BURGESS

In 1954, Burgess had joined the British Colonial Service as a teacher and education officer in Malaya. He devoted some of his free time there to writing "as a sort of gentlemanly hobby, because I knew there wasn't any money in it," and published his first novels: Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East. These became known as The Malayan Trilogy and were later published in one volume as The Long Day Wanes. Burgess lived for two years in the United States, working as a visiting professor at Princeton University with the creative writing program (1970) and as a distinguished professor at the City College of New York (1972). At City College he was a close colleague and friend of Joseph Heller. The initials “GKC” stand for the writer G. K. CHESTERTON (1874-1936). John Sullivan was a prolific scholar of Chesterton’s life and works, and had likely written Burgess to invite him to submit a piece for an upcoming collection of essays on Chesterton by multiple authors, of which Sullivan was to be editor and compiler: G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal (London, 1974). Burgess was by this time known to be interested in Chesterton, and had written the introduction to an edition of Chesterton’s Autobiography, brought out by Hutchinson in London, a few years earlier, in 1969. Burgess’s gracious and grateful refusal, strengthened by abject modesty, and by the self-deprecating anecdote of a struggle with cutting-edge technology (electric typewriter), plus the casual mention of the looming threat of a mental-health catastrophe, make for a remarkable letter by an important writer.