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!)

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!

Old Teachers Never Die ...

... and sometimes they even find their class again.

Was at the Malay College Old Boys dinner at the Istana Hotel last night - very enjoyable. Thought I'd slip in a couple of pictures, not least because these guys kept saying "Just put the photo on your blog and let us pick it up from there."

Once a Malay College boy, always ... Abu (second from left) with his good friends Rahim, Khalil and Mustapha.


I taught these guys 22 years ago and hadn't seen them since. Funny how all that time just melted away ...

We used to publish a magazine of their creative work, Eureka!, which ran into several issues. It has always hurt that the school never officially recognised us as a society (with a picture in the yearbook and so on - these things are so unnecessarily formal!) and help with funds, as we worked very hard and achieved something very worthwhile.

It was, of course the dynosauric pre-computer days I remember typing up the stories on those duplicating sheets (so long ago can't remember what they were called!) and correcting errors with pink fluid. We photocopied the pages of graphic fiction, before labouriously stapling the whole lot together. And then we sold our efforts class to class, just about breaking even so that we could get cracking on the next edition.

Many of these guys say they read this blog so I hope this post encourages them to lurk no more!

Earlier in the day spent an hour and a half stuck in a traffic jam on Jalan Damansara due to a police roadblock so that anyone who looked like a possible demonstrator could be turned back, I suppose. (Bloody annoying, as well as a total waste of police time.)

The centre of the city was completely closed off, and the rain was torrential. It didn't dampen the spirits of those who were walking to the Istana to demand electoral reform. The official version (buried on page 8 of the Star!) is that around 4,000 turned up. Nonsense!

I would consider myself very non-political. I'm broadly-speaking a lazy socialist who can't be bothered with the details of Malaysian politics. Or British ones for that matter.

But I do know that folks have to take a stand for what they believe to be right, and it takes a lot of guts to do that in the face of water canons and thousands of police. I felt very proud when I read the postings on the internet when I got home from MCOBA jollying in the wee hours.

Tunku and Me

Here I am (or a slightly younger version of) being presented to Tunku Abdul Rahman who was Malaysia's first Prime Minister and led the crowds in a rousing call of Merdeka! (freedom) on this day fifty years ago when Malaysia became a nation.

The photo was taken on a less grand occasion. It was Malay College Speech Day 1986. After all the speeches, the staff lined up in the corridor to meet him. I was so proud to have shaken the hand of such a great man.

Wish all Malaysians, here and overseas, a very happy Merdeka.

Looking for Lilian

It's quite fascinating to acquire an antiquarian tome with an inscription on the fly-leaf, so that you can imagine those long ago folks enjoying the book before you.

It's even better when you discover that the inscription was written by the author and signed for a personal friend.

It's much much better when the book in question just happens to be a first edition copy of an extremely important work by one of the C20th's greatest authors.

Can it get betterer?

Oh, yes it can. Ted Mahsun's dad found this copy of Time for a Tiger in a second-hand bookshop in Ipoh and snapped it up for just two ringgit. The inscription reads:

Lilian Sivaram

In friendship
--Anthony Burgess
(John Wilson)

Xmas 1956

I checked for a similar edition, signed by the author and found one via abebooks.com currently on sale from Jonkers Rare Books in Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, U.K.

Price? (Don't faint!) US$2695.13 (RM9,157)

Ted's copy won't be worth as much as it is missing the dust cover and has been nibbled by some naughty bookworms. But still.

But it's the inscription that intrigues. Who is/was Lilian Sivaram?

I consulted the oracle at my finger tips and turned up this reference to an article simply called Malayan Teachers Reunion by D. Maheshwari from the of the New Straits Times (City Advertiser's Happenings section), Feb 22, 2001.

I don't have access to the NST archives so if anyone reading this post does have, could you help us to find the picture referred to so we can see what the lady looks like?

If this is indeed the lady, then she was a teacher, possibly a colleague of Burgess at MCKK.

Burgess did give copies of the book to his friends. Ted's uncle, one of my favourite people in the whole wide world, says that he received several copies of the book himself, but he left them in storage and they got stolen.

Anyway, the moral of the story is 1) poke about in second-hand bookshops because you never know what treasures you may uncover 2) invest in hardback first-edition books and store them carefully, and then get them signed if you can track the author down. Because I doubt that even gold or diamonds would give you such an amazing rate of interest.

