Napoleon Symphony: "Can Burgess write on Napoleon? Of Corsican." (1)

Burgess's Novel published in 1974, based on the script he wrote for Kubrick

Last year's Ridley Scott film on Napoleon inevitably triggered memories of Kubrick's ill-fated epic, abandoned half a century earlier. The film's reported comedic traits and preoccupation with Napoleon's sex life was a feature of Anthony Burgess's script which following Kubric's rejection metamorphosed into Burgess's much under-rated, comic but unfunny novel.

The inside of the dust cover of Napoleon Symphony describes Napoleon as

inspired general, starry eyed lover, laughable cuckold, evangelising republican, great emperor, bloody tyrant, wretched invalid exile, mythic hero.

Anthony Burgess 1917-1993

Several years ago I came across a file in the Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester containing a large number of reviews of the novel, including one from Playboy which described it as "his best novel yet", a view endorsed by Robert K. Morris in the Nation (2).

The novel was written in the early years of UK membership of what was then known as the "Common Market", and one reviewer who took this theme was Ronald Blythe, self taught Suffolk writer, author of Akenfield and collaborator with Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forster. Blythe saw the book as profoundly anti-Napoleon and anti Common Market, which views he endorsed:

What Wellington (and de Gaulle) prevented, Heath arranged.

In those days of course the main opposition to UK membership of the European Union came from the Left, which is why the then Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, called a referendum to try to keep the party together, and Blythe was a life-long Labour voter.

One American reviewer wrote on the same theme:

was a "humbled" Britain's entry into Europe's Common Market a belated fulfillment of Napoleon's long-ago war aims? Such a possibility is the final irony in Anthony Burgess's latest extravaganza. (3)

Time Magazine picked up Burgess's pessimism about England and vision of the Anglosphere, including the United States, all united under a constitutional monerchy.

It may sound positively Napoleonic, but it has vision, the vision of a bold artist who has yet to meet his Waterloo.

The novelist Kay Dick clearly did not care for Burgess, whom she rather snobbishly described as "that proverbial bright grammar school sixth former .. yet never quite beyond that sixth form humour." He was "the best barker in the English literary scene", and "a wizard with words, knows them all, uses them as often as he can" and "like his hero, Napoleon, he does not care for women to think." (4)

A number of other reviewers picked up on Burgess's treatment of Napoleon's sexuality and his relations with women. For one American writer the book was "a randy tomcat's view of the Corsican Ogre" and another saw Burgess's Napoleon as "entirely baffled by women" (5) One reviewer saw

a bad lover, as quick in sex as he is in battle..(6)

and another concluded:

Burgess has given us a Napoleon we've never known before. Invincible, crusading, charming, humble, to be sure. Also gross, profane, plagued with heartburn, flatulence, bad breath.. premature ejaculation and, obviously, self-doubt. (7)

Many reviewers made much of Burgess's Joycean love of language and music, his rather self-indulgent cleverness, and his encyclopedic knowledge and cerebrality. As for the portrait of Napoleon, a number of reviewers saw that beyond the earthy, priapic conqueror Burgess was portraying a more complex figure, the rational, Enlightenment ruler who was ultimately defeated by the English who failed to see the light, and by Slavic and German mysticism and nascent German nationalism.

Even his last ingenious construct, the great garden on Saint Helena, is uprooted by a nature drawn like the Greek fate to opposing his grandiose schemes. (8)

Victoria Glendinning's summary of Burgess's Napoleon seems very apt

.. a violent amalgam of intellect and physicality, a 'machine on top of an animal.' The machine part of him juggles with states, statesmen, school textbooks, regiments, rulers, sisters-in-law and the map of Europe. Under the brain machine his body throbs and aches. He lusts lyrically after his whorish Josephine, who dislikes his bad breath and his perfunctory performances.(9)"

Finally a reminder that the book itself was ostensibly based on Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Its four movements were set in Egypt and Italy, Paris, Moscow and St Helena. For some reviewers it was more noise than symphony, although at least one felt that Burgess like Napoleon and Beethoven had proved that he too was a man of vision, and the Financial Times review concluded that the novel would be relished by admirers of all three! (10)

