Burgess is the only writer apart from Orwell to have two books on Bowie’s list. The titles contrast nicely, showcasing different aspects of their author’s talents. A Clockwork Orange (see p. 1) is short and focused—a pithy sermon on free will powered by the genius of Burgess’s invented language Nadsat. Earthly Powers is a Victorian-style baggy monster, a panorama of the twentieth century and a toothsome celebration of storytelling with a stagy, extroverted quality in keeping with Burgess’s sometimes grandiose intellectual exhibitionism.
The Anthony Burgess of Earthly Powers is not the moral polemicist of A Clockwork Orange but a charlatan-magician with all manner of tricks up his sleeve. For example, Earthly Powers purports to be about “real” historical events but is full of deliberate mistakes to remind us that memory is untrustworthy—and in any case that what we’re reading is a novel, a licensed lie.
The key to Burgess is that he was a performer and a dandy. With his pomaded, nicotine-stained hair and silk handkerchiefs, he was never happier than when pontificating on television, which he did a lot. He enjoyed being abstruse and craved the respect of his peers. But he also craved connection with ordinary readers and achieved it despite his prolixity because his best work has a core of warm humanity and wisdom. I say “work.” The novels were only part of the show. As if it was the easiest thing in the world, Burgess churned out music, librettos, screenplays, and hundreds of book reviews over the course of his career. And, like David Jones, he hid behind an invented persona: “Anthony Burgess” was really John Wilson, born in the Manchester suburb of Harpurhey in 1917.
One of Burgess’s biggest successes, Earthly Powers was narrowly beaten to the 1980 Booker Prize by William Golding’s Rites of Passage. (Burgess had been tipped off about the result and was so cross he boycotted the ceremony, giving the excuse that he didn’t possess a dinner jacket.) The literary world delighted in the fact that Earthly Powers’ central character, a distinguished but second-rate gay British writer called Kenneth Toomey, was based on the notoriously predatory W. Somerset Maugham, with a bit of Noël Coward, Alec Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse thrown in for good measure. Its famous opening sentence finds the eighty-one-year-old Toomey surprised in bed with his “catamite” by an archbishop. The plot, meanwhile, pivots on an apparent miracle witnessed by Toomey: the curing of a terminally ill child in a Chicago hospital by a priest, Carlo Campanati. It’s an act that will have horrendous consequences down the line as the child grows up to become a murderous Californian cult leader.
Watching as Toomey bowls through the century, taking in 1920s Paris, Nazi Germany, and Golden Age Hollywood, name-dropping as he goes, is hugely pleasurable. But the most intriguing thing about Earthly Powers—and the reason I think it resonated for Bowie—is its chilling conviction that world affairs are subject to demonic agency. As a lifelong Catholic Burgess felt this keenly, telling Martin Amis in the Observer: “I do believe in the forces of evil—I myself was subjected to black magic in Malaya [now Malaysia, where Burgess worked in the colonial civil service]. There is, for example, no A. J. P. Taylor–ish explanation for what happened in Nazi Germany. There’s a very malign reality somewhere.…”
Finally, for clue-hungry Bowie buffs, there’s the business of the numerous allusions in Earthly Powers to John Ford’s seventeenth-century revenge tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, pointing up Toomey’s near incestuous relationship with his sculptress sister Hortense. Bowie borrowed the title (slightly amended) for one of the Blackstar album’s more raucous moments, the story of a petty-thief prostitute who steals the narrator’s purse while giving him a blow job. In Ford’s play, Giovanni has a grand passion for his sister Annabella, which he discusses at the very beginning with Friar Bonaventura: “Shall, then, for that I am her brother born, / My joys be ever banished from her bed?” In Earthly Powers, Toomey discusses his feelings for Hortense with the sexologist Havelock Ellis—a very Anthony Burgess joke.