Anthony Burgess A CLOCKWORK ORANGE The Restored Edition Edited With an Introduction and Notes by Andrew Biswell Foreword by Martin Amis 2% \WILLIAM HEINEMANN: LONDON Published by William Heinemann 2012 2 4 6 8 1o 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright © Estate of Anthony Burgess 2012 Introduction and Notes copyright © Andrew Biswell 2012 Foreword copyright © Martin Amis 2012 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase: Edited extract from A Clockwork Orange by Kingsley Amis, from the Observer. Copyright © Estate of Kingsley Amis. Review of A Clackwork Orange extracted from New Novels by Malcolm Bradbury, Punch, 1962. Reproduced with permission of Punch Limited. All Life is One: 7719 Clockwork Estament, 0r Endaéy : End by Anthony Burgess by A. S Byatt, The Times, 1974. Copyright © A. S. Byatt. Extract from Reviewer} by Christopher Ricks (Penguin Books, 2003), copyright © Christopher Ricks, 2003. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Afterward by Stanley Edgar Hyman, copyright © Estate of Stanley Edgar Hyman, 2012. Reproduced by permission. The moral right of the author has been asserted under the Copyright, and Patents Act, 1988, to be identi ed as the author of this work 2; > First published in Great Britain in 1962 by William Heinemann Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London sw1v 25A i www.randomhousecauk Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.c0.uk/0f ces.htm The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954,009 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780434021512 The Random House Group Limited supports The Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC), the leading international forest certi cation organisation. Our books carrying the FSC label are printed on FSC® certi ed paper. FSC is the only forest certi cation scheme endorsed by the leading environmental organisations, including Greenpeace. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk/environment 0 MIX Paper fram responsible sources E g FSC" C014496 Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited) Falkirk, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Germany by GGP Media GmbH, Pé neck Contents FOREWORD by Martin Amis INTRODUCTION by Andrew Biswell A CLOCKWORK ORANGE O NE Page TWO Page THREE Page NOTES NADSAT GLOSSARY PROLOGUE to A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music by Anthony Burgess EPILOGUE: A Malenky Govoreet about the Molodoy by Anthony Burgess ESSAYS, ARTICLES AND REVIEWS The Human Russians by Anthony Burgess \ g is[i 1 Clockwork Marmalade by Anthony Burgess Extract from an Unpublished Interview with Anthony Burgess Programme Note for A Clockwork Orange 2004 by Anthony Burgess Ludwig Van , a review of Beethoven by Maynard Solomon by Anthony Burgess Gash Gold Vermillion by Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange by Kingsley Amis New Novels by Malcolm Bradbury Horror Show by Christopher Ricks All Life is One: Tbe Clockwork Testament, or Enderby r End by A. S. Byatt Afterword by Stanley Edgar Hyman A Last Word on Violence by Anthony Burgess ANNOTATED PAGES from Anthony Burgess s 1961 Typescript of A Clockwork Orange 245 253 259 263 267 275 277 279 293 297 305 307 FOREWORD Martin Amis The day to-day business of writing a novel often seems to consist of nothing but decisions decisions, decisions, decisions. Should this paragraph go here? Or should it go there? Can that chunk of exposition be diversi ed by dialogue? At What point does this information need to be revealed? Ought I to use a different adjective and a different adverb in that sentence? Or no adverb and no adjective? Comma or semicolon? Colon or dash? And so on. These decisions are minor, clearly enough, and they are processed more or less rationally by the conscious mind. All the major decisions, by contrast, have been reached before you sit down at your desk; and they involve not a moment s thought. The major decisions are inherent in the original frisson - in the enabling throb or Whisper (a Whisper that says, Here is a novelyou may be able to write). Very mysteriously, it is the unconscious mind that does the heavy lifting. No one knows how it happens. This is Why Norman Mailer called his (excellent) book on ction The Spooky Art. Wen, in 1960, Anthony Burgess sat down to write A knew that the novel would be set in the near future (and that it would take the standard science- ctional route, developing, and ercely exaggerating, current tendencies). He knew that his Vicious anti hero, Alex, would narrate, and that he would do so in an argot or idiolect that the world had never heard before (he eventually settled on an unfailingly delightful blend of Russian, Romany, and rhyming slang). He knew that it would have something to do With Good and Bad, and Free Will. And he knew, crucially, that Alex would harbour a highly implausible passion: an ecstatic love of Classical music. We see the wayward brilliance of that last decision when we reacquaint