![]() 21 is the symbol of human maturity, or used to be, since at 21 you got the vote and assumed adult responsibility. ![]() Take out your pocket calculator and you will find that these add up to a total of twenty-one chapters. The book I wrote is divided into three sections of seven chapters each. A Clockwork Orange has never been published entire in America. I have a very special duty to it in the United States, and I had better now explain what this duty is. ![]() I have to go on living with A Clockwork Orange, and this means I have a sort of authorial duty to it. Kids cut their pianistic teeth on a Minuet in G which Beethoven composed only so that he could detest it. Rachmaninoff used to groan because people he was known mainly for a Prelude in C Sharp Minor which he wrote as a boy, while he works of his maturity never got into programmes. This is not an unusual experience for an artist. It seems likely to survive, while other works of mine that I value more bite the dust. I receive mail from students who try to write theses about it, or requests from Japanese dramaturges to turn it into a sort of Noh play. I should myself be glad to disown it for various reasons, but this is not permitted. ![]() It refuses to be erased, however, and for this film version of the book by Stanley Kubrick may be held chiefly responsible. ![]() I first published the novella A Clockwork Orange in 1962, which ought to be far enough in the past for it to be erased form the world's literary memory. ![]()
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