CTIssue 135 - March 2017

Insights of “kompromat” (comprofurther bolstered the cultural mising material) is being impact. Bowie, for example, used to manipulate Donald borrowed from both its visual Trump who some fear is unstyle and soundtrack for his live der the control of the Russhows, while his fascination sian secret service. with Burgess’s invented lanThis story may appear as guage, Nadsat, was to continue something of an outlier in right up until his final album the influence the book has Blackstar, which features a song had. But politics and culmostly written in it. ture have rubbed shoulders In 1973 – around the same throughout its history. time as the Wilson plot was Someone else who was first being hatched – Kubrick greatly influenced by the withdrew his film version of book was David Bowie. the novel from British cinemas, In the early 1970s, he’d following several high-profile cases of supposed copycat viowanted to make a musical of another famous lence. For Burgess, the film had work of dystopian fiction, always been a mixed blessing.

Photo: Simon Zirkunow/Flickr.com 1984, but George Orwell’s A Clockwork Orange.

When the novel came out in widow, Sonia, refused him America, his publishers decided his wife, Lynne, had been attacked in the rights. Instead, he adapted his to cut the final chapter, which shows London by four GIs. Lynne suffered a the protagonist grown up and wishideas into Diamond Dogs and cremiscarriage and it seems likely that ated his own dystopian world: a ing to settle down and start a family. the incident contributed to her later broken society where “a disaffected Instead, it ends with him unrepentill-health and early death. youth . . . lived as gangs on roofs and ant and returned to the psychotic . . . had the city to themselves.” mindset that he’d had prior to his In the Britain of that time, with Violence and catharsis brainwashing treatment. It was that food shortages, power cuts and Not only does A Clockwork Orange version that Kubrick filmed.

IRA bombings, an artistic fascinaexplore a society overrun by random Burgess felt this prevented the tion with these ideas isn’t that suracts of recreational violence but Burbook from working properly as a prising. The bleakness of the social gess also includes a scene in which novel, where moral growth is a part landscape shared much of the mood of the essence of narrative. He saw an unnamed writer is attacked and and outlook of the post-war period the decision as symptomatic of the forced to watch while his wife is in which Orwell was writing. But the politics of the times – his book was raped. In his introduction to the world that Bowie ended up imaginKennedyan, he wrote, when what novel, Blake Morrison suggests that ing arguably has as much to do with was wanted was something Nixoniwriting this was a form of catharsis Burgess’s “world of adolescent vioan, “with no shred of optimism in for Burgess – although later in his lence and governmental retribution” it.” He concluded: “America prefers life Burgess spoke of the dejection depicted in A Clockwork Orange. the other, more violent, ending. Who he felt at the accusations that his artCoincidentally, Sonia Orwell alam I to say America is wrong? It’s all work was some sort of promo glamso played a bit part in an incident orising violence. a matter of choice.”

CT which was formative in the incepFollowing a failed attempt by the tion of the novel. In 1944, when BurRolling Stones to film the novel and Philip Seargeant is senior lecturer in gess was stationed with the army in Andy Warhol’s highly experimental applied linguistics at Britain’s Open Gibraltar, it was Sonia Orwell who take on it, Stanley Kubrick’s celebratUniversity. This article first appeared sent the letter informing him that ed adaptation came out in 1971. This at www.theconversation.com 46 ColdType | March 2017 | www.coldtype.net