In a comment on a note on Anthony Burgess, Steve writes:

Burgess famously was told once by his doctor that he had a year to live. So, to provide for his family after his death, he wrote five novels in one year, all published. He turned out to be perfectly healthy and went on to publish countless words.

I just read a biography–The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, by Andrew Biswell–which suggests that it didn’t quite happen like that.

Apparently it’s true that at the age 42, during a period where he and his wife were miserable and drinking heavily, he suddenly collapsed while teaching a class, and he was hospitalized for awhile and examined by specialists. But, according to Biswell:

The diagnosis seems to have been an ambiguous one: nobody was certain that a tumor was present, but nobody was willing to declare that it was absent either. . . . the real difficulty with trying to establish was was actually going on is that other accounts he gave of the brain tumor story differ in significant respects from the “official” version which appears in the autobiography. Burgess was unable to tell the story in the same way twice, and four of these variants are worth looking at in detail.

What follows is some discussion of these stories. And then, this tantalizing bit:

The tangle of stories that he wove around his hospital experiences is mystifying, not least because we have no independent medical evidence that would promise to solve the puzzle definitively. The Public Records Act of 1958 decrees that English medical records are sealed for 100 years after the death of the patient, and the doctors who treated Burgess are bound by the Hippocratic Oath not to disclose the details of the case. The precise nature of his condition is therefore likely to remain a mystery until his doctors’ notes are made available for inspection in 2094.

(I’m not planning to be around in 2094, but readers from that time can click on this convenient link to find out what turns up when the records are unsealed.)

To get back to our main topic, Steve also comments:

It’s been said that geniuses don’t have better thoughts on average, they just have more thoughts, some of which then turn out to be better.

This reminds me of Don Rubin’s remark about the great twentieth-century statistician John Tukey: Don said that that 99% of Tukey’s ideas were terrible, but since Tukey came up with 100 new ideas ever day, things worked out just fine.

Speaking for myself, I think I have lots of ideas, about half of which are really good–but the hard part is developing them and seeing what they’re good for. That’s one purpose of writing this blog (although said purpose is generally not being achieved by entries in the present category.)

My impression from reading Burgess is that there were several sources to his success, beyond the usual explanations of broad intellectual interests and the ability to write snappy sentences:

1. He had lots of energy. This shows up not just in the dozens of books but also in the care he put into little things like the book reviews. As a blogger, I can really appreciate this. I’m certainly more careful when writing a book than when blogging, but I stand behind everything I write in any medium. You certainly don’t need to have lots of energy to be a good or even great writer–think of Philip Larkin, for example–but in Burgess’s case I think it was a key qualitative as well as quantitative virtue.

Burgess is an unusual example of a prolific writer who didn’t publish his first book until the age of 39. He published well over a book a year after that. (A Clockwork Orange was his tenth book and came out in 1962.)

2. Burgess was a serious composer, although not much of a success (for example, I couldn’t find any of his music in a quick online search). I wonder if working steadily at something that you’re not particularly talented at gives some insight into the creative process that can help with your more serious work. After all, 90% (at least!) of the effort of any project is drudgework, the trying and ruling out of possibilities.

3. Rich life experiences. I can relate to this one too. My relevant life experiences have been statistical rather than occurring in the real world, but the general principle remains, I believe, that we learn from and elaborate based on what we’ve done. Recall George Box’s dictum that to learn we must perturb, not just measure.

P.S. I was amused by this line from the obituary of Burgess’s second wife:

Living in a tax haven accorded with her strong belief that the earnings of writers should not be taxed under any circumstances.

It’s good to know that some people have absolute principles. (My core bedrock convictions, in case you’re interested, are that academic tenure should be absolute and that NSF funding should be doubled every ten years.)