Were 20th Century Novels Too High IQ?
Was that Harvard student who assumed "A Clockwork Orange" must be written in Ye Olde English totally off base?
From The Atlantic:
By Rose Horowitch
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
JULY 8, 2026, 5:55 AM ET
… Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. …
The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago.
A simpler prose style came into fashion exactly a century ago with Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. Unlike the French, who perfected their lucid “classical” prose style by the late 17th Century, the English usually devoted more of their literary talent to poetry than to making their writing clear. So, if you want to know why Hemingway had such an impact on his generation (e.g., Evelyn Waugh worshipped Hemingway), it was because he’d finally ended the verbose Victorian era.
This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. And it’s true that Americans’ basic reading skills are declining. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. Amanda Kordeliski, who is on the board of the American Association of School Librarians, told me that she and her fellow librarians have had to buy new books to accommodate students’ diminished reading levels.
I don’t see any mention of immigration, although obviously that’s playing a huge role in young people becoming less adept at reading English.
And yet, basic literacy in English appears to be pretty widespread today judging by how much time people spend staring at their phones:
… And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. …
Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. …
Personally, the illiterates sound smarter to me: it’s the 1930s in the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin has sent a crafty Jew from Moscow to ask us humble Central Asian peasants bizarre questions about the color of bears. This has to be political, right? White bears must be a reference to the Whites, the aristocrats who lost the Civil War. Doctor Luria will probably have everybody who says the bears are white declared a counter-revolutionary and shot. Should I therefore say all bears are red? No, that will just alert this Red commissar that I understand his mission. The safest thing is to play dumb like a country buffoon and say I can’t answer because I’ve never been there.
Whew, he believed me — it worked! (Other than that for the next 90 years the intelligentsia will assume the point of the story was what dumb-asses we were. But we are still alive so … we can live with that.)
… Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)
Harvard went test-optional in its admissions process from 2020-2025 … and they immediately stopped making Harvard students like they used to. (Harvard president James Conant sponsored the development of the SAT test 90 years ago.)
Also, Harvard boosted its racial quotas in anticipation of losing the Students for Fair Admissions case in the Supreme Court in 2023. It now claims that 18% of its freshmen admitted in 2022 were black, a hilariously high number.
Still, I’m not sure I fully believe this anecdote about the Harvard student who thought Old English was the language of A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian sci-fi novel famously written in a futuristic teen Cockney slang influenced, for unexplained reasons, by Russian. If you spent 90 seconds online looking into the novel, you’d learn all about Nadsat, the slang Burgess invented.
And you could watch the equally celebrated 1971 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, which takes pains to use spectacular visuals to make the language comprehensible.
But I want to point out that asking AI for a translation of A Clockwork Orange into regular English is hardly ridiculous. Granted, reading Clockwork and finding it comprehensible was a rite of passage for smart kids for decades. Still, here’s the first page of the book:
‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither. Well, what they sold there was milk plus something else. They had no licence for selling liquor, but there was no law yet against prodding some of the new veshches which they used to put into the old moloko, so you could peet it with vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom or one or two other veshches which would give you a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels And Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg. Or you could peet milk with knives in it, as we used to say, and this would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of dirty twenty-to-one, and that was what we were peeting this evening I’m starting off the story with.
Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need from the point of view of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts. But, as they say, money isn’t everything.
It’s a challenging read to say the least.
Here’s ChatGPT’s translation into Young Adult Novel English:
“What’s it going to be, then?”
There was me — Alex — and my three friends: Pete, Georgie, and Dim, who really was dim. We were sitting in the Korova Milkbar, trying to decide what to do with the evening. It was a nasty, dark, cold winter night, though at least it was dry.
The Korova Milkbar was a place that served “milk-plus,” and maybe you’ve forgotten what places like that were like, since things change so quickly these days and everyone forgets so fast. People don’t read the newspapers much anymore either. Anyway, what they sold there was milk mixed with something extra. They didn’t have a license to sell alcohol, but there wasn’t yet any law against mixing certain new drugs into milk. So you could drink it with vellocet, synthemesc, drencrom, or one or two other substances, which would give you a pleasant, quiet, hallucinatory fifteen minutes — maybe seeing God and all His holy angels and saints in your left shoe, with lights exploding all over your brain.
Or you could drink milk “with knives in it,” as we used to say. That would sharpen you up and get you ready for some violent gang activity. That was what we were drinking on the evening where my story begins.
Our pockets were full of money, so there was no practical need to steal any more cash by beating up some old man in an alley and watching him bleed while we counted the money and split it four ways. Nor did we need to commit extreme violence against some trembling old gray-haired woman in a shop and run off laughing with the contents of the cash register.
But, as they say, money isn’t everything.
Well, that’s pretty dull compared to Burgess’s original. Still, it is easier to read.
When I was young in the 1970s, Burgess (1917-1993) was a huge figure in higher end culture. He wrote many books that were reviewed by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges (who felt a kinship with Burgess) and countless book reviews, and he was constantly being interviewed by William F. Buckley and the like:
On the other hand, Burgess’s fame faded rapidly after his death. It would appear that the consensus today is that he wrote one great book, peaking at age 45 with A Clockwork Orange.
I read six or eight books by Burgess, including one in 1977 that I found to be a masterpiece. But …
Paywall here.
