The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, established in 2003 by Anthony Burgess's colourful widow Liana, is a remarkable and unusual institution. It is dedicated to Burgess's considerable literary and musical output, and is housed in Chorlton Mill in post-industrial Manchester, in the heart of the neighbourhood vividly described by Friedrich Engels in 1845 as incomparably horrible, dirty and disgusting, and its rivers Irwell and Irk as stinkingly contaminated. The area is now in the process of being reclaimed by culture and leisure. Manchester was Burgess's birthplace, and although he expatriated himself very thoroughly and spent much of his life abroad, he never rejected a Mancunian identity, and late in life expressed the wish that his complete works should be published in an “Irwell Edition” named after the “muddy and graveolent river” that crosses the city and runs by and under Chorlton Mill. This did not happen in his lifetime, but Manchester University Press began to publish revised texts of his work under the Irwell imprint in his centenary year of 2017.
Burgess would have been happy with the strange but appropriate location of his unique memorial, and modestly surprised by the academic light industry that has set itself up to commemorate him. He was an exuberant man, given to excess, and a grandiloquent writer, but he was at the same time self-deprecating, keen to turn a joke or a story against himself, as he demonstrates in his entertaining and frank volumes of confessional memoir, Little Wilson and Big God (1986) and You've Had Your Time(1990). He was never sure of his status, and felt he had wasted too much of his life earning money in films and journalism and on British Council lecture tours, instead of dedicating himself to what we now call literary fiction. But, as he complained, he couldn't earn enough to live on by writing the kind of novels that he wanted to write. He was forced by necessity into diversity. Or so he claimed.
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