Ο ANTHONY BURGESS ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ''ΚΟΥΡΔΙΣΤΟ ΠΟΡΤΟΚΑΛΙ''

Anthony Burgess ΝΟΕΜΒΡΙΟΣ 1986

A Clockwork Orange Resucked

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 programmes. 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, pub-lishers 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 clamour 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 colour 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 judgement 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 judgement 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 from A Clockwork Orange: A play with music

The novel, properly novella, entitled A Clockwork Orange first appeared in the spring of 1962. I had written its first version in late 1960, when I was coming to the end of what the neurological specialists had assured my late wife would be my terminal year. My late wife broke the secret in time for me to work hard at providing some posthumous royalties for her. In the period in which I was supposed to be dying from an inoperable cerebral tumour, I produced the novels entitled The Doctor is Sick, Inside Mr Enderby, The Worm and the Ring (a reworking of an earlier draft), One Hand Clapping, The Eve of Saint Venus (an expansion in novella form of a discarded opera libretto) and A Clockwork Orange in a much less fantastic version than the one that was eventually published. This first version presented the world of adolescent violence and governmental retribution in the slang that was current at the time among the hooligan groups known as the Teddyboys and the Mods and Rockers. I had the sense to realise that, by the time the book came to be out, that slang would already be outdated, but I did not see clearly how to solve the problem of an appropriate idiolect for the narration. When, in early 1961, it seemed to me likely that I was not going to die just yet, I thought hard about the book and decided that its story properly belonged to the future, in which it was conceivable that even the easy-going British state might employ aversion therapy to cure the growing disease of youthful aggression. My late wife and I spent part of the summer of 1961 in Soviet Russia, where it was evident that the authorities had problems with turbulent youth not much different from our own. The stilyagi, or style-boys, were smashing faces and windows, and the police, apparently obsessed with ideological and fiscal crimes, seemed powerless to keep them under. It struck me that it might be a good idea to create a kind of young hooligan who bestrode the iron curtain and spoke an argot compounded of the two most powerful political languages in the world - Anglo-American and Russian. The irony of the style would lie in the hero-narrator's being totally unpolitical.



There was what must seem, to us who are living in a more permissive age, an unaccountable delay in getting the work accepted for publication. My literary agent was even dubious about submitting it to a publisher, alleging that its pornography of violence would be certain to make it unacceptable. I, or rather my late wife, whose Welsh blood forced her into postures of aggression on her husband's behalf, reminded the agent that it was his primary job not to make social or literary judgements on the work he handled but to sell it. So the novella was sold to William Heinemann Ltd in London. In New York it was sold to W.W. Norton Inc, though with the last chapter missing. To lop the final section of the story, in which the protagonist gives up his youthful violence in order to become a man with a man's responsibilities, seemed to me to be very harmful: it reduced the work from a genuine novel (whose main characteristic must always be a demonstration of the capacity of human nature to change) to a mere fable. Moreover, though this was perhaps a minor point, it ruined the arithmology of the book. The book was written in twenty-one chapters (21 being the symbol of human maturity) divided into three sections of exactly equal size. The American reduction looks lopsided. But the American publisher's argument for truncation was based on a conviction that the original version, showing as it does a capacity for regeneration in even the most depraved soul, was a kind of capitulation to the British Pelagian spirit, whereas the Augustinian Americans were tough enough to accept an image of unregenerable man. I was in no position to protest, except feebly and in the expectation of being overborne: I needed the couple of hundred dollars that comprised the advance on the work.



... The reviews it received not only failed to whet an appetite among prospective book-buyers: they were for the most part facetious and uncomprehending. What I had tried to write was, as well as a novella, a sort of allegory of Christian free will.. Man is defined by his capacity to choose courses of moral action. If he chooses good, he must have the possibility of choosing evil instead: evil is a theological necessity. I was also saying that it is more acceptable for us to perform evil acts than to be conditioned artificially into an ability only to perform what is socially acceptable. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (anonymous in those days) saw the book only as a 'nasty little shocker', which was rather unfair, while the down-market newspapers thought the Anglo-Russian slang was a silly little joke that didn't come off.



But the nasty little shocker was gaining an audience, especially among the American young. Rock groups called 'Clockwork Orange' began to spring up in New York and Los Angeles. These juveniles were primarily intrigued by the language of the book, which became a genuine teenage argot, and they liked the title. They did not realise that it was an old Cockney expression used to describe anything queer, not necessarily sexually so, and they hit on the secondary meaning of an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton. The youth of Malaysia, where I had lived for nearly six years, saw that orange contained orang, meaning in Malay a human being. In Italy, where the book became Arancia all' Orologeria, it was assumed that the title referred to a grenade, an alternative to the ticking pineapple. The small fame of the novella did not noticeably enrich me, but it led to a proposal that it be filmed. It was in, I think, 1965, that the rock-group known as the Rolling Stones expressed an interest in the buying of the property and an acting participation in a film version which I myself should write. There was not much money in the project, because the permissive age in which crude sex and cruder violence could be frankly presented had not yet begun. If the film was to be made at all, it would have to be in a cheap underground version leased out to clubs. But it was not made. Not yet.



It was the dawn of the age of candid pornography that enabled Stanley Kubrick to exploit, to a serious artistic end, those elements in the story which were meant to shock morally rather than merely titillate. These elements are, to some extent, hidden from the reader by the language used: to tolchock a chelloveck in the kishkas does not sound so bad as booting a man in the guts, and the old in-out in-out, even if it reduces the sexual act to a mechanical action, does not sicken quite as much as a Harold Robbins description of cold rape. But in a film little can be implied; everything has to be shown. Language ceases to be an opaque protection against being appalled and takes a very secondary place. I was bound to have misgivings about the film, and one of the banes of my later life has been the public assumption that I had something to do with it. I did not. I wrote a script, like nearly everybody else in the script-writing world, but nobody's script was used. The book itself, as in a literary seminar, was taken on to the film set, discussed, sectionally dramatised with much free improvisation, and then, as film, stowed in the can. All that I provided was a book, but I had provided it ten years previously. The British state had ignored it, but it was not so ready to ignore the film. It was considered to be an open invitation to the violent young, and inevitably I was regarded as an antisocial writer. The imputation that I had something to do with the punk cult, whose stepfather I was deemed to be by Time magazine, has more to do with the gorgeous technicolor of Kubrick's film than with my own subfusc literary experiment.



