Why did you decide to become a biographer for Anthony Burgess?

 

I began reading Burgess’s novels and non-fiction books when I was at school in London. I 

had heard of A Clockwork Orange and was aware of it as a film which had been suppressed 

by its director, Stanley Kubrick. Having found Penguin paperback copies in my school library, 

I read, quite quickly, A Clockwork Orange, The End of the World News, Earthly Powers and 

Little Wilson and Big God, the first volume of Burgess’s autobiography.

 

Before I read his books, I was aware of him as a literary journalist. Burgess reviewed books 

for the Observer newspaper, which I read. At the same time he was writing for the Times 

Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the Spectator, Saturday Review, Le Monde in 

France and the Corriere della Sera in Italy. He must have reviewed at least one book every 

week for more than 30 years. He was invited to write an article on ‘The Novel’ for the 

revised edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The typescript of that article is more than 

100 pages long.

 

I enjoyed reading Burgess and I liked his style. During his lifetime, he appeared regularly on 

television and radio to promote his books, at a time when most literary writers did not 

engage with the mass media. Burgess was a natural performer, and he always managed to 

say something amusing or provocative when he was on TV. Some of these TV programs are 

available on YouTube.

 

I continued to read Burgess while I was studying English at university, and eventually he 

became the subject of my PhD thesis at Warwick University. My supervisor was a 

biographer, and he encouraged me to think about writing a life of Burgess. The first edition 

of The Real Life of Anthony Burgess was eventually published after ten years of research. 

Since then I have edited A Clockwork Orange and written introductions to three other 

Burgess novels. I am currently editing another novel, The Worm and the Ring, and preparing 

an edition of AB’s uncollected short stories. I am also working on a number of other 

academic projects which have no connection to Anthony Burgess.

 

As an English teacher, especially in assessing students’ understanding of literature, do you 

focus more on the minute details or the meaning/symbolism of those details?  Is there a 

balance?  Connected to this, is there an ethical component to reading?  A social 

component?

 

As a reader, I am primarily interested in stories and style. It can be very useful to think about 

symbol if you’re reading poetry. As a teacher, I tend to concentrate on the meaning of 

individual words and the bigger structure of a literary work. The question of ‘meaning’ is 

often more complicated than readers think. I have recently been reading two books by I.A. 

Richards: The Meaning of Meaning and How to Read a Page. As an undergraduate at 

Manchester University, Burgess read another useful book by Professor Richards, Practical 

Criticism.

 

The ethics of reading is another very large subject. My short answer is yes. Fiction, poetry 

and drama can cause us to analyse moral situations, and to enter into imaginative sympathy 

with fictional characters. I disagree with St Augustine, who writes in Book 2 of The 

Confessions that tragedy is voyeuristic because it invites us to sympathise with the suffering 

of people who are not real. The suffering of a character can seem as real as the suffering of 

a stranger. Social engagement works in a similar way to ethical engagement. One of the 

tasks of imaginative writers is to dramatize abstract concepts, such as freedom and social 

responsibility. Ibsen understood this. So did Brecht and Bernard Shaw.

 

Does Burgess’s life resemble Alex’s early life (or his world while he was writing it) in any 

ways?  Did he use his own childhood as a “model” for the novel?  Or youth subculture 

during the time of the novel’s inception?

 

I knew nothing about Anthony Burgess’s life when I began to read A Clockwork Orange. I 

assumed that it was an autobiography written by a convicted murderer, and I assumed that 

he had written it in prison. Turning to the biographical note at the front of the book, I was 

very surprised to learn that Burgess was a BA in English who had worked as a school-teacher 

in Malaya and composed three symphonies.

 

There were violent gangs in Manchester in the 1920s, when Burgess was growing up there. 

Andrew Davies has written about this in his book, Gangs of Manchester. Burgess does not 

mention gangs in his autobiography. But when he was asked to record an audio-book 

version of A Clockwork Orange, he used a Manchester accent, which suggests that the 

voices in his head were Manchester voices. I have attached an audio file of Burgess reading.

