcription from a tape recorder. Such a transcription never reads like fictional speech, which is artful and more economical than it appears. One could forgive Dennis Wheatley, who wrote well-researched novels of the occult, a good deal if only his characters sounded like people. There is too much, in the novels of Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace, of the pouring out of information cribbed directly from an encyclopedia as a substitute for real speech. The better novelists write with their ears.

A good novel ought to have a shape. Pop novelists never fail to gather their strands of action into a climax: They are helped in this by the comparative inertness of their characters. The characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose on them; they want to go their own way. They do not even want the book to come to an end and so they have, sometimes arbitrarily, as in E. M. Forster, to be killed off. A good novel contrives, nevertheless, somehow to trace a parabola. It is not merely a slice of life. It is life delicately molded into a shape. A picture has a frame and a novel ends where it has to - in some kind of resolution of thought or action which satisfies as the end of a symphony satisfies.

I now tread dangerous ground. A novel ought to leave in the reader's mind a sort of philosophical residue. A view of life has been indirectly propounded that seems new, even surprising. The novelist has not preached. The didactic has no place in good fiction. But he has clarified some aspect of private or public morality that was never so clear before. As novels are about the ways in which human beings behave, they tend to imply a judgment of behavior, which means that the novel is what the symphony or painting or sculpture is not - namely, a form steeped in morality.

Because one always measures oneself against lists : I've read and enjoyed just 22 of the titles Burgess suggests, so there are still big gaps to fill.

Tweeting Burgess

I told you that one of the most enjoyable sessions at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation's recent symposium at the Istana hotel was the Twitter interlude provided by Amir Muhammad and Umapagan Ampikaipakan.

Here are their thoughts on Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy in 15 tweets each (click to full size) - and note how both of them feel the novel has great contemporary relevance for Malaysians.

Burgess in Kuala Kangsar Tour

Thought you might like to see a pic of some of our delegation of members of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Badan Warisan Malaysia on our trip to Kuala Kangsar yesterday. You might recognise Dr. Rob Spence who came to talk to Malay College Old Boys Association about Burgess last year, and his wife Elaine (in blue at the front). We gave books by, and about, Burgess to the schools as a thankyou for their hospitality. We were really privileged to be allowed to see around the schools - the first MCKK where Burgess taught, and the second the girl's school housed in what used to be King's Pavilion (the old residency) where Anthony Burgess and his wife Lynne lived 1954-6. The two schools are rightfully proud of their traditions, and I hope we have added yet another layer to that by reminding them that a very famous author was connected with the buildings. The teacher at the front in the picture is holding a copy of The Long Day Wanes, the US edition of The Malayan Trilogy which I passed to her (... a bit of informal book-crossing!). The biggest thrill for me was being allowed to go up to the top of the tower of the old residency where there were panoramic views of the forested hills, Perak River, and sultan's palace. This is the very scene that inspired Burgess to start writing about Malaya (just read the opening of the second chapter of Time for a Tiger). And of course, our tour took in all the other famous sites in Kuala Kangsar ... mosque, palaces, oldest rubber tree, cemetaries, Idris club (aka Burgess' Iblis Club), riverside ... Our Badan Warsian members added to our enjoyment significantly, being able to explain about history and architecture and culture much more effectively than yours truly, and I must say a big thank you particularly to Najib Ariffin (who also happened to be a Malay College old boy) for his entertaining and informative commentary on the coach. Thanks too to my former student Hasnul Ariffin, who present a spectacular time-lapse photograph of Malay College Big School to the IABF taken to mark the centenary of the school. Thank you to everyone who helped to make our trip a big success. Next - (and I am quite serious here) going to work on a Perak literary tour taking in Ipoh and other places and focusing on more contemporary literature!

BiblioTour Guide

Apologies in advance for not blogging much over the next day or two. The International Anthony Burgess Sympozium starts tomorrow at the Istana Hotel. I am so excited that the event has come to Malaysia (as a result of the success of our Burgess evening last year).

I have the chance to play tour guide on Wednesday for a trip to Kuala Kangsar. The delegates have come from around the world and we will be joined by members of Badan Warisan Malaysia.

