The West is going through an unpleasant phase of decadence, when even a president of the USA can have his tweets censored, when YouTube videos expose the uploader to the risk of their being torn down amid the snarls of cunning groups of the self-righteous (usually actuated by the crassest commercial motives) and their gangs of Peter Carter-Fuck lawyers, probably because putrid, sophomoric speech codes have supposedly been breached. Who are these shysters to tell decent and free people what to say? If only Anthony Burgess were alive today. He would join the Free Britons and the Free Rebel Colonists in the fight for the right to free expression. At a time like this, it is refreshing to look back on Burgess’s career and his uncompromising championing of freedom of speech, especially during the Salman Rushdie affair when he composed his Essay on Censorship, and here, in his introduction to Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), which they tried to ban.
I SUGGEST NOW THAT WE ALL STRIP OURSELVES STARK BALLOCK NAKED
In the Hotel Astoria, Burgess’s wife Lynne collapsed, as she had in Singapore. She was taken to hospital, where she remained for an extended period. Burgess seized the opportunity, as he had in Singapore, to taste the sexual resources of the place in which he found himself, in this case the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The unrestrained rutting is extensively documented in Honey for the Bears (1963) and You’ve Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (1990).
In the early 1970s, the Burgess family — AB, Liana, Andrea, and their Ethiopian maid — lived at Apartment 10D, 670 West End Avenue, in New York in the USA.
Burgess writes in his autobiography:
I foresaw, and said so, that
- student indiscipline
- victimisation of the faculty, and
- the elevation of racial rights above the demands of scholarship
were going to degrade the study of the liberal arts, kill the departments of humanities, and leave the real work in the hands of the students of computer engineering.
Requests from commerce, Burgess writes in You’ve Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, are best rejected by
asking for an exorbitant fee, travel by Concorde, and a hotel suite. But to the great firms and combines, money is better paid to me than to the taxman, and I find myself hoist. Yet demands for maximal comfort cannot always be met by the promoters: one can find oneself in the absent hands of strikers or frustrated by one’s stupidity as a traveller.’
He gives an example of what he calls this dual derangement.
