Symposium
Martha Bridegam
symposium from December 3 '03.
Participants were journalist Orville Schell, Stanford history professor
Peter Stansky, George Packer of the New Yorker, and Alex Woloch, a
Stanford English professor. Incidentally they were all wearing suit
jackets and blue shirts, which nobody mentioned.
I've provided previous installments about parts of the symposium as
described below.
Here's the rest. Opinions expressed in the following are those of the
speakers and not necessarily my own. If some stuff here seems dull, it's
worth skipping to Packer's discussion of his "apprenticeship."
Schell began by naming the three challenges of fascism, communism and
imperialism that Hitchens describes Orwell as having "gotten right."
Schell put it more subtly: "There were these powerful fields of gravity
that he dodged, as you know, masterfully." There must have been
something in him, Schell said, "to navigate between these powerful
fields of gravity and come out unscathed." Homage to Catalonia "was New
Journalism before New Journalism had a definition." Where Orwell did
allow himself to be "seduced" by a "weakness" was "in regard to women,"
in which regard he was "all too English, Awkward and vulnerable." From
there he went on to Celia Kirwan and The List (without making the nature
or degree of the "seduction" plainer than that).
Schell posed the question, "What would be the fields of gravity that he
might be dodging now," and answered with the problems of "commerce,"
advertising and spin doctoring -- things that in his view now "tilt
journalists off course."
He said Packer on Iraq the previous week had been "Orwellian in the nice
sense of the word." (I think he meant
<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031124fa_fact1>.)
Woloch had written on "the place of psychoanalysis in literary culture"
and on Orwell and socialism.
Stansky recommended the new Penguin collections of Orwell's writings. He
went on to talk about Orwell and accuracy as I've already described at
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3FD2E31D.8992260C%40pacbell.net>,
ending up with "I don't believe that the literal serving of truth was
his primary goal." That, rather, his goal had been as stated in "Why I
Write" in the famous phrase: "Every line that I have written since 1936
has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and
for democratic socialism, as I understand it."
Woloch started by quoting Irving Howe on *1984* as "rived by" and linked
to "the totalitarian moment." He said in fact democratic socialism had
receded, especially in the United States. He thought Orwell's irony in
*Wigan Pier* might be "intrinsic to a poetics of democratic socialism."
Despite Orwell's ideal of good prose as "like a window pane," it was
dangerous to reduce Orwell to only that: Orwell "gravitates towards and
shapes his writing around" double-edged situations, situations that are
hard to understand. Orwell also had the "silence, exile and cunning"
that Joyce thought essential for a writer. [NB that phrase had also
appeared in the previous week's NY Review of Books someplace, forget
where.]
W said per the same famous paragraph in "Why I Write," 1936 was "the
year he marks as the origin of his commitment to democratic socialism."
He said critics such as Alex Zwerdling had argued that *Wigan Pier* Part
II "models and anticipates" Orwell's feeling that the left must be
highly self-critical. The autobiographical turn in Part II had a kind of
"puncturing" effect that Orwell saw as necessary to socialism -- and it
in fact did have a disruptive effect in the "divided reception of the
text," especially by Gollancz in his original half-apologetic preface to
the Left Book Club edition.
W noted the line in "Why I Write" before the bit about the window pane
is "One can write nothing readable unless one struggles constantly to
efface one's own personality..." but Wigan Pier Part II and Homage to
Catalonia are full of the author's own ironic personality. W. saw
intended irony in the writer being wakened by the factory whistle and
the clogs of "mill girls" who are already up and going to work. W saw it
as acknowledging the writer's status as distant, fallible, and separated
from what he's supposed to write about.
