'Enderby, Enderby, Enderby s----!': Inside Mr Enderby (1963)

One Hand Clapping and Clockwork Orange are good novels, and both still bear up today. Wanting Seed and Honey for the Bears are interesting, not entirely successful, and have both dated rather catastrophically. But in Enderby Burgess, for the first time in his career, touches the cloth of greatness. I'd read Inside Mr Enderby before but I'd forgotten both how richly it is written and how funny it is. I don't say so because of the book's copious farting, something perhaps less chucklesummoning than I once might have thought. Flatus is hardly funny per se; it depends upon a particular context, and the contexts supplied here are only intermittently risible. But there are a great many funny lines (I'd forgotten the anxious letter to the Fem magazine Agony Aunt: 'he said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child' [78]); and some genuinely laughable set-pieces. The public speech in which Enderby inadvertently (for he hardly understands what he is doing, or saying) declines the award of a gold medal and £50 is hilarious. And Enderby himself works, as a character: not too compacted with costive backstory; nor too buffoonish or repellent; believable and even oddly likeable. His backstory, incidentally. is to do with his gargantuan, life-force, monstrous-feminine Stepmother, based on Burgess's own; dead before the novel starts but still nightmarishly haunting the protagonists' imagination. The novel is also science fiction, which (obviously) I consider a major plus point. I'll come back to that.

In You’ve Had Your Time Burgess records, or confects, a hallucinatory origin for Enderby.

Enderby had appeared to me one day in the bathroom of our hovel outside Brunei Town, a wraith conjured by an attack of malaria. He was, for a microsecond or so, seated on the toiler and writing poetry. I proposed a 200,000-words novel about him called very simply Enderby. It might be more modest, and placatory of the gods of death, to compose something very much briefer called Inside Mr Enderby. Some day Enderby Outside might follow, and then he could be seen off in Enderby’s End. I envisaged an ugly middle-aged man very much on his own, a masturbating bachelor living in the identical furnished rooms Lynne and I were renting though mostly confining himself to the lavatory-bathroom, locked in against the world, writing purgative poems in a place of purgation. He has chosen the smallest room, but soon he must be dragged out to engage the biggest one, type of the great historical capitals, synchronically small but diachronically of large size. The Elizabethans pronounced Rome and room, as the Arabs still do.

Rome as the Church, and Rome as the actual city to which Enderby, married via a series of comic misadventures to a racing car driver’s widow, is taken ‘somewhat against his will’. The marriage is not consummated, and Enderby runs off; but his Muse (‘angry that he should have deserted her for a flesh and blood woman’) abandons him, and he can no longer write poetry. After an inept suicide attempt he is persuaded by Burgess’s perennial bogeymen, the agents of ‘the new Britain of socialist or materialist purpose’, to grow up. He ends the novel working as a barman in a Midlands hotel under the name Piggy Hogg, ‘not,’ Burgess opines in his memoir, ‘altogether a bitter conclusion.’ That pun on ‘bitter’ is exactly the sort of thing we can expect here. ‘End’, which refers of course to death, is also a euphemism for arse (‘rear end’), through which what is inside comes out. Burgess adds a compact world-historical account of the importance of bowels to culture, society and art—howsoever neglected it has latterly become. 'Up to the time of my writing the novel,' he faux-modestly asserts

fiction with the exception of Ulysses, where Mr Bloom spends more than a page in his outdoor jakes preferred to ignore the bowels. Rabelais did not ignore them, and Rabelais was right. Even sweetest Shakespeare names his melancholy character in As You Like It after a water closet and seems to equate depression with constipation. The Reformation has much to do with Luther's costiveness. Also, at the time of writing about Enderby, I suffered from profound dyspepsia.

A lovely touch, that apparently artless juxtaposition of Luther and Burgess, there. It's possible, having myself written a merdean novel (this one, as it happens), that I over-rate this novel, except that Burgess's vision is more flatulent than faecal. Enderby's passiveness is a function of his antiquated model of how poetry gets made: the poet a reed through which the Muse blows inspiration. This breath is not exactly parodied by being replaced by flatus; gusts over which we have relatively little control. The Chinese believed the stomach the seat of the soul because it is the only place in the body that vocalises independent of one's volition. Punched in the stomach outside a pub in London, his assailant asks him, kindly-enough, where he's going, so as to offer directions. '"Victoria," said Enderby's stomach gas, shaped into a word by tongue and lips.' [66]. The last poem Enderby completes before his Muse abandons him is an allegorical piece of schematic codmythopoeia called The Pet Beast, very windy-sounding if its summary is to be believed:

Almost at once his bowels reacted. He ran like a man in a comic film, sat down with a sigh and clicked on the bathroom heater. He scratched his bare legs and read, thoughtfully, the confused draft he was working on. Pfffrumpfff. It was an attempt at allegory, a narrative poem in which two myths were fused—the Cretan and the Christian A winged bull swooped from heaven in a howling wind. Wheeee. The law-giver's queen was ravished ... [gave] birth to the Minotaur, a god-man beast come to rule the world ... Minos had a labyrinth built, vast and superbly marbled, with the Minotaur hidden in its heart. It was a horror, unspeakable, reputedly fed on human flesh; it was the state's bogey, the state's guilt ... finally it was nailed to a cross where it died slowly. [18-19]

The Pet Beast. 'Pet', of course, is French for 'fart'.

So, yes: universal human business, this, universally hidden from view as horrible, unspeakable. Burgess, despite graciously excepting Ulysses, still gives himself too much credit for reintroducing what Bakhtin calls the 'lower bodily stratum' into English letters. If it is hidden, it's hidden in plain view. The word of Dickens Little Dorrit comes crashing down because of financial speculation by Mr Mr Merdle, after all; and Our Mutual Friend is set on a gigantic mountain of shit. We all eat and excrete as necessities of living. The writer does this, but also devours experience and shits out art. All texts are turds. After a manner of speaking.

This isn't to say that Burgess doesn't deserve credit for the bravura way in which he enmerdifies and flatulizes his imagination here, or to deny that there is something strange and unique to this book. Peter J. Smith's recent monograph, Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representation in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift (Manchester University Press 2012) argues that (in the words of David Palumbo) 'the two stools represent “two broadly distinctive attitudes towards scatological writing”: one, associated with Chaucer and Shakespeare, emphasising the “carnivalesque [and] merry”, the other expressing “self-disgust [and] withering misanthropy”. John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, and Jonathan Swift figure importantly in the second category ... Smith laments the loss of a perspective on scatology (available to medieval and Renaissance authors and readers) that understands and encourages interaction of the “two (very separate) stools” that have dominated scatological discourse.' Trying to locate Enderby on this divide is harder than you might think. It is, as I say above, an often genuinely funny novel; but one would hardly describe Burgess as a writer full of life, joy and sunshine. There's certainly a Swiftian grimness to the sordidness of the poet's life, and I even wondered if one reason the name Enderby struck Burgess as the right one is that its dactylic rhythm mimics Swift's 'Celia' in his most famous poem 'The Lady's Dressing Room'. The two main differences are, one, that Burgesss investment in Enderby is not primarily erotic, as Swift's was in Celia (it has sometimes occurred to me that Swift's choice of name Celia is a sort of pun linking the excremental and the erotic: the Latin cellula, or cella, means both a jakes and 'a room in a brothel'); and, two, that Burgess is simply not as disgusted by these bare facts of purgative humanity as Swift evidently was. It's really not that Burgess steals away repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Enderby, Enderby, Enderby shits! On the contrary; he draws all attention to this fact as so largely determining his character's life and art.

One reason the first half of this novel works rather better than the second, Enderby-honeymooning-in-Rome part, is that that's where Burgess captures a hidden truth about writers. I should probably say some writers. I could even just say me. The desire to closet oneself away and just get on with the writing is strong in some of our kind; the kind that dislikes all the palaver of proof-reading, publication, reviews, publicity and exposure, and would just like a life in which material needs are catered to so that the writing can be gotten-on-with. This, though, raises one of the novel's vexing imponderables. Is the point of Inside Mr Enderby that Enderby is a sordid man who happens to write great poetry, after the manner of Schaffer's Amadeus? Or are we supposed to read Enderby's poetry, a great many samples of which are supplied in the novel, and think (like Laurence Olivier's not-good singing and dancing in Osborne's The Entertainer) that they're supposed to be not very good?

In You've Had Your Time, Burgess mockingly quotes a Punch review of this poetry ('it would be helpful if Mr Burgess would indicate whether these poems are meant to be good or bad') adding: 'critical impotence cannot go much further' [138]. So I'll be clear: I'm not asking whether these poems are good or bad. I'm suggesting they are not good, and wondering whether this fact is advertent or inadvertent.

It matters, I think. The world of the novel treats Enderby's work as good if minor. He has fans who have memorised his sonnets; he wins small but significant prizes, the declining of which is reported in the papers. And there is one sense in which the novel clearly sets Enderby's poems as above other modes of bad poetry: Sir George Goodby, who sponsors the prize Enderby inadvertently declines. 'the volumes of Sir George's doggerel most memorable for badness were Metrical Yarns of a Pipeman, A Dream of Merrie England, Roseleaves of Memory and An Optimist Sings' [49]. At the awards, Sir George reads out 'with a voice pitched high and on one tuning fork note, a poem of fourteen lines which was certainly no sonnet':

It had verdant meads in it, and a sun with effulgent rays, also—for some reason—a rosy-bosomed earth. Enderby preoccupied with the need to suppress his body's noises, heard only fragments of an exquisitely bad poem and he nodded approvingly to show that he considered Sir George to have made a very good choice of an illustrative example of very bad poetry. As the last line scrannel-piped wretchedly out, Enderby felt a particularly loud noise coming, so he covered it with a laugh.