I am disclosing a certain gloom about visual adaptation of my little book, and the reader has now the right to ask why I have contrived a stage version of it. The answer is very simple: it is to stem the flow of amateur adaptations that I have heard about though never seen. It is to provide a definitive actable version which has auctorial authority. And, moreover, it is a version which, unlike Kubrick's cinema adaptation, draws on the entirety of the book, presenting at the end a hooligan hero who is now growing up, falling in love, proposing a decent bourgeois life with a wife and family, and consoling us with the doctrine that aggression is an aspect of adolescence which maturity rejects. ... Alex the hero speaks for me when he says in effect that destruction is a substitute for creation, and that the energy of youth has to be expressed through aggression because it has not yet been able to subdue itself through creation. Alex's aggressive instincts have been stimulated by classical music, but the music has been forewarning him of what he must some day become: a man who recognises the Dionysiac in, say, Beethoven but appreciates the Apollonian as well.



... One final point. I toyed, when first publishing the book, with the notion of affixing an epigraph from Shakespeare. This was considered to be a dangerously literary proposal: the book had to stand naked with no chaperonage from the Bard. But perhaps I may now conclude with it. In Act III Scene 3 of The Winter's Tale the shepherd who finds the child Perdita says: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting -.” It sounds like an exceptionally long adolescence, but perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own. It is the adolescence, somewhat briefer, that I present in A Clockwork Orange.



"1985" ΒΙΒΛΙΟ ΤΟΥ ANTHONY BURGESS

ΕΠΙΛΟΓΕΣ

[p. 89]

The techniques for total manipulation of the human soul were in existence in 1932, when Brave New World first appeared. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov had four years more to live, he had done his work, and had been able to see something of the possibilities of its social application. Like his fellow-countryman Bakunin, Pavlov was the product of a great phase of intellectual optimism which could not be held back by Czarist repression - indeed, censorship and obscurantism were a positive stimulus to the revolution of thought. Bakunin believed that men were already good; Pavlov believed that men could be made good. A. materialist of the true nineteenth-century brand, he saw the human brain as an organ, in Wundt's words, secreting thought as the liver secretes bile, and no more of a mystery to the scientific investigator than any other organ of the body. The brain, seat of thought and emotion, instigator of action, could be probed, cut about, radically altered, but it must always be altered in the direction of a more efficient mechanism, a machine dedicated to the improvement of its owner's functioning as a human organism. This was the ultimate Pelagianism. The

[p. 90:]

perfectibility of man should be not merely a pious aspiration but a scientific programme. He worked on dogs and discovered that their reflexes could be conditioned: ring a bell when bringing food and the dog will salivate; ring a bell without bringing food and the dog will still salivate. The potentialities of this discovery were enormous, and Huxley saw them clearly. In Brave New World, infants of the lowest social group must be made to hate the consumer goods they can never afford to buy. Children are encouraged to crawl towards highly coloured toys with gurgles of delight; as they start to touch them, electric bells shrill, sirens hoot, electric shocks are given off by the toys themselves. A few sessions of such conditioning, and the children will hate toys. In the same way, in maturity, they can be made to loathe champagne and caviar-surrogate. This is negative conditioning, conditioning employed in the service of rejection, but positive conditioning is used too. Make sweet scents and lovely music arise out of dustbins and the child is ready to be a lifelong refuse operative.

The Soviet State wished to remake man and, if one knows Russians, one can sympathize. Pavlov deplored the wild-eyed, sloppy, romantic, undisciplined, inefficient, anarchic texture of the Russian soul, at the same time admiring the cool reasonableness of Anglo-Saxons. Lenin deplored it too, but it still exists. Faced with the sloth of the waiters in Soviet restaurants (sometimes three hours between taking the order and fulfilling it), the manic depression of Soviet taxi-drivers, the sobs and howls of Soviet drunks, one can sometimes believe that without Communism this people could not have survived. But one baulks, with a shudder, at the Leninist proposal to rebuild, with Pavlov's assistance, the entire Russian character, thus making the works of Chekhov and Dostoevsky unintelligible to readers of the far future.

Lenin gave orders that Pavlov and his family should be lodged in capitalist luxury, fed with special rations, and that every

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possible technical facility should be granted the master, so that he could devise ways of manufacturing Soviet Man. Pavlov went on working with his dogs ("How like a dog is man," as Shakespeare, if he had read B. F. Skinner, might have said), looking for the seeds of life in the cerebral cortex, afflicting the creatures with diseases of the nervous system in order that he might, with the utmost tenderness (for nobody loved dogs as Pavlov did), cure them. Meanwhile the Soviet police followed up hints about the induction of neuroses, the driving of the Russian soul to breaking point. And the ancient point was being made about nothing in itself being good or bad, only the way in which fallible human beings use it. Certainly, humanism was being given the lie: man can be changed; the criminal can be turned into a reasonable citizen; the dissident can become orthodox; the obdurate rebel can be broken. But Soviet Man was not made.

We hear less of Pavlovianism these days than of Skinnerism. B. F. Skinner, a practising behavioural psychologist, teaches, and has written in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, about the conditions under which human society can alone survive, and these involve changing man through a battery of positive reinforcements. It is never enough to demonstrate to man, on the assumption that he is a rational creature, the rational advantages of losing his aggressive tendencies and developing a social conscience. Only by associating a particular mode of behaviour with pleasure can it be made to seem desirable. The other, negative, way, whereby people associate an opposed mode of behaviour with pain, is inhumane. But there is something in all of us that is unconcerned with the manner in which circus animals are trained -whether with sugar lumps or the whip; it is the training itself that disturbs us. We make a distinction between schooling and conditioning. If a child plays truant or shuts his ears or throws spitballs at his teacher, this at least is evidence of free will. There is something in all of us that warms to the

[p. 92:]

recalcitrant pupil. But to consider hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching (which also features in Brave New World), cradle conditioning, adolescent reflex bending, and the rest of the behaviourist armory, is to be appalled at the loss, even if rewarded with sugar lumps, of individual liberty. Skinner's title appalls in itself. Beyond truth, beyond beauty, beyond goodness, beyond God, beyond life. Big Brother does not go so far.