Being concerned with the need of middle-class socialists to "defer to"
and engage with working-class life rather than project their own ideas
onto it, he suggested Orwell was dramatizing the tension by talking
about the air "black with coal dust" -- something about failing to see
when one tries hardest, and the failure of words as inadequate to the
realities of mining. Emphasis on the need to avoid sentimentalizing,
propaganda, etc., e.g. Orwell's talking about the miners' need to spend
great time and effort just getting to the coal face as "the kind of
point that one is always liable to miss." To W. this was
"quintessentially Orwellian" to constantly emphasize that "there is
always more to exploitation than meets the eye."
--
Packer said Orwell was always the most important writer to him for
reasons that had "nothing to do with literary hierarchies."
He regretted that *1984* was often assigned to children -- it was "too
brainy a book" requiring too much awareness of politics.
Packer said he discovered Orwell at 23, returning from Africa after a
rough and early-ending Peace Corps stint. He felt an Orwellian "acute
sense of failure" and picked up a copy of H to C in an English-language
bookstore in Barcelona. He read it on the plane and was hooked.
Returning home, he began a "Zen-like apprenticeship" to Orwell as a
"very exacting master." He was then an Orwell "fundamentalist" -- he
"could not afford to muse about whether it really happened or not -- it
*had* to have happened." He was upset on reading Stansky and Crick to
find that perhaps some details were not literally true. He had later
become reconciled to the notion that perhaps Orwell hadn't wet his bed,
but he still had to believe Orwell did shoot the elephant. (Joking, I
think.)
He had had to believe that there was a very short conduit between
Orwell's experience and his art. "What was useful and even essential
about Orwell" was that he "had lived certain things" and written about
them "like a windowpane." And, yes, Orwell was sometimes clumsy,
"artless." Sometimes repeated his words.
Early when he was beginning to write he sent a piece to Irving Howe at
*Dissent* and Howe accepted it. The acceptance was written on a pad Howe
had used to write a previous letter, and the impressions from the other
sheet showed Howe had written to someone else: "I love your quote on
Orwell from Empson: 'An eagle with flat feet.' "
Unlike Faulkner or Lawrence, Orwell had sentences you could emulate. P.
is sure that in his twenties he wrote badly imitatively. The lesson of
Orwell was that it was not Orwell's way to "plunge into one's own
personality and explore every corner of it" -- he never talked about
being a son, father or husband -- instead he offered a good lesson in
"how do you write about yourself without getting lost in yourself?"
On Orwell -- "He's not a camera: he has a point of view all the time."
He "overstates so much" -- he's all emphatic. P. could imagine New
Yorker editors "putting a line through every third word." But he's not
writing about himself. He's writing about an experience to which he is a
guide. What he wrote was not journalism but autobiography, "set in a
time and place that is of such enormous interest" that it gives him
value as a witness.
What he did was not "New Journalism." -- "Orwell is *old* journalism.
He's Hazlitt." In Hazlitt the speaker is "I" but quickly goes into an
event like a boxing match and describes it.
P. says he realized "I had apprenticed myself to essentially an
autobiographer," but not to a '90s memoirist of family life. Instead, a
militiaman, a visitor to a coal mine, a shooter of an elephant, a
visitor to Morocco, etc. P.'s own writing at this stage was in the
spirit of "the master" but "unpublishable" -- as in fact Orwell himself
would now have trouble getting published in the United States now.
"It took me about 15 years to get from the point where I felt I had
absorbed all the lessons I could from the close study of Orwell," and
from there, to get published, he had to go from autobiography to
journalism. He had begun trying to write in the H to C spirit without
writing autobiography.
--
At this point Stansky read Patai's contribution, which I've described at
<http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3FDFA9EA.1565FDA2%40pacbell.net>.
--
[The event moved into a long Q&A session. I'll summarize more tightly
from here.]
We've already talked on abgo about the responses to my question on
Eileen's psychology degree.
There was a question about the Nazi-Soviet pact. Stansky said Orwell,
although anti-Communist, was surprisingly consistent with the CP line in
thinking maybe the war *was* a "capitalist racket," as the CP said after
the pact, but it was probably "coincidence."
