ANTHONY BURGESS
INTERVIEWED
IN ITALY IN 1974 ABOUT:
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
(and other
subjects in general)
Interviewer: What
literary significance does this book [A Clockwork Orange] have?
A.B.: In a sense
this book does state what I’m always trying to state in my work; that man is
free, that man was granted the gift of free will and that he can choose, and
that if he decides to choose evil rather than to choose good, this is in his
nature and it is not the task of the state to kill this capacity for choice.
In effect the book A Clockwork Orange says that it is better for a
man to do evil of his own free will than for the state to turn him into a
machine which can only do good. I mean in this sense, I’ve been using the theme
of free will in novel after novel, but this book is different from the others
in that it uses a specially contrived language and also in that it makes far
more explicit use of violence than in any other of my work.
I don’t like violence, I don’t like presenting violence in my books, I
don’t like, even, presenting the act of sex in my books; I am naturally timid
about these things.
But in writing A Clockwork Orange, I was so appalled at the prospect
before us, in the late 1950’s, the prospect of the state taking over more and
more of the area of free choice, that I felt I had to write the book.
The book is didactic, the book teaches, preaches, a little too much and I
don’t think it’s the job of the artist to do that, the job of the artist is to
show.
But the book became popular precisely because it combined the didactic and
what seems, to many people, to be the pornographic. Pornography and violence,
and the teachy, preachy quality; and when you get
these two together you normally produce a book that can become a bestseller.
The book didn’t become a bestseller, not for many, many years, but
inevitably it has become my most popular book and this I resent. Out of the
thirty odd books I have written this is often the only book of mine which is
known, this I resent very much.
Interviewer: It also
talks about a private happening in your life, an element of biography involved?
A.B.: Yes,
indeed. My first wife, who is now dead, was attacked during the war in London,
in the blackout, by four American soldiers, who were in fact deserters. It
wasn’t a sexual attack, it was an attack for robbery, but the result of this
attack was that she had a miscarriage, she lost the child she was carrying at
the time and her health deteriorated, and I suppose her eventual death was
initiated by this act of violence.
I think it’s the job of the artist, especially the novelist, to take events
like that from his own life, or from the lives of those near to him, and to
purge them, to cathartise the pain, the anguish, in a
work of art.
It’s one of the jobs of art, I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said " We
shed our sicknesses in works of art. "
In this sense, the part of the novel, the part of the film, in which the
character is writing a book, and the book is called in my own book, A
Clockwork Orange. It was an attempt to put myself in the novel, to put
myself as a writer who is subject to the deprivations, to the violence of wild
youth, and by that means to clear it out of my system so that I didn’t have to
think about it any more.
I think that the therapeutic virtue of this book is probably its greatest
virtue as far as I’m concerned. Its artistic virtue is rather less.
Interviewer: And then
the novel was made into a film, did it make a lot of money for you?
A.B.: No, I didn’t
make any money at all, I just sold the book rather early on in my career. Ever
since the book had been written, from about 1962 on, there had been attempts to
make a film out of it; but of course, in 1962, 1963, the climate wasn’t yet
ready for films of this kind. We weren’t ready in 1962 to see on the films
explicit violence, explicit rape, even explicit nudity.
So the original attempt to make a film of A Clockwork Orange was an
attempt at a very low financial level. The idea was to make a kind of ‘underground’
film with the Rolling Stones, (a very popular singing group at that time,
and I think still), in it, playing the four leading parts; the film would not
make much money, the film would not be shown publicly probably, but only in film
clubs.
So, in consequence I accepted $500 for the rights of the book.
Naturally the book was now in the hands of operators who were able to sell
it eventually for $500,000. So the money gained from the book has been gained
by those who didn’t write it.
For my own part I don’t worry, because it is the nature of serious artists
not to make money. Artists don’t make money, they get their pleasures in other
ways.
Interviewer: Had you
written the book within 1959 and ’60 anyhow?
A.B.: The book
was written in about…, it was finished in 1960, but there was great difficulty
getting it published.
