Michael Foot's _HG Wells_
Alan Allport
getting it for transatlantic reading (chief criteria for which: dimensions
sufficient to be stowed in carry-on, and prose no more rareified than the
air outside the hull). Can anyone - OK, Tom - tell me if it's any good? Or
does anyone have any other suggestions, esp. Edwardian in genre (think
Orwell at St. Cyp's)?
Alan.
Tom Deveson
Haven't myself read the Foot book on Wells, but it was savaged in the
TLS by Peter Kemp whose judgement I trust and who really does know his
Wells. The burden of his argument was that Foot was wildly inaccurate in
many areas (misplacing characters in the wrong book, etc.) and rigidly
determined to re-write Wells as Foot-like in his political views. This
was to ignore Wells's often very dodgy views on eugenics, elites, women
(not to mention his actual treatment of women), etc.
Foot replied intemperately in the letters column, accusing Peter Kemp of
ludicrous negative comments on Wells and Wellsians that he hadn't made,
and ended by, IIRC, calling him an enemy of the human race. This is
absurd in the light of Peter Kemp's own book on Wells and indeed the
review, which accords great honour to Wells's importance and genius.
The best biography is probably the Mackenzie one, somewhat old now but
still not equalled. All the stuff about eugenics etc. was written about
by critics and commentators at the time, and in other later books such
as George Watson's on writers and politics in 20th century, and in Peter
Kemp's own book. Michael Foot just chose to ignore it all. John Carey,
whose opinion I would also often/usually trust, thinks it's a bad book
too.
Sorry!
Will respond re Edwardian reading but have just been called to help eat
a cheese pie.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
news:uu3yOEAG...@devesons.demon.co.uk...
> Haven't myself read the Foot book on Wells, but it was savaged in the
> TLS by Peter Kemp whose judgement I trust and who really does know his
> Wells.
A little cursor tells me that Kemp is the author of _HG Wells and the
Culminating Ape_ . The Library of Congress lists this intriguingly in the
'biology in literature' section - I take it then that it's a fairly specific
take on HG and not an overview?
Alan.
Tom Deveson
>A little cursor tells me that Kemp is the author of _HG Wells and the
>Culminating Ape_ . The Library of Congress lists this intriguingly in the
>'biology in literature' section - I take it then that it's a fairly specific
>take on HG and not an overview?
It's a general critical study of HG Wells's writing, with biographical
touches. The biological/scientific aspects feature significantly but not
overwhelmingly.
I think it's in print still.
Some randomly thought-of Edwardian/early Georgian literary by-ways for
in-flight reading:
Wells's novel about an English cycling holiday *The Wheels of Chance*
Saki's *Unbearable Bassington* and *When William Came* [I've re-read
both these at least eight times] and *Westminster Alice* or AJ Languth's
life of Saki, with the Anglo-Indian sent-to-boarding-school Orwellian
parallels and the cruel aunts like Kipling's
Herbert Read's autobiography *The Innocent Eye*
AN Wilson's life of Hilaire Belloc (if you can stand the anti-semitism)
Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston (fictionalised autobiographical) trilogy
*Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man*, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer*,
*Sherston's Progress* or his 1st person autobiographical trilogy
Margaret Drabble's life of Arnold Bennett
RG Collingwood's *Autobiography*
Alan Judd's life of Ford Madox Ford
Compton Mackenzie's *Sinister Street* for reading which GO and Connolly
were in trouble, possibly caned, at St Cyprian's -- it goes on much too
long (800+ pages in my copy) but it's got OK/good stuff here and there
Leonard Woolf's autobiography esp. Vol1 *Sowing* before he really knew
Virginia
Katherine Mansfield's letters and journals
Wilfred Owen's brother Harold's *Journey from Obscurity*
Helen Thomas's *As It Was*.........
or for a great polemical knockabout read, John Carey's *The
Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia 1880-1939* which I've cited here from time to time.
Doubt whether all of these fit into hand-luggage.
There's always *A Dance To The Music Of Time*........
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
> Saki's *Unbearable Bassington* and *When William Came* [I've re-read
> both these at least eight times]
Yes, I've seen the latter and was planning to pick it up. Also Childers'
_The Riddle of the Sands_, which sounds like a rattling good read in
addition to being of some historical importance.
And then there's Wodehouse's _How Clarence Saved England_ (1909), which
supposedly sends up the whole pre-WWI invasion-scaremonger genre
beautifully. (One August Bank Holiday the country is overrun by,
simultaneously, the Germans, Russians, Swiss, Chinese, Moroccans, the horde
of the Mad Mullah, etc. Invasions have by this time become so commonplace
that they are inserted inbetween the sports roundups in the newspapers eg.
'Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this
afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3.
Seven ran'.)
Alan.
Tom Deveson
>Also Childers' _The Riddle of the Sands_, which sounds like a rattling
good read in addition to being of some historical importance.
Yes, that's a good one too -- certainly an ideal train/plane read. It
was published just when GO was born, and I would bet he and Connolly
read it at school. Perhaps not rattling, but certainly splashing, as so
much happens at sea. But it was quite (very?) influential on British
naval policy towards Germany in the years leading up to WW1 -- a best-
seller, as I remember.
Childers had a remarkable and apparently paradoxical life -- Haileybury
(public school) and Cambridge, then fought as a volunteer in the Boer
War, became a supporter of Irish nationalism, used his yacht (from
sailing which his expertise in *Riddle of the Sands* was derived) to
land German arms in 1914 to the Irish volunteers, then served in the
Royal Navy during WW1, became Sinn Fein MP in the 1921 Irish parliament
and minister for Propaganda, opposed the Free State treaty, was executed
as member of the IRA by the Free State authorities in 1922. His son was
briefly Irish president about 25 years ago.
>And then there's Wodehouse's _How Clarence Saved England_ (1909), which
>supposedly sends up the whole pre-WWI invasion-scaremonger genre
>beautifully. (One August Bank Holiday the country is overrun by,
>simultaneously, the Germans, Russians, Swiss, Chinese, Moroccans, the horde
>of the Mad Mullah, etc. Invasions have by this time become so commonplace
>that they are inserted inbetween the sports roundups in the newspapers eg.
>'Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this
>afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3.
>Seven ran'.)
That sounds great fun too. Another entirely readable and very
enlightening/enjoyable book is ES Turner's *Boys Will Be Boys* which is
a book-length study of what GO called Boys' Weeklies, going from the
mid-19th century to the mid-20th. The chapter on "Britain Invaded" tells
about innumerable Germans-sailing-up-the-Thames stories which came out
in the years around 1909-1914, replacing those from earlier in the
century when the French and Russians were the baddies.
A wealth of Edwardian (and later) allusion lies behind the name Fry
above. This is CB Fry (1872-1956), the sportsman/scholar and beau ideal
of many schoolboys and overgrown schoolboys of the time. He won Blues at
Oxford for athletics, cricket and football, broke the world long jump
record, captained England at cricket, played for England at football,
broke (and still shares) a world cricket batting record, etc etc.
He was also a classics Scholar at Oxford, senior to FE Smith who later
became Lord Birkenhead and Lord Chancellor. He became a journalist and
ran for many years the training ship Mercury which prepared working-
class boys for the Royal and Merchant Navies. He was a delegate at
Geneva on the post-WW1 Indian delegation to the conference (through the
invitation of his friend, the cricketer KS Ranjitsinhji, who was a
princely delegate) and was supposedly there invited to become King of
Albania.
So much for the outline which was repeated frequently in books for boys
and cricket fans. Less publicised were things like:
the frequent and enthusiastic use of corporal punishment, especially by
Mrs Fry, on the boys at the Mercury, much in the acceptable-at-the-time
St-Cyp mode maybe but by survivors' accounts fairly terrifying
the enthusiastic account of Hitler in Fry's autobiography *Life Worth
Living* (I only read a library copy so can't quote) in which Hitler is
praised for what he is doing for youth -- this around 1936
snobbery as cricket journalist, e.g. describing an Australian touring
team as (again I can't quote exactly) not having a decent public-school
man among the whole team, and referring offensively in a written report
to their back-home jobs, as in "Plumber X bowls and the ball is played
to Electrician Y"
racism of a by-now nearly unimaginable kind - again, commonplace then
but worth examining -- such as, in *CB Fry's Magazine* around 1905,
referring to a US black sprinter who won a big race, and commenting that
this kind of thing was unlikely to be repeated because the lack of
intelligence/brain development would preclude black athletes from ever
challenging those of European origin
etc
Not entirely Orwell-related, but Fry was such a feted figure during GO's
formative years that I though it was worth the detour.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
greg
Tom Deveson wrote in message ...
<snip>
>or for a great polemical knockabout read, John Carey's *The
>Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
>Intelligentsia 1880-1939* which I've cited here from time to time.
Wasn't that a controversial book, where Carey claims that writers like Woolf
and Joyce indulged in obscurity as a way of staving off comprehension by the
great unwashed? A point worth arguing about, I think, although Joyce was
born into a (at best) shabby-genteel family. I recall Carey's book as being
more popular with Marxist magazines than with academics or conservatives
(also telling, I believe.) Roger Kimball seethed over it, predictably
enough.
Alan Allport
> Yes, that's a good one too -- certainly an ideal train/plane read. It
> was published just when GO was born, and I would bet he and Connolly
> read it at school. Perhaps not rattling, but certainly splashing, as so
> much happens at sea. But it was quite (very?) influential on British
> naval policy towards Germany in the years leading up to WW1 -- a best-
> seller, as I remember.
Another book that was highly influential in its day but which has been
forgotten since - for reasons that will become fairly obvious - is _The
Great Illusion_ (1910) by Norman Angell. It's an explanation of why war
between the great European states has become impossible due to the
interconnectivity of the international finance system and the costliness and
destructiveness of modern armaments. I read some of it recently and the
surprising thing is just how convincing it is. Angell was one of the first
globetrotting public intellectuals (he'd be a regular fixture on Larry
King's show today) and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933, for
reasons that aren't especially clear.
> [Fry] was a delegate at
> Geneva on the post-WW1 Indian delegation to the conference (through the
> invitation of his friend, the cricketer KS Ranjitsinhji, who was a
> princely delegate) and was supposedly there invited to become King of
> Albania.
This reminds me of something I wanted to mention about Gordon Brown, he of
the heavy bull's head in the recent _New Statesman_ parody. Apparently, if
fate had taken a different turn, he might have become Crown Prince of
Romania. While young Gordon was up at University - Edinburgh, I think - he
was very much taken with one of his fellow undergrads, the daughter of
exiled King Michael, and she with him. Nothing much ever came of the
youthful dalliance, but they supposedly are still good friends, and I
wonder... are they both still single, by any chance?
That'd show Mandelson, wouldn't it?
Alan.
Gene Zitver
the following entry for 27 March, 1942: "Abusive letter from H.G. Wells, who
addresses me as 'you shit', among other things."
Anyone know what *that* was all about?
Gene
Alan Allport
news:81bj0r$go2$1...@news.netvision.net.il...
I *think* it's a retort to GO's _Hitler, Wells, and the World State_, which
is included in CEJL Vol. II. Unless I've got my timeline wrong.
Alan.
Martha Bridegam
Looks to be right. This is the Complete Works footnote:
"This stemmed initially from Orwell's article 'Wells, Hitler, and the
World State," __Horizon__, August 1941... and was further stimulated by
his broadcast talk 'The Re-discovery of Europe,' about which Wells wrote
to __The Listener__(1)... Inez Holden was present at a 'God-awful row'
between Wells and Orwell arising from the __Horizon__ article. Orwell
thought Wells's belief that the Germans might be defeated quite soon was
a disservice to the general public; Wells accused Orwell of being
defeatist, though he withdrew that. This outburst passed over reasonably
amicably, but was revived when Orwell's broadcast was printed in __The
Listener__, leading to the abusive letter mentioned here. Holden wrote
to Ian Angus, 21 May 1967, that Orwell very much regretted the
__Horizon__ article and was sorry he had upset Wells, whom he had always
greatly admired. See also Crick, 427-31."
(1) Wells letter to __The Listener__ (BBC readers' magazine):
"Your contributor, George Orwell, has, I gather, been informing your
readers that I belong to a despicable generation of parochially-minded
writers who believed that the world would be saved from its gathering
distresses by 'science.' From my very earliest book to the present time
I have been reiterating that unless mankind adapted its social and
political institutions to the changes invention and discovery were
bringing about, mankind would be destroyed. Modesty prevents my giving
you a list of titles, but I find it difficult to believe that anyone who
has read __The Time Machine__ (1895), __The Island of Dr. Moreau__
(1896), __The Land Ironclads__ (1903), __Th War in the Air (1908), __The
Shape of Things to Come__ (1933), __Science and the World Mind (New
Europe Publishing Company, 1942), to give only six examples of a
multitude, can be guilty of these foolish generalisations."
/MAB
greg
Tom Deveson wrote in message ...
>too, from Thackeray and Arnold Bennett to Seamus Heaney and vegetable
>gardening.
>
>Roger Kimball? Help, please.
C'mon Tom, I should be asking you :-)
I believe he is a general conservative cultural commentator (conservative
intellectual remaining a mythical beast) who often writes on art; recently
weighed in on the controversy surrounding the art exhibits in NYC that mayor
Guliani found objectionable. Also wrote a book about contemporary elite
university profs. called 'Tenured Radicals' where the best thing about it
was the title, while it never occurs to him that these people aren't the
least bit 'radical'. Sorry I don't know more, but the man probably isn't a
household name.
Tom Deveson
>Wasn't that a controversial book, where Carey claims that writers like Woolf
>and Joyce indulged in obscurity as a way of staving off comprehension by the
>great unwashed? A point worth arguing about, I think, although Joyce was
>born into a (at best) shabby-genteel family. I recall Carey's book as being
>more popular with Marxist magazines than with academics or conservatives
>(also telling, I believe.) Roger Kimball seethed over it, predictably
>enough.
Yes, controversial but enjoyable for the unfair/street-fighting
qualities Carey brings to literary controversy. He shouldn't be taken as
the last word, but he does a wonderful demolition job, finding the most
awful, embarrassing, snobby, grotesque, shameful sayings & marginalia &
diary entries & letters of his subjects and working them up into a
comic-extravagant emblem of their whole work and significance. The
overall case he makes is much as you describe it, though not really so
in the case of Joyce. He certainly doesn't like the Bloomsberries and
gives many reasons why.
Carey is a potentially lethal reviewer, and a piece like *Shall We
Prance?* on the Oxford literary generation of the 1920s is as funny as
it's unfair. But he does write well and compellingly of his enthusiasms
too, from Thackeray and Arnold Bennett to Seamus Heaney and vegetable
gardening.
Roger Kimball? Help, please.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Patrick Briody
>Yes, controversial but enjoyable for the unfair/street-fighting
>qualities Carey brings to literary controversy. He shouldn't be taken as
>the last word, but he does a wonderful demolition job, finding the most
>awful, embarrassing, snobby, grotesque, shameful sayings & marginalia &
>diary entries & letters of his subjects and working them up into a
>comic-extravagant emblem of their whole work and significance.
I didn't read this book but I did read an extract from in it some
publication, unless I'm confusing it with one of his other books. I was
mystified by an attack on H.G. Wells which seemed to me both humourless and
silly. He homes in on Wells' frequently depicting working-class people as
always preferring cheap, packaged food - like tinned salmon - and implying
that there was some kind of snobbery behind it. I only wish I could count
the number of times Orwell scrutinised working-class eating habits and noted
the same thing, sometimes going on about it at length. Wells was merely
doing his job as a novelist, as Orwell did his as a journalist, by being
accurate. It never occurred to me that he had a trace of snobbery in him. On
the contrary, what stays with me from those Edwardian comedies is Wells'
generosity towards his characters. I must say it put me off reading anything
by John Carey. He struck me as someone whose opinions weren't to be trusted.
Pat Briody
Tom Deveson
>I was mystified by an attack on H.G. Wells which seemed to me both
humourless and silly. He homes in on Wells' frequently depicting
working-class people as always preferring cheap, packaged food - like
tinned salmon - and implying that there was some kind of snobbery behind
it.
This is probably partly a question of personal response. Carey *is*
unfair and below-the-belt in his polemics; some (possibly dishonourable)
bit of my mind responds to that as a cheerful alternative to the
blandness of good academic manners.
