Extracts from You’ve Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess (1990)
I got on with the task of turning myself into a brief professional writer. The term professional is not meant to imply a high standard of commitment and attainment: it meant then, as it still does, the pursuit of a trade or calling to the end of paying the rent and buying liquor. I leave the myth of inspiration and agonised creative inaction to the amateurs. The practice of a profession entails discipline, which for me meant the production of two thousand words of fair copy every day, weekends included. I discovered that, if I started early enough, I could complete the day’s stint before the pubs opened. Or, if I could not, there was an elated period of the night after closing time, with neighbours banging on the walls to protest at the industrious clacking. Two thousand words a day means a yearly total of 730,000. Step up the rate and, without undue effort, you can reach a million. This ought to mean ten novels of 100,000 words each. This quantitative approach is not, naturally, to be approved. And because of hangovers, marital quarrels, creative deadness induced by the weather, shopping trips, summonses to meet state officials, and sheer torpid gloom, I was not able to achieve more than five and a half novels of very moderate size in that pseudo-terminal year. Still, it was very nearly E.M.Forster’s whole long life’s output.
After that first visit, East Berlin became for me one of the metaphysical cities. If ever I wavered in my acceptance of Western capitalism, I had only to return to that grimness unenlivened by the gaudy posters of commercialism to wish to scuttle back to nudes and Mammon…
The East Berliners were in their wretched element, having passed immediately from one totalitarian regime to another. The damnable hypocrisy of the half-town, pretending that the West was the true prison and the gunmen were protecting the freedom of the citizen, stood for a metaphysic based on lies, the biggest lie of all being the perversion of the term demokratisch. Under the roof of the Friedrichstrabe S-Bahn platform two boys with sub-machine-guns paced, their eyes on potential refugees from communist prosperity. It was a relief to get to the Zoo station and all the howling injunctions to consume.
The only guilt I have felt at leaving England is the guilt of not missing England more.
I do not boast about the quality of my work, but I may be permitted to pride myself on the gift of steady application. I will get things done somehow, as D.H.Lawrence did. I fade out of the life of my loved ones to work, even while in their presence, and to them I do not seem to have been working at all. I will even compose music in front of a television film that is blasting music of its own. I do not like my work to get in the way of other people’s lives. I do not call for silence or cups of tea. In the Bedmobile, jolting through Italy, I would type at the rear table, having made myself a pint of strong tea on the stove fed by nether gas tubes. The gift of concentration stays with me, and it is perhaps my only gift.
…one can’t throw away the Eucharist so easily.
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honour a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.
I cannot keep myself healthy – too many bad habits ingrained, cardiac bronchitis like the orchestra of death tuning up under water – but I submit to the promptings of an energy that might be diagnosed as health perverted, for true health enjoys itself and does not wish to act. The energy, which I call creative, is given to the thousand words a day I vowed to produce after the failure of the neurologists’ prognosis freed me from writing more.
Am I happy? Probably not. Having passed the prescribed biblical age limit, I have to think of death, and I do not like the thought. There is a vestigial fear of hell, and even of purgatory, and no amount of rereading rationalist authors can expunge it. If there is only darkness after death, then that darkness is the ultimate reality and that love of life that I intermittently possess is no preparation for it. In face of the approaching blackness, which Winston Churchill facetiously termed black velvet, concerning oneself with a world that is soon to fade out like a television image in a power cut seems mere frivolity. But rage against the dying of the light is only human, especially when there are still things to be done, and my rage sometimes sounds to myself like madness. It is not only a question of works never to be written; it is a matter of things unlearned. I have started to learn Japanese, but it is too late; I have started to read Hebrew, but my eyes will not take in the jots and tittles. How can one fade out in peace, carrying vast ignorance into a state of total ignorance?
The rage I wake to and take to bed is a turbulence not always related to an object. It seems like a pure emotion looking for an object. It cathartises itself into salty howling, then exhaustion, then it starts again.
Kingsley Amis and John Braine had been very much men of the left, but now they were swinging towards a reactionary stance that denied artistic progressivism as well as political. [Page 140]
I had never had strong political beliefs. If I was a kind of Jacobite Tory, like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, this was because socialism was positivist and denied original sin. [Page 140]
I was in the right country for cheating. The Italians, after two thousand years of bad government (except for the odd interludes recorded by Gibbon), had no respect for la legge. [Page 222]
The young Jane Eyre, sternly asked what she, foul sinner, must do to avoid hell, answers that she must keep herself healthy to put it off as long as possible. [Page 389]