Ha ha (perrrpf) ha.

Enderby's poetry obviously isn't bad after the manner of this kind of badness. But the verse has a kind of inertness to it, a mannered and verbal tricksiness that lags just shy of eloquence, or at least of the kind of eloquence that sinks into one's imagination. An example. Here's the sonnet that Vesta Bainbridge, afterwards briefly Mrs Enderby, having memorised, repeats back to its approving author. Does the fact that Burgess printed it elsewhere (as one of 'Five Revolutionary Sonnets' in The Transatlantic Review, 1966), and re-used it in his final work, the verse novel Byrne, mean that he really rated it?

A dream, yes, but for everyone the same.
The thought that sewed it never dropped a stitch.
The Absolute was anybody's pitch.
For, when a note was struck, we knew its name.
That dark aborted any urge to tame
Waters that day might prove to be a ditch
But then were endless growling oceans, rich
In fish and heroes, till the dredgers came.
Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock
Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires;
A martin's nest clogged the cathedral clock,
But it was morning (birds could not be liars).
A key cleft rusty age in lock and lock;
Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

One might describe this is somewhere between Empson and Dylan Thomas, but without the precision of the former or the sheer force of the latter. Octave is about the dream life (somehow both stitched like embroidery, and sonic like the music of the Absolute and the growling of oceans. What?). Sestet is about waking to a cold morning. The preponderance of monosyllables gives the lines a plodding, stompy feel; a dunghill cock doesn't escape being an antiquated cliché on a par with Sir George's verdant meads just because a dunghill is less prepossessing than a meadow; I don't get how the endless growling oceans (too many double-adjectives in Enderby's writing tout court, I think) can be 'rich' in heroes 'until the dredgers came': what, drowned heroes littering the seabed? How is that 'rich'? (one of Enderby's collections is called Fish and Heroes. Is that relevant?) Why is the English cock shouting wake up in German? Is it supposed to be more onomatopoeic than cockadoodledoo? I don't see that, myself. The parenthesis in the antepenultimate line is a false step, I think, breaking the flow and spraining the build-up to the final couplet. The pun on cleft and key distracting rather than expressive, and 'a key cleft' is too much a tongue-twister to say aloud. I'm nitpicking, but I'm nitpicking in the dark (as it were): is this my personal crotchet, or is this supposed to be a poem that just falls short of working?

A much better example of an onomatopoeic joke comes right at the beginning, when time travellers from a future where Enderby is a revered poetic figure explore his flat at nighttime, whilst the poet himself slumbers. Science fiction see? The students handle his papers, pick up his combs and brushes ('the imitation-silver-backed brushes bequeathed by his father. The bristles are indeed dirty') to pluck out hairs as souvenirs, and peer up somnolent Enderby's nose ('the nose is, at forty five,' opines the time travelling teacher, 'past its best as an organ, the black twitching caverns—each with its miniature armpit—stuffed and obtuse' [13]). But they are clumsy, knock things over in the kitchen and cause pepper to go everwhere. The teacher sneezes: 'Aaaaaarch! Howrashyourare!' Much better worldplay. And the final paragraph of the opening chapter works much better, as poetry, than anything written in Enderby's closet:

Look down on all those Victorian roofs, fishscaled under the New-Year moon. You will never see them again. Nor any of this town, in whose flats and lodgings the retired and dying wheeze away till dawn. It is all very much like a great hair comb, isn't it?—the winking jewelled handle, the avenues of teeth combing the hinterland of downs, the hair-ball of smoke which is the railway station. Above us the January sky: Scutum, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius, the planets of age and war and love westering. [17]

Lovely stuff.

Anyway, back to the story. The Pet Beast is plagiarised by an unscrupulous fellow-poet into the screenplay of a major motion picture L'Animal Binato, which later becomes a big hit in the West as Son of the Beast from Outer Space. Enderby rails impotently against this theft; and moreover proves unable to consummate his marriage. Finally he rebels against his new wife's attempt to convert him back to Catholicism. Alone, Museless, he tries to commit suicide by overdosing on aspirin. This fails, but not before he has a hysterical vision of the-horror-the-horror as a kind of monstrous feminine blackness of his dead stepmother:

There she was, welcoming him in, farting prrrrrrp like ten thousand earthquakes, belching arrrp and og like a million volcanoes, while the whole universe roared with approving laughter. She swung tits like sagging moons at him, drew from black teeth an endless snake of bacon-rind, pelted him with balls of ear-wax and snuffled green snot in his direction. The thrones roared and the powers were helpless. Enderby was suffocated by smells: sulphuretted hydrogen, unwashed armpits, halitosis, faeces, standing urine, putrefying meat - all thrust into his mouth and nostrils in squelchy balls. 'Help,' he tried to call. 'Help help help.' He fell, crawled, crying, 'Help, help.' The black, which was solid laughter and filth, closed on him. He gave one last scream before yielding to it.

Solid laughter and filth. Laughing at, not laughing with. The abject will eventually rise up and stifle us horribly; and in some sense this abject is Woman. Burgess is not disgusted that Enderby shits; but he is evidently deeply alarmed that the cosmos squats overhead, and we're living in its pan. Universe, Universe, Universe s----!

Burgessculum: The Eve of Saint Venus (1952; 1964; 1981)

An 'opusculum', is what Burgess calls this novella: the Latin diminutive of opus, work. A little work, then: and, appropriately, it doesn't really work, or only works in trivial ways. It's a comedy of errors premised on the eruption of Greek love-goddess Aphrodite into the upper-crust English society of the 1950s/60s: Ambrose (a dull, worthy young man training to be an architect) will marry Diana ('a good plain English dinner ... neither ugly nor beautiful, wholesomely neutral' [70]) at the stately home of her father, the bibulous Sir Benjamin Bulwer Drayton. Ambrose, wandering the grounds, decides to practice the ring-putting-on art of the impending ceremony, and slips the wedding band onto the finger of a statue of Venus he finds there. Said statue then comes alive, claims Ambrose as her husband. The vicar thinks her a demon, and tries to exorcise her, but without success. There are various high-jinxs and reversals. The statue is struck by lightning and Ambrose is released from the divine bondage; but Venus has 'risen' through the whole village. Everyone frolics. Ambrose has new backbone; Diana, who had been contemplating running off with the importunate Julia, a 'notorious lesbian' (in Burgess's dated and cringe-inducing phrase), changes her mind. She marries Ambrose. All ends happily, with much singing and dancing and implied shagging.

The edition I read was the 1981 paperback reprint, issued, rather wonderfully, to try and cash-in on the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Hindsight makes cynics of us all, of course; and the fawning Burgess undertakes in the new introduction strikes the 21st-century reader with a delightfully vinegary tang. We all know how 'Charles & Di' worked out, after all:

I offer this little fantasy about love and marriage and the goddess who presides over one if not the other as a loyal tribute to the Prince of Wales and his bride. In a book I published a year or two ago, a grim prophesy of an unOrwellian future called 1985, I presented the Prince as an already crowned king with a beautiful dark-haired queen. I got the beauty right but the hair wrong.

'I believe in marriage,' Burgess signs-off his intro, 'and this book is light-hearted testimony to that belief.' Lightness in literature is hard to do, actually, and is certainly a worthwhile ambition. Lightness can achieve effects unavailable to, and truths inexpressible by, heavy, dark and tragic. But lightness cannot be forced, and one era's 'lightness' too often becomes a subsequent era's dated quaintness, or wincing falsity. If I say I didn't believe this novella, I don't mean in the facile sense that a story about statues of Venus coming to life inevitably strains credulity. I mean in the deeper sense: that the book doesn't seem to me to have anything very interesting or insightful to say about love, sexual desire or marriage.

I know, I know. Who breaks a butterfly, or in this case a burgessfly, upon a wheel? The 1981 intro is decently self-effacing about the whole thing:

I wrote this opusculum in 1952, when I had no ambition to be an author and was convinced that my real talent lay in musical composition. I wished to write an opera, and the legend recounted by Florilegus, which I found in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy—the tale of a young man who, placing his wedding ring on the finger of a statue of Venus in his father's garden, finds himself wed to the goddess—struck me as promising material for an operetta libretto. I wrote the libretto, but discovered it was far too long ... I refashioned the work as the novella here presented, and then, since I did not consider myself to be a novelist, placed the manuscript in a drawer.

This origin explains the stock nature of the characters, selected for their respective vocal identities ('Sir Benjamin bass, Ambrose tenor, Diana soprano' and so on) rather than any depth or truth-to-life, something Burgess is frank about. The piece, he says, is 'commedia del'Aldwych' that uses 'certain stock personages associated with long dead actors like Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn and Robertson Hare, who graced the Aldwych Theatre for many years in the farces of Ben Travers' [8]. But he also boasts slyly of the books 'dangerous theological theme', and there I think he overestimates what the book offers. It's an early iteration of the One Hand Clapping and Clockwork Orange thesis, that the welfare state and too much material comfort has in some secret, nefarious manner robbed modern humanity of the capacity to sin, and therefore leeched all real zest and force from life. The vicar complains:

Nobody sins any more and sin, after all, ought to be my business. I envy doctors: they have diseases. But what have I except the same old round of joyless fornications, mechanical slanders, malice clothed as self-righteousness? I see some point in people doing wrong so long as they do it zestfully. But where there's no zest there's no sin. Really we might as well be back in the Garden of Eden. [47]

His interlocutor agrees ('the concept of sin seems to be dead. It's been expelled from the Garden. Freud and Marx hold up their flaming swords') but insists: 'surely that's a good thing?