We'll be visiting both Malay College where Burgess taught (as Mr. J.B. Wilson) and SMK Raja Perumpuan Kalsom which is housed in the old Residency building, better known as King's Pavilion when it was Malay College's prep school. It was here that Burgess lived with his wife Lynn, and wrote Time for a Tiger, the first part of The Malayan Trilogy.

Besides the literary hagiography (!) we will also do the usual Kuala Kangsar sights - the Ubudiah Mosque and the plethora or palaces around Bukit Chandan. If you don't know the town, do go take a trip up there some time. It's probably the prettiest Malaysian town, with plenty of historical stuff to explore.

So if there's nothing much new on the blog for a while, panic not. There are sure to be adventures to be written up.

Amir Takes on Burgess

The Malayan Trilogy is a rambunctious and colourful performance of heat and lust, with the comic bathos of downpours always on hand to quench any potential high-mindedness. It should be made a compulsory text at school, as long as the teachers aren’t prudes who will latah at the lewd words.

Do go read Amir Muhammad's excellent review of Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy which was in The Malay Mail yesterday. it's so good to see the book reaching a new generation of Malaysians and influencing the writing here (both Preeta Samarasan and Shih-Li Kow have named it as one of their favourite reads about the country).

While you're on his blog, do take a look at the other reviews of Malaysian books there including Lethal Lesson and Other Stories by Adeline Lee Zhia Ern, and Adeline Loh's Peeing in the Bush. (Too many Adeline's?!)

Among Burgess' Books

Okay, time for another collection of books in Manchester ...

I went along with Rob and Elaine to the hq of the International Anthony Burgess Association because we needed to have a meeting to hammer out the details for the forthcoming conference in KL. (Details here.)

The house, 10 Tatton Grove, was never one of Burgess' own homes, but the building houses many of his possessions. (A new centre is to be opened in Manchester which will house much more.)

But what fun to poke around among Burgess' eclectic collection of books: some of them first editions of his own works, many of them books for review for various publications, a few stolen from public libraries. Open one and a review card from The New York Times falls out.

Then there are the typewriters he worked on, the family photos from his mantel piece, his musical instruments, his ornaments, his record collection, letters ...

For me, now a through and through "Burgessian" it was magic ...

Si-Fi and Fantasy Must Reads

Yes, Preeta's right, The Guardian's Sci-fi and Fantasy recommendations (part of that 1,000 books) deserves special mention. (Main page here and then look for the three part list at the side.) Oh yeah, and that bloke Burgess has two titles on it - End of the World News and A Clockwork Orange. Both I highly recommend if you haven't picked them up yet.

Burgess Foundation Comes to KL

Following the success of our Time for a Tiger : Remembering Burgess event and Rob Spence's visit last January :

The International Anthony Burgess Foundation will hold its 3rd Symposium in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from 27th-30th July, 2009. The theme of the conference is Conflict, Dialogue and Resolution in Burgess’s work. It is expected that Burgess scholars from Britain, America, Australia and Malaysia will take part in the event. An internationally renowned keynote speaker is being sought for the event, possibly drawn from the Foundation’s honorary patrons, who include Umberto Eco, A.S. Byatt, David Lodge and William Boyd.

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was an English novelist, critic, composer, playwright and dramatist, most famous for the novel A Clockwork Orange. His first novels arose out of his experience in Malaysia in the fifties. The IABF was founded by Burgess’s widow, Liana, the Contessa Pasi della Pergola, to provide a focus for the academic study of Burgess’s work. It has a base in Manchester, publishes a newsletter, and organises events relating to Burgess’s work. Its mission is to encourage and support public and scholarly interest in all aspects of Anthony Burgess's life and works

The symposium will feature a visit to Malay College at Kuala Kangsar* where Burgess taught, and other events.

For further information please contact the Foundation’s Director, Alan Roughley at director@anthonyburgess.org

If anyone locally is able to sponsor the event in any way, or have ideas for good things we might do around the sympozium, please do get in touch with me : sharonbakar at yahoo dot com.

I also want to spread the word to all the academics out there who might be interested, so perhaps some of you (and I know some lecturers and students drop by here sometimes) could pass this message on?

I'm coordinating things locally, and have a couple of volunteers lined up to help me when things get busy. I will keep you informed of developments.

(This has yet to be finalised and permissions sought, but I'm sure will be possible - especially when and old girl of the school is organising this!)