For a recent review see The Great Napoleonic Novel: "It's a sin to want to die for a nation."
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1. Ed Powers writing in Cleveland Press July 26th 1974.
2. The Nation , Aug 3rd 1974.
3. Roderick Nordell Christian Science Monitor May 29th 1974
4.The Scotsman 12 October 1974.
5. Charles A. Brady, Buffalo Evening News June 29th 1974; Martin Washburn, Village Voice July 4th 1974.
6. Newsweek May 27th 1974.
7. Rod Cockshutt, News and Observer North Carolina, June 16th 1974.
8. Mark Mirsky Washington Post May 26th 1974
9. New Statesman 27th September, 1974.
10. John D. Gates. No other identification. Isobel Murray Financial Times 26th September 1974

Exhibition in Manchester: Anthony Burgess and Napoleon

A return visit to the International Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester to look at their exhibition about Burgess and Napoleon. Included in the exhibition are five prints by Jean Charles Pellerin (1756-1836), of various episodes in Napoleon's life.

Entry of Napoleon into Grenoble

Apparently these hung in Burgess's home in Italy in the 1970's, perhaps a result of the influence of his Italian wife, to whom Napoleon Symphony was dedicated:

"a Buonapartista, who, in her extreme youth, could never understand why the British had named a great railway terminus after a military defeat."

Battle of Esling - Death of Montebello

Also there is the letter to Burgess from Stanley Kubrick, dated June 15th 1972,

informing Burgess that his script was not suitable for the film about Napoleon that Kubrick still planned to make.

"I shall start off by saying that I really don't know how to write this letter, and that it is a task which is as awful for me to perform as it may be for you to read."

Debarkation of Napoleon (from Elba)

In the event Napoleon Symphony, published two years after the letter, was also dedicated, perhaps in a rather backhanded, ironic way to Kubrick as well as to Burgess's wife: Also to Stanley J. Kubrick, maestro di color...".

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Napoleon at the Siege of Toulon

As well as a list of some of the sources Burgess used to research his novel, there is a quotation, new to me, written prior to writing it:

My preparatory reading for the novel has taught me that I had really been bludgeoned by the ruling classes into hating Boney, since the common man saw him as a liberator. So he was, of course, for a time. The novelist's attitude to him will only make itself apparent in the course of writing the novel. The question I must ask myself now is: is the novel to be comic or tragic?I do not see how it can be tragic: what was the flaw, where was the sin? He took the Revolution, purged of its extreme features, to countries that needed it. He wanted a united Europe. England having chopped down her forests and exhausted her iron to defeat him, is now entering the Napoleonic dream. It is, in a way, comic, but not meant for laughs. I suppose my Napoleon novel will have to be comic in that way too.

Battle of Rivoli

Not in the exhibition, and this is not intended as a criticism, is the file held by the Anthony Burgess Centre of contemporary reviews of Napoleon Symphony. Some time I intend to write about this and my own reaction to what I think is an underrated novel, albeit one that is far from complimentary about its hero.

Anthony Burgess and Napoleon

According to Anthony Burgess's not always reliable autobiography, at his birth his father breathed beer on him and said He may be a new Napoleon.

Not Wellington. The Catholic northwest, like Ireland, had looked to the French being on the sea, and the decay of the Orange (1)

In the event Burgess did not turn out to be a leader of men, and the highest rank he attained was a Sergeant Major in the Army Educational Corps. At the advanced age of 37 he became a writer. At the same age Napoleon had already written a romantic novel, won countless battles and become Emperor of the French, so Burgess's father had almost inevitably set him up for failure.

In the early 1970's Burgess wrote a script on Napoleon for Stanley Kubrick, producer and director of A Clockwork Orange, which the latter rather tersely declined. Burgess instead turned it into a far from complimentary novel about Napoleon, Napoleon Symphony, a somewhat whimsical attempt to recast the life of Napoleon in the form of Beethoven's famous Eroica symphony which legend has it was intended to be dedicated to Napoleon until he crowned himself Emperor. (2)

Before this novel was published in 1974 Burgess gave his thoughts on Napoleon to Charles T. Bunting

a great demonic force .. a very modern man, really a very contemporary man, because he - well can I say that even - he's half animal and half computer. It's only possible to think in those terms in the modern age. His head was a computer. His body was the body of an ape. .. Napoleon was over-energetic, even sexually so. His excessive sexual energy, of course, explains why he had so little success with women. And he was also a very obscene man, which never comes out in the official biographies. (3)