ourselves, after half a century, with Burgess s leering, sneering, sniggering, snivelling young sociopath (a type unimprovably caught by Malcolm McDowell in Stanley Kubrick s uneven but justly celebrated film). It wasn t me, brother, Alex whines at his social worker (Who has hurried to the local jailhouse): Speak up for me, sir, for I m not so bad. But Alex is so bad; and he knows it. The opening chapters of A Clockwork Orange still deliver the shock of the new: they form a red streak of gleeful evil. On their rst night on the town Alex and his droogs (or partners in crime) waylay a schoolmaster, rip up the books he is carrying, strip off his clothes, and stomp on his dentures; they rob and belabour a shopkeeper and his Wife ( a fair tap With a crowbar ); they give a drunken burn a kicking ( We cracked into him lovely ); and they have a ruck with a rival gang, using the knife, the chain, the straight razor: this would be real, this would be proper, this would be the nozh, the oozy, the britva, not just sties and boots . . . and there I was dancing about with my britva like I might be a barber on board a ship on a very rough sea . viii Next, they steal a car ( zigzagging after cats and that ), cursorily savage a courting couple, break into a cottage owned by another intelligent type bookman type like that we d llied [messed] with some hours back , destroy the typescript of his work in progress, and gangrape his wife: Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so [we] smashed what was left to be smashed typewriter, lamp, chairs and Dim, it was typical old Dim, watered the re out and was going to dung on the carpet, there being plenty of paper, but I said no. Out out out out, I howled. The writer veck and his zheena were not really there, bloody and torn and making noises. But they d live. And all this has been accomplished by the time we reach page 30. Before Part 1 ends, fty one pages later, with Alex in a razz slaop smelling of like sick and lavatories and beery rots [mouths] and disinfectant , our Humble Narrator drugs and ravishes two ten year olds, slices up Dim with his britva, and robs and murders an elderly spinster: . . . but this baboochka . . . like scratched my litso [face]. So then I screeched: You lthy old soomka [woman] , and upped with the little malenky [little] like silver statue and cracked her a ne fair tolchock [blow] on the gulliver [head] and that shut her up real horrorshow [good] and lovely. In the brief hiatus between these two storms of ultra- violence (the novel s day one and day two), Alex goes home to Municipal Flatblock 18A. And here, for a change, A ~ , , , ,7 we w v v M. Ma Hm A,» WNW»; w; he does nothing worse than keep his parents awake by playing the multi speaker stereo in his room. First he listens to a new Violin concerto, before moving on to Mozart and Bach. Burgess evokes Alex s sensations in a bravura passage which owes less to nadmt, or teenage pidgin, and more to the modulations of Ulysses: The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three wise silver amed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine owing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the Violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Here we feel the power of that enabling throb or whisper the authorial insistence that the Beast would be suscep tible to Beauty. At a stroke, and without sentimentality, Alex is decisively realigned. He has now been equipped with a soul, and even a suspicion of innocence a suspi cion con rmed by the cleft disclosure in the nal sentences of Part 1: That was everything. I d done the lot, now. And me still only fteen. In the late 19505, when A Clockwork Orange was just a twinkle in the author s eye, the daily newspapers were monot- onously bewailing the rise of mass delinquency, as the post- war Teddy Boys diverged and multiplied into the Mods and the Rockets (who would later devolve into the Hippies and the Skinheads). Meanwhile, the literary weeklies were much concerned with the various aftershocks ofWorld War II in particular, the supposedly startling coexistence, in the Third Reich, of industrialised barbarism and High Culture. This is a debate that the novel boldly joins. Lying naked on his bed, and thrilling to Mozart and Bach, Alex fondly recalls his achievements, earlier that night, with the maimed writer and his ravaged wife: . . . and I thought, slooshying [listening] away to the brown gorgeousness of the starry [old] German master, that I would like to have tolchocked them both harder and ripped them to ribbons on their own oor Thus Burgess is airing the sinister but not implausible suggestion that Beethoven and Birkenau didn t merely coexist. They combined and colluded, inspiring mad dreams of supremacism and omnipotence. In Part 2, Violence comes, not from below, but from above: it is the clean and focused Violence of the state. Having served two years ofhis sentence, the entirely incor- rigible Alex is selected for Reclamation Treatment (using