Arthur Koestler, a man who has endured Communist incarceration and torture, and hence is disposed to horror at the very thought of brain manipulation, nevertheless now seems to believe that something will have to be done to change humanity if humanity is to survive. The dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki started a new era - one in which we face the possibility of the death of the race. Because of his strange cerebral make-up, the wonders created by man can be the means of destroying man: the supreme product of reason is in the hands of unreason. In his book Janus Koestler points to the paranoid split between rational thinking and irrational, emotion-based beliefs" and suggests that something went terribly wrong in the biological evolution of Homo sapiens. He cites the theory of Dr. Paul D. MacLean, of the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to the effect that man was endowed by nature with three brains - a reptilian one, one inherited from the lower mammals, and a third, a late mammalian development, "which has made man peculiarly man." These three brains will not gear with each other: the term schizophysiological has to be applied to man's central nervous system: man is a diseased creature.

"Man can leave the earth and land on the moon," says Koestler, "but cannot cross from East to West Berlin. Prometheus reaches for the stars with an insane grin on his face and a totem-symbol in his hand." It is not just a matter of inability on the part of the neocortex to control the old animal brain that makes man as he is. It is also the fact that he has a remarkably

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long period of postnatal helplessness, which makes him disposed to submit to whatever is done to him, and this leads to the blind submissiveness to authority which welcomes dictators and war- lords. Man does not go to war to satisfy his individual aggressive urges: he goes out of blind devotion to what is represented to him as a cause. Again, language - that time-spanning creation that may be the highest achievement of the higher cerebral centres - abets the irrational, divisive element which expresses itself through war. Language, out of which high art is made, is also, "in view of its explosive emotive potentials, a constant threat to survival."

Koestler rejects the "reductionist" approach to man, which turns him into the pliable matter of Pavlov or Skinner. But he favours the use of drugs:

Medicine has found remedies for certain types of schizophrenic and manic-depressive psychoses; it is no longer utopian to believe that it will discover a combination of benevolent enzymes which provide the neocortex with a veto against the follies of the archaic brain, correct evolution's glaring mistake, reconcile emotion with reason, and catalyse the breakthrough from maniac to man.

Whatever the approach, whatever the therapy, this view of man as a diseased creature is sincerely held, and the need for some- body to do something about him is represented, by Skinner and Koestler alike, as extremely urgent. Man is living on borrowed time; cure, for the night is coming. Strange that the expert beings who are to administer the cure are themselves men. Can we really trust the diagnostics and remedies of these demented creatures? But the assumption is that, though all men are ill, some are less ill than others. Call, for convenience, the less ill ones well, and we have two kinds of being -we and they or, in Prole Oldspeak, us and them. They are ill, we must cure them.

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It was the sense of this division between well us and sick them that led me to write, in 1960, a short novel called A Clockwork Orange. It is not, in my view, a very good novel - too didactic, too linguistically exhibitionist - but it sincerely presented my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others not. A denial of the universal inheritance of original sin is characteristic of Pelagian societies like that of Britain, and it was in Britain, about ig6o, that respectable people began to murmur about the growth of juvenile delinquency and suggest, having read certain sensational articles in certain newspapers, that the young criminals who abounded - or such exuberant groups as the Mods and Rockers, more playfully aggressive than truly criminal - were a somehow inhuman breed and required inhuman treatment. Prison was for mature criminals, and juvenile detention centres did little good. There were irresponsible people who spoke of aversion therapy, the burning out of the criminal impulse at source. If young delinquents could be, with the aid of electric shocks, drugs, or pure Pavlovian conditioning, rendered incapable of performing antisocial acts, then our streets would once more be safe at night. Society, as ever, was put first. The delinquents were, of course, not quite human beings: they were minors, and they had no vote; they were very much them as opposed to us, who represented society.

Sexual aggression had already been drastically burnt out of certain rapists, who first had to fulfill the condition of free choice, which meant presumably signing a vague paper. Before the days of so-called Gay Liberation, certain homosexuals had voluntarily submitted to a mixture of negative and positive conditioning, so that a cinema screen showed naked boys and girls alternately and at the same time electric shocks were administered or else a soothing sensation of genital massage was contrived, according to the picture shown. I imagined an experimental institution in which a generic young delinquent, guilty of every crime from rape to murder, was given aversion

[p. 95:]

therapy and rendered incapable of contemplating, let alone perpetrating, an antisocial act without a sensation of profound nausea.

The book was called A Clockwork Orange for various reasons. I had always loved the Cockney phrase "queer as a clockwork orange," that being the queerest thing imaginable, and I had saved up the expression for years, hoping some day to use it as a title. When I began to write the book, I saw that this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness. But I had also served in Malaya, where the word for a human being is orang. The name of the antihero is Alex, short for Alexander, which means "defender of men." Alex has other connotations - a lex: a law (unto himself); a lex (is): a vocabulary (of his own); a (Greek) lex: without a law. Novelists tend to give close attention to the names they attach to their characters. Alex is a rich and noble name, and I intended its possessor to be sympathetic, pitiable, and insidiously identifiable with us, as opposed to them. But, in a manner, I digress.

Alex is not only deprived of the capacity to choose to commit evil. A lover of music, he has responded to the music, used as a heightener of emotion, which has accompanied the violent films he has been made to see. A chemical substance injected into his blood induces nausea while he is watching the films, but the nausea is also associated with the music. It was not the intention of his State manipulators to induce this bonus or malus: it is purely an accident that, from now on, he will automatically react to Mozart or Beethoven as he will to rape or murder. The State has succeeded in its primary aim: to deny Alex free moral choice, which, to the State, means choice of evil. But it has added an unforeseen punishment: the gates of heaven are closed to the boy, since music is a figure of celestial bliss. The State has committed a double sin: it has destroyed a human being, since

[p. 96:]

humanity is defined by freedom of moral choice; it has also destroyed an angel.

