The Creative Man's Critic

URGENT COPY by Anthony Burgess. 272 pages. W. W. Norton. $6.95.

What distinguishes the novels of Anthony Burgess is the Elizabethan prodigality of creation. Plots, passions and persons hatch in his brooding skull, and it is a matter of wonder only that he has brought so many gaudy fictional chickens home to roost. It seems almost too much that Burgess should also be so good a critic, because the cliche of legend demands that a critic, however good, is by nature a failed creator.

The collection of quickie critical pieces done for British and U.S. periodicals shows how robustly a generously endowed intelligence like Burgess's can flourish within the limits of deadline and an even deadlier limitation of space.

Love of Gab. Anthony Burgess is not merely a specialist with some painfully acquired, crotchety expertise in, say, lesser metaphysical lyrical poets. His intelligence functions at all levels on a list of subjects that includes Dickens, Kipling, Sartre, Greene, Waugh, Koestler, Milton, "The Writer As Drunk" (Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan), Shaw, Joyce, pornography and Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

Novelist Burgess's principal credential as critic is one that should be essential. He loves the language. Many critics profess to do so as a man will say he "loves children," but the truth of such claims can be tested by the question: how often is he seen playing with children? Like Joyce, Burgess loves to play with words, the greatest of toys allowed to grown men. English is not enough; he can play in Russian, German, Spanish and Malay, and this gives him the insight of a craft-brother to a hundred writers who have little in common but the gift and the love of gab.

Bloody Arrogance. Burgess is opposed to the kind of critic who "mistakes the parade of prejudice for objective appraisal." The latter type has three awful exemplars in Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, who recently collaborated on a book called Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. As the selections begin with Beowulf, and include such dispensable works as Hamlet, Pilgrim's Progress, the poetry of Hopkins and Eliot, it is clear that the three iconoclasts are prepared to do without a great deal that Burgess is not. The essay in which Burgess puts a few of the 50 treasures back in their places, and the three "naughty, smackable" cutups back in theirs, is a masterpiece of robust derision and scholarly scorn. This over, he bursts out against the show-offs: "I've never in all my reading encountered such bloody arrogance."

The spine of Burgess's criticism is philosophical, and he has found his archetypal literary enemy in a most unusual source. In Burgess's view the worst modern vices (materialism, pragmatism, relativism) may be traced to the works and influence of the heretical English monk Pelagius, who denied original sin and, 1,500 years before Marx--or Harold Wilson--taught that human perfection was obtainable by civic means. There is an opposite, more severe, tragic tradition that he identifies with the moral absolutism of Saint Augustine. One or other of these disparate attitudes may be detected by Burgess in almost any important English literary works. Such rigorous philosophical dogma, inherited from a Catholic education, is unexpected in English criticism, which is not normally ideological although the Burgess polarities have been roughly characterized as Cavalier and Roundhead. Yet Burgess's prose never seems plodding despite his spiritual preoccupations. In any case, he is the kind of man who could write a light review of a heavy British Treasury tax form. Should he do so in the future, it will have to be written from Valetta. Anthony Burgess has transplanted himself from tax-heavy Britain to Malta. This move is part of what the British deplore as the Brain Drain. Where Burgess is concerned, both the brain and the drain are considerable.

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