Burgess Revisited

One wonders why the literary world should tire of such a luminous figure. Is the neglect because Burgess left behind too many books? Or that his particular brand of ugliness is not worth dwelling upon? We're willing to forgive Evelyn Waugh for his racism and sexism, in part because Waugh's talent was more readily apparent. Burgess, by contrast, was a man who made up dialects to fuel his narratives, merged Levi-Strauss's structuralist theory with Joycean experimentalism with M/F, and made no secret of his love of popular fiction. Perhaps such idiosyncrasy in books and in writing are far worse than an author's personal peccadilloes. But these reasons are not sufficient enough to discount a writer who toiled over writing that was original and unusual and different, and who deserves due reconsideration.

Edward Champion's post about the need to reconsider the work of Anthony Burgess on the Guardian blog is a sharp dig in the ribs for me because I have had scribblings waiting in my notebook about this very issue since Rob Spence's lecture at Universiti Malaya last month. Datuk Shan who was also there infallibly reminds me every time we meet that I promised to blog this! And I still owe thanks to Professor Lim Chee Seng who made the whole thing possible.

Rob (right) is the kind of academic I appreciate - fascinating, accessible, and very well-researched, and what follows is an extremely potted and pale version of his talk, sketched only in broadest outline and lacking all those examples and details that brought it to life that day at UM.

He talked about the neglect of Burgess in Britain, which is something I hadn't really realised (having been much more concerned about the neglect of Burgess in Malaysia!) noting that the author hasn't been awarded the kind of attention that British authors of a similar stature (e.g. example Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis) have received. And he never received a knighthood or award of the state in Britain, while the critics generally ignored him or were dismissive. Rob notes that there was always a body of opinion which was anti-Burgess.

Until his death, that is. Rob notes the instant revival of interest in Burgess when he passed away in 1993, with the obituary columns unanimous in their praise for him. Apparently the English papers rolled out their major writers including Malcolm Bradbury, A.S. Byatt.

Elsewhere it was a very different story. In Europe he was seen as an intellectual and he was honoured by the French, Italian and Monaco governments. (His most highly regarded work in Europe is Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements.) In the US he was a distinguished visiting professor, someone able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the giants of American literature.

What were the reasons for this neglect in Britain?

First of all, he was perceived as an outsider. He had only lived 16 years in the UK after he left the army, mainly because of British tax laws. He also deliberately excluded himself from literary circles which was probably a contributory factor to the pejorative tone with which his works were met in the press.

Then there is the question of the size of his output. Burgess' sheer productivity (he wrote over 30 novels alone!), seemed to annoy many people, and as Rob says, this suggests differences in literary culture. There is the feeling that if you produce that much stuff it can't be all that good.

Rob describes Burgess as very much a "writer for hire" (churning out not only fiction but also film scripts, reviews, criticism, translation, even at one point a company brochure) but says that he feels that Burgess' fictional output was of a consistently high quality. The author had a strict routine of writing 2, 000 words a day and seldom needed to revise his work.

There is apparently still much unpublished material and we can expect some posthumous novels, as well as a revival of interest in Burgess' musical compositions which are also felt to be very important. So, it seems, we have much more to look forward to.

Let me just leave you with the only bit of video footage of Burgess talking I could find on Youtube. He's discussing pop music and modern culture, and this interview from the '60's seems quaintly outdated now, although what he's actually saying holds every bit as true today.

Remembering Mr. Wilson

Sorry it's taken me so long so get something up about last Monday's event - our Time for a Tiger tribute to Anthony Burgess, sponsored by the Malay College Old Boys' Association with a talk about the author given by Dr. Rob Spence.

I didn't want to rush posting this: it was an event I've wanted to happen for a very long time and the whole evening was very special to me. It went some way to stilling an ache in my heart for the neglect of the author of one of my favourite books The Malayan Trilogy.

It's probably the first literary event I've dreamed up where I've had to do almost nothing at all! When I ran my idea past Mustapha Abu Bakar whom I bumped into at the MCOBA dinner, earlier in the year, he embraced it with total enthusiasm and roped in a couple of very able henchmen, Rashidi Aziz and Ghazali Baherein of the Selangor Timur chapter of MCOBA.

