Playboy Interview: Anthony Burgess

a candid conversation with the visionary author of "a clockwork orange"

In 1959, John Anthony Burgess Wilson, an education officer for the British Colonial Service in Malaya, began suffering from headaches. Doctors imputed them to a brain tumor, told him he had only a year to live and invalided him home to England. Aided by an inborn Elizabethan prodigality--and "massive doses of Dexedrine and gin"--he wrote five and a half dazzling novels during his allotted twelvemonth, in a desperate struggle to earn a legacy for his prospective widow, herself ailing and alcoholic. Whereupon fate played one of its ironic twists: The brain tumor had apparently been misdiagnosed and Anthony Burgess--his pen name--did not die. But his wife did.

Since that time, Manchester-born Burgess, 57, has been only slightly less prolific in his literary output. He has written more than a score of books--many of them novels, including his recent blockbuster success, "Napoleon Symphony," and his best-selling vision of a mind-controlled society, "A Clockwork Orange"--but several of them are erudite literary studies on an astounding variety of topics, from Shakespeare to the structure of the novel to a translation of Rosland's "Cyrano de Bergerac." (Burgess loves to play with languages--nine of them.) He has also written stage and screen plays, composed two symphonies, concertos for flute, bassoon, piano and percussion, a brace of sonatas and some incidental music. "I wish." he says wistfully, "people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of the other way round. I find I still plan a novel rather like a musical work"--a scheme that is most evident in "Napoleon Symphony." And when he isn't writing or composing, he's lecturing, teaching and traveling between his temporary and permanent homes in Rome. Malta and the U. S. He's a hard man to keep up with, as Playboy interviewer C. Robert Jennings discovered. Jennings' report:

"I finally located Burgess in New York. He was teaching classes of City College students in a cluttered, spacious apartment at 93rd and West End Avenue, where he was living with his second wife, an Italian contessa named Liliana, their young son, Andrea, and an Ethiopian secretary. Concurrently, he was appearing on TV talk shows, making assorted commencement addresses, giving a poetry reading, meeting with the Italian producers of a television series on Moses, discussing a suit against the film producers of 'A Clockwork Orange,' outlining the libretto for a musical on the Don Juan legend, working to revive interest in his completed screen musicals on Shakespeare and James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' launching a 12-part TV series on Shakespeare, beginning work on a movie musical about Houdini, outlining a play based on the life of Christopher Marlowe and gearing up for immediate departure on a college lecture tour for which he had made no preparations. 'I don't plan my lectures,' he said. 'I just leave it to God.'

"Obviously, he had no time to talk to me in New York, so I followed him west on his campus tour. Though our actual taping sessions didn't begin until he returned to New York. I caught up with him in the murky depths of a pseudo rathskeller in Berkeley, where he was dining with his lecture sponsors and the editors of various magazines, deftly parrying questions about Ezra Pound, Kipling, Lawrence, Dickens, Sartre, Greene, Sterne, Dylan Thomas, Pope, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce, Goethe, Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins. T. S. Eliot, Vonnegut--and autographing everything from books (often by other authors) to the backs of Blue Chip stamps.

"A huge, shambling haystack of a man. Burgess looks as if he spent his days rummaging through attics. His unkempt brown hair doesn't seem to spring naturally from his great round head so much as surround it, like some nimbus. His face is pasty, his clothes are rumpled; his general mien is that of a man whose daily grind hangs over him with the imminence of Damocles' sword--and yet whose pain at the world's follies is intermittently eclipsed by his Rabelaisian relish for life's sensuous delights. Like Salinger in the Fifties, Vonnegut and Tolkien in the Sixties, Burgess has become something of a cult figure on college campuses. That celebrity brings him not only lecture bookings but some rather down-to-earth offers, like the one from a dude in Berkeley who advised: 'You're old, but you're important, man. I can get you some chicks.' Burgess was vastly complimented. Since most of his new-found collegiate notoriety derives from Stanley Kubrick's film version of 'A Clockwork Orange,' a discussion of that work seemed a good starting point for the interview."

[Q] Playboy: Since A Clockwork Orange is easily your most famous work, and one of the fulcrums on which your talks turned during your last tour of this country, it seems a propitious place to begin.

[A] Burgess: One must make concessions to one's hosts, but Clockwork Orange is the book I like least. We're all inclined to love the pornography of violence, but for me that work was a kind of personal testament made out of love and sorrow, as well as of ideas and theology. My first wife had a traumatic experience during the war, when she was working at the Ministry of War Transport on ships for the D-day landings. She was working very late one night, and coming home off the dock she was very severely mauled by four GI deserters. It often happened that young GIs. probably from unsophisticated states, would think that warm English beer was very weak stuff and would drink too much of it. They'd get drunk, perhaps assault an officer, get frightened, desert and live underground. A lot of these people did odd jobs, but some of them went around mugging and, of course, the blackouts were a natural cover and there weren't very many police around.

My wife was one of their unlucky victims. It wasn't a sexual assault, it was an attempted robbery, and they tried to take her wedding ring off and she screamed and then they hit her; she was pregnant at the time and lost the child. Involuntary abortion. This was followed by a disease that was very hard for the gynecologists to explain. It brought on perpetual loss of blood, perpetual menstruation, so there had to be a corresponding intake of fluid. She was not able to have any children or even to have intercourse for a long time. The gynecological complex begot its own psychological aura. Things never got really right again. And so she just resigned herself to the idea of wanting to die and drank steadily. I couldn't stop her. Finally she got what she wanted.

[Q] Playboy: How old was she when she died?

[A] Burgess: Too young--in her early 40s.

[Q] Playboy: And you distilled this experience into the Clockwork Orange rape?

[A] Burgess: Yes, that was an attempt to cleanse the whole thing out of my mind, by objectifying and fictionalizing it. It was a means of clearing the genuine hatred out of my mind. Pure catharsis, a jeu de spleen.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you originally get the idea for Clockwork Orange when some penologists suggested "conditioning" prisoners to behave well?

[A] Burgess: Yes. I spoke to many people in pubs about this, and they said it was excellent, it was fine. "Knock the bloody heads off the bastards, it would make good citizens of them." That people really believed it was a good thing--that frightened me.

[Q] Playboy: Is it true that you sold the film rights to Clockwork Orange for $500?

[A] Burgess: It's not quite as simple as that. What happened was that in the mid-Sixties. The Rolling Stones wanted to make a movie out of the book with Mick Jagger playing Alex. A New York lawyer--one of this new breed, who is also the executive producer--came on the scene, and I sold it to him then for $500. I needed the money. I've had a couple of ex gratia payments since then, which have brought the total sum up to something like 83000, but in comparison with what the film makers themselves are likely to earn from the global receipts of the picture, it's still not very much.

[Q] Playboy: Does it depress you that everybody else is making so much money on it?

[A] Burgess: In a way it does, but on the other hand. I don't want a lot of money, because that means you have to buy a yacht and a villa, and you have to find time to devote to these things. I have no time. I have to write seven days a week, for the most part, and the fewer things I have, the better.

[Q] Playboy: If money doesn't motivate you, how about fame? Are you enjoying the celebrity status you've achieved since Clockwork became a best seller--and a hit film?

[A] Burgess: In a curious, humble way, it gives me a sense of solidarity with ordinary people. It's especially pleasant in New York to be able to go into a shop and be recognized; it's nice to be in that position, like being in a family or living in a village. It has nothing to do with fame or ability, it's just that one likes not to be anonymous. I'm often recognized by people who've seen me on television. It's a curious thing--I enjoy talking, and going on TV talk shows means that I can be listened to without being interrupted too much. And the smell of grease paint is very pleasant. This may strike you as being absolutely stupid, but I also enjoy the heat of the lamps. I sweat like a pig under them, but I like that sensation of being in the warm.