'It's an atrocious thing,' said the Vicar. 'It's killed both kinds of good living. It's removed a dimension from our lives. We've all lost that incense-laden thrill we used to get from the exciting knowledge that if you pulled up the floorboards you would find a deliciously bottomless pit. What have we instead? Right and wrong, with their interchangeable wardrobes and the police-courts, temples of a yawning, neutral god with a relish for disinfectants. [48]

There's too little, though, of this promising critique in the book as it stands. The Vicar's objection (a fair one) is that when life becomes too safe, something crucial dies. But safe is the length and breadth of this artificial, mannered exercise in neo-Paganism. Opuscu-lame.

I'd read The Eve of Saint Venus before, and it was in my head as his least successful book: arch and forced and twee, qualities almost never present in his other writing. Re-reading it made me a little mellower. It's probably not as bad as I'm making out here. This time around I found, for instance, Sir Benjamin's swearing less excruciating. Here, in the opening passage of the book, he is having a go at his maid, Spatchcock ('an ugly girl but a girl of spirit'):

'Clusterfist. Slipshot demisemiwit.' Sir Benjamin Drayton's swearing was always too literary to be really offensive. 'Decerebrated clodpoles, that's all we have, that's all we have. Sense? Sense, you garboil, you ugly lusk, you unsavoury mound of droppings, sense? ... You chuffcat. Must I be foiled, fooled, fouled at every turn by wanton smashers and deliberate defilers? ... Youlees, you leavings, you flasket of unwholesome guts.' [11]

And so on. I won't lie: first time I read this I rolled my eyes. Re-reading it, I sensed an echo of Stephen Fry swearing at Hugh Laurie as a tramp (avant la letter, obviously) that made it more palatable, and even, distantly, amusing. It works from time to time, but mostly it doesn't. It works a little. It is a little work.

The Venerable Mead: Honey for the Bears (1963)

Dead before the novel gets going, and present only in the anxious, conflicted memory of his onetime best friend (the novel's protagonist Paul Hussey), ex RAF Englishman Robert had a little scam he worked with a contact in the USSR. He would come to Leningrad, posing as a tourist, but in fact illicitly smuggling in western clothes in his luggage. 'Twenty dozen chemical fabric dresses bought wholesale at thirty-shillings each, sold at fifteen roubles each to a certain P. V. Mizinchikov. Fifteen roubles at the unrealistic Gosbank rate was, say, six pounds. Total gross profit for Robert, say, one thousand and eighty pounds; net profit (deduct fare, subsistence, drinks and smokes) about one thousand. Mizinchikov's own profit in that country bloated with cosmonauts, starved of consumer goods—well, that was his own affair' [19-20]. But Robert has dropped dead of a heart-attack, and his widow Sandra has run off to Keswick with a new beau. So Paul Hussey, whom the Russians ('an aitchless race'. 59) insist on calling Paul Gussey, has agreed to follow-through on his late friend's plan.

Paul is a middle-aged, English antiques dealer, with a short temper and bad teeth, and has some close relationship to Burgess himself. Paul's wife, Belinda, is another fictional iteration of Lynne Burgess: voluptuous, drunk, unpredictable. She gets ill with a debilitating rash that flares up and down and necessitates her hospitalisation. Left to his own devices, Paul has a series of grotesque, surreal adventures in Leningrad.

The novel, in fact, is based upon a trip Anthony and Lynne Burgess took to the old USSR in 1960. Indeed, judging by the account Burgess gives in You've Had Your Time, the first half of the novel is pretty much a straight one-for-one transposition:

We had had no trouble with the fatherly customs officer on board who, sparking vigorously from his papirosa, dropped ash on the two suitcases full of polyester shift dresses, admiring that a Western lady should require so many clothes. My copy of Doctor Zhivago intended as a decoy, he ignored. Walking the long road to a taxi stop near some decayed ornamental gardens was arduous, what with all those dresses and the rest of the gear. Not much of a holiday so far. Leningrad seemed at first nothing but carious warehouse façades and a smell of drains and cheap tobacco. There was a Manchester or perhaps Salford atmosphere about it. But the Neva shone, as for the ghost of Pushkin, and the architecture of the city centre was impressive, though it was not a Soviet achievement. I told the taxi driver that he lived in a beautiful city. He shrugged. He was entering the depressive phase of a cycle that seemed to me more Celtic than Slav, Lynne ought to get on well here.

Everything mentioned here, from the decoy copy of Пастерна́к's celebrated novel, right down to the manic-depressive taxi driver, appear in Honey for the Bears. On the other hand, it's always possible that the notorious unreliability of Burgess's memorious accounts in his two-volume autobiography is here deliberately rewriting his life via his fiction.

The second half of the book diverges, one assumes, from Burgess's actual experiences. The ship bringing them across from Tilbury is also transporting a large group of Soviet-approved musical composers, together with a deputation of young British communists, Len Sparts from the Dagenham branch of the Judean People's Front, or at least characterised by Burgess after the manner of that particular English establishment sneery-satirical tradition. At a boozy party onboard, Paul deprecates the clunky proletarian music being played, is hollered down by the British communists ('ah shut it,' sneered the students. 'Drop dead') and reacts.

Paul felt a pentecostal wind blow through him; his cheeks tingled; he stood up ad cried: 'How about Oposkin?' There was a shock of silence. 'Come on,' said Paul, more softly, 'tell us what you know about Oposkin. What we want to know is—what have you done with Oposkin?' He could not for the life of him explain to himself why he had suddenly become so passionate about Oposkin. He was an antique-dealer living quietly in East Sussex, going to Russia to do someone a favour. It was not even as if he were really all that interested in Oposkin, or music at all for that matter. He seemed to have become, for this exciting instant, a mere passive voice to be used by some numinous force supremely concerned about Oposkin. Or, of course, about freedom, whatever that was. [11-12]

Oposkin is a composer hounded out of the USSR for reactionary formalism who later died. There is a suspicion that he was bumped off by the KGB. But it was Paul's friend Robert who was passionate about Oposkin, not Paul himself. His seemingly under-motivated action in shouting his name leads, windingly through the novel's overstuffed middle section, into a final act plot to smuggle the composer's son out of the country. Meanwhile, both Paul and his wife have a series of sexual encounters. The implication in the first section of the novel is that Belinda was having an affair with now-deceased Robert; but the truth is less conventionally heterosexual. Belinda in fact was sleeping with Sandra. Paul ponders his own sexuality confusedly. He is attracted to women, and makes an aggressive pass at the girlfriend of a Russian lad in whose flat he is staying; but in the war he himself had sex with Robert. 'It was during the war. He was in a terrible state. A flier, you know. It seemed natural. But not since, I swear' Paul explains to a Soviet doctor. Then, straying into protesting-too-much territory, he adds: 'it happened a lot during the war. All life is a matter of adjustment and readjustment. And then men went back to their wives quite happily and were quite normal ever after. I don't think you're being fair to me.' [108]

***

There's a fair amount of Russian in the novel, and some linguistic terminology and pondering: Burgess is upfront that Paul's (and so, we assume, Burgess's own) Russian is poor, patchy and often abandons him. Nonetheless more fluent Russianphones have not been kind to him in this novel. Oleg Ivsky, reviewing the novel in the Library Journal (1 February 1964) found 'the constant parading of Mr Burgess’s nauseating brand of pidgin Russian' to be 'particularly obnoxious’. Amazon reader A T Colqhuhon, whilst less showily condemnatory is actually rather more damning when s/he complains that 'this novel is very much marred by the fact that Burgess does not speak (or know) Russian as well as he thinks he does'.

We can unpick some of Burgess's language games. Take the title: Paul's wife Belinda is the honey. Named by her English literature professor father after the heroine of The Rape of the Lock, in Russia she switches, as it were, from a diminutive of Belle, lovely, to a diminutive of милая, one of the Russian words for honey. (I wonder if Burgess explained his authorial pseudonym to Russians only to have it bounced back to him as 'Antony Mburgess'; or perhaps 'Anthony Vurgess'?) The bears are the Russians, of course (медведь, or медведка. This word contains within it another Russian word for honey, мед, presumably on account of the well documented ursine fondness for that substance). And indeed I wonder if Burgess chose his rather awkward English title because he liked the reduplication of its Russian equivalent: Мед для медведей. Med: this word is cognate with the English 'Mead', both being descended, as the dictionaries of etymology inform us, from Proto-Indo-European *médʰu 'honey'. Hence the title of this post, for honey's sweetness and Mead's alcoholic transports, both central to this novel, are venerable human pleasures indeed.