But then, would a true book-lover be able to part with a treasure like this??

The Bringing to Book of Dato' Hamid

Kam Raslan had everyone deceived.

How many readers of arts magazine Off The Edge suspected that that old codger Datuk Hamid, reminiscing about earlier and happier times in his monthly column, was actually Kam, giving voice to one of Malaysian literature's most engaging characters? I twigged quite early on because I'd heard Kam read extracts of a work in progress at our monthly gathering. And now finally, Confessions of an Old Boy: The Dato' Hamid Adventures is in our hands.

Kam writes in the foreword to the book that he feels as if he's known Datuk Hamid all his life, that it felt as if he needed to exist. And in an article which appeared in last month's Off The Edge he says:

I like to think Dato' Hamid is very real (even though I made him up) and that he encapsulates a breed of person that many of us know and most of us can recognise. He is of the old breed that has been airbrushed out of our history, bu who would sooner quote Shakespeare than wave a kris ... would be more a ease in a cocktail party than a kampong ...

And being a friend to many MCKK old boys of my husband's generation and older, I feel that I've met Dato' Hamid many times over!

Dato' Hamid was born, we're told, somewhere between the 1920's and early 1930's, educated at Malay College (dubbed the Eton of the East and set up by the British to create a Malayan civil service) and then at university in the UK before returning home to take up a post in The Ministry. He's a charming old rascal - cultured, well travelled, hedonistic ... and also a little lazy and easily corruptible.

He narrates his memoirs in the book. (Dictates them to Kam as in the picture below?)


Dato' Hamid doesn't actually seem to like the present day and the direction Malaysia has taken very much, and expresses to some extent the Kam Raslan's own sense of alienation.

The author says in the Off the Edge piece.

Many of us gaze over the serried ranks at an UMNO general assembly and do not recognise ourselves or our aspirations in that crowd. These are the Malay masses and they deserve to be represented vigorously. But I'm not one of them. Where do we go if we're not one of them? In my own case I have gone back to the past. I wanted to find a voice in another outsider.

Dato' Hamid's son, "the Ayatollah" represents a certain type of "new Malay" that's only too familiar (goatee-bearded, fanatical, politically ambitious and smugly self-righteous) and is a character I would have liked to see very much more of in the book, particularly because he gives rise to some inspired moments of social commentary.

I don't know where they came from and I don't know where they are taking us ...

says Hamid, speaking I'm sure for many readers. (How many times have I been told that the country was a gentler, kinder, more tolerant place "back then"?)

Hamid finds that he has much more in common with The Grandson, a computer animator who makes good in Hollywood, despite his purple (and later green!) hair and the ring though his nose.

Confessions is a collection of stories, four of them short episodes, and three much more substantial pieces.

My favourite is Ariff and Capitalism, set between Kuala Lumpur and London in 1972 in which Hamid gets drawn into a get-rich-quick scam with hilarious results. (Below, Hamid, being seduced by the buxom "Edwina" at the Sheikh's dinner party in London.)
I also thoroughly enjoyed the rambunctiousness of Dato' in Love which involves among other things the seduction of a Swiss milkmaid and the theft of a diamond.

In The Beat Generation Hamid reminisces about the time in the 1950's when he was dragged along by his friend Nik to work in Paris and Algiers a drummer with a band. Kam writes in his Off the Edge article:

I wanted to show the Malay/Malaysian wanderlust ... Dato' Hamid came back after his adventure, but so many Malaysians have travelled and have never come back. ... What happened to that spirit of adventure? Who let complacency in?

The longest story in the book is Murder in Parit Chindai, which gives a Malaysian twist to the traditional Agatha Christie type murder in the library at a country house with a cast of eccentric characters, any one of whom could have done the grisly deed. It's a very clever piece, and I appreciated the fact that Kam brought in characters of other races (which happens too rarely in fiction by Malaysian authors). But I felt that Hamid and the others seemed like pawns being moved around the chessboard of the necessarily complex plot of the whodunit, rather than initiating action themselves. (It felt in this story as if Kam were pulling the strings rather than taking dictation which for me made it less effective than the other stories.) (Below ... another body.)