The stuff about tinned food in *Mr Polly* and *Love and Mr Lewisham* is
part of a larger account of how many writers (Eliot, Betjeman, Grahame
Greene, Orwell, etc) used tinned food as a symptom of a declining
civilisation. Carey also cites Eric Gill on the blasphemy of Bird's
Custard Powder, but finds virtue in Jerome K Jerome's associating of
tinned pineapple with geniality rather than using it as a symbol of
soullessness.
The chapters on Wells in the book are more broadly about Wells's ideas
on eugenics and the need to get rid of the "inefficient" classes and
races. But he also writes with great respect of Wells's power when he's
writing about lower-middle-class contexts of lost possibilities and the
tragedy of thwarted aspirations. He sees Wells as self-contradictory in
a way that makes him well worth reading. The chapter *HG Wells against
HG Wells* begins: "Wells's greatness as a writer depends not only on the
intensity with which he hates but on the imaginative duplicity that
qualifies his hatred. He is nearly always in two minds, and this saves
him from mere prescription. The utopias he invents seems to waver and
change into dystopias as we watch, robbing us of certainty..."
That seems to me at least an arguable line to take. But, yes, Carey can
be unjust and selective and intemperate in his critical writing. But his
account of, say, Virginia Woolf's snobbery does describe something that
is undoubtedly there, and that has often been ignored, and that was
worth pointing to.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
>(conservative intellectual remaining a mythical beast)
Thanks greg -- nice to start a cold and frosty morning in London (and
the menacing wind is certainly sweeping over the bending poplars newly
bare) with a good laugh. Reminds me for some reason of Jeffrey Archer's
apparently serious request to a friend for advice as to how he might get
into training to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> That seems to me at least an arguable line to take. But, yes, Carey can
> be unjust and selective and intemperate in his critical writing. But his
> account of, say, Virginia Woolf's snobbery does describe something that
> is undoubtedly there, and that has often been ignored, and that was
> worth pointing to.
Specifics?
Have wondered for some time why a woman needs a room of her own whereas
men sometimes do just fine with borrowed tables in public libraries.
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Tom Deveson
>But his [John Carey's] account of, say, Virginia Woolf's snobbery does
describe something that is undoubtedly there, and that has often been
ignored, and that was worth pointing to.
>Specifics?
VW on Joyce's *Ulysses* in her diary: "...An illiterate, underbred book
it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know
how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking and
ultimately nauseating, When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the
raw?...I'm reminded all the time of some callow board school boy..."
Diary Aug 1.6/Sept 6 1922
"Trying to imagine what she calls 'that anonymous monster, the Man in
the Street', Virginia Woolf finds herself visualizing 'a vast,
featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff...occasionally
wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or
admiration bubbles up beneath it.' " [That's Carey, quoting from an
essay VW wrote, which I haven't identified, though he gives a page ref
in the appendix]
A diary entry towards the end of her life, when, as Carey says, madness
and suicide were soon to claim her. She's listening to some other women
in the ladies' lavatory: "They were powdering and painting, these common
little tarts, while I sat, behind a thin door, p-ing as quietly as I
could. Then at Fuller's [a tea shop]. A fat, smart woman, in red hunting
cap, pearls, check skirt, consuming rich cakes. Her shabby dependant
also stuffing. They ate and ate. Something scented, shoddy, parasitic
about them. Where does the money come from to feed these fat white
slugs?"
Carey's comment includes: "...the scene is, of course, invented. The
women in Fuller's are not 'slugs'. 'Common little tarts' is an
intellectual's rewriting of the occupants of the Sussex Grill lavatory.
The invention is strangely self-tormenting. Woolf imagines the women,
and is infuriated by what she has imagined...." He goes on to find
parallels in our old friend Rayner Heppenstall, which I'll transcribe
later, if of interest.
There is quite a lot more re VW's distaste for Arnold Bennett, including
her dismissal of his 'shopkeeper's view of literature'. This involves
some close attention to passages in her essay *Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown*. Carey cites a gloss VW gives on the famous line about how human
character changed on or about December 1910. "In life one can see the
change, if I may use a homely illustration, in the character of one's
cook. The Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,
formidable, silent, obscure, inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a
creature of sunshine and fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now
to borrow The Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat...."
Carey's comment here is: "The essay was originally delivered as a paper
to a Cambridge undergraduate society, and it reverberates with the mirth
of upper-class young people contemplating the sordid lives of their
social inferiors. One can almost hear the well-bred laughter as Woolf
impersonates Arnold Bennett planning a fictional character: 'Begin by
saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent.
Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what
her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico..' "
Carey's real annoyance is at VW's assertion that Bennett would miss the
unpredictable, the incalculable, surprising, complex in a character's
thoughts and feelings, and would only concentrate on humdrum externals.
He gives some telling examples from *Hilda Lessways* to show that she
got it wrong -- probably because she was determined to appropriate
fictional subtlety to herself and similar novelists.
Then there's some stuff about Mrs Dalloway, and some knockabout fun with
Clive Bell's *Civilisation* "on which, Bell's dedicatory letter tells
us, Virginia Woolf acted as consultant." There's too much to go into
here -- about how the barbarian in his urban slum may notice that the
elite scorn pleasures like football and cinemas but won't be able to
indulge artistic tastes even if he attempts to develop them, because he
will lack the leisure obligatory for civilised life. Just one quote
(and, yes, it's Bell not Woolf): "There are now but two or three
restaurants in London where it is an unqualified pleasure to dine."
I'm not John Carey's agent. I just think he's onto something at least
partly true here, and something often passed over silently -- though (as
I've already said) his polemical method can involve sleight-of-mind. But
so does what he is attacking.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
greg
Tom Deveson wrote in message ...
There are many fascinating home truths to be told re VW. Was an anti-Semite,
as is revealed in her diary and her novel, _The Years_. Also interesting
that she is allegedly still hated by the oldest generation of Indian
writers, according to an article in _The New York Rev. of Books_ not long
ago, because she mercilessly discouraged every non-white writer she ever
encountered; Mulk Raj Anand, according to some critics the first noteworthy
Indian novelist, was freezingly discouraged by VW, but GO was much more
encouraging in his reviews of Anand's efforts. That bit about Joyce is
perhaps the most chilling put-down of a significant artist I can imagine. I
took a couple Women's Literature classes in college, and of course VW was
presented as a heroic empathetic paradigm-challenging radical feminist etc.
But she was also hateful, jealous, intolerant, and nasty.
Good for John Carey, too bad people are so uptight and loyal to academic
bullshit that they don't want to hear this stuff.
Martha Bridegam
>
> I took a couple Women's Literature classes in college, and of course VW was
> presented as a heroic empathetic paradigm-challenging radical feminist etc.
> But she was also hateful, jealous, intolerant, and nasty.
> Good for John Carey, too bad people are so uptight and loyal to academic
> bullshit that they don't want to hear this stuff.
Or maybe better to say it's the dog-on-hind-legs syndrome -- the
important thing for a while was that feminist criticism was done at all.
Hope we're past that now.
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
>
> "Trying to imagine what she calls 'that anonymous monster, the Man in
> the Street', Virginia Woolf finds herself visualizing 'a vast,
> featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff...occasionally
> wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or
> admiration bubbles up beneath it.' " [That's Carey, quoting from an
> essay VW wrote, which I haven't identified, though he gives a page ref
> in the appendix]
Anyone know the Joan Baez song, "The Salt Of The Earth"?
Goes like this, near as I can tell from an old tape:
Let's drink to the hard-working people
Let's drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil,
Let's drink to the salt of the earth.
Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back-breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth
(Refrain) When I survey the faceless crowd,
swirling mass of grey, black and white,
they don't look real to me,
in fact they look so strange.
Raise your glass to the hard-working people
Let's drink to the uncounted heads
Let's think of the wavering millions
who want leaders but get gamblers instead.
Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes' gaze a strange beauty shows
And a parade of grey-suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio.
(Refrain) When I survey the faceless crowd,
swirling mass of grey, black and white,
they don't look real to me,
in fact they look so strange.
Let's drink to the hard-working people
Let's think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag-taggy people
Let's drink to the salt of the earth.
Let's drink to the hard-working people
Let's drink to the salt of the earth
Let's drink to the three thousand millions
Let's drink to the humble of birth.
Irony I *think* being intended. Saying more or less that grand slogans
about The People are based on a view of an undifferentiated mass that
isn't a bit like real individual human beings.
Is it possible Woolf could be saying the same?
/MAB
Tom Deveson
> That bit about Joyce is perhaps the most chilling put-down of a
significant artist I can imagine. I took a couple Women's Literature
classes in college, and of course VW was presented as a heroic
empathetic paradigm-challenging radical feminist etc.
But she was also hateful, jealous, intolerant, and nasty.
Good for John Carey, too bad people are so uptight and loyal to academic
bullshit that they don't want to hear this stuff.
If I had been strictly fair, I would have gone on to quote from a bit
later in the diary, where she says, "...I have not read it carefully;
and only once; and it is very obscure; so no doubt I have scamped the
virtue of it more than is fair..." Then on Sept 7th, she reads a review
"in the American *Nation*" [!] which inclines her opinions more
favourably: "...very much more impressive than I first judged. Still I
think there is virtue and some lasting truth in first impressions; so I
don't cancel mine."
While this is more ambivalent than the bits I [Carey] originally quoted,
it does seem indeed chilling to have recourse so naturally to the
language of class superiority in order to judge a book. She recalls
reading it for the first time, in a diary entry for Jan 1941 soon before
her death, and talks of "spasms of wonder, of discovery...long lapses of
immense boredom..." but doesn't recall the comparison to "a queasy
undergraduate scratching his pimples."
In Bloomsbury now you can visit the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar [can't
promise I've got the title exactly right] so perhaps there's an ironic
justice to things.
Carey is an academic himself, and when writing on Milton, Donne, Dickens
etc is more measured, though no less appreciative of vivid detail. In
his Thackeray book, for example [back in Orwell County here] he compares
Thackeray's partridge and truffles in a piece of memoir with the "dead
and sexless" beef in *To The Lighthouse*. Or he compares the death of
George Osborne in *Vanity Fair* with Mrs Ramsay's and Forster's Gerald,
and compares Thackeray's stunning nonchalance with the affected "arty
contrivance" of the 20th century writers.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
news:383B6246...@sirius.com...
> Irony I *think* being intended. Saying more or less that grand slogans
> about The People are based on a view of an undifferentiated mass that
> isn't a bit like real individual human beings.
>
> Is it possible Woolf could be saying the same?
Irony, the last refuge of the lit-crit. (First and only refuge these days,
actually).
Alan.
Gene Zitver
>Anyone know the Joan Baez song, "The Salt Of The Earth"?
>Goes like this, near as I can tell from an old tape:
<snip lyrics>
>Irony I *think* being intended. Saying more or less that grand slogans
>about The People are based on a view of an undifferentiated mass that
>isn't a bit like real individual human beings.
The song was originally done by the Rolling Stones (written by
Jagger/Richards) during their brief period of class-consciousness in the
mid-'60s. It's actually quite a moving song. I don't *think* it was meant
ironically, although it does have a
successful-rock-stars-trying-to-be-sympathetic-to-the-working-class flavor.
Same goes for "Factory Girl" from the same period (from the same album,
actually). The recording itself comes across as touching and sympathetic,
but seeing the words written down
http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/sf.folder/exile/lyrics/beggar/factorygirl.
html
makes me a little uncomfortable.
Not sure what GO would have made of either song, or of the Stones, or of the
'60s.
Gene
JoeBlake
> "Trying to imagine what she calls 'that anonymous monster, the Man
> in
> the Street', Virginia Woolf finds herself visualizing 'a vast,
> featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff...occasionally
> wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or
> admiration bubbles up beneath it.' "
This reminds me of a bit from William Gibson's _Idoru_.
The hero, Laney, has been hired by a TV programme to hunt for dirt on
celebrities:
..."You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say,
Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which
is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually
hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally
I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a
week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a
double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it
sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting.
It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute
extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the
channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
* Sent from RemarQ http://www.remarq.com The Internet's Discussion Network *
The fastest and easiest way to search and participate in Usenet - Free!
JoeBlake
> VW on Joyce's *Ulysses* in her diary: "...An illiterate, underbred
> book
> it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all
> know
> how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking
> and
> ultimately nauseating, When one can have the cooked flesh, why
> have the
> raw?...I'm reminded all the time of some callow board school
> boy..."
> Diary Aug 1.6/Sept 6 1922
>
> A diary entry towards the end of her life, when, as Carey says,
> madness
> and suicide were soon to claim her. She's listening to some other
> women
> in the ladies' lavatory...
> Then there's some stuff about Mrs Dalloway, and some knockabout
> fun with
> Clive Bell's *Civilisation* "on which, Bell's dedicatory letter
> tells
> us, Virginia Woolf acted as consultant." There's too much to go
> into
> here -- about how the barbarian in his urban slum may notice that
> the
> elite scorn pleasures like football and cinemas but won't be able
> to
> indulge artistic tastes even if he attempts to develop them,
> because he
> will lack the leisure obligatory for civilised life. Just one quote
> (and, yes, it's Bell not Woolf): "There are now but two or three
> restaurants in London where it is an unqualified pleasure to dine."
> I'm not John Carey's agent. I just think he's onto something at
> least
> partly true here
I propose he be merged with George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, as
per Alan's bill, to give him more ex cathedra moral authority. Or with
Jim Carrey the comedian, to bring a physical dimension to his
knockabout fun.
Clearly he is no gentleman to rifle through a lady's diary. I really
find that kind of snob-hunting depressing and sterile. I think
vindictive egalitarianism in lit-crit may be some weird compensation
for the left's lack of political power. But having said that, re the
Joyce thing, didn't Ginny also say something similarly scathing and
equally hilarious about Lawrence?
Carey has been working his way through his personal list of the 50 best
books of the century in The Sunday Times. Interestingly, Wells' _Mr.
Polly_ makes the list. In his review of Katherine Mansfield's _The
Garden Party_, he quite unfairly takes Woolf's admiring comment that
she was 'jealous' of Mansfield's writing out of context to make it look
as though she hated her. His choice from Orwell (he limited himself to
one book per author) was, surprisingly, _Coming Up For Air_, which he
claims contains _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ in embryo. Empson's _Seven
Types of Ambiguity_ also makes the cut.
JoeBlake
> There's quite a long section in EM Forster's obituary address on V
> Woolf
> where he deals with this. A bit too long to quote all of it, but he
> says: "...She made no bones about it. She was a lady, by birth and
> upbringing, and it was no use being cowardly about it, and
> pretending
> that her mother had turned a mangle, or that her father Sir Leslie
> had
> been a plasterer's mate....And her snobbery -- for she was a snob
> -- has
> more courage in it than arrogance. It is connected with her
> insatiable
> honesty...She was not going to wring and scrub when what she liked
> doing
> and could do was write. To murmurs of 'Lucky lady you!' she
> replied, 'I
> am a lady,' and went on writing..."
One wonders, idly, how many upper-crust types, open or closet, are
writing fiction (as opposed to biography) today. The only ones I can
think of off-hand is Nicholas Mosely. Or Gore Vidal from the American
upper class. I think anyone from a younger generation would pretty much
have to feign proletarian origins. Vidal himself in an essay on Louis
Auchincloss laments that people like Auchincloss aren't taken that
seriously, as they chronicle the doings of a class who still wield
tremendous power and influence.
Still, the Bloomsburyites were remarkably radical for their day in
terms of their art and lives. To ridicule them for any lingering
prejudices they had been born into is almost as pointless as mocking
their outdated clothes would be.
> But it does seem relevant to Woolf and all
> the
> Bloomsberries to mention their social (incl. snobbish) attitudes,
> especially insofar as they saw themselves and were sometimes taken
> as
> models of progressive/civilised values.
I suppose, if it's genuinely related to their art and not just a cheap
but fun way of heaping obloquy on someone you don't care for. I haven't
actually read any of Carey's longer stuff so I don't know how far his
unfairness goes. I also have to admit I thought he'd written a really
annoying piece I read which slammed _The Waste Land_ on grounds of
elitism, which I now realize can't be the case.
Tom Deveson
>Clearly he is no gentleman to rifle through a lady's diary. I really
>find that kind of snob-hunting depressing and sterile.
There's quite a long section in EM Forster's obituary address on V Woolf
where he deals with this. A bit too long to quote all of it, but he
says: "...She made no bones about it. She was a lady, by birth and
upbringing, and it was no use being cowardly about it, and pretending
that her mother had turned a mangle, or that her father Sir Leslie had
been a plasterer's mate....And her snobbery -- for she was a snob -- has
more courage in it than arrogance. It is connected with her insatiable
honesty...She was not going to wring and scrub when what she liked doing
and could do was write. To murmurs of 'Lucky lady you!' she replied, 'I
am a lady,' and went on writing..."