When I turned up with Rob and his wife Elaine (hours early because I was so totally paranoid about possible jams on Jalan Tun Razak) everything was already set up for us in Wisma Sejarah and the caterers were just moving in.

Sponsorship for the event had been obtained from Maybank (who have a tiger on their logo) and CIMB, and even there were even very nicely designed banners for the event. (I thank Azizul Kallahan and his team for these.)

Kavita from book distributors Pansing turned up with a box full of copies of Anthony Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy for us to sell at a 30% discount - and more or less the entire stock of the books in the country got snapped up within an hour! (More have been ordered from the UK, I'm glad to say.)

The crowd began to arrive, old boys who are really perpetual school boys laughing and joking around, many of my good friends who come by to support just about every lit event I organise, and new friends made via this blog and Facebook. I was too nervous to eat, sipped a little fruit punch wishing it were a Burgessian gin-setengah for a little dutch-courage.

First to speak was MCOBA president , Dato' Megat Najmuddin (fondly known as Mac) who gave the opening address.

We'd met up with him and the organising committee for hi-tea (Elaine and Rob blinded by the sight of such plenty in the buffet spread!) at the PJ Hilton the day before, to finalise details.

I was to introduce Rob, but I am afraid I wanted to hijack the event for a few minutes to fill in the back story and explain how everything came to be brought together, which seems no less than a miracle to me, looking back.

I spun the story about how I had gone to teach in Kuala Kangsar because I fell in love with a book, how meeting Syed Bakar fuelled that connection with Burgess', how I got upset because no-one else I met in the town or school seemed to know or care about the author ... or was maintaining a conspiracy of silence (highly likely I think in the light of some of the stories told later in the evening).

I talked about how I had tried to organise an event in 2006 to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first book of the trilogy - Time for a Tiger, but how the whole think had stalled when the book was placed on a list of "restricted" books, and how it had become necessary for a certain bookshop owner, bloggers and journalists to make a great deal of noise so that restrictions on the book and some other works of fiction were eventually (silently!) lifted. (This got a round of applause, which made me very happy and which I share with all those other noisemakers.)

And how Burgess is now recognised as one of the important British authors of the second half of the twentieth century, so Malaysians and in particular Malay Collegians, should be very proud of that connection.

The last piece of the puzzle was meeting Burgess expert and enthusiast Rob Spence via this blog, and then asking him if he would come to Malaysia to talk on the author. Was I surprised when he said 'yes'! ... provided I could get an official invitation for him, and Prof. Lim Chee Seng of Universiti Malaya very kindly obliged. (I'm so sorry Prof. Lim couldn't make it as I owe him a big thank you.)

Rob then took the floor and gave a really interesting talk about how he felt a personal as well as a professional interest in Burgess after growing up in the same part of Manchester. He gave an overview of Burgess' life but focussed mainly on his time in Malaya including plenty of gossipy snippets which delighted those who had known Mr. J.B. Wilson as a Malay College teacher.

He also took us through the three books of The Malayan Trilogy in which Burgess had made an effort to depict the whole country in its racial diversity (to an extent I think that no author has managed since). The novel has been largely misunderstood by post-colonial academics he said - my feeling too.

One point that Rob emphasised was that English literature owes a great deal to this country

Malaya made Burgess

as it gave Burgess his start as a novelist. It is a debt perhaps owed particularly strongly to the people of Kuala Kangsar and the boys of MCKK.

Then it was time for questions and for those who had been taught by Wilson/Burgess, the real experts, to have their say.

His former students stepped up to the microphone to tell us what they remembered of JB Wilson, the man and the teacher.

We heard about the rows between Wilson and his wife Lynn in the King's Pavillion hostel, and quite publicly in the bars in town, we heard about the succession of guests to their quarters for drinking parties, including the local police chief.

We heard too about how Wilson was an exacting editor of the school magazine pushing young writers to do their best and offering a glass of what looked like kopi-o but turned out to be stout to one young journalist.

We heard too about how one boy remembered Wilson (who was also a composer) playing the piano, and how he worked with him on a piece of music.

My friend Kamalundran who had been a teacher at MCKK, remembered Burgess from the teachers' college in Kota Bahru and recalled how he was a teacher always on th side of the students.

