THE BRILLIANCE OF BURGESS

Burgess Interview Excerpt from the Paris Review

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NTERVIEWER

Composers traffic heavily in transitions. Isn’t this particular instance of literary composition by musical analogy an example of “formal trickery,” best understood by the reader who is at least an amateur musician?

BURGESS

I think that music does teach practitioners in other arts useful formal devices, but the reader doesn’t have to know their provenance. Here’s an example. A composer modulates from one key to another by the use of the “punning” chord, the augmented sixth (punning because it is also a dominant seventh). You can change, in a novel, from one scene to another by using a phrase or statement common to both—this is quite common. If the phrase or statement means different things in the different contexts, so much the more musical.

INTERVIEWER

One notices that the form of A Vision of Battlements is meant to be similar to that of Ennis’s passacaglia, but can any but the most tenuously analogous relation be established between literature and music generally?

BURGESS

I agree that the musico-literary analogies can be pretty tenuous, but in the widest possible formal sense—sonata form, opera, and so on—we’ve hardly begun to explore the possibilities. The Napoleon novel I’m writing apes the Eroica formally—irritable, quick, swiftly transitional in the first movement (up to Napoleon’s coronation); slow, very leisurely, with a binding beat suggesting a funeral march for the second. This isn’t pure fancy: It’s an attempt to unify a mass of historical material in the comparatively brief space of about 150,000 words. As for the reader having to know about music—it doesn’t really matter much. In one novel I wrote, “The orchestra lunged into a loud chord of twelve notes, all of them different.” Musicians hear the discord, nonmusicians don’t, but there’s nothing there to baffle them and prevent them reading on. I don’t understand baseball terms, but I can still enjoy Malamud’s The Natural. I don’t play bridge, but I find the bridge game in Fleming’s Moonraker absorbing—it’s the emotions conveyed that matter, not what the players are doing with their hands.

INTERVIEWER

What about film technique as an influence on your writing?

BURGESS

I’ve been much more influenced by the stage than by the film. I write in scenes too long for unbroken cinematic representation. But I like to run a scene through in my mind before writing it down, seeing everything happen, hearing some of the dialogue. I’ve written for both television and cinema, but not very successfully. Too literary, or something. I get called in by makers of historical films to revise the dialogue, which they then restore to its original form.