The Malayans is set "Somewhere near Seremban - 2001" and is a conversation between a group of old friends, Malaysians of different races (a reminder that the ethnic divisions was not a feature of the landscape of the country in the past) following the death of one of their gang on the golf course. They mull over life, talk about their children and contemplate the principles and idealism on which the new country was founded at Independence and how it has lived up to them.

Would I recommend the book? Most definitely. It's hugely enjoyable, deeply relevant, and beautifully written. I read it with a huge smile on my face, often laughing out loud at the turn of a phrase.

I am left saying that I want more, much more of Dato' Hamid, his friends and family ... especially The Ayatollah!

A very nicely written review by Dzireena Mahadzir appeared last Sunday's Readsmonthly supplement of the Star.

Burgess in the Independent

In August 1954 an eccentric, chippy English teacher named John Burgess Wilson made a rather miserable boat journey to Malaya. His first two novels had just been rejected by Heinemann. He and his wife, Lynne, had become addicted to gin on the long voyage; by the time they arrived at Singapore, Lynne was so paralytic that their journey north into the peninsula had to be postponed until she had dried out. Wilson hadn't even intended to apply for the teaching position in the Colonial Service. He thought, he said later, that he had written about a job in theChannel Islands, but had mixed the locations up when posting his letter drunk.

During the five years he spent in Malaya and Brunei as a Colonial Officer, Wilson was frequently in trouble with his superiors and the police, his marriage became hellish and he ended up being invalided home with a suspected cerebral tumour after he lay down on a classroom floor and refused to get up.

But it was the making of him. For, as his biographer Roger Lewis puts it: "John Wilson went to Malaya and came back as Anthony Burgess." The man who was to go on to write such celebrated novels as Earthly Powers and A Clockwork Orange - and to assume the persona of the pseudonym he wrote under - finally found his voice in a country where the white man's role was to prepare three races, the Malays, Chinese and Indians, for independence; and, while he was at it, to try to avoid being shot or garrotted by the Communist insurgents who lurked nearby in the omnipresent rainforests.

By the time he left the East, Burgess was the published author of the three novels known as the Malayan Trilogy and had begun, in his forties, one of the most prolific and successful literary careers of the late 20th century. He was happy to acknowledge his debt to the country. "The Malay language," he wrote, "changed not just my attitude to communication in general but the whole shape of my mind."

Fifty years after the declaration of independence - the focal point of all three novels - I stand outside Burgess's classroom at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar, a boarding school set up in 1905 for the sons of the Malay upper classes and known as the "Eton of the East". Here it was that the trouble all began for Victor Crabbe, the trilogy's hero; here too it began for Burgess. It was to this classroom that Crabbe, and Burgess, walked from quarters in the King's Pavilion (the former British Residence) overlooking the Perak river, arriving drenched in sweat. It was around this town, thinly disguised as Kuala Hantu (estuary of ghosts), that Burgess/Crabbe earned odd looks from his fellow colonials for drinking in local dives rather than amongst white men.

For Time for a Tiger, the first of the trilogy, and set around the Malay College (renamed Mansor School), is no mere novel. It is so closely related to actual events that many identified themselves - often with displeasure - when it was published. (The second book provoked similar reactions, and even a libel case.) It was this authenticity that led Burgess to claim that he had captured Malaya and Borneo more accurately than either Somerset Maugham or Conrad. But it also led to ambivalence among those who knew him then. Should they be proud to have been im-mortalised by such a famous writer, or was he just using them?

The Malay College old boys of the class of '55 who had Burgess as their form master as well as English teacher are agreed on one thing: they'd never come across anyone like him before. "He was the first Bohemian we had met," recalls Ariff Babu, now a businessman in nearby Ipoh. He wore bell-bottomed trousers, and rarely a tie. He sweated profusely - "wiping out the drips from his forehead and neck to no end, while his armpits were never dry," remembers another pupil, Suleiman Manan - and constantly ran his hands through a stubbornly errant forelock. Mr Wilson was certainly no smooth Oxonian. "He was not elegant in speech," says Suleiman, "munching his words to a mumble as though he had had too much whisky the night before."

But Burgess impressed by not speaking down to his charges - he addressed them as "gentlemen", a term Suleiman says had never been used to them before - and also by his command of Malay, written in Jawi, the Arabic script common at that time. "I can never forget his first day in class," says Ariff. "He strode to the blackboard and in a firm hand wrote, ' Nama saya [my name is] John Wilson' in Jawi. He bowled me over. We thought then of the British as being the supreme power. They wouldn't want to mix with us. But here was this orang puteh [white man] who was able to relate to us."