What emerged was a portrait of a man entirely unsuited to the profession, at odds all the time with the school authorities, but able to relate to the boys and in many ways having a profound influence on their lives.

Most of them, anyway. Datuk Hamiddin Abdullah said that for decades he had hated the teacher and had to stop reading Time for a Tiger at the beginning of chapter 3 when he found his own shameful story (reported in confidence) recorded for the whole world to read. Talk about an author stealing from life.

This evening, said Datuk Hamiddin, he had finally changed his mind about Burgess and was going to finish the book, and I actually feel that he may have been feeling proud to be part of the fiction.

I really want to collect these reminisces (and from those who couldn't make it) and if MCOBA agrees, edit them into a book.

My thanks again to everyone who came, and those who helped organise the event. I don't think it could have been a better event.

(Below, the old boys, with Rob, Elaine and myself.)


Postscript:

See also Rob's posts here and here.

There's also a very nice account by inspigoblog.

Camus (previously one of my MCKK little boys!) has a whole lot of lovely photos of the event. here.

Our Burgess Pilgrimage

Thought I'd share with you some of the photos I took on the trip up north to Kuala Kangsar on the "Burgess pilgrimage" I made with Rob, Elaine and Abu. For those of you who've skipped a beat, this town was my home for three years. And Anthony Burgess ... or rather John Burgess Wilson also lived and taught and began his career as a novelist there in the fifties.

Even Burgessians (for such we are, said Dr. Rob) have to eat. First stop, breakfast at the Tapah service station. While globalisation leads to a distressing homogenization of the world, and fast food franchises looking the same the world over, at least the local branch of Dunkin' Donuts is bold enough to initiate a new variety.

The only place to eat if you want to connect with the real Kuala Kangsar is Yut Loy restaurant, famous for possibly the best pau (steamed buns with a range of fillings) in Malaysia, and also as a smokers' haven for the Malay College boys, allowed out to town on Saturdays. They congregate in the room upstairs as they have for decades. And no doubt the friendly proprietor tips them off when a prefect or teacher approaches. Ah, tradition!

And the only dish to eat in Yut Loy if you want to follow local traditions is "egg steak". (A culinery delight i don't think even Boolicious has discovered.)

The dish that was invented for British and Aussie servicemen stationed in the town after the war and during the emergency when they couldn't afford beef steak. It consists of two runny yolked fried eggs, dowsed in a gravy made of dilute Worcestershire sauce, enriched with tinned processed peas, and served with thick slices of toast. Of such stuff are gourmet dreams made.

It feels like a place where time has stood still. These pictures of Kuala Kangsar in the floods date from 1967.

On to the official tourist route, which took us on a winding drive around Bukit Chandan, the town's royal hill and one of the richest spots for architecture in the country. Above, of course, is the famous Ubudiah Mosque:

... bulbous as a clutch of onions ...

as Burgess said irreverently in Time for a Tiger. We also pointed out to Rob and Elaine the Sultan's Palace, Istana Iskandariah (left):

... designed by a Los Angeles architect ...

Sadly, the Istana Kenangan (built without the use of a single nail) was closed to the public.

An army of asplenium nidus bent on world domination in the branches of an ancient rain tree on Bukit Chandan.

An old house (right) I loved to cycle to when I lived in Kuala Kangsar had burned down and only the blackened frame remains. Really this breaks my heart. I remember exploring inside the house, being careful of the broken floorboards ... and finding two thrones in an otherwise empty upstairs room! The house became the hang-out of drug addicts and I guess that's how the fire started. Clearly, it was yet another palace on a hill of palaces and I guess that no-one really cared enough to try to preserve it.

The most important stop was to see King's Pavilion, built 1905, which served as the British resident's home and later as the prep school for Malay College. This is where Anthony Burgess/ JB Wilson lived (upstairs) when he was hostel master. My husband was one of the seven year olds he describes in his autobiography Little Wilson and Big God, crying themselves to sleep at night and pissing off the balcony (which Abu says isn't true, but as Rob says, if Burgess were given the choice between the truth and a better story, he'd go with the latter). This is also where Burgess' protagonist Victor Crabbe lived in the alternate universe's Kuala Hantu.

The building now houses the Sekolah Menegah Raja Perempuan Kalsom.

