But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?
Burgess, Anthony
BUT DO BLONDES PREFER GENTLEMEN? HOMAGE TO QWERTYUIOP AND OTHER WRITINGS Anthony Burgess/McGraw-Hill/$24.95 Terry Teachout Anthony Burgess has written approximately fifty-four books. (The adverb...
...Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, is genuinely penetrating: Steinbeck was always luckier than Hemingway in his film adaptations...
...It is possible to write on demand and produce an oeuvre of lasting interest...
...But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 43...
...His work has earned him a modest measure of fame and a more than decent living on the Cote d'Azur...
...Graham Greene once called Burgess "an avid if undiscriminating reader," and he is all too clearly willing to write about anything he is sent, from Selected Letters of James Thurber to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians to Edmund Wilson's The Forties...
...Comparisons to Chesterton are not prima facie ridiculous, but this book suggests an altogether less comforting analogy...
...But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to QWERTYUIOP and Other Writings, his latest book, goes a long way towards answering this vexing question...
...Some of his literary criticism like this offhand comment on John Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...One or two more have probably been published since this issue of The American Spectator was put to bed...
...Why has Anthony Burgess failed to make a more lasting literary impression...
...is a far more modest undertaking, it is every bit as revealing of the witty, flawed artist within...
...Connolly managed to write two or three books of lasting value...
...courrier...
...The adverb is not ornamental...
...7iy Our...
...None of his books has stood up to even the modest test of time provided by a decade or two...
...Burgess has no larger ideas...
...Great reading, a handy refer- * ence...
...The author took what came in living his journalistic life, and it would be pretentious to suppose there was a pattern in it...
...The editors of Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 and Shaw's Music are separately described as having done "the expected fine job of editing...
...NOW, every week receive a 32-page tabloid devoted to 30 nationally-distributed newspaper columnists with a conservative appeal...
...no re-evaluation of his burgeoning oeuvre appears likely...
...Call Th11--Free 800-558-1244 Effective 2, 1186 In Iowa and Alaska Call Collect: 515-465-2585 Hampton§ Weekly S ' ATIVE li~l~~~(O\ MI ably no better—and see no good reason for doing more than merely notice this reprint...
...Though But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen...
...Twenty-eight are novels, two children's books, five translations, two plays, one a collection of verse, the rest nonfiction in its sun-dry forms...
...Burgess's candid preface makes a very modest case for the publication of this book, a 608-page collection of occasional pieces most of which were originally occasioned by the urgent re-quest of a checkbook-wielding literary editor for a thousand-word review: The reading and reviewing of books which, in the covenant I have always insisted upon, have been selected not by myself but by a literary editor, keeps my mind open to fresh ideas in both literary creation and criticism...
...For every flash of insight there are a dozen unreliable summary judgments...
...But there is not nearly enough substance to this collection...
...ONLY FIRST ISSUE FREE t.~,l-F 460Rannuut O single-copy rate...
...The occasional pieces of Evelyn Waugh, for instance, have a weight and gravity which derive from Waugh's underlying preoccupation with the permanent things...
...City State Zip * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ^ .am...
...Burgess is, for in-stance, very sharp on feminism...
...Money-back guarantee in FULL...
...I have reviewed fresh editions of it—professionally, but probReturn The Coupon...
...Such an approach is necessarily personal, and abuses of personality are all too frequent in Burgess's Work...
...Ancient Evenings is praised, The Executioner's Song panned...
...contains, by Burgess's own reckoning, a mere one-third of his journalistic output from the last seven years...
...A review of a volume of Dickens's letters starts off "The energy of the man...
...No-Risk Vial Subscription Special 1 U.S.A...
...I cannot afford French furniture), suffering, the other morning, from malaria and bronchial asthma, I was pleased when all this Perelman came with the 6 a.m...
...Perelman review: That's why, in bed on the floor (my only luxury is my address...
...The I-did-this anecdotal lead appears so often here as to make the reader wince on its eightieth repetition...