Ludovico s Technique ). This turns out to be a crash course of aversion therapy. Each morning he is injected with a strong emetic and wheeled into a screening room, Where his head is clamped in a brace and his eyes pinned Wide open; and then the lights go down. At rst Alex is obliged to watch familiar scenes of recre- ational mayhem (tolchocking malchicks, creeching devotchkas, and the like). We then move on to lingering mutilations, Japanese tortures ( you even Viddied a gulliver being sliced off a soldier ), and nally a newsreel, with eagles and swastikas, ring squads, naked corpses. The soundtrack of the last clip is Beethoven s Fifth. Grahzny bratchnies [ lthy bastards] , whimpers Alex when it s over: Using Ludwig van like that. He did no harm to anyone. He just wrote music. And then I was really sick and they had to bring a bowl that was in the shape of like a kidney . . . It can t be helped, said Dr Branom. Each man kills the thing he loves, as the poet prisoner said. Here s the punishment element, perhaps. The Governor ought to be pleased. From now on Alex Will feel intense nausea, not only when he contemplates Violence, but also When he hears Ludwig van and the other starry masters. His soul, such as it was, has been excised. We now embark on the curious apologetics of Part 3. Nothing odd Will do long, said Dr Johnson meaning that the reader s appetite for weirdness is very quickly surfeited. Burgess (unlike, say, Franz Kafka) is sensitive to this near infallible law; but there s a case for saying that A Clockwork Orange ought to be even shorter than its 196 pages. It was in fact published with two different endings. The American edition omits the nal chapter (this is the version used by Kubrick), and Closes with Alex recovering from what proves to be a cathartic suicide attempt. He is listening to Beethoven s Ninth: When it came to the Scherzo I could Viddy myself very clear running and running on very light and mysterious nogas [feet], carving the Whole litso of the creeching world with my cut throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right. This is the dark ending. In the of cial version, though, Alex is afforded full redemption. He simply and m)mm«mmn smwanaw r&é R M :2 smmmlmww/Mwm» bathetically outgrows the atavisms of youth, and starts itching to get married and settle down; his musical tastes turn to what they call Lieder, just a goloss [voice] and a piano, very quiet and like yearny ; and he carries around with him a photo, scissored out of the newspaper, of a plump baby a baby gurgling goo goo goo . So we are asked to accept that Alex has turned all soft and broody at the age of eighteen. It feels like a startling loss of nerve on Burgess s part, or a recrudescence (we recall that he was an Augustinian Catholic) of self punitive religious guilt. Horri ed by its own transgressive energy, the novel submits to a Reclamation Treatment sternly supplied by its author. Burgess knew that something was wrong: a work too didactic to be artistic , he half conceded, pure art dragged into the arena of morality . And he shouldn t have worried: Alex may be a teenager, but readers are grown ups, and are perfectly at peace with the unregenerate. Besides, A Clockwork Orange is in essence a black comedy. Confronted by evil, comedy feels no need to punish or correct. It answers With corrosive laughter. In his book on Joyce, foyxprz'ck (1973), Burgess made a provocative distinction between what he calls the W novelist and the B novelist: the A novelist is interested in plot, character, and psychological insight, Whereas the B novelist is interested, above all, in the play of words. The most famous B novel is Finnegan: Wk/ee, which Nabokov aptly described as a cold pudding of a book, a snore in the next room ; and the same might be said of Add: A Family Chronicle, by far the most B inclined of Nabokov s nineteen ctions. Anyway, the B novel, as a genre, is now utterly defunct; and A Clockwork Orange may be its only long term survivor. It is a book that can xiii still be read with steady pleasure, continuous amusement, and at times incredulous admiration. Anthony Burgess, then, is not a minor B novelist , as he described himself; he is the only B novelist. I think he would have settled for that. i é i; g 2 ,3» 5% Eiwmwéeasw wmtwwwmz "\"¢1 1(«S, \,\:H $31 H : \\, TWQKQNMl a i ww l wlmwmu wwm mwwy imuu-Aw wkamwwmnmht uvmmunzmwuWm rscwkwuvrs kmqem manly? «mam m INTRODUCTION Andrew Biswell In 1994, less than a year after Anthony Burgess had died at the age of seventy six, BBC Scotland commissioned the novelist William Boyd to write a radio play in celebration of his life and work. This was broadcast during the Edinburgh Festival on 21 August 1994, along With a concert performance of Burgess s music and a recording of his Glasgow Overture. The programme was called An Airful of Burgess , with the actor John Sessions playing the parts of both Burgess and his ctional alter ego, the poet F. X. Enderby. On the same day, the Sunday Times ran a