Next stop was the Idris Club, named after the fun-loving Sultan Idris. In Time for a Tiger, Burgess rechristened it the Iblis Club. Iblis, of course, means Devil. All these cheeky renamings of Malaysian towns and landmarks would have passed the books foreign readers by. My theory - Burgess wanted to share a joke with his Malay speaking readers (to whom the book is dedicated) and not let the others in on it. (He didn't even fully explain the joke in his autobiography).

I used to be a member of the club. (Actually this is where I brought Abu on our first date!) To quote Burgess in Earthly Powers:

It was in Kuala Kangsar, if you will forgive the novelettish circumlocution, that I met the love of my life.

But now the Idris Club seems a very sad, rundown place and the people running the place seemed more than a little suspicious of us.

I had to sneak this picture of the billiard table through an open window. Can't see Burgess being a snooker player but I'm sure his characters played a frame or two here.

Of course, our trip culminated in a visit to Malay College, where the author taught. The school features prominently in Time for a Tiger.

On our trip home, we stopped off in Ipoh and christened the trip with Tiger Beer and tea. The 101 year old FMS bar is faced with closure, and many of the old shophouses seemed to be boarded up. More heritage buildings about to be lost?

I did a sterling job of pointing out other landmarks that make their way into Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain ("That's a cave temple over there") and Preeta Samarasan's forthcoming Evening is the Whole Day. Am thinking of taking up bibliotourism for a living.

If you'd like more on Burgess in Kuala Kangsar, I think you will find this extract from the first volume of his autobiography, quite fascinating ... particularly on the topic of Malay ghosts and the affair he carried on with a coffee-shop waitress called Rahimah.

Reading Burgess in Kuala Hantu

Reading Burgess' Time for a Tiger on the bank of the Sungei Lancap ...

We went up to Kuala Kangsar on Saturday with Rob and Elaine for our own mini-pilgrimage to the former haunts of John Burgess Wilson, Malay College teacher and later novelist extraordinaire.

I'm getting really excited about our Burgess tribute tonight ...

Postscript:

Sorry I haven't put up my post about the event yet, but have so much to write. It will be up soon, promise!!

It Really Is Time for a Tiger!

Something that I've wanted to happen for a long time is going to happen on January 14th, and perhaps you would like to be part of it?

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you will know that have posted several times about British author Anthony Burgess (real name John Burgess Wilson) who was a teacher at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar in the 1950's.

Something that made me sad when I taught there in the 1980's was that no-one on the staff, and none of the students knew anything about him or had read his books. Burgess' first novel, Time for a Tiger (the first part of The Malayan Trilogy) was set in Kuala Kangsar and the town is also mentioned in Earthly Powers, considered to be one of the most important literary works of the last century.

Many of the old boys of Malay College remember Mr. Wilson with fondness, even if not all of them were aware that he was later a famous author. (My husband, Abu, did not make the connection that his Worsley-driving hostel master with the pretty wife was Wilson/Burgess until just a year or two ago!)

We are just bit late with our fiftieth anniversary celebration of the publication of Time for a Tiger (published 1956), but well, never mind!

Several things have come together:

First, meeting Rob Spence via this blog and persuading him (it wasn't hard!) to come to Malaysia to talk on Burgess.

Rob is a Mancunian like Burgess, brought up in the same district of Manchester (though some years later!). Currently he’s Associate Head of Department. English and History at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancs.

Burgess was the subject of his PhD thesis, and he is planning to write a book on the author. He has published articles on various modern and contemporary writers including Robert Nye, George Mackay Brown, Penelope Fitzgerald and Jane Rogers, and has a book on Louis de Bernieres forthcoming.

Secondly, Professor Lim Chee Seng of University Malaya who made is possible for Rob to come. (Rob will also be giving a lecture there.)

Thirdly, the wonderful wonderful guys in MCOBA, in particular Mustapha Bakar, who took my sketchy idea and ran with it. I think that this will be a really interesting evening!

This then is the event:

Time for a Tiger
(A tribute to Anthony Burgess)

Date: 14 January

Venue: Wisma Sejarah, Jalan Tun Razak. Just before National Library if from Jln Pahang (Map)

Admission: Free or small charge (we are currently trying to get sponsorship) but by invitation only as places are limited due to size of the hall. Please contact me by email if you would like to attend. (sbakar@streamyx.com)

Tentative Programme :

7.45 pm Cocktail

8.15 pm Opening Address by President of MCOBA

8.30 pm Introduction of Speaker by Sharon Bakar

8.40 pm Address by speaker Rob Spence.