Burgess was more liberal than J D Howell, the headmaster whose stern but amiable features still stare down from the gallery of portraits in the college's Hargreaves Hall. It was with Howell that Burgess clashed over the expulsion of a pupil who had been caught in a compromising position with a girl. The monitor of his form, Abdul Rahim Ismail, headed a group who went to complain to Burgess. "We told him that we thought it was unjustified," says Rahim. "He seemed receptive." The incident is recorded in Time for a Tiger, and Crabbe, just like Burgess, ends up being transferred to a different establishment on the east coast of Malaya for challenging the headmaster's authority. But it doesn't seem likely that Burgess could have stayed at the Malay College for long in any case. Crabbe spurns the Iblis Club, full of planters and colonial officers, in favour of local kedais (roadside shops), but Burgess went further.

Ariff drives me to the location of the local toddy shop. Now a patch of wasteland, it is just across the road from the Idris Club (for Iblis, read Idris, named after a former sultan of the state), so his presence there could hardly have been discreet. Burgess makes it sound like a local drinking spot, but Ariff corrects me. "The government used to create areas to control the consumption of toddy [a low-grade, noxious coconut beer]. It was not a place a normal Malayan would go - it was for Indian coolies. He must have been really desperate to go there."

Lynne's behaviour was also the subject of talk. "We hardly ever saw her, but we suspected she was drunk most of the time," says Ariff. In Little Wilson and Big God, the first instalment of his memoirs, Burgess makes much of their mutual infidelity. I ask Ariff about this. "There was a rumour that a Malay teacher was carrying on with her," he says. "We thought he must be blind - she was terrible!" As for Burgess himself: "I don't think that women were ever his weakness. In fact we worried about his sexual preference sometimes."

Burgess returned to Malaysia (the country was renamed in 1963 after the Federation of Malaya joined with the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah, and, briefly, Singapore) to film a segment for the BBC series Writers and Places in 1980. "We met up at the Royal Ipoh Club," remembers Ariff, "where my wife and I entertained him for dinner. We saw quite a bit of each other during the few days he was in Ipoh, and he was even kind enough to appraise a short play my wife had written for the radio.

"I was all set to reinstall him on my pedestal. That is, until I witnessed his live BBC interview, in which he proceeded to paint a very disparaging picture of Malaysia since independence." A furious Burgess is seen unable to make himself understood when speaking Malay to a waitress. "The country and I," he says finally to camera, "have nothing to say to each other."

Burgess always had a reactionary streak, and he disliked the way that Malaysia had embraced modernity and consumerism, just as he had been unimpressed with the changes he found in Britain on his return from the East in 1959. But he did forge a connection with his class at the Malay College. "I liked the senior boys whom I taught, and felt that a rapport was growing," he said of the class of '55, describing them as "delicate of perception".

"When my father read the trilogy," remembers Rahim, "he said, 'this man understands us and our surroundings. Unlike all the other English writers.' And he specifically mentioned Somerset Maugham. I think the same." For Anthony Burgess, the strange, prickly, egomaniacal man who saw "the tropics as normality and the temperate zones as the locale for suicidal dementia", there could be no greater compliment. For it was in Malaya, as he "sweated and was happy to sweat", that Little Wilson became Big Burgess.

Thanks Ted for e-mailing me this link from the Independent. Sholto Byrnes writes about Burgess in Malaya and interviews several of the folks who knew him.

This is a very important piece which echoes my own article on the Kakiseni website and in my blog entries regarding the importance of Burgess and the neglect of him in Malaysia. And Byrnes also notes the lack of a commemorative plaque on the walls of Malay College. Great minds, hey?

*The article can now be found here.

Earthly Powers

When I was posted, a year after my arrival, to Kuala Kangsar to teach English, I found myself on my own mission to understand Burgess and the Malaya he painted. The royal town did not disappoint: it had more than its share of eccentric characters, the Ubudiah mosque was still ‘as bulbous as a clutch of onions’, the Istana did indeed look as if it had been designed by a Los Angeles architect -- just as Burgess had described them -- and I became a fully paid-up, bar-propping member of the Iblis (sorry, the Idris) Club.

