Panorama Little Wilson and Big God

By Paul Gray

Having written some 50 books during the past 30 years, Anthony Burgess has no urgent need to prove that he is prolific. Nevertheless, a scant three months after the U.S. publication of The Pianoplayers, his 29th novel, here comes the first volume of Burgess's autobiography. It is, the author admits in a preface, "longer than I intended, and I foresee that the projected second and last volume -- whose title will probably be You've Had Your Time -- will be as long, if not longer." Shortly after this promise to produce roughly 1,000 pages of printed prose about himself, Burgess introduces his opinion of professional writers: "They are not remarkable people, and if they are novelists they are particularly lacking in interest."

That statement hardly sounds like an inducement to rush out and buy Little Wilson and Big God. Yet writers' autobiographies are generally less interesting for the quantity of their experiences than for the quality of their remembering. By this standard, Burgess has plenty to tell indeed.

Not that his life, or the first 42 years of it covered here, has been uneventful. In early 1919, around the time of Burgess's second birthday, his mother and older sister died of Spanish influenza. His father, on a furlough from the British army, walked into his Manchester lodgings on a horrid scene: "I, apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room." At the end of Little Wilson and Big God, on a Christmas holiday in 1959, the author is told that he has an inoperable brain tumor and a year to live.

Between these two dramatic points, Burgess strings a panorama of impressions, both personal and pertinent to his age. John Burgess Wilson (his pseudonym came later) grew up Roman Catholic in a Protestant country, "more of a Celt than an Anglo-Saxon." He was neither the first nor the last Englishman to feel estranged from his native land while learning to love its language and literature, but his generation was cut off from the past by the arrival of radio, the cinema, "American world hegemony, the dissolution of Christendom." When he begins losing his Catholic faith, the author confers with a priest, who later remarks that "it was a sad business, a matter of 'little Wilson and big God.' "

Much of the remaining story reads like an Evelyn Waugh comedy, told from the point of view of the butt of the joke. The longer Burgess's education proceeds, the more unqualified he becomes for useful employment. He meets and later marries a spirited Welsh classmate at Manchester University who has an idiosyncratic notion of marital fidelity: "There were plenty of attractive people around and it would be a shame and a waste not to find out what they were like with their clothes off." World War II offers Burgess nearly six years of wasted time in uniform; he gets no closer to combat than Gibraltar. Then it is on to teaching, including stints in England, Malaya and Brunei, before his death sentence and his decision to write as much as he could to provide for the support of his widow-to-be.

Burgess's story matters because he survived to become one of England's most important postwar novelists. It entertains because it is crammed with odd, intriguing information: recipes for old-fashioned Lancashire dishes, Malayan expressions for a variety of sexual acts, the crotchety digressions of an inexhaustibly curious mind. "I suppose," Burgess writes, "that a novelist who produces an autobiography has a right to expect that most of its readers will also be readers of his fiction." In this case, he is wrong. People who have never heard of Anthony Burgess, much less John Burgess Wilson, can easily find this book an occasion of laughter and education.