Chapter 25 Addendum That's Not My Clockwork Orange

I tapped out a title—"A Clockwork Orange"—and wondered what kind of story this title should go with.I've always loved this Cockney saying, feeling that it's not just a grotesque metaphor for queer behavior (not necessarily sexual), but perhaps has a deeper meaning.A story began to surge. Lynne and I have identified a new British phenomenon - the violence of teenage gangs. During the vacations in 1957 and 1958, we all saw bad boys in coffee bars.The boys were dressed in fashionable neo-Edwardian clothes, heavy-soled boots, and strange haircuts.They look so elegant and not violent, but the faint of heart are afraid of them.They were the embodiment of the "spirit of the age," as if to bluntly express their dismay at the post-war decline of world power Britain, and to conjure up the era of Edwardian expansion, at least through their attire.They were originally called "Brother Edward".Now in the 1960s, a group of more casually dressed hooligans took their place.They were called "Modern Guys" and "Rocker Guys" because the first ones wore modern clothes for whatever they did, and the others rode motorcycles with rockers and stays. The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, is right to say that leather jackets are the signature garment of rockers, but wrong to think that they got their name from their love of rock music.Lynne and I were on our way to Hastings and watched the Hyundais and Rockers beat each other to the death.

These young men seem to simply love attacking itself.They are the embodiment of Manichaeism's cosmic principles, opposing for the sake of opposites, yin and yang, X and Y repel each other.I have a hunch that the blind energies of these new generations with pockets full of money will seriously disrupt the social order.Of course, they are not unprecedented.Elizabethan apprentices also rioted, but they were dealt with very simply - sometimes simply by hanging.At first I thought about writing this new book as historical fiction, about an apprentice riot in the 1590s, when violent teenagers beat up a woman selling eggs and pestered them for overpriced eggs, as if Will Shakespeare slipped in a blood-smeared and The egg yolk on the road broke through the lips.In the end, however, I decided to make a prophecy and set it in the not-too-distant future—say, 1970—when teenage aggression has reached such a level that governments are trying to use Pavlovian negative reinforcement Cut the weeds and root them out.I feel that this novel must have a philosophical or theological basis—the free will of teenagers can choose between good and evil, although most of them choose evil; through the adjustment of scientific means, this kind of free will is artificially eliminated; Is deeds a theologically greater evil than free choice to do evil?

The problem with writing this novel is purely stylistic.The storyteller had to be a rogue teenager in a future age, and it had to be told in their own kind of English.This English should be a mixture of their gang slang and his own idioms.It would be wrong to write this book in the slang of the early 1960s: like all slang, it will not last, and by the time the manuscript goes to type it may already be smelling of lavender.The question seemed tricky at the time.A kind of 1970s slang had to be coined, but I dare not invent it.The 1960s slang in that half-finished draft was clearly not working, and I locked it in a drawer to write something else.

Lynne and I decided it was time for a vacation.A Russian steamer sailed from Tilbury to Leningrad, stopped at Copenhagen and Stockholm, and returned.There will be a short stop at the Leningrad Hotel between sailing breaks.The Russians were famous drinkers, and Lynne knew she would be comfortable with them.After finishing my daytime novel writing and proofreading tasks, I began to revisit Russian.I wanted to convince Lynne that she should at least learn the Cyrillic alphabet so she would know where the ladies' room was and be able to say a few polite words about people.But she disdains going back to school.I sighed and dug into my vocabulary and common verbs.Soon, in a flash of inspiration, I found a solution to the stylistic problem.The vocabulary of my space-age hooligans can be a mixture of Russian and colloquial English, with rhyming slang and gypsy drunkenness.The Russian word for "boy" ends in "nachach," so use that to name this drugi or droogs or teenage idiom spoken by violent dudes.

Russian lends itself better to English than German, French or Italian.After all, English is already mixed with French and German.Russian has multisyllabic words like zhevotnoye (best) and short words like brat (brother).Like Eastern languages, Russian does not distinguish between legs and feet—one noga covers both, hands and arms, and there is also a word for ruka.This linguistic limitation can turn my scary young narrator into a clockwork doll with moving limbs.There is already much violence in my drafts smoldering in a drawer, and there will be more in the finished work, this strange new sign like a fog that obscures the vandalism of the book a little, Protect the reader from his own base instincts.It was a brilliant irony of a group of politically impotent teenagers practicing the ultimate totalitarian violence, speaking slang from the two dominant political languages ​​of the time.