[Q] Playboy: On those talk shows, and in the discussions after your lectures, one question always seems to come up--so we'll ask it, too: What did you think of the film version of A Clockwork Orange?

[A] Burgess: I thought it was very good. I felt I was in the presence of a classic from the moment the film began, with the Purcell music done electronically and all that. But in terms of adaptation, there were many, many faults in the film. It misses many of the main points of the book. Kubrick makes violence very attractive, and the ending was changed drastically.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Burgess: Well, I can't blame Kubrick for this; he was working from the American edition of the book, even though he was making the film in England with British artists. But the American edition is a truncated one, only 20 chapters, in comparison with the British edition, which has 21. In the last chapter of the British edition, young Alex is growing up and regretting his violence as rather a waste of time. He is changing from within; he wants to get married and have a child and perhaps become a composer of music. The film gives the gloomy impression that the cycle is going to begin again, which was not my intent. Mine was a positive ending. Of course, the whole book is an optimistic book. I was, after all, brought up a Catholic, and Catholics are trained to be optimistic about man, because they accept at a very early age the great premise that man was born into a state of evil. Once we realize that, then we can only go up, we can't go down. Whereas liberals, religious or secular, believe otherwise; they believe that man was born with at least an equal potentiality for good--perhaps only with a potentiality for good--so they become disappointed when men commit evil.

Catholics of my kind don't become disappointed, because we expect evil: we know man is, as it were, programmed that way. We're surprised at his capacity for good. Look at history, and you'll see that man has survived only because of his odd flashes of goodness. We feel that man will probably go on, not getting better but certainly surviving, and producing more Hitlers--but also more Mozarts and Caravaggios, and so on. As a lapsed Catholic, I find my sense of good and evil is quite simple, really: I don't think of God as being good in the sense of giving money to the poor and meek, who definitely have not inherited the earth. God is good when He gives us a grilled steak. There's good when we make love or eat an apple or watch a sunset. Evil certainly exists, too; it is undoubtedly evil to fart during Beethoven's Ninth. But choice is all. To impose good, whether through force or through some technique like aversion therapy, is evil; to act evil is better than to have good imposed.

[Q] Playboy: Was aversion therapy being used anywhere at the time you wrote A Clockwork Orange, or do you think the current practice was inspired by your book?

[A] Burgess: Aversion therapy dates back at least to the experiments of Pavlov, of whom it may be said that he was one of the fathers of the Russian Revolution. At least he was quite willing to let his laboratory experiments be extended to help produce a kind of new Soviet man who should be conditioned to be happy in the social situation imposed upon him. The technique was not always aversive; he used both pain and pleasure as triggers for promoting responses. But during the period of the Cold War--or, in Korea, the hot war--and during the Revolution in Russia, it was always aversive techniques that were used for changing people's minds, or for brainwashing them. The techniques used in Clockwork Orange are also aversive, but this doesn't deny the fact that more positive inducements are possible. The big difference between the vision of Clockwork Orange and the vision of B. F. Skinner, for instance, is that Skinner hates the idea of aversion therapy and thinks totally in terms of positive inducements. He thinks we can become good--and achieve it pleasantly--if given rewards for doing the right thing.

[Q] Playboy: What's your opinion of Skinner?

[A] Burgess: I think he's very dangerous. There's obviously a great desire on the part of the American people, and to some extent on the part of Europeans, to want his kind of world: one in which everything is made easy, in which you shall be wound up like a clockwork machine and be good all the time and have no worry about making ethical choices. What horrifies me about Skinner is that he can think the human soul responds only to rewards. That isn't true at all. If I could be given candy and yachts and houris for becoming a mechanical creature, something inside me would still say no. If one of the conditions of being a free man, of being able to think my own thoughts and come to my own conclusions, was that I should be lashed every day, or live on bread and water. I would still prefer that to luxury without freedom. People aren't quite as simple as Skinner thinks.

Not long ago, I spoke to the New York chapter of Phi Beta Kappa; it was a lecture for which I was given no money and for which everybody came very late--and in order to make it. I had to give up a lecture in Ohio for which I would have been paid $2000. But a lat-bellied surgeon there said to me that nobody does anything without the inducement of money. I didn't say any more than "Oh, yes?" But it's rather American to assume that people do things only for tangible rewards. I don't think it's true of man at all. Man has done many things with the sure knowledge that he would be punished for doing them. Such as translating the Bible during the pre-Reformation period or believing in the Trinity when it was taught that the Trinity was heresy.

[Q] Playboy: Even if you didn't get paid for that Phi Beta Kappa speech, don't you lecture primarily for the money in it?

[A] Burgess: I don't seem to have made any money out of it at all. I've worked very, very hard this past year, been all over the Union lecturing to students, but all the money seems to have gone into hotel bills, meals, air fares, which all comes out of one's own pocket, and into standing drinks for the students. So you have to end up by thinking of it not as a profitable undertaking but as a means of meeting the students. And from that angle. it's been rather interesting. I enjoy meeting American students. They're sharp and they're anxious to hear people talk, which is something you don't find in Europe. Americans like writers to be real people who will talk to them and discuss their books. There is a very bad novel by Somerset Maugham called Cukes and Ale in which there is a character who says that Americans prefer a living mouse to a dead lion, and I agree with him totally. That's one of the things I like about America.

[Q] Playboy: You were something of a living lion as a visiting professor at Princeton, but you've been quoted as having hated that experience. Why?

[A] Burgess: I was definitely the dead mouse there, not really wanted. I had great difficulty even finding out what was going on in the English Department. Quite apart from that, I resented a lot of the kids who were ragged in appearance but very rich. It's a horrible aspect of the heresy called Americanism. You have a lot of money: your father owns Quaker Oats or General Motors or something, and you've got to go about in bare feet with holes in your trousers and talk about the virtues of poverty. But you're at Princeton, which is not a university for the poor, and you spend money freely, carelessly.

[Q] Playboy: Why should you be so disturbed by what students choose to wear?

[A] Burgess: I suppose I've been going through a sour period as regards the sartorial habits of the young because I'd been running a creative-writing course for American students in Majorca, in the village of Deyá, where Robert Graves lives. And there I saw a lot of hippies, members of the drug culture, dressed in espadrilles and ragged jeans and butterflied T-shirts. That is how the peasants of that island have to dress. They don't choose to dress that way; they'd be glad to wear tuxedos every evening. But these cool children sat there cadging coffee and toking on their joints, mocking in their very dress these peasants who have to wrest a living from the sea and the soil. It was an assumption on their part that only fools worked. Well, somebody has to work.

These kids were a special elite, and they are the very ones who cry out against elitism. But what I think sickened me more than anything about these kids in Deyá was that once a week they gave up one of their number--in this particular case, it was a young man called Michel--to the local police to be beaten up. He was their scapegoat, their Jesus. Michel would be beaten up and return with bruises on his body, and the whole company could be sustained in peace for another week, until it was time for Michel, who was the dumbest of the group, to be beaten up again, the sacrificial lamb, lord of the flies.

[Q] Playboy: It's interesting that you should mention Lord of the Flies, since the violence of its film version--like that of Clockwork Orange--was damned by some critics as having a possibly brutalizing effect on movie audiences. You no doubt read that Arthur Bremer wrote in his diary that just before he decided to shoot George Wallace, he had gone out to see A Clockwork Orange. Do you feel that a vision of violence can precipitate real violence?

[A] Burgess: Art never initiates. It merely takes over what is already present in the real world, such as violence, and makes an aesthetic pattern out of it. or tries to explain it. or tries to relate it to some other aspect of life. If I am going to be blamed, however remotely, for the attempted assassination of Wallace, well. I must point to Shakespeare's King Lear or to Hamlet. Hamlet may have been made responsible for many a young man's killing his stepfather, or trying to. Or point to the New Testament--specifically, its description of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, which drove a multiple killer in England to the murder of many women, so that he could drink their blood. That was his way of taking the Sacraments. And that man in New York State who killed. I think, 65 children before being caught because he wanted to offer them up to Jehovah: he wouldn't have gotten that idea into his head il he hadn't read the Old Testament. Even the holiest art can be said to inspire violence, but the impulse is already there in humankind. There may be a trigger of some sort: it could be a work of art. or a chance association of ideas. But the artist himself cannot be blamed for that.