Packer noted that in "My Country Right or Left," Orwell described a
dream after the non-aggression pact in which Orwell realized he would
fight for his own country if necessary. And there were other things at
work in him -- personal, subjective... [sorry, the notes run out here.]
Stansky commented on Orwell as a patriot and a socialist and as critical
of "people on the left who were doing down England." His image of
England as "a family with the wrong members in control" did presume
England was a family.
There was a question on the Trilling introduction to H to C as a
"disservice" to Orwell -- T. saying thank God that Orwell wasn't a
genius, we can aspire to write like him, Orwell as a writer who didn't
see himself as an intellectual, declassing himself, constantly looking
for "honest space" to write from. Someone writing from outside the
establishment...
Packer agreed with the questioner.
Stansky commented, "But he wasn't ordinary. I admire him for taking that
pose," but it was a literary *creation* to present himself in terms of
"I'm your ordinary sort of fairly bright person." He said to the
questioner, "You are evidence that he succeeds."
Woloch said that for "Orwell's fate as a writer in the twentieth
century," he wasn't sure it was such a good thing to be a writer outside
the academy. He said Orwell was "under-studied" at academic levels above
the level of teaching to children.
Packer said, "He doesn't want to be studied, he needs to be read." and
"There is such a thing as over-studying Orwell."
Schell said Orwell *did* reinvent himself, he wasn't dishonest about who
he was.
There was a question about The List. Schell noted that Walter Duranty,
recently nearly "defrocked" for his blindness to the Soviet atrocities,
had been on Orwell's list.
Packer said it wasn't surprising that Orwell turned in the list. All his
life "he understood that you had to take sides" and there was no point
keeping your "hands clean." In the POUM, "when he saw that it was cops
against workers" he got involved. In World War II Orwell had made a list
of fascist sympathizers. "Is there any reason why any of us would object
to" such a list now? We now feel reminded of the McCarthy years, but
Orwell's list did not blacklist anyone. It didn't make him "a rat."
Stansky said he did find the List troubling, and noted a difference that
nobody in the government had been interested in Orwell's list of
fascists and he had never submitted it. The list had had an antisemitic,
homophobic aspect -- not attractive. Stansky himself took a middle
position on the List: "I don't feel that it condemns Orwell totally." GO
was after all only suggesting who should not be trusted to work for the
government. Stansky found Timothy Garton Ash's NYRB piece
[<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16550>] a little more sympathetic than
his own position -- but he thought the list was blown out of proportion.
Schell noted Orwell "was very wary lest this list leak out" -- he didn't
want to smear people, only provide information.
A questioner asked about people viewing the world through Orwell's lens,
and the different kinds of people who see the world through him. Orwell
saw Dickens through himself; the questioner saw Iraq through "Shooting
an Elephant." He asked Packer if he had had Orwell in mind when writing
about Iraq.
Packer said, "at this point it's all unconscious." He felt his "long
labor" on Orwell was over. He had at one point suffered from an Orwell
dependency, having to look him up before writing a word. He noted
Orwell's eye for detail but also for a sense of human contact not to be
found in descriptions of the New York Times type. [Not certain if I'm
paraphrasing right here.] About the meeting with the Italian militiaman
that opens H to C: "One was making contacts of that kind all the time in
Spain" -- he called that "the news that stays news, as Ezra Pound called
literature."
There was a [confusing] question about Orwell getting credit for
"creating" (?) the later twentieth century.
Woloch said it was interesting how Orwell's words had traveled into
language: when there is a political crisis, it is in language (?) in
which we can comprehend politics. Orwell had a whole "arsenal of terms"
for comprehending things. He had come up with an "ability to cut through
complex problems," -- "not a simple thing to arrive at." [Sorry, some
notes unclear here.] W. said Orwell had been emerging from a context in
which socialism was "really alive." [Sorry, not sure of relevance of
this.]
Schell said very few writers had their names used descriptively like
Kafka and Orwell.
