In Loco Parentis a Vision Through Clockwork's Prism

End of the World Newsletter Vol 1.2 - December 2005 In Loco Parentis admit I didn’t know what to expect. So, the various essays presented for Thanks to all of you. I I’ve never edited a paper before, your delectation all focus on different unless one includes the comics I aspects of a very complex man. We have Other acknowledgements are owed. I’d used to draw for my own amusement at Christine Lee Gengaro’s delightful piece like to thank Alan Roughley for putting the age of eight. I suppose I expected on her first teenage encounter with A his faith in me and letting me take a turn some sort of common theme to emerge Clockwork Orange. We have Rob Spence at the steering wheel. I’d like to thank from the various essays submitted by – Manchester’s answer to Iain Sinclair Patrick McDonagh for technical help. our selfless contributors. Wrong. All of - on the contrast between Burgess’s Thanks to CLG for being a rock in times our writers have come up with a different Cottonopolis, so wonderfully evoked in of trouble. Thanks to Andrew Biswell for take on Burgess, and while that might Little Wilson and Big God, and the rather just being a damn good friend and for make it difficult for me to present myself harsher conurbation that has taken its making me laugh so much (if you haven’t as The Man With The Plan, it says a place. We have Ákos Farkas bringing heard his Tom Paulin impersonation you lot about our favourite writer, about his his usual astonishing erudition to bear haven’t lived). Thanks also to the people multiplicity, his polymathy. After all, we’re on just one (highly significant) word in A at Angers, Ben Forkner, John Cassini, talking about a man who wrote over fifty Clockwork Orange. And, out of left-field, a Valérie Neveu and Graham Woodroffe for books, on very varied themes. He could newcomer, Norman Ball, with a witty and accepting my early essays about Burgess do the end-of-empire novel (The Malayan wicked essay applying Burgess’s theories and for encouraging me to keep pounding Trilogy), the provincial English novel about Pelagianism and Augustinianism to the clavichord. And thanks to Liana (The Right To An Answer); he could do the current Bush administration. And to Burgess for her many kind words. I hope science fiction (A Clockwork Orange; The round it off, a piece by Andrew Biswell you all enjoy this issue of The End of the Wanting Seed); he could do the historical hammered out amid, I’m sure, great World Newsletter. A la prochaine! novel (The Kingdom Of The Wicked, clouds of tobacco smoke in the limited Nothing Like The Sun, A Dead Man In time available to him during the run-up Douglas Milton Deptford); he could also do the boundary- to the publication of his eagerly-awaited pushing modernist novel (MF, Napoleon biography of the man himself. So...a Symphony). He could do anything. He pretty good issue, I hope, and all thanks was a genius, and it’s impossible to think to the selfless efforts of our contributors, of another 20th century writer who so two of whom stepped in at the very last effortlessly straddled so many genres. moment working against a grim deadline. A Vision through Clockwork’s Prism By Christine Lee Gengaro came to Burgess, like so many others, through A Clockwork in such a fascinating way. After a few interesting diversions, Orange. When I was in my teens, my father pressed the most notably into the Enderby series and This Man and Music, I orange paperback book into my hands and told me to read I decided to start at the beginning. A Vision of Battlements is it. As a musician and avid music-lover, I identified with Alex. Like Burgess’s “self-portrait” of his time in Gibraltar. The hero of him, classical music was my pleasure alone to savor. On the the book is Richard Ennis, a sergeant in the Army Vocational inside cover of my father’s copy of Clockwork, there was a list of and Cultural Corps. Ennis is, for all intents and purposes a eleven other works of fiction written by the author and six works teacher in the corps, but he is first and foremost a musician of non-fiction. I wondered, even then, if music found its way into and composer. The novel puts forth a memoir that is, at Burgess’s other books. The only other novel by Burgess that my times, a more eloquent statement of Burgess’s compositional father had in our library was M/F. I was delighted to find the lines process and feelings about the craft of composition than is of music in the book and sat at our piano plunking out the notes This Man and Music. The latter