But by the 1980s, MCKK had completely forgotten the author. There wasn’t a copy of a single one of his books in the library, no commemorative plaque on the wall, and an embarrassed silence in the staffroom when I asked if anyone had read him. Not even the longest serving English teacher -- who had been on the staff at the same time as Burgess -- was prepared to discuss him.

Burgess was incredibly prolific, producing over thirty novels, including the visionary and dystopian A Clockwork Orange , and Earthly Powers, which was nominated for the 1980 Booker prize and recently voted third best British novel of the last 25 years. He also produced hundreds of reviews, academic studies, television and film scripts, opera librettos -- and, being an amateur composer, even several symphonies. Be that as it may, Kuala Kangsar just wasn’t interested. Never mind that the author was arguably one of the most important literary figures of the 20th Century.

My article about the neglect of Burgess, Malay College, and the restricted books issue is up on the Kakiseni website. Eliciting controversy, I hope with all my heart. Please do go read.

The jawi inscription at the top, is the dedication at the front of The Malayan Trilogy: To All Malaysians. And I thought I'd throw in a picture of me as cikgu at Malay College with my boys in 1988. I'm sure you can find me!

I still have every hope that we can celebrate the anniversary of the trilogy and do something good for readers and for the boys of Malay College ... once the book is declared 'unrestricted' (as commonm sense dictates it should be) and the MCOBA (Malay College Old Boys Association) make a decision about what it is they want to do.

Thanks, Zedeck for being the kind of bullying, pain in the arse kind of editor that gets a much better piece of work out of me. (But I told Zedeck I'd put him in my suitcase and take him back to the UK with me if I get deported!)

I was asked to write an article on banned and restricted books for MPH's Quill, but it was deemed "too sensitive" for publication when I sent it in, (although there was nothing in it that isn't in the public domain already, with just a soupçon of opinion added). Which I understand, particularly when there is going to be a pic of the PM on the cover. Still ... it feels funny to have an article on banned books ... in a sense banned!

Zedeck's editorial this month focuses on the happy ressurgence of things literary in KL.

My Malaysias

I was tagged by KG who was tagged by Sharanya as the next blogger to contribute to the 50 Posts to Independence Project started by Nizam Bashir. The idea is to write about anything that makes Malaysia special to that person. The project culminates on the nation's 50th birthday next year.

Here's a free-flow thing I've just knocked up, barely ahead of the deadline. More of a collection of notes than anything else (certainly not a poem ... or not yet). I enjoyed writing this and the memories it brought back and I'm nudged towards fleshing the whole thing out. (Great things about blogs is that they can be places to post stuff that's in-progressy!)

And in turn, I tag Eliza whose intelligent writing I enjoy ... both in my class and on her blog.

My Malaysias

My first Malaysia

Raub

goldmining town until the veins were flooded
when the Japanese came.
one street of Chinese shophouses,
one cinema, one supermarket
a school where I taught Form Three students
resisitant in their way to the invasion of English.

a memory of curfew,
imprinted itself on the town.
the last of the communists hung out
in the steaming forest.informers staked out the coffee shops
and army officers
drank whisky with discreet napkins around the glass
at the tenth hole of the golf club,
built by an Irish doctor
who never found his way home -
as i might not.

orang asli felled small game
with blowpipes along FELDA roads
distracting me from driving lessons.
the best Chinese restaurant was a zinc hut
behind the bus station
(the towkay's fortune gambled away),
kari ayam in Sempalit
the red tables cloths
of that place in Sungai Lui
that sold mee.

my second malaysia

Kuala Kangsar

"it was in Kuala Kangsar
if you will forgive the novelettish circumlocation
that i met the love of my life"

said Burgess (and hey, that works for me)

his writing drew my dislocated self
to his "estuary of ghosts"
with its sluggish river and footferry,
golden domed mosque, kampongs,
and scatter of palaces
(one a secret place with rotting floorboards
and birds nesting in the throne room).

i came to teach the elite
those white uniformed boys
who came wet to class rainy afternoons
(because umbrellas were not macho)
for Steinbeck.