 

Gang violence was very much in evidence in England in the 1950s and 1960s. Dominic 

Sandbrook describes this phenomenon in his social history of Britain, Never Had It So Good 

(in the chapter titled ‘The Teenage Consumer’). The Teddy Boys, who were also known as 

‘Edwardian Strutters’, dressed up in old-fashioned Edwardian frock coats and carried 

weapons: knuckle-dusters, razors and bicycle chains. At one time Burgess lived in Hove, on 

the south coast of England, where these gangs of violent young men would regularly fight 

on the beach at weekends.

 

What inspired Burgess to write this novel?

 

Love of language. One of his favourite books was Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, a novel 

about a dream which is written in an invented dream language. Burgess read Joyce’s book 

when it first appeared in 1939, and he later wrote two introductory books about Joyce and a 

shortened version of Finnegans Wake. It was one of his two favourite books, the other being 

Joyce’s Ulysses.

 

Burgess learned basic Russian when he visited St Petersburg (then known as Leningrad) in 

1961. He wrote an article about this visit, ‘The Human Russians’, which gives a flavor of the 

times (copy attached).

 

Burgess also invented a number of prehistoric languages for the film Quest for Fire, directed 

by Jean-Jacques Annaud, based on the French novel La Guerre du Feu by J.H. Rosny. The film 

is a thing of great beauty and strangeness. It’s available on DVD in America.

 

It is clear from his critical writing that Burgess had read many other dystopian novels, such 

as Zamyatin’s We, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s 

Brave New World, The Aerodrome by Rex Warner, Facial Justice by L.P. Hartley and When 

the Kissing Had to Stop by Constantine Fitzgibbon. He also read widely in utopian fiction, 

such as Walden Two by B.F. Skinner. And he found out about brainwashing and chemical 

persuasion from a non-fiction book by Huxley, called Brave New World Revisited, published 

in 1959.

 

Of what significance is the structure of the novel (i.e., 3 parts, 7 chapters each)?

 

Oddly enough, Burgess didn’t say anything about the importance of the 21 chapters until 

1980. His plan for the novel, which appears in his private notebook from 1960, simply says 

that he was planning a novel in three parts.

 

In the manuscript, Burgess writes at the end of part 3, chapter 6 (sometimes called the 20th 

chapter): ‘Should we end here? An optional epilogue follows.’ So, according to the author, 

the twenty-first chapter was ‘optional’. The UK and US publishers obviously arrived at 

different answers to Burgess’s editorial question (‘Should we end here?’).

 

The account he later gave in his introduction to the 1986 Norton edition is misleading. 

Burgess had sold the manuscript to a university library in 1966, and I think he had forgotten 

what it said.

 

I am not really persuaded by the idea that the 21 chapters signify the number of human 

maturity. Alex is 18 years old at the end of the book, not 21.

 

Why do Alex and the droogs speak so much Russian-influenced slang?  And why was the 

society and government so seemingly communistic?

 

The droogs speak Russian because Burgess knew Russian. He decided not to use the teenage 

slang of the day because he knew that words such as ‘cool’, ‘groovy’, ‘cats’ and ‘chicks’ 

would quickly become outdated. There are strong elements of Russian, but also some 

Arabic, Cockney rhyming slang, Army slang and Shakespearean English. The slang 

lexicographer Jonathon Green (who compiled Green’s Dictionary of Slang) has a very useful 

essay about A Clockwork Orange on his website: http://jonathongreen.co.uk/dollops-of-

mud-and-demonic-poetry/

 

The political figures in A Clockwork Orange are a mixture of ultra-liberalism (Mr F. Alexander 

and his friends) and authoritarianism (the police and the Minister of the Interior). I’m not 

sure that this could be called a communist government, and we know that Burgess had very 

little sympathy for communism. He once said that all governments were evil, and that the 

business of the state was to keep the drains clean and not to interfere in the lives of 

ordinary citizens.

 

Burgess’s most sustained discussion of politics appears in his book 1985, which contains a 

chapter on A Clockwork Orange. There are teenage gangs in 1985 who form an underground 

university and teach themselves Latin and Ancient Greek. They want to learn about the 

classics, and these languages are not taught in their schools.