That's only part of one paragraph in Forster's 16-page essay. He covers
lots of other ground. But it does seem relevant to Woolf and all the
Bloomsberries to mention their social (incl. snobbish) attitudes,
especially insofar as they saw themselves and were sometimes taken as
models of progressive/civilised values.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam wrote
>
> >Anyone know the Joan Baez song, "The Salt Of The Earth"?
> >Goes like this, near as I can tell from an old tape:
>
> <snip lyrics>
>
>
> The song was originally done by the Rolling Stones (written by
> Jagger/Richards) during their brief period of class-consciousness in the
> mid-'60s. It's actually quite a moving song. I don't *think* it was meant
oh, dear.
> ...Same goes for "Factory Girl" from the same period (from the same album,
> actually). The recording itself comes across as touching and sympathetic,
> but seeing the words written down
> http://camel.conncoll.edu/ccother/sf.folder/exile/lyrics/beggar/factorygirl.
> html
> makes me a little uncomfortable.
Ish. Forget class-consciousness, the problem with that song is incipient
domestic abuse. He'll tell her all those things to her face, make her
believe she's lucky to have him, and then one night dinner will be late
and heaven help her. If she's lucky she'll make it to a restraining
order clinic.
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>> But it does seem relevant to Woolf and all the Bloomsberries to
mention their social (incl. snobbish) attitudes, especially insofar as
they saw themselves and were sometimes taken as models of
progressive/civilised values.
>I suppose, if it's genuinely related to their art and not just a cheap
>but fun way of heaping obloquy on someone you don't care for.
Not sure I agree, though I wouldn't want to veer too far away from
Orwell-specifics -- though one of these questions is whether the moneyed
young beasts from Cambridge (as in Keep the Aspidistra Flying) were a
real and harmful influence, rather than Gordon's paranoid self-
exculpating fantasy.
The FR Leavis argument still seems to me to compel a measure of
agreement.
Summarising it drastically it would go roughly:
I) that the wider Bloomsbury coterie formed a real and often inimical
influence in British literary life of the time
ii) that they were able to do so because of their social connections as
much as because of their creative or discriminating gifts
iii) that they often (both as a result and as a manifestation of the
above) used assumptions of social superiority as a substitute for true
moral/literary judgements, often without realising they were doing so --
simply because their own friendships and presumptions over-ruled their
chances of seeing things otherwise ("Really, you know, there isn't
anyone else," as Leavis quotes Roy Harrod, reporting on the
characteristic note of Bloomsbury in his life of Keynes)
iv) that as a result they promoted bad writers (e.g. Clive Bell) and
dismissed good ones (as in the Joyce quote) with harmful results on
literary culture that derived directly from their assumptions of
superiority
v) that they were able to promote friends and protégés into influential
positions in the literary world, which meant rewards and accolades for
the undeserving and ignorant patronage/dismissal of the deserving --
Leavis wd refer for example to the treatment of Lawrence -- over a
number of literary generations.
vi) that a shallow or superficial or merely sophisticated version of
enlightened discourse -- Leavis's example would be Lytton Strachey --
became an acceptable tone and model of thought, one that was as tempting
to young would-be writers and critics and historians as it was ruinous
of their talents.
The upshot of all this, if it's accepted, is that the specifically
Bloomsbury snobbery *is* relevant to a consideration of a lot of
creative/imaginative work that got done in the 20s,30s,40s,50s even. I
don't think you have to buy all Leavis's specific and indignant examples
of coterie/literary politics (what he calls "flank-rubbing" somewhere)
to acknowledge that he has a point.
And now I think about it, this is really an Orwellian theme after all.
Essays like Queenie Leavis's 1939 piece *The Background of Twentieth
Century Letters* which gets stuck into Cyril Connolly, or Frank Leavis's
piece on *Keynes, Spender and Currency-Values* (1951) deal directly with
people and themes that GO handled in a comparable if not identical way.
Another classic place to follow the argument would be Leavis's *Keynes,
Lawrence and Cambridge* in *The Common Pursuit*.
Then there's the related fact that LH Myers (who admired Orwell's
writing and paid the money for him to go to Morocco for his health -- a
gift which GO regarded as a loan, and eventually repaid) wrote in his
novel *The Near and the Far* a 950-page coded attack, set in the court
of a Rajah at the time of the Great Mogul, on the self-regard, communal
self-congratulation and self-conscious social aloofness of Bloomsbury,
whose members and atmosphere he knew well.
I don't at all want to sound tediously combative about all this. I
haven't been able to get Leavis out of my mind for thirty-five years,
and he will tend to surface in many discussions.
Tom (not even mentioning anyone called J--n C---y)
--
Tom Deveson
JoeBlake
> >> But it does seem relevant to Woolf and all the Bloomsberries to
> mention their social (incl. snobbish) attitudes, especially
> insofar as
> they saw themselves and were sometimes taken as models of
> progressive/civilised values.
> >I suppose, if it's genuinely related to their art and not just a
> cheap
> >but fun way of heaping obloquy on someone you don't care for.
> Not sure I agree
I'm not remotely qualified to debate this until I read some of the
people you cite. I was really just arguing for the sake of it, and
because I think Woolf is if anything underrated as a writer, and the
Bloomsburys are such an easy target for a certain kind of ridicule it's
important to say there were good things about them. I will venture a
few more incautious remarks. Please be gentle with me.
>though I wouldn't want to veer too far away from
> Orwell-specifics -- though one of these questions is whether the
> moneyed
> young beasts from Cambridge (as in Keep the Aspidistra Flying)
> were a
> real and harmful influence, rather than Gordon's paranoid self-
> exculpating fantasy.
Surely the Bloomsburies were quite long-toothed moneyed beasts by then?
> The FR Leavis argument still seems to me to compel a measure of
> agreement.
> Summarising it drastically it would go roughly:
> I) that the wider Bloomsbury coterie formed a real and often
> inimical
> influence in British literary life of the time
Wider Bloomsbury? How wide does he cast the net? British literary life
of the time was a village anyway, Six Degrees to Sonia Brownell and all
that.
> ii) that they were able to do so because of their social
> connections as
> much as because of their creative or discriminating gifts
> iii) that they often (both as a result and as a manifestation of
> the
> above) used assumptions of social superiority as a substitute for
> true
> moral/literary judgements, often without realising they were doing
> so --
How does he realize it when they don't? Omniscience must be wearying
for him.
> simply because their own friendships and presumptions over-ruled
> their
> chances of seeing things otherwise ("Really, you know, there isn't
> anyone else," as Leavis quotes Roy Harrod, reporting on the
> characteristic note of Bloomsbury in his life of Keynes)
A bit humourless of Leavis?
> iv) that as a result they promoted bad writers (e.g. Clive Bell)
Bell's badness or otherwise is highly debatable.
> and
> dismissed good ones (as in the Joyce quote) with harmful results on
> literary culture that derived directly from their assumptions of
> superiority
> v) that they were able to promote friends and protégés into
> influential
> positions in the literary world, which meant rewards and accolades
> for
> the undeserving and ignorant patronage/dismissal of the deserving
> --
> Leavis wd refer for example to the treatment of Lawrence -- over a
> number of literary generations.
Writers are all bitches. I'm sure you know Lawrence's quote on Joyce:
'My God, what a clumsy _olla putrida_ James Joyce is! Nothing but old
fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest
stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.' As
those later diary quotes showed, VW changed her mind about JJ. Is
Leavis able to show that Bloomsbury ever harmed Lawrence or Joyce?
> vi) that a shallow or superficial or merely sophisticated version
> of
> enlightened discourse -- Leavis's example would be Lytton Strachey
> --
> became an acceptable tone and model of thought, one that was as
> tempting
> to young would-be writers and critics and historians as it was
> ruinous
> of their talents.
> The upshot of all this, if it's accepted, is that the specifically
> Bloomsbury snobbery *is* relevant to a consideration of a lot of
> creative/imaginative work that got done in the 20s,30s,40s,50s
> even.
I don't know. How much influence did they continue to have after the
30s movement came along?
> I don't at all want to sound tediously combative about all this.
No, I was the one being tediously combative without even knowing what I
was talking about.
>I haven't been able to get Leavis out of my mind for thirty-five
> years
John Carey will be jealous.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving to our colonial cousins
Martha Bridegam
>
> Tom Deveson wrote:
>
> > >> But it does seem relevant to Woolf and all the Bloomsberries to
> > mention their social (incl. snobbish) attitudes, especially
> > insofar as
> > they saw themselves and were sometimes taken as models of
> > progressive/civilised values.
> > >I suppose, if it's genuinely related to their art and not just a
> > cheap
> > >but fun way of heaping obloquy on someone you don't care for.
> > Not sure I agree
>
> I'm not remotely qualified to debate this until I read some of the
For those of us who are *really* not remotely qualified, would someone
care to list off the major Bloomsbury figures? I get as far as Woolfs
and Sackville-Bagginses, and after that it's pure guesswork.
And BTW is there some reason why making unattributed references to
Horace is less snobbish than writing cranky notes about James Joyce?
/MAB
greg
Martha Bridegam wrote in message <383DF3...@coastside.net>...
>And BTW is there some reason why making unattributed references to
>Horace is less snobbish than writing cranky notes about James Joyce?
I think that nicely sums up what hard work it really is to determine which
literary star is more pretentious than the other literary star. If there
were just some pretension calculus, where we could calculate who was the
worst offender, we wouldn't have to read any of these books and could go
back to watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
Tom Deveson
>Surely the Bloomsburies were quite long-toothed moneyed beasts by then?
I was thinking, without necessarily a great deal of care and attention,
that Orwell might have been thinking that Gordon Comstock might have
been thinking of people like e.g. John Lehmann, who was a bit younger
than GO (b 1907) and went to Eton and Cambridge. By 1938 he was General
Manager of the Woolfs' Hogarth Press and editing New Writing magazine.
He later went on to publish Penguin New Writing, edit the London
Magazine, edit New Soundings on BBC Radio and was chair of the Editorial
Advisory Panel of the British Council during the 1950s. He published
good things in all these roles, but also lots of dubious stuff that you
suspect got in because the authors wore the right old-school-ties or, as
part of an alternative 30s trend, were an old-school-tie version of what
a proletarian author *ought* to sound like.
(That's not merely my paranoid fantasy: when Philip Toynbee reviewed
Robert Hewison's book about British cultural life from 1945-1960 *In
Anger*, he referred to the gentlemen-of-letters of literary London of
the period as 'younger members of, or immediate and grateful heirs to,
the Bloomsbury Group'. That would be people like Connolly, Spender,
Peter Quennell, Alan Pryce-Jones (editor of the TLS) and himself.)
Lehmann was very sniffy about people like Kingsley Amis when they began
to publish in the 1950s -- one of the turning-points in all that
business was when John Wain replaced Lehmann on New Soundings and began
to broadcast the work of people like Donald Davie, Philip Larkin,
Geoffrey Hill, Jon Silkin, Dannie Abse, etc. There was an exchange of
letters in *The New Statesman* about this in the course of which Lehmann
deplored the 'blight' of 'provincialism', as part of a bad-tempered
debate in which the words 'provincial' and 'metropolitan' flew about in
what Davie called 'a flurry of innuendo'.
All I'm suggesting is that people at the time recognised that the Leavis
version of a Bloomsbury coterie wasn't entirely removed from their own
experiences of getting things published, reviewed, talked about. I know
there are infinite qualifications to the cartoon version I've just given
-- Harry Ritchie's *Success Stories: Literature and Media in England
1950-1959* from which I've pinched some of the above does a good
readable and careful job of following some of the threads in more
detail.
>Wider Bloomsbury? How wide does he cast the net? British literary life
>of the time was a village anyway, Six Degrees to Sonia Brownell and all
>that.
Yes. True enough. On the other hand, it could be seen as part of the
very point Leavis was making, ie that social cosiness and flank-rubbing
don't make for firm standards of literary argument or critical
discrimination. The smallness of the village continues to be true and I
don't see how in a small country it's likely to change. See above for
the 'wider' sense of Bloomsbury in my rather fuzzy formula.
>How does he realize it when they don't? Omniscience must be wearying
>for him.
Surely outsiders sometimes notice things that insiders ignore because
they're taken for granted.
Agreed, Leavis' insistences can often be wearyingly dogmatic and it can
be -- has been -- argued that his axioms [not the right word -- can't
think of a better one at the moment -- descriptive principles? starting
points?] for critical discussion constitute a closed epistemological
circle.
But when Queenie Leavis drew attention, for example to Lord David
Cecil's account of Thomas Hardy -- "...it is the inevitable defect of a
spontaneous genius like Hardy's that it is impervious to education. No
amount of painstaking study got him within sight of achieving that
intuitive good taste, that instinctive grasp of the laws of literature,
which is the native heritage of one bred from childhood in the
atmosphere of a high culture..." -- she was right, I think, to imply
that Lord David was simply taking for granted his own impeccable fitness
to judge, and was quite unable to notice that Hardy's well-equipped
study of music and architecture and his wide reading and his sense of a
deep and powerful heritage from Dorset town and country life constituted
as real and personal a cultural training as his own upper-crust version.
>> simply because their own friendships and presumptions over-ruled
>> their
>> chances of seeing things otherwise ("Really, you know, there isn't
>> anyone else," as Leavis quotes Roy Harrod, reporting on the
>> characteristic note of Bloomsbury in his life of Keynes)
>
>A bit humourless of Leavis?
Possibly. He can make you laugh though -- the CP Snow lecture still
does, in places.
[Just seen the time -- off to work. Will resume later. Glad to have you
back. Have you got a computer now? he asked nosily.]
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
>Martha Bridegam wrote in message <383DF3...@coastside.net>...
>
>>And BTW is there some reason why making unattributed references to
>>Horace is less snobbish than writing cranky notes about James Joyce?
My computer hasn't come up with this post of Martha's, nor the one
Martha sent about Amazon books to which Alan replied. Anyone else having
the same problem? Or why this gap should suddenly appear?
I've asked for them to be fetched, but have thrice got the message "not
available". I'd appreciate having them forwarded by e-mail if someone wd
be so kind.
Thanks in advance Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
>I've asked for them to be fetched, but have thrice got the message "not
>available". I'd appreciate having them forwarded by e-mail if someone wd
>be so kind.
They've just arrived on the fourth request to server. Sorry about fuss -
- please don't after all flood me with emails. This must be what happens
when you become three people.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
>For those of us who are *really* not remotely qualified, would someone
>care to list off the major Bloomsbury figures? I get as far as Woolfs
>and Sackville-Bagginses, and after that it's pure guesswork.
It's a bit of a how-long-is-a-piece-of-string? question, but here goes.
Basically it was the circle of people centred on the two daughters of
the Victorian writer and critic (of whom Queenie Leavis wrote with much
respect) Leslie Stephen. The "Bloomsbury" comes from the district near
the British Museum in London where they had (some of) their residences
in the elegant squares -- mainly now used by London University for
graduate studies etc, and hence producing occasional odd juxtapositions
like the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar I mentioned the other day. When my
wife was working at the Institute of Computer Studies many years ago, in
Gordon Square where the Woolfs did their publishing, the daily round of
programming/gossip/technical chat would occasionally be interrupted by a
researcher looking for evidence of numinous emanations or unpublished
laundry lists from the dead past.
Vanessa married Clive Bell and Virginia married Leonard Woolf. Lytton
Strachey, Duncan Grant (the artist), JM Keynes and EM Forster are
usually thought of as the main part of the group, in Forster's case more
fitfully. Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy are other close associates
perhaps less remembered. TS Eliot was associated with them at one time,
but I wouldn't call him a Bloomsbury writer.
Then there are countless others from Dora Carrington to David Garnett
whom you could add to the list, not to mention periodic tables as to who
was at Eton, who at King's/Trinity Cambridge, who was in the Apostles
Society there, who was influenced by the philosophy of GE Moore, who had
sex with whom using what method, who is mentioned in whose
diaries/letters/memoirs, who painted whom, etc etc. All that has been
written about endlessly. But that list should be enough for the moment,
I hope.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
JoeBlake writes
>> iv) that as a result they promoted bad writers (e.g. Clive Bell)
>Bell's badness or otherwise is highly debatable.
