A Clockwork Orange
— 1962 —
New York: W. W. Norton, 2019; with an introduction by Anthony Burgess; 212 pages
FIRST LINES
“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else.
PLOT SUMMARY
Alex is fifteen. With his three friends—his “droogs”—he spends drug-fueled evenings stealing, raping, fighting rival gangs, and terrorizing the population in a future city that seems like Manchester, England, but could be Leningrad or New York.
His excessive criminality falls to what the Beethoven-loving Alex calls being “ultra-violent”—a nasty bit of teenage rebellion in a society in which all work is drudgery, or “rabbiting.” In Alex’s world, evil is constant and brutality is pervasive. After getting two very young girls drunk, Alex sexually assaults them.
An arrest by the “millicents” lands Alex in prison. There he is offered a stark choice: to serve his full fourteen-year sentence or gain his freedom in exchange for joining a behavior modification program that will erase his violent impulses.
But there is a hitch: the technique, involving drug injections and “viddying” extremely violent movies, is experimental. Will it really change Alex? In this stark, dystopian vision, Burgess poses big questions about free will and virtue. “What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ANTHONY BURGESS
Novelist, composer, screenwriter, and literary critic, Anthony Burgess was born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England, on February 25, 1917. Both his mother and an aunt died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. But the boy survived, was raised Catholic, and later was sent to Catholic schools. With no formal musical instruction, Burgess acquired a passion for classical music through a home-built radio and taught himself to play the piano. Graduating from Manchester University in 1940, he joined the British Army, serving as a musical director of a unit that entertained the troops in Europe during World War II.
During the war, Burgess married Llewela “Lynne” Isherwood Jones. While enduring London’s wartime blackout, she was assaulted by American soldiers while pregnant and lost their expected child. This attack, Burgess later said, inspired the brutality he depicted in A Clockwork Orange.
Trained in linguistics, Burgess taught after the war, first in British secondary schools and later with the Colonial Service in Malaya and Brunei. While in Malaya, he wrote Time for a Tiger, the first of a trilogy of novels set in the British colony.
His teaching career was interrupted when Burgess was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1959. Told that he had a year to live, Burgess returned to London and began producing novels, essays, and criticism. Working in a frenzy to provide for his wife, he wrote five novels in a year, after which it became apparent that he had been misdiagnosed.
In 1961, he and Lynne took a voyage to Russia that crucially influenced the inventive language and dark social climate that permeate A Clockwork Orange. No socialist, Burgess saw the suppression of individuality and state control as dangers and the idea for a novel took hold. This merged with reports of growing teen gang violence in England and a book was born. Burgess later claimed that he wrote A Clockwork Orange in three weeks.
“I first heard the expression ‘as queer as a clockwork orange’ in a London pub before the Second World War,” Burgess explained. “It is an old Cockney slang phrase, implying a queerness or madness so extreme as to subvert nature, since could any notion be more bizarre than that of a clockwork orange?… I began to write a novel about curing juvenile delinquency. I had read somewhere that it would be a good idea to liquidate the criminal impulse through aversion therapy; I was appalled.”
Critical reception was mixed when A Clockwork Orange appeared in England in 1962. When an American publisher offered to publish the book on the condition that the final chapter be dropped, Burgess accepted. “I needed money back in 1961, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance,” he wrote, “and if the condition of the book’s acceptance was also its truncation—well, so be it.” Published in the United States in 1963, A Clockwork Orange was extolled by a New York Times reviewer as “brilliant.”
Burgess received five hundred dollars for the movie rights, originally planned as a vehicle for the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger as Alex. Then Stanley Kubrick took over as director. An initial “X” rating—which meant “No one under 17 admitted” and typically applied to pornographic films—was changed to “R” (“Restricted”) after Kubrick deleted some scenes for the 1971 release.
Eventually, Kubrick’s “sinny”—the word for a movie, from “cinema” in A Clockwork Orange—was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director and garnered awards around the world. Overshadowed by the film’s success, Burgess said:
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 is 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.
Well before the film appeared, Burgess’s wife, Lynne, had become an alcoholic and Burgess had begun an affair with Italian translator and literary agent, Liana Macellari. After Lynne’s death from cirrhosis in 1968, Burgess married Macellari. During the early 1970s, they moved to the United States, where he taught writing at Princeton University and the City University of New York, among other schools. To avoid England’s high tax rate, Burgess and Liana later moved to Monaco while keeping homes in Italy and France.
In addition to his novels, Burgess composed music and wrote more than fifty books, some under a second pseudonym: Joseph Kell. His output includes a biography of Ernest Hemingway and several books about the work of James Joyce: Here Comes Everybody (also published as Re Joyce, 1965) and Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973). Burgess also wrote for film and television, including Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 miniseries, Jesus of Nazareth.
In 1980, Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers, a sweeping saga about a novelist telling his life story, was a finalist for the Booker Prize, which went instead to Rites of Passage by William Golding (see entry). Suffering from lung cancer, Anthony Burgess returned to London, where he died on November 22, 1993, at the age of seventy-six.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
Anthony Burgess’s most famous book, A Clockwork Orange is a riveting exploration of big questions about free will and morality. The devilishly clever narrative brings to life an extraordinary personification of evil in a provocative mixture of action, ideas, and language—its invented slang is central to the book’s impact. His created vocabulary includes words like “viddy” for “see,” “horrorshow” for “good,” “appy polly loggies” for “apologies,” and “the old in and out”—you can probably guess its meaning. While challenging, his “Nadsat” has its own compelling logic and exhilarating quality.
Recognizing this hurdle, Burgess wrote:
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 turned the book into a linguistic adventure.
And adventure it is, though a perverse one, vividly reimagined in Kubrick’s film classic. If you have never seen it, you should be warned—the film is “ultraviolent” and its treatment of sexual violence in particular is difficult to watch. Read Burgess first for his rich language and audacious vision.
“Like 1984, this is a book in which an entire social order is implied through language. And what language!” wrote Richard Lacayo in listing the novel among Time magazine’s All-TIME 100. “Stanley Kubrick’s coldly magnificent ‘sinny’ adaptation has sometimes threatened to overshadow this great novel. Don’t let it happen.”
I agree. There are some key differences from the novel. The most significant of these is the ending. Kubrick’s film was based on the American edition of the novel, which deleted Burgess’s final chapter—and Alex’s ultimate fate. The revised 1986 American edition restored the novel’s missing twenty-first chapter. Which ending is right? Stop after chapter 20, as Kubrick did? Or continue on to chapter 21?
You choose. After all, A Clockwork Orange is about freedom of choice. As Burgess put it, “Eat this sweetish segment or spit it out. You are free.”
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Having read his books on Joyce, I look forward to reading Burgess’s exploration of the life and work of “Papa” Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway (1978). Getting one significant novelist’s insights into another is an intriguing prospect.
Of Burgess’s many other fiction titles, I moved the novel Earthly Powers to my To-Be-Read list. Weighing in at nearly seven hundred pages, Burgess’s 1980 novel certainly did not make the list of great short books. But it is widely considered his next-best book. The story of an aging gay Roman Catholic novelist, it spans the twentieth century’s major events and explores issues of faith, morality, and free will that animate much of Burgess’s work. Finally, to follow A Clockwork Orange consider reading several other important great short books in this collection. Burgess explores the same troubling moral landscape investigated by his contemporaries William Golding in Lord of the Flies, Doris Lessing in The Fifth Child, and George Orwell in Animal Farm (see entries).