Roger Lewis
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Roger Lewis (born 26 February 1960) is a former Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and the biographer of Anthony Burgess (1917-93). Lewis has also published books on Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and Charles Hawtrey.
[edit] Biography
Lewis was educated at the University of St. Andrews and Magdalen College, Oxford. He lives in St Jean-des-Bois, France.
[edit] Lewis on Burgess
Lewis's controversial work Anthony Burgess was published in 2002. Critics could not decide whether it was an out-and-out hatchet job, a complicated form of tribute, or both.
Confronted by a Dutch interviewer, Lewis himself claimed that the book was indeed a tribute to Burgess; that he had intended to create an authentically Burgessian biography — full of footnotes, showing off its scholarship, and puce with rage and fervour. His judgement that Burgess was "a great writer who never wrote a great novel" sums up his frustration that a man of such range and talent seemed dedicated more to sheer quantity of output than to quality; and he laments — along with many of AB's other friends — that the gentle, generous John Wilson felt the need to create — and hide behind — the bombastic, monstrous "Anthony Burgess".
A reader's review of Lewis's Anthony Burgess:
- "Lewis's book is filled with animosity towards the writer, and revelations that are not at all revelationary since most are found in the two works of autobiography by Burgess himself (Little Wilson and Big God and You've Had Your Time). One such example is when Lewis reveals that the name Anthony was not on his birth certificate. This is something detailed within the first ten pages of Burgess's first volume of autobiography, where the author reveals that the name Anthony was his confirmation name (and therefore not on his birth certificate). This however becomes for Lewis a major point of identity crisis in Burgess, which eventually leads him to assert that Burgess was a spy. One might think this a postmodern comment on autobiography and an intellectual criss-crossing of fact and fiction, but reading the work you soon learn that it is not. Lewis gives a textual analysis of ABBA ABBA in the appendices to the book and uses the opportunity to do nothing but complain of how Burgess does not match up to Keats or James Joyce. Throughout the work Lewis refuses to try and understand what he calls the 'intractable' elements in the author's work, and instead resorts to vitriol."
[edit] Extracts from Roger Lewis's Anthony Burgess
He never got the hang of young people and would bridle and bristle at long hair and pop music like a beef-faced retired colonel in Angmering-on-Sea.
Being Burgess was...a bogus business.
...a parody of a great writer, rather than a great writer.
...what is this persistent fantasy that he is a great leg-over man?....he has had carnal knowledge of Chinese, Malay, Buginese, Tamil, Singhalese, Bengali, Japanese and Algonquin women - all prostitutes....Or perhaps it was the same prostitute - there's a lot of racial overlap in the Federated Malay States....his sexual antics are fiction.
...great writer who never wrote a great book - but perfected a great writer act.
His conversation was a monologue, delivered in his exhibitionistic Victorian actor-manager voice.
I think Burgess hated being a human being, and he was only to be happy inside his head.
Burgess was not a generous man, financially, spiritually or morally...
[on Burgess's first wife Lynne] Who, in actuality, would want to align themselves with her ruinous boozing? Once you'd seen her project a stream of vomit, like the trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel, six feet across a room, you'd seen everything. It's so sad, the decline from a sheltered and provincial childhood to a non-life as an afternoon-club drunk and good-time girl. She returned to her husband because there really was nobody else....she couldn't cope with adulthood - with its disappointments, curtailments, longings and dissolvings. Hence, the drinking trough, the recourse of those who fear a clear consciousness, who are disinclined to see things in their true colours.
...Burgess is like a definition of hell.
He wrote to keep back his thoughts, and not (particularly) to articulate them.
....Though he wanted us to believe his sexual energies were unstoppable, actually he was impotent.
...gaunt, wan features ... waxy and pallid, long deprived of the sun. And how are we going to describe his hair? The yellowish-white powdery strands were coiled on his scalp like Bram Stoker's Dracula ... What does it say about a man that he could go around like that ... king of the comb-over (did the clumps and fronds emanate from his ear-hole?) ... however the nicotine-stained fuzzy bush at the summit of frame served to distract from the ugliness of the rest of his face ... unnaturally long lower teeth, the colour of maize, and no upper set to speak of, the top of his mouth or lip having become elongated to conceal his gums, like a baboon.
If he'd had a daughter, would he have pounced on her? An impossible speculation – who can say?
...he was berserk.
His success came from impressing people who didn't quite know better; he was left alone by those who did. He fell into that gap, and made a fortune for himself.
He knew you weren't his equal, and I find this an insult.
Who does he think he is?
I continue to feel close to him....His dedication and intelligence can't be denied...
I wallowed in Burgess's fecundity and catholicity....I adored his spectacle and noise, his flamboyance, the surface pleasures of his prose....he was irresistible.
...he is a man whose talents, acquirements and virtues are so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence. He was a Doctor Johnson of our fin de siècle...
- Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess (2002)