The novel has not been well understood. Readers, and viewers of the film made from the book, have assumed that I, a most unviolent man, am in love with violence. I am not, but I am committed to freedom of choice, which means that if I cannot choose to do evil neither can I choose to do good. It is better to have our streets infested with murderous young hoodlums than to deny individual freedom of choice. This a hard thing to say, but the saying of it was imposed on me by the moral tradition which, as a member of Western civilization, I inherit. Whatever the conditions needful for the sustention of society, the basic human endowment must not be denied. The evil, or merely wrong, products of free will may be punished or held off with deterrents, but the faculty itself may not be removed. The unintended destruction of Alex's capacity for enjoying music symbolizes the State's imperfect understanding (or volitional ignorance) of the whole nature of man, and of the consequences of its own decisions. We may not be able to trust man - meaning ourselves - very far, but we must trust the State far less.

It is disturbing to note that it is in the democracies, founded on the premise of the inviolability of free will, that the principle of the manipulation of the mind may come to be generally accepted. It is consistent with the principles of Ingsoc that the individual mind should be free, meaning free to be tormented. There seem to be no drugs in use in Airstrip One, except temporarily mind-dulling cheap and nasty gin. A strong centralized State, with powerful techniques of terrorization, can keep the streets free from muggers and killers. (Queen Elizabeth I's England hanged rioting apprentices on the site of the riot.) Our own democratic societies are growing weak. There is a great readiness to be affected, in the direction of the loss of authority, by pressure groups of all kinds, including street gangs as much as aggressive students. The lack of a philosophy at the centre

[p. 97:]

(which neither Ingsoc nor Communism lacks) is matched by indecisiveness in dealing with crime. This is human; we leave draconian deterrents and punishments to the totalitarian States. But the eventual democratic response to crime may well be what could be represented as the most human, or humane, or compassionate approach of all: to regard man's mad division, which renders him both gloriously creative and bestially destructive, as a genuine disease, to treat his schizophrenia with drugs or shocks or Skinnerian conditioning. Juvenile delinquents destroy the State's peace; mature delinquents threaten to destroy the human race. The principle is the same for both: burn out the disease.

We must, say both Koestler and Skinner, accept the necessity of change. A new race, Homo sapientior, must be created. But, I say again, how far can we trust the therapists, who are as imperfect as ourselves? Whose blueprint of the new man must we follow? We want to be as we are, whatever the consequences. I recognize that the desire to cherish man's unregenerate nature, to deny the possibility of progress and reject the engines of enforced improvement, is very reactionary, but, in the absence of a new philosophy of man, I must cling to whatever I already have. What I have in general is a view of man which I may call Hebreo-Helleno-Christian-humanist. It is the view which the Savage in Brave New World, who has been reared in the wilds on a volume of William Shakespeare, brings to the stable utopia of AF 632: "I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin." The World Controller, Mustapha Mond, sums it up for him: "In fact, you're claiming the right to be unhappy." Or the right, perhaps, not to find life dull. Perhaps the kind of humanity that can produce Hamlet, Don Giovanni, the Choral Symphony, the Theory of Relativity, Gaudi, Schoenberg and Picasso must, as a necessary corollary, also be able to scare hell out of itself with nuclear weapons.

[p. 98:]

What I have in particular is a kind of residual Christianity that oscillates between Augustine and Pelagius. Whoever or whatever Jesus Christ was, people marvelled at him because he "taught with authority." There have been very few authoritative teachers in the world, though there have been plenty of authoritarian demagogues. It is possible, just possible, that by attempting the techniques of self-control that Christ taught something can be done about our schizophrenia - the recognition of which goes back to the Book of Genesis. I believe that the ethics of the Gospels can be given a secular application. I am sure too that this has never seriously been tried.

The basis of the teaching is as realistic as Professor Skinner's, though the terms are rather emotive. Sin is the name given to what the behaviourists would like to cut, burn, or drug out. There is a parallel between the cohesion of the universe and the unity of man. This makes a kind of sense out of the doctrine of the Incarnation. In order that the unity of man may be more than a mere aspiration, love, charity, tolerance have to be deliberately practised. The technique of loving others has to be learned, like any other technique. The practice of love is, we may say, ludic: it has to be approached like a game. It is necessary first to learn to love oneself, which is difficult: love of others will follow more easily then, however. If I learn to love my right hand, as a marvel of texture, structure and psychoneural coordination, I have a better chance of loving the right hand of the Gestapo interrogator. It is difficult to love one's enemies, but the difficulty is part of the interest of the game.

The serious practitioners of the game, or ludus amoris, will find it useful to form themselves into small groups, or "churches," and meet at set intervals for mutual encouragement and inspiration. They may find it valuable to invoke the spirit of the founder of the game. Indeed, they may gain strength from conjuring his, in a sense, real presence in the form of a chunk of bread and a bottle of wine. If they believe in the divine

[p. 99:]

provenance of the founder, they will be able to strengthen their sense of the need to promote human love to the end of human unity, since this is a figure of the unity of the divinely created cosmos. Men and women must practise the technique of love in the real world and not seal themselves off into communes or convents. The existence of the State is acknowledged, but it is accepted that it has little to do with the real purpose of living. Caesar has his own affairs, which he considers serious but are really frivolous. The practice of love has nothing to do with politics. Laughter is permitted, indeed encouraged. Man was put together by God, though it took him a long time. What God has joined together, even though it be an unholy trinity of a human brain, let no man put asunder. Pray for Dr. Skinner. 'May Pavlov rest in peace. Amen.

ΣΧΟΛΙΑΣΜΟΣ

After examining the "victory of the state over Winston Smith", Burgess observes that "Bakunin believed that men were already good; Pavlov believed that man could be made good [and that the brain was] a machine dedicated to the improvement of its owner's functioning as a human organism. This was the ultimate Pelagianism."

He then discusses Skinner's behaviouralism, appalled at the loss of individual liberty, and Arthur Koestler's pessimistic view of humanity, concluding that both see "man as a diseased creature", but that they are presupposing their own ability to diagnose this. In effect, "though all men are ill, some are less ill than others..."

"It was the sense of this division between well us and sick them that led me to write, in 1960, a short novel called A Clockwork Orange. It is not, in my view, a very good novel... but it sincerely presented my abhorrence of the view that some people were criminal and others not. A denial of the universal inheritance of sin is characteristic of Pelagian societies like that of Britain, and it was in Britain, about 1960, that respectable people began to murmur about the growth of juvenile delinquency and suggest [that the young criminals] were a somehow inhuman breed and required inhuman treatment... There were irresponsible people who spoke of aversion therapy... Society, as ever, was put first. The delinquents were, of course, not quite human beings: they were minors, and they had no vote; they were very much them as opposed to us, who represented society."

