This is penetrating; thank you. You are quite right - they did not understand Burgess. They did not understand his willingness to exploit, and his joy in exploiting, the potentialities of the English language in all its wealth and complexity to the fullest extent of his powers. He splashed the linguistic cash. Why not, if his pockets were full of it? It made them feel small, jangling their small change. They did not understand the breadth of his subject-matter, many of them believing that the subject-matter of the modern English novel ought to be Hampstead adultery, or possibly someone’s little Islington heroin addiction, and little else. Despite their proto-multiculturalism, they did not understand, and considered suspect, his authentic knowledge (so unlike their own shallow and bogus grasp) of foreign languages, locales, and peoples, not just those of the Mediterranean but of the Levant and of Southeast and East Asia. They did not understand what Seymour-Smith calls his ‘despair’ (I think the word is too strong) in the face of the circumambient rot and nihilism of modern England, even then, more than 60 years ago, on his return from Borneo. That was a time when you could say that the destroyers of all that is good in England, who had begun their work of iconoclasm and ideological poisoning after the ‘14-‘18 Great Slaughter, were getting into their stride. (Sometimes people who have lived and worked away from their homeland for a period are able, upon their return, to get at its true contemporary reality, to evaluate it with greater acuity or poignancy.) His own generation did not understand his disheartened reaction - he a longtime teacher, and by all accounts, a dedicated and brilliant one - in the face of unmistakable signs of cultural degradation and the decay of liberal education, that is to say the scrapping of the goal of cultivation in the sciences and the arts - of the life of the mind, of the spirit, of genuine æsthetic appreciation - in favour of the modern fake culture of ugliness, sordor, and kitsch. Not only did his own generation not understand him, they complacently found his opposition to the dismantling of all that was fine about England distasteful and infra dig - ‘course and unattractive, and he’s such a bore’. If his own generation couldn’t understand him, succeeding generations had not the slightest idea either. For instance, in ‘62 he dashed off in six weeks what he called a jeu d’esprit called A Clockwork Orange. One of several themes of the novel is youth violence. (‘Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. Its dynamism has to find an outlet in smashing telephone kiosks, derailing trains, stealing cars and smashing them and, of course, the much more satisfactory activity of destroying human beings. There comes a time, however, when violence is seen as juvenile and boring. It is the repartee of the stupid and ignorant.’) The violent aspect of the novel was partly actuated by the rape of his first wife by GIs in London during the Second World War. There is no trace of glamorisation of violence; far from it; there is a horror of violence; the novel, although altogether lacking in sentimentality, is touching in certain passages in its treatment of the pitiful victims of violence. Yet today’s youth - also the young-and-idiotic-at-heart middle-aged or geriatric - have turned Alex and his droogs into a revolting cult, something directly contrary to Burgess’s purposes. The gang’s wallowing in violence is what appeals to today’s nihilistic young, and it is the only thing they know about Burgess. Perhaps this should not surprise us; many of the same young people who think Alex is glamorous are keen on attending demonstrations that glamorise Hamas, chanting genocidal ‘from river to sea’ slogans and hailing torture, rape, murder and beheading of innocents. ‘The young know nothing,’ as Burgess put it; he also was able to show that distressingly large numbers of the young - and older people who ought to know better - are moral defectives. I’m in agreement with your view that only those who ‘defy and deny’ putrid modern orthodoxies can understand, appreciate, or enjoy Burgess’s work.

burgessodyssey.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/b-man/

I rather agree with the assessment. 'The most gifted and versatile novelist of his generation. Not one member of Burgess's generation approaches his fluency, energy, inventiveness, effrontery. For intelligence, learning, imaginative capacity, writer's professional cunning - no English practitioner in the form comes near him.' Speaking for myself, I'd say that one thing that is so very enjoyable about Burgess is what Seymour-Smith acutely describes as his 'elephantine fun, the celebration of the human and the ludicrous, even within the husk of evil'. (An example of this is the treatment of Goebbels's speech in Earthly Powers and the reaction of Toomey.) The thing about Burgess is that he's so damned funny, relentlessly so. La comédie humaine to the power of n. As an English *comic* novelist alone, he has no late-20th-century rival, I reckon - the heir of Waugh, for sure.

I take it you mean that Anthony Powell, or Poe-elle, or Pole, would’ve had a nervous breakdown about the supposed mispronunciation of his esteemed name, while Anthony Burgess, or Bourgeois, or Borghese, or Borges, would’ve been indifferent on the matter of the ‘right’ pronunciation of ‘Powell’ or perhaps faintly amused at the absurdity. Yes, I remember reading something of the kind, that Anthony Pole insisted on this rarefied, indeed rather pissyarsed, pronunciation to set himself Masonically apart from or above the great unwashed, and that a distant cousin of his, Margaret Thatcher’s factotum, harboured the same fatuous conceit. (Anthony Pole claimed to be directly descended from King Arthur or a Welsh prince, or some such ballocks, or bollocks, or bollox.) It must’ve been quite boring being Anthony Pole, constantly having to correct librarians, publishers, fellow writers, male and female lovers, psychiatric nurses, postmen (‘Letter for Mr Powell.’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘Says Powell ‘ere’), bank managers, male and female prostitutes, monks, undertakers, airline check-in clerks (‘May I confirm your destination, Mr Powell?’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘The ticket indicates Paris, sir’), karate teachers, opticians, chimney sweeps (‘We’ll ‘ave it cleared for you in no time, Mr Powell.’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘Ah, we use special wire brushes ‘n vacuums these days, Mr Powell’), car mechanics, locksmiths, accountants, proctologists (‘Inserting now, Mr Powell; you might feel a little sting.’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘Actually we call it a hæmorrhoid-ligator biopsy forceps, Mr Powell. Now just try to relax’), police officers, psychotherapists, butchers, the vicar (‘Anthony Dymoke Powell, do you take this woman to be your wedded wife?’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘Don’t blame you for having a hard-on, Mr Powell - she’s delectable - but that’s for tonight; for the moment, a simple yes or no answer will suffice’), barbers, insurance salesmen, urologists, plumbers (‘I’ll have this latrine unblocked for you in a jiffy, Mr Powell.’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘Well, we call it a drain rod-plunger combo, but near enough, Mr Powell. Stand back please, sir, ‘cos the shite can sometimes hit the fan’), STD testing clinic operatives, dentists, the grocer (‘Morning, Mr Powell.’ ‘It’s Pole.’ ‘It’s chilly, no doubt about it. Your usual order today, is it, Mr Powell?’), notaries public, travel agents - all these people have to be corrected constantly, and 90% of them never remember how to pronounce the name correctly the next time you see them, that’s the infuriating thing.