I ended up making about 200 words.Books are about brainwashing, so the text of the best book itself is a brainwashing tool.To brainwash the reader, let him learn a little Russian.This novel is all about experimenting with language manipulation, in which loanwords can be slowly learned from context: any request from a publisher for a glossary, I flatly refuse.Vocabulary interferes with language manipulation and undermines the effects of brainwashing.Inventing new rhymes, digging up old rhymes (mainly from the King James Bible) to use in this kind of cobbled-together weirdness, it's a lot of fun to do.By the time we set foot on the Alexander Radishchev, a well-equipped steamer on the Baltic line, for Tilbury, the novel is nearly finished.

In May 1962, it came out... Not a single critic in England liked it, The Times Literary Supplement said it was: "Slimey empty words... a rotten product with an empty stomach." Second half, published by WW Norton in Published in New York.Norton's vice president, Eric Swainson, insisted that the final chapter of the book be deleted.I had to agree to the censorship because I needed this upfront payment, but I was reluctant.I have carefully laid out this work.The whole book is divided into three parts, each with seven chapters, and the total number of chapters symbolizes the maturity of a person in the traditional number concept.My young narrator, the music-loving villain Alex, grows up by the end of the story and discards violence as a childish toy.This is the theme of the final chapter, and it is what makes this work a short but true novel.Yet all Swainson wanted was reversible change brought about by government regulation.He wanted Alex to be an allegorical character, not a fictional character.At the end of chapter 20, Alex says "I'm really healed," and he's back to his bad pleasure.Thus, the American and European versions of my novel are essentially different.The crude tradition of popular American fiction drives out so-called British moderation.

Although it was arguably a different book, the American critics seemed to understand my intentions better than their English counterparts. "Time" magazine said: "This book may seem like a bawdy thriller, but Burgess has written a gem in English - a philosophical novel. This may be overlooked, because the protagonist of the novel says All in Nachachi, in order to give him the special status he deserves—half human, half inhuman. The pilgrimage of the 'Beat Generation' Stavrogin is a serious and successful moral essay. Burgess bluntly sees Alex as the villain more human than Alex as the good zombie. The clockwork of a mechanical society must never pass off as morally chosen organic life. If evil cannot be accepted as a possibility, then goodness is meaningless.”

It is comforting to be understood in America, but humbling to be misunderstood in one's own country.The American critics forced me to take my own work seriously and to think about the morality of the novel.I was brought up Catholic (and this book is more Catholic and Jewish than Protestant) and I naturally assumed that human nature should be defined by its degree of free will to St. There is no moral choice when the two poles are opposite.I feel like it would be a dangerous book because it presents the good, or at least the innocuous, as something remote and abstract from my protagonist's future adult life, while depicting violence as joy Dionysus hymn.Violence cannot go unrepresented, though, because if I put Alex in the dock at the beginning of the story and charged him with a crime that can be summarized as judicial language, then even the most easy-going spinster reader would take it for granted. Complain that I cut corners.Fiction is about dealing with the concrete and the individual, even Henry James' novels, so the crime of juvenile violence was essential to me.But the excitement I get when I write it myself makes me sick, and Auden is right that the novelist has to get along with the filth.

I discussed with George Dwyer in his diocese of Leeds the moral responsibility of the novelist.I was invited to a literary lunch organized by the Yorkshire Post, where George led a pre-dinner prayer.George's master's thesis was done by Baudelaire, and he knew it like the back of his hand.Literature, even the kind that is popular at literary luncheons, is an aspect of this fallen world, and its mission is to clarify the nature of corruption.A novel whose hero is guilty or immoral, if read to a thoughtful reader, can be molded by fear, and distance himself from the roots of his sin.And for the unthinking reader, it does nothing.It is true that literature that has lost its nature can induce evil, but that is not the fault of literature. The Bible also inspired a killer in New York to use children to sacrifice to his evil lord; the murderer Haig, who killed women and then drank their blood, was obsessed with communion.