A questioner said there was something wrong with journalism if it didn't
allow the "I." He asked Packer, if he taught journalism, how he taught
writers to use the "I" "both personally and responsibly" but with
freedom.
Packer said he did teach that way. He wouldn't know how to teach daily
news reporting. There are so few outlets and each has its own rigid
notion of the narrator in the story -- they may react against too much
over-the-transom "I"." He had recently reread Tom Wolfe's "The New
Journalism" and found it tedious. "What there isn't is a sense of the
essay." He said Orwell was out of the English essay tradition. P. said
we don't have an American essay tradition that combines the essay with
journalism, meaning reporting.
Schell said, "The 'I' is a very bad place to start but it's not a bad
place to end up."
A questioner suggested Orwell died timely, having run out of windmills.
Stansky said he didn't remember Taylor or Bowker quite saying that. "His
critical intelligence was such " that he would "never have run out of
topics." S. said Orwell was thinking about writing a novel at the time
of his death, and was in correspondence with an author you wouldn't
necessarily associate with him: Evelyn Waugh.
S. said, yes, sometimes Orwell's writing could be awkward. He would not
be "in sync with the masters and mistresses of Microsoft" -- Microsoft
Word put green lines under many of Orwell's sentences. But Orwell was a
great "naysayer" on behalf of the "underdog." As a critic he would never
have run out of things to say.
Packer said "He wouldn't've run out of steam but it was a good thing
that he was writing in the '30s and '40s." That was "a public age," and
Orwell was "a pamphleteer in the best sense." He might not have done as
well in a "private" era like the '50s -- or the '90s.
Stansky said "the personal essay seems alive -- not too well," in
English newspapers. He said the English tradition of "the impersonal 'I'
" is opposed to that of Americans, who are either impersonal or
"personal in your face."
A questioner noted Eileen wasn't mentioned much in H to C although she
was there.
Stansky regretted Patai's absence since she is a feminist critic. He
noted Orwell had been accused of misogyny, that he was not "nice about
women," and his personal relations with women were not at all good. The
first year of his marriage to Eileen probably went well and after that
he was probably unfaithful...
Packer said, "I don't know if there's room in Homage to Catalonia for
the fighting in the trenches, streetfighting in Barcelona, and Mrs.
Orwell." He had heard James Fenton say that you leave out your companion
in writing because as a writer you have to treat your reader as "the
wife" -- as the companion you tell first about something that happens.
Schell wondered what Hollywood would do with Orwell's wife: he had heard
there was a film project afoot.
A questioner wondered what Orwell would have thought of
actor-politicians.
Stansky said he didn't think Orwell was interested in America, though in
*1984* England is "Airstrip One," so he did predict what some would now
see as being England's position. He probably could have devoted an essay
to the actor-politician question.
The man in the film project spoke up. Yes, he said, it would be about
Eileen. he asked why Orwell "never wrote" an essay about the meaning of
"democratic socialism as I understand it."
Packer said a little sharply, "Yes, it's right in here" -- in Homage to
Catalonia. He read out the passage beginning, "For the Spanish militias
while they lasted..." that continues, "...one got perhaps a crude
forecast of what the opening stages of socialism might be like..."
Packer said, "It's not a political program. It's an atmosphere." He said
later Orwell did issue a program, e.g. calling for a 10:1 maximum income
ratio, but he didn't go very far with it.
A questioner asked how Eric Blair, as product of English education and
yet anti-establishment, fit into England at the time of "the imperial
project."
Stansky said "Shooting an Elephant" was about that, and *Burmese Days*.
That Orwell had no particular affection for Burmese people but felt
forced to shoot the elephant because "the English had been forced into
the imperial stance." Where many people of anti-imperialist opinions
were "sentimentalizing the victims," Orwell refused to do so but also
said "we have no business being there." He noted that Orwell probably
saw *Down & Out* as "assuaging his guilt."
That's all my notes. I forget if it went on at all from there.
c/o M