9.30 pm Q & A and discussion

10.15 pm Supper and networking

Update (30/12):

The response for this has been fantastic (much more than I could have anticipated!) and I have now filled the seats I have available. I have replied to those people whose names are definitely on the list. Very many thanks!

The Stories Behind the Titles

Why is Joseph Heller's classic novel of World War II called Catch-22 (an expression which has now entered the English language) and not Catch-11 or Catch-21? Why is James M. Cain's novel called The Postman Always Ring Twice when it does not feature a single postman? Why is P.G. Wodehouse's man-servant called Jeeves? Why was Melville's whale Moby-Dick? Did Nabokov nick the title Lolita from another writer?

Telegraph columnist Gary Dexter sets out to uncover the stories behind the titles of 50 famous classics and comes up with some intriguing literary trivia. Extracts from the book appear in the Telegraph and the Independent.

One of the most intriguing questions (for us, anyway) is whether the orange in the title Anthony Burgess' famous dsytopian novel A Clockwork Orange was actually a play on the Malay word orang meaning man:

Anthony Burgess gave at least three possible origins for the title A Clockwork Orange, none convincing. The first was that he had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange" in a London pub. He wrote in the introduction to the 1987 US edition: "The image was a bizarre one, always used for a bizarre thing."

Then, in an essay, "Clockwork Marmalade", published in 1972, he claimed he had heard the phrase several times, usually in the mouths of aged cockneys. But no other record of the expression in use before 1962 has surfaced. Several commentators have doubted it ever existed. Why an orange, in particular? Why not a clockwork apple? The phrase does not seem to have much wit or accuracy when describing something queer, odd or strange.

The second explanation was that the title was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning man. Burgess taught in Malaya from 1954 to 1959. He wrote in Joysprick, his study of Joyce: "I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for 'man' – orang – was contained in the title..." This conjuring of a clockwork man, central to the book's ideas, is clever, but sounds like an afterthought. Burgess wrote elsewhere that the orang echo was a "secondary" meaning – probably shorthand for a happy accident.

This leads to the third possibility, which is, as he wrote in a prefatory note, that the title is a metaphor for an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness, being turned into an automaton. This idea is built into the book. The story of Alex is one in which two unpleasant alternatives for future societies are contrasted. The first is one in which malefactors are allowed to exercise free will to torture and murder, and are, if caught, punished; the second is one in which they have their freedom of choice cauterised, resulting in a safe society populated by automata.

Burgess intended to contrast two ways of looking at the world, the Augustinian and the Pelagian. The Augustinian is that man's freedom is guaranteed, but original sin makes suffering inevitable. The Pelagian (heretical) view is that mankind is perfectible and original sin can be overridden. Burgess leant heavily towards the Augustinian side. The phrase "a clockwork orange", as representative of the Pelagian nightmare, appears in the book itself, in fact as the title of a book.

There is one other possibility. Did Burgess mishear that phrase in the pub? Terry's began making Chocolate Oranges in 1931. "Chocolate" and "clockwork" aren't homophones, but they might sound alike in a noisy pub. Perhaps Burgess misheard. Perhaps he knew it but liked what he had misheard. Perhaps – I speculate – he did not want to admit to the drab origins of his title.

I'm very tempted to buy this Dexter's book! (And I blame Aswan because he sent me a link to it.) As Marcus Berkmann in the Spectator points out:

No literary lavatory will be complete without a copy.

The Great Malaysian Novel?

Columnist Umapagan Ampikaipakan asks a very interesting question in the Star today: where's the Great Malaysian Novel?

Such a novel would be, he says:

Epic in nature, but not in proportion, it would be universally regarded as required reading. It would be a source of inspiration, an ideal to strive towards.

I'm not too sure what he means by "source of inspiration" and he doesn't elaborate ... the three books he picks out are all deeply critical about Malayan/Malaysian society as well as extremely well-written and entertaining. (Inspiring then, in a sense because authors shouldn't be afraid to be critical? I would say that this is a very good idea to strive towards!)