In those days people were very squeamish, in 1960, in England, only then
for the first time was it possible to buy a copy of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover in its unabridged form, it’s only just over ten years ago. The
climate has changed so fundamentally in ten years, that it’s very hard for us
now to believe what life was really like in the 1960’s.
Interviewer: But putting
money aside what has signified for you with the appearance of the film?
A.B.: The film
has just been a damned nuisance.
I am regarded by some people as a mere ‘boy’, a mere helper to Stanley
Kubrick; the secondary creator who is feeding a primary creator who’s a great
film director.
This, I naturally resent, I resent also the fact I am frequently blamed for
the various crimes which are supposed to be instigated by the film.
It is said that young boys see this film, and I believe in England now young
girls also, and then they go round imitating what they have seen in the film.
They go round beating up old men and there have been one or two murders, and
the murders have been blamed on this film.
Well, when the press gets on to these sad events they don’t go to the
director and ask him what he thinks about it, they go to the author.
They go to me and say " Do you feel responsible for all
this? " and I have to say, " Well, whether I’m responsible
or not, this question should have been asked twelve years ago when the book was
first published, not now when the book has become better known after its
transference to another medium. "
But the fundamental answer is, no, one is not responsible. If I am
responsible for young boys beating up old men or killing old women after having
seen the film then Shakespeare is responsible every time some young man decides
to kill his uncle and blames it on Hamlet.
Shakespeare is responsible for producing a film like King Lear, in
which unutterable violence is presented, and even that earlier play of
Shakespeare’s, Titus Andronicus, in which not only do we have multiple
rape but also mutilation and finally cannibalism.
Shakespeare, as far as I know, has never been blamed for any of the
violence in the world; and for that matter, if we’re going to start blaming
books, let’s start blaming the Bible, the most blood-thirsty ever
written, was the Bible.
And there was a man in New York State who killed something like sixteen
children, slaughtered them in cold blood, and he said he was fascinated by the
stories of blood sacrifice in the Old Testament and he merely wanted to
present a sweet offering to the Lord.
Again, we had a man in England, a man called Haig who murdered various
women and drank their blood, and he blamed all this on the sacrament of the
Eucharist, he said he was so fascinated by the notion of drinking the body and
blood of Christ during mass that he merely wanted to transfer this to his own
life, and drink the blood, at least, of live women.
Now, if, when, we get to that stage, all art is culpable; and I prefer to
say that elements in man which produce violence, which produce murder and rape,
are already there and are not likely to be instigated, or even prevented, by a
work of art. The work of art merely takes life as it is and shows life as it is
and that’s the end of it’s duty.
Interviewer: Mr. Burgess
what is your opinion of our present civilization and our society, our present
society?
A.B.: It is no
different from any other society, in the sense that our society is violent, our
society is irresponsible. I don’t think we’re any worse than, say, the society
in which Shakespeare lived.
The stories we read about Elizabethan England indicate that it was far more
dangerous to walk the streets of London say, in 1590 odd, than it is to walk
the streets of New York or Rome today.
The fact is that human nature doesn’t change, we’re violent, we’re
naturally violent, we’re naturally aggressive and we just see more of it
nowadays because we see more newspapers and more films.
And let me get this straight, while I’m at it; there’s nothing wrong with
violence, violence in itself is not a bad thing, it is not automatically to be
condemned, because only through violence can beneficent changes be made.
It was only through violence that the Americans were able to create a revolution,
it’s only through violence, in our own age, that we were able to defeat the
Nazis.
Interviewer: Well then,
where and how is society to be criticised since human
nature, according to you, is the same, doesn’t change?
A.B.: Well, in
certain superficial senses we can criticise human
society, we can say that the profit motive is too important, or the state is
too powerful and things of that kind, but when we criticise
human society all we’re doing is criticising humanity.
We’re just merely saying that man is like this, man is acquisitive and this
is probably wrong, man is aggressive and this is probably wrong and so forth.
