About a Renaissance man

About a Renaissance man

Suparna Banerjee

The name ‘Anthony Burgess’ continues to be overshadowed by the title ‘A Clockwork Orange’

For this writer, it seems, these are fantastic times. After the ‘father of fantasy’ J.R.R. Tolkein, whose 125th birth anniversary was commemorated in these columns recently, it is time to celebrate the birth centenary of Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), another doyen of 20th century ‘Brit Lit’, whose masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1962) is among the most celebrated specimens of dystopia, a form of fantastic fiction.

Although Burgess’ fame rests almost solely on this one dystopian novel, his creative output was both varied and prolific. In addition to around 30 novels, he wrote scripts for many films and television series. A professor of English and phonetics—whose real name was John (Anthony Burgess) Wilson—was also the author of many acclaimed non-fictional works, among them being a celebrated study of James Joyce (Here Comes Everybody), a translation of Oedipus the King, studies of the novel form, and a thinly-veiled biography of Shakespeare (Nothing Like the Sun).

He also wrote numerous articles and reviews for newspapers, including The Observer and The Guardian. And, In short, Burgess was an exemplar in the modern age of what in another era would have been called the ‘Renaissance Man’. Did this prolific writer who dominated the English literary circuit with his powerful public speeches and his flamboyant, almost arrogant persona, who bragged of his womanising powers—and who liked to be addressed as ‘Dr. Burgess’—secretly identify with Dr. Samuel Johnson, the dynamic 18th century scholar-critic whose dominance over the literary scene of his times is legendary, and whose burly appearance Burgess resembled?

            Possibly. Possibly, again, this self-conscious Byronic-Johnsonian persona was just that, a facade behind which the famous man of letters hid the vulnerable core of being John Wilson—whose loveless childhood and difficulties with the Catholic faith found reflection in his autobiography, as did his sense of failure as a musician and, his varied life experience as a struggling music arranger and as an army man and Education Officer in Britain, Spain, Borneo and Malay. Many critics have observed that his two-part autobiography—Little Wilson and Big God and You’ve had Your Time—constitutes his finest writing.

Film vs. book

Yet, in an interesting creator-creation drama, the name ‘Anthony Burgess’ continues to be overshadowed by the title A Clockwork Orange, the novel whose fame turned to notoriety upon its filming in 1971 by Stanley Kubrick. The film, which seemed to glorify riotous violence and violent sex, was quickly banned in England. However, for thousands of viewers in England and outside, the film succeeded in misrepresenting the novel, which, in actuality, is a subtle probe into some of the deepest moral dilemmas of modern life.

A study of juvenile delinquency, the novel is set in a near future England dominated by extreme youth violence in an ambience of unrest and inequality. However, rather than simply condemning the cruel violence perpetrated on defenceless people by Alex, the teenage protagonist, and his gang, Burgess brings in issues of the moral legitimacy of a state-controlled programme of psychological rehabilitation that converts Alex into a meek conformist and a victim of violence in turn. Alex loses the essence of his being, thereby losing his taste not only for violence but also for classical music that was the only noble thing that energised him.

In the end, he is shown to overcome his conditioning and return to his violent ways, proving the ultimate inefficacy of any coerced programme of moral uplift.

This intended ending was later supplemented with an added final chapter, in which Alex eschews violence and cruelty by choice. This ultimate chapter was omitted in the American edition of the novel and, consequently, in Kubrick’s film, and this, perhaps, was partly to blame for the way Burgess’s intention in the novel was misunderstood.Here was a novel—reckoned by the Modern Library as among the 100 best English language novels written in the 20th century—that posed difficult moral-philosophical questions pertaining to the dynamics of state power and the individual’s liberty, the possibility of nurture overcoming nature, and, ultimately, to the nature of goodness itself. As Burgess later put it, “Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?” In other words, how is a modern society to negotiate the difficult interchange between individual will and society’s requirements? Does not a man cease to be a man if he ceases to choose?

This moral earnestness of the novel was, however, balanced by a play of lively wit, a near-perfect sense of the comic, and above all, the linguistic virtuosity displayed in a unique lingo—the “nadsat”—that was a blend of pure invention with elements of English slang and the Russian language. Indeed, wit, innovation, supple prose, and ‘high moral seriousness’ always exists seamlessly together in Burgess’ work—right from his Malayan trilogy The Long Day Wanes (1956-59), through the loosely autobiographical Inside Mr. Enderby, up to his later fiction, which includes the ambitious Earthly Powers (1980).

Anthony Burgess, the recipient of several honours, English and French, one feels, is to be remembered ultimately as a writer whose body of work consistently illustrates the Horacean adage that good literature combines both entertainment and moral gravitas—that searching social critiques need not be arid, or that erudition need not eschew wit at all.