2015 is the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, and to mark the occasion we present a new exhibition looking at some of the material relating to Napoleon Bonaparte held in the Anthony Burgess archive. The exhibition contains prints from Burgess’s art collection, rare books from the library, manuscripts of Burgess’s Napoleon projects and more.

Burgess was fascinated with Napoleon from a very early age. According to his autobiography, at his birth it was clear that Burgess ‘had to be a great artist of some kind or another. My father breathed beer on me and said ‘He may be a new Napoleon’.

Burgess did not become a great military leader and had an undistinguished army career, and he did not become a writer until much later in life. However, Napoleon emerged as an inspiration in 1972 when Burgess wrote the beginnings of a novel based on Napoleon’s life, with the intention that Stanley Kubrick would use it as the basis for a film script. The novel took the formal structure of Beethoven’s Third Symphony — the Eroica, originally dedicated to Napoleon before his assassination of Louis Antoine de Bourbon, the Duke of Enghien — with each section of the narrative corresponding to a passage in the score.

In the event the text of Burgess’s novel was judged not to be sufficiently filmic, and Kubrick said that Burgess’s freedom with the chronology of events confused the drama of the story. Kubrick also felt that the comic vision of Napoleon, as presented in the novel, fell short of his heroic stature.

Burgess went on to develop the novel into one of his most important and experimental works, published in 1974 under the title Napoleon Symphony.

Napoleon Symphony appeared in five languages on publication and was warmly received by critics. It closes with ‘An Epistle To The Reader’, a 181-line poem in rhyming couplets, articulating the way in which musical forms are used in the text and explaining its modernist ambitions. This virtuoso conclusion demanded a virtuoso response from Burgess’s translators, who also had to contend with the novel’s many changes of register, from high politics to low slang, a great deal of idiomatic dialogue, and the army and drinking songs which pepper the text.

Here is a sample review: ‘In an age of dull prose, jargon of sociology and psychology, incessant buzz of gossip, the endless dribble of weepy-eyed ghetto hysterics, tin clatter of avant-garde mobiles, hollow academic puling: a reader who delights in succulent phrase, the zest of word play and a saucy paragraph must fall on each new work of Anthony Burgess with ravenous appetite. Burgess at his most characteristic, craziest, surpasses the high fun of the invented language in A Clockwork Orange‘ (Mark Mirsky, Washington Post Book World, 26 May 1974).

The exhibition is free and is open weekdays 10am-2pm, and during the evenings when events are taking place in the Engine House building. Napoleon Symphony is published by W.W. Norton in the United States.

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