But where we must be careful, I think, is in this area where the word
progress appears. I’m not quite sure what the term progress means, I think
progress is possible in the material sense, I think it’s a good thing for
people to have more material comforts, nobody would deny that; I don’t ask for
many for myself but I don’t begrudge Liz Taylor and Richard Burton having
yachts and Cadillacs and so forth.
This is a good thing, this is part of human nature, the pampering of the
flesh, the giving to the senses of what will awaken the senses and gratify the
senses.
But in the wider, moral sense, progress is not possible, we cannot become
better people unless we become different human beings, different animals.
I do accept the fundamental Christian tenet that man is born in original
sin: we are more likely than not to choose the bad rather than the good, and
this, which is called the Augustinian point of view, I too believe, after Saint
Augustine who first propounded it, seems to be in thorough accordance with the
facts if history.
Now, there is a contrary belief which strangely enough, or not so
strangely, came from England, or came from Britain; there was a monk called
Pelagius who said that man is good, that man is capable of becoming better,
that man can build the just society and create his own heaven upon earth.
This seems to me to be false, it is not borne out by the facts of history,
but this false theory, this heresy, underlies Socialism, underlies Communism, underlies
all political theories which believe that man can fulfil
himself through the state.
But when we see the state becoming powerful, trying to fulfil
man, we see that the state becomes a great instrument of tyranny, as in Russia,
as in Nazi Germany.
What we have to do is live our lives, sort out our own morality for
ourselves, accept that we’re imperfect and just do the best we can.
This has always been the position of the just man throughout history and it
must be the position in the future: we will not get any better but we must try.
Interviewer: You do
believe in God then , Mr. Burgess?
A.B.: I don’t
know whether I believe in God or not. It seems to me that God is a very useful
fiction, when Voltaire said " If God does not exist, it would be
necessary to invent him. " I think he was propounding a very profound
truth.
We cannot get through the day without using, at least as a hypothesis, the
notion of God, the notion of Creator, the notion of Sustainer.
But I find it more and more difficult to accept the God of the churches,
whether it happens to be the Catholic church or Islam, which is of course at
the moment, a very, very, potent religious body because it’s tied up with oil.
I think that the hypothesis of God is a good one, but in the sense that God
has any relationship to me, the concept has no real meaning.
I just merely accept God as a kind of intellectual hypothesis which I find
useful, no more. I’m not a practising Christian, I
don’t go to church, I don’t believe there’s a heaven; I believe that after this
life we’re finished with, but during this life the hypothesis of God is a very useful
one.
Interviewer: So you are
inclined to think that this world is convincing evidence that it exists
somewhere a co-even and total logic?
A.B.: No. I
think that it is possible for man, as it were, to create an alternative universe,
I think it’s the job of the artist, the job of the scientist, the job of the
thinker to build up, as it were, an image of some possible ultimate reality. I
think that the best thing men can do is create a structure like, say,
Beethoven’s ninth symphony, or a structure like the philosophy of Descartes or
Spinoza, whether these systems, the musical system of the ninth symphony, the
philosophical system of Spinoza or Descartes is an image of some ultimate
reality, we don’t know.
I would rather hope that it would be so, but it doesn’t matter if not.
This is our sole job, it’s to impose on the chaos of life some structure,
some order, and the order is best found, I think, in art and philosophy.
Interviewer: Would you
agree with that sentence pronounced by Jacques Monod, " Life is a
fact of chance and necessity and man is alone in an indifferent
universe. "
A.B.: Well, this
is absurd, this point of view, … yes, I accept that. I accept that the universe
is a great mass of whirling matter which is totally indifferent to man and that
hence man is somewhat absurd in his confrontation with this huge nescient
chaos.
But man’s glory is that he can create order, man’s glory is that he can
create structures which have a more formal significance, more pattern, than the
swirling mass of life he sees around him and man must get on with his job.
Political man is totally unimportant, sexual man, consuming man, these are
not important, but creative man is the only thing which is important, that is
why we’re here, in a sense, to create.
Interviewer: You live in
Rome now, in exile, as it were. Have you accustomed yourself to exile?
