Anthony Burgess, a professional to his finger- tips, knew how to write an arresting first sentence. The locus classicus is his opening to Earthly Powers. But try this for size, a lapel-grabbing start of a piece about William Walton in The Listener:
Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music over the (a) bloody mary and (b) raspberry yoghurt helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing.
Apo-what? I have just enough Greek to know that it’s something to do with death; a helpful footnote reminds us that ‘άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω’, or ‘I want to die’ are the closing words of The Waste Land’s epigraph. I doubt the readers of the Listener in 1968 were given a footnote, but then maybe they didn’t need one.
Music was always Plan A for Burgess: ‘Neglect of my music by the orchestras of the Old World was what mainly turned me into a novelist,’ he says, perhaps tongue in cheek, for he tells other origin stories about his career elsewhere, about a performance of his Third Symphony at the University of Iowa.
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