Burgess notes that certain rapists and homosexuals had been voluntarily treated through various forms of aversion therapy (the latter group including, I think, Alan Turing), and imagined a generic delinquent undergoing similar treatment "and rendered incapable of contemplating, let alone perpetrating, an anti-social act without a sensation of profound nausea.

"The book was called A Clockwork Orange for various reasons. I had always loved the Cockney phrase 'queer as a clockwork orange', that being the queerest thing imaginable, and I had saved up the expression for years, hoping some day to use it as a title. When I began to write the book, I saw that this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness. But I had also served in Malaya, where the word for a human being is orang. The name of the antihero is Alex, short for Alexander, which means 'defender of men'. Alex has other connotations - a lex: a law (unto himself); a lex(is): a vocabulary (of his own); a (Greek) lex: without a law. Novelists tend to give close attention to the names they attach to their characters. Alex is a rich and noble name, and I intended its possessor to be sympathetic, pitiable, and insidiously identifiable with us, as opposed to them. But, in a manner, I digress.

"Alex is not only deprived of the capacity to choose to commit evil. A lover of music, he has responded to the music, used as a heightener of emotion, which has accompanied the violent films he has been made to see. A chemical substance injected into his blood induces nausea while he is watching the films, but the nausea is also associated with the music. It was not the intention of his State manipulators to induce this bonus or malus: it is purely an accident that, from now own, he will automatically react to Mozart or Beethoven as he will to rape or murder. The State has succeeded in its primary aim: to deny Alex free moral choice, which, to the State, means choice of evil. But it has added an unforseen punishment: the gates of heaven are closed to the boy, since music is a figure of celestial bliss. The State has committed a double sin: it has destroyed a human being, since humanity is defined by freedom of moral choice; it has also destroyed an angel.

"The novel has not been well understood. Readers, and viewers of the film made from the book, have assumed that I, a most unviolent man, am in love with violence. I am not, but I am committed to freedom of choice, which means that if I cannot choose to do evil nor can I choose to do good. It is better to have our streets infested with murderous young hoodlums that to deny individual freedom of choice. This is a hard thing to say, but the saying of it was imposed on me by the moral tradition which, as a member of western civilization, I inherit. Whatever the conditions needful for the sustention of society, the basic human endowment must not be denied. The evil, or merely wrong, products of free will may be punished or held off with deterrents, but the faculty itself may not be removed. The unintended destruction of Alex's capacity for enjoying music sumbolizes the State's imperfect understanding (or volitional ignorance) of the whole nature of man, and of the consequences of its own decisions. We may not be able to trust man - meaning ourselves - very far, but we must trust the State far less.

"It is disturbing to note that it is in the democracies, founded on the premise of the inviolabilityh of free will, that the principles of the manipulation of the mind may come to be generally accepted... the eventual democratic response to crime may well be what could be represented as the most human, or humane, or compassionate approach of all: to regard man's mad division, which renders him both gloriously creative and bestially destructive, as a genuine disease, to treat his schizophrenia with drugs or shocks or Skinnerian conditioning. Juvenile delinquents destroy the State's peace; mature delinquents threaten to destroy the human race. The principle is the same for both: burn out the disease.

"... What I have in general is a view of man which I may call Hebreo-Helleno-Christian-humanist. It is the view [of] the Savage is Brave New World... 'I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.' The World Controller, Mustapha Mond, sums it up for him: 'In fact, you're claiming the right to be unhappy.' Or the right, perhaps, not to find life dull. Perhaps the kind of humanity that can produce Hamlet, Don Giovanni, the Choral Symphony, the Theory of Relativity, Gaudi, Schoenberg and Picasso must, as a necessary corollary, also be able to scare hell out of itself with nuclear weapons.

"What I have in particular is a kind of residual Christianity that oscillates between Augustine and Pelagius. Whoever or whatever Jesus Christ was, people marvelled at him because he 'taught with authority'. There have been very few authoritative teachers in the world, though there have been plenty of authoritarian demagogues. It is possible, just possible, that by attempting the techniques of self-control that Christ taught something can be done about our schizophrenia - the recognition of which goes back to the Book of Genesis. I believe that the ethics of the Gospels can be given a secular application. I am sure too that this has never seriously been tried."

Burgess then goes on to consider the implications and practicality of this, closing the chapter with "Man was put together by God, though it took him a long time. What God has joined together, even though it be an unholy trinity of a human brain, let no man put asunder. Pray for Dr Skinner. May Pavlov rest in peace. Amen."

''The book was called A Clockwork Orange for various reasons. I had always loved the Cockney phrase 'queer as a clockwork orange', that being the queerest thing imaginable, and I had saved up the expression for years, hoping some day to use it as a title. When I began to write the book, I saw that this title would be appropriate for a story about the application of Pavlovian, or mechanical, laws to an organism which, like a fruit, was capable of colour and sweetness. But I had also served in Malaya, where the word for a human being is orang''.
(From 1985, Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, London, 1978)

ΣΥΝΕΝΤΕΥΞΗ ANTHONY BURGESS ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ''ΚΟΥΡΔΙΣΤΟ ΠΟΡΤΟΚΑΛΙ''


Interviewer: What literary significance does this book have?

A.B.: 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 a private happening in your life, an element of biography involved?

A.B.: 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 cathartise 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 it make a lot of money for you?

A.B.: 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 within 1959 and ’60 anyhow?

A.B.: 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: But putting money aside what has signified for you with the appearance of the film?

A.B.: 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: Mr. Burgess what is your opinion of our present civilization and our society, our present society?

A.B.: 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.

Interviewer: Well then, where and how is society to be criticised since human nature, according to you, is the same, doesn’t change?

A.B.: Well, in certain superficial senses we can criticise human society, we can say that the profit motive is too important, or the state is too powerful and things of that kind, but when we criticise human society all we’re doing is criticising humanity.

We’re just merely saying that man is like this, man is acquisitive and this is probably wrong, man is aggressive and this is probably wrong and so forth.

But where we must be careful, I think, is in this area where the word progress appears. I’m not quite sure what the term progress means, I think progress is possible in the material sense, I think it’s a good thing for people to have more material comforts, nobody would deny that; I don’t ask for many for myself but I don’t begrudge Liz Taylor and Richard Burton having yachts and Cadillacs and so forth.