Do you consider yourself an exiled writer?
A.B.: I think I
am an expatriate writer rather than an exiled writer. When a writer has to
leave his country and go to some other country, then he is a genuine exile. I
decided to expatriate myself from England, I think chiefly because I felt that
no writer could do his best work in England anymore, I think the days in which
a writer could create great art no longer exist in England.
It is partly because of the lack of conflict, partly because of the
domination of the welfare state and partly because English society itself is no
longer dynamic. I find that American society, for instance, is far more
dynamic, there are things happening there, there are changes being made; violence
is involved, naturally, but things are moving and it’s only out of these
elements of violence and sex that novels and poems can be made.
You can’t make a poem, you can’t make a novel, out of the kind of life
that’s lived in middle class London anymore.
One has to get out, but I do find that living in Italy I am up against a
very severe problem, and it is the problem of not being surrounded by my own
language.
I resist Italian, I resist all foreign languages as I get older because I
want to know more and more about my own; my job is to exploit the resources of
English and I resist Italian. I feel that I am surrounded by foreigners,
although of course, I am the foreigner, and this does bring about a very
depressing sense of isolation at times.
Not so bad for the musician. One of the reasons I am writing music at the
moment is because I recognise it as a kind of
international language: the way into foreignness, it's a kind of alternative
Italian, if you like.
Interviewer: Have you
been away long?
A.B.: From
England? I left England in 1968, so I suppose it is long enough. I have no
desire to go back, when I do go back I find a country rather hard to
understand; I don’t understand the names that are used in conversation, I don’t
understand the main issues that are discussed.
The England that means anything to me at all is the England of the past. I
feel that the England of Shakespeare, the England of Chaucer, have a reality
for me which the England of Harold Wilson or Edward Heath, or both together,
doesn’t possess.
Interviewer: You have
written so many novels, several critical books, essays, historical books, this
is quite a lot. Do you work hard or do you work in a great hurry?
A.B.: I don’t
work hard, I work as anybody else works, I do my job. I get up in the morning,
have my breakfast and do my job but, and I say this to all writers, every
writer must try and write at least one thousand words every day; no more, no
less.
Interviewer: How did you
start writing?
A.B.: How did I
start writing? I started writing because I began my career as a musician.
I tried to be a composer for many, many years, and I found the writing of
music very difficult because the mere physical labour
of setting down on paper, notes for the instruments of the orchestra is wearing
in itself. And in England, at the end of the war, it was not easy to get music performed,
certainly there was no money in it and I used to envy these people who sat down
at a typewriter and merely produced a simple line.
So I tried to do the same thing myself, I wrote a novel, the novel was
accepted, and I saw myself as a novelist doing this kind of work solely as a
hobby; but when I was invalided out of the colonial, the British colonial,
service, with no job, I found that the only job that I could do was that of
being a novelist.
And I think that many novelists, certainly in England, become novelists
because they can’t find any other work. That’s how I became a novelist, I just
found myself with nothing else to do except write novels and I’ve carried on
with that to the present day.
Interviewer: Mr.
Burgess, excuse me if I ask you, do you have a certain vanity?
A.B.: Do I have
a certain vanity? What, a physical vanity? I have no physical vanity. Intellectual
vanity? No, I don’t think I am a vain person. Why, do I seem to be a vain
person?
Interviewer: Er, we were wondering about your hair pulled down on your forehead.
A.B.: Yes, oh
that’s because I’m going bald, if I comb my hair high then you’ll see a large
bald patch. For some reason I resent baldness, I resent it strongly because I
associate it with impotence, although I’m probably wrong. Yes, there is a kind
of vanity, it’s probably a sexual vanity after all. We all have it.
Interviewer: Now, the
last book which has appeared in France, La Folle Semence, it has been quite successful and it has been called
a fable on the theme of population explosion. Is this a problem which preoccupies
you in particular?
A.B.: Well, it’s
a problem which did preoccupy me when I first conceived the book because I was
living in the far east at the time, I’d seen India, I’d seen Bombay, I’d seen
Calcutta.