Other details are simply transferred over from Burgess's dabblings in Russian culture. Tracing some of these back to source suggests that this may not have been as extensive as all that. For instance, 'Oposkin' is a name Burgess found in Dostoevsky: the charlatanic main character in his novel, The Village of Stepanchikovo (1859).  In Honey, Oposkin's masterwork is an opera called Akulina Panfilovna, unperformable in the USSR, whose score was 'slyly sent off to Costoletta in Milan', and afterwards also staged at Covent Garden. Akulina Panfilovna is the name of a pretty young character from Dostoevsky's Uncle's Dream (also 1859). The final act of Burgess's drama sees Paul smuggle out Oposkin's son, despite pursuit by the police. After they have reached Helsinki, and the young fellow has disappeared into the West, Paul discovers that he wasn't Oposkin's son after all (the composer had no son), but was rather a man called Stepan V. Obnoskin. This surname is also lifted from Dostoevsky's The Village of Stepanchikovo. There are inevitable references to and elements adapted from War and Peace (Война и миръ/Voyna i mir); deliberately debased as per the broader satiric purpose. Late in the novel Paul is arrested and beaten up by the police; on his hands and knees he 'opened his mouth as if to pray and ballooned our an astonishing mess ... Rvota i krov [рвота и кровь]: vomit and blood. That would make a good enough title for a new Russian epic of violence' [169]

The 'Russian-ness' of the novel is not only linguistic. One of the ways it succeeds is by setting before the reader a very vivid sense of place (and, inevitably, time). Burgess is excellent on the telling detail: the shabbiness and occasional splendour; the 'out of order' signs everywhere, the lack of traffic and advertising billboards in the wide streets, the smell of Russian cigarettes. Cannily, he also layers over the first-hand observations of 'actual' Russia a number of overlapping fantasies of 'mythic Russia', of the sort that Western travellers are liable to carry with them when they visit. First, Paul, in a Leningrad taxi:

As they drove south Paul's heart ached, but not for Belinda. In his soul was a great plangent song for Russia, Russia, Russia, a compassion hardy to be borne. But why? It was not up to him to feel anything for Russia, these grimy warehouses, these canals, the Venetian Salford on which an irrelevant and perhaps disregarded metaphysic had been plastered. But with an inexplicable sob in his throat he gathered to himself the city, all the cities, all the lonely shabby towns he had never seen, the railway trains chuffing between them with wood sparks crackling from their funnels, the wolves desolate on the steppes, the savage bell-clang of Kiev's great gate, dead Anna Karenina under the wheels, the manic crashing march of the Pathetic Symphony, hopeless homosexual dead Tchaikovsky, the exiled and the assassinated, the boots, knouts, salt-eaten skin, the graves dug in the ice, poor poor dead Robert. [71-72]

This last touch, via hopeless homosexual dead Tchaikovsky, suggests the centre of gravity of this sudden access of pity is self-, of course. But there's a palpable charge to the writing here, for all that it is a collation of cliché. The passage is paired with a second much later in the book, voiced by the wheelchair-bound, hermaphroditic 'Dr Tiresias', a rather sinister British individual involved in some (s/he claims Scarlet Pimpernel-like) trafficking to and from of cultural artefacts and people under the pretense of an 'Angleruss' organisation. Tiresias considers the Revolution a disaster and his/her vision of Russia is one of a chocolate-box nostalgia:

Ah, the bottom fell out of things when the Tsar and family were so brutally liquidated. That is the modern term, you know: "liquidated". Old Rapustin and his dirt. Still, there was glamour. A first-class French cuisine in the hotels, a comfortable journey from Petrograd to Moscow—foot-muffs and samovars—and the land under fairy snow: ah, lovely! [198]

This is deliberately flatter and less affecting. Dr Tiresias turns out to be  a sham, or at least a relict of a dead past. Such a world cannot be resurrected.

***

'Dr Tiresias', whatever his/her name actually is, embodies what I presume to be one of the main thematic foci of the novel. Honey for the Bears is fascinated with hermaphroditism, or perhaps with a sense of the incoherence of insisting upon a rigid distinction between male and female. The very first lines of the novel are given to our Waste-Land-y intersex observer:

When I first read that, I wondered if Burgess was having a pop at Bertrand Russell with this character; but as the novel goes on you realise how unRussellian the Doctor is. And whilst it's possible that s/he has foresuffered all enacted on this same divan or bed (in Alexei's flat, where he rents space for a week, Paul presses his sexual attentions first on a girl and then a group of boys), s/he's really not the kind of person to spend his/her time sitting by Leningrad below the wall and walking among the lowest of the dead. The point has little or nothing to do with actual Trans identity. It is Burgess projecting his thematic dialectic of 'masculine' West meeting 'feminised' East (it's your basic Orientalism 101, see), rendered with more sophistication by the fact that the book is well aware that elements of the West are feminine, elements of East masculine -- in order to suggest a melding, or a moving beyond. At the end of the book Dr Tiresias announces:

'Russia,' said the Doctor, ruminatively. 'I think we must move on, Madox and I. Towards the East. I am tired of categories, of divisions, of opposites. Good, evil; male, female; positive, negative. That they interpenetrate is no real palliative, no ointment for the cut. What I seek is the continuum, the merging. Europe is all Manichees; Russia has become the most European of them all.' [201]

This is what underpins both the confusion of sexual orientation, or rather the oddly vague bisexualty, of the novel's main character. This is also behind the Carry-On staged ludicrousness of the scenes in which Oposkin fils/Obnoskin is smuggled out dressed as Paul's wife. The fellow is hyperbolically male: 'burliness, ill-shaven forearms and massive neck' plus a 'leeringly masculine' face [203]. But it's de rigueur in English comedy that put Bernard Bresslaw in a dress and, oh the hilarity, all the red blooded men who encounter him lust pantingly for him. When I was a kid I suppose I thought the joke here is that people are stupid. Now I wonder if the 'joke' is that English men are closeted homosexuals who need only the flimsiest of pretexts to abandon their forced impressions of arousal at the sight of a topless Barbara Windsor. At any rate, no sooner has Oposkin jr/Obnoskin been bunged in a dress and ushered from Paul's hotel then the comedy takes its inevitable Bresslavian turn:

The hotel was full of guests arriving for the Angleruss dinner. A fat little man in a blue uniform cast a look of desire at young Oposkin. Young Oposkin giggled. He had been told to open his mouth only to giggle; he was supposed to be an English lady. he spoke naturally a deep blurred Russian and nothing else. [206]

I'm being too dismissive; the final act, when Paul smuggles this guy out of the country, is apprehended on the boat, met by Russian police in Helsinki and still manages to get 'young Oposkin' away, is both funny and surprisingly tense. It's the larger thematic that's a little clod-footed. Still: overall an extremely evocative, entertaining and richly written novel.

Jean Pélégri, The Olive-Trees of Justice (1959; 1962)

In You've Had Your Time, Burgess recalls the early 1960s, when impoverishment impelled him to all sorts of literary labour:

If I considered a book from France or Italy worthy of translation, I would sometimes be offered a hundred pounds to do the job myself. The contract specified 'good literary English', whatever that was. Lynne and I stayed up for most of the night, on three very minor French novels. With the help of the big Cassell's dictionary she would rough out the English and I would then gorblimey it into the good literary form required. But Lynne's tenses were weak, and she would confuse imperfects and conditionals. This would entail cursing retyping and dawn threats of suicide. I sometimes improved the style of the Frenchman, so much so that when The Olive Trees of Justice appeared in America (Les Oliviers de la Justice, by Jean Pelligri), a critic acclaimed its elegance and searing imagery and asked why Anglo-Saxon novelists could not write like that. [35-36]

It's not exactly encouraging that Burgess gets the name of the author wrong here, though what's an extra 'l' (perhaps standing for Lynne, who did the groundwork for the translation) amongst friends. At any rate, I've ordered a copy of the translation from eBay, and a copy of the original from amazon.fr, and when they arrive I shall compare them to see how much of the book is original Burgess. I suspect the answer will be: not much. At any rate, I'll report back.

I am sorry to confess that Jean Pélégri was a name unknown to me, until I chanced upon this reference. Wikipedia makes him sound like an interesting writer, and quotes Mohammed Dib from 2003, the year of the man's death: 'Jean Pélégri, Algerian by birth and one of the great writers of our time, greater than Albert Camus in any case, remains unknown in France. Why? Because he tried so hard to mark his terrority as an Algerian that he created a different kind of French language just for his own use. And for that, French readers rejected him.' Intriguing.

----
[Update: 15th June] My French copy finally arrived, and I've been able to look at the two side by side. The novel itself is a striking, if (deliberately) attenuated story: the narrator relates life in French Algeria in the mid 1950s; the constant threat of Arab terrorism (or freedom fighting), the hardscrabble existence. Mostly he is concerned with the death of his father, Michel. The first two thirds of the novel trace the old man's decline and eventual demise. The final third sees him buried, and the country finally igniting. French-Algerian Pélégri ends with a panegyric to Arab-Algerians, 'ces-hommes là, si tendres, si charitables, que nous avions tout refusé même la plus simple des justices', and a cry for peace. It is these men, the book says, who are the true oliviers de la justice. Most of the book is closely described landscapes, rooms, the paraphernalia of ordinary life. This is how Pélégri opens his novel:

C'était un samedi, un samedi d'été comme les autres, le dernier samedi du mois d'août, et je ne me doutais pas, non, je ne me doutais pas que mon père le lendemain matin allait mourir. [LODLJ, 13]

Here's Burgess:

It was Saturday, a typical Saturday in the summer, the last Saturday in August, and I had not the slightest doubt that, the following morning, my father was going to die. [TOTOJ, 11]

If we're looking for evidence of fancyfying and gorblimeying of the French, this, with its rather plainer English (omitting for instance the flourish with which Pélégri repeats the phrase 'je ne me doutais pas') is liable to disappoint. Not that it's badly done: only that the implication that P.'s style is plain and B. titivated it isn't borne out by comparison. Some examples:

Je m'étais assis derrière le chauffeur, près d'une fenêtre ouverte. Cependant, même en pleine course, l'air restait chaud. La blancheur des murs brûlait les yeux et quand, en croisant une auto, étincelait un chrome ou un pare-brise, cela blessait, comme une lame. [LODLJ, 13]

I sat down behind the driver, near an open window, but even when we were going at full speed the air was still hot. The whiteness of the walls seared the eye, and when another car came in sight the sparkle of chromium-plating or a windscreen struck like a knife-blade. [TOTOJ, 24]

Sur le balcon, dans la lumière électrique, les géraniums rouges semblaient phosphorescents. Ce soir, c'était la mort qui rôdait. La rue était déserte, plongée dans un silence anormal. [LODLJ, 62]

On the balcony under the electric light the red geraniums seemed to have a phosphorescent glow. That evening death was on the prowl. The street was deserted, plunged in an abnormal silence. [TOTOJ, 50]

Le mur de briques était percé d'une ouverture basse, derrière laquelle s'ouvrait une petite grotte. On se courbait pour y entrer, comme pour le marabout du palmier, on se faisait petit. Et là, au fond de cette crèche humide, doucement éclairée par la lampe, on apercevait enfin, au milieu d'un bouquet de bulles, blottie dans son nid d'argile, palpitante, vernant de naître, la source! [LODLJ, 158]

