The British writer Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), which, in turn, is famous primarily because of Stanley Kubrick's notorious film adaptation (1971). The popularity of the book and the film it inspired annoyed Burgess—he felt that A Clockwork Orange was not at all his best work. Asked about it in an interview, he dismissed the novel as "gimmicky" and "didactic." But, whatever the author's objections, something in this little black comedy about state control resonated with the public; if not exactly a part of literary canon, A Clockwork Orange is certainly a cult classic.
Burgess was born and raised a Catholic in Manchester, England. While he rebelled against the church as an adolescent and never quite returned to the fold, his religious upbringing profoundly influenced the novels he would later write in their treatment of the problems of free will and original sin. While he never went back to going to mass, he continued to think about ethics in terms derived largely from Catholicism.
Burgess began writing as a hobby when he was stationed in Malaya (then a British colony, now part of Malaysia) as an education officer for the British Colonial Service in the 1950s. The first novels he published were all about life in Malaya and the conflict playing out between eastern and western values. While the issues Burgess treated are serious ones, he presented them with a light touch and a great deal of humor. He still saw himself as a teacher rather than a professional novelist until he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1960. Burgess didn't want the cancer surgically removed, lest "they hit my talent instead of my tumor," but then the doctors decided that an operation would be impossible anyway. The doctors gave him a year to live, and Burgess began to write at a furious pace, hoping that if he wrote enough, the royalties could support his wife after his death. He wrote five novels (among them The Wanting Seed, which, like A Clockwork Orange, takes place in a very dismal future of Burgess's invention) and, from that point on, thought of himself as a writer first and foremost. And the doctors, it turned out, were mistaken: Burgess did not have cancer.
In 1961, Burgess visited Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in what was then the Soviet Union. Before going, Burgess brushed up on the Russian he had picked up during his service in World War II—his Russian vocabulary would later be put to use in his invention of "nadsat talk," the slang used by the teenage hooligans of A Clockwork Orange. The glimpse he got of Soviet life, heavily regulated in every aspect by the repressive Communist government, was a major influence on the totalitarian world of his most famous novel. Burgess was disgusted by the state intervention in individual life he saw in the USSR—as he has said, "My political views are mainly negative: I lean towards anarchy: I hate the State. I loathe and abominate that costly, crass, intolerant, inefficient, eventually tyrannical machine which seeks more and more to supplant the individual." Direct inspiration for Alex and his posse came in the form of a group of young Russian hoodlums, dressed like teddy boys (a tough British teenage subculture that arose in the 1950s), hammering away at the door of a restaurant in Leningrad where Burgess was eating his dinner. He was afraid at first they were after him, the westerner, but, when he wanted to leave the place, the toughs stepped politely aside to let him pass and then continued their hammering at the door.
To contextualize the political views expressed in A Clockwork Orange, we must keep in mind that Communism in the early 1960s was a very serious threat to the democracies of the west. Burgess and others saw Communism as an intrinsically wrong- headed system—not only were existing Communist governments, as epitomized by the Soviet Union, brutish and repressive, but the Communist project seemed to shift moral responsibility from individuals to the state. As Burgess saw it, under a socialist regime, the state made choices for the people, and, however "good" those choices were, however much tending toward peace and efficiency and justice, the state was committing the essential sin of robbing its citizens of their free will. Besides Communism, Burgess saw other developments as subtler threats to individual freedom. After World War II, Britain developed into a welfare state, in which the government provides its citizens with necessities, such as medical care, child support, and housing, as well as extensive aid to the poor; this development had near crested at the time Burgess was writing. Burgess raised the same moral objections to this as he had to Communism: Again, the government forces its people to consider the good of society over their own freedom and individuality.
Nor was Burgess impressed by the United States' claim to represent freedom and to be the true opposite of soul-crushing Communism; as he saw it, America's mass popular culture was also a force that tended to brainwash people and press them into passive sameness. He saw in Anglo-American youth culture—the booming scene of mods, rockers, teddy boys, and all the rest of the teenage subcultures— more of the same mindless conformity. While these kids might have thought they were rebelling, they dressed alike and spoke alike, taking on the identity of their chosen tribe instead of developing their own. These are among the threats to individual freedom that Burgess observed, exaggerated, and put into the fictional world of the novel. As he said in an interview, "When I wrote A Clockwork Orange, which was back in 1959, 1960, 1961...I was really writing about the present, but I was mythicizing it a little...There's no need, really, to write about the future. You just look at the present and extend into a minimal world of fantasy the tendencies of the present and you get a so-called futuristic novel."
The inspiration for Ludovico's Technique, which the scientists use to brainwash young Alex, comes from behavioral psychology, as popularized in the mid-twentieth century by B. F. Skinner. Skinner, a psychologist, advocated the restriction of individual freedoms to achieve an ideal planned society. He studied how people could be made to modify their behavior by systematized rewards and punishments, how people could come to associate the behavior desired with the pleasure of the reward they received for it and, as we see in Alex's case, how people could be made to associate unwanted behavior with the pain of punishment. Behaviorism won many adherents through the '40s, '50s, and '60s; Skinner's methods of conditioning were used successfully on retarded children and juvenile delinquents. Burgess found these ideas revolting and their spread threatening; in an interview, he called one of Skinner's works, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, "one of the most dangerous books ever written."
Out of his disgust with these developments, all of which seemed to lead toward an eventually radical curtailment of human freedom and choice, Burgess brewed the story of Alex. When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, reviews were mixed; generally, nobody paid much attention. Different versions were published in America and in Britain; in America, the last chapter, in which Alex begins to grow up, was taken out because the publishers decided that it was too sentimental. Burgess strenuously opposed this chopped-off version, but, having only a small reputation stateside, he could not convince his publisher to release the complete version of the novel. Thus, the novel that American readers were given was a more pessimistic, bitter parable than the British version. The book became a cult hit among American college students, and then, almost a decade later, Kubrick filmed his adaptation, based on the American version. This movie was both a huge scandal because of its violence and a major success, and it was the movie that made the book on which it was based famous.
Burgess continued writing novels, none of which attained the popular success of A Clockwork Orange, and composing—like his creation Alex, Burgess loved classical music—until his death in 1993.