Unfortunately, if you're going to create a work of fictional art, you have only two main topics: sex and violence. These two major impulses in man--the aggressive impulse and what I suppose is the philoprogenitive impulse, the desire to procreate--have to be the two main themes. We're told that their representation in the popular art forms has led to sin and crime: therefore, presumably, we must get rid of art. Yet we cannot get rid of art. We have to accept that the possibility of a work of art's causing such an aberration or such a triggering of an impulse of violence is very much the exception, something we have to put up with. It's a small payment we have to make.

[Q] Playboy: How about the cathartic value of art for the artist himself? Do you suppose that if Hitler had been able to get into the Vienna Academy, freeing him from the drudgery of house painting and paper hanging, he might not have become the psychopath of the century?

[A] Burgess: I think most men would much prefer to create something, a work of beauty, than merely to be in a position of power, which normally means to be destructive. What I'm really trying to say is that the desire to create a work of art has something to do with the desire to beget children. I think it's significant, possibly, that Hitler had no children. He was not the sort of man who would. Yet he wanted to have something. and since he couldn't create works of art, he had to have power and he had to destroy. I don't think the case of Mussolini is altogether cognate with that of Hitler, because Mussolini was a writer; he wrote novels. He wrote a novel, which I have read, called The Cardinal's Mistress. It wasn't a bad novel, but obviously he wanted to be another D'Annunzio. He couldn't be D'Annunzio. so he had to become a great dictator instead. I don't know how much research has been done on this, but I should imagine that there are a fair number of men who have done great harm in history through thwarted artistic impulses. One knows from one's own personal experiences how bitter, destructive and thoroughly misanthropic small failed artists can be.

[Q] Playboy: You said earlier that Clockwork Orange was the book you liked least. Which is your favorite?

[A] Burgess: I don't like any of them very much, because when you read a book you have written, you see so many of your own faults. So the favorite book is always the next one. You feel that in the next book you'll get rid of your faults, but the faults are always there, in the very first sentence. You have to write a book out of your imperfect self. A man who says he loves his books is either a liar or a bloody fool.

[Q] Playboy: Is it as painful to write as it is later to read what you've written?

[A] Burgess: Agonizing. Especially the beginning. When one starts a new novel, one has to get the first sentence right, and this takes a long time. Then one gets that right and one tries another sentence, and it takes a long time to get that right. Probably about 50 pieces of paper go into the wastebasket before I've got the first page right. But once the first page is right, it becomes easier as one goes on. This explains why my original manuscripts are not very valuable. They don't fetch much money on the market. Where as an original typescript by. say. Philip Roth, which is covered with loops and corrections and is obviously the single effort, must be very valuable. Probably he knows this and writes them that way deliberately.

[Q] Playboy: How much do you normally write during a day?

[A] Burgess: In the days when I was working full out, I would produce 2000 words a day. But after that I diminished my output to 1000 words a day. because of other commitments. But it still strikes me that the only way to write a novel is to get up in the morning and make your coffee and have your breakfast and work steadily from about nine until lunchtime and then have no lunch: have a pot of strong tea. It is essential that one work in the afternoon and probably stop about five or six. then perhaps do a little more work before going to bed. in the cool of the evening. The afternoon has normally been the taboo time as far as writers are concerned. Afternoon, they say. is a dead time. Well, I say it's a very live time, because you're touching new areas of the brain. You're not quite as conscious as you were in the morning, or will be again at night, hence various things will come up in the unconscious, which most people waste in the siesta. The important thing is not having lunch. Once you start having lunch with gallons of wine, it's the end of the day.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you say the writer is more conscious again in the evening?

[A] Burgess: I think in the evening one has a much sharper view of what one's done during the day and can do some correction, if correction is necessary. With the artificial light glaring down, the workroom becomes a kind of laboratory. I suppose you could sum it up by saying that in the morning one is working consciously, but there are odd threads of unconscious motivation going on: in the afternoon the unconscious becomes much more important; then in the evening one is totally conscious--or even self-conscious.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever write while sitting on the toilet, as your quirky poet does in Enderby?

[A] Burgess: No. but I've known at least two poets who actually imitated the Enderby method. I know one quite considerable poet who had this little table made for himself just big enough for him to sit on the lavatory seat and work from--which is an admirable idea, because the bathroom was almost made for that purpose, with a huge wastepaper basket, where you can just throw things. and hope the tap doesn't drip.

[Q] Playboy: What contemporary writers do you read? Do you enjoy the so-called New Journalism?

[A] Burgess: Well. I'm not a fan of Tom Wolfe, yet I've never been prejudiced against him. I admire his titles, and I admire him very much as a draftsman: he draws extremely well, and this is probably his primary vocation. But I don't think he's a very good writer. I think he is a very stodgy and rather boring writer. The rhythms of his prose don't seem to be derived from speech. It's as though he's building a little machine for himself, a rather bizarre machine that shall have validity as a machine, quite apart from any purpose it serves in real life. It's almost like a kind of Faberge egg. only on a very much lower level: it's not jeweled. I don't find in Wolfe any of the joy one gets in reading an older writer like, say. Evelyn Waugh. who does have this bejeweled kind of Faberge quality, but also has the rhythm of speech and a little popular humor derived from the people. All of Wolfe's humor derives from what he thinks the kids may like. There's usually something wrong with writers that the young like.

[Q] Playboy: They dote on Vonnegut. What's wrong with him?

[A] Burgess: I'm possibly totally mistaken, but I've sensed a kind of common quality in Vonnegut and Saroyan. What I found in Saroyan's work was a kind of oversimplistic gloomy optimism, a platform for nonsense. He produced a film I'll never forget as long as I live: The Human Comedy, It was the stickiest piece of false optimism I've ever seen in my life. There was a major war going on--but what the film showed was how nice everybody was. There was the mother playing the harp at home and then one GI saying, to a whole gang of GIs in a passenger train. "Why don't we sing a good old-time church song?" This is false, and I find the same kind of falseness in Vonnegut. I could put up with Vonnegut as a minor science-fiction writer until it came to Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse is a kind of evasion--in a sense like J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan--in which we're being told to carry the horror of the Dresden bombing and everything it implies up to a level of fantasy, which means that neither the fantasy nor the realism works. And. at the same time, the thing is bound together with this nomic phrase "And so it goes." It's the tone of the thing that's so sentimental, It's the only book I think I've ever read that I had to give up 20 pages before the end. Only 20 pages left, but I said no. I cannot finish it.

[Q] Playboy: What about Vonnegut's use of language?

[A] Burgess: One has the sensation that he's deliberately holding back on vocabulary: this is the great American thing to do, not to be too effusive. But the result is a tremendous monotony. I understand American usage very well, although frequently I pretend not to in order to force the users into thinking out and explaining such tropes as "uptight" and "copout" and looking for the etymologies of "rap" and the universal greeting "Hi." "Hi" is, I think, the one seasoning of American life that I cannot accept, although I find it hard to give a reason. Perhaps it's British reserve or something. "Hi" is too casual, so familiar that it has overtones of contempt; it sounds like a mockery of an Amer-Indian greeting or the password of some such preposterous society as the Elks or Water Buffaloes. I'm not too keen on "wow," either, although the Yale professor who is called the "Third" Reich thinks highly of it and, indeed, makes it the chief vocal expression of Consciousness III ecstasy. The lady who wrote The Sensuous Woman likes it, too. Her recipe for what I suppose has to be called penilambency involves coating the member with double cream, coconut and icing sugar; she has a low-calorie alternative for weight watchers. The first tongueful brings an ejaculation of "Wow!" On second thought, is it "Mmmmmmmmm!"?