I have to admit I haven't read enough Bell to do more than agree it's
debatable, but I'm also willing to declare a prejudice against people
who call their books *Art* or *Civilisation* with a measure of ex
cathedra self-assurance which only outstanding creative gifts backed by
vast erudition could justify.
Bell's contrast between "the austere and thrilling raptures of those who
have climbed the cold white peaks of art" and those of us who keep to
"the snug foothills of warm humanity" [*Art*] uses the kind of preening
rhetoric that I'm happy to steer clear of.
>Is Leavis able to show that Bloomsbury ever harmed Lawrence or Joyce?
As for *harming* Joyce, I don't think it's one of Leavis's concerns.
Joyce was tough enough, and removed enough in Europe, and had enough
rich American backers not to need support from Bloomsbury, though TS
Eliot promoted the reputation of *Ulysses* when others were calling it
just a dirty book. (Leavis didn't really have much to say about Joyce
anyway, though there's an intriguing episode in his teaching career when
he was in trouble with the police and the university authorities for
referring to Ulysses in lectures attended by women.)
The Lawrence-at-Cambridge story has been told by Lawrence, by Keynes, by
Bertrand Russell, by David Garnett, by others. Whatever the truth of it
(and Lawrence isn't necessarily a reliable witness) when Lawrence
recalled the morning of March 6th 1915, when he had breakfast with
Keynes and Russell in King's College, he wrote: "...it was one of the
crises of my life. It sent me mad with misery and rage." This was maybe
an over-reaction -- none of us was there and we can't say -- but
Keynes's comment that Lawrence looked at Bloomsbury-in-Cambridge with
"ignorant, jealous, irritable" eyes seems a mite self-defensive. I don't
know, really. He must have *felt* harmed to write like that, but Russell
tells a different story. As greg wrote, if we had meters to attach to
writers to measure pretension, honesty, integrity, ego, etc, we wouldn't
need to read them or argue about them.
>I don't know. How much influence did they continue to have after the
>30s movement came along?
A lot, I think. Not only the stuff about literary editors being the next
generation of Bloomsbury in the 1940s/1950s that I quoted from Philip
Toynbee in the previous post, but, for example, all the business in
Spender's autobiography about dining with Virginia and Leonard shows how
continuous (and practical in terms of networking) the links were between
the original Bloomsbury group and some of the writers of the 30s.
When Keynes was chair of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and
the Arts (which became the Arts Council) in the late 1940s, he promoted
the work of HM Tennent Ltd which produced the bland or bloodless West
End plays against which the 1950s dramatists (Osborne, Pinter, Wesker
etc) reacted. And when Kingsley Amis was describing the planning of
*Lucky Jim* he said: "*Lucky Jim* wasn't going to be about Bloomsbury.
Nothing perhaps so tangible or explicit as Bloomsbury, but it wasn't
going to be about what people did after work...or what people did who
weren't working anyway. It was going to be about somebody with a job..."
I know none of the above really proves anything, but it indicates that
Bloomsbury was a strong concept in English writing/culture from the
1910s through to the 1950s, and that many people outside its charmed
circle weren't happy with its self-reinforcing customary definitions of
what was worth doing. I am embarrassedly aware the name Orwell doesn't
occur in the above -- apologies to anyone who tuned in for direct
Orwell-talk -- but he's an absent presence in nearly all of these
English ever-running arguments.
>P.S. Happy Thanksgiving to our colonial cousins
And from me belatedly too.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
JoeBlake
> Lehmann was very sniffy about people like Kingsley Amis when they
> began
> to publish in the 1950s -- one of the turning-points in all that
> business was when John Wain replaced Lehmann on New Soundings and
> began
> to broadcast the work of people like Donald Davie, Philip Larkin,
> Geoffrey Hill, Jon Silkin, Dannie Abse, etc. There was an exchange
> of
> letters in *The New Statesman* about this in the course of which
> Lehmann
> deplored the 'blight' of 'provincialism', as part of a bad-tempered
> debate in which the words 'provincial' and 'metropolitan' flew
> about in
> what Davie called 'a flurry of innuendo'.
> But when Queenie Leavis drew attention, for example to Lord David
> Cecil's account of Thomas Hardy -- "...it is the inevitable defect
> of a
> spontaneous genius like Hardy's that it is impervious to
> education. No
> amount of painstaking study got him within sight of achieving that
> intuitive good taste, that instinctive grasp of the laws of
> literature,
> which is the native heritage of one bred from childhood in the
> atmosphere of a high culture..." -- she was right, I think, to
> imply
> that Lord David was simply taking for granted his own impeccable
> fitness
> to judge, and was quite unable to notice that Hardy's well-equipped
> study of music and architecture and his wide reading and his sense
> of a
> deep and powerful heritage from Dorset town and country life
> constituted
> as real and personal a cultural training as his own upper-crust
> version.
Ugh. Yes, I can't argue with that.
> Have you got a computer now?
Unfortunately no, I've just been house-sitting for someone who has.
Fortunately, perhaps, in that I'm going home now and so will be spared
trying to defend the Bloomsburies without really knowing much about it.
It was really just a chivalric reflex provoked by you all laying into
Ginny. Thanks for the information anyway. And thanks especially for
solving the Mice conundrum. Perhaps you should contact Crick or Shelden
in case the biogs are ever revised? There must be many other people out
there who've grown frown-lines over it.
Jonathan Mason
>
> Tom Deveson wrote:....
Massive chunks excised here.....
>
>
> Carey has been working his way through his personal list of the 50 best
> books of the century in The Sunday Times. Interestingly, Wells' _Mr.
> Polly_ makes the list. In his review of Katherine Mansfield's _The
> Garden Party_, he quite unfairly takes Woolf's admiring comment that
> she was 'jealous' of Mansfield's writing out of context to make it look
> as though she hated her. His choice from Orwell (he limited himself to
> one book per author) was, surprisingly, _Coming Up For Air_, which he
> claims contains _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ in embryo. Empson's _Seven
> Types of Ambiguity_ also makes the cut.
I can see that "Coming Up" (my favorite Orwell novel by a long way)
contains "1984" in embyo, but "Animal Farm"--hardly!
Almost everything in "Amimal Farm" and "1984" can be found in Orwell's
other writings. I think the difference is that the earlier novels were
too British for an American readership. "Animal Farm" and "1984" take
Orwell's schtick into other worlds (the allegorical farm, the future)
that make it more accessible to the reader who is unfamiliar with the
lost past of an Edwardian English childhood so eloquently set down in
"Coming Up For Air".
Patrick Briody
Jonathan Mason wrote in message <383ED80D...@sunline.net>...
>I can see that "Coming Up" (my favorite Orwell novel by a long way)
>contains "1984" in embyo, but "Animal Farm"--hardly!
>
My favourite too - Orwell at his most Wellsian (I mean, most comic). On the
"Animal Farm" thing, I can't see much that you would call embryonic, unless
it's that scene where he likens some children running down a hiil in
gas-masks to "little pigs". But I suppose it must be something else, which
has so far eluded both of us.
Pat Briody
Tom Deveson
>My favourite too - Orwell at his most Wellsian (I mean, most comic). On the
>"Animal Farm" thing, I can't see much that you would call embryonic, unless
>it's that scene where he likens some children running down a hiil in
>gas-masks to "little pigs". But I suppose it must be something else, which
>has so far eluded both of us.
My favourite too, for Patrick's reason, and for another reason which
sheds a sort-of side-light on what J--n C---y might have meant.
That's the element in the book about the preservation of the past. I
took away a particularly glowing memory of my first reading of *Coming
Up For Air* which derived from the early passages to do with Bowling's
childhood. When I read the book again some years later I was surprised
to see how little space they actually occupied.
The nostalgia which manages not to be regressive -- like DH Lawrence's
wonderful poem *Piano* which teeters on the edge of being tempted by
sentimentality and then rejects it by recognising its power -- colours
the book. Fatty Bowling's one remaining freedom during the Gadarene rush
to cataclysm (as in the "little pigs" imagery Patrick quotes above or
the letter to Connolly on 14 Dec 1938 while he's working on CUFA) is to
preserve in his mind the past that's been destroyed in the real world.
The same idea -- freedom being the right to resist the enforced
obliteration of memory -- is central to Animal Farm (and of course
Nineteen Eighty-Four). I imagine that's what J--n C---y may have meant
by saying the earlier book contains the two later ones. Another common
element between the two books is the disillusioned report CUFA offers on
the failure of socialism, not as an idea or ideal, but as something that
the Labour movement can't explain or deliver to those who should be its
popular supporters.
BTW, it's a pleasant fact that the last words Orwell's father
consciously heard before dying -- and father and son hadn't got on well
together -- were when GO's sister read out to him a favourable review of
*Coming Up For Air*.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
message news:rQuTReAo...@devesons.demon.co.uk...
> Patrick Briody writes of _Coming Up For Air_:
> >My favourite too - Orwell at his most Wellsian (I mean, most comic).
> My favourite too, for Patrick's reason, and for another reason which
> sheds a sort-of side-light on what J--n C---y might have meant.
And I thought I was the only one all these years. I think we need to ask,
then; are Patrick, John - erm, Tom - and I alone in our preference for CUFA,
or is it *everyone's* favourite Orwell? (Of those who have read the whole
bunch, of course.)
Alan.
Martha Bridegam
saying anything memorable anyhow.
/MAB
Patrick Briody
Tom Deveson wrote in message ...
>
>That's the element in the book about the preservation of the past. I
>took away a particularly glowing memory of my first reading of *Coming
>Up For Air* which derived from the early passages to do with Bowling's
>childhood. When I read the book again some years later I was surprised
>to see how little space they actually occupied.
>
respect is Graham Greene. Ten years or so separated my first and
second readings of "The Heart of the Matter". Possibly because I was
brought up in a climate and landscape similar to that of the novel, I had
a strong memory of its content in terms of sights, sounds, smells, etc, but
when I
went back to the book I was amazed to discover how much of it I had supplied
myself. I've noticed that about all his novels. He has a genius for making
the
reader do all the work.
Pat Briody
MN1st
>> Patrick Briody writes of _Coming Up For Air_:
>
>> >My favourite too - Orwell at his most Wellsian (I mean, most comic).
>
>> My favourite too, for Patrick's reason, and for another reason which
>> sheds a sort-of side-light on what J--n C---y might have meant.
>
>And I thought I was the only one all these years. I think we need to ask,
>then; are Patrick, John - erm, Tom - and I alone in our preference for CUFA,
>or is it *everyone's* favourite Orwell? (Of those who have read the whole
>bunch, of course.)
I can't speak for everyone, but CUFA is my favorite Orwell novel, with Buremese
Days coming in a close second. I especially enjoy the chapter in CUFA on his
reading habits. Reminds me somewhat of the Boys' Weeklies essay.
Martha Bridegam
>
<re Bloomsbury> Basically it was the circle of people centred on the two
daughters of
> the Victorian writer and critic (of whom Queenie Leavis wrote with much
> Strachey, Duncan Grant (the artist), JM Keynes and EM Forster are
> usually thought of as the main part of the group, in Forster's case more
> fitfully. Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy are other close associates
> perhaps less remembered. TS Eliot was associated with them at one time,
Thx. Believe it or not, that straightens a few things out.
/MAB
Tom Deveson
Another reason, which critics have from time to time pointed out, is
that here Orwell himself disappears far more into his characters than in
the other novels. Bowling's nostalgia is *like* GO's own, but it's put
into an almost entirely different voice and person, and is held at a
critical distance; this is why the feeling doesn't slip into
sentimentality.
The only place where an Orwell-figure appears is when Bowling is in a
hospital camp during the war, and "kids from the slap-up boys' schools
in Eastbourne used to be led round in crocodiles to hand out fags and
peppermint creams to the 'wounded Tommies' as they called us. A pink-
faced kid of about eight would walk up to a knot of wounded men sitting
on the grass, split open a packet of Woodbines and solemnly hand out one
fag to each man, just like feeding the monkeys at the zoo." I'm sure he
must have enjoyed the comic objectivity of writing this way about
himself.
The prose of the sections about early memories of Lower Binfield, when
"it was summer all the year round", with the passages about "the dust in
the lane and the warm greeny light coming through the hazel boughs" and
all the other reassuringly rich sensuous detail is worth looking at more
closely. It uses the linguistic device of the evocative and generic
definite article in profusion. This reminds me of the similar passages
in Mark Twain's *Life On The Mississippi* where Twain recalls his
boyhood in a roll-call of phrases beginning with a summative 'the',
conjuring up one single vivid experience and making it stand for many.
It's a marvellously sustained piece of writing and Orwell was familiar
with it, as we know from a reference earlier in the 30s. He uses *Life
on the Mississippi* sometimes as a touchstone of writing that expresses
individuality and freedom from fear of the sack, and I wonder whether it
was in his mind when he was at work on CUFA.
The other contemporary piece of writing that does something comparable
in evoking the English landscape in sharp clear localised images that
simultaneously hold a broader sense, a generation's sense, of a country
in transition comes in the choruses in Auden and Isherwood's *The Dog
Beneath The Skin* of 1935. Auden wrote the choruses. The locales are
more varied and the method is very different -- the implicit model
behind the writer's stance is a movie camera panning and zooming or a
hawk flying and hovering -- but the characteristic Auden use of a
generic 'the' is a striking though not dominating feature. Knowing O's
ambivalence towards Auden, I doubt whether he would have wanted to
recognise a parallel -- perhaps I'm only seeing it because both books
made such an impact on me at the same time, thirty-five years ago -- but
it's worth celebrating the work anyway. [If it's not out-of-place to say
so here, I once had a conversation with the poet Peter Porter, in which
we agreed that the choruses from *The Dog* were the best dramatic verse
in English since Shakespeare.]
Let's hear it for the big sea-turtles.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Jonathan Mason
>
> Patrick Briody writes
BTW, it's a pleasant fact that the last words Orwell's father
consciously heard before dying -- and father and son hadn't got on well
together -- were when GO's sister read out to him a favourable review of
*Coming Up For Air*.
Interesting. Does anyone know what kind of a man Blair senior was, or
what he though of Orwell's books? Orwell describes his own origins as
upper lower middle class, yet others saw him more Old Etonian than
parvenu.
Orwells best-known father figure is obviously not a father, but a Big
Brother, then we have Sambo in "Such, Such Were the Joys", Father
Bowling, Uncle Ezekiel, and that is about it.
One can see that Orwell's sisters may have been partial models for Hilda
Bowling, but where can we find Blair Sr. in Orwell's writings. Perhaps
in the Rector (Dorothy's dad) in *A Clergyman's Daughter* of whom Orwell
wrote "Probably no-one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as
ten minutes would have denied he was a 'difficult' kind of man. The
secret of this almost unfailing ill humor really lay in the fact that he
was an anachronism..." Could this be the retired opium agent?
Martha Bridegam
>
> Interesting. Does anyone know what kind of a man Blair senior was, or
> upper lower middle class, yet others saw him more Old Etonian than
> parvenu.
Have been reading some interesting stuff about the role of the blackface
minstrel show in American society (and also some V.S. Pritchett, which
indirectly influences the following). Bear with me for a minute, this is
relevant. The analysis -- taken mainly from Robert Cantwell's __When We
Were Good__, a history of the folk song revival -- goes something like
this:
Immigrants and other "white" Americans of precarious social standing,
feeling lost amid the transition to an industrial economy, felt a need
to define themselves as "white" as a defense against second-class
status. They therefore adopted the minstrel show as a popular
entertainment because it allowed them to act out descriptions of who
they thought they were *not*. This was not just a matter of simple
hatred or self-congratulation. It also projected onto African America
the idea of a more relaxed pre-industrial life for which the actors, as
members of a rigid industrialized society, felt genuine affection and
nostalgia. So nostalgia for life before factories, and resentment of
regimentation -- both decent human emotions right out of __Coming Up For
Air__ -- got diverted into a racist spectacle.
(Am sorry to admit we have a family photo showing the cast of a U.S.
minstrel show somewhere around the 1940s. My grandfathers -- both
factory workers, one a child of immigrants -- are in it smiling side by
side. At least they're not in blackface themselves, but others in the
picture are.)
BTW Cantwell makes some comparisons to cross-dressing that I think would
have been improved by adding a discussion of the drag theatrical
tradition among upper-class men's organizations such as, in the U.S.,
the Bohemian Grove gatherings and the Harvard Hasty Pudding Theatricals.
I presume these are from English models -- would Cambridge Footlights be
one of them?
