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    A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (UK Version)
    by
    ANTHONY BURGESS
    Contents
    Introduction
    (A Clockwork Orange Resucked)
    Part 1
    Part 2
    Part 3
    Glossary of Nadsat Language
    Anthony Burgess was born in Manchester in 1917 and was a graduate
    of the University there. After six years in the Army he worked
    as an instructor for the Central Advisory Council for Forces
    Education, as a lecturer in Phonetics and as a grammar school
    master. From 1954 till 1960 he was an education officer in the
    Colonial Service, stationed in Malaya and Brunei. He has been
    called one of the very few literary geniuses of our time.
    Certainly he borrowed from no other literary source than himself.
    That source produced thirty-two novels, a volume of verse, two
    plays, and sixteen works of nonfiction-together with countless
    music compositions, including symphonies, operas, and jazz. His
    most recent work was A Mouthful of Air: Language,
    Languages...Especially English. Anthony Burgess died in 1993.
    Introduction
    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
    November, 1986
    A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (UK Version)
    Part 1
    1
    "What's it going to be then, eh?"
    There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is
    Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in
    the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do
    with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
    The Ko Part 1 rova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O
    my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like,
    things changing so skorry these days and everybody very
    quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.
    Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They
    had no license for selling liquor, but there was no law yet
    against prodding some of the new veshches which they used
    to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vel-
    locet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other vesh-
    ches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen
    minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in
    your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you
    could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this
    would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty
    twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this even-
    ing I'm starting off the story with.
    Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need
    from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to
    tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his
    blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor
    to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired
    ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till's guts. But,
    as
    they say, money isn't everything.
    The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion,
    which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with
    the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch
    underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of
    a design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so
    that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a
    hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and
    poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown's
    litso (face, that is). Dim not ever having much of an idea of
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