[Q] Playboy: Whatever turns you on. How about Salinger?

[A] Burgess: I still admire Salinger. I think he was a very considerable writer. I have to say was. though, alas: he no longer writes. But I thought The Catcher in the Rye was a major novel; it's rather the innovation of a special narrative style that represents a breakthrough in that phase of Anglo-American literature.

[Q] Playboy: How do you rank Ken Kesey as a writer?

[A] Burgess: I read Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was reviewing. I suppose I helped introduce him to England. I thought highly of that novel in 1962. But I never thought it was worthy of having a cult built on it. The young have seized on certain figures of madness, certain vaguely deranged figures, as representing possibly a sane culture--as if this that they're living in is sanity. One can name various other books like this--let's say, the Hobbitt books of Tolkien. His characters are mad figures in a sense.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of them?

[A] Burgess: I don't think very highly of them. I thought very highly of Tolkien as a scholar. He was playing a game; he was entitled to his games. But they were very much the games of a philologist. I owe most to him, and I think the young ought to think they owe most to him, for having produced, with Professor E. V. Gordon, that beautiful edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That was his real work.

But we were talking about the New Journalism. I can't take it very seriously. I don't see where the break has occurred between the old and the new. If you mean the tendency of "mere" journalists--I put the word in quotes because I am a mere journalist in some ways myself--to make their journalism into books and to expect their books to be accepted as major opera, if this is the New Journalism, then I'm not sure that I like it very much.

[Q] Playboy: Truman Capote seems to consider himself the father of the New Journalism because of In Cold Blood.

[A] Burgess: I agree. I find Capote's earlier work extremely interesting and extremely beautifully written. Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp. But there's a rather fatty, unventilated preciosity about it, which I think is one of the aspects of the Southern genius: this humidity, this enclosed, hermetic, incestuous quality, if you like.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it has anything to do with homosexuality?

[A] Burgess: I was going to suggest that it might. I'm very scared of saying it. but this interest in making a prose style out of bric-a-brac is something you find in a lot of minor homosexual writers. On the other hand, there have been so many big homosexual writers--Socrates. Plato. Forster. possibly William Shakespeare--to whom this doesn't apply. In Cold Blood is very well written, rather overwritten at times. I had no objection to the style, or to the treatment, but I had a large reservation about Capote's interest in the subject. I was worried about the author rather more than about the book. In any case. I would say that this book is nothing compared with Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night. which is a very considerable work, indeed.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a Mailer fan?

[A] Burgess: I'm not a Mailer fan. I refuse to be a fan of his. Why should I be? I can't learn anything from Mailer, any more than he can learn anything from me: he goes his own way. But in that I like Mailer, in that I've read all of Mailer and will go on reading all of Mailer and regard him as a very considerable figure--yes. I am a fan.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that contradictory?

[A] Burgess: Well, it depends on what the term fan means. I always take a fan to mean somebody who sits at the feet of another, making oblations. I don't do that, but I think very highly of Mailer's work.

[Q] Playboy: Mailer thinks very highly of it, too.

[A] Burgess: It's a pity about that. But his mode of journalism, if you can call it that, is far superior to anything the genuine journalists, by which I mean the regular writers who suddenly put their journalism into books, ever achieve. Mailer is using a very much earlier technique than anything the 20th Century has discovered--the technique of Daniel Defoe, of either presenting reality in the form of a novel or presenting the materials of a novel in the form of reality. You can take your choice between the two. A Journal of the Plague Year presents real events in the form of a novel. The mere collocation of those two elements is enough to make us think of 20th Century techniques such as Mailer uses in Armies of the Night. You're aware of the reality: you're aware of the fictional techniques. You can in some measure make them fertilize each other.

[Q] Playboy: Would you include Mailer in a modern-literature course, if you were giving one?

[A] Burgess: I wouldn't give a course that covered any author later than, say, Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh.

[Q] Playboy: Well, then, let's start with Joyce. If you were giving a post-Joyce course, whom would you include besides Greene and Waugh?

[Q] Playboy: Well. I would certainly cover John Dos Passos. I would also cover a writer whom nobody respects: Sinclair Lewis, one of the seminal fiction writers of our age. I would say that Joyce's prose style in Finnegans; Wake is a parodic embellishment of the prose style of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, that the basic rhythms of Joyce's figures are derived from Lewis. You get them perhaps best in the novel It Can't Happen Here, where you get these post-Dickensian sentences with big encrustations of detail, taken over by Joyce and parodied. It's a point that's not been made before, but which I think is reasonable. I don't have to excuse myself for having read Babbitt at least 30 times: give me a copy and I'll read it a 31st time with great pleasure. One can't despise a man one reads so often. I recommend Dos Passos to my creative-writing students and tell them to learn from him how to deal with problems of cohesion, how to bring together the cinema verite and the fictional. I would also teach Hemingway. But I would not teach Scott Fitzgerald

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Burgess: Because I think that Scott Fitzgerald, although a very brilliant short story writer, failed to enter the modern age in his prose style. He yearned toward the verse of Keats and he tried to get too many of the rhythms of Keats's verse, the devices of onomatopoeia, into his prose style.

[Q] Playboy: Does that mean you're anti Keats?

[A] Burgess: Not at all. It means that Keats is all right for 1800. But Scott Fitzgerald wasn't writing in 1800. Gatsby is a good novel but not a great one. Hemingway, on the other hand, was a great prose innovator, far more than is realized, and I would certainly teach Hemingway very closely, indeed, his early works especially. I think Fitzgerald has been overrated.

[Q] Playboy: What about Henry Miller?

[A] Burgess: Miller has had nothing to write about since the Tropic books. He has lived too long. God bless him. It's a testimony to what heavy smoking and drinking and sex can do to a man. I don't think there's anything pornographic about Miller, though, because the sexual act as he depicts it is totally unreal. Some of the acrobatics in Tropic of Capricorn seem improbable. The scene where the wife of the narrator, who is presumably Miller himself, is ill in bed and a girl comes in from the neighboring apartment to see how she is. and Miller gets behind her and copulates with her from the back: This doesn't seem likely to happen. The wife would know what was going on. Somebody would know what was going on.

[Q] Playboy: The things that go on in Naked Lunch wouldn't happen, either: A man dies while he's being screwed.

[A] Burgess: That's just our friend Bill Burroughs being heavily didactic and heavily anti-junk. He's very Swiftian in some ways. Bill's favorite authors are Jane Austen. Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne. I have a very powerful image of Bill, when my first wife was very, very ill, reading Jane Austen to her. Imagine this great drug cultist with his heavy black framed glasses and his undertaker's suit reading Jane Austen: " Tis a circumstance commonly observed." etc. He was an 18th Century man who believed he was a reincarnation of Sterne and Swift, swift is probably true. James Joyce said that Sterne and Swift were misnamed, because Sterne is swift and Swift is stern. Bill managed to combine the two in Naked Lunch. but what he is trying to say is merely that the body is junk, which is very puritanical, even very Manichacan: dark forces fighting against the forces of light.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of that, what do you think of the drunken poets, the Dylan Thomas-Brendan Behan crowd?

[A] Burgess: Dylan wasn't a drunken poet at all, though he drank a great deal. When he wrote his poetry, he was stone sober. He attacked it with great sobriety, building it up coldly and in an immensely systematic way, and then he would go and get drunk after a long session of poetic labor. I think to compare him with Brendan Behan is to do both a great injustice. Behan wasn't really a writer at all.

[Q] Playboy: More of a raconteur?