I’d seen the ghastly results of over-population, and of course, I was
living very close to Singapore, which is a little island crammed with humanity
of all kinds, and naturally I saw this problem as one that was facing the east,
but not yet facing the west.
In my little novel I present this theme of over-population as affecting my
own country, England. I imagine a future in which the population is so great
that people haven’t enough to eat and the state steps in and forces people to
have fewer and fewer children.
But I do, rather boldly I think, suggest a solution: the solution doesn’t
lie in contraception, in the states’ imposing a limitation on the family, the
solution is a Malthusian one.
Now, Malthus was an English clergyman who lived in the eighteenth century
and first propounded the idea that soon there would not be enough food in the
world for people, and therefore we had to do something about it.
He said the only thing we could do about it is to delay marriage, is to practise chastity, nowadays, of course, we don’t believe in
that, we believe that everybody has a right to copulate if they wish to; and they
must guard against the inevitable biological results of copulation.
My view is as presented in this novel, so it’s not perhaps essentially a
serious view, I wouldn’t go to the gallows on this view, is that we have to
continue to accept certain natural checks.
Malthus said we have checks such as earthquakes, volcanoes, famines, these
keep the population down.
But man has a cultural check and this cultural check is war. So, in my book
I present wars which are waged, not for any ideological reason, not for
territorial reasons, but because it’s a means of keeping the population down.
Interviewer: Then
another cultural check would be cannibalism?
A.B.: Well, this
seems natural enough to me. It is probably always wrong, evil indeed, to kill
one’s neighbour for whatever cause.
But as far as I know there’s never been any prohibition as far as eating
the body of your neighbour is concerned, I can’t see
any ground at all for imagining that cannibalism is evil. What harm is one
doing? One is merely breaking certain taboos and these taboos are naturally
highly irrational. But it may very well be that one of our solutions to the
coming problem of famine is cannibalism, we may be going to our supermarkets
and buying cans of meat which are called Mensch,
or something like that, and these will be acceptable because we do, in fact, accept
all kinds of nameless meats, seasoned with sodium nitrate, that we find on the
shelves of supermarkets.
This may well happen and we may well so change our cultural thinking, our
moral thinking, that we will accept it
It seems to me a far more reasonable solution than abortion which is
genuine murder, and I do base my hatred of abortion on a very simple theory and
that is, that everybody has a right to be born, but nobody has a right to live.
This is the fundamental theme of the novel we’re talking about.
We all have a right to be born but as far as living, well, who can
legislate? Have I a right to live to the age of seventy? If I have that right,
who says so? Beethoven was dead at my age, fifty seven, Napoleon was dead at
fifty two, so was Shakespeare, Chatterton was dead at seventeen, Keats was dead
at twenty five. What right do I have to live longer than these people?
But I think I have a right to be born and I have a right to know what life
is like and after that it is a matter of chance, a matter of war, a matter of
murder, a matter of what you will; but we all must have this taste of life and
for that reason everybody must be born who wants to be born.
Interviewer: According
to a psychoanalytical point of view, cannibalism can be interpreted as an act
of love.
A.B.: Well,
there’s a curious ambiguity which exists in, I think, all languages. If I say I
like men, I like women, I can also say, I like pork, I like beef, j’aime le porc, j’aime l’humanité etc.
There’s obviously a fundamental sense that the act of liking, that the act
of loving, can be interpreted as a desire to possess ultimately, the desire to
take the body of the loved thing or the loved person within one’s own system,
to absorb it.
This of course is there in the Sacrament of the Eucharist in the Catholic
church, although our present churchmen are trying to kill that old, perfectly
natural, cannibalistic symbolism; Christ said " Eat me, drink
me. " In other words, " Love me. "
And this is based on a fundamental need , I think, on the part of men,
to absorb beings greater than himself, either spiritually and, Christ says,
physically; this seems to be the finest theological justification for
cannibalism one can ever find.