in the Chinese restaurant
(how did i become an honorary man?)
we yang singed, and not with Chinese tea,
spun the chicken head on the empty platter
to see who would drink the next forfeit
or sing
and Bobby who slaughtered pigs by day
giving us Santa Lucia in the the richest
sweetest baritone.
and then him
back for a school reunion
asking "where can one get a beer in this place?"
his romantic chat-up line.the rest as they say is history
my history
and his.
my third malaysia is the malaysia of now
and here

a city of jams and flashfloods and too large malls
which leave me breathless with agrophobia
a skyline changing from one day to the next
but an excitement at being at the centre of things
and a feeling of the possibility of change.

corporate training
in golden triangle boardrooms
how to write the perfect business report.then a teachers training college
and mid-morning breakfast escapes for pan mee or utthapam
with the best colleagues of my life.
poetry classes under casuarinas -
teaching necessarily subversion
through poetry.

observing teaching practice on hot afternoons
in parts of the city i'd lost my way trying to find
proud of my students growth into teachers
and watching at the back of the classroom
the reactions of my hypothetical child
(the only one i'd ever have).

inheriting a family and customs
finding places to adapt and common ground.
carrying hantaran at weddings,
folding my too large self on the floor at kenduris
but never never neatly enough.
relatives scrambling through the bin for the
plastic wrapping of my Christmas turkey
to make sure it really was halal.the agak-agak versions of family recipes
scribbled on slips of paper
and consumed with fingers.

mat salleh I am ... but these are my stories to tell.
my credentials.
see how line by line,
Malaysia has written me.
so that these are the stamps in my passport
in lieu of the official one that says

i belong.

Burgess Biographied

As for what remains, a dozen years after Burgess's death, and the prospects for his reputation, I kept thinking of some momentous, long-ago explosion, far out to sea, whose debris, even now, continues to wash fitfully up upon the lone, lorn 21st-century sands.

D J Taylor reviews Andrew Biswell's The Real Life of Anthony Burgess * in the Independent. It's a book I very much want to read, especially after having read Burgess' own biographies, Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time.

I am an unashamed lover of Burgess as I've said before. I actually chose to be posted to Kuala Kangsar in the '80's because I'd so enjoyed his trilogy and I guess that I was on my own little mission to try to understand him and the Malaya he painted. The town did not disappoint. It had more than its share of remarkable, eccentric characters. The Ubudiah mosque was still "as bulbous as a clutch of onions" and I became a paid-up bar-propping member of the Iblis (oops, sorry the Idris) Club .

But the school where he taught (MCKK) had completely forgotten him. There wasn't a copy of a single one of his books in the library. No plaque on the wall. I pondered on whether this was the result of an embarrassed silence (although Burgess had been even-handedly rude about all the races including the British in his writing) or genuine ignorance and indifference. Concluded the latter.

And of course there is the perfectly understandable desire to shed whatever remnants of the colonial legacy still persist. Merdeka wasn't struggled for for nothing and it isn't PC to honour a British writer. Never mind that he was arguably one of the most important literary figures of the C20th.

And in a the three and a half years I lived there, I met only one person who had known him personally. (Though years later, reading the autobiography, Abu suddenly recalled his housemaster Mr. Wilson ...).

I found this piece written by Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad recently. It gives, I think another perspective.

* You can win a copy of the new biography in a competition on the Anthony Burgess website.

Skimming, Scanning, Scumming and Skinning

"There are two very important reading skills," my lecturer, Sandy, told us told us on our Methodology course, "the first is Skimming, where you run your eyes over a whole text to get the gist of it as quickly as possible. The second is Scanning, where you are searching for a specific piece of information and you run your eyes down a page until it jumps out at you.

"Then there are two more skills no-one tells you about. One is Scumming where you flick through an novel looking for the naughty bits which you then read slowly and carefully."

(And here I laugh, remembering a copy of Colleen McCullogh's The Thorn Birds which I once borowed from Malay College library.

It should have been called The Torn Birds because an earlier reader had gone through and cut out all the pages where the action hots up a little. Frustrating! One moment the characters were about to kiss, the next, the action was somewhere else entirely. I imagined my censor somewhere sleeping in the college hostel, with all those torn pages under his pillow, dreaming the naughtiest of dreams and plotting his life of future passion.)

"And finally," Sandy went on "There's the skill of Skinning. (Much loved by academics, by the way.) This is where you read someone else's writing very very carefully simply so that you can discredit them as thoroughly as possible in your own writing and score points."