The brick wall was pierced by a deep hole behind which a little grotto opened out. You had to bend down and make yourself small in order to get in, just as you had to for the shrine under the palm-tree. And at the bottom of this damp crèche, softly lighted by a lamp, you could see at last—in the middle of a cluster of bubbles, snuggled down in its nest of mud, the palpitations of the stream which had just been born. [TOTOJ, 128]

A cause de chaleur, la place du Gouvernement était déserte, comme un champ à l'heure de la sieste. C'était là, autrefois, que je venais chercher la verité.... Mais avant d'aller vers la mer, j'ai voulu continuer un peu, jusqu'à cette impasse toute proche où je venais souvent avec mon fils, et que nous appelions l'Impasse aux Oiseaux. Au coucher du soleil, en effet, les oiseaux s'y rassemblent sure les fils électriques, par centaines, par milliers, et c'est un jacassment assourdissant. [LODLJ, 224]

Because of the heat, Government Square was deserted, like a field at siesta time. It was here that, in the past, I had come looking for truth .... But before proceeding towards sea, I wanted to go on a little farther, as far as a near-by dead-end where I often went with my son and which we called 'the cul-de-sac of the birds'. Indeed at sunset the birds would assemble on the telegraph wires in their hundreds, in their thousands, and their chatter was deafening [TOTOJ, 181]

This is all perfectly fine translation; but it cleaves very closely to the original ('plunged' for 'plongée', 'damp crèche' for 'crèche humide' and so on) in a way that rather suggests a translator hugging the shore. Does the job, mind you.

I went through pretty closely looking for evidence of stylistic enrichment, without finding any. Occasionally a sentence (let's say: 'tu t'enfonçais toujours davantage dans le noir de ce puits sans fond', 163) is rendered in a way that sort-of foregrounds a self-consciousness literariness: not 'you sank ever deeper into the darkness of that bottomless well', but AB's 'you penetrated the blackness, sinking deeper and deeper into the bottomless well' [131]. But it's not much. Moments you might think are sly Burgessisms turn out not to be, as when the narrator finds it hard to believe that the Archangel Gabriel could talk to Mohammed in Arabic (as his Arab servant insists he did) and also to the Virgin Mary in Hebrew (as the priest says), and declares: 'I couldn't accept the idea of a polyglot Archangel Gabriel' [143]. Actually this is straight from the French: 'je ne pouvais me faire à l'idée d'un archange Gabriel polyglotte' [175]. Overall I adjudge Burgess's account of his role as that of rewriter-cum-improver to be a big fib. He instead has, to his credit, produced a close, readable and accurate translation. Ah well.

The Wanting Seed (1962)

This is the first Burgess title I've read on this chronological go-through that seems to me really not to work. I'm not saying it's a bad book. It's readable, some of the set-pieces are very well handled, and the whole is thought provoking. But nonetheless, there's something in the machinery of the book that grinds, or catches, and the result halts and groans, somehow. Put it this way: there is a genuinely interesting conceit, or rather a schematic theory of history, behind this book. The problem is that Burgess does a rather intermittent job of realising this theory in a coherent dramatic-narrative structure.

The setting is the near-future dystopia of a massively overpopulated world, freed from war by a quasi-sovietised autocratic state. The world groans under the bulk mass of humanity. London stretches from the south coat to Norwich and as far west as Bristol. Food is synthetic, unappetising and in short supply; global resources are depleted and now mass-die-offs are killing all the fish. In a prescient anticipation of China's 'one child policy' (not adopted until 1979; in the 60s Mao was still exhorting Chinese citizens to have as many children as possible), Burgess posits a strict law limiting couples to a single child, with severe penalities for the over-fecund. The state also encourages individuals to sterilise themselves, and homosexuality is actively encouraged, to the point where heterosexual people suffer social stigma and some pretend to be gay in order to advance their careers. Our hero, Tristram Foxe, is passed over for promotion because he is straight, and because his family has a history of over-breeding. He is bitter at this, and gets drunk. Meanwhile his wife, Beatrice-Joanna Foxe, is having an affair with Tristram's brother Derek, a ruthless individual who is passing as gay in order to improve his prospects for promotion.

First, then, the theory. It's symptomatic of the novel's approach to its Big Theme that Burgess sets the story going with a schoolteacher literally lecturing bored schoolkids about the specifics of the Big Theme. In SF nowadays we call this kind of thing 'infodumping'. Tristram Foxe is the schoolteacher, named presumably for a Holy-Grail-Restore-Life-To-The-Wasted-Land Arthurian associations of the Christian name, and perhaps nodding at 16th-century priest John Foxe, of Foxe's Martyrs fame, who became a Protestant in part out of opposition to the principle of clerical celibacy (he described this in letters to his friends as 'self-castration'). It's a little unclear how far Tristram is teaching official ideology, and how much is his own idiosyncratic view on the matter: there is a mile-high statue overlooking the English channel, of Pealgius, or Augustine, depending, which suggests the former. At any rate, Tristram tells his kids that history is cyclical, characterised by three phases: Pelphase, Interphase, and Gusphase. Pelphase is so-called after Pelagius, who believed in the intrinsic goodness of human beings. Condemned as a heretic by Augustine, Pelagius is taken by Burgess to be the representative figure for all social philosophies predicated upon the perfectibility of humankind, of which socialism and Communism are (he implies) the latest. 'Pelagius' means 'from the sea', and there's a great wash of sea imagery and seaside scenes in the novel. Tristram says: 'a government functioning in its Pelagian phase commits itself to the belief that man is perfectible, that perfection can be achieved by his own efforts, and that the journey towards perfection is along a straight road." Gusphase is Augustinian and predicated upon the belief in the innate wickedness of human beings, conceptualised by many in terms of original sin. Men must be restrained, punished and given particular structures to live. The 'interphase' is the time of transition from one to the other: a time of excessive brutality, police torture and savagery, social chaos and violence. The novel opens in Pelphase but is more concerned, really, with Interphase: ('"Brutality!" cried Tristram. The class was at last interested. "Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn".')

So far so stiff: as grand theories of history go, it's not the most convincing I've ever heard. What lifts it out of mere artificiality is the motor of change that Burgess proposes: they are the dialectically connected forces of disappointment on the one hand, and on the other its antonym, being-pleasantly-surprised (is there a single word with that precise meaning in English?). According to Tristram, the problem with 'Pelphase' is precisely that people believe humanity to be better than it is, and so are continually being disappointed. This, rather than the sheer pressure of overpopulation and environmental degradation, is what propels the breakdown. Conversely, what brings 'Gusphase' to an end is exactly the opposite of this: people assume human beings are so deeply sinful and wicked, they end up being repeatedly surprised by how much better they actually are. This, I think, is interesting: I'm not sure I know of another book that treats disappointment as having such world-changing power. Yet there's something insightful and true about this: disappointment is surely a much more potent force in the world than is generally understood. We are less troubled by bad behaviour, even quite severe delinquency, from people of whom we expect nothing better; and often disproportionately troubled by more trivial transgressions by people of whom we had high hopes. Burgess's originality is in imagining this as a social as well as an individual phenomenon.

There are problems, though. The novel is caught uneasily between on the one hand a (by 1962, standard in SF) doomsday narrative of society collapsing under the weight of overpopulation, and on the other a more abstracted sense that society will collapse because of the structural forces of disappointment tipping Pelphase into Interphase. It's hard to shake the sense that overpopulation, here, is supererogatory to the social breakdown Burgess wants to delineate; although I suppose we could instead say that that breakdown (the main 'event' of the book) is, as the phrase goes, over-determined. Things in life often are. More worrying, perhaps, is the sense that the paraphernalia of state oppression, police torture and so on, are features only of the Interphase; the Pelphase has almost no need for police, it seems (hard to believe, but there you go) and the Gusphase is only sketched-in. In neither of those cases did I believe it.

Then there's the story Burgess sets out to tell. As with many of his early novels, this is disposed, like an Elizabethan drama, into five acts. The first, 'Part One', sets-up the world summarised in my second paragraph, up there. Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna have already had their one permitted child. He died an infant. We see their misery, and understand that Beatrice-Joanna's affair with Derek is in part reaction to this. Then we get four more-or-less disconnected novella-length episodes.

Act 2: Beatrice-Joanna discovers she is pregnant, probably via Derek. Since this puts her in contravention of the law she leaves her husband and flees the city to stay with her sister in the countryside. Meanwhile the interphase is beginning: Tristram is caught up in a riot and, though blameless, is locked up in prison. He appeals to his brother (now high up in the government) to have him released, threatening to reveal him as a heterosexual and the father of an illicit child to boot if he doesn't; but Derek coldly decides his brother will be less bother safely behind bars.

Act 3: society descends to chaos, vividly rendered in terms of mass sex-orgies and cannibalism. Beatrice-Joanna gives birth, and names the baby Derek. Tristram eventually escapes from prison. In Act 4: Tristram tramps across interphase England, eating where he can, trying to make his way back to his wife. He ends up in Preston, where he goes for food at 'WD North-West District Communal Feeding Centre' This, though, is a front for forced conscription into the army.

