Interviewer: What literary significance does the book A Clockwork Orange have?
Burgess: In a sense this book does state what I'm always trying to state in my work; that man is free, that man was granted the gift of free will and that he can choose, and that if he decides to choose evil rather than to choose good, this is in his nature and it is not the task of the state to kill this capacity for choice. In effect the book A Clockwork Orange says that it is better for a man to do evil of his own free will than for the state to turn him into a machine which can only do good. I mean in this sense, I've been using the theme of free will in novel after novel, but this book is different from the others in that it uses a specially contrived language and also in that it makes far more explicit use of violence than in any other of my work. I don't like violence, I don't like presenting violence in my books, I don't like even presenting the act of sex in my books; I am naturally timid about these things. But in writing A Clockwork Orange, I was so appalled at the prospect before us, in the late 1950's, the prospect of the state taking over more and more of the area of free choice, that I felt I had to write the book. The book is didactic, the book teaches, preaches, a little too much and I don't think it's the job of the artist to do that, the job of the artist is to show. But the book became popular precisely because it combined the didactic and what seems, to many people, to be the pornographic. Pornography and violence, and the teachy, preachy quality; and when you get these two together you normally produce a book that can become a bestseller. The book didn't become a bestseller, not for many, many years, but inevitably it has become my most popular book and this I resent. Out of the thirty odd books I have written this is often the only book of mine, which is known, this I resent very much.
Interviewer: It also talks about an event in your life, is that an element of biography?
Burgess: Yes, indeed. My first wife, who is now dead, was attacked during the war in London, in the blackout, by four American soldiers, who were in fact deserters. It wasn't a sexual attack, it was an attack for robbery, but the result of this attack was that she had a miscarriage, she lost the child she was carrying at the time and her health deteriorated, and I suppose her eventual death was initiated by this act of violence. I think it's the job of the artist, especially the novelist, to take events like that from his own life, or from the lives of those near to him, and to purge them, to cathartize the pain, the anguish, in a work of art. It's one of the jobs of art, I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said "We shed our sicknesses in works of art." In this sense, the part of the novel, the part of the film, in which the character is writing a book, and the book is called in my own book, A Clockwork Orange. It was an attempt to put myself in the novel, to put myself as a writer who is subject to the deprivations, to the violence of wild youth, and by that means to clear it out of my system so that I didn't have to think about it any more. I think that the therapeutic virtue of this book is probably its greatest virtue as far as I'm concerned. Its artistic virtue is rather less.
Interviewer: And then the novel was made into a film, did you make a lot of money from it?
Burgess: No, I didn't make any money at all, I just sold the book rather early on in my career. Ever since the book had been written, from about 1962 on, there had been attempts to make a film out of it; but of course, in 1962, 1963, the climate wasn't yet ready for films of this kind. We weren't ready in 1962 to see on the films explicit violence, explicit rape, even explicit nudity. So the original attempt to make a film of A Clockwork Orange was an attempt at a very low financial level. The idea was to make a kind of 'underground' film with the Rolling Stones, (a very popular singing group at that time, and I think still), in it, playing the four leading parts; the film would not make much money, the film would not be shown publicly probably, but only in film clubs. So, in consequence I accepted $500 for the rights of the book. Naturally the book was now in the hands of operators who were able to sell it eventually for $500,000. So the money gained from the book has been gained by those who didn't write it. For my own part I don't worry, because it is the nature of serious artists not to make money. Artists don't make money, they get their pleasures in other ways.
Interviewer: Had you written the book in 1959 and '60?
Burgess: The book was written in about…it was finished in 1960, but there was great difficulty getting it published. In those days people were very squeamish, in 1960, in England, only then for the first time was it possible to buy a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in its unabridged form, it's only just over ten years ago. The climate has changed so fundamentally in ten years, that it's very hard for us now to believe what life was really like in the 1960's.
Interviewer: Putting money aside what has changed for you with the release of the film?
Burgess: The film has just been a damned nuisance. I am regarded by some people as a mere 'boy', a mere helper to Stanley Kubrick; the secondary creator who is feeding a primary creator who's a great film director. This, I naturally resent, I resent also the fact I am frequently blamed for the various crimes which are supposed to be instigated by the film. It is said that young boys see this film, and I believe in England now young girls also, and then they go round imitating what they have seen in the film. They go round beating up old men and there have been one or two murders, and the murders have been blamed on this film. Well, when the press gets on to these sad events they don't go to the director and ask him what he thinks about it, they go to the author. They go to me and say, "Do you feel responsible for all this?" and I have to say, "Well, whether I'm responsible or not, this question should have been asked twelve years ago when the book was first published, not now when the book has become better known after its transference to another medium." But the fundamental answer is, no, one is not responsible. If I am responsible for young boys beating up old men or killing old women after having seen the film then Shakespeare is responsible every time some young man decides to kill his uncle and blames it on Hamlet. Shakespeare is responsible for producing a film like King Lear, in which unutterable violence is presented, and even that earlier play of Shakespeare's, Titus Andronicus, in which not only do we have multiple rape but also mutilation and finally cannibalism. Shakespeare, as far as I know, has never been blamed for any of the violence in the world; and for that matter, if we're going to start blaming books, let's start blaming the Bible, the most blood-thirsty ever written, was the Bible. And there was a man in New York State who killed something like sixteen children, slaughtered them in cold blood, and he said he was fascinated by the stories of blood sacrifice in the Old Testament and he merely wanted to present a sweet offering to the Lord. Again, we had a man in England, a man called Haig who murdered various women and drank their blood, and he blamed all this on the sacrament of the Eucharist, he said he was so fascinated by the notion of drinking the body and blood of Christ during mass that he merely wanted to transfer this to his own life, and drink the blood, at least, of live women. Now, if, when, we get to that stage, all art is culpable; and I prefer to say that elements in man which produce violence, which produce murder and rape, are already there and are not likely to be instigated, or even prevented, by a work of art. The work of art merely takes life as it is and shows life as it is and that's the end of it's duty.
Interviewer: What is your opinion of our present civilization and our society, our present society?
Burgess: It is no different from any other society, in the sense that our society is violent, our society is irresponsible. I don't think we're any worse than, say, the society in which Shakespeare lived. The stories we read about Elizabethan England indicate that it was far more dangerous to walk the streets of London say, in 1590 odd, than it is to walk the streets of New York or Rome today. The fact is that human nature doesn't change, we're violent, we're naturally violent, we're naturally aggressive and we just see more of it nowadays because we see more newspapers and more films. And let me get this straight, while I'm at it; there's nothing wrong with violence, violence in itself is not a bad thing, it is not automatically to be condemned, because only through violence can beneficent changes be made. It was only through violence that the Americans were able to create a revolution, it's only through violence, in our own age, that we were able to defeat the Nazis.
It goes on for another 7 pages, but nothing more on ACO.
Archived 2007-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net