Interviewer: You are
also interested in futurology apart from the population explosion, do you think
that our technical progress will make life longer and that old people will take
over?
A.B.: There
seems to be no evidence, as far as I know, that people are living longer than
they were, say, in the time of Shakespeare. Whenever one looks, say, at an
anthology of Elizabethan poetry one finds that people die young and people die
old, pretty much as today. People die at eighty, people die at eighty five, at
ninety, people also die at twenty, people die at sixteen.
My own pragmatic experience teaches me that life isn’t becoming necessarily
any longer, people are dying just the same.
But there is an undoubted fear on the part of the young that the world is
in the hands of the old; I don’t think there is anything necessarily wrong in
that, there is no great vice in being aged any more than there is any great
virtue in being young.
I think a lot depends on how wise the old are, and we have to do something
about our educational system whereby we regard it as a continuous process, not
merely something that happens in childhood or adolescence, but something that
goes on all our lives so that our old are wise as well as old.
There’s no danger in what I believe is called a gerontocracy, there’s no
danger in the old ruling, we’re going to get a lot of this in time to come, so
long as the old are wise.
There’s no virtue in youth either because youth usually is not wise.
Interviewer: It has been
said that man is going through an identity crisis, doesn’t know the reasons
which make him live or think. What do you think of it?
A.B.: I don’t
worry too much about identity, it’s far more important to live than to have an
identity.
Let me try to explain what I mean: I’ve just written a novel, or rather, I
have a short novel coming out this year, in which my hero, who is a professor
in an American university, has a sudden heart attack and finds that part of his
brain is blocked out, blacked out, and he has to give a lecture on an
Elizabethan dramatist and the only thing he can do is to invent one on the spur
of the moment.
He can’t remember any real ones, and by the time he has invented this one;
he has invented his work, his character, his life, he finds he’s just as real
as any of the students sitting in that room. He has identity, he has thorough
identity, but what he doesn’t have is life.
It is far more important to live piecemeal, live through the senses, live
through the brain, than to worry about what one is, to worry about one’s name
or one’s character or one’s make-up, these things are not important and I think
this phrase ‘identity crisis’ is one of the stupidest I’ve ever encountered.
We are, we fill up space, we fill up time, we’re hunks of meat
perambulating the world, we think, we have sensations, and that’s all we should
worry about.
I, myself, have been through so many identity crisis, in this sense I don’t
even know what my name is; the name under which I’m appearing at the moment is
not my real name. I’ve used various other names, I don’t really care what name
I’m called, what name goes down on the registries.
I am a being, occupying this chair at this moment, and I have certain
thoughts and certain sensations and that’s all that matters.
Identity is not in the least important.
Interviewer: Do you
believe then, in the old reasons by Catechism, are still valid, based on, to
serve God and to love God?
A.B.: In the
sense that God means the ultimate vision, the vision of beauty, the vision of
truth, which is the job of the philosopher or the artist to purvey, I think
that may be said to be correct.
I don’t think we’re here solely to eat and drink and copulate, I think
we’re here to create, and as we’re supposed to be made in God’s image, in that
sense, the sense of creation, we’re most fulfilling our nature, the nature of a
being somewhat like God.
More and more, as I get older, I find that these fundamental theological
concepts have a certain truth in them, although it’s not necessarily the truth
that the Pope or the Archbishop or the bishop or the Priest sees.
Trust the artist more than the churchmen, the artist will interpret
theology far better than they.
Interviewer: This will
be the future of morality,… which is not wholly sexual morality of course,…
creativity?
A.B.: Well, yes,
this is a problem. We’ve already talked a little about the future as far as the
population explosion is concerned. As far as our diminishing food supplies are
concerned we may have to create a new morality, a morality in which it is not
only tolerable but even virtuous to eat one’s fellow men.
We’re always creating new moralities all the time.
But there are certain fundamental moral tenets that we can never disown and
this of course, I think, is, to use the Schweitzerian
phrase: respect for humanity, love for humanity, the sense that we are all one member
of each other, and that possibly respect is a little more important than love.
