BUT DO BLONDES PREFER GENTLEMEN?
Anthony Burgess
New York, McGraw Hill, 1986
589 pp., $24.95
In England and France, this gathering of yellowing newsprint was called Homage to Qwert Yuiop: Selected Journalism 1978-1985. Crossing the Atlantic, the text has been baptized anew as But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: an altogether more tangy title, redolent of Lorelei Lee and the cocktail hour. In Europe, Burgess is the busy hack, paying duty to his well-worn Smith-Corona ("this perpetual typewriter hammering"); for the Manhattan publication transfer, however, Burgess is the dapper man of letters who takes the train from Monte Carlo to Barcelona to purchase shoes: his reviewing promoted to the status of belle-lettres.
Both perspectives pertain. That he is the most industrious of authors is self-evident. Since I became, in 1984, Burgess' recording angel, he has produced, to make me industrious also, Enderby's Dark Lady (a novel), Ninety-Nine Novels (an idiosyncratic annotated reading list), Cyrano de Bergerac (an adaptation of Rostand for the Royal Shakespeare Company), The Kingdom of the Wicked (a run of de Mille epic, spawned from the A.D. Anno Domini script), Flame into Being (a biography of D. H. Lawrence), L' Enfance du Christ (a translation of Berlioz's oratorio), Blooms of Dublin (a musical based on James Joyce's Ulysses), Oberon Old and New (a completely refurbished libretto for Weber's opera), and a version of Bizet's Carmen. In the summer, another novel is promised, called The Piano Players. His new word processor at his home in Monaco is rumored already to contain, on its floppy discs, a memoir of Manchester (the birthplace), a sword and sorcery romp about King Arthur in 1960s Leningrad, and an operetta about Freud--called From Summa to Psyche.
And, without pause for a quarter of a century, regular articles come lickety-split in any newspaper you care to pick up: from The New York Times to The London Times, from the TLS to Vogue, from the Yorkshire Post to the American Scholar...and dozens more. Burgess has a prodigal hand. He's as busy as a grotto of goblins making clockwork artifacts (or clockwork oranges). Based on the Cote d'Azur, he fills the world with his words, conquering with a fusillade of paper. The typewriter is the lance and shield; the bands and clatters of the keyboard are the sounds of battle. QWERT YUIOP is up there on the escutcheon--his heraldic device, as Non Sanz Droict was Shakespeare's.
This, then, is Burgess the super-scribe: his Fleet Street patented persona, "an unshaven slave of the deadline," who reckons he has to toil so hard because remuneration from writing is so meager. Though he lives in the playboy's Mediterranean, he wails that "I cannot afford French furniture"--and has to go to sleep on the floor. Not even Mozart, he says twice, had to make his own bed, and Mozart was buried in a pauper's plot. Joseph Conrad had a Cadillac. Sir Edward Elgar had a chauffeur-valet. All Burgess has--he says--is a jalopy, piloted by his wife, Liana, and no garage.
Contrary to the plea of impecuniosity, there is Burgess the cosmopolitan--who knows everyone and who has read everything and who needs to work no more; who could, if he wished, immerse himself in the upholstery of the Belle Epoque. Though content is exactly the same, Homage to Qwert Yuiop
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