In the fall of 1971, Liana and I came to London at the request of Warner Bros. and stayed at the Clerridge Hotel for an in-house preview of a Stanley Kubrick film. I am familiar with and admire Kubrick's work. Paths of Glory, which had not yet been released in France, is a neat metaphor for the brutality of war, in which the French were far more brutal than the Germans. Dr. Strangelove is a biting satire on the nuclear annihilation we all look forward to.Kubrick captures a true masochism in this one-act play, dotted with mushroom clouds: fearing something while secretly expecting it.I feel, though, that he overestimated Peter Cyrus' performance by casting him as three very different characters at the same time in this masterpiece, obscuring the irony of the obsessive techno-worship.It won't be a masterpiece, not only because James Mason and Cyrus are questionable, but because Kubrick hasn't found a cinematic equivalent to the extravagant style of Nabokov's literature.I know that Nabokov was rejected; moreover, my entire manuscript was rejected as well.So I fear that the paring-down-to-plot-skeleton approach that has killed the film will make it a dispensable porn.The authors of both books intended to highlight language, not sex and violence; however, movies are not made of words.Look, I was expecting a professional take on visual futurism.The novel is set in an anachronistic future that may have already been in the past; Kubrick had the opportunity to create a fantasy future that, with added verisimilitude through the setting, could have an impact on life in the present. I was horrified when the receptionist at the Clerici Hotel recognized Liana as my wife, not an Italian-speaking nanny, and they gave us a suite in the Arabian Oil Sheikh: I feared I would have to This movie is hard work; studios don't allow free money.Liana, Deborah Rogers, and I went to a "Soho" screening room with Kubrick in the back and listened to Walter Carlos' electronic version of Henry Purcell's Queen Mary Sad and happy, the movie opened.Ten minutes later, Deborah said she couldn't take it and wanted to go out; eleven minutes later, Liana said the same.I pulled them all back to their seats; they were too angry to be rude to Kubrick in the face of these highly rendered attacks.We finished the film, but it didn't end with the book I published in London in 1962: Kubrick was referring to the American abridged version, and the film ends with a realistically rendered fantasy from the American version The last chapter of , which is the penultimate chapter of another edition.Alex, the villainous hero, was originally conditioned to hate violence, but now his conditioned reflex has failed. He is wrestling with a naked woman, and the onlookers in racing suits are applauding cautiously.Alex's smug voiceover: "I'm really healed." The defense of free will becomes the complacency of criminal impulse.The British version of the book has Alex growing up and abandoning violence, calling him a childish doll; Kubrick admits he has not seen this version: the American, though he lives in England, Only the only version Americans are allowed to see is referenced.I curse Eric Swenson at Norton. Now that the movie is out, conservatives think it was made with such talent, which makes it all the more dangerous.The film's talent is undeniable, and some of the highlights are the director's responses to the wordplay in the novel.The camera plays, slowing down and speeding up; when Alex jumps from a window, a video camera is thrown out of the window to show his attempted suicide - a thousand pound machine is rendered useless in one fell swoop .Over its dire themes—that individual violence is preferable to state violence—there was much skepticism in Parliament, and the film was urged to be banned.When the smug artist Kubrick trimmed his nails at his Bourgenwood mansion, it all fell to me: explaining the film to the press, and the almost-forgotten book, What exactly was said, some preaching of "free will", confirming the Catholic element in it.The Catholic media was a bit unhappy.I told the Evening Standard that the idea for the book arose from the attack on my wife by some American hooligans, which was written on a poster by a newspaper seller: A Clockwork Orange Hooligan Assaulted My Wife.Senator Maurice Edelman, an old friend, slammed the film in the same paper, and I had to call him back.I couldn't tell whom I was defending—the novel that was called "the little book of bawdy thrillers" or the movie that Kubrick kept silent about.I realized (not for the first time) that even a thriller has little impact compared to a movie.Kubrick's achievements completely overshadowed mine, and I was responsible for the so-called malign influence on teenagers. One influence that does not qualify as vicious is the musical content of the film, which is not only an emotional stimulus but a character in itself.If pop-loving teens can be persuaded to listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — even if it's a Moog electronic version — then some should be less slanderous in light of this artistic exaltation.But the film, and perhaps the book, seems to deny this Victorian notion of the link between great music and good character.There were still music theorists everywhere claiming that Beethoven made people see divine manifestations.What Alex sees in the Scherzo of the Ninth Symphony is quite the opposite: the icon of Christ in the procession, the painted Christ giving a communist salute.The music was the same, but there was nothing but violence on the covers of the records that were everywhere in London. I went to dinner at Kubrick's house, where I saw first his watchdog, then his daughter, now grown up, who played a lisp baby in Later, at the end of "Paths of Glory", she played a lovely wife who had been a German songstress.I also felt Kubrick's emphasis on music.While Alex North was breaking down trying to write the music, Kubrick had already decided to score among the symphonies already available.Kubrick set a bad example for his followers.For example, the soundtrack of John Boorman's "King Sword" is selected