The
novel, properly novella, entitled A Clockwork Orange first appeared in the
spring of 1962. I had written its first version in late 1960, when I was coming
to the end of what the neurological specialists had assured my late wife would
be my terminal year. My late wife broke the secret in time for me to work hard
at providing some posthumous royalties for her. In the period in which I was
supposed to be dying from an inoperable cerebral tumour, I produced the novels
entitled The Doctor is Sick, Inside Mr Enderby, The Worm and
the Ring (a reworking of an earlier draft), One Hand Clapping, The
Eve of Saint Venus (an expansion in novella form of a discarded opera libretto)
and A Clockwork Orange in a much less fantastic version than the one
that was eventually published. This first version presented the world of
adolescent violence and governmental retribution in the slang that was current
at the time among the hooligan groups known as the Teddyboys and the Mods and
Rockers. I had the sense to realise that, by the time the book came to be out,
that slang would already be outdated, but I did not see clearly how to solve
the problem of an appropriate idiolect for the narration. When, in early 1961,
it seemed to me likely that I was not going to die just yet, I thought hard
about the book and decided that its story properly belonged to the future, in
which it was conceivable that even the easy-going British state might employ
aversion therapy to cure the growing disease of youthful aggression. My late
wife and I spent part of the summer of 1961 in Soviet Russia, where it was
evident that the authorities had problems with turbulent youth not much
different from our own. The stilyagi, or style-boys, were smashing faces and
windows, and the police, apparently obsessed with ideological and fiscal
crimes, seemed powerless to keep them under. It struck me that it might be a
good idea to create a kind of young hooligan who bestrode the iron curtain and
spoke an argot compounded of the two most powerful political languages in the
world - Anglo-American and Russian. The irony of the style would lie in the
hero-narrator's being totally unpolitical.
There was what must seem, to us who are living in a
more permissive age, an unaccountable delay in getting the work accepted for
publication. My literary agent was even dubious about submitting it to a
publisher, alleging that its pornography of violence would be certain to make
it unacceptable. I, or rather my late wife, whose Welsh blood forced her into
postures of aggression on her husband's behalf, reminded the agent that it was
his primary job not to make social or literary judgements on the work he
handled but to sell it. So the novella was sold to William Heinemann Ltd in
London. In New York it was sold to W.W. Norton Inc, though with the last
chapter missing. To lop the final section of the story, in which the
protagonist gives up his youthful violence in order to become a man with a
man's responsibilities, seemed to me to be very harmful: it reduced the work
from a genuine novel (whose main characteristic must always be a demonstration
of the capacity of human nature to change) to a mere fable. Moreover, though
this was perhaps a minor point, it ruined the arithmology of the book. The book
was written in twenty-one chapters (21 being the symbol of human maturity)
divided into three sections of exactly equal size. The American reduction looks
lopsided. But the American publisher's argument for truncation was based on a
conviction that the original version, showing as it does a capacity for
regeneration in even the most depraved soul, was a kind of capitulation to the
British Pelagian spirit, whereas the Augustinian Americans were tough enough to
accept an image of unregenerable man. I was in no position to protest, except
feebly and in the expectation of being overborne: I needed the couple of
hundred dollars that comprised the advance on the work.
... The reviews it received not only failed to whet
an appetite among prospective book-buyers: they were for the most part
facetious and uncomprehending. What I had tried to write was, as well as a
novella, a sort of allegory of Christian free will.. Man is defined by his
capacity to choose courses of moral action. If he chooses good, he must have
the possibility of choosing evil instead: evil is a theological necessity. I
was also saying that it is more acceptable for us to perform evil acts than to
be conditioned artificially into an ability only to perform what is socially
acceptable. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer (anonymous in those days)
saw the book only as a 'nasty little shocker', which was rather unfair, while
the down-market newspapers thought the Anglo-Russian slang was a silly little
joke that didn't come off.