Joe Blake mentioned Dick Van Dyke a few days ago. Think about that
cringe-making chimney sweeps' dance in "Mary Poppins." Isn't that a
blackface performance? I think it's a terribly significant bit of pop
culture because it combines English and American methods of projecting
the idea of freedom onto persons viewed as inferior.
Which is IMHO why the Orwell tramping disguise episodes are also
cringe-making. They're an attempt to become somebody else, yes -- but
someone or other called them "a preemptive strike on failure," and in a
way you could view them as Orwell's personal minstrel show -- dressing
up as someone else in order to bring out the differences that he sees
as denoting his (otherwise precarious) superiority.
Like the industrial & immigrant Americans who acted out minstrel shows,
he had a tremendous uneasiness about his ability to do the social
climbing that was expected of him -- about whether he could "pass" in an
adopted social class. He could play "Old Etonian" much more easily by
overtly rejecting the status (while also expecting people to notice his
snooty accent & being mildly annoyed when they didn't) than by going on
to a conventional government or professional career in which he might
have been exposed as an impostor.
Maybe __Coming Up For Air__ is a better story than some of the earlier
ones because it authentically goes back into Orwell's own personal
regrets and nostalgias instead of projecting them onto other people --
???
> .....One can see that Orwell's sisters may have been partial models for Hilda
> Bowling, but where can we find Blair Sr. in Orwell's writings. Perhaps
> in the Rector (Dorothy's dad) in *A Clergyman's Daughter* of whom Orwell
> wrote "Probably no-one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as
> ten minutes would have denied he was a 'difficult' kind of man. The
> secret of this almost unfailing ill humor really lay in the fact that he
> was an anachronism..." Could this be the retired opium agent?
I have a feeling Orwell's own biological father didn't occupy the place
of a father in his personal psyche. He doesn't ever seem to have
acknowledged a close connection. But on the other hand could he have
felt his father turned his mother &/or sisters into a Dorothy by being
chronically dissatisfied in the same way?
/MAB
greg
Martha Bridegam wrote in message <384055...@coastside.net>...
<snipping blackface stuff>
>Which is IMHO why the Orwell tramping disguise episodes are also
>cringe-making. They're an attempt to become somebody else, yes -- but
>someone or other called them "a preemptive strike on failure," and in a
>way you could view them as Orwell's personal minstrel show -- dressing
>up as someone else in order to bring out the differences that he sees
>as denoting his (otherwise precarious) superiority.
I don't know that anyone cares about the moral short-comings of a journalist
out exploring. When I read Hitchens or Joan Didion or other good journalists
who are aware of themselves as observers, I just want them to be good
describers, accurate and fair. They could be bastards in their private lives
(might well be the case) but they are arguably at their least interesting
when feeling exotic to whatever milieu they've chosen to be the source of
their observations. A good journalist is obligated to that milieu as much as
to readers; no compunction is needed to do it well, and doing it well is
probably hard enough.
Martha Bridegam
Apologies if previous post came across as convoluted, tasteless, or
both. Have been messing with some ideas about transferred racism in
insecure middle-class (white) Americans' attitudes toward The Homeless,
& maybe these ideas aren't either thoroughly thought out or relevant on
this newsgroup.
Though I do think the projected-nostalgia thing -- think of it as the
Silly Dick
Van Dyke Cockney syndrome if you'd prefer -- might have affected,
frexample, Orwell's noted tendency to give extra journalistic attention
to grotesques of poverty like the Brookers who were not viewed by their
neighbors as ordinary at all.
But we were talking about __Coming Up For Air__. Hooray for the
sea-turtles.
BTW isn't the last page of the book pure Wodehouse?
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>BTW isn't the last page of the book pure Wodehouse?
"Dash it, Martha -- "
"No, Pongo, I mean it."
"But --- "
"What did you say?"
"I only said 'But' -- "
Pongo Deveson-Davison-Carey tottered to a chair and stared glassily at
his transatlantic interlocutor. Then, as if a new backbone had been
inserted in the place where, until now, a couple of feet of spaghetti
had been nestling, he rallied once more.
"But, Martha just how many of these Wodehouse types have you
discovered?"
"What on earth are you burbling about, Pongo, you dithering chump?"
"Well it's like this. There I was, quite happy recalling that that
Kingsley Amis chappie had been referred to by a reviewer in the 1950s as
a "Welfare Wodehouse." Not to mention as "the scholarship boy's Stephen
Spender" by another scribbling cove, and as "a fish-and-chips Waugh" by
yet another one. And now you come along telling me that the whole
business started much earlier and with a different fellow altogether.
This Blair character, or whatever he calls himself. Got two different
names and a dashed distressing moustache. It's enough to make you think.
I say, do you think you could be right?"
"Do you know, Pongo, I think I might be. You might be a footling ass at
times, and the great three-toed sloth might be rather quicker than you
are in ever getting to the point, but if you agree with me on this one,
I might just overlook the fact that you've not got two names, you've got
three...."
etc Tom
--
Tom Deveson
JoeBlake
> Which is IMHO why the Orwell tramping disguise episodes are also
> cringe-making. They're an attempt to become somebody else, yes --
> but someone or other called them "a preemptive strike on failure," and
> in a way you could view them as Orwell's personal minstrel show --
> dressing up as someone else in order to bring out the differences >
that he sees as denoting his (otherwise precarious) superiority.
> Like the industrial & immigrant Americans who acted out minstrel
> shows, he had a tremendous uneasiness about his ability to do the >
social climbing that was expected of him -- about whether he could >
"pass" in an
> adopted social class.
What if the dressing-up comparison were extended to rituals like
Halloween or the Mexican Day of the Dead, i.e rites of exorcizing
fears? Perhaps Orwell was exorcizing the fear of failure he took away
from St. Cyp's?
On the other hand, TVs dress up as women because they idolize/want to
be/want to feel closer to them.
I suppose most of the regulars here read Mary McCarthy's excellent
Orwell essay in utero. MM attributes Orwell's descent to, among other
things, his following the least line of resistance because of 'a
mystical feeling that the will is evil' (meaning that power is evil).
Mary Mac and GO are similar characters in some ways - being of the left
but satirizing it, compulsive self-examination and awkward
truth-telling, both feeling themselves to be outsiders at school,
although in McCarthy's case she managed to get into the magic circle of
superior girls. Anyway, the semi-autobiographical heroine in McCarthy's
_The Company She Keeps_ thinks of Socialism as being an aristocracy of
the spirit. The point for her, though (and perhaps for GO?) is not so
much to find a way to turn the tables on real aristocrats, as to avoid
being one of the dreary middle-class, to be 'finer and nobler' than
them.
JoeBlake
> > >My favourite too - Orwell at his most Wellsian (I mean, most
> comic).
> > My favourite too, for Patrick's reason, and for another reason
> which
> > sheds a sort-of side-light on what J--n C---y might have meant.
> And I thought I was the only one all these years. I think we need
> to ask,
> then; are Patrick, John - erm, Tom - and I alone in our preference
> for CUFA,
> or is it *everyone's* favourite Orwell?
Toss-up between Burmese Days and Aspidistra for me. But surely it's
just some abstruse Litmanship gambit for us all to claim to prefer
these lesser-known works and disdain his true masterpiece, _A
Clergyman's Daughter_.
Martha Bridegam
>
> Alan Allport wrote:
>
> > > >My favourite too - Orwell at his most Wellsian (I mean, most
> > comic).
> > > My favourite too, for Patrick's reason, and for another reason
> > which
> > > sheds a sort-of side-light on what J--n C---y might have meant.
> > And I thought I was the only one all these years. I think we need
> > to ask,
> > then; are Patrick, John - erm, Tom - and I alone in our preference
> > for CUFA,
> > or is it *everyone's* favourite Orwell?
>
> Toss-up between Burmese Days and Aspidistra for me. But surely it's
> just some abstruse Litmanship gambit for us all to claim to prefer
> these lesser-known works and disdain his true masterpiece, _A
> Clergyman's Daughter_.
Hey, I still think Dorothy's his most believable female character. If
only he'd reconsidered the seduction/amnesia bit & digested the DAOIPAL
outtakes.
Any experienced shrink would question that story about jolly Mr.
Warburton being the actual cause of Dorothy's freakout. I suppose Orwell
had to invent a reason why a woman who's naive and not adventurous would
take up a life he had personally visited by choice. He probably met
someone like her & couldn't figure why she left home.
Y'know, it would've been easy to fix __A Clergyman's Daughter__. It all
would have fallen into line if he had started from a premise of abuse
within D's family, creating a secret that couldn't be told & couldn't be
lived with. That's the sort of thing that really does make naive young
women leave reasonably comfortable homes in a hurry & live on the street
rather than go back. Amnesia is precisely *not* the explanation for
Dorothy's behavior.
But come to think of it, the Mr. Warburton/amnesia explanation would
make a great lie for her family to tell the neighbors.
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
>
> What if the dressing-up comparison were extended to rituals like
> Halloween or the Mexican Day of the Dead, i.e rites of exorcizing
> fears? Perhaps Orwell was exorcizing the fear of failure he took away
> from St. Cyp's?
Exorcism. You've got something there. "...Well, here are the dogs, and
they are not so bad." That's from __Wigan Pier__, isn't it? The
discussion after he had digested his motives & experience a little.
>
> On the other hand, TVs dress up as women because they idolize/want to
> be/want to feel closer to them.
Which is why I think the better comparison is to upper-class drag
theatricals, where the point is to underscore one's maleness (or
"exorcise" effeminacy?) by *not* being a convincing female.
>
> I suppose most of the regulars here read Mary McCarthy's excellent
> Orwell essay in utero.
Speaking for self, I haven't read it, & can't find it on Alan's site.
Alan, am I looking on the wrong page -- or would someone care to post
it?
> MM attributes Orwell's descent to, among other
> things, his following the least line of resistance because of 'a
> mystical feeling that the will is evil' (meaning that power is evil).
That power over others is evil, yes. That "the will" is evil, I don't
think he ever believed. If he wasn't resisting anything in that period
then what's __Aspidistra__ about?
> .........Anyway, the semi-autobiographical heroine in McCarthy's
> _The Company She Keeps_ thinks of Socialism as being an aristocracy of
> the spirit. The point for her, though (and perhaps for GO?) is not so
> much to find a way to turn the tables on real aristocrats, as to avoid
> being one of the dreary middle-class, to be 'finer and nobler' than
> them.
ouch.
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam <jo...@sirius.com> wrote:
> > JoeBlake wrote:
> > >
> >
> > > I suppose most of the regulars here read Mary McCarthy's
> > excellent
> > > Orwell essay in utero.
> > Speaking for self, I haven't read it, & can't find it on Alan's
> > site.
> > Alan, am I looking on the wrong page -- or would someone care to
> > post
> > it?
> >
>
> HREF="http://www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk/marym.htm">http://www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk/marym.htm</A>
>
> Some of it's old ground and some of it I think is unfair or wrong but
> there are several interesting points.
Tremendous thanks. Hell of a read, and nice to find a proponent of GO's
earlier work.
But apart from the obviously wrong stuff, what do people think about
this notion of Orwell as dispassionate experimenter using self as
nearest available material? It's easy enough to multiply examples of
this mood in Orwell, but is it fair to call that his major
characteristic?
And now I want to know more about this Mary McCarthy who goes around
haunting her beaus in an evening gown carrying a bottle of poison.
Is McCarthy the one who was hired to write for the New York Times'
Washington bureau on condition that she also work half-time running the
switchboard? Or do I have her mixed up with someone else?
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
>
> The speculation about Orwell's motives for disguising himself as a tramp is
> interesting. But I think it needs to be balanced by pointing out that
> whatever the motives, it allowed Orwell to produce a basically honest piece
> of journalism which avoided romanticizing the tramping life and showed that
> almost all tramps were ordinary working people who, for one reason or
> another, had fallen into the life involuntarily.
There's all kinds of romanticism. He skipped the obvious traps -- which
is more than most people do -- but then there's Bozo the screever.
Respectfully submitted,
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Gene Zitver
>And now I want to know more about this Mary McCarthy who goes around
>haunting her beaus in an evening gown carrying a bottle of poison.
She famously said of Lillian Hellman, "Every word she writes is a lie,
including 'a' and 'the'." Which may be something Orwell might wish he had
said about someone.
Gene
JoeBlake
> But apart from the obviously wrong stuff, what do people think
> about
> this notion of Orwell as dispassionate experimenter using self as
> nearest available material? It's easy enough to multiply examples
> of
> this mood in Orwell, but is it fair to call that his major
> characteristic?
Not his major characteristic, no, but I think she's right when she says
his experimental tinkering must have led him to construct the perfect
tyranny/ murder/ pub.
I do think she's badly wrong when she says Orwell as a novelist has no
interest in 'the process of rising or sinking in ordinary society'.
> And now I want to know more about this Mary McCarthy who goes
> around
> haunting her beaus in an evening gown carrying a bottle of poison.
Mary McCarthy, 1912-89, novelist and critic, born in Seattle of
Catholic-Jewish-Protestant background. Not to be confused or
amalgamated with Joe McCarthy, Gene McCarthy, Jenny McCarthy or Charlie
McCarthy. The actor Kevin McCarthy ('Invasion of the Body Snatchers'
etc.) is her brother, though.
Hung around with the Partisan Review crowd and other NY literary
leftists at about the time Orwell was writing his London Letters. Her
second husband was the critic Edmund Wilson.
Her novels include _The Group_, about a group of Vassar graduates in
the 30s, _A Source of Embarrassment_, in which an assortment of
leftists and artists set up an idealistic communal farm which becomes
riven by factions, and _The Groves of Academe_, in which an incompetent
teacher pretends he is the victim of an anti-communist witch-hunt to
try and keep his job. Also _Birds of America_, which in its early
chapters sounds a note of elegy for a vanishing small-town America
somewhat reminiscent of what CUFA does for a lost England, and which
features a hero so beset by ethical dilemmas he agonizes over whether
or not it's moral to tip a chambermaid when others can't afford to do
so, and asks himself what Kant would do in the same situation. (Much of
her work satirizes the tendency of the left to be stymied by petty
bickering or intellectuals in general to be made ineffectual by
oversensitivity or sophistry, but she's too good a novelist to be put
down as narrowly political or aridly cerebral.) Her critical essays are
brilliant. She's also written about art (_The Stones of Florence and
Venice Observed_), went to Vietnam to write about the war, and wrote an
excellent memoir, _Memories of a Catholic Childhood_.
IMO anyone who hasn't read her stuff has a treat in store (as a teacher
used to tell me when I'd failed to read set texts). It's always
perilous to recommend books or writers, but whenever I come across her
books in second-hand shops I buy them to give to people.
> Is McCarthy the one who was hired to write for the New York Times'
> Washington bureau on condition that she also work half-time
> running the
> switchboard? Or do I have her mixed up with someone else?
Don't know.
Tom Deveson
<lots of good rich stuff re Mary McCarthy> to which I add a few vaguely
Orwellian grace-notes.
She wrote a second memoir after *Memories of a Catholic Girlhood*, when
she was in her mid-seventies, called *How I Grew*. This re-visits the
strange girlhood and schooldays, and then takes her on to Vassar -- with
sort-of Orwellian touches about becoming "radicalized" while nonetheless
getting to know the rich during the era of the Bonus March and the
"first labor pains of the New Deal."
The opening of chapter 3 has an odd echo of the opening of *Such, Such
Were the Joys* -- "In my first year at Annie Wright Seminary, I lost my
virginity." It was during a dark winter afternoon, probably during
Thanksgiving vacation, in the front seat of a car parked off a lonely
Seattle boulevard, and she was fourteen. 'He' was a man in his mid-
twenties. I hope it's not offensive to quote the words she writes about
him holding up the used condom afterwards, as they seem to bear all the
marks of an essentially Orwellian moment: "the jism is horribly ugly to
me, like snot or catarrh, and I have to look away."
She was associated with Dwight Macdonald on *Partisan Review*, and as
such denounced by the Communists for publicly endorsing the Trotsky
defence committee at the time of the Moscow Trials, though she was more
a civil-libertarian than a Workers-Party-Liner.
