Little Wilson and Big God by Anthony Burgess

First published: 1986

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1917-1959

Locale: Great Britain, Gibraltar, Malaya, and Brunei

Principal Personages:

• John Anthony Burgess Wilson, an author and musician
• Llewela “Lynne” Jones Wilson, his wife
• T. S. Eliot, a famous poet, playwright, and editor
• Lionel Charles Knight, a university professor and well-known literary critic
• Dylan Thomas, a famous Welsh poet
• Eric Blair, a novelist, essayist, journalist, and radio broadcaster (best known as George Orwell)

Form and Content

The first volume of a proposed two-volume autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God is a detailed account of Anthony Burgess’ life and times, from his birth up to 1959. Begun in 1985, it was published to coincide with the author’s seventieth birthday, February 25, 1987. This work is a response to several would-be biographers: an effort to preempt their work, since it would be easier to write of his own life than to pass the information to them. Burgess claims that the professional writer’s life is unremarkable, not worth a biography. His inner life is to be found in his previously published works. Yet viewed as “an allegory of all men’s lives,” an autobiography might offer comfort or relieve some of the miseries of others, he observes. Following the examples of Saint Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Burgess writes his confessions in Little Wilson and Big God. Without offering great spiritual revelations, these confessions examine a multiple ego, “somewhat different from the ego that is doing the examining,” which “may stand for a great number of my generation.” In writing his autobiography, Burgess hoped that its readers would be familiar with his novels and that they would be interested in learning of the background and real experiences that were the raw material for his fiction. He has predicted that his writing career will end with the second volume of his autobiography.

The book consists of 448 pages of text, a three-page foreword, and a ten-page index. It is divided into six parts, corresponding to major changes in Burgess’ life. The first part covers his family’s history and his own childhood, up to his entering Xaverian College at the age of eleven. Part 2 covers his secondary education up to his entering Manchester University. The third part covers his university days and his engagement to Llewela Isherwood Jones, usually called Lynne. Part 4 is an account of his experiences as a British soldier from 1940 to 1946, including details of his marriage (1942) and military service, mostly in Gibraltar. Part 5 recounts the struggle to readjust to life in England on a teacher’s salary and tells of the writing of A Vision of Battlements (1965).

The final section is devoted to the experiences of Burgess and his wife while Burgess was a college lecturer in Malaya and, later, in the Sultanate of Brunei. Their sojourns in the British Colonial East (1954-1959) gave the author the impetus to write his Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes (1956-1959, 1965), under the name Anthony Burgess, and English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958), as John Burgess Wilson. This five-year period was one of the unhappiest times for the Burgesses, whose antisocial behavior was resented by the colonial authorities. The irregular life-style, the debilitating climate, and his wife’s attempted suicide all contributed to Burgess’ physical breakdown, which ended his colonial service. In London, doctors informed him (erroneously) that he had a terminal brain tumor. The book ends with Burgess at the age of forty-two beginning to write novels to support his prospective widow.

Critical Context

Although Burgess has offered a considerable amount of autobiographical material to the public over the years, nothing approaches the comprehensiveness of this work, and one is surprised to find such intimate details of his social indiscretions provided here. Readers will also find richly detailed and evocative memories of life in Manchester in the 1920’s and 1930’s and full accounts of Burgess’ various occupations up to the age of forty-two, much of which contributes to one’s understanding of Burgess’ earlier novels. Again, one is surprised at how closely Burgess stays to the reality of his own life in his fiction. That is particularly true of Richard Ennis, hero of A Vision of Battlements, whose unruly and truculent army service in Gibraltar is frequently a mirror image of Burgess’ own experience. Many times Burgess did not even change the names of real people he describes in his novel.

Burgess’ life is always presented in the broader context of history. For example, he provides interesting descriptions of what London’s literary world was like during wartime, a rich and lively account of the complexity of Malaya before it achieved independence, and valuable glosses of common Malay and Chinese words which clarify various religious and social distinctions not familiar to Western thinking.

Allowing for comic fictional distortion, there is little disparity between Burgess’ autobiographical opinions and the moral and religious implications of most of his novels. Burgess’ heroes—decent, well-intentioned men—follow or find a commitment. Their seriocomic blunderings are largely the result of their assertion of free will in societies which cause suffering for nonconformists. Burgess’ sinner-heroes, often Catholics, are guilt-ridden or deeply aware of their shortcomings, but they struggle for their rights against painful odds.

Little Wilson and Big God deserves to stand among the best autobiographies of twentieth century authors. Burgess is a lively, often-shrewd commentator on and witness to his own times, combining entertainment and instruction. His contribution to the literary treasury of English literature is considerable, for all of his eccentricities and personal resentments. Paul Boytinck writes that the book is a masterpiece,

the best literary autobiography of the year. . . . Every page includes something of interest: a tag of verse here, a damp squib that goes off hundreds of pages later, an intelligent speculation here and a gross shaft of indelicate wit there; and, above all, a touching honesty everywhere.

Bibliography

Aggeler, Geoffrey. Anthony Burgess: The Artist as Novelist, 1979.

Aggeler, Geoffrey. Critical Essays on Anthony Burgess, 1986.

Boytinck, Paul. Anthony Burgess: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide, 1985.

Boytinck, Paul. “Little Wilson and Big God,” in Queen’s Quarterly. XCV (Summer, 1988), pp. 448-450.

Coale, Samuel. Anthony Burgess, 1981.

Lodge, David. Review in The Times Literary Supplement. No. 4378. (February 27, 1987), pp. 203-204.