I interviewed Anthony Burgess, the English novelist, critic and man of letters, who lived with his wife and son in Malta, for The Sunday Times of Malta in 1970. The interview was published on 7 June. Censorship was truly ferocious at the time and I formed part of the Censorship Reform Group. I did not realise it then but the interview was a scoop. I came across it recently and felt it would be a good idea to publish it once more in the present climate of the censorship of Stitching.

Marie Benoît

Does the country you live in affect what you write?

Not greatly. I write novels, and these are made out of memory and imagination, not the immediate world outside.

Do you think the general atmosphere in Malta is conducive to writing?

In writing fiction I find one place as good as another. But there are certain kinds of writing that Malta doesn’t help. Book criticism for instance. There have been too many instances of British and American journals of repute sending me books for review, and these same books being held up by the post office to be sniffed through by smuthounds. The deadline passes, the job of reviewing has not been done, and one’s professional reputation suffers. There are certain periodicals which will never ask me to review books again. This is the fault of the Maltese State.

Which do you consider your most significant work?

The writer is never a good judge of his own books. The novel I am told, chiefly by the American academic world, is my best, is one I like very little, A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick is filming it at the moment. Although the book is a set text in American colleges and even religious seminaries, it means nothing in Malta, and I doubt if the film will ever be seen here. The book of mine I dislike least is Enderby.

You have done many things in the artistic field. You have composed music and you even paint. What do you like doing best? What is your greatest ambition?

I prefer composing music to writing prose, it’s comparatively mindless. I’ve already composed, incidentally, an overture for the Manoel Orchestra, and I’m working on a symphonic sketch called Giggifogu. My big ambition is to write an opera based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, that great Catholic literary

monument.

You have ‘harshly criticised’ Malta on several occasions. Seeing that we have been under colonial rule for so long, don’t you partly blame your own countrymen for a great many things which have been left undone, say, in the educational and cultural fields? Don’t you think you are expecting far too much from such a small island?

Last question first. I don’t think size has much to do with cultural achievement. Look at what ancient Athens did, as well as Elizabethan London. Blame colonialism by all means, but remember that the British, unlike Napoleon, scrupulously refused to interfere with Maltese traditions and never tried to diminish the power of the Church. Malta has had its own destiny in its hands for many centuries. But by Malta I mean the ruling oligarchy, not the people. The people have always had a rough deal and they are still having it. Otherwise why so much emigration? They have never been encouraged to think for themselves. Their very language has been relegated to a minor place, while the oligarchs talked about art and politics in Italian or English. Who is to blame that Maltese has had an orthography for only a little over a century?

Surely Malta’s paternalism has been a good thing, no drug addiction here, no

sexual perversion, not much violence.

We can eradicate any public evil we wish most efficiently if we employ dictatorial methods. The secret of government, as of private morality, is to balance individual freedom of choice with what is considered to be a necessary apparatus of repression. Lead us not into temptation. But it’s only to God that we pray so, it’s not up to the State to keep away the occasions of sin. There should not be any protection at all: it’s up to us as individuals to engage temptation and try to conquer. That’s what free will is about. Malta would try to do away with the concept of the Church Militant altogether and see this theocratic community as a trailer of the Church Triumphant. No fight against sin, no athletic struggle of the soul. Just the flabbiness of virtue achieved through sheer repression. If you can call such virtue virtue.

But you have to judge by results. Our “protective” censorship system and mediaeval Catholicism make things safer for young minds and bodies.

Is any Catholic going to be so heretical as to suggest that ends justify means? God forbid. Incidentally, your Catholicism isn’t “mediaeval”, it’s typical of the 18th and 19th century Papal States. Mediaeval Catholicism was creative not repressive. As for young Maltese being rendered safe from violence, pot and dirty books, that only applies in Malta. Get young Maltese abroad and they don’t become notable for virtue. Wartime prostitution in London was run by the Maltese (some of whom, incidentally, nearly killed one of my best friends in Soho, W1 in 1943). Have you not heard of the Mediterranean Club in Sydney? Take off that chain of paternalism and the reaction in the direction of licence can be both murderous and suicidal.

