In 1958, while still working as a teacher in Malaya, Anthony Burgess wrote the book English Literature: A Survey for Students. It was published under his birth name John Burgess Wilson. In this book is one of Burgess’s earliest published descriptions of Keats:

‘Perhaps John Keats, had he lived beyond his mere twenty-six years, would have become one of the great poets of all time. So many, aware of his sensuous gift and flood of rich language, believe, thinking also that his Letters show the beginnings of a mature and incisive intellect that might, given time, have tempered his lush Romanticism to something like a Shakespearian quality.’ 

This passage sets up Burgess’s prevailing opinion of Keats. In fact, Burgess becomes increasingly emphatic in his belief that had Keats lived he could have been a nineteenth century Shakespeare. In his fiction, Burgess treats Keats’s death with the kind of indignation that is proportionate to such a loss to literature, and Keats makes himself repeatedly felt in Burgess’s writing as a kind of angry apparition.

By the mid-1970s Burgess was living in Rome with his wife Liana and their son Andrew. In the second part of his biography, Burgess describes the first of two supernatural encounters he had there with Keats. Reading Keats’s poetry on the Spanish Steps outside the house in which Keats died of tuberculosis on 23 February 1821, Burgess describes the following eerie visitation:

‘Reciting the odes, I became aware of a kind of astral wind, a malevolent chill, of a soul chained to a place where the body died, of a silent malignant laughter that mocked not my reading but the poems themselves.’  YH

As part of a TV series entitled Cities in which a series of famous writers played the role of tour guides to the cities they lived in, Burgess repeated the reading, and this time the encounter with Keats was captured on film:

Later, making a television film on Rome for Canada, I recited the last sonnet – ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ – on the steps outside Keats house. It was high summer, and the sky was cloudless, but within the space of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter a storm arose, the rain teemed, I and the television team were drenched, and the final couplet was drowned by thunder. The camera caught all this. I am not imputing a demonic vindictiveness to the soul of John Keats. It seemed to me rather a fierce creative energy, forbidden its total fulfilment by a premature physical death, frustrated into destructiveness, was hovering around the house where he died. Fanciful, true. Let it go, forget it. YH

Keats’s ‘fierce creative energy, forbidden its total fulfilment by a premature physical death’ becomes a driving principle at work in Burgess’s novel ABBA ABBA. The premise of the novel, a fictional meeting staged between Keats and the Roman poet Belli, is effectively the portrayal of a lost opportunity for literature:

But if Keats had lived to, say, Belli’s age – Belli died in 1861 at seventy-two – would he not have outgrown his romanticism and, with that Shakespearean wit and intelligence manifested in his letters, moved onto a fuller poetry, doing Browning’s work better than Browning? Could he have learned from Belli how to employ the colloquial, the obscene, the blasphemous? YH

This feeling of loss is most poignantly felt in Keats’s own agonised pleading and promises to grow up:

‘Whoever presides over poetry, spare me to dare the darkness. Everything is an allegory of the unknown. Teach me the way of the reading of the signs. Give me time to grow. No more play.’ (ABBA ABBA)

In Burgess’s description, the whole reason for writing ABBA ABBA was to subdue or bind Keats’s ‘fierce creative energy’ into his writing: ‘Keats was watching all the time. I would quieten his unquiet spirit by putting him in a little novel’ (TH). Keats follows Burgess all the way to Monaco, and eventually, in Burgess’s own words ‘Keats submitted to being put in the novella ABBA ABBA without any further protest’, however not before Keats’s spirit caused more havoc:

‘A French truck nudged us on to a soft shoulder on a secondary road, and the Renault, a very lightweight vehicle, went over and over and ended upside-down in a ditch. We managed to unfasten seat-belts before the car caught fire, though we would have been out of it more quickly had we not been wearing seat-belts. I, like the fool I was, am, went on puffing at a Schimmelpenninck. Andrew, cool and brave, got the luggage out. The car destroyed itself. How far this could be blamed on John Keats I do not know.’ YH

Burgess’s Keats has been criticised for various things, including that ‘his Keats fails to be Keatsian’ (Roger Lewis). However, in many ways, the idea of what ‘Keatsian’ is, is exactly what Burgess’s portrayal challenges. Burgess’s frustrated spirit is a direct counternarrative to what the Keats-biographer Aileen Ward describes as ‘the myth of Adonais’—Keats as the ‘pale flower’ described in the elegy by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In 1979, Burgess published another book for students They Wrote in English. Here, he repeats what he wrote in his survey of English literature in 1958, writing that ‘John Keats, had he lived beyond his shamefully brief span of twenty-six years, might well have qualified himself to stand as high as Milton or Shakespeare’ (SIE). However, Burgess’s tone has softened slightly, and the ‘time and ingenuity’ spent on the novella (which it ‘could not possibly repay’ YT) makes itself felt in his conclusion:

‘But it is fruitless to conjecture: what we have we have, and we must be very thankful for it. Keats’s finest poems – the great Odes and the last sonnets – are amongst the best in the language.’

He also jumps to Keats’s defence, when reflecting on Byron’s infamous lines that Keats was ‘snuffed out by an article’ in reference to the severe review of Keats’s Endymion in Blackwood’s Magazine: 

‘That mind was never snuffed out, though his body lies in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Keats died (Shelley’s body lies not far away). The impact of his poetry is as powerful as it ever was. One approaches his brief sad career with a mixture of gratitude and anger. Old men of ninety walk round in a glow of total unaccomplishment; a boy of twenty-six died in the fire of immense promise.’ (SIE)

Biographers describe the way that after Keats’s death, casts were taken of his face, hand and foot. Casts were also taken of Burgess’s face and hands after he died, and are now kept at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester. Seeing the casts of Burgess’s hands, and given his extensive, ghostly engagement with Keats, it is difficult not to think of Keats’s own poem ‘This Living Hand’ when you see them:

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you. 

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