The Inside The Archive blog series describes highlights of the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we look at Anthony Burgess’s notebooks.

There are fourteen diaries and notebooks by Anthony Burgess in the Foundation’s archive, containing fragments of manuscript material written between 1940 and 1977.

Burgess was not a prolific diarist, and his attempts to keep a daily record of his activities do not extend beyond a few entries for each year. In 1951 a new year diary begins on 1st January, but fades out by 4th February. His subsequent attempts at diary-keeping end on 3 January 1952 and 2 January 1954.

The interest in these early diaries lies in his collaboration with his first wife, Lynne, who contributes some of the entries herself.

Apart from family letters, annotated photographs and a handful of inscribed books in the Burgess Foundation’s library, Lynne Wilson did not leave many traces. Most of what we know about her life with Burgess is told in his words, but these fragments provide valuable examples of her writing. Of particular interest are brief diaries covering the months from January 1955 to December 1956, mostly written by Lynne, which provide a  first-hand contemporary record of their life in colonial Malaya.

Some of Burgess’s notebooks help us to understand the development of particular literary works. A notebook entry by Burgess on a page dated 4 February 1958 contains the earliest surviving references to the plot of A Clockwork Orange. A two-page outline shows that Burgess originally intended the novel to be set in 1980, and the name of the protagonist is given as ‘Fred Verity’. One of Burgess’s early working titles was ‘The Plank in Your Eye’, a reference to the Sermon on the Mount.

The earliest surviving notebook material, which can be dated to 1940, is an incomplete draft chapter from Burgess’s university dissertation on Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. In his autobiography, Burgess recalled that he wrote it as German planes droned overhead on their way to bomb Trafford Park, and industrial area near Manchester. The completed dissertation was submitted in the summer of 1940, but no copies have survived.

The same notebook contains manuscript notes towards a lecture on ‘Cultural Reconstruction’, delivered by Burgess while he was working for the Royal Army Education Corps in Gibraltar between 1943 and 1946, and there are two fragments of an untitled story about life in the British Army. It is possible that this material is related to Burgess’s novel about his life in Gibraltar during the Second World War, A Vision of Battlements, written in 1952 but not published until 1965.

Other notebooks contain early plans for novels, such as Honey for the Bears (working title: ‘Two, Two, the Opposites!’), M/F — also referred to here as ‘The Incest Play’, ‘The Riddle Solver’, and ‘The Solver of Riddles’ — and The Wanting Seed, whose working titles included ‘Fertility Novel’, ‘Let Copulation Thrive’, and ‘Hope Lies with the Children’.

Elsewhere in the collection of Burgess notebooks, we find a few bars of music by Burgess, limericks, cocktail recipes, personal accounts, to-do lists, cartoons and calligraphic exercises in Jawi, the Arabic form of Malay. Taken together, these books provide fragments of information about various aspects of Burgess’s personal and professional life, and his ambitions to become a writer and/or a composer.

The notebooks have already provided some background for the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess and a few academic articles. They appear in the catalogue of manuscripts, which can be accessed via the Archives Hub. Because the notebooks are very fragile, consultation of this material is subject to the approval of the Foundation’s archivist. Contact us for more information.

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