There's a sort-of fictionalised version of Dwight Macdonald in the story
*Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man* which comes in the book
*The Company She Keeps*. Something almost-Orwellian appears in the
characterisation too (we're in the 1930s): "Most men had come to
socialism by some all-too-human compulsion: they were out of work or
lonely or sexually unsatisfied or foreign-born or queer in one of a
hundred bitter irremediable ways...But Jim was like the Roman centurion
of Saint Paul; he came to socialism freely, from the happy centre of
things, by a pure act of perception...By simply being the way he was,
Jim Barnett made a great many people on the left feel happy, almost
sentimental. He was a mascot, a good-luck piece....With Jim it was a
point of honour that he should never agree completely with anyone or
anything. He had never swallowed Marxism whole, he used to say in a
slightly boastful tone, as if he had achieved a considerable feat of
acrobatics...It was not that he considered that he was especially
brilliant or talented; his estimation of his qualities was both just and
modest. What he reverenced in himself was his intelligent
mediocrity....he had only to leaf over his feelings to discover what
America was thinking. There was something sublime about this, but there
were responsibilities too...Jim's function, as he saw it, was to ring
the new ideas against himself, and let the world hear how they sounded.
It was his duty, therefore, to 'be himself', and his virtues and his
weaknesses were alike untouchable...he could not drop into the life of a
Communist front man, because this would have involved a suspension of
individual judgement, a surgical sterilization of the moral faculty that
was odious to him.."
She translated Simone Weil's *The Iliad or The Poem Of Force* which
Dwight MacD published in his journal *Politics* in 1945.
She wrote (in *On The Contrary*) the line: If someone tells you he is
going to make 'a realistic decision', you immediately understand that he
has resolved to do something bad. [which seems to have a smack at least
of GO]
*Tiny* nit-picking amendment to Gene's quote [apologies, Gene] re Lilian
Hellman: Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> <snip Mary McCarthy's Catholic girlhood>
>
> There's a sort-of fictionalised version of Dwight Macdonald in the story
> *Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man* which comes in the book
> *The Company She Keeps*. Something almost-Orwellian appears in the
> characterisation too (we're in the 1930s): "Most men had come to
> socialism by some all-too-human compulsion: they were out of work or
> lonely or sexually unsatisfied or foreign-born or queer in one of a
> hundred bitter irremediable ways...But Jim was like the Roman centurion
> of Saint Paul; he came to socialism freely, from the happy centre of
> things, by a pure act of perception...
Backhandedly Orwellian, you must mean. Orwell was damn well bitter and
irremediable, and arguably all those other things in the list, too.
Hm. "Compulsion" is an Orwell word -- the first essays-&-letters vol. of
the Complete Works is called __A Kind of Compulsion__, a phrase taken
from "Why I Write." And McCarthy's inclusion of "foreign-born" is
almost, if not quite, an echo of Orwell's mid-'40s theory of transferred
nationalism.
But there's a difference. McCarthy's sunnier, if that's the word. It's
hard to imagine Orwell characterizing any intellectual as coming from
"the happy centre" of anything. He doesn't seem to have thought of
anyone as emotionally simple (except maybe sometimes The Proles, and
then only in the lazily characterized abstract).
Jumping back to McCarthy's Orwell essay, wotzis claim that Orwell
virtually invented the criticism of popular culture? That has to be
wrong, given, e.g., Huxley, and all our discussion here of the
pre-Orwell writers who complained about advertisements & in the process
discussed their social significance. But is there an argument to be made
that GO helped invent post-modernism? Maybe that's a better, narrower
way to describe what was new about the "Boys' Weeklies" essay?
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>Backhandedly Orwellian, you must mean. Orwell was damn well bitter and
>irremediable, and arguably all those other things in the list, too.
Yes, *backhandedly* sounds about right. I was more thinking of the
"secular saint" and "conscience of his generation" descriptions, which
are also right in their way, though certainly not exhaustively so. The
Yale man sounded in this description not unlike [I think the *not un-*
formula is OK there] how some admirers felt about Orwell in about 1955,
and indeed in 1965. But not entirely like either.
>Hm. "Compulsion" is an Orwell word -- the first essays-&-letters vol. of
>the Complete Works is called __A Kind of Compulsion__, a phrase taken
>from "Why I Write." And McCarthy's inclusion of "foreign-born" is
>almost, if not quite, an echo of Orwell's mid-'40s theory of transferred
>nationalism.
>
>But there's a difference. McCarthy's sunnier, if that's the word. It's
>hard to imagine Orwell characterizing any intellectual as coming from
>"the happy centre" of anything. He doesn't seem to have thought of
>anyone as emotionally simple (except maybe sometimes The Proles, and
>then only in the lazily characterized abstract).
Best not search my posting for coherence or accuracy -- it was a bit
late, and I was intrigued by the Dwight Macdonald/GO comparison [which I
think is at least partly valid] and shouldn't really have extrapolated
to Mary Mc's fictionalised version of DM.
>Jumping back to McCarthy's Orwell essay, wotzis claim that Orwell
>virtually invented the criticism of popular culture? That has to be
>wrong, given, e.g., Huxley, and all our discussion here of the
>pre-Orwell writers who complained about advertisements & in the process
>discussed their social significance. But is there an argument to be made
>that GO helped invent post-modernism? Maybe that's a better, narrower
>way to describe what was new about the "Boys' Weeklies" essay?
I think the particular difference of Orwell's essays in this area --
Boys' Weeklies, Raffles + Miss B, Donald McGill, English Murder etc --
from the stuff about e.g. advertisements in earlier writers is that GO
was less sweepingly dismissive of his topics, more intrigued and
affectionate even where he finally saw flaws, more concerned with the
gargoyles on the surfaces as well as the architecture of the forms and
structures. He didn't just make passing references to tinned food or
cheap music; he went into detail and related what he saw to what many
people felt and dreamed and worried about and that was quite original,
though I suppose there's a kind of hint sometimes in Chesterton.
Think of the opening of *Boys' Weeklies*, that inviting first paragraph
invoking the newsagent's shop with the poky little window and the dark
interior smelling of liquorice allsorts. There's something positive and
affectionate here, despite the characteristically placed word *vilely*.
I used to read this section over and over, about 25 years after it was
written and when the post-war versions of those shops were still to be
found, and it was always with a sense that he rather liked the shops,
and certainly thought their contents worth studying for more than mere
de haut en bas reasons.
When Richard Hoggart set up the first university department to look at
popular culture here -- the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham in 1964 -- it was with a sense of explicit debt to Orwell's
pioneering example. Both the Leavises were also precursors, though
fiercer. Raymond Williams had debts here to both GO + the Leavises, not
always fully acknowledged.
This was long before PoMo. I would want to argue that GO *isn't* an
inventor of PoMo, if only because his approach to culture is
uncompromisingly moral and evaluative, but I'm prepared to be persuaded
otherwise.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> When Richard Hoggart set up the first university department to look at
> popular culture here -- the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
> Birmingham in 1964 -- it was with a sense of explicit debt to Orwell's
> pioneering example.
How acknowledged? Sounds interesting.
> Both the Leavises were also precursors, though
> fiercer. Raymond Williams had debts here to both GO + the Leavises, not
> always fully acknowledged.
Been reading Williams on Orwell. Half the time he sounds like a teacher
judging a bright pupil's progress in the established curriculum:
"The unity of Orwell's 'documentary' and 'imaginative' writing is the
very first thing to notice. There were many problems of method, but at
least Orwell got past the conventional division, if only in practice.
And he saw the division as it actually presented itself to him as
something more than a formal problem. He correctly saw it as a problem
of social relationships [snip quote from 1936 review of Henry Miller et
al that concludes with the need to admit as a writer "that you yourself
are an ordinary person for nine-tenths of the time, which is exactly
what no intellectual ever wants to do."] There is still some unnoticed
class feeling in this. Orwell is still seeing from far enough outside to
suppose that there are people -- a class of people -- who are 'ordinary'
ten-tenths of the time. But to have got as far as he did is something."
Seriously, Williams has a point. In fact, it's the point Joe Blake &
Mary McCarthy have been making -- that even ostensibly democratic
intellectuals tend to think of themselves as a kind of alternative
aristocracy. But sheesh, the style. Searching the texts for politically
appropriate progress, and implicitly discounting all the soft fiddly
stuff about toads and cups of tea. I can see Mr. Williams operating one
of those sledgehammer test-of-strength concessions at a county fair,
where you swing the hammer down onto a gizmo that sends an indicator
flying up a labeled rating pole. You, sir, are you man enough to test
your resistance to class prejudice? George Orwell -- Not Bad! D.H.
Lawrence -- 98-Pound Weakling! Henry Miller -- Good Girl! Either Leavis
-- Close, But No Cigar!
In the concluding "Continuities" section, Williams comments, "Most
radicals, I have noticed, prefer his essays, as if 'The Art of Donald
McGill' or 'Dickens' or 'How the Poor Die' or 'Raffles and Miss
Blandish' were somehow his major works. I admire these and many of the
other essays, but I don't believe they can be isolated from his other
work, and an Orwell restricted to them would be a much smaller
figure..." Two of the four essays are among those cited in TD's previous
post. Yes, it's a funny kind of admiration/acknowledgment.
Given all this it's hard to picture Williams saying interesting things
abt popular culture. Would think he'd dismiss a lot of it as lacking
political meaning. What does he have to say?
>
> This was long before PoMo. I would want to argue that GO *isn't* an
> inventor of PoMo, if only because his approach to culture is
> uncompromisingly moral and evaluative, but I'm prepared to be persuaded
> otherwise.
I was thinking about the Bugs Bunny As Culture Hero end of PoMo, not the
If Everything's Relative I Didn't Do Anything Wrong end of PoMo. But
does someone
(greg?) feel like defining the term? I sure can't.
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>> When Richard Hoggart set up the first university department to look at
>> popular culture here -- the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
>> Birmingham in 1964 -- it was with a sense of explicit debt to Orwell's
>> pioneering example.
>
>How acknowledged? Sounds interesting.
I can't provide chapter and verse -- this is more a memory of how the
matter was discussed at the time. I don't imagine it was ever a formal
acknowledgement in the Centre's inaugural statement. Hoggart mentions
his debt to *Raffles + Miss B* in *The Uses of Literacy* (1957) when
he's talking about sex-and-violence novels, and mentions GO and the
Leavises and Denys Thompson in a piece he wrote called 'Literature and
Society' for a volume called *A Guide to the Social Sciences (1968).
These dates are near enough to the founding of the Centre to suggest
Hoggart did have Orwell's example in mind at the time, but I'm afraid I
can't produce anything more specific. (Weird abg-o synchronicity --
Simon Hoggart, Richard's son, has literally just this second come on the
radio, talking about today's House of Commons debate. He's a
parliamentary sketch writer and host of radio quiz shows -- bit of
generational irony there?)
>Seriously, Williams has a point. In fact, it's the point Joe Blake &
>Mary McCarthy have been making -- that even ostensibly democratic
>intellectuals tend to think of themselves as a kind of alternative
>aristocracy. But sheesh, the style.
Dwight Macdonald's review of Raymond Williams's *The Long Revolution*
(1961) says, among much else, : "...He isn't good at generalizing and
this is hown by his appalling prose style -- for one cannot conceive of
an idea apart from the words in which it is expressed...Mr Williams's
prose is that of a propagandist; it is fuzzy on principle, swathed in
circumlocutions, emitting multisyllabic words as the cuttlefish does
clouds of ink, and for very much the same purpose..."
>In the concluding "Continuities" section, Williams comments, "Most
>radicals, I have noticed, prefer his essays, as if 'The Art of Donald
>McGill' or 'Dickens' or 'How the Poor Die' or 'Raffles and Miss
>Blandish' were somehow his major works. I admire these and many of the
>other essays, but I don't believe they can be isolated from his other
>work, and an Orwell restricted to them would be a much smaller
>figure..." Two of the four essays are among those cited in TD's previous
>post. Yes, it's a funny kind of admiration/acknowledgment.
The best treatment I know of this theme is again Christopher Hitchens's
long 1999 lecture on Orwell and Raymond Williams, which is far too long
for me to dare to summarise. It is being published in Critical
Quarterly.
>Given all this it's hard to picture Williams saying interesting things
>abt popular culture. Would think he'd dismiss a lot of it as lacking
>political meaning. What does he have to say?
Huge intake of breath. That needs *another* book to reply. In a sense
all RW's books deal with the relation between politics and popular
culture, and several of them are entirely on that theme. The following
is a *very*, not to say *extremely*, truncated version of an entirely
inadequate answer.
RW wants to reconcile his political support for the Left, his personal
experience of moving during his life from working-class Wales to a
professorship at Cambridge, his preoccupation with the human aspects of
the theory of communication (going back to watching his father work as a
railway signalman), his study of literature initially under the strong
influence of the Leavises (and therefore at second-hand of TS Eliot --
there are intriguing places where Eliot the conservative and Williams
the socialist say similar things about culture)), his radical wish that
the popular press and TV should not be so trivial and reactionary in
social/political matters, his insistence nonetheless that academic
critics shouldn't scorn the readership/viewership of the mass media from
a position of class or cultural superiority, his idealising wish that
the mass media should be in some form of collective/public ownership
rather than corporate or baronial fiefdoms, his attempts to bring
together the study of cultural forms (how is TV actually experienced?),
cultural ownership (who gets to say what's on it?), cultural content
(what sort of shows get shown and not shown?) and cultural prediction
(what will all this be like in ten, twenty years time? can we stop or
alter it?) --- well, you can see this sentence won't end. I think I give
up at this point -- the answer is also complicated by the fact that RW
became less and less of a Leavisite and more and more of a cultural
materialist, while never really being simply either. Might try another
time -- my brain hurts (Gumby).
>I was thinking about the Bugs Bunny As Culture Hero end of PoMo, not the
>If Everything's Relative I Didn't Do Anything Wrong end of PoMo. But
>does someone
>(greg?) feel like defining the term? I sure can't.
My thought was that while a postmodernist would say a bus ticket is no
more and no less interesting than *King Lear*, Orwell was quite prepared
to say that some books/films/etc were not only disgusting or morally
revolting but also were rubbish. He might enjoy writing about them and
be fascinated by them, but he would also make it clear that they were
the cultural equivalent of cheap sweets. [I know there's more to it than
that, but....]
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam writes
>
> >Given all this it's hard to picture Williams saying interesting things
> >abt popular culture. Would think he'd dismiss a lot of it as lacking
> >political meaning. What does he have to say?
>
>
Sorry about that.
For an encore:
What's postmodernism?
Who are the protagonists in __1984__?
What are some parallels to 20th-century history in __Animal Farm__?
Do you have any essays available on "Shooting an Elephant"?
I have read "Burmese Days," really, cross my heart, I have, but what is
the hero's name and what are the major conflicts in the story?
Just out of purely personal curiosity, I would like to see a 2000-word
essay comparing and contrasting Orwell's John Flory with Conrad's Dr.
Monygham. Please submit in one-sided format by Tuesday at 5 p.m. to
Professor Dawson's Lit. 101.
Please explain 20th-century literature.
"...and the names of all the stars, and of all living things and the
whole history of Middle-earth and Over-heaven and of the Sundering
Seas..."
etc.
/MAB
greg
Martha Bridegam wrote in message <38500E67...@sirius.com>...
>Tom Deveson wrote:
>>
>> Martha Bridegam writes
>>
>> >abt popular culture. Would think he'd dismiss a lot of it as lacking
>> >political meaning. What does he have to say?
>>
brain hurts (Gumby).
>>
>
>Sorry about that.
>
>For an encore:
>
>What's postmodernism?
Here's an example from the Nov. 22 New Yorker:
Wilderness is iteslef an event of deconstruction. Wilderness bewilders. The
bewildering is a dis-orienting, a loss of the directionality inherent in
willful subjectivity. Without centering principle, wilderness is the
constitution (if such a word makes sense anymore) of every being by every
other being, the co-constitution of plant, animal, virus, cloud, breeze,
stream, rock and mountain. Meanings weave, unweave, proliferate and
dissipate. This is the real of monstrous, promiscuous Pan, half-human,
half-animal, everywhere alive. Socrates panics. [finis]
That is from a famous enviornmental theorist named Kieran Suckling.
I've seen worse.
Tom Deveson
>Who are the protagonists in __1984__?
>I have read "Burmese Days," really, cross my heart, I have, but what is
>the hero's name?
Er, er......let's talk about Montaigne. This week's *Times Literary
Supplement* asks writers and critics to name their book-of-the-
millennium (which BTW was an ironic essay-title of Dwight McDonald's)
and two out of the fifty choose Montaigne's Essays.
Have been to the John Carey talk tonight on Utopias and returned home in
recognisable form -- at least, my daughter recognised me. John Carey has
just now been on live TV talking about the use of Princess Diana as a
Madonna-statue in yet another "controversial" art exhibition. No
antimatter explosions to report.