But the nasty little shocker was gaining an audience,
especially among the American young. Rock groups called 'Clockwork Orange'
began to spring up in New York and Los Angeles. These juveniles were primarily
intrigued by the language of the book, which became a genuine teenage argot,
and they liked the title. They did not realise that it was an old Cockney
expression used to describe anything queer, not necessarily sexually so, and
they hit on the secondary meaning of an organic entity, full of juice and
sweetness and agreeable odour, being turned into an automaton. The youth of
Malaysia, where I had lived for nearly six years, saw that orange contained
orang, meaning in Malay a human being. In Italy, where the book became Arancia
all' Orologeria, it was assumed that the title referred to a grenade, an
alternative to the ticking pineapple. The small fame of the novella did not
noticeably enrich me, but it led to a proposal that it be filmed. It was in, I
think, 1965, that the rock-group known as the Rolling Stones expressed an
interest in the buying of the property and an acting participation in a film
version which I myself should write. There was not much money in the project,
because the permissive age in which crude sex and cruder violence could be
frankly presented had not yet begun. If the film was to be made at all, it
would have to be in a cheap underground version leased out to clubs. But it was
not made. Not yet.
It was the dawn of the age of candid pornography that
enabled Stanley Kubrick to exploit, to a serious artistic end, those elements
in the story which were meant to shock morally rather than merely titillate.
These elements are, to some extent, hidden from the reader by the language
used: to tolchock a chelloveck in the kishkas does not sound so bad as booting
a man in the guts, and the old in-out in-out, even if it reduces the sexual act
to a mechanical action, does not sicken quite as much as a Harold Robbins
description of cold rape. But in a film little can be implied; everything has
to be shown. Language ceases to be an opaque protection against being appalled
and takes a very secondary place. I was bound to have misgivings about the
film, and one of the banes of my later life has been the public assumption that
I had something to do with it. I did not. I wrote a script, like nearly
everybody else in the script-writing world, but nobody's script was used. The
book itself, as in a literary seminar, was taken on to the film set, discussed,
sectionally dramatised with much free improvisation, and then, as film, stowed
in the can. All that I provided was a book, but I had provided it ten years
previously. The British state had ignored it, but it was not so ready to ignore
the film. It was considered to be an open invitation to the violent young, and
inevitably I was regarded as an antisocial writer. The imputation that I had
something to do with the punk cult, whose stepfather I was deemed to be by Time
magazine, has more to do with the gorgeous technicolor of Kubrick's film than
with my own subfusc literary experiment.
I am disclosing a certain gloom about visual
adaptation of my little book, and the reader has now the right to ask why I
have contrived a stage version of it. The answer is very simple: it is to stem
the flow of amateur adaptations that I have heard about though never seen. It
is to provide a definitive actable version which has auctorial authority. And,
moreover, it is a version which, unlike Kubrick's cinema adaptation, draws on
the entirety of the book, presenting at the end a hooligan hero who is now
growing up, falling in love, proposing a decent bourgeois life with a wife and
family, and consoling us with the doctrine that aggression is an aspect of
adolescence which maturity rejects. ... Alex the hero speaks for me when he
says in effect that destruction is a substitute for creation, and that the
energy of youth has to be expressed through aggression because it has not yet
been able to subdue itself through creation. Alex's aggressive instincts have
been stimulated by classical music, but the music has been forewarning him of
what he must some day become: a man who recognises the Dionysiac in, say,
Beethoven but appreciates the Apollonian as well.
... One final point. I toyed, when first publishing the book, with the notion of affixing an epigraph from Shakespeare. This was considered to be a dangerously literary proposal: the book had to stand naked with no chaperonage from the Bard. But perhaps I may now conclude with it. In Act III Scene 3 of The Winter's Tale the shepherd who finds the child Perdita says: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting -.” It sounds like an exceptionally long adolescence, but perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own. It is the adolescence, somewhat briefer, that I present in A Clockwork Orange.