Books: True Vocation

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THIS MAN AND MUSIC by Anthony Burgess McGraw-Hill; 192 pages; $14.95

Told by a doctor at the age of 43 that he had a year to live, Anthony Burgess greeted the news by taking up a literary career. He turned out five books in one year, hoping that the royalties might make a legacy for his wife. Now, 23 years and some 40 books later, the author of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers still regards writing as an "unwanted" gift, an "enforced vocation."

His true vocation, he says, is the one he has aspired to ever since adolescence, when he sat transfixed by a BBC radio broadcast of Debussy's L 'Après-Midi d'un Fanne: composing. With little outside encouragement, young Burgess taught himself music, beginning with the piano keyboard. "Find middle C," he maintains, "and you have found everything." At 20 he had written his first symphony. By the time of his erroneous death sentence he had, while supporting himself as a teacher, produced a catalogue of 65 mostly unplayed works.

In This Man and Music, Burgess sets out to see what his two arts have to say to each other. Music, of course, does not "say" anything; its content is tension and release. It communicates, but mysteriously, as "a semiotic organization." When the symphonic tone poems of Berlioz and Strauss try to incorporate narrative and character, the novelist in Burgess protests.

Literature that yearns toward the condition of music provides a more promising line of inquiry. Burgess explores lyric verse, the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the verbal polyphony of James Joyce. He envisions quasimusical novels built on principles of "structuralism, a liberation from marketplace meanings," and offers two of his own, M/Fand Napoleon Symphony, as exhibits.

The going gets technical at times. Burgess assumes, for example, that most of his readers will recognize the "mystic chord" of Scriabin when they see it on a staff. But he writes with his usual quirky vigor and never loses sight of the quotidian world in which mystic chords get written: glossing one of his own scores, he recalls such details of its composition as "a particular face on television, a stab of heartburn, the cat licking my toes." Those who persist through the occasional thickets of crotchets and quavers will find in this little book the middle C of Anthony Burgess.

—By Christopher Porterfield