[A] Burgess: Yes. He was a man who put his conversation down on paper. But can this kind of confessional writing really become literature? I don't think so, because literature involves selection and there was very little selection in Brendan's talk. The fact is that Brendan was also a man who wrote sober, but he was rather more willing than Dylan to give up writing and drink when the pubs were open. He got his greatest satisfaction from being a bard: to him being a bard was being in a saloon bar drinking heavily, feeling the euphoria welling up. Then he would sing and he would talk. That was his major fulfillment. To write, to sit coldly in a room and write, was to him torture. He was fulfilled only in a pub. This was not true of Dylan. Dylan was not a great talker in pubs. He would sing a little, but I always found him strangely taciturn, rather shy.

Another aspect of Dylan's reputation was that he was said to be a great satyromaniac who couldn't keep his hands off women and was very fond of sexual exercise. That's not true either. He was almost impotent. My first wife, who was Welsh, slept with him frequently--was by way of being his mistress. I discovered--and she told me all he really wanted was to get into bed with a woman and be comforted by her, to feel her warmth and hold her tight. His sexual activities normally took place in the bathroom: he was a great masturbator. I was amazed when I first came to America and I met a woman, a drunken faculty wife at a party, who said, "Can you screw as good as Dylan?" Obviously, she had no experience of Dylan screwing.

[Q] Playboy: Is masturbation a common release for writers, to your knowledge?

[A] Burgess: Yes, I think most artists find that when they're writing something, they become sexually excited. But it would be a waste of time to engage in a full-dress--or undress--sexual act with somebody at that moment. So they often go into the bathroom to masturbate. Thomas did this all the time. Quite a number of artists masturbate, then they write. Our sexual energy has been aroused, now we come, now we're able to concentrate on the other aspect of this energy, which is the creative aspect. In other words, the sexual act becomes a kind of irrelevance, and rather a nuisance.

In my own most creative period of writing, I had less sex than I'd ever had in my life before. During the four years when my first wife was very ill and the period I was writing things like Enderby and Tremor of Intent and the Shakespeare book--highly sexed books, incidentally, which may have a lot to do with sublimation--I was sort of acting a lot of sex out in the books. I have a very full sexual life now and I find I don't feel inclined to write about it much. If I weren't living so full a sexual life, I would probably be cramming everything with sexual connotations, sexual symbols and sexual acts. When I read novels by young men or young women that are full of sex, I often feel the authors are probably quite frustrated. This, of course, I know to be a fact from the work I get from my students: horrifyingly hair-raising and generally nauseating fantasies of sex and violence, mostly from the women, which are not literature but are extremely disturbing, obviously derived from a period of frustration.

[Q] Playboy: Pornography, which is used to relieve sexual frustration, has never been more popular in America. How do you account for that?

[A] Burgess: It's a very refined country, America, and it goes in for very sophisticated pleasures. The pleasure one derives from masturbation, abetted by certain pornographic images, can be far more keen than normal sexual intercourse, which is--to me. anyway--a matter of very great affection, of linking of bodies, elating and pleasurable but not essentially manic. It doesn't lead one into an area of demons, that world of the dark gods. But I think that people want this other world occasionally and they get it best from masturbation and pornography. So that it is as much a purgative as senna or rhubarb. It may also help defossilate a dying marital impulse.

[Q] Playboy: A great many marital impulses must be dying, if one can judge by the fact that close to 50 percent of our marriages fail in America.

[A] Burgess: Let me be totally naive and totally honest about this: I just do not understand why marriage breaks down in America. It's quite exceptional in the whole world. I'm an ordinary person--indeed. I'm more irritable and more wayward than most, being a kind of artist--but if I could manage to sustain marriage for 26 years with a person who wasn't necessarily the best person for me in the world, I don't see why the hell other people can't. I would say that once you enter into a marriage, you're entering into a mode of life to which you are committed, and you must make up your mind about this when you start. I think marriage ought to be made harder, if you like. Obviously, people in America don't think about what they're entering into. Or it may be the fact that the tradition of divorce is strong here because of your Puritan background, which made adultery, in some areas, a capital crime. You don't have mistresses, as Europeans do. America goes in for serial polygamy, or serial polyandry--wife following wife or husband following husband. This is very much an American pattern. It stems from the desperate fear of fornication.

But why Americans cannot get on together, I'm damned if I understand. It's as though they don't even comprehend what marriage is about. They seem to regard it as mainly being about sex, but it's not about sex at all. It's a matter of setting up the primal social unit, and this isn't just a matter of begetting children. It's a matter rather of building up a kind of miniature civilization in which there's a culture, in which there are immense subtleties of language, immense subtleties of communication. In some ways, this is what life is all about. If life is mainly concerned with communicating with others, then we have the most subtle, the most rarefied, the most varied kind of communication in the married state. And you've got to develop a marriage, over the years, in order for this civilization to develop. You can't just marry for five years and then get out of it and start again. It's a terrible waste of the whole communicative process. But I've seen the most admirable people living together and suddenly he decides to go off with some chick or other or she gets into bed with the milkman. This is no ground for divorce. I mean, if you fornicate quietly, it's just something quite transient. It's nothing to do with the major issue of marriage, which is about an immense complex intimacy with another person; sex is neither here nor there.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that the cohabitation of the young outside marriage--whether it's at a college or in a commune--will help reduce the rate of marital breakdown, perhaps by giving them more understanding of the problems of living together?

[A] Burgess: They ought to know precisely what they're entering into when they do it. When I was young, we were more furtive about sex, which gave spice to the whole business and promoted the sexual urge as fear. We weren't blasé about it; we were aware that there was something we had to look forward to, that there was a tremendous responsibility in living with somebody for a long time. And I don't think these kids have that. They're brought up in the American tradition, whereby you can get out any time you wish. I think that's very bad; it promotes irresponsibility. I don't like too much freedom. It distorts the discipline demanded of creative urges.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think drugs--especially acid--impede or release those urges?

[A] Burgess: Well, they don't do me any good, because as an artist, I'm much more concerned with passing visions on than merely enjoying visions. I think LSD is a fairly selfish means of attaining some vision of ultimate reality. When I lived in the Far East, I took opium regularly, as the Chinese took it, at the end of the day's work, in the cool of evening, and it was highly relaxing, promoted sleep. I found it extremely healthful. Whereas so many white men in the tropics cracked up, fought, killed, committed suicide. I was always fairly calm. And when I'm in Tangier, I normally take some kit, but I don't find it does anything for me. I think drugs are really for the mentally impoverished. What they can't contrive through the normal conscious processes, they contrive through an outside force over which they have no control.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been so far out of control that you sought outside help, such as analysis?

[A] Burgess: No, nor ever will. Never. A close friend of mine, who's been under heavy analysis for some time, even suggested to me that I might be a better writer if I underwent analysis. And I said, Why? It's my job not to be fully aware of the unconscious process. If I'm going to understand everything, if I'm going to be rid of various fixations, then I probably won't write at all. A very bright young girl said to me, "For Christ's sake, don't get rid of your guilt, because that's the source of your writing strength: once you cease to be guilty, then you won't write so well." I would agree with that. But I have a lot of writing students who go to psychoanalysts because they're having difficulty in living with their wives or something, and when they're under analysis, of course, they're not doing any writing. The process of self-discovery that goes on in writing disappears and the business of another man's discovering what's going on in your mind takes its place.

[Q] Playboy: Why are Americans so possessed with psychoanalysis?

[A] Burgess: Once you get a particular commodity available, that commodity has to be purveyed, And if there weren't so many expatriate Viennese and Germans, brought up in that very special Viennese bourgeois tradition of neurosis, hysteria, and so forth, coming over to America and having to impose that pattern on America, I don't think America would be so concerned with analysis.

[Q] Playboy: But some of the things you've said--about America's sexual attitudes, for example--would suggest that Americans are. perhaps by tradition, more neurotic and uptight than most Europeans.

