ANTHONY BURGESS’S newspaper career was a long one, and began when he was twelve years old. A drawing in the Manchester Guardian on 21 November 1929 by John Burgess Wilson (as he then was) of 261 Moss Lane East, Manchester was a winning entry in the Christmas ‘Fathers and Mothers’ competition, and depicted his father Joseph Wilson sleeping in his armchair next to a bottle of whisky and a pipe. Poems in Electron – the school magazine of Xaverian College, Rusholme – followed; and his earliest book and theatre reviews were written while studying English literature at the University of Manchester between 1937 and 1940, where they appeared in Serpent, the student newspaper.

Burgess was conscripted into the army in December 1940 and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and as musical director of a dance band. He was eventually posted to Gibraltar in 1943, where as well as his work as a teacher in the Royal Army Educational Corps he reviewed films for the Gibraltar Chronicle until his demobilisation in 1946. After shuttling between unfulfilling teaching jobs in England, Burgess and his first wife Lynne lived in Malaya and Brunei between 1954 and 1959 where he taught for the British Colonial Service, and it was then that he began to publish his first fiction. His career as a journalist began to flourish once again after they had returned to England and Burgess became a full-time writer.

From 1960 Burgess contributed regular articles to Country Life and the Listener, as well as anonymous reviews to the Times Literary Supplement. This work took place alongside the task of writing novels: by 1962, Burgess had published ten, including The Malayan Trilogy, The Right to an Answer, The Doctor Is Sick, The Worm and the Ring, Devil of a State, One Hand Clapping, The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange.

From May 1963 Burgess was also the fiction critic of the Yorkshire Post, writing a fortnightly column on new novels. He had joined the paper in 1961, and in his time there contributed more than sixty articles about several hundred different books. One morning a book called Inside Mister Enderby by Joseph Kell appeared on the doormat of his house in Etchingham along with the regular parcel of five or six that Burgess was called upon to review, and he led with a not entirely positive notice of it in his next article. As quickly became apparent, Inside Mister Enderby was in fact by Anthony Burgess himself, writing under a pseudonym, and his mischievous review of it in retrospect could have been judged as a private joke invisible to all except Burgess’s publishers. However, his subterfuge was discovered and reported in the diary column of the Daily Mail, and the Yorkshire Post promptly sacked him.

It does not seem that Burgess’s review of himself was the product of arrogant hubris. In the second volume of his autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time, he makes clear that he was under the impression that the books editor at the Yorkshire Post, Kenneth Young, was in on the joke as Burgess had warned him earlier that year that a pseudonymous novel was about to appear; indeed, Burgess had already been revealed as the author of Inside Mister Enderby a month before in a review in the Daily Telegraph, so his cover had long since been blown. The remarks he makes about Inside Mister Enderby, reprinted here as the first review, ‘Poetry for a Tiny Room’, are in any case hardly very complimentary about the qualities of the novel. Gore Vidal remarked at the time that the response of the Yorkshire Post was somewhat humourless: ‘at least, he is the first novelist in England to know that a reviewer has actually read the book under review’. Burgess later retold the story many times, as did others; a version appears in the final piece in this book, ‘Confessions of the Hack Trade’.

This notorious sacking was not the end of his journalistic career, of course. Dismissal from the Yorkshire Post did nothing to slow his prodigious output. Continuing his association with the Listener, he became its television critic; he continued to review books and write commentaries for the Times Literary Supplement; he began to contribute reviews to the Guardian from 1964, and later for the Observer, for which publication he wrote almost continuously until the end of his life. He became the theatre critic of the Spectator in 1965, and broadened his remit to include book reviews for that publication as well. He wrote for the Hudson Review, Encounter, American Scholar, the Times, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

Burgess’s literary stature increased throughout the 1960s, with his journalistic writing taking place alongside the production of more novels (The Eve of St. Venus, Nothing Like the Sun, Tremor of Intent, Enderby Outside) and, increasingly, commissioned screenplays (some original, some based on his own novels, none of which went into production). His first television appearance was on the BBC in 1962, and he contributed to many radio programmes, including Woman’s Hour, Children’s Hour and The World of Books; his Desert Island Discs interview was broadcast on 28 November 1966. Burgess was perhaps one of the first writers to embrace television and radio as a way of establishing a public persona and communicating his ideas to a mass audience, and he would continue his media activities for many years to come.

As his reputation grew, and especially after the adaptation of his novel A Clockwork Orange into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, Burgess’s journalistic activities expanded still further as he defended his book on air and in print. As well as producing many pieces of writing about youth culture and violence, he commentated on almost all aspects of contemporary culture for publications across the world, including Rolling Stone, Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, Playboy, El País and many more. The breadth of the subjects that he covered was astonishing, going far beyond his areas of immediate knowledge and expertise to include writing about food, anthropology, jazz, the evils of taxation, architecture, feminism, Islam, and whatever else was demanded by the editor of the day. His greatest loyalty was perhaps to the Observer (‘my paper’, as he called it), to which he contributed more articles than to any other single publication – but Burgess would write for almost anyone, about almost anything.

This makes Burgess’s journalism sound like the worst kind of hack work, knocked off quickly and clumsily for the money. Some of his pieces on more populist subjects, such as pieces on the royal family, the Moors Murderers or football hooliganism for the Daily Mail, on first reading seem slighter than his writing about literature – but even here there are references to Shakespeare, Beethoven and Catholic theology that make the approaches taken entirely distinctive. It seems clear that Burgess’s ability to write high-quality copy for many different readerships, while always combining sober judgment with a characteristic style and flair, contributed to the unending demand for his work from newspapers.

Nonetheless, Burgess was often anxious not to contradict the impression that his journalism was merely the work of a pen for hire. He made many claims that reviewing and other journalistic writing were subliterary activities and a distraction from the real business of writing novels; but how seriously to take these claims is not always clear, especially when they themselves are contained in articles for the newspapers. In a 1973 ‘Viewpoint’ column for the Times Literary Supplement Burgess complains at length about the injustices visited upon journalists – non-payment of fees by villainous editors, last-minute spikings of copy innocently sweated over by the naïve and luckless writer – and finishes by saying:

I quit now, while I’m still enjoying it. No more ‘Viewpoint’ from me. […] If one happens to be a novelist, one has really very little to give in the way of ideas, new literary theories, scholarly assessments […] The business of being a novelist entails the shedding of intellectuality, the ability to think in general terms, even the capacity to read anything but proofs. The alternative to indulging in literary expatiation is grunting about the woes of the professional writer or feeling compelled, as I do more and more these days, to engage in long public acts of self-defence or renewed recrimination.

While Burgess did abandon this particular column (though not the Times Literary Supplement altogether, for whom he continued to write for another twenty years), it is by no means clear that he really believed much of this. By 1973 he had completed seventeen novels and three works of literary criticism (as well as working on film scripts, music, translations and many other creative activities) so it was not as if he had been completely distracted by his writing for periodicals. Further, his journalistic writing, especially that directly concerned one way or another with literature, offered him space to reflect on his own practice, to explore new areas of fiction and culture, to check out the competition, and to develop his theories of the novel itself. Especially after 1968, when he left England for good to live variously in Malta, Italy and ultimately Monaco, journalism and the mass media more generally seems to have offered Burgess the opportunity to participate in contemporary literary and artistic culture in England and the United States that his self-imposed physical exile otherwise denied him.

It is also clear that Burgess’s journalism lies behind many of his book projects, and is reworked into his more permanent statements about literature. His extensive reviewing and literary commentaries certainly laid the foundations for his surveys The Novel Now (1967) and Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 (1984), and there were also substantial non-fiction works on D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Clive James, replying to Burgess’s anti-journalism claims in his book The Metropolitan Critic (1974), remarks that ‘if Burgess’s literary journalism was meant to be such an inherently inferior activity he might have done us the grace of being worse at it, so that we could have saved the money it cost to buy Urgent Copy and the time it took to enjoy it.’

Urgent Copy (1968) was the first collection of Burgess’s journalism to be published in his lifetime, and is the model for this new selection insofar as its focus is squarely on substantial literary studies of his contemporaries and predecessors. It remains a fascinating entry point to his literary preoccupations during the first extremely productive part of his career. In the introduction to Urgent Copy, Burgess is mildly and unconvincingly apologetic that these commissioned and apparently relatively insubstantial pieces have been captured in book form, and expresses an anxiety that he has been rather too kind to some of the writers whom he has commented on. This is evidently due to sympathy:

Book-writing is hard on the brain and excruciating to the body. It engenders tobacco addiction, an over-reliance on caffeine and dexedrine, piles, dyspepsia, chronic anxiety, sexual impotence. Behind the new bad book one is asked to review lie untold miseries and very little hope.

It is true that Burgess would often look for the positive in making his judgments, but he could also be very direct. Many writers receive stern appraisal, and there are some examples in this new selection; but these appraisals are not made in the service of scoring cheap points. Any disappointment felt at a shortcoming of a new work is genuinely felt. The main feeling that Burgess’s literary studies engender is a sense of excitement at meeting new writing, devouring it greedily and presenting an invitation to his readers to experience it too.

Burgess’s second collection of journalism is Homage to QWERT YUIOP (1986), which is a huge selection of pieces written between 1978 and 1985 taken from the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times and the Observer. There are nearly three hundred essays, which Burgess estimates in his introduction to represent approximately a third of his total output in this period. His total output of journalism, at least: novels published during this period included Earthly Powers, Abba Abba, The Pianoplayers, and several more. Rather more wide-ranging than Urgent Copy, Homage to QWERT YUIOP includes – as well as a large volume of book reviews – essays on the world of the cinema, critical assessments of particular authors, and pieces on linguistics and music. This new selection aims to represent at least some of these preoccupations.

By the time of Homage to QWERT YUIOP Burgess no longer pretended to undervalue his literary journalism, writing that:

I do not mind doing this work; indeed, I enjoy it. It is a means of keeping in touch with a public that does not necessarily read my or anybody else’s fiction. The reading and reviewing of books keeps my mind open to fresh ideas in both literary creation and criticism. And the need to keep within the limit of a thousand words or so is, as with the composing of a sonnet, an admirable formal discipline.

AS HIS vast output shows, Burgess was disciplined, formidably so, and this quality was of immense value to literary editors: he could be relied upon time and again to produce a lively and critically acute reading of a new book, to length and to deadline. Burgess was fond of emphasising the authentic labour inherent in writing. In Urgent Copy he compares himself to a carpenter, for example, making a table or cupboard of a specified size as quickly as is consistent with efficiency; and the title of Homage to QWERT YUIOP refers to Burgess’s main tool as a novelist and journalist, the manual typewriter. ‘When you hear your own clatter you know you are at work, as a blacksmith is. More, the rest of the household knows you are at work and does not suspect you of covertly devouring a Playboy centrefold.’ The title of the present volume is in this mode, reflecting Burgess’s own sense of himself as a worker engaged in honest and blameless industry.

A third selection of Burgess’s journalism was made after his death by Ben Forkner and Burgess’s widow Liana. One Man’s Chorus (1998) captures some of Burgess’s range, with a sample of his travel writings and reflections on contemporary world events; there are also pieces marking anniversaries of particular writers and musicians, and again a selection of literary studies. Taken together, the three books of Burgess’s journalism reveal but a fraction of the enormous and largely invisible whole, and it is a great sadness that all of these selections are now out of print. As part of the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, a major series published by Manchester University Press, it is likely that a critical edition of Urgent Copy will be made available in the coming years, and this will be welcomed by a new generation of readers: Burgess’s journalism is both an important document of the twentieth century in its own right, and critical to a full appreciation of his fiction and other creative work.

The Ink Trade brings into view a number (albeit a relatively small number) of Burgess’s works that have not been seen since their first publication, or which have never been published in any form before. The definition of ‘journalism’ has been stretched slightly to include pieces given as talks or lectures and written up for publication, but which have for one reason or another never appeared; the main body of the selection is taken from periodicals, some of which will have had only very small readerships. The essays span Burgess’s entire journalistic career, from an example of his fiction reviewing for the Yorkshire Post to his more expansive work for the Observer at the end of his life. Rather than grouping the articles by theme, as was attempted to an extent in Urgent Copy and Homage to QWERT YUIOP, the arrangement is almost completely chronological, with a minor adjustment at the very beginning and end to enable the selection to start with Burgess’s ill-starred review of his own book, and to conclude with a reflection on his own journalistic practice many years later.

Readers will find that themes emerge in any case as the book progresses: certain names reappear, occasionally unexpectedly, as do certain preoccupations. There is a sustained engagement with language and how it is used, especially in the pieces on slang and translation. There is an anxiety about television and the mass media, balanced by a fascination with cinema. The business of writing, and how it interacts with literature itself, is often there; popular fiction sometimes gets a kicking, though not necessarily just because of its popularity. Obscenity; Irishness; American culture; European identity; the question of what a novel actually is: all these questions and many more are wrestled with in different ways as Burgess confronts a new subject. At times the list of his subjects reads like a roll-call of an Anglocentric canon of literature – and it may in fact be that Burgess’s journalism and other critical writings have contributed more to the creation of that canon than has previously been acknowledged. Always in place are Burgess’s touchstones of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham, Ford Madox Ford and others, who are invoked in surprising contexts, both to offer insights into the importance of a particular set of ideas or a particular piece of writing, and to articulate something about Burgess’s own artistic work.

The most important figure to loom behind this selection, and perhaps behind all of Burgess’s writing, is that of James Joyce. Burgess’s early experiences of reading Joyce as a schoolboy were so profound that they shaped his later output in fundamental ways, and his engagement with Joyce and his works became the main artistic challenge of his life. Joyce appears in these pieces as one who opened up the possibilities of modern fiction, but also as a monitory presence whose Ulysses casts a shadow over the century. ‘Joyce as Novelist’, published here for the first time, presents a detailed and extended personal account, late in life, of the ways in which Burgess measured himself against his great inspiration.

Where available, full bibliographical details of each piece are provided as footnotes to the main text. The titles of the pieces are those used when they were first published, or, where there has been no previous publication, are taken directly from the manuscripts. In Homage to QWERT YUIOP Burgess changed a number of the titles from the published texts to his own original preferred titles, but in the interest of assisting possible future bibliographers this practice has not been followed here. On a very few occasions no title has been provided either by the author or anyone else, and for ease of reference a title has been invented using a brief phrase from the piece itself – this has been clearly noted throughout. Undated pieces have been assigned a place in the volume based on internal evidence, and this again has been noted.

Editorial intervention has been kept to a minimum, especially as a number of these pieces have already been edited by others before publication by a newspaper or journal. Where a published version of an article exists, this is the version preferred; previously unpublished pieces take the text from the typescript. Like the typescripts of his novels, Burgess’s typescripts of his journalism are largely free of corrections, with the text being presented clearly and unambiguously: in this respect the editor’s role has been a straightforward one, and Burgess’s copy has been left as it is. However, minor spelling errors have been silently corrected, and instances of repetition have in a few cases been deleted. Like most journalists, Burgess was not above reusing material on occasion, particularly for publications in different countries – though given the volume of what he produced it is surprising that there is not far more of it, accidental or deliberate.

There are of course some gaps in this selection. There are no pieces specifically about music, yet Burgess’s journalism about composers and musicians could easily fill another volume. It would be a hugely valuable volume too, giving greater understanding of Burgess’s own musical writing and how it relates to his literary output. Similarly, there is little directly about religion, and material drawn from Burgess’s writings on this subject would provide new angles on an important concern of his fiction, quite apart from being a fascinating collection in its own right. While television appears from time to time in these pieces, there is none of Burgess’s television criticism proper here: a shame, or perhaps an opportunity for another project, as his Listener reviews from the 1960s constitute an intriguing and illuminating document of a particular cultural moment. Looking beyond newspaper reviews and criticism, there is of course a wealth of print and broadcast interviews, documentaries, radio programmes and much more which remains uncollected. There is no complete catalogue – while Paul Boytinck’s bibliography remains a monumental achievement and a vital resource, it does not cover all the periodicals for which Burgess wrote, and ends in 1982 – and despite the recent renewal of scholarly interest in Burgess’s life and work it is unlikely that one will be created in the immediate future. Given the scale and challenges of the task, a collection of complete journalism remains a distant prospect.

The potential value of such a collection is not in doubt, especially in the interest of reappraising Burgess’s wider contribution to twentieth-century fiction. Indeed, many of Burgess’s essays connect directly to the materials and preoccupations of his novels. The title of the present selection is in fact taken from the piece ‘By-products of the ink trade’, reprinted here, which is a review of the fifth series of the Paris Review interviews with leading writers. In Burgess’s own wide-ranging 1972 interview with the Paris Review he describes the benefits of book-reviewing to a novel-writer:

Quite apart from the idea that reviewing books and writing about them presents useful ways of finding out about the world, the example given here shows a way in which the novels and the journalism directly interact. Burgess’s positive review of The Scope of Anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss appeared in 1967, and was later collected in Urgent Copy as ‘If Oedipus Had Read His Lévi-Strauss’. The approaches to mythology and linguistics ultimately outlined in Lévi-Strauss were already of interest to Burgess, as can be seen in his 1963 piece ‘The Corruption of the Exotic’, collected here, and in the novel MF (1970), which Burgess would later describe as one of his favourites. Similarly concerned with linguistics and anthropology, Burgess’s 1965 essay ‘Word, World and Meaning’ appeared first in the Times Literary Supplement, reappeared in Urgent Copy and then is presented as a lecture delivered by a character in the 1980 novel Earthly Powers. Other examples of journalism and novel-writing overlapping in surprising ways include Burgess’s writing about translation, which illuminates his novel Abba Abba about the Roman poet Belli; or his essay on Shakespeare ‘Getting the Language Right’, again reprinted here, which offers an understanding of his use of Elizabethan language in Nothing Like The Sun; or ‘The Anachronist Strikes Back’, which articulates his technique in writing the historical novel The Kingdom of the Wicked.

Because of the many different forms in which Burgess worked – fiction, poetry, film scripts, classical music, as well as journalism – he is often described as a polymath, excelling in disparate fields. However, this does not fully capture the way in which different types of artistic production are closely linked in his work: books such as The Pianoplayers combine prose, song lyrics and sheet music; lectures (such as ‘Can Art Be Immoral?’, a previously unpublished piece that is collected here) contain verse; narratives are driven using stage musicals or comic songs, such as in End Of The World News or Napoleon Symphony. Journalistic forms are used in the same way: fictions are paired with lengthy critical essays, such as in A Dead Man in Deptford, and dialogue is turned into an interview in 1985. These techniques again show the ways in which Burgess’s journalistic writing is very much part of his creative process.

Altogether it is clear that Burgess’s journalism operates not least as a way of working through ideas and approaches that also emerge in novels and other works. Bringing some of Burgess’s journalism back into view in this selection will offer new perspectives on his literary career. It is hoped too that this selection will have an appeal beyond students and researchers, and have something to offer to a new generation coming to Burgess for the first time: a disparate general readership, surprised and delighted to find writing of such quality and interest in the unpromising surroundings of newsprint. In recent years Burgess’s journalism has fallen into neglect. The Ink Trade provides a way in to this vast storehouse, and demonstrates that it can be as rewarding as the best of his novels.