Here’s how to open with a bang. “It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”

That’s the confident, melodious, literate, entertaining first sentence of Earthly Powers, the 1980 novel by Anthony Burgess. Not bad for someone born in 1917. One of the few advantages in choosing authorship as a profession is the faint possibility of a long career. Burgess’ practical attitude to his writing, his detailed understanding of voices, the changing sounds of humanity and the musics and mass cultures they produce all helped to keep his voice on the page young and, in every sense, vital. His outrage in the face of media-sponsored human folly also helped to keep him burning bright. Burgess always both gave and received in his relationship with popular culture.

And that first sentence is typically craftsmanlike. Burgess loved the precision, power, and adventure inherent in his huge vocabulary. He was a grammar school-boy, an eternal autodidact and a trained teacher — he’s going to give you words. It’s a tease, a deft setting out of the novel’s key elements and a display of bravado, partly by the author and partly by his fictional narrator Kenneth Toomey who will admit he was aiming to impress. Both Toomey and Burgess are showmen with an interest in “high” art, “low” entertainments and everything in between. Burgess once wrote: “There is no worse neurosis than that which derives from a consciousness of guilt and an inability to reform” — and Toomey is created to embody that throughout his suitably serpentine memoir.

Burgess gives us here one of his many morality tales, as told by an immoral old man: lapsed Catholic, hack writer, guilty sensualist who looks back over a star-studded, sordid, compromised life, during the star-studded, sordid, compromised 20th century. It’s a kind of joke Burgess tells against himself — holding a funhouse mirror up to personal and professional falls from grace and adding a few he avoided. And he reveals the energy and empathy not just of an author, but an entertainer — a man who liked the immediate applause his music could gather when performed, who took pains to give a rattling good reading for an audience, even when he’d just learned he was dying of cancer.

Burgess, born John Burgess Wilson, was the son of performers. His mother, who died when he was very young, was a dancer and his distant father played the piano, mainly in pubs but had one music hall evening, accompanied by the Eight Lancashire Lads — including Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin. Burgess was a writer with his earliest roots and inspirations deep in popular culture, a lonely child who read out silent movie speech cards to illiterate neighbour kids in the cinema, a warily intelligent adult who addressed popular forms as an observer, a creator, and one of the UK’s earliest authors to embrace the possibilities of television. And through popular culture, as a writer and composer, the unloved child and initially under-loved man could allow himself the benefit of mass appreciation, affection without commitment.

I grew up watching Burgess on chat shows — back in the days when a hot guest for a chat show could be a literary novelist. He’d sit, the Lancashire lad made good, talking in soft, fastidious Manchester tones, answering serious but deferential questions as a wise old polysyllabic author. I remember his swept-aside combover with that comical little kick above one ear, and the deadpan face and delivery. It was the face of someone who wouldn’t mind performing on the page using the hypnotising, futuristic voice of Alex, the Beethoven-loving thug of A Clockwork Orange, or the subtly subversive narration of Janet Shirley, a northern housewife whose comment on killing her quiz show-winning — but — insane husband is: “The best first thing to do, when you’ve got a dead body and it’s your husband’s on the kitchen floor and you don’t know what to do about it, is to make yourself a good strong cup of tea.”

Burgess grew up as Jackie Wilson. He’d been poor and didn’t like it. His aim was to earn a living and he chose — rather late — to do that by writing. He mentioned aiming for, “2,000 words before breakfast and then you have the rest of the day.” That is a good many words, in case you were wondering. Before breakfast. At one point he had to write under another assumed name, Joseph Kell, to prevent himself from seeming disreputably productive. He brought the work rate of a good tradesman to what was still regarded as a gentlemanly game, something creative chaps did to pass the time, not work, not commerce, not setting out your stall in the public eye.

The Burgess onscreen in my living room was selling himself on his own terms. He would talk about the details of literature, the work. His forensic eye owed its insights not to a university, but to early Catholic instruction in self-examination and to Manchester’s streets, the twists of working-class wit in the pubs and booze shops his family ran and frequented. Burgess never lost his early affection for the wordplay that makes a joke, a song, a rhyme, out of current events and personalities, human failings.

Unconventionally educated and inveterately curious, Burgess was a polyglot magpie amongst the world’s inspirations. He was an elitist in the sense that he liked — as every craftsman does — a proper job, well done. He’d never forget a street rhyme of quality, or a fine aria, sonnet, a foreign term, a good movie or nickname.

He’d met many types of people and was didactic in the widest possible sense — here is this joke, keep up before it’s gone; here is this word, you can learn it; here is my work, it exists and is part of culture, you can read it and also you might like to know that it is work, takes effort and that, for example: “When I hear a journalist like Malcolm Muggeridge praising God because he has mastered the craft of writing, I feel a powerful nausea. It is not a thing to be said. Mastery never comes and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle, he dies fighting.” That’s art as a feet-on-the-ground craft. And it’s writing as a way of being in the world — you get knowledge, you get skill, you get dignity, you get — if not righteousness, then some measure of contentment. Burgess saw the age of instantaneous fame coming, the toxic emptiness of much culture. It’s not at all an accident that another gentle ghost echoing through Earthly Powers is Tom, the music hall comic, the man who is praised towards the end of the book for practising a “comedy of kindness.” Burgess’s own humour could be less than kind — it was based on sharp observation, often of defects and stupidities, given that we’re only human — but he has Toomey describe Tom as a saint. In a book where there is a genuine miracle performed with terrible consequences, the spotlit clown is left the angel’s part. To see everything and still be kind — that is saintly. And educational. And entertaining. And a precious part of any healthy culture.

By arrangement with The Guardian

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 5th, 2017