As for censorship, am I expected to take seriously a system that held back one of the books I myself had written because it was in French, ipso facto, presumably, a dangerous language, and waived the same book through when it came out in Danish? The French title was Un Agent Qui Vous Veut du Bien (meaning incidentally that the spy hero ends up as a priest) but the Danish title was Martyrenes Blod – Martyr’s Blood, a holy title. Yet the two books were the same book. I can, admittedly, feel a little sympathy for censors who ban books with titles like Topless Junkie, but none when they are solely concerned with killing the engagement of new ideas. Malta is the only country in the world that has banned the books of one of its most distinguished residents, I mean Desmond Morris. Morris’s fault? A scientific approach to human behaviour. And there are certain classics which are set books in the Catholic universities of America, Candide, for instance, still prescribed here.

The Maltese cannot yet discriminate and judge for themselves and the majority are not prepared to cope with a flood of permissive literature, films and so on. What solution do you suggest for giving more intellectual freedom to a people traditionally not encouraged to think for themselves?

Are the Maltese different from any other people in the world? Are they not human beings? Give them what London or Rome already has, progressive cinema, the right to read books written and published in an honest spirit of enquiry as to the nature of man and society. Is Malta in greater need of protection than Rome? Or are Malta’s faith and morality so shaky that they cannot resist the onslaught of new ideas and images of life? Christ came to bring not peace but a sword, meaning, I should have thought, the dialectic of human living through which the faith should be brightened and sharpened. As for a greater permissiveness in the provision of art and literature people don’t have to go to the library or the cinema if they don’t wish. Nothing is being forced on anyone.

How do you think the church has failed in Malta? What can it do to help build a society which is better equipped to cope with life in the modern world and at the same time retain a high sense of values?

I’d better say now that I’m a Catholic, one of a family that has suffered for its faith. I had an Elizabethan ancestor who was executed for refusing to accept the Queen as head of the church. We’ve had to fight for Catholicism, which is more than the Maltese have had to do in the modern period, and I hold the faith precious. Moreover, as there’s only one Catholic Church, I have a right to speak about the form of its manifestation in Malta. The Church in Malta is my Church as much as it is Archbishop Gonzi’s. I think this about it: it tries to act for Caesar as well as God, despite Christ’s insistence on the separateness of the two tributes. Indeed, it has tried to be Caesar. When a Church tries to build a theocratic State, embodying the individual will in the collective, then surely it’s sinning in the direction of denying freedom of conscience. Theocracies are usually Calvinistic, which deny free will, recognise that predestination kills the significance, eschatologically speaking, anyway, of morals, and hence erect a system for the enforcement of the “good”. It’s strange to me to see Catholicism acting as though it were Calvinism.

Churches don’t “fail”. They’re concerned with the Kingdom of Heaven, not the conduct of the secular State. The job of priests is primarily to administer the sacraments. Only they can do that. The job of teaching or learning Christian doctrine is the job of each one of us, lay or cleric. The Church in Malta (I refuse to say “the Maltese Church”; there’s no such thing) must stick to its task of preaching the Kingdom of Heaven and leave the Kingdom of Earth to the earthy politicians. But it’s had so much secular power for so long that it will be reluctant to relinquish it. As long as this secular power is acquiesced in by the laity, and held by the clergy, Malta will remain a good place for young Maltese, with their

curiosity, their intellectual honesty, their desire to see the world and make their own judgements on what they see, to get out of.

Anthony Burgess was one of the most talented and prolific novelists of our day. Although he regarded criticism as a secondary activity he was also one of today’s most perceptive and influential literary critics.

He was born in Manchester in 1917 and studied both music and languages at the university there. In 1940, he joined the British army. He was determined to make his name primarily as a composer. It was not until he was in his late 30s that he started taking writing seriously enough to let it interfere with his musical composition. By then he had composed two symphonies as well as sonatas, concertos for various instruments and popular songs.

After lecturing in England from 1946-1954 he went as senior education officer to Malaya where he wrote his first published books. After Malaya he went to Borneo as a lecturer but in 1959 he was invalided home with a suspected brain tumour. He was given a year to live so, in one year, wrote as many novels as he could. This warning proved groundless and Anthony Burgess lived in Lija between 1968 and 1970 with his Italian wife Liliana and their son Andrea, who spoke fluent Maltese but not very good English. Problems with the Maltese state censor later prompted a move to Rome. They finally went to live in Monte Carlo. Burgess died on 22 November 1993 from lung cancer, at the Hospital of St John & St Elizabeth in London. His ashes went to the cemetery in Monte Carlo.

Quotable Anthony Burgess

• Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate.

• If a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man

• Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don’t know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.

• Readers are plentiful: thinkers are rare.

• Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

• Life is a wretched grey Saturday but it has to be lived through.

• Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.

• If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of

others.

• Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.