front page story about the same radio play under the headline BBC in ROW Over Festival Play s Violent Rape Scene . The newspaper claimed that the broadcast would feature a live re enactment of a rape scene based on the controv ersial Anthony Burgess work, A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick s lm, which was said in the article to have been blamed for carbon copy crimes , was also crit icised for its explicit depiction of gratuitous rape, Violence and murder. Yet anyone who tuned into the radio broad cast hoping to receive the kind of indecent grati cation promised by the Sunday Times would have been severely disappointed. William Boyd s play, which featured less than two minutes of material derived from A Clockwork Orange, was a digni ed tribute to Burgess s long life of musical and literary creativity. Even in death, it seemed, Burgess (Who had often parodied the style of no nonsense, right wing columnists in his ction) could not escape being the subject ofunder-informed and apocalyptic journalism. To understand the development ofthe controversy which has come to surround A Clockwork Orange in its various manifestations, we must go back more than fty years to 1960, when Anthony Burgess was planning a series ofnovels about imaginary futures. In the earliest surviving plan for A Clockwork Orange, he outlined a book of around 200 pages, to be divided into three sections of seventy pages and set in the year I980. The anti hero of this novel, whose working titles included The Plank in Your Eye and A Maggot in the Cherry , was a criminal named Fred Verity. Part one was to deal with his crimes and eventual convic tion. In the second part, the imprisoned Fred would undergo a new brainwashing technique and be released from jail. Part three would consider the agitation of liberal politicians who were concerned about freedom and churches concerned about sin. At the novel s conclusion Fred, cured of the treatment, would return to his life of crime. The other novel Burgess was planning at this time was Let Copulation Thrive (published in October 1962 as The I/Vamtz'ng Seed), another futuristic fable about an over- populated future in which religion is outlawed and homo sexuality has become the norm, of cially promoted by government policies to control the birth rate. In Burgess s imaginary future, men are press ganged into the armed forces to take part in war games. The true purpose of these con icts is to turn the bodies of the dead into tinned meat to feed a hungry population. What The Wmting Seed and xm-uwlkmmemnwmewmsmwwwmmrEMMMMM)Mwa kM VMMWWMWMWMa w t sz Mi i u m WMMW WMWM u swash Wm A Clockwork Orange share is an underpinning idea of poli tics as a constantly swinging pendulum, with the govern- ments in both novels alternating between authoritarian discipline and liberal [aissez zz're. Despite his gifts as a comic novelist, and the cultural optimism he had shown during his years as a school teacher, Burgess was an Augustinian Catholic at heart, and he could not altogether shake off the beliefin original sin (the tendency ofhuman kind to do evil rather than good) which had been drilled into him by the Manchester Xaverian Brothers when he was a schoolboy. A similar fascination with evil is found in the works ofhis friend and co-religionist Graham Greene, whose novel Brighton Roc/e (1938) presents a comparable blend of social decay and teenage delinquency. Before Burgess came to write dystopian novels of his own, he had spent nearly thirty years reading other exam ples of the genre. In his critical study Tbe Novel Now (published as a pamphlet in 1967 and expanded to book length in 1971), he devoted a chapter to ctional utopias and dystopias. Twentieth-century literary writers, he argued, had on the whole rejected the socialist utopianism of H. G. Wells, who denied original sin and put his faith in scienti c rationalism. Burgess was far more interested in the anti utopian tradition ofAldous Huxley, who chal lenged the progressive assumption that scienti c progress would automatically bring happiness in speculative novels such as Brave New 70er (1932) and A er Many a Summer (1939). He was no less impressed by the political dystop- ianism ofSinclair Lewis s novel It Can tHappen Here (I935), a gloomy prophecy about the rise of a right wing dictator- ship in America, or by Tbe Aerodrome (1941), Rex Warner s wartime fable about the appeal of handsome young pilots with fascist inclinations. Burgess had read George Orwell s Nineteen Eightvaour shortly after publication (the title page of his diary for 1951 is headed: Down with Big Brother ), but he tended to disparage Orwell s novel as a dying man s prophecy, which was unduly pessimistic about the capacity of working people to resist their ideological oppressors. In his hybrid novel/critical book 1985, Burgess suggested that Orwell had simply been caricaturing tenden cies that he saw around him in 1948. Perhaps every dysto pian vision is a gure of the present, Burgess wrote, with certain