Well friends, the same thing is happening to me here on blogland. Day after day I'm being well and truly "skinned" by another blogger who wishes only to discredit me. It's been going on for months now and it's a little wearing, to say the least.

The Day My Toilet Caught Fire

Today, in a picturesque small town called Rye on the South coast of England, my friend Barry is celebrating his 80th birthday. And he'll have with him most of his far-flung children, their spouses (from Australia, Canada, Hawaii and Britain), and his grandchildren with him to make this a very special day.

Barry has always called me his "adopted daughter", which brings a lump to my throat everytime he says it.

I've know Jean and Barry for over twenty years now. Jean came to teach here with CfBT (Centre for British Teachers) and was posted to Kluang. Barry came with her as a non-working husband, though within a year had taken over the running of the 'A' Level programme when the previous Project director died suddenly of a heart attack, and thus became not only friend but boss for a while.

We stayed friends after Jean and Barry moved back to Britain, and I used visit them in Plymouth. Later they came out to live in Malaysia again when Jean was involved in resourcing our college library for the B.Ed programme.

Anyway, cue the burning toilet story which Barry teases me about to this day. He says it could only happen to me. But it really wasn't my fault ...

At the time (mid 80's) I was teaching at the famous (or should that be infamous?) Malay college, and one day Barry (as big boss) came up on an official visit to check on our progress. I agreed to host a gathering of all the British teachers on the programme at my place. (I rented the upper floor of a semi-d from the Hokkien family who lived below.)

I cooked all day, and around seven in the evening my colleagues began to arrive. Irene and Alan who taught Economics, John who taught Business Studies, Lorri who taught Geography, and then Chris and Neil, who both taught English with me, turned up with wives and kids in tow.

Of course there's that little period of chaos whenever you hold a gathering - folks all arrive at the same time and you're letting them in, and greeting them, and saying thank you for the flowers, and opening the wine, and getting them a drink and so on.

So I had my hands full when, amid this chaos Chris pointed out that the lightbulb in my loo had gone and asked if I had a candle because his kids wanted to use it. I found one, gave to to him and thought nothing more of it.

The evening went very well, we talked shop for a while, then ate and chatted. The only thing that surprises me, looking back, was that in all that time no-one went to the loo.

Alan was helping me to wash plates in the kitchen while the rest continued to party, when we heard a strange sound like oil frying in a pan. Oddly enough, it was coming from the toilet!

Alan and I looked at each other and, mystified, crept up to the door to listen. What on earth was happening inside? I yanked the toilet door open and a huge cloud of black smoke whoofed out into the flat causing my guests (boss included) to run screaming to the balcony. Soot blacked every inch of my lounge and highlighted most embarrassingly all the cobwebs I had failed to clean in my slatternly housekeeping.

Alan and I meanwhile hurled buckets of water at the flames, which fortunately were easily extinguished. But the plastic cistern of my squat loo was now a molten puddle on the floor, the tiles were blackened and cracked, and the window broken. It was a scene of utter devastation.

We were all totally mystified as to the cause of the fire. It was only next day that that idiot Chris (who ironically been the first guest to go home and had missed the excitement) said that it was just possible perhaps that it had been caused by the candle he'd left burning, stuck to cistern without anything underneath it.

I got workmen in and managed to get the damage repaired without my cantankerous landlord suspecting anything.

But the damage to my reputation has never been repaired, and Barry loves to remind me of that.

Happy Birthday, anyway Barry. I'm thinking of you today and sending my love from across the world.

Makcik Kantin

She was the best possible language teacher. She loved to gossip and wasn't going to let a small thing like not having much language in common stand in her way.

My Malay was just about good enough for buying things in the market and ordering food at the stalls (thanks to Edward S. King's book which I'd dilligently worked my way through)



but really didn't take me any further than that. I spoke in a stilted textbookish way, sounding every bit the awkward mat salleh.

Until Makcik Kantin took me in hand.

If I had no classes at the end of the morning, I'd slip down to the canteen to sit with her while she shaped the doughnuts for the boys' end of school snack.

Makcik was an expert in the matters of the heart. I found myself telling her in my very limited vocabulary about the comings and goings of various boyfriends in my life and about what I wanted from love. About how I wanted to marry. About the kids I wanted to have. When I was stuck for how to say something, she'd patiently fill in the gaps for me while I noted down the new phrases and slid them into my own response.

