'A Clockwork Orange' Follow-up Surfaces After Decades Unseen: NPR

Gather round, my droogs. It's time for a story.

Not long after the 1971 release of the movie adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, the novel's author, Anthony Burgess, received a quote from a publisher: Write a short follow-up to the novel, the word "Clockwork" in the title and brims with artwork, and we will make you a rich man.

So, according to Burgess scholar Andrew Biswell, the novelist got to work on a brief piece, which soon became a big piece, which eventually ballooned to 200 pages. Written under the name The Clockwork Condition, the work was to be a philosophical meditation on the very nature of modern life – but alas, it never was. The manuscript was never published, and despite rumors of the project, it was never found.

Until now.

On Thursday, Manchester Metropolitan University, where Biswell teaches modern literature, announced that the professor had unearthed the long-lost manuscript. It was found in a snowdrift of the late novelist's materials, stacks of papers and about 1,000 hours of recordings at the Burgess Foundation in Manchester during the long process of cataloging.

Biswell tells NPR he was "very surprised" when he came across it.

"I was delighted, because I'd come across a reference to The Clockwork Condition – just one reference – in an interview from around 1975, where was Burgess asked, 'Where is this book?' And he said, 'Oh God, that will never be published. That does not really exist, '"Biswell explains.

"And so that caused me to believe that the manuscript is one of the most important things in the world." . "It's possible, I think, but it did not complete it."

Do not think of the project as a straight-up, exactly; Biswell says it's probably more accurately described as "a kind of nonfiction commentary on many of the issues that are raised by the Clockwork Orange novel. "

"He was going to write a book about the condition of modern man. Dante's Inferno, who was one of his favorite poems, "says Biswell, who cobled together a portrait of the work from the manuscript itself, but also from Burgess' correspondence around the time he was writing it. , it was – as they said in the proposal – the need for man to break out of the existence and come to grips with his own deepest self. "

So why did The Clockwork Condition never see the light of day?

In a word, Burgess got distracted. Stanley Kubrick's film, including an ill-fated attempt by the two men to make a movie about Napoleon.

"I think he became so embroiled and immersed in these other literary projects that he ended up not writing this book about the human condition," Biswell says.

Still, Burgess had already agreed to write something under the name of "Clockwork." That this project became The Clockwork Testament, a novella published in the mid-1970s that was partly inspired by his own experiences writing A Clockwork Orange and see it in the big screen.

But Biswell will not rule out the possibility that the unfinished manuscript could still be published.

"There's enough in the way of writing that you can understand what book might have been," he says.
"But I think it would be a lot of editing, and it would require the right designer to catch the mood of what's there."

In the meantime, Manchester Metropolitan University has released a couple of excerpts from the work. Here's one, my dog ​​of the day – read it and weep:

"Goodness is a matter of common sense, something required by the community, but truth and beauty remain values. The pleasures and diversions of the flesh are delightful, and, if God had anything to do with them, I'd like to thank God for them, The organization of societies is fascinating, Sport is thrilling. What does it really look like in the world of delusion and multiplicity, really and ultimately exists – the final monad, the intellectual intimation that there is a God, the bones and the bones of a child, and, through the pursuit of beauty, he may not gain intimation that God exists (but is for the scientific or philosophical intellect), but an indirect t experience of the quiddity or whatness of God. This is what education should prepare us for. Unfortunately it does not. And the television programs and the movies and the Daily Mirror are in the service of unreality, the hiding of the nature of the human and the doling out of anodynes as a substitute. If I wanted to use the term 'evil', I'd say that that kind of smothering is evil. If you want Christian language, I'd almost say that you're going after the truth about the Holy Ghost. "