features sharpened and exaggerated to point a moral and a warning. British dystopian ction was enjoying a minor renais sance in the early 19605, and Burgess, Who was reviewing new novels for the Times Literary Supplement and the Yorkshire Post, was well placed to notice this phenomenon and respond to it in his own imaginative writing. In I960 he read Facialjustz'ce by L. P. Hartley and When the Kissing Had to Stop by Constantine Fitzgibbon. But the novel which caught his attention more than any other was T176 Umleep (1961) by Diana and Meir Gillon, a husband and wife writing team who also worked together on a number of political non ction books. Reviewing this book in the Yorkshire Post on 6 April 1961, Burgess wrote: [The Umleep is] much to my taste, a piece of FF (fut c or future ction) which, in that post Orwellian manner which is really a reversion to Brave New iVorld Untevisited, terri es not With the ultimate totalitarian nightmare but With a dream of liberalism going mad. In this perhaps not so remote Gillon England, with its stability (no war, no crime) ensured by advanced psychological techniques, life is for living. Life s biggest enemy is sleep; sleep, therefore, must be xviii liquidated. A couple of jabs of Sta Wake and you reclaim thirty years from the darkness. But things don t go quite as expected. There s too much wakeful leisure: crime and delinquency ensue and there have to be police. Then comes an epidemic of unconsciousness, believed at rst to be caused by a virus from Mars. Nature reacts violently to Sta Wake and warns man, as she s warned him before, against excessive naughtiness or liberalism. The other book Burgess read while he was preparing to write A Clockwork Orange was Brave New World Revisited (1959), Huxley s non ction sequel to his earlier novel. From Huxley he learned about the emerging technologies of behaviour modi cation, brainwashing and chemical persuasion. There is no evidence to suggest that Burgess had read Science andHuman Behaviour by the psychologist B. F. Skinner, but he found a summary of Skinner s theories in the pages of Huxley s book: And even today we nd a distinguished psychologist, Professor B. F. Skinner ofHarvard University, insisting that, as scienti c explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himselfappears to approach zero. Man s vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice none of these is conspicuous in the new scienti c self portrait. As Jonathan Meades has observed, Skinner would be completely forgotten today were it not for Burgess s hatred of him, which he articulated in ctional form through the character of Professor Balaglas in 7776 Clockwork Yiesmmmt (1974). In his day, Skinner was well known for his utopian novel When Two (I948), in which he imagined a bright technocratic future ofteetotal conformity, commu- nal child rearing (the words mother and father have become meaningless), utilitarian clothing, and harmonious living in single sex dormitories. The bright lights and garish posters of advertising have been abolished in Skinner s ideal community, and history is no longer thought to be worth studying. In Science and Human Behaviour, he dismisses genetics, culture, environment and individual freedom of choice as insigni cant factors when it comes to determining human personality. To Burgess, who believed in the primacy of free will (and whose public persona was almost entirely self created), this was the most revolting kind of nonsense. One of the purposes of his own dystopian novel was to offer a counter argument to the mechanistic determinism of Skinner and his followers. The prison chaplain in A Clockwork Orange sums up Burgess s position very concisely: When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.) Burgess was a talented linguist who had studied Malay to degree standard and made translations of literary works written in French, Russian and Ancient Greek. It was his interest in Russian language and literature rather than politics which took him to Leningrad (now known as St Petersburg) for a working holiday in June and July I961. He had been sent there by his publisher, William Heinemann, who hoped that he might write a travel book about Soviet Russia. He taught himself the basics of Russian by acquiring copies of Getting Along in Russian by Mario Pei, 7246b Yourself Russian by Maximilian Fourman, and ThePenguin Russian Course. Yet the intended non ction project was soon put aside when a different kind of book began to take shape. Before leaving England, Burgess had contemplated writing his novel about teenage hoodlums using British slang of the early 19603, but he was worried that the language would be out of date before the book was published. Outside the Metropole Hotel in Leningrad, Burgess and his wife witnessed gangs ofviolent, well-dressed youths who reminded him of the Teddy Boys back home in England. He claimed in his memoirs that this was the moment at which he decided to devise a new language for his novel based on