Decolonise Anthony Burgess and then cancel him

The cry goes up:

Make every member of the Anthony Burgess fan community pay for the crime of disseminating such misogynist filth. This man is worse than Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Cancel. Cancel. Cancel.

The smoking gun discovered by the offence-archæologists: on page 386 of the Penguin paperback edition of the first volume of The Confessions of Anthony Burgess (Little Wilson and Big God, 1987), the sexist and colonialist author-reactionary states in the course of an lengthy catalogue of his pædophilic experiences in Southeast Asian brothels:

I had sexual encounters with Tamil women blacker than Africans, including a girl who could not have been older than 12.

Burgess v. Miss Piggy

A proposal for a blue plaque at the Burgess house in Chiswick has been turned down in favour of one for the home of the creator of Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, who was deemed to be of greater importance in the development of modern Western culture. A woman described as the ‘curatorial director’ of the state-funded body known as ‘English Heritage’, which apparently has the power to bestow the plaques, stated:

At present, the durability and extent of Anthony Burgess’s overall literary impact is not sufficiently clear.

Chiswick is a suburban neighbourhood of London, England. Burgess and his first wife Lynne owned and occupied 24 Glebe Street in the district in 1964-68.

縮陽 😨🔪 On shook-jong

Textbook summary by Anthony Burgess of the nature of this distressing ailment.

Greene the man and the writer

Anthony Burgess concluded that Graham Greene was ‘a very good minor writer’.

Greene’s fury at Burgess

The overvalued British establishment novelist Graham Greene tended to look upon Anthony Burgess as rather a parvenu. Greene, a Balliol man, judged that Burgess (Manchester university), whom he considered to be a lower-middle-class provincial upstart — albeit in possession of a indisputable comic gift as a novelist and a highly engaging talent and acuity as a critic — was gaining far too much attention in the Press and television than was meet or right or suitable for someone of that sort of background. Such media, the patrician Greene appears to have felt, were vulgar unless — properly, by his estimation — they featured himself, which before the advent of Burgess they had done lavishly enough. Greene grew angry, feeling that the limelight was being stolen from him, and embarrassed himself.

Burgess had first met Greene in the late 1950s, when Greene had made it clear to Burgess that, as Burgess put it, ‘he had achieved much and had reached a plateau where he could afford to take leisurely breath. He had not written the definitive Malayan novel which should match the definitive Vietnamese one entitled The Quiet American, and he did not think that I would write it either.’

Extract in the video is from ‘Russian Roulette’, the Canadian academic Richard Greene’s 2020 biography of Graham Greene. (No relation.) Video includes footage of Greene’s Antibes flat, which he shared with a concubine whom he refused to marry.

Koro

A description by Burgess of shook jong, or genital retraction syndrome, is to found in Murder to Music, one of the tales collected in The Devil’s Mode (1989).

Snow and sex

‘A brown mare, she rode me’

Snow is a tale included in the collection The Devil’s Mode (1989). It is Anthony Burgess’s answer to W. Somerset Maugham’s 1921 story Rain.

One theme of Snow is the expatriate European’s longing, in the depths of the hot season in the East, for the snowy north, for the northern European winter of the festive season. It descends into soft pornography: the Burgess-like protagonist enjoys his share of exotic rutting, and does not — fantastically — appear to have to pay for it, either in a pecuniary or in any other way. The tale won the 1958 Bad Sex Prize (Southeast Asian division).

The character Rosemary Dunning is described thus by the elderly, salivating writer. (‘An old man’s lust’, as Burgess put it. He was in his seventies when The Devil’s Mode was published, though the story was composed in Kota Bharu, when he had not long turned forty.)

Her name will give the reader an impression of pink and white Englishry, but Rosemary was very black, a Christian half-Tamil in whom the Dravidian colouring had long swamped the white of the surname. She was a girl of twenty-five, of extreme beauty, the features totally Aryan, the naked body superb. It was while she was riding me that Maimunah came into the bedroom with her armful of laundered linen. Fool, I had failed to lock the door. Maimunah saw the tuan as succubus to a shining naked black body, looked both shocked and fascinated, said ‘Minta ma’af’* and hurriedly left.

Maimunah cannot resist the sexually very potent tuan. The Burgess-like protagonist explains, blending erotica with linguistics and a knowledge of tropical agriculture and industries, that later,

I lay in bed with a naked Malay girl not more than eighteen with, on my engorged phallus, a product of Malayan latex for which the Malay language had no name save for the periphrastic pekakas untok tidak buat anak†. She had learnt one lesson from the black Rosemary and, a brown mare, she rode me.

* ‘Sorry.’
† ‘Contrivance for not having children.’

Burgess’s perspective on porn

Anthony Burgess points out that pornographic works

encourage solitary fantasy, which is then usually quite harmlessly discharged in masturbation. A pornographic book is an instrument for procuring sexual catharsis, a substitute for a sexual partner.

If we read a book or see a play or film

and are driven to discharge the aroused emotion in some solitary or social act, we have experienced good pornography or good didacticism but bad art — an instrument of stimulation masquerading as a work of art. Pornography is harmless so long as we do not corrupt our taste by mistaking it for literature.

Has any twelvemonth fed us more with fear?

A cunt of a year ends; fuck you to hell, is the refrain of a contemporary chanteur. Burgess, too, was dispirited:

Was ever a more salutary year?

As for the new twelvemonth, he exposes the pathetic fallacy of a fresh start. The first of January will not magically bring about regeneration in our corrupt selves or in our putrid world. We will continue to churn in last year’s Satanic mill. He thinks — wrongly, of course — that

at least we’re learning, and no more pretend that history moves to a Hegelian end.

On trolls

‘The Critic‘ — c. 1934, Kevin Jackson indicates in the collection of Burgess poetry he has edited called Revolutionary Sonnets (2002).