Finally we get to Act 5, the strangest of the novel. Tristram, pressed into military service, He's barrelled through basic training, shipped overseas with a great quantity of comrades to face 'the enemy', the identity of whom, along with the casus belli, are never disclosed ('"But who is this damned enemy?" asked Sergeant Lightbody for the thousandth time' [168]). They land somewhere, perhaps Ireland, march across country and enter a large building that looks like a country house on the outside, but which on the inside is only a 'mere shell, like something from a film set'. It's dark. The sound effects of guns and shells firing are played on loud-speakers; fireworks and other visual effects are occasionally played. There is a short, fierce battle in which everybody (except Tristram) is killed. The novel reveals what the reader has suspected for twenty-pages or so: the whole thing has been staged, two halves of the same army destroying one another to reduce overpopulation, and perhaps also to blow off interphase steam and lower to incidence of violence more generally. It is called an 'ES', or 'Extermination Session'. It's implied the dead bodies are recycled as a proto-Soylent-Green. (Indeed, in You've Had Your Time, Burgess flat-out accuses Harry Harrison of plagiary) In an epilogue, Tristram gets away and returns to the mainland finally meeting his wife again in Brighton.

There are various ways in which Burgess's colonial experiences, and his canny eye for the state of the nation, served him well as a novelist. He saw clearly and early, for instance, that the UK was becoming the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural place it is today. But he handles this matter better in other novels. For instance, one of the joys of The Doctor is Sick is how diverse are the ethnicities and nationalities of the people Spindrift encounters, differences Burgess captures via astutely observed reproduction of their modes of speech. The Wanting Seed can't do this, since part of the scattershot satirical point of the novel has to do with the crushing homogoneity of the socialist state. Instead Burgess gives us a cartoonish set of visual descriptions: 'Miss Herschhorn, a Teutonico-Chinese ... with dog's eyes and very lank, straight black hair' [8]; 'a boy of purplish Dravidian colouring with strong Red Indian features' [14]; 'a handsome Nigerian girl' [19]; 'a waiter came, black as the ace of spades in a cream jacket' [59] and so on. The three main characters are White, of course; and the extent to which the novel ostentatiously notices racial difference only when it is non-White speaks to a problematic.

There's a similar difficulty with the novel's handling of homosexuality. The premise is quite a sharp one, with its inversion of the bias against same-sex desire (I wonder if Joe Haldeman read this novel prior to writing The Forever War ...); and Burgess gets credit for including homosexuality in his fiction more broadly. Many of his novels have gay characters in them, from Time for a Tiger through to the splendid Earthly Powers. Who amongst his contemporaries was even doing this? (Are there any gay characters at all in Graham Greene, for instance? In 1960s-era Doris Lessing? In David Lodge or John Fowles? Are there any in Golding except that leering predatory schoolmaster character in the early bit of Darkness Visible?) And the satire of The Wanting Seed is not premised on the inherent absurdity of a world in which homosexuality is valorised and heterosexual fecundity stigmatised: not at all. Burgess understands that beyond a certain point fertility is blight, and he introduces several fundamentalist Christian background characters in order not-so-subtly to mock their be-fruitful-and-multiply beliefs. The Bible (banned in Burgess's future) is 'an old religious book full of smut. The big sin is to waste your seed, and if God loves you He fills your house with kids' [37]. Still: one might wish that Burgess's gay characters weren't so bottom-wigglingly, preeningly camp all the time, so ghastlily true to homophobic caricaturing form. A lesbian couple kissing in an elevator are 'classically complementary—fluffy kitten answered stocky bullfrog' [9]. A 'steatopygous young man' in a 'flowery round-necked shirt' uses the elevator mirror 'to make up his face, simpering, as his lips kissed the lipstick' before 'undulating' off [10]. By the time you meet Tristram's colleagues (one has 'a mincing, niggling voice .. a whiff of perfume and two sets of twittering lashes' [52]) it dawns on you that Burgess hasn't the first clue about how actual gay people live and are. Without, quite, advancing a homophobic agenda he nevertheless shares the common homophobic misapprehension that a gay man is necessarily effeminate, that homosexual desire somehow 'unmans' a man. Derek, Tristram's brother, is repeatedly described as mincing: 'He minced' [39]; 'Oh, Tristram,' minced Derek, alveolizing the name to an insincere caress' [40]. Engrave it in tablets of brass and set them over the writer's working desk: the number of times you should use the word 'mincing' to describe a gay character is: zero—assuming, of course, that you want your gay characters to come across as real people, and not caricatures from a 1975 Two Ronnies sketch.

But perhaps the small-scale 21st-century-reader's disappointment in this connects, in some way, with the book's Big Idea about disappointment as a driver of historical change. I'm put in mind of Martin Amis's rearguard defence of Larkin's sexism, racism and so on ('Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores'). The real problem with The Wanting Seed is not its heart-in-the-right-place clumsinesses (never amounting, I think, to active malfeasance) as far as representing sexual and racial diversity as social facts is concerned. The problem is one of two incompatible novels forced together: a good brisk novel about a heavily overpopulated world reacting with social pressure via a "Make Room! Make Room!" avant la lettre big reveal at the end; and a thesis about cultural history as alternating from Pel- to Gus-phases that not only doesn't need the overpopulation premise to operate, actually tangles in destructive and confusing ways with it.

A Clockwork Orange (1962). 2: The Nadcat Nadsat on the Nadmat

A mistake sometimes made by people not familiar with this novel is to believe it is written in Nadsat, as if Burgess's Sovietised slang constitutes a new future-language (as with the future Orwell envisaged for Newspeak, or the idiom of Riddley Walker). But no: Nadsat is a sociolect, not a language. It is the shared discourse of a gang, and amounts to what used, rather charmingly, to be called "thieves' cant". Other characters in the novel do not speak it, and indeed comment upon it as subcultural oddity:

‘Quaint,’ said Dr Brodsky, like smiling. ‘The dialect of the tribe. Do you know anything of its provenance, Branom?’

‘Odd bits of old rhyming slang,’ said Dr Branom… ‘A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal Penetration.’ [125]

Of course, since the first-person narrator Alex does speak it, we get a fair quantity of it in our reading experience. Michael Adams [in From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (2011)] summarises:

Approximately five per cent of the text comprises Nadsat words; so, around one word in twenty is a Nadsat term, with on average twenty-four per page. There is a certain amount of variation, with some pages containing in excess of thirty Nadsat terms, and some fewer than twenty. Burgess estimated that a reader would become accustomed to Nadsat within the first fifteen pages, by which time they would have encountered around 350 instances of Nadsat. The reader should not be able to look Nadsat words up in a glossary or dictionary, because part of the purpose of the book was to act as ‘a brainwashing primer’ (Burgess 1972b, 199) for the reader. The reader was to experience a little of what Alex is subjected to in the conditioning that is applied to him. As a result of reading the book, the reader would be ‘in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary—without effort, with surprise.’ The process of reading A Clockwork Orange was to be an object lesson in the issues with which the book grapples. [67]

Adams offers some specific ру́сский examples:

The Russian noun babushka ‘grandmother’ becomes Nadsat baboochka; dévochka ‘girl’ becomes devotchka; drug ‘friend’ becomes droog; gólos ‘voice’ becomes goloss; golová ‘head’ becomes gulliver; mál’chik ‘boy’ becomes malchick; milícija ‘police’ becomes millicent; rabóta ‘work’ becomes rabbit; vesh’ ‘thing’ becomes veshch; and yaz’ík ‘tongue’ becomes yahzick. The degree of adaptation varies; it is more extensive in the case of gulliver, millicent, rabbit and yahzick, but in those cases Burgess plays on associations of sounds and meanings in English.

Not just those ones, either. I like the way a boy is, by buried implication, a bad or evil 'chick', or girl; one of many places in the novel where (here in a small way) the gender assumptions of the world get monkeyed about with. 'Millicent' is another; a rather prim girl's name being used for police officers who, the novel shows, are always men, and only too keen to beat people up. Broadly, there's a good deal that's Queer about this Clockwork Orange. Adams goes on:

Of the non-Russian words some are reduplications, possibly imitating schoolboy slang, such as baddiwad ‘bad’, eggiweg ‘egg’, jammiwam ‘jam’, skolliwoll, ‘school’, and possibly Pee and Em for ‘father’ and ‘mother’. Some are based on rhyming slang, such as charles/charlie ‘priest’, from Charles Chaplin, rhyming with chaplain … a few words in A Clockwork Orange originated from other languages, such as clop ‘knock’ from Dutch kloppen; orange ‘man’ from Malay orang; tashtook ‘handkerchief’ from German Taschentuch; tass ‘cup’ from either French tasse or German Tasse; and vaysay ‘toilet’ from the French pronunciation of W.C. Finally some Nadsat words appear to be Burgess’s own invention: chumble, perhaps a blend of chatter and mumble; filly ‘play around with’; guff ‘laugh’; sharp ‘a female’; shilarny ‘concern’; sinny ‘films’, based on cinema, snoutie ‘tobacco’ or ‘snuff’; ‘staja ‘state jail’ and vellocet ‘a type of drug’ perhaps taken from velocity (compare speed as a slang term for an amphetamine drug). Despite what the doctor at the clinic says, no one has discovered any ‘gypsy talk’ among the Nadsat terms. [69]

I think Adams makes heavy weather of these last few. 'Guff' is clearly short for 'guffaw'; 'snout' has been prison slang for tobacco since the 19th-century; and 'sharp' is straightforward, if derogatory, rhyming slang (sharp and blunt meaning cunt). The point is Burgess invents almost nothing. (Also there is indeed 'gypsy' or Romany talk in the book: rozzer for policeman is one example).

It seems a little overstated to suggest that acquiring a vocabulary of a couple of hundred Nadsat words without needing to consult a dictionary amounts to 'brainwashing', of the sort satirised in the novel's disensouling version of the Ludovico technique. Certainly it was strategically canny of Burgess to invent his own teen slang, rather than simply reproducing actual teenspeak of the 1950s/60s; he later claimed to have assembled a large glossary of this latter, but changed his mind about using it when he considered how transient such slang is. It prevents the novel becoming a mere Austin Powers parody.

