Anthony Burgess's friends
Name:Roland Barthes
  
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  •  AB originally took Structuralism 101 with RB, and the two became inseparable semiological pals after a brief fistfight over the open-mid front unrounded vowel Schwa ə
    A few Caledonian 80/- ales cemented their friendship, and led to M/F, a tribute to S/Z.
Name:Charles Baudelaire
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  • Met after being sent the galleys of "Les Fleurs du Mal" to review, Anthony went to Paris for a long drinking session with Jim Joyce and Sam Beckett. The spirit of dear old Charlie's poetry graced the air that summer, and was the buzz of all the trendy pavement cafés.
Name:Leonard Bernstein
  
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  • Adolph and Betty were having a few friends round for a soirée, and we discussed composition over a few Piña Coladas. There was talk of collaborating on a treatment of Voltaire - maybe Œdipe - but AB returned to Malaya.
Name:Bertolt Brecht
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  • Met at the Anti-Fascist Poetry Convocation in Gibraltar 1942. We enjoyed badinage in the Old Norrøn dialect and some fine Algerian schnapps. Bert sailed for America the following day, but the two friends exchanged regular telegrams on the subject of punitive taxation.
Name:Lewis Carroll
  
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  • Met  randomly: in a laudanum den above the antiquarian bookseller in Carfax Oxford, just a few doors away from Ædes Christi. A jolly joint, but we couldn't get a decent pint there, and had to repair to The Turf. And the Bird & Baby. And the Lamb & Flag for a quickie with CSL and Tolkein before closing time.
Name:Aaron Copland
  
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  • Nadia and Lenny were having a soirée with GG and Emily, and we were introduced. Our shared passion for music and didactics was reinforced over a few boilermakers. We planned to collaborate on a Broadway musical of the life of Emily Dickinson but couldn’t get the clearance for the fire-eaters.
Name:The Oxford English Dictionary
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  • Jim Murray and AB were having a glass of chilled gin and water in the Trout at Godstow Bridge, and chatting about their pal J. R. R. Tolkien who was working on Waggle to Warlock. Jim’s team were also looking for a researcher for Circumflex to Diaresis, and after some more Tanqueray, AB took the job, but was forced to give up at cliché. Nevertheless he later wrote that the OED was "the greatest publishing event of the century.".
Name:Thomas Stearns Eliot
  
 
  • Esmé Valerie, nearly 40 years younger than her husband TS, had always enthusiastically championed other writers, and had occasionally shared a bottle or two of Weißherbst Rosé in the Fitzroy with AB. Strangely the two writers had not run into one another at one of Fitzrovia's literary watering holes years before.
Name:Charles De Gaulle
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  • Met randomly: at the French pub in Soho. It was the summer of 1940, and adventitiously we shared a decent bottle of Moroccan Rosé, and a chat about how best to improve the morale of the Free French forces. Le Général commissioned AB to write a speech to be delivered on the BBC.
Name:Benny Goodman
  
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  • The King of Swing and AB collaborated on a rigid structuralist foundation for the Jitterbug, presented in the Æolian mode, but did not get far with the popular audience in their naïveté.
    They repaired to Tipsy McStagger's, and after a few Corpse Revivers with C L-S, worked on the pardigmic ur-myth for Stompin’ at the Savoy.
Name:Thomas Hardy
  
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  • When Anthony went to live in Wessex, times were harsh. But the pubs were welcoming and drink was cheap, particularly the excellent Isle of Wight Poitín. A young poet and novelist could find a hearty welcome amongst good local folk.
    Tom was there too, in the saloon bar, naturally.
  
Name:Gustav Holst
  
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  • Gustav and AB collaborated on ideas for the Planets at Fuller's Brewery in Chiswick, which was a handy lunchtime retreat near Gustav's school. A couple of pints of Pride, and a few "à votre santés" usually got the creative musical juices flowing. Uranus was a tricky one to lick, though.