[A] Burgess: I think that the American myth has been a most dangerous one. It strikes me that from about the middle 17th Century. America was a new Eden. It was the land where you could forget that you were born into original sin. and so you could make a fresh start. Here was Paradise. But things turn out to be just the same in America as anywhere else. So there is this huge disappointment. The point is that all of the disappointments of history spring out of the failure of the liberal idea to work. The discovery we were discussing earlier--that man is always unregenerate, always fallen--often manifests itself in rage and bitterness, and in the kind of corruption and violence you find in America. In Europe, we aren't likely to be disappointed anymore. We know the worst, so we don't expect too much of man. But I think there is still a tendency in America, especially in the Midwest, for man to be regarded as some great beloved creature of God whose finest flower is in America, where he will find the just and the affluent society. In mythic terms, fallen man is given a chance to go back to Eden. The discovery that that's not true leads to frustration, often to violence.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why America has more assassinations, and attempted assassinations, than Europe does?

[A] Burgess: That certainly has a great deal to do with it, I'm sure. If Eden fails, there's no place else to go. so they kill God, and God happens to be the President. I think it goes deeper than that. though. The Americans who are mad and manic enough to try to kill political figures may be submerged voices of the subconscious recognition that there's something wrong with the American Constitution. Under it, your President is not quite a monarch, but nevertheless a possible despot who functions not under the glamorous guise of despotism but with the voice of plain-spoken democracy. It's just a theory, but I feel that a dissatisfaction with the Constitution itself has been manifested throughout American history. Very few people have been prepared to argue this rationally: the Constitution is more or less sacrosanct. It's only the manic voices and the manic guns that seem willing to protest against the various anomalies built into it.

[Q] Playboy: What would be your notion of the ideal government for America today?

[A] Burgess: I wouldn't have a Presidency at all. I'd find some tottering monarch somewhere, or some bland, pretty one. Perhaps I'd take Princess Grace of Monaco and set her up as a nominal monarch. Then she would officially, technically appoint a government and, of course, the party system as in England would come into being and you would have a prime minister who would be very subject to the will of the people and to the will of his own colleagues in, say, the House of Representatives. I think that would be a healthier system. The head of the Executive should not be dirtied by politics.

This is the great lesson of the limited monarchy of England, which does work. Whatever people think about monarchy, it works in England. I hate the queen, because I think she's anti-intellectual, somewhat stupid and somewhat snobbish. But I like some members of the family. One knows Tony Armstrong-Jones. One meets Princess Margaret, one meets Anne and Charles, one meets the Earl of Hare-wood because of his musical activities. One knows these people. If you go to a party given by Time-Life in London, it's "Hi ya, Tony. How is Maggie? She OK?" Tony says, "I'm sorry the missus couldn't come tonight. She's got a bit of a cold." The queen keeps out of that pretty well, though. And this is good, this is sensible. She is untouchable by scandal, for the most part. Your President certainly is not. This is the main difference.

I'd love to see America come back to the monarchical principle: if it did. the prophecy of George Bernard Shaw in his play The Apple Cart, which nobody dares put on these days, might well be fulfilled. This play is set in the future, which means the past, for it was written in 1930. It's about a King Magnus, a very constitutional monarch who presides over cabinet meetings, and so forth: but because of his personal charm and skill, he has far more power than the government does. But the point is that in the second act, the American ambassador comes in and says that the Declaration of Independence has been canceled and America is coming back to the mother country. But "not poor, not hungry, not ragged, as of old. Oh. no. This time he returns bringing with him the riches of the earth to the ancestral home." The king is appalled, for he realizes what this entails: It means the imperial government moves to Washington and, in consequence, England loses all power. It all goes over to America.

[Q] Playboy: Do you seriously think anything like that could happen?

[A] Burgess: Not in our lifetime, but possibly American constitutional legalists might see the value of a constitutional monarchy here--and it could well come out of a scandal rather like Watergate.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of Watergate, you must have some thoughts about American politics and the sorry state it's in now.

[A] Burgess: I've no respect for politicians. I think they're all equally bad and I've lived in various countries. In England, Nixon would have to resign, just as Lords Lambton and Jellicoe automatically resigned after the sex scandals, which are the kind we seem to have in Britain. But here, the notion of a President's resigning would be as traumatic. I think, as the idea of an abdication in Europe. This is why in some ways, one sympathizes with Nixon. One realizes how reluctant he must be to show the comparative impotence--or the comparative humanity--of the Executive, the fact that the Executive is subject to popular feeling and to popular conviction. In Europe, there's the sense that there has to be some connection between the Executive and the legislature. And this could only be through a representative of the Executive, like a prime minister.

[Q] Playboy: Nixon claims to stay up until four o'clock in the morning reading the works of a famous Prime Minister. Disraeli, but does he utter a word that would smack of that?

[A] Burgess: Well, perhaps he has a sort of Reader's Digest version of Disraeli's novels, or does he read the political speeches? One doesn't know. If he reads the novels, there's a possibility he may be corrupted by a very fine spirit of brilliant and witty cynicism. They're the greatest political novels ever written. But possibly he's not really capable of under-standing those. I should imagine that he probably just has a book there and sees himself as Disraeli. But nobody more unlike Disraeli than Nixon could conceivably be imagined. A man like Adlai Stevenson was far closer to Disraeli. Of course, he had to die. You wouldn't get a Disraeli either in England or America now. Those days are over. Disraeli was too honest, too witty, too brilliant.

[Q] Playboy: What are your own political leanings, when you're at home in England?

[A] Burgess: One's got to be agin the government, any government, because the people in it are bad people or else they wouldn't have got in. But politics is something that depends on temperament, depends on circumstance. I am Catholic. I am, hence, very conservative. I am also agrarian, in that my ancestors lived in small rural areas for a long, long time. And I've never had any money. therefore I've no sympathy for the capitalists. But I object strongly to socialism, because it becomes a totem of terrorism: it has to be that. So I suppose I end up as an anarchist. I feel the most sympathy for the Catalonians, the Basques, and so on, who believe that it's possible to run a community without any government at all and even to build railways and factories through a kind of nonpolitical cooperative system. I suppose that's my ideal.

I hate government. I believe politicians are not only bad people but incompetent people. I think if they had any talent, they wouldn't be politicians, but artists, preachers or teachers. And so I end up with the ultimate conservatism, which is to leave men alone as far as possible and let them carry on as they will. In the wider historical sense. I believe things were best in the Middle Ages, when everybody was Catholic, when nobody worried very much about political parties, when one got on with the job and regarded the whole business of rule as something left to those who weren't fitted for anything else.

[Q] Playboy: Many of America's dissident young seem to agree with you. Have you studied radical politics in America?

[A] Burgess: Nobody in America really knows what radical politics is, because nobody has suffered enough in America. What radicalism you had died in the late Sixties, because it had no roots to flourish in, probably through the grace of God. When we talk about poverty in America, we don't mean anything like the poverty in India, or poverty in southern Italy or even poverty in Northern Ireland. Nobody knows what poverty is in America. They've no idea. The standards in America are so high--and God bless America for this--that a person without a refrigerator is regarded as a specimen of suffering humanity. Radical politics has to do with people who are eating the vomit of dogs, which you'll find in Calcutta or in Haiti. America can't know that, and it is very much to America's credit that it can't, because it has already achieved a society so remarkably affluent that, "although some people seem to be starving, they're really not in the sense that an Indian is starving. Or even in the sense that a Calabrian Italian is starving.

You can't possibly know anything about radical politics. If you walk through the streets in Calcutta, you begin to learn all there is to know about the nature of humanity. Tony Randall, a good actor and a very intelligent man, said on a program on which I appeared with him that he goes to India frequently to refresh his view of what human life is. He says when he walks through Calcutta he realizes that he dare not give a penny to anybody, because he will be killed or the person to whom he gives the penny will be killed. He daren't give a piece of bread to anybody, because the bread will be forced out of that person's mouth; the mouth will be torn apart: other people will be killed in the process of fighting for that little piece of bread; and nobody will get anything. "Compassion is a luxury of the affluent," he said, and how true that is. Only in this fat society, where nobody is really starving, can people talk about compassion.

