I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which
ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased from the world's literary
memory. It refuses to be erased, however, and for this the film version of the
book made by Stanley Kubrick may be held chiefly responsible. I should myself be
glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted. I receive mail
from students who try to write theses about it or requests from Japanese
dramaturges to turn It into a sort of Noh play. It seems likely to survive,
while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust. This is not an
unusual experience for an artist. Rachmaninoff used to groan because he was
known mainly for a Prelude in C Sharp Minor which he wrote as a boy, while the
works of his maturity never got into the programs. Kids cut their pianistic
teeth on a Minuet in G which Beethoven composed only so that he could detest it.
I have to go on living with A Clockwork Orange, and this means I have a sort of
authorial duty to it. I have a very special duty to it in the United States, and
I had better now explain what this duty is. Let me put the situation baldly. A
Clockwork Orange has never been published entire in America. The book I wrote is
divided into three sections of seven chapters each. Take out your pocket
calculator and you will find that these add up to a total of twenty-one
chapters. 21 is the symbol for human maturity, or used to be, since at 21 you
got the vote and assumed adult responsibility. Whatever its symbology, the
number 21 was the number I started out with. Novelists of my stamp are
interested in what is called arithmology, meaning that number has to mean
something in human terms when they handle it. The number of chapters is never
entirely arbitrary. Just as a musical composer starts off with a vague image of
bulk and duration, so a novelist begins with an image of length, and this image
is expressed in the number of sections and the number of chapters in which the
work will be disposed. Those twenty-one chapters were important to me. But they
were not important to my New York publisher. The book he brought out had only
twenty chapters. He insisted on cutting out the twenty-first. I could, of
course, have demurred at this and taken my book elsewhere, but it was considered
that he was being charitable in accepting the work at all, and that all other
New York, or Boston, publishers would kick out the manuscript on its dog-ear. I
needed money back in 1961, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance,
and if the condition of the book's acceptance was also its truncation-well, so
be it. So there is a profound difference between A Clockwork Orange as Great
Britain knows it and the somewhat slimmer volume that bears the same name in the
United States of America. Let us go further. The rest of the world was sold the
book out of Great Britain, and so most versions-certainly the French, Italian,
Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Rumanian, and German translations-have the
original twenty-one chapters. Now when Stanley Kubrick made his film-though he
made it in England-he followed the American version and, so it seemed to his
audiences outside America, ended the story somewhat prematurely. Audiences did
not exactly clamor for their money back, but they wondered why Kubrick left out
the dénouement. People wrote to me about this-indeed much of my later life has
been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustrations of
intention-while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the
rewards of their misdemeanor. Life is of course, terrible. What happens in that
twenty-first chapter? You now have the chance to find out. Briefly, my young
thuggish protagonist grows up. He grows bored with violence and recognizes that
human energy is better expended on creation than destruction. Senseless violence
is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the
constructive. Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks,
derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, in the much
more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings. There comes a time,
however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of the
stupid and ignorant. My young hoodlum comes to the revelation of the need to get
something done in life-to marry, to beget children, to keep the orange of the
world turning in the Rookers of Bog, or hands of God, and perhaps even create
something-music, say. After all, Mozart and Mendelssohn were composing deathless
music in their teens or nadsats, and all my hero was doing was razrezzing and
giving the old in-out. It is with a kind of shame that this growing youth looks
back on his devastating past. He wants a different kind of future. There is no
hint of this change of intention in the twentieth chapter. The boy is
conditioned, then deconditioned, and he foresees with glee a resumption of the
operation of free and violent will. 'I was cured all right,' he says, and so the
American book ends. So the film ends too. The twenty-first chapter gives the
novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human
beings change. Their is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you
can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom,
operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy best-sellers show
people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely
indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of
the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American
or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel. But my New
York publisher believed that my twenty-first chapter was a sellout. It was veddy
veddy British, don't you know. It was bland and it showed a Pelagian
unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model for unregenerable
evil. The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than the British and could
face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam. My book was
Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was
a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on
the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the
inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Holy Roller, about people
being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so
it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of human life. I do not think so
because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this
to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform
evil, then he is a clockwork orange-meaning that he has the appearance of an
organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be
wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the
Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order
that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of
moral entities. This is what the television news is about. Unfortunately there
is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To
devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create. We like to have the
pants scared off us by visions of cosmic destruction. To sit down in a dull room
and compose the Missa solennis or The Anatomy of Melancholy does not make
headlines or news flashes. Unfortunately my little squib of a book was found
attractive to many because it was as odorous as a crateful of bad eggs with the
miasma of original sin. It seems priggish or Pollyannaish to deny that my
intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my
readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I
enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist's innate cowardice that
makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to
commit for himself. But the book does also have a moral lesson, and it is the
weary traditional one of the fundamental importance of moral choice. It is
because this lesson sticks out like a sore thumb that I tend to disparage A
Clockwork Orange as a work too didactic to be artistic. It is not the novelist's
job to preach; it is his duty to show. I have shown enough, though the curtain
of an invented lingo gets in the way-another aspect of my cowardice. Nadsat, a
Russified version of English, was meant to muffle the raw response we expect
from pornography. It turns the book into a linguistic adventure. People
preferred the film because they are scared, rightly, of language. I don't think
I have to remind readers what the title means. Clockwork oranges don't exist,
except in the speech of old Londoners. The image was a bizarre one, always used
for a bizarre thing. "He's as queer as a clockwork orange," meant he
was queer to the limit of queerness. It did not primarily denote homosexuality,
though a queer, before restrictive legislation came in, was a term used for a
member of the inverted fraternity. Europeans who translated the title as Arancia
a Orologeria or Orange Mécanique could not understand its Cockney resonance and
they assumed that it meant a hand grenade, a cheaper kind of explosive
pineapple. I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a
living organism oozing with juice and sweetness. Readers of the twenty-first
chapter must decide for themselves whether it enhances the book they presumably
know or is really a discardable limb. I meant the book to end in this way, but
my aesthetic judgment may have been faulty. Writers are rarely their own best
critics, nor are critics. "Quod scripsi scripsi" said Pontius Pilate
when he made Jesus Christ the King of the Jews. "What I have written I have
written." We can destroy what we have written but we cannot unwrite it. I
leave what I wrote with what Dr. Johnson called frigid indifference to the
judgment of that .00000001 of the American population which cares about such
things. Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.
Anthony Burgess
November, 1986
© 1986
Anthony Burgess
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