from "Tristan and Isolde" and "Twilight of the Gods", and the non-Arthurian elements in the music seem abrupt.But Kubrick often found the right score.I showed him on his piano that there was an acceptable counterpoint between "Ode to Joy" and "Singin' in the Rain" (which Alex sang while beating the husband of the woman he planned to rape), But he doesn't care.Something of value he gave me was an idea for my next novel.It's all about the music. There was a time when I thought about writing a Regency novel, some sort of parody of Jane Austen, in the form of a Mozart symphony.The novel will be divided into four movements—a chapter of Allegro, a chapter of Andante, a chapter of minuet and trio, followed by a rushing finale—and the plot follows symphonic form, rather than psychological possibility .So, in the first movement, a ball in a country house, the characters appear in the exposition, are drawn into a violent fantasia in the development, and then return to their true colors in the encapsulation.Therein lies an obvious problem: literal repetition works in music, but not in narrative text.This problem can be solved by employing non-trivial repetitions—characters' actions are reproduced in a different style, or in new ways, but in a style that recalls (through rhyme and imagery) what has been said earlier .This scheme showed such difficulty, and probably not very readable, that I dropped it in a drawer.I mentioned this to Kubrick when I was discussing narrative techniques with him, and he suggested what I should have thought of—that is, to imitate symphonies that themselves contain narrative associations.He was referring to Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 in E-flat, a "hero" who was at first Napoleon but could later represent any great military hero.Where are the narrative associations?The first movement clearly shows struggle and victory, the second is about a grand public funeral, and in the third and fourth movements the hero is elevated to mythic heights - a special one about Prometheus. Myth, Beethoven has a detailed interpretation in his ballet "Prometheus". Kubrick didn't offer the idea out of sheer generosity.He wanted to make a film about Napoleon, using shooting techniques that Abel Gance did not have, and he hoped to summarize Napoleon's career in a medium-length film.He needed a screenplay, but the screenplay had to be a novel first.The musicalization of Napoleon's life, from the Italian wars to his exile on St. Helena, would be a condensed process, which meant using condensed techniques in the film.Therefore, if the Battle of Waterloo is matched with Beethoven's Scherzo, there will be no problem even if the plot is accelerated to the point of comedy in the film narrative.The exile and guest death on St. Helena would have to be represented in terms of Beethoven's themes and variations—perhaps derived from the filming style of Eisenstein's rendition—Napoleon's death should be followed by his mythical resurrection, Because Beethoven said so.This movie requires helicopters to shoot grand war scenes, and all the scenes have to be created too detailed, and its shooting budget will be several million higher than that, but this movie has to be shot sooner or later, and Kubrick is obviously the best choice.At the same time, it was only a matter of time before a book called Napoleon Symphonies (no other name was possible) was written. I found out that Warner Bros. wanted to rely on me to promote a film that had just opened in New York.They put me at the Algonquin Hotel and Malcolm McDowell at the Pierre.He and I were going to do radio and TV shows to promote the movie, and we were like a funny father-son pair.This relationship is also very appropriate, because the protagonist in the film is named Alex Burgess, although his original name is Alex Drage (this is from Alex calling himself-although only In fiction—Big Alex or Great Alex).The film makes no mistake about being inconsistent, because no copy editor likes to read a novel. Before I set out to do a publicity show with Malcolm, I went to a public preview to see how the audience reacted, because Kubrick was still doing his nails in Boohenwood, which seemed to give him an invisible of divine light.The audience was all young people, and I was almost turned away at first because I was too old.They were so moved by the violence in the episode, especially black people, that they stood up and yelled, "Come on, man."I'm a little relieved that a very beautiful female interviewer correctly predicted that the French would "look at it like crazy," while to American teenagers it would look like a thrill to teenage violence.Not too long ago I saw reports that four boys, dressed in mobster outfits from the movie, gang-raped a nun in Poughkeepsie.The clothing style issue was dismissed—the kids hadn’t seen the movie—but the rape was real, and the blame fell on Malcolm and me.Kubrick was still doing his nails, even when he was awarded two New York Review Awards.I just had to accept these at Satie's with a thank you note.Everything I wanted to say, Kubrick said on the phone.I said something else. On the way back to Rome, I stopped in London.I had to send those two medals showing that the New York critics recognized Stanley Kubrick as the best director and screenwriter of the year.Also, I had to appear on a BBC radio program to defend the art of Stanley Kubrick and the apparent depravity of a book that few people read. So, to go back to Rome, to Liana, is to go back to Europe in a sense that goes beyond geography.The trouble I was going to have in Italy, much later, was accusations of blasphemy, not abetting juvenile violence.Europe is more or less Catholic, and it has seen the true meaning of novels and movies.The Roman press wanted to trumpet my status as the godfather of sin, but it also admitted that sin was not my creation.What the French and Italians say about free will is close to St. Augustine's theory of free will, and when it comes to libre arbitre or libero arbitrio, theology is unavoidable.Whatever the Puritan English may say about it, it is the voice of theology after all.