Nadsat, as a hundred commentators have noted, is simply the Russian suffix for -teen. F. Alexander, the writer whom young Alex assaults early in the novel (the author of the in-text Clockwork Orange), gives Alex shelter after his treatment, not, at first, knowing who he is. He is puzzled by Alex's polari-style natter. 'Oh that is what we call nadsat talk,' Alex explains. 'All the teens use that.' We can't, of course, downplay the importance of Russian to this language. (One in-joke I only noticed this time round: F. Alexander's friends, who rally round to co-ordinate their opposition to the government, includes Z Dolin, 'a very wheezy smoky kind of veck', whose coughing is rendered onomatopoeically in the novel as 'kashl kashl kashl' [175]. A good sound for a cough; but also the Russian word—Ка́шл—for cough). But, nevertheless, I want to suggest a different, more bollocky influence.

One thing a thieves' cant, or subcultural slang like Polari, allows is the expression of obscenity that would otherwise be censored. Look at the front cover of the first edition again. Is there any other mass-market book published in the 1960s that has the word 'testicles' right there, on the front like this?

'Yarbles' ('your balls') and 'blockos' ('bollocks') are both transparent enough. But there are testicles all through this novel. I suspect this is because Burgess understands how large a part 'balls' play in male criminality: testosterone is a dangerous substance to have in one's bloodstream, and the urge to attack and to rape are both, in a sense, testicular. The name 'nadsat' includes within it nads, a standard term for that part of the body. 'Clockwork' has its associations, too: this, fairly short, list of synonyms lists 'clockweights' as referring to wedding tackle; and sex is 'cockwork', the old in-out, in-out. Plus, see how much fruit and veg is pressed into slang usage for this topic (oranges are not listed as testicular euphemisms, but they might as well be: 'apples', 'apricots', 'plums', 'watermelons', 'spuds', 'potatoes' and 'cherries' all are). And one thing that Burgess certainly knew was that the Latin testiculum is the diminutive of testis, witness + diminutive suffix -ulum. It may or may not be true that testimony was accompanied by swearing on one's 'oranges' (so to speak), or holding on to them; but it reflects in interesting ways upon testicular Alex, whose first-person narrative here is testimony in both a legal and a personal sense.

---

[PS: one interesting datum from Andrew Biswell's biography that I unearthed when reading around on this topic: ‘Burgess’s own recording of passages from A Clockwork Orange—issued on vinyl by Caedmon in 1973—deliberately reverts to the Manchester accent of his youth. This implies that he was, at some level, associating Mancunian English with yobbery and ultra-violence. It also raises the possibility that, when the author of A Clockwork Orange heard the hero-narrator’s voice in his head, Alex spoke with a Manchester accent, as opposed to the south-of-England RADA accent employed by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation. [Andrew Biswell, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador 2005), 29] My sense is: I tried reading passages aloud in the accent of my Manchester 'put wood int thole' grandfather, and again in the Estuary English of my school days. It works better in the former, not least because it makes the 'thou' and 'thee' more demotic, less incongruously high-culture Shakesperian. But also, just for the general rhythm of it.]

A Clockwork Orange (1962). 1: Queer As

Re-reading A Clockwork Orange was a process of unlearning my assumptions about it. Before, I took the novel to be a fairly straightforward sign-o-the-times diatribe, a more-or-less curmudgeonly middle aged white man looking with displeasure on the rise of youth culture. He sees young people taking drugs, hanging out in gangs (when Blackboard Jungle was shown in UK cinemas in 1956 it provoked excited Teddy Boys to rip up seats with knives; some then spilled outside to fight; in some places there were riots. Mind you, the Mods vs Rockers phenomenon didn't get going until 1964). There was a degree of cultural panic about 'youth violence' in the late 50s and early 60s, and this novel is part of that larger context. The Russian provenance of Alex's 'Nadsat' slang seemed to me part and parcel; for after all it's Orientalism 101 to think of 'the East' as more prone to cruelty and violence, and we can imagine the insidious nature of assumption at a time (1961) when the cold war was still hot. My main judgment was that using Beethoven, instead of pop or rock, as the catalyst, or accelerant of Alex's violence was a false step. Rousing though the last movement of the Ninth is, the idea that youth subcultures would accrete around Classical Music was, well, daft. Burgess may have considered pop beneath contempt and therefore notice; posterity has well and truly disagreed.

Still, as I say, re-reading upended these assumptions. A new perspective on the novel orange-crushed upon my faculties. I'll jot a few things down here:

1. It occurred to me for the first time that ‘Alex’ is so-called because he is a-lex, that is lawless.

2. The violent delinquency of youth is hardly an anxiety unique to the early 1960s. This is not to deny that Clockwork Orange is inevitably a product of its time. But re-reading the novel made me wonder if, rather than projecting current violence into a notionally nadsaturn (nadsattish? nadsattelite?) future, Burgess isn't actually using the novel to reflect backwards on the histories and traditions of violence. Ernest Ryman's Teddy Boy (Michael Joseph 1958; it made quite a splash as an Ace paperback original in 1960) looks like it might be the sort of work Burgess is aping.

(Bit unfortunate, the book's own blurb calling it ‘pathetic’ on the front cover there. I mean, you see what they're getting at. But still). In the event Ryman's rather restrained novel has almost nothing in common with what Burgess is doing. It's a straightforward tale of moral decline and karmic punishment, written by an ex-Navy officer and public school teacher with a didactic aim (in The Observer Penelope Mortimer thought that it was ‘really the nicest possible book’). Burgess’s Alex has almost nothing to do with  Ted. He has rather more to do with Brighton Rock’s Pinkie, although without that latter’s neurosis and disgusted fear of sex. Indeed, where Greene portrays a sociopath as a person with something patently and profoundly wrong in their soul, Burgess’s originality is in creating a character who is, basically, ordinary. He doesn’t engage in acts of violence, rape and murder because he is driven, or twisted, or (like Pinkie) because he has essentially self-melodramatising notions of his own satanic elevation, or declivity. He does it because he enjoys it. He's well aware that what he's doing is wrong, and that 'you can't have a society with everybody behaving in my manner of the night'. Nonetheless he professes puzzlement that the State wishes to reform him: he's happy to let people alone who wish to act in socially licit ways. It's just that he ‘goes to the other shop’.

3. I'm trying to think of earlier portraits of evil that do this, and I don't know if I can conjure any (Camus' L’Étranger is one possibility, I suppose; although I'm not sure 'evil' is the right word for that character). Recently I read Terry Eagleton's On Evil, which I didn't much like. As I say in another place Eagleton sets his face against those (as he sees them) modish and misguided leftists and postmodernists who think morality all relative, evil just another name for 'anti-social activity' and so on. Accordingly the core of his analysis is a close reading of what he presumably sees as the most important 20th-century fictional treatments of evil: Golding's Pincher Martin; Greene's Brighton Rock; Mann's Doktor Faustus. Burgess's name doesn't so much as appear in the index. There may be many reasons for this, of course; but it may have to do with Clockwork Orange's startling refusal to peg its moral portraiture to the grandiose superstructure of Cosmic Evil and Cosmic Good (as per Golding: sublime black lightning flickers through a winter sky! the sinner reduced to a monstrous pair of obsidian lobster claws!) of those three existential melodramas. It is the horrifying ordinariness of Alex's offending that is so appalling; the pettiness of it, the little shifts and lies he tells, the shop-soiled hypocrisy of his attitudes to authority–the act he puts on for his social worker, the police and prison guards. It's tempting to say that Burgess set out to re-write Crime and Punishment from the premise: how would this story go if Raskolnikov were perfectly untroubled by guilt? But it's more than that. The ‘Alexander the Large’ nickname he gives himself [52] is doubly ironic. It's not just that Largeness is a fundamentally different quality to Greatness (which of course it is); it's that he's not large. He has no ambitions beyond the gratification of his nasty appetites; stealing some small change; having a good time from one night to the next. There's nothing of Raskolnikov's self-dramatising discourse of ‘the great man’ about him. Alex's violence is fundamentally casual. That it is a large part of the greatness of Burgess's novel that it understands just how much of the evil in the world is precisely that: casual. In this I think Burgess puts his finger on an uncomfortable but, alas, profound truth of human nature.

4. It may have been for reasons connected to this that the ‘classical music’ layer of the novel bothered me less on this fre-read than it did the first time I encountered the book. It's easy to forget (with Kubrick's reimagining overlaying our memories) just how young Alex is: fifteen at the time of his arrest. The two girls he tempts back to his bedroom and rapes are ten in the novel. He shares with Janet in One Hand Clapping something of the terrifying perilousness of innocence, the capacity children have to access their desires in a blankly unmediated, unconsidered way. One way of putting this might be to say that Alex has the form of adulthood without the content of wisdom that comes from learned experience: the debateable final chapter is the first place in the novel where this starts to change. In that sense Alex is like music: form without specific content. Pop songs would work less well for Burgess in this context, because in them words and music have equivalent status. Most of the music Alex loves is sheer music: Bach, Handel, Mozart. Ludwig Van's final symphony is the exception because it is choral and for this reason it has a particular effect. After raping the ten year olds, and kicking them out, Alex nods off: 'they were going down the stairs and I dropped off to sleep, still with Joy Joy Joy Joy crashing and howling away' [52]. Burgess reads this emotion as a tigerish intensity of predation and cruelty; not the dictionary definition of the word ‘joy’, perhaps, but not outwith the realm of the possible, especially when we remember (as Burgess certainly knew) that Schiller's ode was originally to freiheit rather than freunde. If Alex is anything, he is the embodiment of a perfect existential frieheit, albeit one viewed through the lens of original sin. And this is the point about even the purest and most elevated music: as Schopenhauer says in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: 'the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.' The wrinkle is that Burgess takes it as axiomatic that this essence is, in a word, sin. Burgess makes Alex a kid not in order to make a Teddy Boy point about youthful delinquency, or not just for that reason. He does so because this moves him closer to the situation in which we are all born.