These books would be high on my own list of greatest reads about Malaysia too: Anthony Burgess The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy; Henri Faulconnier's Malaisie (translated into English as The Soul of Malaya), and a novel which isn't a novel but travel and social commentary, Rehman Rashid's A Malaysian Journey.

The idea of a Great (Fill in the Name of Your Country) Novel actually has it's origins in the US where it has become something of a national preoccupation. Remember the search for the Great American Novel in the New York Times last year? The Brits have, probably wisely, never given the notion of the Great British Novel much thought, although the Observer sportingly drew up a list of the best novels of the last 25 years. (In India Sashi Tharoor saved everyone the bother of even thinking of another one!)So what would the Great American Novel look like? (Then by extention we might be able to identify its Malaysian cousin.) Critic A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times (article now archived on the International Herald Tribune site):

The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and horse, is often taken as the very symbol of fantastical impossibility, a unicorn's unicorn. But the Great American Novel, while also a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism), may be more like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster. It is a creature that quite a few people - not all of them certifiably crazy - claim to have seen.

And he says, there were also American critics who didn't hold much with the idea of elevating one or two books over the rest and calling them the greatest:

There were those who sighed that they could not possibly select one book to place at the summit of an edifice with so many potential building blocks, and those who railed against the very idea of such a monument. More common was the worry that our innocent inquiry, by feeding the deplorable modern mania for ranking, would distract from the serious business of literature and, worse, subject it to damaging trivialization. To consecrate one work as the best would be to risk the implication that no one need bother with the rest. The determination of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of reasoned judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing.

But here's some food for thought when we talk about the literature we want and are hungry for. How supportive are we of the writers who are brave enough to put their words out there?

If you read Rehman's foreword to his latest edition of A Malaysian Journey, you will see how he was initially turned away by publisher after publisher who deemed his material too controversial. In the end he was forced to self-publish.

Burgess' Malayan Trilogy has endured decades of neglect in Malaysia, been sidelined by postcolonial literary types in academia who decried it an orientalist text, perpetuating myths about the country, and more recently became a "restricted" book thanks to some bureaucrat deciding that copies shouldn't be allowed into the country.

How many readers have read Faulconnier's book ... or even have heard of it's existence? (Hands up guys!) How many copies of it could you round up if you went around the bookshops? (Silverfish has it though, I bought a replacement copy the other day.)

As I've said before, it is time to pay more attention to Malaysia's literary heritage, much of which is out or print, hard to get copies of, or goes untranslated.

And I'd like to ask Mr Umapagan a question: why didn't your article didn't give a single mention to Malaysian authors who have won considerable recognition overseas and at home in the last few years? Have they slipped below your radar, or do you really think that they don't make the grade?

Because I reckon that however you measure it, the Great Malaysian Novel might not be as far away as you think.

Postscript:

Raman points out:

The Great Malaysian novel (or the great Malaysian anything) is going to happen when somebody does it, not when somebody talks about it ...

Raja Ahmad's Home for Art

Went along to the opening of Raja Ahmad Aminullah's gallery, RA Fine Arts, yesterday. It's in a bungalow house tucked away in Jalan Aman just behind City Square, on Jalan Tun Razak. Some literary types were there among the art lovers. Had a long chat with Thor Kah Hoong and Ted Mahsun. I bumped into one of my ex-MCKK students, Latt Shariman, whom I hadn't seen for more than twenty years ... and of course in my usual blur way didn't recognise him. Also met a couple of old school friends of Abu's and we chatted about how (even if a bit belatedly) we might finally get the Burgess plaque project off the ground.

Gave poet Rahmat Harun the frangipani treatment.

Raja Ahmad with the Prince Regent of PerakRaja Nazrin Shah and Tuanku Zara Salim who were the guests of honour, and behind them (in the orange shirt) speaker for parliament Tan Sri Ramli Ngah Talib

I was introduced to the prince and had a nice chat about my days in Kuala Kangsar.

I saw the great man of Malaysian literature A. Samad Said sitting alone and plucked up courage to say hello. No sooner had I sat down next to him than he said "Are you Sharon Bakar the blogger?" and called over his wife to meet me! Really, I was laughing!

The gallery has some excellent art and is open by appointment, call 03-21617431.