Old Books in Manchester

One of the pleasures of my recent trip back to UK was meeting up with Rob Spence and his wife Elaine Ellery. Some of you will remember that Rob is a friend I met through this blog when he responded to a post I put up on Anthony Burgess. Rob subsequently came out to give a lecture on Burgess at Universiti Malaya, and a talk to Malay College Old Boys. It was also his idea to bring the International Anthony Burgess' Societies Sympozium here in July. (More about this later.) Well, I hadn't been up to Manchester in over two decades and was pleasantly surprised by the changes to the city centre. Victorian buildings have shed their grime and stand proudly next to gleaming modern structures, the shopping is pretty tempting, an efficient tram service will replace traffic clogged roads in the city centre, and it's a pretty happening place with plenty going on on the art's scene. Best of all, it takes less than two hours now from London via the super efficient Virgin trains. (Oh and I also hear they have a fairly good football club.) Ah, but the rain, it raineth every day ... so if you visit take a brolly. And then there are the libraries. Rob took me to the Portico Library for lunch since he is a member. It was opened in 1806, and most of the books on the shelves, which members are free to read, date from the (19th. (Rob did though point out some contemporary fiction, and of course the library also awards an annual literary prize and hosts other events.) Just look at these books in the section titled Polite Literature (presumably fiction that wouldn't scare the delicate young ladies!) Here's the ceiling ... This is Rob's hang-out place when he is in the city, and there is space for members to sit and read and work, and hsve a light meal. (The bean soup was so good, and the lady who made it had grown the beans in her own garden.) If I lived in Manchester this would be my second home But this isn't the only fascinating old library in Manchester. After lunch we visted a vertiable cathedral of books - the John Rylands Library which was founded by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband, and built in the late (19th in the gothic style. There were a couple of excellent exhibitions, including one on the art of the sonnet. We chatted to one guy who was involved with restoring the antiquarian books. And finally, we made a quick detour into the Manchester Central library - where Rob bought me one of the coolest bookbags ever as a gift! Jealous? : There's another collection of books in Manchester left to talk about, but I'll post on that later. (More of my England trip photos on Facebook.)

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!