Liana Burgess, requiescat in pace

[Dave Monroe]

Liana Burgess
Last Updated: 2:20am GMT 05/12/2007


Liana Burgess, who died on Monday aged 78, was a translator, literary
agent and the second wife of the novelist and composer Anthony
Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers.

She was feared and respected by publishers throughout the world for
her ability to drive a hard bargain on behalf of her husband's
writing, and her prize-winning Italian translations of Burgess's
Malayan Trilogy and The End of the World News did much to secure his
reputation as one of the major European writers of the 20th century.

By the time he died in 1993, her shrewd negotiations with publishers
and film companies had netted a fortune of more than $3 million and 11
houses all over Europe. She donated many of these assets to
universities to promote the study of Burgess's work.

Liliana Macellari (who shortened her first name to Liana) was born in
Porto Civitanova in Italy on September 25 1929. Her mother was the
Contessa Maria Lucrezia Pasi della Pergola, an amateur poet and
painter.

Lucrezia was said to have brought the family into disrepute by
marrying a photographer and actor named Gilberto Macellari, who died
during the Second World War after fathering two daughters.

advertisementLiana's sister, Grazia, died young in a mountaineering
accident, and her mother, who claimed to be descended from Attila the
Hun, spent years mourning her dead daughter by painting countless
portraits of her and writing bad poetry in her memory.

Liana taught herself English by reading the novels of Henry James and,
after graduating from the University of Bologna, she travelled to
America in 1953 to pursue literary research on a Fulbright Fellowship.
Here she met and married her first husband, Benjamin Johnson, the
English translator of Italo Svevo's short stories.

The marriage was not a success; they separated shortly afterwards and
Johnson divorced her in 1967.

In the late 1950s Liana Macellari returned to Rome, where she founded
an English-language theatre company. Writing as Liana Johnson, she
began her Italian translation of Lawrence Durrell's epic Alexandria
Quartet in 1960.

In Rome she had an affair with an unemployed drifter called Roy
Halliday, with whom she moved to London. After Halliday was drowned in
a sailing accident in the Atlantic, Liana Macellari said that she had
gained nothing from her involvement with him except his typewriter.

She met Anthony Burgess, who was to become her second husband, in
1963. While working for the Bompiani Literary Almanac, she was asked
to compile an annual report on new English fiction.

When she read A Clockwork Orange and Inside Mr Enderby (published
under the pseudonym Joseph Kell), she believed that she had discovered
two novelists of genius. She wrote enthusiastically to both authors
and was surprised to discover that they were the same man.

They arranged to meet for lunch in Chiswick, and immediately began a
clandestine affair. "I fell in love with the work," she said later.
"Anthony was never a good-looking man."

Burgess was powerfully attracted by her dark-haired beauty, and by her
passionate hatred of the Italian state and the Roman Catholic Church.

He was unhappily married to his first wife, Llewela, a notoriously
aggressive Welsh alcoholic, but refused to leave her for fear of
offending his cousin, George Patrick Dwyer, who was the Roman Catholic
Bishop of Leeds.

Liana Macellari gave birth to a son by Burgess, Paolo Andrea (later
known as Andrew Burgess Wilson), in 1964. They continued to meet in
secret, and Llewela was told nothing of Burgess's illegitimate child.

In 1967 Liana took up a teaching post at King's College, Cambridge,
where she made Italian translations of Thomas Pynchon's V and The
Crying of Lot 49.

Reunited with Burgess shortly after the death of his wife in March
1968, she abandoned her academic career in Cambridge and they married
six months later. Liana was 38, Burgess 53; Paolo Andrea, newly
legitimised, was four years old.

Determined to avoid the punitive 90 per cent income tax imposed on
high earners by the Labour government, the trio embarked on a life of
restless travelling in a Bedford Dormobile.

While Liana drove - often dangerously - through France and across the
Alps, Burgess sat in the back of the van and clattered away at his
typewriter, producing novels and film-scripts for Lew Grade and Franco
Zeffirelli.

They settled briefly on Malta before setting out on a four-year tour
of American universities. Burgess was a visiting professor at Chapel
Hill, Princeton and City College in New York. Liana developed her
talent for photography, and began an ambitious translation of James
Joyce's Finnegans Wake under the title pHorbiCEtta.

Driven by a belief that property was a sound investment, she bought
houses in Rome, Malta, Bracciano, Callian, Siena, Lugano, Twickenham,
central London and Monaco. Many of these residences were sparsely
furnished, and some were left to stand empty for decades.

Her activities as an agent were equally unconventional. She refused to
be loyal to any publisher, convinced that they were all motivated by
greed and dishonesty.

Her 25-year marriage to Burgess was a remarkable literary partnership.
Her translation of the Trilogia Malese - in which she found ingenious
Italian equivalents for his bawdy, polyglot puns - was awarded the
Premio Scanno prize.

As well as acting as his European agent from 1975, she translated
Belli's blasphemous Roman sonnets for the novel Abba Abba.

She also appears in fictional form as the seductive Italian
photographer Paola Lucrezia Belli in Burgess's autobiographical novel,
Beard's Roman Women (1977).

When she sued the executive producers of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork
Orange for 10 per cent of the film's profits, this money allowed the
family to establish a semi-permanent home on the rue Grimaldi in
Monaco.

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

Exiled in Monaco, Burgess often claimed that he had no friends except
his wife, but he maintained that the small civilisation of their
marriage was sufficient.

Liana was grief-stricken when he died from lung cancer in 1993, as she
was when Paolo Andrea died suddenly in 2002; but she was sustained by
her determination that Burgess's literature and music should not be
forgotten.

As her health began to fail in recent years, she was looked after with
great kindness by two close friends in Monaco, Gerard Docherty and
Caroline Langdon Banks.

She leaves no surviving relatives, but her commitment to scholarship
has led to the creation of the Anthony Burgess Centre at the
University of Angers and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation
in Manchester.

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