The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, December 2, 2024

Notebook: In a 2012 reconsideration of A Clockwork Orange, the 1962 novel that made him mildly famous when it was published, and world-famous when Stanley Kubrick directed the movie in 1971, Anthony Burgess wrote this: “Novelists put dirty language into the mouths of their characters, and they show these characters fornicating or going to the toilet. Moreover, it is not a useful trade, as is that of the carpenter or the pastry cook. The novelist passes the time for you between one useful action and another; he helps to fill the gaps that appear in the serious fabric of living. He is a mere entertainer, a sort of clown.” It is a strange if not defined understanding of what “useful” is. More surprising for a novelist: “His use of words is not to be taken too seriously. The President of the United States uses words, the physician or garage mechanic or army general or philosopher uses words, and these words seem to relate to the real world, a world in which taxes must be levied and then avoided, cars have to be run, sicknesses cured, great thoughts thought and decisive battles engaged. No creator of plots or personages, however great, is to be thought of as a serious thinker—not even Shakespeare.” Burgess had the writer’s tendency to shock (this is the author of A Clockwork Orange, after all, a novel premised on shock). But this is a sadly materialist, reductive view of life, of what he calls “the real world,” especially for a novelist (he wrote 50 books after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, the first three written at top speed in order to get them published and leave a bit of money for his wife and son after his death. Naturally, he did not die on schedule). Is the “real world,” the “serious fabric of living” to be reduced to paying taxes, fixing cars, fighting wars (killing!), bypassing hearts? Is that what we live for? To count the days and pay our dues in an endless loop of dues and bills-paying? I thought it was the reverse: we toil to live. We toil and pay taxes and hopefully survive the bypass in order that we may not merely live but, if we’re lucky, love, life. What is life at heart–in its only truly valuable essence–but the chance to know beauty, pleasure, to be epicureans, to know love and truth–if we’re lucky–and to avoid pain? Aren’t books and literature among the more aesthetically easy ways to live? How are three hours spent on a couch with Watch the North Wind Rise or hiking the Badlands of South Dakota any less “useful” to a life than getting an oil change? How is the oil change–or the bypass–more useful, rather than a pitiful interruption of life as it ought to be lived? “But don’t read like children read, to have fun,” Flaubert wrote a correspondent, “nor even the way the ambitious like to read, to learn. Read to live.” To Flaubert, reading was life. (He would not have approved of Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal,” Updike tells us in Odd Jobs). Or as Philip Roth put it: “I read fiction to be freed from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own. It’s the same reason that I write.”

—P.T.