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August 8, 2006
OGIC: Writers in amber
In between novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, I'm reading around in Anthony Powell's captivating Memoirs. As in the fiction, the portraits here are sharp and indelible, and several are of notable writers. For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald at the MGM commissary in 1937:He was smallish, neat, solidly built, wearing a light grey suit, light-coloured tie, all his tones essentially light. Photographs--seen for the most part years later--do not do justice to him. Possibly he was one of those persons who at once become self-conscious when photographed. Even snapshots tend to give him an air of swagger, a kind of cockiness, which, anyway at that moment, he did not at all possess. On the contrary, one was at once aware of an odd sort of unassuming dignity. There was no hint at all of the cantankerous temper that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface. His air could be thought a trifle sad, not, as sometimes described at this period, in the least brokedown.
...Fitzgerald took a pen from his pocket, and a scrap of paper. On the paper he drew a rough map of North America. Then he added three arrows pointing to the continent. The arrows showed the directions from which culture had flowed into the United States. I am ashamed to say I cannot now remember precisely which these channels were: possibly the New England seabaord; the South (the Old Dominion); up through Latin America; yet I seem to retain some impression of an arrow lancing in from the Pacific. The point of mentioning this diagram is, however, the manner in which a characteristic side of Fitzgerald was revealed. He loved instructing. There was a schoolmasterly streak, a sudden enthusiasm, simplicity of exposition, qualities that might have offered a brilliant career as a teacher or lecturer at school or university.
Not only that, but the day Powell lunched with him, Fitzgerald began his scandalous affair with Sheilah Graham. Next is Ford Madox Ford:
Another Duckworth author, though only intermittently, was Ford Madox Ford. As the work of an old acquaintance, Gerald Duckworth was prepared to publish Ford's books from time to time, but they were not popular with Balston [a Duckworth director], who did not regard their small sales as redeemed by the author's undoubted interest in literary experiment. Ford's novels usually deal with a similar social level to those of Galsworthy, though Ford is far more aware of the paradoxes of human nature, the necessity, at that moment, of exploring new forms of writing. An immense self-pity--in general an almost essential adjunct of the bestseller--infected Ford adversely as a serious novelist, while at the same time for some reason never boosting his sales. His misunderstandings and sentimentalities on the subject of English life (half-German himself, he very nearly opted for German nationality just before 1914) make him always in some degree a foreigner, marvelling at an England that never was.
And, at length, George Orwell:
Orwell was in his way quite ambitious, I think, and had a decided taste for power; but his ambition did not run along conventional lines, and he liked his power to be of the éminence grise variety.That preference was no doubt partly owed to a sense of being in some manner cut off from the rest of the world; not allowed, as it were by an irresistible exterior influence, to enjoy more than very occasionally such few amenities as human existence provides. This did not prevent his strong will and natural shrewdness from making him an effective negotiator. Indeed, his genuine unworldliness--in the popular sense--was used by him with considerable effect when handling those who were rich or in authority. He would somehow unload on them the whole burden of his own guilt, until they groaned beneath its weight. He was not at all afraid of making himself disagreeable to persons whom he found, in their dealings with himself, disagreeable. "If editors, or people of that sort, tell you to alter things, or put you to a lot of trouble," he used to say, "always put them to trouble in return. It discourages them from making themselves awkward in the future."
It is interesting to speculate how Orwell's life would have developed had he survived as a very successful writer. The retirement to Jura, even at the preliminary warning signs of financial improvement, was probably symptomatic. Orwell, I suspect, could thrive only in comparative adversity. All the same, one can never foresee the effect of utterly changed circumstances. Prosperity might have produced unguessable alterations in himself and his work. It would inevitably have invested him with more complex forms of living; complications which, in accordance with his system, would have to be rationalized to himself, and weighed in the balance.
Orwell's gift was curiously poised, as suggested earlier, between politics and literature. The former both attracted and repelled him; the latter, close to his heart, was at the same time tainted with the odor of escape. He once said that he could not write a line without a specific purpose. On the other hand, so far as day to day politics were concerned, he could never have become integrated into any normal party machine....
He was easily bored. If a subject came up in conversation that did not appeal to him, he would make no effort to take it in; falling into a dejected silence, or jerking aside his head like a horse jibbing at a proffered apple. On the other hand, when Orwell's imagination was caught, especially by some idea, he would discuss that exhaustively. He was one of the most enjoyable people to talk with about books, full of parallels and quotations, the last usually far from verbally accurate....
The Orwell myth, now substantially launched in a shape scarcely amenable to modification, presents on the whole a tortured saint by El Greco (for whom Orwell would certainly have made an admirable model), a figure from whom all human qualities have been removed. Periodically fierce arguments rage as to precisely where he stood politically. I am not here concerned with that side of him, although it is worth remembering that it took courage--in that now largely forgotten post-war period, when Stalin was still being held up by the Left as a genial uncle--to fire an anti-Communist broadside like Animal Farm that placed a permanent dent in the whole Marxist structure; especially courageous on the part of a writer, himself of the Left, laying his professional reputation open to smear and boycott, which those he so devastatingly exposed hastened to set about.
Posted August 8, 2006 10:15 AM
