Celebration: Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange, with Dominic Sandbrook, Thursday 18th October, 7.00pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
Words by Emma Shaw
Last night, Dominic Sandbrook offered up a fiftieth birthday celebration of Anthony Burgess’s most enduring work. Sandbrook provided a wide-ranging contextual history for both the book and Stanley Kubrick’s film, released ten years later. The event was held at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, housed in a listed former mill on Cambridge Street. The setting for Burgess’s archive offers a reminder of his industrial output—A Clockwork Orange, written in only three weeks, was one of six novels published by Burgess in 1962.
From a table in the foyer, Waterstones sold copies of Sandbrook’s books on the history of post-war Britain, setting up his credentials as a talking head for those not familiar with his work on television and radio. Once inside the building, the plush red seats and eclectic mix of antiques dotted around the lecture hall looked oddly out of place against the exposed brickwork and aluminium ducting. I later discovered that the furniture and other curios were recovered from Burgess’s homes in Italy and elsewhere. His piano was tucked discreetly behind the stage, shrouded beneath a black cover.
On the way in, I was invited to sample an evil-looking beer produced by the sponsors of the event, Brentwood Brewing Company. Chockwork Orange is an award winning dark ale, which at 6.5% could easily fuel a night of ultra-violence. Luckily, few members of the audience were brave enough to return for a second glass. I can, however, recommend the chocolate brownies.
Priming his audience for the nostalgia that followed, Sandbrook got down to business by revealing the seventies-style knitted tank top beneath his suit jacket. Skipping back a decade, he began his lecture with an analysis of how sixties Britain was transformed into an affluent consumer society. He offered an engaging mix of anecdotal detail (1962 is now fixed in my memory as the year in which Golden Wonder released their first flavoured potato crisp–cheese and onion, since you ask) with acute insight into the anxieties that accompanied such a rapid period of change.
Sandbrook gave an alternative representation of Britain in the Swinging Sixties as a conformist culture structured around a deeply conservative establishment. It transpired that Burgess was not alone in saying he ‘despised’ the Beatles. Having established his backdrop, Sandbrook argued that Burgess’s direct inspiration for A Clockwork Orange lay in ‘his response to the forces that were reshaping British Society and, specifically, to the transformation of youth culture’. Acknowledging the underlying question posed by the book as ‘should we be free to choose evil or compelled to do good’, he presented the novel as a response to contemporary anxiety about teenage rebellion, violence and social disorder.
Sandbrook then segued into an account of the power cuts, stagflation and strikes that characterised seventies Britain. He described a society far closer to Burgess’s dystopian view, where the violence described by Alex was acted out on the football terraces most Saturdays. Evidence of Burgess’s resentment towards Kubrick and the film of A Clockwork Orange was revealed by Burgess’s words: ‘Kubrick’s achievement swallowed mine whole, and yet I was responsible for what some called its malign influence on the young’. Burgess was bitter that he, not Kubrick, was held responsible for the copycat violence supposedly provoked by the film: ‘If a couple of nuns were raped in Berwick-on-Tweed, I would always get a telephone call from the newspapers.’ Sandbrook countered by making the case for Kubrick’s film as essential in securing Burgess’s legacy.
Whilst the film has ensured the book has not been consigned to literary history as ‘a period piece’, an alternative account would credit Burgess’s inspired invention of nadsat, the language of Alex’s narration, for the book’s contemporary feel more than half a century after it was written. Nadsat neatly avoids miring the book in dated language. Just as it allows Burgess to gloss Alex’s diabolical violence and make it appear (almost) comical, it enables the book to skirt around the intervening decades of ever-changing gangland slang and thereby retain its freshness.
The Foundation’s Director, Dr Andrew Biswell, who began the evening by introducing Sandbrook returned to host the Q and A that followed. Sandbrook fielded questions from the audience who, as Alex might have said, were mainly of the older bourgeois type with a smattering of oomny devotchkas and malchiks scribbling furiously in their notebooks. Questions ranged from the marginalisation of women in the book to Burgess’s views on Jimmy Savile (‘that disgusting man’), before Biswell rounded up a thoroughly horrorshow event.