...Burgess has it backward: his opinions are excreted, and in volume...
...Box 29H• Hampton, Iowa 50441 * WILL* BUCKLEY* KILPATRICK* HARVEY* SOBRAN * KIRKPATRICK EVANS&NOVAK*RUSHER* HART* YODER*RIESEL*KISSINGER*(HAPMAN*LAMBRO PODHORETL*JACK ANDERSON* HEMPSTONE*JONES* RABINOWITZ*MOHR*BROOKES*LEE IACOCCA It's an ALL-STAR conservative cast...
...The results are, to put it mildly, careless and superficial...
...Yet Burgess's hold on the attention of the literary world has been exception-ally transient...
...By comparison, the occasional pieces of Anthony Burgess—Irishman, lapsed Catholic, and Joyce addict—are little more than well-worded fluff...
...When I have typed three pages of typescript and a bit over, I know that my allowable quota has been filled...
...But, having read 776 pages pretty well nonstop by 5 a.m...
...There's a TOPIC INDEX in every issue...
...You are to open the book at any page and take what comes...
...It's New *It's Weekly *It's TOPICAL...
...Another is the Orwellian reminiscence that incongruously appears at the beginning of an S.J...
...Yes, please send me my free copy...
...His artistic credo comes from Mallarme: "Literature isn't made with ideas, it's made with words...
...Chesterton (on whom Burgess writes briefly and well) did exactly that...
...If 1 am not fully * • satisfied at any time I can "cancel" your invoice or obtain a full refund...
...Anthony Burgess, in a career infinitely snore prolific, has had no such luck...
...holds up reasonably well on this score...
...Most of them have every column published in full...
...It is no use being angry with Connolly," Edmund Wilson once wrote of Cyril Connolly, another pro= digiously gifted Irishman who started out as a serious author and ended up a feuilleton machine...
...He loved the medium . . . because he had a gift for dialogue but no corresponding talent for a modern kind of resit: in film, recit is left to the camera...
...the following morning (cable from New York: CAN YOU REVIEW BEST OF BERNARD LEVIN 1500 WORDS REPLY SOONEST), I felt that I wanted a damned good cry...
...his criticism consists solely of point-to-point responses cloaked in words galore...
...This book is littered with hints of why Anthony Burgess is so ineffectual as a critic...
...Enjoy, also, a witty selection from over 24 acclaimed cartoonists...
...It's no wonder that he should long since have been reduced to the syndicated columnist's feeble shuffle through the various ways of dragging in the first person singular...
...I reviewed Experiment in Autobiography when it was first published by Gollancz in 1934...
...Hemingway's dialogue is less realistic than it looks, but his resit is nerve and bone and very original and new...
...That was an amateur job, for the school magazine...
...Wilfrid Sheed, writing in Max Jamison, speaks of "the dreary business of accreting an opinion...
...Whatever his faults may be . . . he is one of those fortunate Irishmen, like Goldsmith and Sterne and Wilde, who are born with a gift of style, a natural grace and wit, so that their jobs have the freshness of jeux d'esprit, and sometimes their jeux d'esprit turn out to stick as classics...
...Just $32 a year (52 issues...
...Women don't believe there are neutral zones: what males call neutral they call male...
...I understand that * the price for an additional 52 issues 11 year) is only $32 * • under your Thal Subscription Offer...
...To succeed, though, it is absolutely necessary to have something to say that goes beyond the compass of the object of criticism proper...
...A book which can be opened with profit at any page is eminently suitable for bedside use, and But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen...
...Addy...
...Even Earthly Powers, a book clearly meant to serve as clinching masterpiece, was fumbled through garrulousness...
...The problem clearly goes deeper than mere logorrhea or the absence of a definitive masterpiece...
...One of them can be found in the preface: "And the need to keep within the limit of a thousand words or so is, as with the composing of a sonnet, an admirable formal discipline...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