John Carey's talk was very intriguing -- ultra-digested summary of his
theme was that Utopias are necessary to the human imagination but that
their design works by trying to abolish real people. If you start
constructing a utopia, you usually find yourself defining the kinds of
people and varieties of human behaviour (crime, selfishness, etc) you
*don't* want in it.
He mentioned very favourably the Orwell essay on utopias that's in
Davison but not in CEJL. (Hint)
He also referred in the chat afterwards to the series he's been writing
on the books of the century in the Sunday Times. The two biggest batches
of angry letters came after choosing *Coming Up for Air* and *Lucky
Jim*. There'll be a piece in the paper in two weeks summarising the
correspondents' outrage. He authorised me to send best wishes to abg-o,
after I described the generous range of argument/participants -- he made
the point that Orwell is a writer who promotes as much (or more)
intelligent and alert discussion among non-academic readers as among
professional critics.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Chris Pando
>
... snip ...
>
> What's postmodernism?
1. Pynchon and precultural theory
In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the distinction
between ground and figure. The main theme of la Fournier's[1] analysis
of Saussurean semiotics is a mythopoetical reality. The main theme
of Humphrey's[2] model of capitalist feminism is the role of the reader
as participant. In a sense, the premise of precultural theory implies
that consensus is a product of communication.
Saussure promotes the use of subdialectic deappropriation to analyse
sexual identity. But many discourses concerning the praxis of semantic
truth exist. If Saussurean semiotics holds, we have to choose between
the cultural paradigm of expression and subcapitalist discourse.
Baudrillard uses the term 'precultural theory' to denote a textual
totality. Thus, the premise of Saussurean semiotics implies that
sexuality serves to reinforce colonialist perceptions of society, given
that Marx's essay on predeconstructive theory is invalid. Any number of
situationisms concerning Saussurean semiotics may be found. In
Dubliners, Joyce affirms precultural theory; in Ulysses, Joyce
deconstructs subcapitalist discourse. The subject is interpolated
into a Saussurean semiotics that includes language as a paradox.
Courtesy of The Postmodernism Generator, at
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/community/postmodern.html
Chris
--
Hitler, it appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not
raped anybody, nor carried off any pieces of loot with his own
hands, nor personally flogged any prisoners, buried any wounded
men alive, thrown any babies into the air and spitted them on
his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched them off with
church tapers -- in fact he has not done any of the things which
enemy nationals are usually credited with doing in war-time. -
George Orwell
Alan Allport
news:38505F...@earthlink.net...
> In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the distinction
> between ground and figure. The main theme of la Fournier's[1] analysis
> of Saussurean semiotics is a mythopoetical reality. The main theme
> of Humphrey's[2] model of capitalist feminism is the role of the reader
> as participant. In a sense, the premise of precultural theory implies
> that consensus is a product of communication.
Ah, but...
In the works of Wood, a predominant concept is the concept of subdialectic
art. Therefore, Mensonge suggests the use of textual structuralist theory to
challenge the hegemony of sexism over class. If constructivism holds, we
have to choose between the submodern paradigm of discourse and Sontagian
camp. The subject is interpolated into a capitalist postcultural theory that
includes truth as a reality.
Alan.
Alan Allport
news:38500E67...@sirius.com...
> Just out of purely personal curiosity, I would like to see a 2000-word
> essay comparing and contrasting Orwell's John Flory with Conrad's Dr.
> Monygham. Please submit in one-sided format by Tuesday at 5 p.m. to
> Professor Dawson's Lit. 101.
Haven't you ever considered how much money we could make turning a.b.g-o
into an honest-to-goodness term paper mill, knocking out timeworn apercus
about Boxer's relationship to Napoleon at a dollar a line?
Alan.
greg
Martha Bridegam interrogated our assumptions thus:
>yada, spam, spam, misinterpretation, still relevant today
>although the Wall's down, spam spam and that Little List goes to show
>you never can tell."
Is that the Jewish communist list? Has there been any serious examination of
what he was up to, now that the initial fallout/media blitz took place?
Martha Bridegam
>
<Snip interesting Carey>
>
> ....He mentioned very favourably the Orwell essay on utopias that's in
> Davison but not in CEJL. (Hint)....
Happy to type it up but sorry, not sure which article you mean. I expect
you *don't* mean "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun," since that one's
on Alan's site, at http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~allport/chestnut/fun.htm.
But not sure which other one you & Mr. Carey have in mind.
Got a year, an extract of text, or a vague synopsis I could start from?
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam wrote:
> >
>
> ... snip ...
>
> >
> > What's postmodernism?
>
> 1. Pynchon and precultural theory
>
> between ground and figure. The main theme of la Fournier's[1] analysis
> of Saussurean semiotics is a mythopoetical reality. The main theme
> of Humphrey's[2] model of capitalist feminism is the role of the reader
> as participant. In a sense, the premise of precultural theory implies
[Socrates reaches for the hemlock...]
>
> .........Courtesy of The Postmodernism Generator, at
> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/community/postmodern.html
That thing's amazing. Guess we may not have artificial intelligence but
we've sure got artificial pseudointellectualism.
OK, seriously, isn't postmodernism something broader than the
deconstructionism you & greg are lampooning? E.g. I had the idea that
"postmodern" architecture includes those silly 1980s office buildings
that use blank pink stone 'medallions' where a Victorian architect would
have put up fanlights or edifying plaques. And that generally po-mo has
to do with quoting from older things in new contexts, instead of just
extruding slick new stuff. So that rap music, for example, would be
postmodern in its use of "sampling." Am probably just wrong here.
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
>
> Haven't you ever considered how much money we could make turning a.b.g-o
> into an honest-to-goodness term paper mill, knocking out timeworn apercus
> about Boxer's relationship to Napoleon at a dollar a line?
Dollar a line? Too steep I think -- for the high-school market anyhow.
Suppose we could handle undergraduate theses?
Or howzabout we build a machine to do it for us? Not like a passable
Orwell essay is brain surgery:
"Blah blah blah, boot, face, but yet, blah blah, hope, proles, decency,
blah, crystal spirit, eventual despair, yada, yada, Victorian
sentimentality, mint humbugs, but paradoxically faith in Socialism,
blah, Boxer, yada, fruit juice, Tory Anarchist, wintry conscience, spam,
spam, midnight of the century, spam, bleak view despite flashes of humor
but after all he was sick half the time, blah, spam, anticommunism,
Koestler, yada, spam, spam, misinterpretation, still relevant today
although the Wall's down, spam spam and that Little List goes to show
you never can tell."
/MAB
Gene Zitver
>"Blah blah blah <snip> and that Little List goes to show
>you never can tell."
Great stuff, and I especially like that Chuck Berry flourish at the end. In
fact Chuck could probably turn the whole thing into a song (cf _Too Much
Monkey Business_).
Gene
Tom Deveson
>
><Snip interesting Carey>
Sorry, I just got the impression there was a piece called Utopias or
some such. Will try to chase up relevant data.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
>OK, seriously, isn't postmodernism something broader than the
>deconstructionism you & greg are lampooning?
As you say, OK, seriously....
It's worth looking at how introductions to Postmodernism do the initial
definition -- they tend to point in all directions simultaneously.
*Postmodernism for Beginners* (1998)in the Writers and Readers series
begins its chapter 'What is Postmodernism?' (after a definition of
Modernism which persistently refers to *The Waste Land* by the name
*Wasteland*) with the question "Then how does Postmodernism differ from
modernism?"
You wait expectantly. Then the answer comes: "There is little agreement
on the subject, partly because 'Postmodernism' -- whatever it is -- is
an attempt to make sense of what is going on now -- and we can see the
present clearly only in retrospect."
Then comes a set of paired contrasts (courtesy of Ihab Hassan):
Modernism: Form (conjunctive/closed)
Postmodernism: Antiform (disjunctive/open)
Modernism: Purpose
Postmodernism: Play
Mo: Design
Pomo: Chance
Mo: Hierarchy
Pomo: Anarchy
Mo: Art Object/Finished Work
Pomo: Process/Performance/Happening
Mo: Presence
Pomo: Absence
Mo: Centering
Pomo: Dispersal
Mo: Genre/Boundary
Pomo: Text/Intertext [there's your rap/sampling]
Mo: Root/Depth
Pomo: Rhizome/Surface
On the other hand, the introduction to *Postmodernism: A Reader* edited
by Patricia Waugh (1992), after saying that there are many
postmodernisms, each of which has invented its own theoretical
precursors and historical trajectories, goes on to suggest that for the
purposes of this particular book, postmodernism is "a theoretical and
representational 'mood', developing over the last twenty years and
characterised by an extension of what had previously been purely
*aesthetic* concerns into the demesne of what Kant had called the
spheres of the 'cognitive' or scientific and the 'practical' or moral."
I guess a blanket definition might be that it is a set of reactions to
and accounts of the way the 'grand narratives' of the Enlightenment and
its direct cultural consequences have broken down.
But possibly not. After all, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's *Answering the
Question: What is Postmodernism?* comes the sentence: "It seems to me
that the essay (Montaigne) is post-modern, while the fragment (The
Athenaeum) is modern."
As Montaigne said: "There's more ado to interpret interpretations than
to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other
subject. We do but intergloss ourselves. (*Of Experience* in the 1603
Florio translation
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam interrogated our assumptions thus:
>
> >you never can tell."
>
It's the list of supposed Communists and fellow-travelers (including
U.S. Sen. Claude Pepper) that paid offensive undue attention to race &
religion. It also called Paul Robeson "very anti-white."
> Has there been any serious examination of
> what he was up to, now that the initial fallout/media blitz took place?
Don't know more than what we've discussed here before: there are
suggestions that he had maintained the list with Richard Rees as a hobby
for years; he gave the list to Celia Kirwan, to whom he had also
proposed marriage, when he wasn't strong enough to do any fresh work for
her hearts-and-minds project; he felt Stalinist intellectuals were a
danger; he did this in Britain, which was not the home of Joe McCarthy;
nevertheless it was a stinking thing to do.
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Alan Allport
> It's the list of supposed Communists and fellow-travelers (including
> U.S. Sen. Claude Pepper) that paid offensive undue attention to race &
> religion. It also called Paul Robeson "very anti-white."
... the modifiers suggesting that it is possible to pay inoffensive and due
attention to these things? How un-Bridegamlike (though possibly quite true).
And *was* Paul Robeson very anti-white? Genuine question - don't know much
of anything about him. The suggestion seems to be though that this is a
priori absurd, which I find unconvincing. Was Stokely Carmichael very
anti-white? Sure sounds it to me.
Alan.
Martha Bridegam
>
> Martha Bridegam <jo...@sirius.com> wrote in message
> news:38513765...@sirius.com...
>
> > It's the list of supposed Communists and fellow-travelers (including
> > U.S. Sen. Claude Pepper) that paid offensive undue attention to race &
> > religion. It also called Paul Robeson "very anti-white."
>
> ... the modifiers suggesting that it is possible to pay inoffensive and due
> attention to these things? How un-Bridegamlike (though possibly quite true).
Ouch. I'll speak more plainly: Orwell labeled the people on his list not
only as Communist or sympathetic to Communism, but also sometimes as
Black, Jewish or Catholic. It is uncomfortable to think about why. I
expect Mary McCarthy would have had a theory or two if she'd heard about
this.
> And *was* Paul Robeson very anti-white? Genuine question - don't know much
> of anything about him. The suggestion seems to be though that this is a
> priori absurd, which I find unconvincing.
There's Some Of His Best Friends evidence to the contrary: Robeson was a
close associate of many white '30s Communists in the United States. He's
in some of Jessica Mitford's family pictures as reproduced in __A Fine
Old Conflict__. Don't know more than that.
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Martha Bridegam
>
>
> I guess a blanket definition might be that it is a set of reactions to
> and accounts of the way the 'grand narratives' of the Enlightenment and
> its direct cultural consequences have broken down.
>
> But possibly not. After all, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's *Answering the
> Question: What is Postmodernism?* comes the sentence: "It seems to me
> that the essay (Montaigne) is post-modern, while the fragment (The
> Athenaeum) is modern."
OK, wasn't Montaigne also a puncturer of sweeping narratives? I mean,
the man goes to visit the Pope and bitches about his gallstones all the
way, right?
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
Tom Deveson
>> And *was* Paul Robeson very anti-white? Genuine question - don't know much
>> of anything about him. The suggestion seems to be though that this is a
>> priori absurd, which I find unconvincing.
>
>There's Some Of His Best Friends evidence to the contrary: Robeson was a
>close associate of many white '30s Communists in the United States. He's
>in some of Jessica Mitford's family pictures as reproduced in __A Fine
>Old Conflict__. Don't know more than that.
This is going off topic slightly, but then again maybe it's not. The
introduction to Josef Skvorecky's wonderful novella *The Bass Saxophone*
(1967) is called 'Red Music.' It's about being a young jazz enthusiast
and sax player in Czechoslovakia during the 1940s. This taste was first
denounced by Goebbels -- "ugly sounds of whining instruments so
insulting to the soul" and then as the Nazis issued directives banning
"Judeo-Negroid music" was described in complex bureaucratic ways
(definitions quoted by Skvorecky, but I can't type all the details now.)
Then, as S says, "the censors of an entirely different dictatorship" got
to work in the late 1940s and new Goebbelses "started working in fields
that had been cleared by the old demon. They had their own little Soviet
bibles...their vocabulary was not very different...except that they
were, if possible, even prouder of their ignorance....They compared the
music to 'the moaning in the throat of a camel' and 'the hiccuping of a
drunk', and though it was 'the music of cannibals', it was at the same
time invented by the capitalists 'to deafen the ears of the Marshallized
world by means of epileptic loud-mouthed compositions.' [S gives chapter
and verse for these quotes.]
"Unfortunately, these Orwellian masters soon found their disciples among
Czechs, who in turn -- after the fashion of disciples -- went even
further than their preceptors, declaring wildly that jazz was aimed 'at
annihilating the people's own music in their souls..' "
Skvorecky goes on to talk about the appeal of Stan Kenton, but "In place
of Kenton, they pushed Paul Robeson at us, and how we hated that Black
apostle who sang, of his own free will, at open-air concerts in Prague
at a time when they were raising the Socialist leader Milada Horakova to
the gallows, the only woman ever to be executed for political reasons in
Czechoslovakia by Czechs...Well, maybe it was wrong to hold it against
Paul Robeson. No doubt he was acting in good faith, convinced that he
was fighting for a good cause. But they kept holding him up to us as an
exemplary 'progressive jazz man', and we hated him. May God rest his --
hopefully -- innocent soul.."
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
greg
Martha Bridegam wrote in message <38513765...@sirius.com>...
>greg wrote:
>>
>> Martha Bridegam interrogated our assumptions thus:
>>
>Don't know more than what we've discussed here before: there are
>suggestions that he had maintained the list with Richard Rees as a hobby
>for years; he gave the list to Celia Kirwan, to whom he had also
>proposed marriage, when he wasn't strong enough to do any fresh work for
>her hearts-and-minds project; he felt Stalinist intellectuals were a
>danger; he did this in Britain, which was not the home of Joe McCarthy;
>nevertheless it was a stinking thing to do.
It sounds stinking, but there's got to be some reason why he thought one's
religious persuasion was relevant, especially if what was all-encompassingly
objectionable was being a 'Stalinist intellectual'; what would it matter
what your religion was, especially as Stalinist doctrine wasn't/isn't
amenable to religious activity of any type?
greg
Tom Deveson wrote in message <7DinVNA3...@devesons.demon.co.uk>...
>Then comes a set of paired contrasts (courtesy of Ihab Hassan):
>
>Modernism: Form (conjunctive/closed)
>Postmodernism: Antiform (disjunctive/open)
Meaning: You don't ever have to make up your mind.
>Modernism: Purpose
>Postmodernism: Play
Meaning: Croquet and lawn darts in the groves of academe (MMcCarthy's rather
than Milton's)
>Mo: Design
>Pomo: Chance
Meaning: Relative principled relativism
>Mo: Hierarchy
>Pomo: Anarchy
Meaning: All sleepy sophomores are rebels.