This is a good thing, this is part of human nature, the pampering of the flesh, the giving to the senses of what will awaken the senses and gratify the senses.

But in the wider, moral sense, progress is not possible, we cannot become better people unless we become different human beings, different animals.

I do accept the fundamental Christian tenet that man is born in original sin: we are more likely than not to choose the bad rather than the good, and this, which is called the Augustinian point of view, I too believe, after Saint Augustine who first propounded it, seems to be in thorough accordance with the facts if history.

Now, there is a contrary belief which strangely enough, or not so strangely, came from England, or came from Britain; there was a monk called Pelagius who said that man is good, that man is capable of becoming better, that man can build the just society and create his own heaven upon earth.

This seems to me to be false, it is not borne out by the facts of history, but this false theory, this heresy, underlies Socialism, underlies Communism, underlies all political theories which believe that man can fulfil himself through the state.

But when we see the state becoming powerful, trying to fulfil man, we see that the state becomes a great instrument of tyranny, as in Russia, as in Nazi Germany.

What we have to do is live our lives, sort out our own morality for ourselves, accept that we’re imperfect and just do the best we can.

This has always been the position of the just man throughout history and it must be the position in the future: we will not get any better but we must try.

Interviewer: You do believe in God then , Mr. Burgess?

A.B.: I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. It seems to me that God is a very useful fiction, when Voltaire said " If God does not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. " I think he was propounding a very profound truth.

We cannot get through the day without using, at least as a hypothesis, the notion of God, the notion of Creator, the notion of Sustainer.

But I find it more and more difficult to accept the God of the churches, whether it happens to be the Catholic church or Islam, which is of course at the moment, a very, very, potent religious body because it’s tied up with oil.

I think that the hypothesis of God is a good one, but in the sense that God has any relationship to me, the concept has no real meaning.

I just merely accept God as a kind of intellectual hypothesis which I find useful, no more. I’m not a practising Christian, I don’t go to church, I don’t believe there’s a heaven; I believe that after this life we’re finished with, but during this life the hypothesis of God is a very useful one.

Interviewer: So you are inclined to think that this world is convincing evidence that it exists somewhere a co-even and total logic?

A.B.: No. I think that it is possible for man, as it were, to create an alternative universe, I think it’s the job of the artist, the job of the scientist, the job of the thinker to build up, as it were, an image of some possible ultimate reality. I think that the best thing men can do is create a structure like, say, Beethoven’s ninth symphony, or a structure like the philosophy of Descartes or Spinoza, whether these systems, the musical system of the ninth symphony, the philosophical system of Spinoza or Descartes is an image of some ultimate reality, we don’t know.

I would rather hope that it would be so, but it doesn’t matter if not.

This is our sole job, it’s to impose on the chaos of life some structure, some order, and the order is best found, I think, in art and philosophy.

Interviewer: Would you agree with that sentence pronounced by Jacques Monod, " Life is a fact of chance and necessity and man is alone in an indifferent universe. "

A.B.: Well, this is absurd, this point of view, … yes, I accept that. I accept that the universe is a great mass of whirling matter which is totally indifferent to man and that hence man is somewhat absurd in his confrontation with this huge nescient chaos.

But man’s glory is that he can create order, man’s glory is that he can create structures which have a more formal significance, more pattern, than the swirling mass of life he sees around him and man must get on with his job.

Political man is totally unimportant, sexual man, consuming man, these are not important, but creative man is the only thing which is important, that is why we’re here, in a sense, to create.

Interviewer: You live in Rome now, in exile, as it were. Have you accustomed yourself to exile?

Do you consider yourself an exiled writer?

A.B.: I think I am an expatriate writer rather than an exiled writer. When a writer has to leave his country and go to some other country, then he is a genuine exile. I decided to expatriate myself from England, I think chiefly because I felt that no writer could do his best work in England anymore, I think the days in which a writer could create great art no longer exist in England.

It is partly because of the lack of conflict, partly because of the domination of the welfare state and partly because English society itself is no longer dynamic. I find that American society, for instance, is far more dynamic, there are things happening there, there are changes being made; violence is involved, naturally, but things are moving and it’s only out of these elements of violence and sex that novels and poems can be made.

You can’t make a poem, you can’t make a novel, out of the kind of life that’s lived in middle class London anymore.

One has to get out, but I do find that living in Italy I am up against a very severe problem, and it is the problem of not being surrounded by my own language.

I resist Italian, I resist all foreign languages as I get older because I want to know more and more about my own; my job is to exploit the resources of English and I resist Italian. I feel that I am surrounded by foreigners, although of course, I am the foreigner, and this does bring about a very depressing sense of isolation at times.

Not so bad for the musician. One of the reasons I am writing music at the moment is because I recognise it as a kind of international language: the way into foreignness, it's a kind of alternative Italian, if you like.

Interviewer: Have you been away long?

A.B.: From England? I left England in 1968, so I suppose it is long enough. I have no desire to go back, when I do go back I find a country rather hard to understand; I don’t understand the names that are used in conversation, I don’t understand the main issues that are discussed.

The England that means anything to me at all is the England of the past. I feel that the England of Shakespeare, the England of Chaucer, have a reality for me which the England of Harold Wilson or Edward Heath, or both together, doesn’t possess.

Interviewer: You have written so many novels, several critical books, essays, historical books, this is quite a lot. Do you work hard or do you work in a great hurry?

A.B.: I don’t work hard, I work as anybody else works, I do my job. I get up in the morning, have my breakfast and do my job but, and I say this to all writers, every writer must try and write at least one thousand words every day; no more, no less.

Interviewer: How did you start writing?

A.B.: How did I start writing? I started writing because I began my career as a musician.

I tried to be a composer for many, many years, and I found the writing of music very difficult because the mere physical labour of setting down on paper, notes for the instruments of the orchestra is wearing in itself. And in England, at the end of the war, it was not easy to get music performed, certainly there was no money in it and I used to envy these people who sat down at a typewriter and merely produced a simple line.

So I tried to do the same thing myself, I wrote a novel, the novel was accepted, and I saw myself as a novelist doing this kind of work solely as a hobby; but when I was invalided out of the colonial, the British colonial, service, with no job, I found that the only job that I could do was that of being a novelist.

