“Unhappy all the Time”: Religion in Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers

Abstract

I like Somerset Maugham's stuff tremendously [...,] but I should think he was unhappy all the time, wouldn't you? He was an unpleasant man. --P. G. Wodehouse, 1975 interview W. Somerset Maugham appears in thin disguise as Kenneth Marchal Toomey in Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers (1980), the supposed memoirs of a literary lion who derides himself as an indifferent and overrewarded scribbler (278). Although Maugham was particularly religious and certainly Roman Catholic, Burgess gives his protagonist a strong Catholic background. Toomey says that he was born into the faith but, not able to believe (338), proposes to die out of it. Meanwhile he has a friend who becomes the Pope. In fact, the book begins with Toomey's being asked to help make the dead Pope a saint. The way in which religion shapes the principal character (and the literature he produces) in Burgess's satiric masterpiece is file main focus of this essay. Using only his middle names, John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-1995) wrote more than 60 books, including television and film scripts as well as his own memoirs (Little Wilson and Big God [1987] and You've Had Your Time [1990]). In 1983 Garland Press published Paul Boytinck's Anthony Burgess: An Enumerative Bibliography with Selected Annotations, which ran about as long as Earthly Powers--some 600 pages. Earthly Powers is a title that betrays Burgess's constant preoccupation with word play. Earthly Powers, however, is more than playing with language, as Burgess did when he invented Primitive Indo-European for Jean-Jacques Annaud's film The Quest for Fire (1982) or a Russian-influenced British jargon for A Clockwork Orange (1963) or an Elizabethan dialect for a memoir of William Shakespeare's time, Nothing Like the Sun (1964). In Earthly Powers Burgess's lifelong interests in music (he was a talented composer, an erudite music critic, and the author of a 1974 novel about Ludwig Beethoven, Napoleon Symphony), in the works of James Joyce (he wrote an excellent introduction to that difficult author), and in religion (he stunned us in 1985 with The Kingdom of the Wicked, which is nothing less than a retelling of the Acts of the Apostles) all appear in the satire of an octogenarian author looking back over his career and the literary society in which he achieved fame. Other authors have spoken through first-person narrators--from the Emperor Hadrian to Huck Finn, from Felix Krull to Holden Caulfield. Burgess lets the subject of the satire indite and indict himself. All the while Burgess is engaged in what he said was his constant aim in literature: to clarify moral choice in dealing with life's problems. Here and elsewhere he takes an Augustinian tack in recognizing our fallen human nature. We see the flawed character of the central character and the many shortcomings of his lifestyle as the rather nasty old man gives the raspberry, the finger, or the ax. Toomey is supposed to be as successful as Maugham, and he certainly is as curmudgeonly as Evelyn Waugh and as homosexual as Angus Wilson. (Waugh once said he would have been even nastier had he converted to Catholicism.) Toomey teaches, as it were, by bad example, and we cannot but feel some sympathy with this anti-hero. The Bad Guys, whether Richard III or Macbeth or lesser mortals, are always interesting and often truer to life than most of the Good Guys depicted in literature. Toomey has spent a long life nursing his nastiness. Now he has decided to strike out against a whole range of targets, many of them quite deserving of excoriation. As in all truly successful satire, we do entirely despise him; we rather like him. In fact, we are pushed toward loving him because we want to tell him that lack of love is his basic problem. As with all the most trenchant satire, however extreme he may be, Toomey is merely farcical; he is human and tragic. …