>Mo: Art Object/Finished Work
>Pomo: Process/Performance/Happening
Meaning: Thank goodness for open-ended grants
>Mo: Presence
>Pomo: Absence
Meaning: No idea
>Mo: Centering
>Pomo: Dispersal
Meaning: Everyone who isn't provincial is in political exile
>Mo: Genre/Boundary
>Pomo: Text/Intertext [there's your rap/sampling]
Meaning: You better like rap
>On the other hand, the introduction to *Postmodernism: A Reader* edited
>by Patricia Waugh (1992), after saying that there are many
>postmodernisms, each of which has invented its own theoretical
>precursors and historical trajectories
I had come to believe that 'trajectory' was just another vague academic's
word when they aren't sure what they mean, but GO uses it in one essay when
talking about Joyce, that Portrait OTA and Ulysses were part of the
trajectory away from Dubliners and towards Finnegans Wake. He also says that
Dubliners has 'a frigid competence', which seems like a perfect
characterization to me. Would like to know if he wrote on Joyce elsewhere
(other than the Dickens essay and the Henry Miller piece)...
>As Montaigne said: "There's more ado to interpret interpretations than
>to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other
>subject. We do but intergloss ourselves. "
Grist for the publishing mills..
Gene Zitver
>It sounds stinking, but there's got to be some reason why he thought one's
>religious persuasion was relevant, especially if what was
all-encompassingly
>objectionable was being a 'Stalinist intellectual';
No more reason, I think, than for any of GO's other anti-semitic comments.
It was just an unfortunate part of who he was (I suppose his upbringing and
the times he lived in are partially to blame), and much as we might like to
wish it away, it's still there. Intellectually he tried to suppress his
anti-semitism, but never quite succeeded.
> what would it matter
>what your religion was, especially as Stalinist doctrine wasn't/isn't
>amenable to religious activity of any type?
As Tom might say, books have been written on the subject, but very briefly:
for most Jews (e.g. myself), Jewishness is more a matter of
national/ethnic/cultural identity than religion. The majority of Jews in
Israel are more or less secular. I would guess that most of the Jews Orwell
knew, and mentioned in his list, fit into this category.
Gene
Alan Allport
news:82sr5d$4ns$1...@news.netvision.net.il...
> As Tom might say, books have been written on the subject, but very
briefly:
> for most Jews (e.g. myself), Jewishness is more a matter of
> national/ethnic/cultural identity than religion. The majority of Jews in
> Israel are more or less secular. I would guess that most of the Jews
Orwell
> knew, and mentioned in his list, fit into this category.
Orwell wrote (or at least edited the latest compilation of) this list in the
late 1940s, during the British withdrawal from the Palestine Mandate and the
first round of the Arab-Israeli wars, a period of great Anglo-Jewish
politicization. When he talks about Jewishness in the list, he's referring
to it in the same way as he might Russian citizenship ie. as a possible
source of anti-Western influence (it being far from clear at that point
where Israel would fall in the great Cold War divide). I don't say that this
was a particularly fair assessment and it certainly doesn't look too
appetizing from our vantage point, but I don't think referring to religion
in this way in c. 1948 was quite as arbitrary as it seems in 1999.
Alan.
Alex Ball
<a...@devesons.demon.co.uk> wrote:
<snip>
>On the other hand, the introduction to *Postmodernism: A Reader* edited
>by Patricia Waugh (1992)
<snip>
Who also wrote _Metafiction : The Theory and Practice of Self-Concious
Fiction_ which I heartily recommend. It's out of print now (IIRC) but
I managed to pick up a copy for half the list price through
http://www.clique.co.uk/bib.htm which is a set of links through to
out-of-print bookstores.
Why is this post starting to sound like a particularly insidious piece
of spam?
Anyway, the book is very good, although requires the right frame of
mind to get into it. Some very intersting insights. It has led me to
start reading Fowles' _The French Lieutentants's Woman_ which I'm
greatly enjoying.
The customer review of the Waugh on www.amazon.co.uk is worth look
just for the phrasea about headaches.
--
Alex Ball
alex...@mail.com
ICQ:17821675
Martha Bridegam
>
> ......Skvorecky goes on to talk about the appeal of Stan Kenton, but "In place
> of Kenton, they pushed Paul Robeson at us, and how we hated that Black
> apostle who sang, of his own free will, at open-air concerts in Prague
> at a time when they were raising the Socialist leader Milada Horakova to
Our recent discussions seem to have their thumb on the pulse of __The
Nation__, or vice versa. The 12/20/99 issue has Cockburn lambasting the
Big Labor WTO protesters who turned out for a rally in Seattle, but who
he says could have done a lot more good 15 blocks away with the civil
disobedience folks who were then being tear-gassed, shot at, etc.
On the facing page is a column by Paul Robeson, Jr., saying newly
released FBI and CIA records encourage his suspicions that his father's
hitherto unexplained suicide attempt in Moscow in 1961 may have been
caused by CIA-initiated drugging. Robeson Sr. was then subjected to
electroshock 'treatment' at a psychiatric hospital in Britain, which his
son now also attributes to the CIA. Hard to credit conspiracy theories,
but you never know. Those must have been strange times.
BTW Mr. Cockburn has this to say in the midst of a 12/6/99 Leters to the
Editor battle:
"...I've come to think that, sadly, often there's far more likelihood
that a liberal will be a statist authoritarian than a conservative will
be an anarchist. It was not me but my dead friend Jack Finnegan, a lumpy
from the Glasgow slums, who liked to bill himself as 'ML' by political
persuasion, adding wryly, 'Monarchist-Leninist.' It was sort of a joke.
But, sure, looking at efficient, modern-minded Tony Blair, who's now
making the House of Lords into a quango, what radical wouldn't identify
with that energetic foe of Monsanto, Prince Charles? Go on, I dare you!
Call me an anarcho-monarchist-constitutionalist. Dirty beast!..."
Who does that sound like? (And what's a 'lumpy'? Anything like a
wobbly?)
/MAB
Gene Zitver
>Our recent discussions seem to have their thumb on the pulse of __The
>Nation__, or vice versa. The 12/20/99 issue has Cockburn lambasting the
>Big Labor WTO protesters who turned out for a rally in Seattle, but who
>he says could have done a lot more good 15 blocks away with the civil
>disobedience folks who were then being tear-gassed, shot at, etc.
Don't get me started on Cockburn. I don't know if he's still doing it, but
in the 80s he was writing flatter-the-rich pieces for House & Garden
magazine. IMHO this weakens his moral authority when it comes to lecturing
labor folks on their behavior in Seattle-- especially if he wasn't being
tear-gassed and shot at himself.
As for "Big Labor"-- if only it *were*. The term implies some kind of equity
with Big Business that these days, unfortunately, doesn't come close to
existing.
Gene
Martha Bridegam
>
> Don't get me started on Cockburn. I don't know if he's still doing it, but
> in the 80s he was writing flatter-the-rich pieces for House & Garden
> magazine. IMHO this weakens his moral authority when it comes to lecturing
> labor folks on their behavior in Seattle-- especially if he wasn't being
> tear-gassed and shot at himself.
Ow. (And OK, I wasn't there either.)
House & Garden, for real? About what?
>
> As for "Big Labor"-- if only it *were*. The term implies some kind of equity
> with Big Business that these days, unfortunately, doesn't come close to
> existing.
So shall we say Mainstream Labor?
;-)
/MAB
--
jo...@sirius.com
greg
Gene Zitver wrote in message <830ufo$jgs$1...@news.netvision.net.il>...
>Don't get me started on Cockburn. I don't know if he's still doing it, but
>in the 80s he was writing flatter-the-rich pieces for House & Garden
>magazine. IMHO this weakens his moral authority when it comes to lecturing
>labor folks on their behavior in Seattle-- especially if he wasn't being
>tear-gassed and shot at himself.
And Cockburn's friends don't sound half as colorful as he seems to think
they are. I mean, 'my friend thinks I'm an anarchist, but I think *he's* an
anarchist' stuff. We're in ninth grade again.
Martha Bridegam
Had meant to point out the irony of Cockburn pretty near calling himself
a "Tory Anarchist," yet leaving old family nemesis Orwell out of the
discussion.
BTW Joel spotted a ghastly/funny item in the WTO coverage: a municipal
apology to Seattle bystanders who had been "unnecessarily gassed, beaten
and shot." As though -- to borrow a thought from Alan -- there were
moments when it *was* necessary.
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>I had come to believe that 'trajectory' was just another vague academic's
>word when they aren't sure what they mean, but GO uses it in one essay when
>talking about Joyce, that Portrait OTA and Ulysses were part of the
>trajectory away from Dubliners and towards Finnegans Wake. He also says that
>Dubliners has 'a frigid competence', which seems like a perfect
>characterization to me.
Even 'The Dead'? Even the last pages of 'The Dead'?
Cyril Cusack read it on the radio many years ago. My parents were just
carrying out the dishes to do the washing-up, and stopped and then stood
frozen holding the cups and plates for twenty minutes while he spoke
those last pages. Surely the cadences are heart-stoppingly whatever is
the opposite of frigid.
>Would like to know if he wrote on Joyce elsewhere
>(other than the Dickens essay and the Henry Miller piece)...
Biographically, there's a mention in a letter that he thought he saw JJ
once in the *Deux Magots* in 1928 but couldn't be sure. (BTW, he was
also living near the Scott Fitzgeralds when he was in Paris, but didn't
get to know them, nor Hemingway either.)
In his own practice as a novelist, there's the obvious debt to Joyce's
Nighttown in *A Clergyman's Daughter* in the Trafalgar Square scene.
There are some parallels between *Portrait of the Artist* and *Such,
Such Were The Joys* -- being bullied by bigger boys, being pushed into
the mud at football (Stephen Dedalus is pushed into cold slimy water),
being beaten unjustly and called 'you little slacker' (Stephen is called
'lazy idle little loafer') and being threatened by hell-fire sermons.
But these parallels sadly come from life as much as from literature. So
too, perhaps, with the line from *Portrait* which has an Orwellian ring
to it, describing how Stephen 'was conscious of failure and of
detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his
neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.'
In *Coming Up for Air* there are some echoes too. It might be mere
coincidence that the firm building houses on Bowling's street is Wilson
and Bloom. But Bowling *is* like Bloom in some ways, being unpredictably
bookish, curious, amicable, slightly vulgar, nostalgic, a salesman
[though George B feels superior to newspaper canvassers, which is
Bloom's job], full of odd information and passing thoughts from the
associations of memory. King Zog reminding Bowling of King Og of Bashan
is the sort of thing that happens in Bloom's mind all the time. Bowling
must be a conscious effort on GO's part to do what he admiringly
described Joyce as doing: writing about 'ordinary people behaving in an
ordinary manner', summing 'up better than any book I know the fearful
despair that is almost normal in modern times', and making Bloom 'a
rather exceptionally sensitive specimen of the man in the street',
making the point here that 'the cultivated man and the man in the street
so rarely meet in modern literature.' Bowling reads Paul de Kock, as
does Molly Bloom. The epigraph of *Coming Up for Air* --'He's dead, but
he won't lie down' -- is like a one-sentence summary of *Finnegans Wake*
[the Irish song *and* the novel].
As for writing about Joyce -- There's a long fluent but rather didactic
letter to Brenda Salkeld [December 1933] in which GO speaks admiringly
of Joyce at greater length. I can summarise it if you like, but most
people have probably got access to the CEJL (have you?) -- it's Vol 1,
Item 49. That's probably the main account of his personal experience of
Joyce. He writes to her a bit later [Sept 1934] saying he almost wishes
he hadn't read *Ulysses* because it makes him feel so inferior as a
writer, 'like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.'
The radio talk *The Rediscovery of Europe* in 1942 (CEJL 2/Item 31) also
has quite a bit about Joyce. It compares *Ulysses* to Galsworthy at some
length. Again, I can summarise if you haven't got access to CEJL.
Then there are passing references, like the remark re FW that Joyce in
trying to make up a language is 'as absurd as one man trying to play
football alone' which I suppose is an interesting and unconscious rough-
hewn parallel to Wittgenstein's contemporary account of the varieties
and kinds of game ('Spiel') being analogous to the diversity of
linguistic usages. Or there's a nice *As I Please* column about JJ in
March 1944 (CEJL 3 Item 26) which puts the boot into The Times for its
'mean, cagey little obituary' and goes on to reflect on the *Inside the
Whale* issues of the connection between writing and politics,
speculating that even JJ would have been afflicted by Hitler.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
> <Snip interesting comparisons to Joyce>
>
> ....But Bowling *is* like Bloom in some ways, being unpredictably
> bookish, curious, amicable, slightly vulgar, nostalgic, a salesman
> [though George B feels superior to newspaper canvassers, which is
Not sure if this is relevant, but Orwell felt sufficiently removed from
Bowling's character to do some preparatory research. There's a letter to
a friend saying he has a certain income in mind for a 'commercial
traveller' character in a story & would that be a realistic figure &
what route would the salesman be likely to travel.
BTW, since Bloom's status has to do partly with his wife's singing as
well as his own job, he's not really on a social level below Bowling, is
he?
/MAB
Gene Zitver
>Gene Zitver wrote:
>>
>> Don't get me started on Cockburn. I don't know if he's still doing it,
but
>> in the 80s he was writing flatter-the-rich pieces for House & Garden
>> magazine. IMHO this weakens his moral authority when it comes to
lecturing
>> labor folks on their behavior in Seattle-- especially if he wasn't being
>> tear-gassed and shot at himself.
>
>Ow. (And OK, I wasn't there either.)
>
>House & Garden, for real? About what?
It's been many years since I saw one of his H&G pieces, and I really can't
remember. I *think* they were travel articles aimed at well-to-do
travellers. Or maybe about antiques. I do remember failing to detect any
left-wing political content. Maybe someone with access to a library with
back issues of H&G could do a little research.
>> As for "Big Labor"-- if only it *were*. The term implies some kind of
equity
>> with Big Business that these days, unfortunately, doesn't come close to
>> existing.
>
>So shall we say Mainstream Labor?
OK, I can live with that. : - )
Gene
Tom Deveson
>BTW, since Bloom's status has to do partly with his wife's singing as
>well as his own job, he's not really on a social level below Bowling, is
>he?
I wouldn't care to discriminate among the class distinctions of Dublin
1904 and Home Counties 1938, but, if I *had* to adjudicate, I would
guess that Bloom is middle-lower-upper-lower-middle class and Bowling is
lower-middle-upper-lower-middle class. Or the other way round.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
> BTW, since Bloom's status has to do partly with his wife's singing as
> well as his own job, he's not really on a social level below Bowling, is
> he?
Don't know about Edwardian Dublin, but the lot of the newspaper canvassers
GO describes in _Wigan Pier_ (or maybe its the WP Diary) is singularly
unhappy. He presents it a job-of-last-resorts, or nearabouts. Whereas
Bowling is doing quite nicely - indeed, his quest in CUFA is surely a
rebellion against the safe but spritually unfulfilling quality-of-life
insurance package he's coddled himself in.
Alan.
Jonathan Mason
Tom Deveson <a...@devesons.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:A9bJKXAV...@devesons.demon.co.uk...
> greg writes
> >I had come to believe that 'trajectory' was just another vague academic's
> >word when they aren't sure what they mean, but GO uses it in one essay
when
> >talking about Joyce, that Portrait OTA and Ulysses were part of the
> >trajectory away from Dubliners and towards Finnegans Wake. He also says
that
> >Dubliners has 'a frigid competence', which seems like a perfect
> >characterization to me.
>
> Nighttown in *A Clergyman's Daughter* in the Trafalgar Square scene.
> There are some parallels between *Portrait of the Artist* and *Such,
> Such Were The Joys* -- being bullied by bigger boys, being pushed into
> the mud at football (Stephen Dedalus is pushed into cold slimy water),
> being beaten unjustly and called 'you little slacker' (Stephen is called
> 'lazy idle little loafer') and being threatened by hell-fire sermons.
> But these parallels sadly come from life as much as from literature. So
> too, perhaps, with the line from *Portrait* which has an Orwellian ring
> to it, describing how Stephen 'was conscious of failure and of
> detection, of the squalor of his own mind and home, and felt against his
> neck the raw edge of his turned and jagged collar.'
Yes, indeed! In Crick's biography there is much discussion as to how factual
"Such, such were the joys" is, with some Old St. Cyprians taking violent
issue, and others saying "yes, a boy was beaten for bedwetting, but not
Blair." But it struck me too that the beating for breaking his glasses
featured also in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, if my memory does
not trick me, is of that same Orwellian quality of being punished for
something over which one has no control.
The feel of Fatty Bowlings soapy neck against the collar in the opening of
Coming Up For Air also has parallels with the passage quoted just above
these comments.