book, a non-fiction account of with my right hand while I held the book open with my left. Even Burgess’s experience with music, is sometimes contradictory though I was pleased that music was a part of the story, I was and frustrating. It is as if Burgess started with the first chapter ultimately disappointed because the music in M/F did not form a and kept writing through to the end, never looking back, never structural throughline essential to the narrative, the way it did in double-checking, simply getting all of his thoughts down on A Clockwork Orange. paper. By telling Ennis’s story, Burgess tells his own, and does so in a slightly less self-conscious (and perhaps more honest) Years later, as I was considering A Clockwork Orange in its way than in a straightforward memoir. In chapter nine of A Vision various forms as the subject of my doctoral dissertation, I of Battlements, Ennis finishes his Passacaglia and assembles wondered what kind of author would use music in his novels work for a concert of his music. Burgess’s account of the 1 composition and the ensuing rehearsals paint a vivid picture of proclaim it to mean victory, but Ennis tells them: “Beethoven was Ennis’s artistic inner life. As is the case with much of Burgess, a musician, not a fabricator of slogans in sound. Music was his there is more truth in the fiction than we may first realize. life, he cared nothing for politics.” I saw A Vision of Battlements through Clockwork’s prism and The moment at which Alex and Ennis truly meet in their parallel I noticed some similarities between them. There are musical universes is the moment at which they are compelled by almost seeds planted in Vision that come to full flower in Clockwork. primal forces to defend music from the disparagement of the The two books differ in very important respects like point of ignorant. Alex does so in the Korova Milkbar, Ennis in a café. view (first person inA Clockwork Orange, third person in Vision) Alex and his droogs hear a woman singing from the fictional and tone (Vision is realistic and Clockwork is futuristic), but the opera Das Bettzeug. Dim makes a rude noise and Alex punches works are linked together by music and I envision them almost him in the mouth saying, “Bastard. Filthy drooling mannerless as companion works. Ennis is not like Alex, but Alex grows to bastard.” Ennis, sitting in a café with dockers, hears a Flamenco be like Ennis. In the twenty-first chapter ofA Clockwork Orange, singer perform two lines of a Lorca poem set by Ennis himself. Alex starts to think like the older man. When Alex contemplates She is interrupted by a rude noise and Ennis leaps wildly on the the works of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Britten, not only as man saying, “You mannerless bastard. You moronic imbecilic compositions, but as constructions, works of creation, he animal sod.” The similarities between them, at these moments, begins to see his own destructive tendencies in a new light. are unmistakable. Alex and Ennis, different though they may be, Ennis arrives in Gibraltar perceiving all enemies—“time, share a passion for music and a fierceness to protect it from the sea, the state, war”—as destroyers, “anti-builders”; in harm. contrast, Burgess calls his main character, “Ennis the builder.” A Clockwork Orange, because it was my first experience with Alex and Ennis see everyday events in musical terms. For Burgess, will always be the prism through which I view the rest Alex, a fight with Billyboy is a waltz. For Ennis, the incessant of his art, both music and literary. Some might find that limiting, repetition of a verbal phrase is the thematic material of a but I find the musical underscore of his works a powerful tool for “complex subterranean fugue.” Both characters crave Mozart: analysis of characters and allegory. Both Ennis and Alex (and Alex wants to hear it when he is released from the Ludovico Burgess too, it would seem) may exist in different times and treatment center, Ennis is “thirsty for the sound” of the composer places, but transcend their differences through music and they after being force-fed visual aids to learning. Both characters live out their lives in a dimension of sound that deepens our decry the use of Beethoven for something beyond the simple experience of their stories. enjoyment of his music. For Alex, the composer’s music should not be used as a tool of the government: “He did no harm to Christine Lee Gengaro took her PhD in Music History at the anyone.

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