Fifty years after it was published, English novelist Anthony Burgess’s disturbing A Clockwork Orange has lost little of its power.
At least, that impression will soon be tested anew. Next month W.W. Norton releases a 50th-anniversary edition, A Clockwork Orange: The Restored Text.
When the book first appeared in Britain in 1962, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer rubbished it as “viscous verbiage which is the swag-bellied offspring of decay.” In his introduction to the revised edition, Andrew Biswell, a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University and the director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, quotes that review, which probably helped to restrict sales to fewer than 4,000 copies by the mid-1960s.
Biswell calls his edition “restored” because he compared three varying original versions, along with a 1961 Burgess typescript. Given Burgess’s ambiguity about what he wanted to include, Biswell leans towards incorporating all he can of the distinctive slang of his protagonists, in preference to standard-English equivalents that appeared in the early editions. Among the editor’s rationales is that Burgess was a sloppy typist and proofreader.
Biswell, the author of the semi-official biography The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, (Picador, 2005), augments his edition with a facsimile of six pages from the original typescript and endnotes. He also sought to resolve the issue of whether or not to include an “epilogue” that Heinemann printed as a 21st chapter in the British edition. It was eager to have a sort of “happy ending,” But Norton left the chapter out of its 1963 first American edition. Biswell shows that Burgess was ambivalent about which option was best, so includes it to allow readers to decide for themselves.
Also among Biswell’s appendices is a chapter from a book that Burgess started on the ethics of the kind of brainwashing and social control that his chief protagonist, a 15-year-old thug, undergoes in response to his violent criminality. Burgess wrote the chapter in 1973 in response to a book request from Norton. The chapter – all Burgess found time for – was rediscovered earlier this year in the archives of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
Norton had been eager to capitalize on the international fame that came to Burgess with the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1972 film, A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick’s version was relatively faithful to the book, and Burgess initially liked it. But he ended up loathing what he viewed as, oddly, “a radical reworking of my own novel.” The film was even more shockingly immediate than the book: Its violence seems more grotesque, and its humor even more perverse, as the delinquent protagonists mete out their senseless punishment on the defenseless, as on their own gangland kind.
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange called for disgust, and provoked it, as the chilling, dystopian tale of a callous recidivist whose rampages lead to his treatment with brainwashing methods. To vivify the actions and thinking of Alex and his mates, Burgess improvised a distinctive lingo from slang of the day and from other languages, particularly Russian. High on mescaline, which they call “synthemesc,” and amphetamines (“knives”), Alex and his “malchicks” smash in skulls, rape not only women but also 10-year-old girls, and kill an old woman as they rob her home. They do all this with a relish for “lashings of ultraviolence,” imposed with boot and truncheon “tolchocks.”
Burgess’s intention, says Biswell, was not to mimic the slang of the Teddy Boys of 1950s England, but to concoct his own, timeless, relatively placeless “Nadsat” argot, named for the Russian suffix for “teen.” On the revised edition’s cover, an illustration from the original English edition appears: a fearsome, youthful face captioned with the words: “Yarbies, bolshy great yarblockos to thee and thine.”
The slang enhances the fascination that countless readers have found in Alex after the book gradually garnered cult status, aided by plugs from the likes of William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol. Though a thoroughly nasty piece of work, he is oddly “cultured” in a canny-projects-dweller way. He delights in classical music, Beethoven’s above all, although it does fuel his violence as much as less harmful passions. As even he notes, his attachment to the classics belies the liberal notion that the arts surely calm any savagery in the soul.
That part of his characterization of his “hero” helped Burgess to present some of the core themes of his book—chief among them, suggests Biswell, is the danger of pendulum swings from the bullying far right to the ludicrously liberal. Burgess wrote in the later essay “A Clockwork Orange Resucked” that he intended his title “to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism oozing with juice and sweetness.” His protagonist only marginally possesses that, and it is no wonder that prison officials opt to treat him with varieties of correction that he would himself call pure “horrorshow.”
For 30 years before writing his dystopian portrait of “liberalism gone mad,” as he described his novel, Burgess had read many others, and had a particular liking for Aldous Huxley, who was anti-utopian rather than dystopian. That form suited his “Augustinian Catholic” outlook, “drilled into him by the Manchester Xaverian Brothers” of his schooling, Biswell writes. Burgess hated hippies—“bearded louts”—and pop music, and his mix of disaffections soon influenced many younger British novelists, sardonic moralists like himself including Martin Amis and Will Self.
From Huxley, writes Biswell, Burgess learned about and deplored “the emerging technologies of behaviour modification, brainwashing and chemical persuasion.” He suggests that a good summation of Burgess’s own view of human nature is one uttered by a prison chaplain in A Clockwork Orange: “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”