And of course, in the process, I picked up something of the back-of-the-throat- gutterality of the Perak dialect.

Makcik knew the secrets happy marriage. I must cari orang yang baik hati. She had definitely found hers. She and her husband were still very much in love after many years of marriage and bringing up three children. Her sons helped to run the canteen and were grinning in the background as she told me this.

Most of all though, Makcik loved to talk about ghosts, and I was simply amazed at the variety and ingenuity of Malay ghosts. And I listened with rapt attention as Makcik introduced me to pontianaks, langsuyars and toyols, and the djinns (a better class of spirit for royalty) who lived in the Sultan's palace. She saw the ghosts as fellow kampong dwellers, part of the natural order of things, and seemed to be on speaking terms with many of them. Why, only the previous night she had seen a hantu kumkum stitting on a neighbour's roof.

The only stories about British ghosts I could offer in return seemed remarkably feeble in comparison.

Sometimes I often brought along Berita Harian and we'd go through some of the stories together. There was always an amusing tale of the would-you believe-it kind on the front page of the newspaper (or "suratkaboor" as Makcik called it.

How we howled with laughter when we read about the poor bridegroom sitting in state on the wedding dais when along came a tebuan and stung him on his kemaluan.

With stories like this who could resist learning Malay?

Abu Immortalised

Abu drove all the way down to Seremban this morning for a booklaunch.

Anyone who knows him will be doubly surprised. First of all, this is a man who has great disdain for mornings. Simply doesn't do 'em. Seldom rises before 1 p.m. and even then that's pretty early for him. (His breakfast is at 2p.m. and lunch about 5.)

Secondly, although he used to be an avid reader, he hardly picks up a book now from one year's end to the other. He thinks I'm quite mad playing arty-farty-literatti and mocks me quite shamelessly about going to launches and other events.

This book though was pretty special to him. The Last Expatriate:Reminiscences of an Educationalist in Malaysia (Utusan Publications) is written by his headmaster from his Malay College days, Neil Ryan. Abu actually holds the record for being caned more than any other boy in the entire history of the school, and was the bane of Ryan's life. Here's what he writes about Abu:

There were plenty of examples of boys using their initiative but one particularly stands out. One morning it was discovered that a 15 year old had gone missing. After a search throught the whole college area, one of the prefects remembered the boy's liking for advnture and went to search further afield. Later that evening, just before the police were notified, the missing person was found camping out in Ulu Kenas and was returned to base. However, this was only a foretaste, some time later he was gone again, this time from his home. Instead of returning to school he journeyed to Singapore where he joined the British army as a boy soldier. He was tracked down by his family and returned to College proudly displaying a tattoo acquired in the army. The person concerned finished his education, spent time in vietnam as a freelance journalist, studied overseas and became a successful lawyer.

He actually ran away for several days the first time, before he was found in the jungle. He used to sneak back into the school kitchen at night to steal food supplies. His father had to make the journey up from Temerloh to see the headmaster. Secondly, he returned to Singapore several times to get more tattoes put on his arms. That's why you never see him without long sleeves these days.

One of the strangest things for a boy who gave his headmaster endless trouble - the two are now firm friends. We meet up with Neil and Josephine whenever they are back in Malaysia and visit them in Melbourne where they now live.

This wasn't the first time that Abu has been immortalised between the pages of a book. He makes a brief appearance in Rehman Rashid's A Malaysian Journey. Rehman refers to him as Joe Baker, the bastard, (Joe Baker is his nickname - Abu says it has some connection with the word for "ringworm" in Malay) and talks about how he was a total bully as rugby captain making him run several laps of the sports field for showing up late for rugby practice.

He even gets an indirect mention in a work by Anthony Burgess! John Burgess Wilson (the writer's real name) was housemaster at King's Pavillion, the large building near the residency where the prep school boys were housed. In Big Wilson and Little God, the first volume of his autobiography (my copy of which sadly went walkabout), he writes about the little boys (as young as 7), crying for their mothers at night. He also describes the little boys pissing off the balcony and then rushing inside when a teacher appeared and pretending to be at their prayers so they couldn't be reprimanded. (Abu denies vehemently that this ever happened.)

Whatever the truth about these things, there's no denying that Abu's become something of a legend in the school's history.

This weekend the school marks its 100th anniversary.