He made his name with A Clockwork Orange, the savage social satire that inspired Stanley Kubrick’s cult film. Now, the East Sussex house where Anthony Burgess wrote the novel – and set the scene of a violent break-in and assault – is for sale.
Burgess lived in the Victorian semi-detached house on the High Street in Etchingham between 1960 and 1968, when he sold it to his neighbour and former cleaner. It was in the study – now a bedroom – that he wrote his seminal 1962 novel, a nightmarish vision of youth in revolt for which he invented a futuristic slang called Nadsat, in which house was domy and to buy kupet. Kubrick’s 1971 screen adaptation sparked controversy with its violent and sexually explicit scenes.
Burgess, a former literary critic of the Observer, wrote the first two Enderby books in the house, as well as Nothing Like the Sun, a novel about Shakespeare’s love-life narrated in Elizabethan English.
Professor Andrew Biswell, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, told the Observer: “It’s fascinating to be able to see the interior of Burgess’s former residence, where he wrote so many of his important books.”
He added: “This could be an opportunity for a Clockwork Orange super-fan to own the house where the novel was written. Burgess’s novel features a middle-aged author much like himself, who is writing a book entitled A Clockwork Orange. The author and his wife are beaten up by a gang of teenage droogs who invade their home.” The typescript of his novel ends with the words “Etchingham, Sussex. August 1961”.
In a passage where the writer is beaten up, Burgess wrote: “They clopped over to the writer … whose horn-rimmed otchkies [glasses] were cracked but still hanging on … and making ornaments shake on the mantelpiece ... while he fillied with the author of A Clockwork Orange, making his litso [face] all purple and dripping away.”
Biswell acknowledged that “prospective buyers of Burgess’s house may be rather put off by this fictional episode of violence in the home”.
But, like Burgess, buyers may well fall for a four-bedroom, three-storey house with views over large gardens and open countryside. It is on the market for £510,000.
Burgess lived in the house, called Applegarth, with his first wife, Lynne. She died in 1968 and he then left England to settle in Malta.
Biswell said: “Writing about Sussex in the 1960s, Burgess remembered the village of Etchingham as a sleepy place where only half the houses had good drains. He said that his neighbours across the road had to make do with outside toilets and a trench.”
A selection of his essays, including many pieces written in Etchingham, appears in The Ink Trade, published by Carcanet.