 

Do you consider the ending of the novel to be a “happy ending”?  Connected to this, why 

do you think the American publisher insisted on removing the original twenty-first chapter 

as a condition for publishing it?

 

See above for the textual history of the novel. I believed that Burgess favored both endings 

at different times. When he was asked to write a Clockwork Orange film script in 1969, 

Burgess removed the twenty-first chapter. Later, when he adapted the novel as a stage 

musical (A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music), he restored the final chapter and added 

some extra scenes in which Alex finds a girlfriend and they sing a song about freedom to the 

tune of Beethoven’s ‘Song of Joy’. So that gives us a third possible ending.

 

This question of endings is not a simple one. Interviewed on television by Isaac Bashevis 

Singer in 1985, Burgess said that Alex is going to become a great composer after the novel 

has finished, and that his youthful energy will be used for artistic creation. But is this 

actually suggested anywhere in the text? Or is the author talking about a possible future for 

Alex which exists only in his head, and not on the page?

 

What was the novel’s reception amongst book critics, the general public, etc.?

 

The novel sold very badly in its first ten years of existence. Critics disliked it more than any 

of Burgess’s previous novels. The London publisher was worried that it was an obscene work 

which would damage Burgess’s reputation, and before publication they considered asking 

him to adopt another pseudonym. 

 

Anthony Burgess’s real name was John Burgess Wilson. He took on the pen-name ‘Anthony 

Burgess’ when his first novel appeared in 1956, because he worked for the British 

government in Malaya and they had a strict rule that their employees were not allowed to 

write works of fiction under their own names.

 

He also published two novels in the early 1960s as Joseph Kell. This was because he wrote 

very quickly and his London publisher (William Heinemann) was embarrassed about the 

number of books coming out under his name. Burgess killed off Joseph Kell in 1968 and 

reprinted his novels as Burgess novels.

 

In your opinion, what is the best method of criminal rehabilitation?

 

As a professor of English, I am not really qualified to discuss theories of criminology. I have 

friends who have worked in prisons to encourage offenders to write about their 

experiences, and the effects are sometimes very positive and transformative. I admire the 

former criminal Jimmy Boyle, who wrote a famous prison autobiography and a series of 

novels. My sister is involved in a project to encourage literacy among prisoners (helping 

them to write letters to their families), and she tells me that many people who are in prison 

have very poor literacy skills. Some of them cannot read at all. I do think that literacy is an 

important key to participating fully in society.

 

I have read and enjoyed examples of prison writing, including Louis Althusser’s prison 

diaries, the poems of Robert Lovelace, and the magazine Not Shut Up, which is written by 

offenders in prison. In Britain we have an organisation called the Turnkey Trust, which 

encourages prisoners to express themselves through the visual arts. Some of their art is 

remarkably good; other pieces are violent and disturbing. But self-expression through art is 

important, especially when you feel that you have no other voice.

 

There was a recent case in the United Kingdom where the head of the prison service tried to 

ban prisoners from receiving parcels from outside, including parcels of books. Eventually the 

High Court in London ruled that the ban was illegal. The Society of Authors campaigned 

against the book ban, along with several prominent writers, including the Poet Laureate, 

Carol Ann Duffy. Further details are here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30344867

 

Many people in Britain believe that prison should be about rehabilitation and reflection, not 

punishment and cultural deprivation. This is still very much a live issue here. What do YOU 

think?

 

Do you think that individuals like Alex, in the real world, can actually be reformed or 

rehabilitated?

 

This seems to be the message of Anthony Burgess’s novel. We can choose, and we are free 

to change our lives for the better.

 

On the other hand, it can be very difficult to change people’s behaviour, and the debate 

about rehabilitation goes on.

 

The other side of the argument is summed up in a non-fiction book by B.F. Skinner called 

Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner, who was an academic psychologist, believed that it 

was the task of the state to condition people into good behavior. Burgess disagreed, and he 

outlined his reasons in another novel, The Clockwork Testament, which I recommend.