Скачать или смотреть In Search of Anthony Burgess: St Margarets (4/8)

8 Kings Road, St Margarets, Twickenham, Middlesex, England. The place where Anthony Burgess wrote "An Essay on Censorship" in 1989, having decided to take a stand against intolerance and hypocrisy amid the Satanic Verses affair.

"Evidently, there is a political element in the attack on The Satanic Verses which has killed and injured good if obstreperous Muslims in Islamabad, though it may be dangerously blasphemous to suggest it. The Ayatollah Khomeini is probably within his self-elected rights in calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, or of anyone else for that matter, on his own holy ground. To order outraged sons of the Prophet to kill him, and the directors of Penguin Books, on British soil is tantamount to a jihad. It is a declaration of war on citizens of a free country, and as such it is a political act. It has to be countered by an equally forthright, if less murderous, declaration of defiance....I do not think that even our British Muslims will be eager to read that great vindication of free speech, which is John Milton's Areopagitica. Oliver Cromwell's Republic proposed muzzling the press, and Milton replied by saying, in effect, that the truth must declare itself by battling with falsehood in the dust and heat....I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forgot what Nazis did to books ... they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires....If they do not like secular society, they must fly to the arms of the Ayatollah or some other self-righteous guardian of strict Islamic morality." (newspaper article by Burgess)

Censored, banned, cut, bowdlerised, destroyed, conveniently lost, burned. Who knows? At Geoffrey Grigson Productions we possess only fragments of the "Essay on Censorship". This Burgess work, which remains highly topical and deserves a much wider readership, remains elusive. Anyone with the full verse text who would like to share extracts with the wider world via YouTube is beseeched to get in contact at:

[email protected]

Extract from "The Right to an Answer" (1960):

'...The senior Mr Denham's,' he said, with deadly Eastern realism, 'will perhaps only be better in the grave

'I come here to your beautiful country ' Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ' your beautiful country, I say,' he said defiantly. '...So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments...'

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