Everybody came to London to flog their latest product
The Savage God
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
Prolific
In 1960, while working as a colonial civil servant in North Borneo, Burgess was told by his doctors he had an inoperable cerebral tumour and only one year to live.
“I realised a lot had to be done in that year, so I wrote six books,” he said. “I worked rather harder than I do now, 2000 words a day.
“Now I only do one thousand. Towards the end of that year, when I realised I was not going to die after all, I could get up at six, have the 2,000 words done by breakfast at ten, then have the rest of the day to myself.
“It’s a question of discipline: not so much discipline as allotting time.
It has been a sin to be prolific only since the Bloomsbury group — particularly Forster — made it a point of good manners to produce, as it were, costively. I’ve been annoyed less by sneers at my alleged overproduction than by the imputation that to write much means to write badly. I’ve always written with great care and even some slowness. I’ve just put in rather more hours a day at the task than some writers seem able to.
“The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories….Common criminals…can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.” A Clockwork Orange.