And I think that many novelists, certainly in England, become novelists because they can’t find any other work. That’s how I became a novelist, I just found myself with nothing else to do except write novels and I’ve carried on with that to the present day.

Interviewer: Mr. Burgess, excuse me if I ask you, do you have a certain vanity?

A.B.: Do I have a certain vanity? What, a physical vanity? I have no physical vanity. Intellectual vanity? No, I don’t think I am a vain person. Why, do I seem to be a vain person?

Interviewer: Er, we were wondering about your hair pulled down on your forehead.

A.B.: Yes, oh that’s because I’m going bald, if I comb my hair high then you’ll see a large bald patch. For some reason I resent baldness, I resent it strongly because I associate it with impotence, although I’m probably wrong. Yes, there is a kind of vanity, it’s probably a sexual vanity after all. We all have it.

Interviewer: Now, the last book which has appeared in France, La Folle Semence, it has been quite successful and it has been called a fable on the theme of population explosion. Is this a problem which preoccupies you in particular?

A.B.: Well, it’s a problem which did preoccupy me when I first conceived the book because I was living in the far east at the time, I’d seen India, I’d seen Bombay, I’d seen Calcutta.

I’d seen the ghastly results of over-population, and of course, I was living very close to Singapore, which is a little island crammed with humanity of all kinds, and naturally I saw this problem as one that was facing the east, but not yet facing the west.

In my little novel I present this theme of over-population as affecting my own country, England. I imagine a future in which the population is so great that people haven’t enough to eat and the state steps in and forces people to have fewer and fewer children.

But I do, rather boldly I think, suggest a solution: the solution doesn’t lie in contraception, in the states’ imposing a limitation on the family, the solution is a Malthusian one.

Now, Malthus was an English clergyman who lived in the eighteenth century and first propounded the idea that soon there would not be enough food in the world for people, and therefore we had to do something about it.

He said the only thing we could do about it is to delay marriage, is to practise chastity, nowadays, of course, we don’t believe in that, we believe that everybody has a right to copulate if they wish to; and they must guard against the inevitable biological results of copulation.

My view is as presented in this novel, so it’s not perhaps essentially a serious view, I wouldn’t go to the gallows on this view, is that we have to continue to accept certain natural checks.

Malthus said we have checks such as earthquakes, volcanoes, famines, these keep the population down.

But man has a cultural check and this cultural check is war. So, in my book I present wars which are waged, not for any ideological reason, not for territorial reasons, but because it’s a means of keeping the population down.

Interviewer: Then another cultural check would be cannibalism?

A.B.: Well, this seems natural enough to me. It is probably always wrong, evil indeed, to kill one’s neighbour for whatever cause.

But as far as I know there’s never been any prohibition as far as eating the body of your neighbour is concerned, I can’t see any ground at all for imagining that cannibalism is evil. What harm is one doing? One is merely breaking certain taboos and these taboos are naturally highly irrational. But it may very well be that one of our solutions to the coming problem of famine is cannibalism, we may be going to our supermarkets and buying cans of meat which are called Mensch, or something like that, and these will be acceptable because we do, in fact, accept all kinds of nameless meats, seasoned with sodium nitrate, that we find on the shelves of supermarkets.

This may well happen and we may well so change our cultural thinking, our moral thinking, that we will accept it

It seems to me a far more reasonable solution than abortion which is genuine murder, and I do base my hatred of abortion on a very simple theory and that is, that everybody has a right to be born, but nobody has a right to live.

This is the fundamental theme of the novel we’re talking about.

We all have a right to be born but as far as living, well, who can legislate? Have I a right to live to the age of seventy? If I have that right, who says so? Beethoven was dead at my age, fifty seven, Napoleon was dead at fifty two, so was Shakespeare, Chatterton was dead at seventeen, Keats was dead at twenty five. What right do I have to live longer than these people?

But I think I have a right to be born and I have a right to know what life is like and after that it is a matter of chance, a matter of war, a matter of murder, a matter of what you will; but we all must have this taste of life and for that reason everybody must be born who wants to be born.

Interviewer: According to a psychoanalytical point of view, cannibalism can be interpreted as an act of love.

A.B.: Well, there’s a curious ambiguity which exists in, I think, all languages. If I say I like men, I like women, I can also say, I like pork, I like beef, j’aime le porc, j’aime l’humanité etc.

There’s obviously a fundamental sense that the act of liking, that the act of loving, can be interpreted as a desire to possess ultimately, the desire to take the body of the loved thing or the loved person within one’s own system, to absorb it.

This of course is there in the Sacrament of the Eucharist in the Catholic church, although our present churchmen are trying to kill that old, perfectly natural, cannibalistic symbolism; Christ said " Eat me, drink me. " In other words, " Love me. "

And this is based on a fundamental need , I think, on the part of men, to absorb beings greater than himself, either spiritually and, Christ says, physically; this seems to be the finest theological justification for cannibalism one can ever find.

Interviewer: You are also interested in futurology apart from the population explosion, do you think that our technical progress will make life longer and that old people will take over?

A.B.: There seems to be no evidence, as far as I know, that people are living longer than they were, say, in the time of Shakespeare. Whenever one looks, say, at an anthology of Elizabethan poetry one finds that people die young and people die old, pretty much as today. People die at eighty, people die at eighty five, at ninety, people also die at twenty, people die at sixteen.

My own pragmatic experience teaches me that life isn’t becoming necessarily any longer, people are dying just the same.

But there is an undoubted fear on the part of the young that the world is in the hands of the old; I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong in that, there is no great vice in being aged any more than there is any great virtue in being young.

I think a lot depends on how wise the old are, and we have to do something about our educational system whereby we regard it as a continuous process, not merely something that happens in childhood or adolescence, but something that goes on all our lives so that our old are wise as well as old.

There’s no danger in what I believe is called a gerontocracy, there’s no danger in the old ruling, we’re going to get a lot of this in time to come, so long as the old are wise.

There’s no virtue in youth either because youth usually is not wise.

Interviewer: It has been said that man is going through an identity crisis, doesn’t know the reasons which make him live or think. What do you think of it?

A.B.: I don’t worry too much about identity, it’s far more important to live than to have an identity.

