BOOK REVIEW : An Eclectic Life, a Potent Biography : YOU’VE HAD YOUR TIME; The Second Part of the Confessions <i> by Anthony Burgess</i> , Grove Weidenfeld $23.50, 416 pages

The odd fate of Anthony Burgess is one of the great inspirational tales of contemporary letters and a comfort to discouraged baby boomers and procrastinating novelists alike.

Burgess, as we are reminded in the second volume of his memoirs, was an obscure British colonial functionary serving in Malaya when he was told that he had a brain tumor and that he had one year to live. In 1960, at the age of 43, he vowed to turn himself into a professional writer and lay in a sufficient supply of manuscripts to support his soon-to-be widow.

“Because of hangovers, marital quarrels, creative deadness induced by the weather, shopping trips, summonses to meet state officials and sheer torpid gloom, I was not able to achieve more than five and a half novels of very moderate size in that pseudo-terminal year,” he recalls in “You’ve Had Your Time.” “Still, it was very nearly E. M. Forster’s whole long life’s output.”

The doctors, of course, were wrong, and Burgess has so far produced some five dozen books, plus an uncounted number of articles and reviews, film and television scripts, and a fascinating assortment of oddments.

He is best known for “A Clockwork Orange,” but he is also the author of the entry on “Novel, The” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He composed an original piece for harmonica and guitar for John Sebastian pere , father of the folk-rocker of Lovin’ Spoonful fame; he scripted a biblical epic starring Burt Lancaster as Moses, and he devised the root language of the troglodytes in “Quest for Fire.”

“You’ve Had Your Time,” following “Little Wilson and Big God,” picks up the autobiography with Burgess’ self-invention as a writer in 1960 under a medical death-sentence and closes with the author’s bittersweet contemplation of death in old age: “One’s frustration at impotence to put the world right, expressed in rage, one’s shame at the hopeless tears one starts to enjoy,” writes Burgess in a deeply touching “Envoi,” “these make the prospect of death a little easier.”

Burgess is a kind of latter-day literary Don Quixote--he even carries a sword concealed in a walking stick on his visits to Manhattan--and he does battle with real and imagined enemies in exotic settings around the world: agents, black militants, book reviewers, censors, customs officers, Mafiosi, movie producers, petty bureaucrats and various other malefactors.

Burgess, otherwise relentlessly wry and sharply ironic, is capable of extraordinary tenderness when writing about his two marriages, one tragic and the other redemptive. His first wife, Lynne, is depicted as a doomed Welsh beauty who drank herself to death, but not before engaging in rampant promiscuity on a global basis.

Liana, his current wife, is an Italian woman of striking beauty and intellect who gives him succor, a son, and life-saving companionship in his hard-scrabble existence. His account of the aches and intimacies of marriage--”a miniature civilization or micropolis,” as he describes it, “a fund of common memories . . . memories of codes, a potent shorthand”--amounts to a romance of tragic proportions.

Some of Burgess’s cracks will strike the reader as outrageous or at least politically incorrect. “Many women are perhaps sluts at heart,” he observes in passing. “Women are not permitted to take art seriously when they themselves practice it, for they recognize that it is a mere surrogate for the creative miracle of bearing children.”

And sometimes it’s tempting to regard Burgess as merely a charming curmudgeon, as when he bemoans the passing of “the half-crown or tosheroon , the loveliest and most rational coin of all.”

But Burgess is too accomplished as an artist, and too demanding of his own art, to be regarded as a mere caricature. He is, as he wrote of one of his own characters, “a man drunk on words, any words.” But he is also possessed of a classical sensibility, an uncompromising sense of moral order, and a natural flair for showmanship, all of which combine to make “You’ve Had Your Time” an effervescent but potent brew.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Lies of the Night” by Gesualdo Bufalino.