This is a roundabout way of coming back to one of the main critical currents as far as this novel is concerned: the way it stages a fundamentally theological debate about modes of evil. What Alex does is very, very bad; no question. But Burgess wants us to believe that what the State does to Alex is worse, because it removes his capacity for free will. Andrew Biswell's 2012 Penguin edition includes a wealth of useful material, including Burgess's 1972 Listener article on the book:

A Clockwork Orange was intended to be a sort of tract, even a sermon, on the importance of the power of choice. My hero or anti-hero, Alex, is very vicious, perhaps even impossibly so, but his viciousness is not the product of genetic or social conditioning: it is his own thing, embarked on in full awareness. Alex is evil, not merely misguided, and in a properly run society such evil as he enacts must be checked and punished. But his evil is a human evil, and we recognise in his deeds of aggression potentialities of our own—worked out for the non-criminal citizen in war, sectional injustice, domestic unkindness, armchair dreams. In three ways Alex is an exemplar of humanity: he is aggressive, he loves beauty, he is a language-user. ... Theologically, evil is not quantifiable. Yet I posit the notion that one act of evil may be greater than another, and that perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanisation, the killing of the soul—which is as much as to say the capacity to choose between good and evil acts. Impose on an individual the capacity to be good and only good, and you kill his soul for, presumably, the sake of social stability. What my, and Kubrick's, parable tries to state is that it is preferable to have a world of violence undertaken in full awareness—violence chosen as an act of will—than a world conditioned to be good or harmless. I recognise that the lesson is already becoming an old-fashioned one. B. F. Skinner, with his ability to believe that there is something beyond freedom and dignity, wants to see the death of autonomous man. He may or may not be right, but in terms of the Judaeo-Christian ethic that A Clockwork Orange tries to express, he is perpetrating a gross heresy. It seems to me in accordance with the tradition that Western man is not yet ready to jettison, that the area in which human choice is a possibility should be extended, even if one comes up against new angels with swords and banners emblazoned No. The wish to diminish free will is, I should think, the sin against the Holy Ghost.

‘I don't know how much free will man really possesses,’ Burgess says: ‘Wagner's Hans Sachs said: Wir sind ein wenig frei—we are a little free, but I do know that what little he seems to have is too precious to encroach on, however good the intentions of the encroacher may be.‘’ It's not just the anxiety that a B F Skinnerised future of smiling automata was just around the corner that makes this seem old-fashioned. It's the sense (as with Pincher Martin and Brighton Rock) that the ordinariness of Alex's evil somehow requires a grander theoretical superstructure to be comprehensible. Burgess is so worried the he will be accused of gleefully indulging in a pornography of violence that he over-stresses the extent to which the novel is a homiletic.

5. One thing that struck me forcefully upon my re-read is the playfulness of Alex. Of course, the game he is playing is a horrible one: violent, cruel, thoughtless and so on. But it is a game. In that same Listener essay, Burgess notes that readers are nonplussed by how likeable Alex is. But he is likeable as kids are, because they possess an unchallenged wisdom with respect to play that adults often lose. In this he reminds me a little of a character at the other end of the age-spectrum: Shakespeare's Falstaff. It's a rather elementary observation to make about Shakespeare that he is particularly fascinated by two interlocking dualities: appearance vs reality on the one hand, and 'play' (broadly conceived) vs reality on the other. Observed with any kind of ethical distance, Falstaff is a monster: colossally self-serving and self-indulgent, happy to use others, happy even to send others to their death so long as he can continue to indulge his own appetites. This isn't how he figures, of course. The reason he doesn't strike us as simply a cowardly, murderously irresponsible monster is that Falstaff understands the joy and necessity of play. He plays at being a brave knight, he plays at having a good time (plays with such immersion that he actually has a good time), even plays at being King; and the complexity of the representation is marvelously deepened by the fact that he is, actually, a character in a play. Falstaff's joy at playing is infectious, and we, the audience, 'play along', as the wonderfully apt expression had it. It goes without saying that, for Shakespeare, Falstaff's play must eventually collide with and lose to the harshly real world; but whilst he's able to maintain it, his playfulness is actually wonderful. He gestures to a Wodehousian/Woosterish world where all is play, and good food, and fun, with the addition of those rather unWoosterish joys of sex, street-fighting (Gad's Hill!) and killing.

The novel is playful in another, more Joycean sense. It plays with language. Nadsat, though, is too large a question to consider here, and I shall return to it in another post shortly. My last point here has to do with the related question of how Alex simultaneously flouts and in a sense represents the law. The first thing Alex and his droogs do is beat up an old guy emerging from the library with a bunch of books on the perfectly blameless subject of crystallography. They mock him:

‘But what is this here? What is this filthy slovo? I blush to look at this word. You disappoint me brother.’

‘But,’ he tried. ‘But, but.’

‘Now,’ said Georgie. here is what I would call real dirt. There's one slovo beginning with an f and another with a c.’

‘Oh,’ said poor old Dim, smotting over Pete's shoulder and going too far, like he always did, ‘’it says here what he done to her, and there's a picture and all. Why,’ he said ‘you're nothing but a filthy-minded old skitebird.’ [12]

They ‘punish’ him by ripping his books, stealing his false teeth, beating him and tearing off his clothes. But why do I put ‘punish’ in inverted commas, there? What happens to the poor old feller is certainly punishing. Of course Alex has no ‘actual’ authority, and there's nothing ‘actually’ obscene about the books the old man is carrying. Alex is playing at being a manifestation of authority, of the superego (‘"You naughty old veck, you," I said, and then we began to filly about with him’: presumably ‘filly’ replaces ‘horse’, slangwise, here). It is of course part of Alex's obscene play that he pretends to be an authority figure, punishing a malefactor, when in fact he is (and knows full well that he is) the criminal. But it's a game he carries through the whole of the novel. When he lures the two truant ten-year-olds back to his flat, he styles his rape of them as an education ('well if they would not go to school they must still have their education. And education they had had' [52]) as if he were some ghastly school teacher. Presumably the 'lesson' they learn is that the world is a horrible place, or perhaps ‘don't trust strangers’, which many people would consider apt. Later, in the state jail ‘staja’, a rambunctious new arrival into the crowded cell is ‘taught’ his place: ‘if we can't have any sleep let's have some education. Our new friend here had better be taught a lesson’ [97]. Gleefully entering into the spirit of this, Alex kicks the newcomer to death.

It makes perfect sense, in the logic of the novel, that Alex's former droog Dim, and his old sparring partner Billyboy, end the novel as policemen. They beat Alex badly, 'doling out a bit of the old summary' and 'having our say in the State's name' [160]. There's never any doubt in this novel that violence is the mode of state-sanctioned law enforcement: the police assault their charges as a matter of course, and the Ludovico treatment, described over several chapters, is a violent and invasive attack upon both body and soul. In all this the delinquency of Alex is revealed to be not violence as such, but violence unsanctioned by the state.

Alex, clearly, is Sadean in his appetites. The state notionally takes a Kantian approach to ethics, and something of Kant's clockwork regularity and machinic absolutism is evident in Burgess's broad-brush satire. Dr Brodksy seeks to make perfect Kantian citizens, incapable of violating the categorical imperative (Kant valued ‘free will’ highly. of course; but if we boil it down, his argument is that we are really only actually free if we obey the moral law). A Clockwork Orange is, in fact, deeply interested in the extent to which Kant is actualised in de Sade, or de Sade in Kant. That de Sade is the hidden ‘truth’ of Kant's ethical absolutism is the argument of Slavoj Žižek, in his ‘Kant with (or against) Sade,’ [it's in The Zizek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 285-301]. Jodie Dean summarises:

Žižek draws out the equivalence between the Kantian moral law and the superego insofar as both reject contingent feelings, emphasize pain, and rely on cold, unconditional injunctions that compel the subject to “sacrifice his attachment to all contingent, ‘pathological’ objects”—Do your duty! Enjoy!” He emphasizes how Sade makes visible the subject of the enunciation of the moral law. Kant conceals this subject, this author of the command to universalise, to abstract. For Kant, the autonomous subject simply posits the moral law. The actual source of the injunction is invisible. Žižek, following Lacan, argues that the injunction comes from the Sadean sadist-executioner, that is to say, the superego. Put somewhat differently, Sade separates out what Kant links together: “the assertion of an unconditional ethical injunction and the moral universality of this injunction.” The end result is a formal equivalence between the injunction of law and the injunction of superego. [Jodi Dean 'Žižek on Law' https://www.blogger.com/jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/files/zizek_on_law_2.doc]

It's complicated, in A Clockwork Orange, by Alex's perfect absence of guilt; and then reinforced by the novel's insistence that when the Law intervenes 'in' Alex to prevent his Sadean excesses, it results in a kind of impossible short circuit that is absolutely intolerable—intolerable for the novel, within fewer than 40 pages Alex's conditioning has been 'magically' reversed (in his sleep, no less), because intolerable for Burgess's Catholic-derived sense that humanity itself depends upon having the freedom to transgress. But this is just another way of saying: permitting the Sadean executioner superego its power. It's the perfect circularity of the process, here, that is interesting: the roundness, we might say, rather than the clockworkness, of the orange. Given the, it could be argued, essentially Protestant nature of this Kantian perspective, it may also be the colour. But at any rate, the violence with which a short-circuit cuts bang! a circuit is the currency of this novel. Short and sharp and shocking.

6. The ‘a’ that prefixes the law in Alex's name is a curious thing. It can be either privative or copulative. It could be that we see Alex as a-lex in the sense of being lawless; or it could be that he is a-lex in the sense of being 'at one with the law'. Fitting.