Anthony Burgess on his ‘A Clockwork Orange’ regret: “I should not have written the book”
The relationship between art and the artist is a unique one. In many ways, a person’s art is their own child, a product of them that is nurtured with time and work until it’s raised, fully grown and finished before being sent off to take its place in the world independently. On the other hand, an artist is their art, becoming an indelible part of their own identity. For Anthony Burgess, with his brainchild of A Clockwork Orange, this quandary presented an existential problem.
The links between art and the artist are confused even more when it comes to dark or violent tales. The creators of horror films or slashers should, and generally aren’t, marred as horrific, evil people. There is a level where imagination has to come into play and create a level of distance between the person and the idea they came up with and worked on. Writing, just like making music or films, is a skill and a talent that involves strife and thought. To engage with art requires nuance in the consideration of the creative, their intentions and the position their creation then sits in the world.
But for Burgess, the mind between the 1962 novella A Clockwork Orange, a tale about a sadistic gang who prowl the streets of dystopian London, that nuance seemed to get completely lost. As the years went on, he realised more and more that society had missed the point of his creation, and instead, he was left with a sense of guilt or regret over the work he’d sent out into the world with the best of intentions.
“The misunderstanding [of the novel] will pursue me until I die,” he wrote in the 1985 biography of D.H. Lawrence, Flame into Being, “I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation”. It’s a devastating thing to hear that an artist, after working so hard and creating something as incredible as that story, could come to look back on it with upset or remorse. But really, Burgess was failed by his readers.
A Clockwork Orange is a political satire. Set in a dystopian world, it follows the protagonist Alex and his gang of ‘Droogs’ on their wild and violent escapades as the state sets out to reform him. When he is eventually reformed, after a series of incredibly horrendous rapes and attacks, he’s devoid of free will and autonomous moral choice. Overall, it’s a story about freedom, the nature of evil and the capacity for redemption. It asks the question of whether it’s better for a person to choose to be bad or be forced by the state to be good, leaving the answer up to the reader’s interpretation.
But quickly, Burgess realised that his reader didn’t consider this. Instead of getting the deeper meaning, the novel was seen as glamorising violence and became the scapegoat for any violent attack. “If a couple of nuns are raped in the Vatican, I get a call from a newspaper. They have turned me into some kind of expert on violence,” he said, claiming that the reaction was gravely worsened by Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation of the book. After the story stretched further across cultural commentary, its name began being brought up more and more in headlines like “Police hunt the Clockwork Orange rapist gang” or “Child dies in Clockwork Orange war”, attaching the story to real-life crimes as if Burgess somehow orchestrated them.
Decades after the release of the novella and years after the film adaptation, Burgess’ conscience couldn’t take anymore. What had started as a stroke of genius and a satirical story written quickly during a three-day spring of intense inspiration, had now been twisted totally. What should have been an amazing brainchild raised by a gifted writer was now being handled as if Burgess had brought up a psychopath.
Burgess wasn’t the only one worried about its impact on the wider world, either, with Kubrick himself pulling the movie from distribution after a number of threats to his own life.
By 1986, in the prologue to a reissued version, the writer cut ties with the novel altogether. “I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons,” he said before sadly accepting, “It seems likely to survive, while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust.” As A Clockwork Orange remains his best-known work, he was unfortunately correct.