[Q] Playboy: You've had good things and bad things to say about America. As a transplanted Englishman now spending a good deal of your time here, do you feel at home in this country--or do you remain something of a disaffected alien?

[A] Burgess: I'm an Englishman; I have no place in America at all. except that I have an actual bond with America because we share a common culture. Very importantly, we share a common language, which I think has reached its finest flower in this country--not in England but here--and I feel a certain resentment when I meet Sicilians. Italians. Germans, Greeks or Poles in Wisconsin and find that they don't regard this culture as their native culture. I feel that this republic was set up as a culture devoted to the English ideas of justice and the English language, a literature made out of English literature. I feel unreasonably resentful when I find these foreigner here making claims for their own languages and cultures.

[Q] Playboy: How do you relate to the blacks' insistence on a black culture in America?

[A] Burgess: Well, I've found that black men in America, for the most part, are not quite as suspicious of me as they are of their fellow Americans, although they should be. There's a curious sympathy between American blacks and Englishmen that lies in the fact that they speak in the same way. The typical black voice is not an American voice. It's not a Midwestern voice or a Brooklyn voice or a Bronx voice; it's very much more like an English voice. The Englishmen say fatha. motha; and blacks, of course, speak in precisely the same way. Of course, it's not a black lingo at all, it's Southern lingo. The "rrr." as in father or mother, which you get in the North, derives straight from 1620's mode of speech; whereas the Southern states, for the most part, developed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. And some of the features of the later development of English are retained in Southern speech.

As for developing their own black culture, I've often wondered why American blacks want to learn Swahili. That's not their language at all. Swahili is a language from the east coast of Africa, with a strong Islamic-Arabic element in it; but the American black is a west-coast black almost entirely. His language is a language of the west coast--Ibo, which nobody is willing to learn. The American black is a very special kind of black who is extremely artistic. Jazz and other forms of black arts are really west-coast arts. You wouldn't find them on the east coast; you wouldn't find them in Central Africa or even in South Africa. And this partly explains the quality that blacks ought to think about sometime, the quality that made them slaves in the first place and the quality that makes them aggressive now. The aggression is not a natural reaction to a long period of slavery. It's something purely temperamental and allied to this artistic impulse. The white man was responsible for slavery, but between the white man and the slave was the black slave trader, the tribal chief who was black and who had as many bad qualities in him as the white man.

All I'm suggesting is that one ought to look a little more seriously at what is meant by negritude and to consider that the particular kind of negritude that black Americans represent may not be representative of the whole of Africa but only a very small, rather unusual segment of Africa. Englishmen, though they belong to an effete race and are an effete nation, have had a lot to do with Africa, far more than America has. And, of course, Englishmen were among those who pioneered the slave trade. But this black-oppression business gets in the way of other modes of oppression. It's driving out of our sights the long history of oppression against the Jews, and also the oppression of various forms of white man. I feel that I myself, as a northern English Catholic, have been oppressed for many centuries. My ancestors were threatened with actual state execution for refusing to become Protestant, and after that, they were unable to become members of the total national culture because of educational and job discrimination that still goes on.

[Q] Playboy: Do you tend for that reason to identify with minority cultures?

[A] Burgess: I do tend to identify with certain minorities such as the Boston Irish, because of the Irish element in me; my grandmother was Irish. And with all Catholics, whether they happen to be Puerto Rican or Bavarian, I find a kind of multiple allegiance, a multiple identification. My people are the poor and downtrodden, the drunk, the fat-bellied and the garlic-smelling, the Catholic and the sentimental. But ultimately, I always go back to the Jeffersonian ideal, which is based on English culture. I feel that the prose of the Declaration of Independence is the most beautiful, the most inspiring, the very perfection of the English language. I admire those men of 1776, although I think they did the wrong thing in many ways. They should have waited a little longer.

[Q] Playboy: For what?

[A] Burgess: For George the Third to die. I think it's a great, great shame that the English-speaking world is divided like this. The particular mode of neoabsolut-ism that George the Third proclaimed would have died with him, and there would have been a much more reasonable attitude toward the Colonies on the part of his successors. Then we never would have had this horrible nonsense with the Presidency, which has caused so much trouble in America. I don't think this mode of culture is really fitted for republicanism. The Americans are really a limited-monarchy people, not like these great mad republicans you get down in South America or in Spain or, for that matter, in Italy. If Canada can cope with that situation--Australia and New Zealand. too--and have less trouble than America, then this great hope of a genuine united culture could have done a great deal of good for the world.

Still, the day may come when England and America and the other English-speaking nations will be united within a single union. I want this to happen very, very much. Nothing has disappointed me more than to see England have to submit to what it has been fighting against for 2000 years: being absorbed into the Continent of Europe. In other words. Napoleon's great attempt at bringing England into Europe has at last succeeded, as I pointed out in the epilog to Napoleon Symphony. But this is not what we wanted. We should be looking farther west. We always have looked west.

[Q] Playboy: So despite America's faults--her violence, her corruption, her puritan-ism, her pollution--you'd like to see her reunited with the mother country?

[A] Burgess: Yes. One talks about the badness of America. But at least America is full of understanding. The rivers are polluted, the air is polluted, but man knows this in America, and although he doesn't do a great deal about it, at least he's aware, and awareness of the process is the beginning of wisdom. In Italy, people don't seem to know anything about it. The whole of Ravenna, which is a beautiful city, is cloaked in industrial smog. Nobody gives a damn; nobody cares about the mindless noise in Rome.

[Q] Playboy: Does it distress you, as it does some, that Europe is becoming Americanized in a processed, plastic, pop sort of way?

[A] Burgess: Well, I think the whole world has become Americanized. But it's not necessarily a bad thing to go into a restaurant and find a refrigerator there, find you can get ice in your gin and tonic. For many years in England--and I say this feelingly, because I know the trade from the inside; I was brought up in a big pub in Manchester, played piano in pubs--they did not serve ice in the pubs, nothing cold but lager. Well, it's not a good thing to have no ice, and if America has brought only ice to the world, I think that's an excellent thing. And I don't see anything against a cold Coca-Cola; it's the finest way of beginning a day after a hard night's drinking. I've lived in the Far East, and Coca-Cola is there, but when you see Coca-Cola in Arabic script, it doesn't look quite so bad. It's the standardization we object to. It's the image of some great anonymous cartel that lies behind the identity of the Holiday Inns and the Ramada Inns. If only they could disguise themselves. If the Holiday Inn is to appear, like all Holiday Inns, with its ridiculous sign--you know, "Welcome Aboard, Admiral!"--it deserves rejection.

[Q] Playboy: Nietzsche said something about evolving from the ape to the human to the superhuman. And with the superhuman, he said, we would get ourselves into trouble. Is there anything of that Nietzschean nightmare about America? Have our hard-eyed technicians become superhuman?

[A] Burgess: Oh, yes, I think there's no doubt about that. I think the kind of Siegfried ideal, which Nietzsche took from Wagner--or it may be the other way around--is certainly incarnated in America. The superastronaut, the superpolitician--from Hamilton to Nixon--the supertechnician, the superscientist, even the superwriter like Mailer, this is a very American thing. These people soar above the purely human, and this probably explains why they make such a mess of the purely human, why such small considerations as concerning oneself with the rights of ordinary people go by the boards. Cartoons like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel had to originate in America. It's interesting that Superman was invented by a couple of Jews. Lenny Bruce was foolish when he leaped out of a third-floor window and said, "Look at me. I'm Super-Jew." It wasn't a very clever joke, because Superman already was Super-Jew. He was a creation of the Jews, who are in many ways the conscience of America, its imagination.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned superastronauts. Do you see the space race as part of this process of moving toward a "superhumanity"?

