Reading A Clockwork Orange

The dis­cus­sion of A Clock­work Orange is well past over­due.   Most of us in my infor­mal book club have been very busy over the past few months, and read­ing a book and find­ing an avail­able time for to meet up has been dif­fi­cult for some.   I’m a lit­tle con­cerned that choos­ing A Clock­work Orange may have put one of the nails in the group’s cof­fin, because I’m fairly cer­tain it didn’t hold mass appeal.  Hav­ing seen the Stan­ley Kubrick movie first, I was pre­pared for Alex’s glee­ful por­trayal of the vio­lent life he led, and I expected that it might be a bit grue­some for oth­ers to read. Inter­est­ingly, it actu­ally turned out to be a much lighter read than I expected.

The book is writ­ten in Nad­sat, a dialect Burgess cre­ated for the book com­posed of “…odd bits of old rhyming slang.  A bit of gypsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Pro­pa­ganda. Sub­lim­i­nal pen­e­tra­tion.”  At the begin­ning, Alex’s dia­log is con­fus­ing and for­eign, but Burgess quickly gives plenty of clues as to the mean­ing of unfa­mil­iar words.  Of course, most print­ings of the book now have a glos­sary.  Fail­ing that, an online ver­sion is easy to come by.  After a chap­ter or so, the reader should have a gen­eral han­dle on the lan­guage with­out any aids, any­way.  I found this an inter­est­ing device, but  I enjoy plays with lan­guage and am fas­ci­nated with how pid­gins and dialects are formed and func­tion.  Alex is very musi­cal, and that comes through in his speech pat­terns. I enjoyed the par­al­lelism to the music in his lyric turns of phrase, but oth­ers found it to be dis­trac­tion from the larger mes­sage of the work.

To com­pli­cate mat­ters fur­ther, the British ver­sion has a sig­ni­cant dif­fer­ence to the orig­i­nally pub­lished Amer­i­can ver­sion, and I almost missed it entirely.  My copy, printed in the 60s, was on loan from the local library.  A few of the other girls were read­ing an online copy. About an hour before meet­ing time on our orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion date, I was look­ing online for inter­est­ing talk­ing points.  I kept run­ning across a ques­tion about the sig­nif­i­cance of the drink Alex orders in the last chap­ter. I was absolutely con­fused.  There’s no oppor­tu­nity for Alex to order a drink in the last chap­ter!  Did I nod off some­where near the end?!

A quick online search solved the mys­tery. Orig­i­nally, the final chap­ter was sim­ply not pub­lished in Amer­ica. I found Anthony Burgess’ essay on the sit­u­a­tion and the miss­ing last chap­ter with 30 min­utes to spare.   I think the book is stronger with­out the mor­al­iz­ing of the last chap­ter, but it wasn’t my work.  If Burgess had a for­mula and a plan, how much should it be hon­ored? I sup­pose, in the end, he allowed it to be pub­lished with­out that last chap­ter, so he made the deci­sion himself.

I grinned as I read Burgess’ introduction:

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 that duty is.

So he wasn’t very fond of the book, him­self!  There was a talk­ing point, and I was very excited, but also dis­traught.  As I was fran­ti­cally try­ing to print out 6 copies of that last chap­ter so we would all have it to refer to, I got a phone call.  Only one of the girls had been able to read it, and quite a few of the group wasn’t going to be able to make it after all.  The extra time was actu­ally a relief, and absolved me from deal­ing with a frus­trat­ing paper jam.

A month later, we still haven’t dis­cussed the book in much detail.  The mis­ad­ven­tures along the way taught me more about the book than I would have learned sim­ply buy­ing it from the book­store. As I said, I really enjoyed it, but it does read like an early work, and I under­stand why Burgess later found it to be dis­taste­ful. I also under­stand why Kubrick and the Amer­i­can pub­lisher chose to forego the last chap­ter.  I still find myself con­flicted about that last chapter. I’ve tried very hard not to spoil any­thing for any­one in this post on the off chance that some of you are still work­ing on the book.  Still, I hope that even if we don’t meet, that every­one would feel free to talk about the book in the com­ments, whether they are a part of the book club or not.