Burgess papers reveal alternatives to notorious Earthly Powers ‘catamite’ opening

As the novel turns 50, researchers discover manuscripts with different versions of the provocative first line

For four decades, children have sniggered at the first line of the Anthony Burgess novel Earthly Powers, regarded as the most deliberately provocative opening in 20th-century fiction: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me,” Burgess wrote.

With the use of the word “catamite”, the term for a passive boy recipient of homosexual intercourse, the sentence flew in the face of homophobic norms and also implied pederasty. But newly discovered papers reveal the polymath and former Observer writer had created different versions of this “arresting opening” for a book he hoped would establish him as a literary heavyweight.

He talked about writing a novel of Tolstoyan or Dickensian scope and carried the manuscript around from place to place.

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