Anthony Burgess Reviews Himself
In the early 1960s Burgess had a regular reviewing gig at the Yorkshire Post, work he took seriously, although he found the paper’s readers entirely disengaged from what he had to say. No matter how praising or negative his reviews, no readers contacted the paper, or him, with expressions of agreement, disagreement, correction or anything at all— except in one instance where he mentioned, in passing, that orchids have no smell, which occasioned a flurry of angry letters to the paper from outraged orchid-loving Yorkshire folk. It seems, orchids do have scent.
In 1963 Burgess published Inside Mr Enderby as ‘by Joseph Kell’, a pseudonym he had used previously for the novel One Hand Clapping (1961). Not realising that Kell and Burgess were one and the same man, the Post sent him the book to review. He did so, was found-out and sacked. The second part of Burgess’s autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time (1990), has the story:
Back in Etchingham post office a mountain of other people’s fiction awaited me. But then there arrived from the offices of the Yorkshire Post a lone volume, meticulously wrapped, unsullied by contact with Alvin Redman tripe and Mills and Boon sub-erotica. It was Inside Mr Enderby by Joseph Kell. That previous autumn, during my tour of the bookish villages of the Ridings, I had had lunch at his club with the editor of the Yorkshire Post, Kenneth Young, and had, as I well remembered, forewarned him about the publication of a new novel by me under a new, or fairly new, pseudonym. Let that book not be sent to me but let it be reviewed by someone else, preferably Peter Green. Kenneth Young had said nothing, but he seemed now to be disclosing a sense of fun hitherto concealed. He apparently wanted me to review my own book, so I reviewed it. I wrote, under the heading ‘Blasts from the Smallest Room’ (changed by the literary editor to “Poetry in a Tiny Room’): ‘This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals (“thin but over-savoury stews,” Enderby calls them) and halitosis. It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone. It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock.’ Then I turned to cleaner fiction. No one, discovering the double identity, not the editor himself, could complain that I was boosting my own work. I was going out of my way to put people off.
I was surprised at the response of the literary world to this harmless piece of foolery. A week after the publication of the review the Daily Mail disclosed that Joseph Kell was really Anthony Burgess, who had chosen a disguise in order to be paid for advertising his own work. Kenneth Young appeared on Granada Television to denounce my treachery and summarily, in public, to fire me. There was no response of either regret or satisfaction from Yorkshire Post readers, who first as last ignored me when I was not writing about inodorous orchids. I had just sent a review article to the Observer, in which I discussed books by V. S. Naipaul, Penelope Gilliatt and John Wain. This article now became deeply suspect (I presumably might be all those writers in disguise) and was neither published nor paid for. I gained temporary fame as a literary villain. I was even invited to sit at the high table of a Foyle’s literary luncheon and wondered if this would be a kind of pillory and I a target for bread rolls. Ah well, Daniel Defoe had been in the pillory too. Maurice Edelman MP and Sir Charles Snow, establishment pillars, had the guts to defend me in the national press. Are we losing our sense of humour? After all, Walter Scott had reviewed the first of the Waverley novels, and at great length too. A novelist who reviewed his own work might be presumed at least to have read it, which was more than could be said for some well-regarded hacks who would read only its blurb. [Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (1990), 71–72]
You can read the whole review in Will Carr’s edited selection of Burgess’s journalism The Ink Trade (Carcanet 2018), a highly readable volume. The specific review, ‘Poetry For a Tiny Room’, is here.
But here’s an oddity: the passage Burgess quotes in You’ve Had Your Time ends: ‘It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock.’ And that’s how the reprint of the review Carr includes in The Ink Trade ends too. But that’s not how the original review ended! If you check the actual copy, it concluded thus:
It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock. And yet how thin and under-savoury everything seems after Enderby’s gross richness.
I can see why Burgess omitted the last sentence from his account of the review; it runs counter to his rather self-serving narrative of ‘I thought the editor wanted me to review my own novel, I reviewed it negatively anyway, “going out of my way to put people off”, and yet the literary establishment hounded me!’ Not that the original review is altogether dithyrambic, but its envoi does say that Enderby is a book richer and better than other contemporary fiction, which is a pretty praising, self-praising, note on which to end. As I say: I can see why Burgess omits it from You’ve Had Your Time. What I can’t see is why Carr omits the sentence from The Ink Trade.