    .
Name:Charles Ives
  
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  • Lenny and Aaron introduced us at an all-nighter of Shōchū Frappés. We discussed a symphony to be called (CH3CH2OH) but it remained the unanswered question.
Name:James Joyce
  
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  • It was a magical time in Paris that spring, with the flowers of a new post-Freudian poetic language blooming in the fertile imaginations of every young litterateur. And the heady thrill of absinthe was a novel indulgence. Or was it novels. Or poetry. I seem to recall writing something. I've got my notes right here. Actually it might have been Zürich. Another absinthe?
Name:Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
 
  • AB treasures his first edition of Søren’s Øjeblikket, which he enjoys reading for intellectual and philosophical inspiration over a glass of Bärenjäger, or maybe a Kahlúa and tonic.
Name:Harpo Marx
  
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  •  One evening at the Café Glissando, conversation turned to the lost art of silent movies, and how AB felt that he could have been a Pianoplayer at the cinema. A productive idea.
Name:Ezra Pound
  
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  • We were introduced by Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp at a particularly bibulous vorticist celebration at Li Po's Sòjú Bar on the Rue Türkçe. Fascism became a point of sharp difference.
Name:Ayn Rand
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  • Met through the Society of Self-Invented Authors. At our annual dinner and cocktail celebrations at the Ritz the maître d'hôtel usually introduces new members with an amusing version of "spin the bottle".
Name:Maurice Ravel
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  • Claude and Gabriel were having a small cocktail party for their musical friends, and AB and Maurice got chatting over a few apéritif kir royales. AB was a great admirer of Daphnis et Chloé and also of Shéhérazade, and offered to do a treatment of La Marseillaise in the Mixolydian mode, in tribute to the great Mixologists of France. He was very disappointed when Maurice turned down the Légion d'honneur.
Name:Arnold Schoenberg
  
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  • AB had always found Arnie’s work Mäßig, aber sehr ausdrucksvoll, and arranged to have lessons with the master on a visit to USC. Their vigorous discussions of serialism and non-pentatonic atonalism late into the night over jugs of Sangría at Trader Vic’s were the talk of the campus. Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht and his Ode to Napoleon were an inspiration for AB’s Napoleon Symphony, especially after a few bottles of Kaštelanski Zinfandel.
Name:George Bernard Shaw
  
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  • During a trip to sample the excellent Baile Átha Cliath Guinness via the Dún Laoghaire ferry, we realised we both admired each others work, and also shared a love of linguistics, though not necessarily of polemics.
Name:Igor Stravinsky
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  • After a couple of glasses of rosé Игорь Фёдорович and AB found that they had considerable common ground in Poétiques Musicales, but agreed that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all." [Chronicles of My Life].
Name:August Strindberg
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  • Met while drinking fierce aqvavit in a pavement café in Uppsala and reading Från Fjerdingen och Svartbäcken.
    Anthony commented "When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg Award." a comment that would later be stolen.
  
 
Name:John Millington Synge
  
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  • The two friends had originally met in Würzburg while studying fin de siècle European Literature and Language. It was there that the germ of an idea for a stage show to be called "The Playboy of the Eastern World" first came to light.
    Some years later, after a large number of pints of Guinness in Durty Nellie’s near Luimneach, and several dozen oysters, JMS decided to transfer the action to Ireland.
    .
Name:Dylan Thomas
  
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  •  Met at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where the discussion turned to the possibility of marketing Welsh Whisky (Gwyród Cymru).
    "Llaregub" seemed like a promising name, but after moving on to Crème de Menthe Frappés, the concept got lost in the general poetry of life.
Name:Alan Turing
  
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  • At the dark end of Hut 8, we bombardière cryptanalists used to meet for a warming brew late on a winters night. Sherry Bovril was one of our favourites in those difficult days of rationing. AB was sketching out the libretto for an opera to be called "Enigma", but Geheimschreiberteknik proved to be a difficult rhyme.
Name:Orson Welles
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  • Orson and AB originally fought over who was the most modest, and which of them had the more unfinished projects, but made it up over a few cool Crème de Cacaos at the Salon de Contrefaçons.
Name:William Butler Yeats
  
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  • After a long lunchtime of Guinness and Dublin Bay oysters, the lively conversation turned to kroužeks háčeks and whether anyone was able to understand JM Synge's acute accent.