Kubrick, Burgess and Mentors

[RonPrice]

And I had been able to organize my life in some ways not unlike that creative spirit Stanley Kubrick who tailored virtually his entire existence to the making of films(1949-1999). I, though, was making only one film: my life in a multitude of different literary genres. I was able to draw on an immense reservoire of "idees recues" for: revealing insights, fertilizing phrases, unexpected converging or parallel lines of thought. I could do this in the context of isolation and a concomitant contact with a rich assortment of professionals and specialists in whatever field interested me.

I was freed from the kind of consuming passion illustrated by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. Miller was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer. In this play Willy Loman was Miller’s lead character. Loman was a salesman who found himself regarded as useless in his occupation because of his age and so he killed himself. The idea of greatness and success is a dominant theme in the play. Willy longs to achieve great things and to be remembered after his death. Willy's emphasis on being well-liked stems from a belief that it will bring him to perfect success--not a harmful dream in itself, except that he clings to this idea as if it is a life-preserver, refusing to give it up. I make reference to this great play of the 20th century because the success Willy sought through being liked, was one I also sought and found. Even now when I don’t have one hundred students in front of me every week I still want to be liked by the few I do interact with. And when I’m not liked my spirit flags; I tend to avoid the person who has some antipathy for me. It happens rarely in these years of post-employment: perhaps one person every two years. This I found was hardly something to concern me, more like a fly to tick off one’s leg, if not ignore it altogether.

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A CLOCKWORK ORANGE AND BLACK

Anthony Burgess has bookshelves which sag under what looks like a story of blistering success: more than thirty novels, many published to international critical acclaim; dozens of non-fiction titles, from a discursive study of beds to a two-volume, 1,200-page history of English literature, written in Italian; the long entry for the Novel in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; librettos and musical scores: symphonies, song settings, sonatas; translations into and out of English; screenplays, documentaries and lectures; and countless reviews, thousands and thousands of them, a sample to be found in two collections, Urgent Copy (1968) and Homage to Qwert Yuiop (1986). Penguin have awarded modern classic status to Earthly Powers (1980) and A Clockwork Orange (1962). The latter owes its fame to Stanley Kubrick's brutal, stylish film. The musical score of this film insinuated itself into my psyche quite unbeknownst to my waking self. -Ron Price with thanks to Roger Lewis, Anthony Burgess: A Life, 2004.

As I come to my late adulthood
I look back to 1962
as the year of great beginnings,
not that I knew it at the time.
I did not know much then, at 18
as the world came close to the edge
of giving it all to the cockroaches.
Was it Kennedy who saved us in October?

Was Clockwork Orange a wake-up call
to a new anti-utopian world
of violence and state control
emerging, then, as I struggled
to control a embryonically massive id
that was exercising its own control?

I did not know, then, busy as I was
trying to pass nine grade 13 subjects
in my last months of freedom before
a bi-polar disorder rushed into my life
with its own controlling factor,
its own clockwork orange and black,
its own violence, emotional disarray
and a fear and confusion as deep as
the one you portrayed Anthony/Stanley.

Ron Price
16 April 2004