Confessions of a Justified Sinner Read Online Free Page A

schizophrenia:
    1. The patient’s conversation may be unreal and disturbing.
    2. Thoughts and perceptions are odd and distorted and often imply persecution of the patient.
    3. The patient may hear voices, see visions, have irrational beliefs and delusions.
    4. Behaviour may be bizarre.
    5. The patient may be agitated and may behave in an antisocial or violent way.
    (from
Medical Terminology in Hospital Practice
, ed. P. M. Davies)
    Burgess’s own books contain much on medicine and disease.
The Doctor is Sick
deals with the fantasy of a patient dying from a brain tumour. The infernal underworld where he believes he is heading is blended with the criminal underworld of a Dickensian London; or
Honey for the Bears
about losing one’s identity in the madhouse of Soviet Russia; or
Nothing Like the Sun
, where Shakespeare is in the tertiary phase of syphillis; or his many adaptations of
Cyrano de Bergerac
, with its hero emotionally crippled by a huge nose … There are many more. The whole lot could be seen as prefigured in Hogg’s interests. Like the historical Hogg, Burgess’s fictional characters demonstrate the insecurities of men educated out of their social class — men who have too much brain, who are never satisfied or safe, and who have nothing to protect themselves with except language. It will have to be left to other commentators comprehensively to elucidate Burgess’s obsession with doubles — good and evil, creativity and poetasting — and to discuss the rift between his origins and what he has made of himself, as sketched in his volumes of memoirs, which he subtitles his
Confessions.
And who is going to examine the way the celebrity on the Côte d’Azur, with his villa on Malta and chalet in Switzerland, is related to the half-Scottish Manchester Catholic schoolmaster, born John Wilson, the very same name as James Hogg’s friend (1785-1854), the metaphysician and editor?
    Roger Lewis

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
             
    The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
was first published, anonymously, by Longmans in June 1824 and reissued in 1837 as
The Private Memoirs of a Fanatic
, heavily edited by D. O. Hill, who removed all the Calvinistic satire and references to the devil. An edition by Shiells & Co. in 1895, called
The Suicide’s Grave, Being the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, returned to the 1824 original, but introduced many new misprints and slips. The 1824 text was also used for an edition of Hogg in the Campion Reprints Series (1924) and by the Cresset Press (1947), where the book was introduced by André Gide, who said Robert’s behaviour ‘is the exteriorized development of our own desires, of our pride, of our most secret thoughts’.
    There are two other modern texts available, both following that of 1824. John Carey’s, for the Oxford University Press World’s Classics Series (1969), contains a detailed bibliography, pinpointing the discrepancies between editions, and exacting explanatory notes on such items as the Covenanters, the Scottish legal system and Episcopalian dress. He also informs us that a grey stone slab may be found at the top of Fell Law mountain, at the exact spot where Hogg places Robert’s desecrated tomb. In his preface, Professor Carey usefully investigates the so-called factual nature of the Editor’s Narrative — and discovers considerable indecisiveness: ‘the old laird marries after succeeding to Dalcastle in 1687, but his second son is seventeen on 25 March 1704; Colwans and Wringhims go to Edinburgh in 1704 to attend a session of parliament that took place in 1703; Mrs Calvert sees Drummond’s claymore glittering in the moon, and the surgeons testify that this sword fits George’s wound, whereas Wringhim, by his own and Mrs Calvert’s account carried a rapier; George’s body is found on a ‘little washing green,’ but Mrs Calvert remembers it as ‘not a very small one’; she thinks she sees him ‘pierced