Autobiography: You've Had Your Time

Overview
Anthony Burgess’s You’ve Had Your Time, published in 1990, is the second installment of his confessions, picking up where Little Wilson and Big God leaves off and carrying the story through three crowded decades. It opens with the collapse that sent him home from colonial service in the Far East in 1959 and a mistaken diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor, the shock that propelled a frantic burst of writing. From there the book tracks the making of his reputation, the complexities of his private life, a peripatetic sequence of homes, and an almost manic range of creative projects in fiction, criticism, translation, film and television work, and music.

Life after the death sentence
Back in England, facing what he believed was a very short future, Burgess wrote at speed and breadth, discovering both the commercial and imaginative advantages of industry. He recounts the genesis of A Clockwork Orange, the mid-sixties Enderby novels, and the audacious Shakespearean ventriloquism of Nothing Like the Sun. He revisits the American edition of A Clockwork Orange with its missing final chapter and the long afterlife of the book in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, which he treats as both windfall and burden: fame, invitations, and money on one side, and on the other the narrowing of public perception to a single title and the moral panic that brought him unasked into debates on youth violence and censorship.

The personal narrative runs hard alongside the professional. Burgess describes the strains of his first marriage to Lynne, her alcoholism and death in 1968, without false piety, folding grief into an account of perpetual motion. He relates meeting the Italian-born Liana Macellari, the birth of their son, and a patchwork domesticity distributed across countries and languages. The book’s geography is restless: England gives way to Malta, where run-ins with censorship and currency controls push him to Rome; residencies and extended stays in the United States, and finally the tax-sheltering, sunlit stability of Monaco. Along the way are teaching stints, lecture tours, journalism done to deadline and for fees, and the endless negotiations with agents, publishers, and broadcasters that kept the enterprise afloat.

Work, craft, and money
Burgess is candid about finances: high British tax rates drive his relocations and his prodigious output no less than artistic zest. He details screen and television work, novelizations and scripts on biblical subjects, essays and reviews, cultural commentary, and the parallel career he never ceased to claim, that of a composer. Pages are given to symphonies, concerti, and pastiche, to the struggle of getting music performed, and to the structural thinking that connects his scores and his prose. The book returns often to the discipline of making: schedules, word counts, and the blend of pleasure and compulsion that constitutes vocation.

Encounters and opinions
Threaded through are portraits and vignettes: editors and producers, fellow writers and critics, the hazards of festivals and television studios. Burgess’s judgments are spirited and sometimes barbed, on Catholicism and heresy, on universities and the media, on the English language and its hybrids, on Joyce, Shakespeare, and the novelist’s duty to entertain while extending the range of speech. He wears his polyglotism lightly, sprinkling the pages with puns, quotations, and quick etymologies that double as self-portraiture.

Voice and design
The tone is expansive, sardonic, and incorrigibly digressive. Chronology is honored in broad strokes, but episodes loop back for second looks, contradictions are aired rather than concealed, and the author’s taste for mythmaking is put on stage with a wink. The result is a life told as performance: a confession that argues, annotates, and sometimes revises itself. By the time the narrative reaches Earthly Powers and the late-1980s work, Burgess has sketched not a tidy ledger of achievements but the ecology that produced them, illness averted, grief survived, debts paid, pleasures seized, and the daily practice of art rendered as a stubborn, improvisatory craft.