Let me try to explain what I mean: I’ve just written a novel, or rather, I have a short novel coming out this year, in which my hero, who is a professor in an American university, has a sudden heart attack and finds that part of his brain is blocked out, blacked out, and he has to give a lecture on an Elizabethan dramatist and the only thing he can do is to invent one on the spur of the moment.

He can’t remember any real ones, and by the time he has invented this one; he has invented his work, his character, his life, he finds he’s just as real as any of the students sitting in that room. He has identity, he has thorough identity, but what he doesn’t have is life.

It is far more important to live piecemeal, live through the senses, live through the brain, than to worry about what one is, to worry about one’s name or one’s character or one’s make-up, these things are not important and I think this phrase ‘identity crisis’ is one of the stupidest I’ve ever encountered.

We are, we fill up space, we fill up time, we’re hunks of meat perambulating the world, we think, we have sensations, and that’s all we should worry about.

I, myself, have been through so many identity crisis, in this sense I don’t even know what my name is; the name under which I’m appearing at the moment is not my real name. I’ve used various other names, I don’t really care what name I’m called, what name goes down on the registries.

I am a being, occupying this chair at this moment, and I have certain thoughts and certain sensations and that’s all that matters.

Identity is not in the least important.

Interviewer: Do you believe then, in the old reasons by Catechism, are still valid, based on, to serve God and to love God?

A.B.: In the sense that God means the ultimate vision, the vision of beauty, the vision of truth, which is the job of the philosopher or the artist to purvey, I think that may be said to be correct.

I don’t think we’re here solely to eat and drink and copulate, I think we’re here to create, and as we’re supposed to be made in God’s image, in that sense, the sense of creation, we’re most fulfilling our nature, the nature of a being somewhat like God.

More and more, as I get older, I find that these fundamental theological concepts have a certain truth in them, although it’s not necessarily the truth that the Pope or the Archbishop or the bishop or the Priest sees.

Trust the artist more than the churchmen, the artist will interpret theology far better than they.

Interviewer: This will be the future of morality,… which is not wholly sexual morality of course,… creativity?

A.B.: Well, yes, this is a problem. We’ve already talked a little about the future as far as the population explosion is concerned. As far as our diminishing food supplies are concerned we may have to create a new morality, a morality in which it is not only tolerable but even virtuous to eat one’s fellow men.

We’re always creating new moralities all the time.

But there are certain fundamental moral tenets that we can never disown and this of course, I think, is, to use the Schweitzerian phrase: respect for humanity, love for humanity, the sense that we are all one member of each other, and that possibly respect is a little more important than love.

There’s too little respect about at the present time, too little respect for people as unique beings, capable of creation, capable of the ideal vision; to kill a man, to kill a woman or to kill a child is to kill the vision that that child or woman or man possesses of the ultimate reality. This is a terrible thing to do. Lack of respect.

Interviewer: What are you working at?

A.B.: What am I working at here? I’m writing a symphony at the moment here, but a symphony to me is rather like a woman knitting, it keeps one part of my brain occupied while another part can concentrate on new literary ventures.

Well, at the moment I’ve completed a long, an epic poem I suppose you can call it, about Moses, The Lawgiver, and I’m writing a novel. I’ve started a novel about a kind of Pope John in which I present the situation that at the moment is being presented to us, whereby Pope John is a candidate for canonisation; he’s going to be made a saint.

In my novel it, in effect, states that the canonisation is thoroughly misplaced, that Pope John was possibly a bad man, even though he didn’t intend to be a bad man, because we owe to him the present disruption of one of the greatest intellectual and moral institutions that ever existed, the Catholic church.

I am working on a series for television about the life of Shakespeare, I’m working on a film about Beethoven’s relationship with his nephew. I am working on various things, there’s always plenty to do, there’s no writer’s block as far as I’m concerned, and there aren’t really enough hours in the day for the things that I have to do.

Interviewer: Which are the linguistic areas that you consider more fertile today?

A.B.: It’s very hard to say, I don’t know them all. I should imagine that possibly… very interesting things are going on in the Finnish language that are not translated into English.

But as far as we can tell, the English language is producing some very interesting things, I don’t say England, I don’t say America, I just say those areas in which the English language is used.

I might say West Africa I might say the West Indies, I might say South Africa, Australia and so on.

The English language has certain virtues which are not possessed, for instance, by the Italian language, which is the language that surrounds me at the moment, it is a highly flexible language, a language willing to change, a language willing to discard all its grammar and, this is very important, to amass as big a vocabulary as it possibly can.

I feel that the Russian language, for instance, has probably been ruined by the Soviet system, the delimitation of meaning, the unwillingness of the state to allow subtleties, ambiguities, which are resident in all languages, for a purely artistic end.

I don’t know what Solzhenitsyn is like as a writer, I’ve only read him in English and I gather the translations are pretty bad, but Solzhenitsyn has his limitations imposed by the fact that he’s a Russian; he loves Russia and not humanity, in that, he is a product of the Soviet system.

But in America where there is comparative freedom to write what one wishes, in England too, the possibilities are very large.

I don’t think they have yet been fulfilled, we haven’t at the moment got a great writer in English, we may have in the future, the lines of communication are open.

The English language is developing in a very interesting way and I feel sure that the possibilities in the field of literature for English are immense, if not infinite.

Interviewer: Do you have any message that you would like to deliver to mankind, to people?

A.B.: Well, as the Americans say, ‘If you want a message you must go to Western Union.’ It is not the job of the artist to propound messages, it is the job of the preacher, it is the job of the politician; it is merely the task of the literary creator, like the musical creator, to produce shapes, structures, which will be satisfying in themselves and which need not necessarily have any direct relationship to life as we live it at the moment.

I don’t think that man can do anything more at the moment than to look at himself and say ‘I haven’t changed much, I am what I was when I was kicked out of the Garden of Eden,’ to use that convenient myth, ‘I must cultivate those qualities in myself. I must not take politicians seriously, all politicians are probably the most evil men alive; they pervert language, they pervert thought, they pervert morality. Take no notice of the political unit, but rather in the smallest possible community, the community of one’s family, the community of one’s friends, and try and develop those latencies which lie within us as creative beings.’

I can say no more than that, it’s not really a message.

Interviewer: Un bellissimo messaggio.