Liana Burgess, requiescat in pace

[rich]

Elizabeth Harwick passed away yesterday

she was a fan of Pynchons and was part of committee to award him w/
pulitzer in 1974

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/arts/05hardwick.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin


rich

On Dec 5, 2007 11:02 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/05/db0501.xml
>