Burgess's Trauma

Please do not attempt to expand the article by reviving Burgess and subjecting him to more trauma.

## Childhood Trauma

Burgess's mother died in the year following his birth from the Spanish flu. Burgess believed that his father resented him for surviving.

Burgess was bullied as a child for his fashion choices.

### In ACO

Burgess's childhood experience being beaten by gangs for fashion is heavily apparent in *A Clockwork Orange*.

## Education, Authorship, and Thanatophobia

Burgess did not originally want to become an author.

He turned to writing because he thought it would be the easiest way to leave his wife with a nest egg before his apparent demise.

## Alcoholism

Burgess and his first wife were both alcoholics:

Anthony Burgess's wife was a notoriously nasty drunk  who would go on to die of cyrhosis of the liver.

Burgess claims that he wrote A Clockwork Orange in a state of "near drunkenness" to deal with "material that upset [him] very much".

## Lynne's Trauma

Burgess confirmed that *A Clockwork Orange* was based on "an element of biography" :

```
Yes, indeed. My first wife, who is now dead, was attacked during the war in London, in the blackout, by four American soldiers, who were in fact deserters. It wasn’t a sexual attack, it was an attack for robbery, but the result of this attack was that she had a miscarriage, she lost the child she was carrying at the time and her health deteriorated, and I suppose her eventual death was initiated by this act of violence.
I think it’s the job of the artist, especially the novelist, to take events like that from his own life, or from the lives of those near to him, and to purge them, to cathartise the pain, the anguish, in a work of art.
It’s one of the jobs of art, I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said " We shed our sicknesses in works of art. "
In this sense, the part of the novel, the part of the film, in which the character is writing a book, and the book is called in my own book, A Clockwork Orange. It was an attempt to put myself in the novel, to put myself as a writer who is subject to the deprivations, to the violence of wild youth, and by that means to clear it out of my system so that I didn’t have to think about it any more.

```

## Criticism

One could easily criticize Anthony Burgess for writing a book based off of trauma that was not his own, especially considering he would go on to cheat on his wife one year after the book was published. Furthermore, given the fact that the attack was committed chiefly on his wife yet the novel deals with themes of forgiveness, one might ask, by what right does Anthony Burgess have to be the arbiter of forgiveness for the traumas experienced by another?

## References

1. ↑ Lewis, 2002, p. 64
2. ↑ Lewis, 2002, pp. 53-54
3. ↑ The Telegraph, 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1571513/Liana-Burgess.html
4. ↑ Mitgang, 1993, p. 23
5. ↑ Anthony Burgess Estate, 2002, http://www.masterbibangers.net/ABC/index.php?option=com\_content&view=article&id=49
6. ↑ The Telegraph, 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1571513/Liana-Burgess.html

*To see the full list of references for this entire project (and not this specific page), see Works Cited.*