There’s too little respect about at the present time, too little respect
for people as unique beings, capable of creation, capable of the ideal vision;
to kill a man, to kill a woman or to kill a child is to kill the vision that
that child or woman or man possesses of the ultimate reality. This is a
terrible thing to do. Lack of respect.
Interviewer: What are
you working at?
A.B.: What am I
working at here? I’m writing a symphony at the moment here, but a symphony to
me is rather like a woman knitting, it keeps one part of my brain occupied
while another part can concentrate on new literary ventures.
Well, at the moment I’ve completed a long, an epic poem I suppose you can
call it, about Moses, The Lawgiver, and I’m writing a novel. I’ve
started a novel about a kind of Pope John in which I present the situation that
at the moment is being presented to us, whereby Pope John is a candidate for canonisation; he’s going to be made a saint.
In my novel it, in effect, states that the canonisation
is thoroughly misplaced, that Pope John was possibly a bad man, even though he didn’t
intend to be a bad man, because we owe to him the present disruption of one of
the greatest intellectual and moral institutions that ever existed, the Catholic
church.
I am working on a series for television about the life of Shakespeare, I’m
working on a film about Beethoven’s relationship with his nephew. I am working
on various things, there’s always plenty to do, there’s no writer’s block as
far as I’m concerned, and there aren’t really enough hours in the day for the
things that I have to do.
Interviewer: Which are
the linguistic areas that you consider more fertile today?
A.B.: It’s very
hard to say, I don’t know them all. I should imagine that possibly… very
interesting things are going on in the Finnish language that are not translated
into English.
But as far as we can tell, the English language is producing some very
interesting things, I don’t say England, I don’t say America, I just say those
areas in which the English language is used.
I might say West Africa I might say the West Indies, I might say South
Africa, Australia and so on.
The English language has certain virtues which are not possessed, for
instance, by the Italian language, which is the language that surrounds me at
the moment, it is a highly flexible language, a language willing to change, a
language willing to discard all its grammar and, this is very important, to
amass as big a vocabulary as it possibly can.
I feel that the Russian language, for instance, has probably been ruined by
the Soviet system, the delimitation of meaning, the unwillingness of the state
to allow subtleties, ambiguities, which are resident in all languages, for a
purely artistic end.
I don’t know what Solzhenitsyn is like as a writer, I’ve only read him in
English and I gather the translations are pretty bad, but Solzhenitsyn has his
limitations imposed by the fact that he’s a Russian; he loves Russia and not
humanity, in that, he is a product of the Soviet system.
But in America where there is comparative freedom to write what one wishes,
in England too, the possibilities are very large.
I don’t think they have yet been fulfilled, we haven’t at the moment got a
great writer in English, we may have in the future, the lines of communication
are open.
The English language is developing in a very interesting way and I feel
sure that the possibilities in the field of literature for English are immense,
if not infinite.
Interviewer: Do you have
any message that you would like to deliver to mankind, to people?
A.B.: Well, as
the Americans say, ‘If you want a message you must go to Western Union.’ It is
not the job of the artist to propound messages, it is the job of the preacher,
it is the job of the politician; it is merely the task of the literary creator,
like the musical creator, to produce shapes, structures, which will be satisfying
in themselves and which need not necessarily have any direct relationship to
life as we live it at the moment.
I don’t think that man can do anything more at the moment than to look at himself
and say ‘I haven’t changed much, I am what I was when I was kicked out of the
Garden of Eden,’ to use that convenient myth, ‘I must cultivate those qualities
in myself. I must not take politicians seriously, all politicians are probably
the most evil men alive; they pervert language, they pervert thought, they pervert
morality. Take no notice of the political unit, but rather in the smallest
possible community, the community of one’s family, the community of one’s
friends, and try and develop those latencies which lie within us as creative
beings.’
I can say no more than that, it’s not really a message.
Interviewer: Un bellissimo messaggio.
© Estate of Anthony Burgess 2002. © ABC & Bibliothèque universitaire d'Angers. Last update June 30, 2008
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