Piece in the comic today about Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange by the novelist Irvine Welsh. It hadn't occurred to me that Welsh is so young that his first acquaintance with the tale was with the Stanley Kubrick movie. However I read the novel when it came out - and when I was young and enthusiastic - and thought it a very remarkable piece of writing, fierce but eventually moral.
Burgess, a brilliant writer, had a huge and varied output and deservedly became enormously rich. However he comes across like so many brilliant writers and poets as bigoted, paranoid, reactionary and self-regarding. He believed in the cold war which is represented in a future configuration in the novel.
But the whole social atmosphere of the novel is a sort of extrapolated fifties, very right-wing somehow. The movie is different.
I have a much-treasured image of my granddaughter Mirabel and her Cousin Lola posing in the very same pedestrian underpass that Alex and his droogs hang out in in the movie. London locations, don'tcha just love'em?
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Burgess was responsible for my brief foray into writing to authors, when he complained in a press interview that readers never contacted him. I did, telling him I loved the verbal invention of "A Clockwork Orange" and that I thought I had known the models for the main characters in "Time for a Tiger" (although I imagine a lot of readers think this about a lot of books, and are wrong). He did not reply.
Neither did Suzanne, Dowager Duchess of St. Albans. Part of her "Mango and Mimosa" is about her childhood on her father’s Malayan rubber estate. He detested my own General Manager, as did I. Nor David Lodge, to whom I wrote to say how much his acutely observed "Deaf Sentence" chimed in with my own experiences as a deafie. I tried Jan Morris over "Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere", having spent a year in the place, shortly after he (to become she) left it. No reply here either and I gave up writing to authors.
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I thought John Crace had Burgess (in that era) summed up pretty well.
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When I first read A Clockwork Orange I was about fourteen and didn't understand a word. I struggled through it manfully, guessing what all the words meant. Then I turned the last page to find a glossary. Marvellous.
As to writing to authors, that's something I often do, and have had nice replies from some. The last who wrote back was Ron Mallet, the physicist with an interest in time machines. I wrote only last week to Erich von Daniken, as you do, but no reply yet. I expect he's been abducted by aliens.
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>> When I first read A Clockwork Orange I was about fourteen and didn't understand a
>> word. I struggled through it manfully, guessing what all the words meant. Then I turned
>> the last page to find a glossary. Marvellous.
>>
>> As to writing to authors, that's something I often do, and have had nice replies
>> from some. The last who wrote back was Ron Mallet, the physicist with an interest
>> in time machines. I wrote only last week to Erich von Daniken, as you do,
>> but no reply yet. I expect he's been abducted by aliens.
The postal service across parallel universes is patchy at best.
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>> No reply here either and I
>> gave up writing to authors.
>>
>>
You have reminded me that my late wife made a hobby of writing to famous people, and somehow had the knack of nearly always getting a reply.
She initiated, and continued, correspondence with Auberon Waugh, Ian Mckellan, Lord Jacobovich, David Attenborough, and others I can't remember, but it did seem quite easy.
I had a shot myself once, and wrote to Robert Robinson pointing out that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir-presumptive not heir-apparent to the Austrian throne. He conceeded the point, although observing that Franz Joseph was in his eighties.
Perhaps the trick (as Henry Root would put it) is in realising that all famous people have a weak point on which they are sensitive, and if you can both identify it and assuage it at the same time, they invariably fall for the flattery.
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Literary Milestone - Ambo