[A] Burgess: No. I do think the exploration of space is one of the brightest things America has ever done, but I think the motivation has been mostly international rivalry, an attempt to do one better. It obviously has to be done, of course. Man has to explore, man has to understand the universe he's living in. And this obviously entails going to the moon, going to other planets. I think that one of the wisest, brightest and most imaginative things that America has done is to spend these billion--uselessly, if you like--on the various moon probes, and eventually achieve a moon landing. I think, though, that it's a testimony to the ingrained unimaginativeness and apathy of the American people that they didn't respond to the moon landings with elation, with a sudden outburst of poetry, which is what one would have expected. I think Americans are so inured to seeing science-fiction films on television that when they saw this real thing happening, it just struck them as a rather badly made sci-fi movie.

[Q] Playboy: And to most people, Skylab was a pale imitation of the space platform in 2001?

[A] Burgess: Exactly. One with a tatty old umbrella that's falling apart. But I know our own reaction to this in Europe was one of immense excitement. "God, a man has been put on the moon! This is incredible!" The New York Times commissioned me to write a poem celebrating the landing.

[Q] Playboy: You predicted the moon landing in A Clockwork Orange--years before the actual event. Do you consider yourself something of a prophet?

[A] Burgess: It's fallacious to believe that there's such a thing as a fiction of the future. Any fiction that seems to be set in a future time is really set in the present, with a few fantastic embellishments that the writer can allow himself. For instance, 1984 is really about 1948--and that was the original title of the book. First of all, Orwell was talking about England. One recognizes England with all the bomb damage and the shortage of food and shortage of drink and good cigarettes, and all he's done in the book is got the left-wing intelligentsia, the readers of New Statesman and The Nation, to realize their fantasy of imposing their will on the proletariat and perpetuating a kind of tyrannical, essentially intellectual socialism. So it was a satirical study of the present.

Clockwork Orange is a satirical study of life as it was in 1960, when the tone of postwar England was socialistic, collectivist. and I was really trying to satirize that sort of world in which people had nothing to live for, had no energy--except for the young, who could do nothing with their energy but employ it to totally barbarous ends. I was really writing about the present. The then present. The now past. The future is already in the past. In Clockwork Orange, I had world telecasts and men on the moon. Of course, these things have come true: but there's nothing in the book that wasn't already present in the technology of the early Sixties, except for the use of a composite dialect called Nadsat.

Of course, one doesn't always get the details right. In The Wanting Seed, a study of the population explosion that I wrote the same year as A Clockwork Orange, I created a future in which people say the Mass in Latin, and England still hasn't got a decimal coinage. You could say that was false prophecy. But I wasn't intending to prophesy. However, I also described an overpopulated world in which, because there isn't enough to eat, people have to start eating each other. And this was prophecy. But everybody thought it was a kind of Swiftian satire, like A Modest Proposal, in which Swift suggested that the surplus children of Ireland who couldn't be fed should be eaten by the English. I would merely ask people who worry about the lack of food in the world what they have against cannibalism. Murder is wrong, undoubtedly, but presumably war is not wrong; at least some wars, such as the one that rid us of Hitler, have been necessary--surgical, as if to remove a disease.

Anyway, in my novel I present artificial wars in which the corpses are immediately taken over by some processing organization that turns them into food. I think this is going to happen eventually. Indeed, in a science-fiction film called Soylent Green, it's already happened. We're so used to eating anonymous food from the supermarkets--I've eaten puddings that contained, as far as I could tell, no natural element whatsoever. You don't really know what the hell you're eating anymore. So what may well happen is that in supermarkets there will be cans of processed human flesh mixed up with sodium nitrates and monosodium glutamate and God knows what else. And we will eat it, and it will nourish us, and a great problem will be solved.

[Q] Playboy: Do you expect us to swallow that?

[A] Burgess: I'm afraid so. It's the only thing in any of my fiction that I think might possibly come true--and will probably have to come true. Our reluctance to eat human flesh is parallel to the Hindu reluctance to eat any kind of animal flesh. We have to get over it sooner or later if we're going to survive. And so long as we have genuine cannibalism, we may have a return to Catholic Christianity with its sacrificial elements. We may have a unified Church again. There's no doubt that the Church is in a mess at the moment. It doesn't know where to turn, has no authority, doesn't know what it believes. I blame this on Pope John. The fact that we've left a noble language and a noble liturgy behind for the sake of the vernacular is a great sin, in my opinion. Pope John was obviously a good priest to have in a Communist town like Milan, but he wasn't for that reason qualified to be a Pope. A Pope should be intellectual.

[Q] Playboy: But John had panache.

[A] Burgess: Pope John had panache, which very few Popes have had. Probably the Borgias were the last people to have it. I'm writing a novel now, based roughly, I suppose, on the character of Pope John. It's about an investigation preparatory to canonization--as, of course, they're trying to canonize Pope John now. The question to be resolved in the novel is whether a particular occurrence was a simple coincidence, a divine miracle or a diabolical miracle: whether this great and good Pope was really diabolically inspired. I believe Pope John was undoubtedly a good man; you dug him, but you dug him because he was a great human vulgarian. You dug him as you'd dig some great baseball player. Now his successor, this man who has not very much heart but a good deal of intellect, is striving with great difficulty to build on the ruins.

[Q] Playboy: We were talking of the future--not just of the Church but of the world. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about our chances?

[A] Burgess: I'm not too gloomy about the future, because I think man is so ingenious that he will find solutions to his problems. We may even have a pretty good time.

[Q] Playboy: You don't think we'll blow ourselves up?

[A] Burgess: I think we've gone past that. I think it might have happened in the Forties or the early Fifties, but it hasn't happened yet and I don't think it's going to. I think man is going to survive. He will have to worry most about overpopulation and about overcentralization of government. But there are solutions to these problems and I think we're going to find them. On the other hand, I don't want to live too long. I merely want to pass out when the time comes and leave it to others.

[Q] Playboy: You don't fear death, then?

[A] Burgess: Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay, and that's all one can say about it. I desperately believe in free will. But I know I'm predestined to die. I'm not really scared, however. I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you can write as little as a page of prose--even bad prose--that is eternal.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any vision of life after death?

[A] Burgess: No, I do not. I used to believe very strongly in hell and even in purgatory, in limbo, as well as heaven. Although I think most people find it hard to believe in heaven but have no difficulty believing in hell, which is a fair commentary on the kind of lives we live.

[Q] Playboy: You believe, then, that when you die it's just all over?

[A] Burgess: Yes, I think it's probably true that when this body dies, when this brain is no longer fed with blood, then the mind goes with it. And when I go, I don't want to be cremated. I want to give some of my phosphates back to the earth. That's my ultimate ambition.

[Q] Playboy: Have you given any thought to your epitaph?

[A] Burgess: I've always been in love with a particular epitaph that may or may not be appropriate, but I'm determined to have it. You'll find it in the pseudo-Homeric poems, fragments of Greek poetry including an Ode to Pan: "Him the gods have made neither a digger nor a plowman, nor otherwise wise in ought, for he failed in every art."

[Q] Playboy: But you haven't.

[A] Burgess: Yes, I have. It's humble because it's true. We do fail if we attempt art. We're happier if we can do things like digging and plowing, just putting our hands to the ground, reaching Walden Pond. You can do that successfully because you have nature's help. But all artists fail.

[Q] Playboy: That's rather a sad note on which to end.

[A] Burgess: The sadness is in life. One loves life regardless of its sadness, perhaps because of it. It's summed up in a line by Virgil: "Sunt lacrimae rerum; et mentem mortalia tangunt." "There are tears in things, and all things doomed to die touch the heart." What one loves about life are the things that fade. It's a sense of things passing--so regretful, regretful--of things being beautiful and yet mortal, that makes life worth living.