Autobiography: Little Wilson and Big God

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s Little Wilson and Big God, the first volume of his two-part autobiography, recounts his life from his birth in 1917 up to 1959, ending just before the novels that made him famous. The title signals a double portrait: “Little Wilson,” the vulnerable, comic, sensual self born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, and “Big God,” the looming Catholic deity whose presence and absence shape his moral imagination. The book intertwines memory, satire, and confession, presenting a life formed by music, language, and the demands of faith and doubt.

Childhood and Education
Burgess evokes working-class Manchester with affectionate irony: a world of cinemas, music halls, and Catholic ritual. His mother, Elizabeth, and his elder sister died in the influenza pandemic when he was a toddler, leaving him to a melancholy, musical father who later remarried. The young Wilson grows up amid rosaries and pianos, in a house where guilt and harmony compete for precedence. Catholic schooling at Xaverian College hones his linguistic appetites and a talent for mimicry, while university study in Manchester confirms his split ambition: he wants to be a composer, yet words come just as readily as notes. He composes diligently, hearing symphonies in his head, and begins to sense that the England of his youth is both a prison of class and a playground of language.

War, Marriage, and the Making of a Writer
The Second World War sends him not to the front but to Gibraltar with the Army Educational Corps, where he teaches, performs, and composes for troops. War service is less heroism than bureaucracy, a lesson in imperial oddity and the varieties of Englishness. He marries Llewela “Lynne” Jones, clever, stylish, and hard-drinking, and their bohemian poverty becomes a proving ground for wit and endurance. He recounts a brutal wartime assault on Lynne by deserters and links it to a miscarriage, an episode that haunts his understanding of violence and malevolence. Back in civilian life he teaches in provincial schools, struggles to place his music, and discovers that fiction offers a quicker route to expression and income than orchestral scores.

Malaya and Brunei
In the mid-1950s he joins the British Colonial Education Service and moves to Malaya, then to Brunei. The tropics sharpen his senses and his satire. He studies Malay, listens for rhythms in speech, observes the political transitions of late empire, and measures his own Englishness against a multilingual, Muslim milieu. The heat, bureaucracy, and comedy of expatriate life seed his first published fiction, later gathered as The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy. He delights in linguistic borrowing and musical structure, turning classrooms and clubs into stages for farce and argument. A collapse in Brunei in 1959 brings a diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor and a predicted year to live; he heads home and begins to write with feverish purpose, a vow that will animate the next volume of his story. The diagnosis will prove wrong, but the urgency it creates becomes biographically decisive.

Faith, Form, and Persona
Running through the narrative is the tug-of-war between the catechism and the café, confession and carnality. “Big God” is never absent from the page, whether as theological problem, source of fear, or wellspring of aesthetic order; Burgess’s Catholicism provides both grammar and adversary. He sketches the birth of “Anthony Burgess,” a pen name drawn from his mother’s surname that allows the schoolmaster-composer to become a novelist without losing face. The style is baroque, punning, and proudly erudite, mixing Mancunian demotic with liturgical cadence. He owns his unreliability, polishes anecdotes, and turns private griefs into public comedy, but the through line is unmistakable: a boy bereaved and baptized into language grows into a man determined to orchestrate his life, whether in notes or in sentences.

Scope and Ending
Little Wilson and Big God closes at the brink of metamorphosis. Having mapped the terrain of childhood, war, marriage, and empire, Burgess stops on the threshold of the 1960s, armed with a deadline from mortality and a new certainty that his future lies on the page.