Classic indeed!

Bang on

Agreed.....and that's why he hated Maugham.

Is that a good thing?

Greetings. The unedited interview is knocking around on KZfaq somewhere but it's hard to watch because Burgess keeps being interrupted - in that irritating way they have - by an overeducated but ignorant and shallow woman TV presenter.

👍🏻

He is indeed great fun.

Very well said.

It never palls, does it, that novel? I don't think I've ever read anything so absorbing, so entertaining, so instructive, or so wildly funny.

@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess Right?! I wonder what the problem is with EP. I have friends who are major readers who have heard of the book and just know of Burgess from “A Clockwork Orange “. Perhaps this is only true in the US (where I live). Anyway I certainly appreciate commenting with someone else who has read the book. My regards!

@@deirdre108 The problem with EP? The critics didn't like it. It was judged to be too much of a 'ragbag'.

@@InSearchOfAnthonyBurgess Critics! They were probably annoyed that they had to read (partly read?) and review a 600 page book. I checked out the Booker Prize nominations for fiction published in 1980-- EP is a better novel than the shortlisted ones, most of them I read and many I thought were quite forgettable. "Midnight's Children" won that year and a good case can be made for that, but I still think EP is a better book. "Ragbag" indeed!

Tee-hee! 😂 Actually I think Burgess made that up anyway.

For instance, he claims somewhere, I think in his autobiography (much of the content of which is fabricated; it is the best novel he ever wrote) that in Gib, some officer found a copy of Finnegans Wake in Sgt-Maj Wilson's effects and thought it might be some kind of code book. Incredible to a ludicrous degree, but amusing.

It was supposed to have happened when he was 15. He travelled to France in order to procure a copy of Ulysses. He smuggled it back into England 'cut up into sections and distributed all over my body'. The customs officers at Dover, having not the slightest interest in banned literature, must've said to each other, 'Here's a total crackpot' and told him (to his disappointment), 'On your way, feller.'

A opportunity to be a prisoner of conscience, and he fluffed it!

The opportunity to become a prisoner of conscience came up again, in La Línea de la Concepción. Burgess was ready this time. He would not be denied. He made sure to be thrown into jail for the offence, he explains in his autobiography, of ‘upholding the democratic philosophy’ in a bordello. (Speaking for myself, when I visit a brothel, political questions are not uppermost in my mind, but there it is.) Burgess delivered a lengthy speech inside the bagnio, and continued it, even more loudly, outside in the street. (He was hog-whimpering drunk.) During the course of his address to the people - of La Línea in particular and of Spain in general - he described the Caudillo and President of the Government of Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, as, among other things, a dirty great ’cabrón’ (lit. billy-goat).

Omniscience.

Polymathy.

Moby dick could definitely be called proto modernist but it came out in 1851 and the prose is still very much of the nineteenth century. Great Gatsby is definitely of the modernist era but isn’t pointed to perhaps as much as being a ‘modernist’ text because it’s story and prose is relatively conventional in comparison to Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf.