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The stage for this performance is the Rome apartment where Burgess lives with his second wife Liana and their nine-year-old son Andrea, surrounded with the tools of his many trades —books, typewriters, recording equipment, even an electronic organ. The confidence, vitality and theatricality are typical. All his readers are familiar by now with the story of how he got his start as a novelist when doctors declared that he had only a year to live and he began writing like a man possessed, determined to build up an estate for his future widow.
Sacred Cow. The doctors were wrong, of course. But Burgess still works with the passionate speed of a condemned man. Right now he has three new novels in the works: an espionage thriller in a "super-James Bond vein," a biographical fiction based on his pianist father's musical career, and a novel devoted to Pope John XXIII, about whom Burgess, a strict English Catholic, is highly critical. Soon to be published is the third and concluding volume of the Enderby novels, the story of a poet who loses and then regains his creative gift, generally regarded as one of Burgess's finest literary accomplishments. There is also an epic poem based on his recent script for the Italian TV production of Moses—with Burt Lancaster in the title role. In his spare time, Burgess looks for someone to put on his musical based on James Joyce's Ulysses.
Burgess has strong, not to say brash, opinions on practically everything of importance and is not overly modest. "If I may say so, writing Napoleon Symphony was probably more difficult than writing a War and Peace, which can go on as long as it likes, and does." He kicks another sacred Russian cow in Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "The most swollen reputation of our day," he observes of the Nobel-prizewinning exile. "They say he is a great writer because he is a great man."
Ironically, to Burgess, who carries high the torch of fiction's modernist tradition, the future of literary studies and serious reading looks bleak. "Nobody reads in the past any more," he grieves. "You can major in literature in America beginning with Hermann Hesse." (Burgess should know. He has spent most of the past five years teaching at Princeton and the City College of New York, though he now intends to devote himself full time to writing.) The author's exuberant pessimism extends to the course of democratic government, especially in his native England. His solution is for England to be part of a global English-speaking union with Australia, America and Canada, to be governed by a constitutional monarch. It may sound positively Napoleonic, but it has vision—the vision of a bold artist who has yet to meet his Waterloo.