Burgess also added some pertinent comments about his reactions to Napoleon as an Englishman and about the views of the English lower classes. He concluded with a brief reference to what we used to call the Common Market, which the United Kingdom (including England!) had recently joined, despite the efforts of another French leader to prevent it from doing so:

I've never really known much about Napoleon. Being an Englishman, I've never been attracted to Napoleon because, after all, he was the enemy. This is what I have been brought up to believe, but having done some research and having seen it from my wife's point of view - my wife's an Italian - I see now that he was not really the enemy; he was only the enemy of the ruling class in Britain, and, of course, he was very popular with the lower class. And in my own town of Manchester when the Peterloo Massacre took place, the working people were animated by Napoleonic principles. They were more on the side of the Revolution, and Napoleon seemed to them to embody the ideas of the Revolution. they were not on the side of the ruling class, and I see now that it's possible to be an Englishman and a Bonapartist. I see also that Napoleon has fulfilled posthumously his intention of bringing England into Europe. It's been done by peaceful means, but the great dream of a united Europe with England as part of it has been fulfilled with the Common Market. So Napoleon is still a living force. (4)

Contrary to the claims of modern Eurosceptics, Burgess had no doubt in 1973 that England had become part of something rather more than a mere market! That is my memory too!

The support for Napoleon amongst sections of the English population to which Burgess refers does not fit in with conventional views of English history. It was certainly not part of the curriculum that I studied, although it has appeared on a number of occasions in my blog.

At some point I intend to return to Napoleon Symphony, which I read on my last trip to St Helena two years ago, and have been mulling over ever since.
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1. Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (Vintage Edition 2002) p. 17
2. An earlier post covers Burgess's script for Kubrick. I have since examined a document at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester which is certainly nothing like a full script, but a few pages which lay out a number of themes recognisable in Napoleon Symphony . If this is what was sent to Kubrick, then his short reply turning it down is entirely understandable.
3. "Dressing for Dinner in the Jungle", Charles T. Bunting/ 1973 Studies in the Novel v.5, No 4 Winter 1973 pp 75-76.
4. ibid.

Napoleon Week on the BBC

In commemoration of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, an event of far more significance than Waterloo, Radio 3 is currently scheduling a number of programmes about Napoleon.

The first, broadcast yesterday (1st December) but still available online, was about Tchaikovsky's patriotic 1812 Overture Tchaikovsky A Dishonest Overture?

Napoleon is also the somewhat unlikely subject of Composer of the Week. As far as I am aware he never composed anything, although he did write a novel, but this daily programme, beginning tomorrow, is about Napoleon's musical tastes and his encouragement of music and the arts.

This evening there is Tolstoy and Napoleon, the first of three literary programmes, to be broadcast on successive Sundays,

which is followed tonight by Napoleon Rising, a play by Manchester born author Anthony Burgess, creator of A Clockwork Orange, who wrote a novel about Napoleon and a script for the Kubrick film that was never made.

Then each evening this week there is a short programme, Napoleon and Me, the first of which is about Julia Blackburn's searching for the "ghost of Napoleon" on St Helena.

Overall it looks like an interesting and slightly unusual perspective on Napoleon. I am particularly looking forward to hearing what Andrea Stuart has to say about the Empress Josephine, one of the most misunderstood women in history.

Perhaps the most interesting revelation from the advance publicity, and news to me at least, is that Richard Wagner attended Napoleon's Second Funeral to report the event for a German newspaper.

It is unfortunate though that someone in the BBC appears to think that Napoleon's ashes were returned from Corsica!

Kubrick, Burgess and Napoleon

In December 2009 I posted a note on Stanley Kubrick's film about Napoleon, which of course was never made.

I was surprised to hear today that among the large collection of unpublished materials left by prolific Manchester born author Anthony Burgess, most famous for A Clockwork Orange, is a script for Kubrick's Napoleon film no less. Burgess did of course write a novel about Napoleon, a largely forgotten one, Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, so titled because it was designed to follow the structure of Beethoven's Eroica symphony. Burgess's novel was published in 1974, some years after the Napoleon film that never was. Interestingly it was dedicated to Kubrick.

Whether Kubrick intended to use this script or not is another matter. My understanding is that he didn't use Burgess's script for A Clockwork Orange. Anyway, Burgess's Napoleon script now resides among the voluminous collection in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.