Russian, to be called Nadsat (this being the Russian suf x meaning teen ). The urban location of the novel could be anywhere, he wrote later, but I visualised it as a sort of compound of my native Manchester, Leningrad and New York. For Burgess, the important idea was that dandi ed, lawless youth is an international phenomenon, equally visible on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Burgess s literary agent, Peter Janson Smith, submitted the typescript of A Clockwork Orange to Heinemann in London on 5 September 196I, with a covering letter explaining that he had been too busy to read it. Heinemann s chief ction reader, Maire Lynd, wrote a cautious report, and she noted that Everything hangs on whether the reader can get into the book quickly enough [. . .] Once in, it becomes hard to stop. But the language dif culty, though fun to wrestle with, is great. With luck the book will be a big success and give the teenagers a new language. But it might be an enormous op. Certainly nothing in between. James Miehie, Burgess s editor, circulated a memo on 5 October, in which he described the novel as one of the oddest publishing problems imaginable. He was worried about how to promote the book, Which was very different in genre from Burgess s previous comic novels about Malaya and England. Michie was con dent that the invented language would not be too forbidding for most readers, but he identi ed a risk that certain episodes of sexual Violence in A Clockwork Orange might lead to a prosecu- tion under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. The author can plead artistic justi cation, Michie wrote, but a delicate-minded critic could convincingly accuse him of indulging in sadistic fantasies. One ofMichie s suggestions was that the possible damage to Burgess s reputation could be limited by publishing the novel with Peter Davies (an imprint of Heinemann) and under a pseudonym. It is unlikely that Burgess knew anything about these utters 0f nervousness among his publishers. By 4 February 1962 he was corresponding with William Holden, Heinemann s publicity director, about a glossary of Nadsat to be circu lated to the travelling bookshop reps. One other publishing dif culty was created by Burgess himself. At the end of Part 3, Chapter 6, the typescript contains a note in Burgess s handwriting: Should we end here? An optional epilogue follows. James Michie decided to include the epilogue (sometimes referred to as the twenty rst chapter) in the UK edition. When. the novel was published in New York by W W Norton in 1963, the American editor, Eric Swenson, arrived at a different answer to Burgess s editorial question ( Should we end here? ). Looking back on these events more than twenty years later, Swenson wrote: What I remember is that he responded to my comments by telling me that I was right, that he had added the twenty tst upbeat chapter because his British publisher wanted a happy ending. My memory also claims that he urged me to publish an xxii American edition Without that last chapter, which was, again as I remember it, how he had originally ended the novel. We did just that. Burgess came to regret having allowed two different versions of his novel to circulate in different territories. In 1986 he wrote: People wrote to me about this indeed much ofmy later life has been expended on Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention. Yet it is clear from the 1961 typescript that Burgess s intentions about the ending of his novel were ambiguous from the start. A Clockwork Orange was published by Heinemann on 14 May 1962 in an edition of 6,000 copies. The book sold poorly, despite having been praised by critics such as Julian Mitchell in the Spectator and KingsleyAmis in the Observer. A memorandum in the publisher s archive notes that only 3,872 copies had been sold by the mid 196os. The tone of many early reviews was one of baf ement and distaste for the novel s linguistic experiments. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, John Garrett described A Clockwork Orange as a viscous verbiage which is the swag bellied offspring of decay. Robert Taubman in the New Statesman said that it was a great strain to read. Diana Josselson, writing in the Kenyon Review, compared A Clockwork Orange unfavourablywith 7776[nberz'tom William Golding s novel about Neanderthals: How much one cares for these hairy creatures, how much one hates their successor, Man. Malcolm Bradbury, whose more encouraging review appeared in Punch, claimed that the novel was a modern work in the sense that it dealt with our indirection and our indifference, our Violence and our sexual exploitation of one another, our rebellion and our protest. Despite these mixed responses from the mainstream press, A Clockwork Orange soon began to gather an underground XXiii following. William S. Burroughs, the author of 77% Naked Lunch (published in Paris in 1959), wrote an enthusiastic recommendation for the Ballantine paperback edition in the United States: