A real good horrorshow

By MIKA ROSS-SOUTHALL

On holiday in the remote mountains of
Mallorca recently, I read Anthony Burgess’s A
Clockwork Orange, and for days
after finishing the book, had a recurring nightmare which involved a person with
a “Peebee Shelley maskie” violently hacking me into tiny, bloody bits. Maybe
I’m easily shocked, but the nightmares are a price worth paying for the experience of reading Burgess’s unexpectedly mind-blowing prose. The incidents that Alex,
the novel's school-boy narrator, describes are shocking; more so because of the book's disturbing language. Here’s how Alex and
his “droogs”, Georgie and Pete, rape a woman and attack her husband, a writer:

“He did the strong-man on the
devotchka, who was still creech creech creeching away in very horrorshow
four-in-a-bar, locking her rookers from the back, while I ripped away at this
and that and the other, the others going haw haw haw still, and real good
horrorshow groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies, O my
brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge. Plunging, I could
slooshy cries of agony and this writer bleeding veck that Georgie and Pete held
on to nearly got loose howling bezoomny with the filthiest of slovos that I
already knew and others he was making up.”

In the TLS of April 22, 1965 (three years after the original, UK publication
of A Clockwork Orange), Burgess wrote
an article explaining his experimental style: “I wanted to write about possible
ways of dealing with the disease of juvenile delinquency, and I wanted the
story of one young thug’s rehabilitation to be recounted by the patient
himself. This, I thought, called for the use of teenage slang, and I began my
first draft in the coffee-bar idiom (most painfully learnt) of the day. But I
reflected that, by the time the book came out, the slang would already be out
of date . . . . A trip to Russia showed me that stilyagi behaved much like our own (as they were then) teddy-boys,
and I was struck by the notion of fusing the cognate images into one . . . by
manufacturing a composite language, a sort of Anglo-Russian dialect I called
(after the Russian “-teen” prefix) Nadsat.
Conservative by nature, I do not like strangeness for its own sake, and the
fact that my new slang could be justified in terms of a real foreign language
eased my embarrassment at having to write in it . . . . The title of the book
is A Clockwork Orange, taken by some
Americans as avant-garde clever-cleverness but, as any Cockney will know, as
native and traditional as Bow Bells”.

The author’s unfamiliar “slovos”
(words) are especially imaginative when it comes to describing body parts: “litso”
(face), “rot” (mouth), “zoobies” (teeth), “rookers” (arms and hands), “guttiwuts”
(stomach) and “glazzies” (eyes).  “Droogs”
comes from Russian drugi, meaning
friends in violence. “Horrorshow”, from kharashó, the
neuter form of the Russian word for “good”, is used as a term of
approbation, like modern slang “wicked” and “sick”. The latter, incidentally,
is also used by Alex to express approval – an unintentionally prophetic stroke on Burgess's part.

For me, one of the best slang coinages is “sinny”
(cinema), apt given the evil Alex is forced to endure through films and also because
of what Burgess was later to feel about Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, released
in 1971. Burgess thought his novel’s unfamiliar language veiled the violence – nothing
is described outright, he leaves it to the reader’s imagination (which is often
more powerful) – whereas Kubrick’s film starkly realizes the incidents and Burgess’s wordplay is mostly lost.

An awareness of his novel’s potential
to do harm perhaps encouraged Burgess to write a letter to the Editor of the TLS in 1964 defending the work
of his friend, William Burroughs:

“if any writer is likely to rehabilitate an
effete form and show us what can still be done with a language that Joyce
seemed to have wrung dry, it is William Burroughs . . . . Unfortunately, too
many people who should know better protract a squeamishness about
subject-matter that sickens their capacity to make purely literary judgments. I
do not like what Mr. Burroughs writes about; for that matter I do not always
like what I myself write about: I was nauseated by the content of my A Clockwork Orange. There is . . . no
lip-smacking on the part of Mr. Burroughs when he works at the refining of his
raw material into art. Life is, unfortunately, life. Out of life we must
choose, for our writing, what will best stimulate us to write well. ‘Everything
that lives is holy.’ This may not be morally true, but it is true of the
subject-matter of literature. For heaven’s sake, let us leave morals to the
moralists and carry on with the job of learning to evaluate art as art”.

In his autobiography, Burgess suggested poor sales of A Clockwork Orange were probably
down to over-exposure – people didn’t feel they
needed to read the book, especially following the film. Yet Kubrick based his film adaptation on the American edition, which cuts the last chapter where Alex matures and reforms,
and then muses that the next generation will go through the same mayhem of adolescence,
“so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round”. The
US publishers, W. W. Norton, thought this ending wouldn’t appeal to
American readers; perhaps they didn't get the author’s subtle,
cyclical pessimism. (Burgess only accepted the cut
and the addition of a Nadsat glossary
for financial reasons, but in later reprints, he insisted on reinstating the last
chapter and dropping the glossary.) And another editorial oversight, this time from the English publishers, Heinemann: in
Burgess’s typescript, from which the original 1962 edition was taken,
an editor has written in the margin, “will this name be known at publication time?”, beside “Elvis Presley”.

Why read A Clockwork Orange now? Well, if you don’t, “bolshy
great yarblockos to thee and thine”.