The Ultimate Beatnik

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (184 pp.)--Anthony Burgess--Norton ($3.95).

In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty little shocker but is really that rare thing in English letters--a philosophical novel. The point may be overlooked because the hero, a teen-age monster, tells all about everything in nadsat, a weird argot that seems to be all his own. Nadsat is neither gibberish nor a Joycean exercise. It serves to put Alex where he belongs--half in and half out of the human race.

While Pee & Em Are Away. It is a nightmare world Alex lives in, and readers of Constantine FitzGibbon and George Orwell will place the time roughly between When the Kissing Had to Stop and this side of 1984. Only the lewdies (the old) read any more and "newspapers not being read much neither." There is universal social security. The millicents (police) are everywhere. Russia is the dominant influence (the pop singers are Berti Laski and Johnny Zhivago), and it is suggested that Alex and his dreadful droogs (gangmates) get their Russian-based special vocabulary by subliminal propaganda. Life for Alex is real horrorshow (just fine--from the Russian kho-rosho?). Alex wears skin-tight black tights, padded pletchoes (shoulders) and real horrorshow boots for kicking. He likes to go to milk bars for the old moloko (milk) or milk-plus, a teen tipple laced with what seems to be mescaline. Thus hyped up, Alex and his hyped-up droogs prowl the town and kick in the keeshkas (tripes) of a lewdie, nearly murder an old shopkeeper for a few polly (pounds) and cancers (cigarettes). They invade the country house of a writer, like Burgess himself, the author of a novel called A Clockwork Orange, and force him to look on while they rape his wife. Alex's sole link with humanity seems to be his love for "Ludwig van," especially the Choral Ninth. While his pee and em (parents) are at work, he perversely violates two small girls (Alex himself is only 15) while Beethoven gives out with the Ninth on the record player.

Gulliver Unravels. At this point it may be suspected that Burgess is merely putting on a Grand Guignol and that he shares Alex's taste for the existentialist's "gratuitous act" or pointless crime. He is not. Alex's later story is "like tragic" and expounds a bitter moral theorem. He is jailed and selected by the state authorities for Reclamation Treatment. Under drugs and with his eyelids clipped open, he is forced to watch an endless succession of films showing Japanese and Nazi tortures while Beethoven supplies the sound track. Then, conditioned like Pavlov's dog, Alex is released on society, guaranteed to vomit at the sight of violence or the sound of Beethoven. As one of his brainwashing group observes, "He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice." The experiment fails when Alex goes into a frenzy after hearing some Mozart, leaps from a window and knocks all the grafted goodness out of his gulliver (head).

This pilgrim's progress of a beatnik Stavrogin is a serious and successful moral essay. Burgess argues quite simply that Alex is more of a man as an evil man than as a good zombie. The clockwork of a mechanical society can never counterfeit the organic vitality of moral choice. Goodness is nothing if evil is not accepted as a possibility.

Burgess, a member of an old English Catholic family, was a composer and teacher before he became a fulltime writer four years ago. His earlier book, Devil of a State, is a Waugh-like account of a fictional state remarkably like Brunei, where he had served as educational adviser to the Sultan. It won praise for what seemed like the high spirits of a young talent (Burgess was then 42). It gave little hint of the moral seriousness of Orange, where the brassily orchestrated jive of nadsat is used to point up a grave philosophic theme. It is a gruesomely witty cautionary tale--but not one for children.

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