The Politics of Literary Reputation

...He to an intellectual history of Howe begins by chronicling some of the per- himself...

...To invoke our culture's writer of recent years—throughout his bravest critic of totalitarianism as life, Orwell seemed to believe that the a symbol of injustice is rather like pressing problems of political organizablaming Lou Gehrig for Lou Gehrig's tion and economic equity would more disease...

...Still, some of Rodden's "faces" of Orwell are more equal than others, and he has no qualms about calling Orwell "a democratic socialist...

...to The Orwell Rodden admires most is him, what is at stake is nothing less I that of Irving Howe, whom he than the "ransacking of Orwell's lega- calls the "designated keeper of the cy," and he spends well over 400 pages Orwell flame...

...police state, and come away disappointed...

...To claim Orwell as one of their own...

...Norman Podhoretz sees Laced with jargon, the book is slow him as a guiding spirit of neoconser- going, and will appeal more to acavatism, Christopher Hitchens finds demics than to lovers of Orwell...

...he preferred the old ways, the traditional ways, which is surely not the road of socialism...

...book is a litany of academic and jourSome of these characterizations of nalistic bickering...

...Thatcher's share-owning welfare state, Castro's low-tech Stalinism, or even the redistributive capitalism of contemporary America...

...Institutional and individual teen Eighty-Four as an "ideological attitudes are lumped into these categorsuperweapon" for the West...

...Podhoretz merely brought Orwell to bear on certain defined foreign policy issues, like the disarmament movement, which rests on the pacifism that Orwell deplored...

...ticism...

...been readers...

...Rodden calls the article "audacious," and accuses Podhoretz of "converting Orwell posthumously, and of caricature...

...John Rodden disagrees...

...It seems uncharitable of Rodden to expect his own preoccupations to be covered in such an article, which has more the tone of a jeu d'esprit than of a propagandist tract...

...Analyzing his political role in Bolshevism, the author reviews Trotsky's insights and limitations, his failure to gain command of the Party after the death of Lenin, and the fatal weakness in his struggle against Stalin...

...343 pages (Rare photographs) Cloth $24.95 At better bookstores or order directly from Prometheus Books Toll free (800) 421-0351 • In N.Y...

...Rodden breaks re- Podhoretz's, which makes sense only sponses to Orwell down into a "picture for the fact that both are New York gallery" of four Orwellian "faces": the Jews who came to intellectual maturity Rebel, the Common Man, the Prophet, together in the 1950s...

...anyone look-ownership," Christopher Hollis meets ing for Orwell the tramp, the gardener, a Catholic, Izvestia comes up with a the war hero, the sexual adventurer, will chronicler of the U.S...

...In 1947, Orwell offered to subsidize the distribution of Animal Farm in the Eastern bloc, and it's unlikely he would have grown more trusting of the Soviet Union had he lived to see the tanks roll into Budapest and Prague...

...Rodden is an enemy Orwell's work are based on bias, others of cultural canons ("all reputations are on ignorance, but, at first glance, sort- adventitious and conditional"), and is ing out the "true" Orwell from the overindulgent of some of Orwell's more "false" Orwell seems hardly more im- fatuous readers...

...we get "Trilling's Orwell," "Wiltemporary readers would share his slant, liams's Orwell," "The Soviet Union's but there have been as many different Orwell," "Orwell in the Classroom," readings of George Orwell as there have and so on...

...Most con- ies...

...in the more active section of the Left the orthodoxy of the moment is anti-Americanism...

...Podhoretz seems on firm ground when quoting him: "If someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother...

...Even in his socialist dodge creditors, beat their wives, and manifesto The Lion and the Unicorn, worry about birthmarks...

...If Howe's Orwell is the fullest, Podhoretz's is the sharpChristopher Caldwell is an editor and est politically, despite Rodden's skepwriter living in Washington...

...Neither Podhoretz nor Rodden mentions the remarks of Frederic Warburg, who became Orwell's publisher after Victor Gollancz rejected Homage to Catalonia for fear that it would offend the British Communist party: I don't think he was ever a socialist, although he would have described himself as a socialist...

...How anyone can believe [in cutting links with America] after looking at the map and remembering what happened to neutrals in the late war, I do not know...

...Podhoretz was "a good deal more TROTSKY Memoir and Critique by Albert Glotzer E yewitness history...

...The paperback edition . . . contained a preface by Gollancz himself saying that Orwell was in fact acting as devil's advocate against socialism, though omitting to mention that Orwell was not only a devil's advocate but believed the views of the devil's advocate...

...27.50 Christopher Caldwell D uring the Cold War, the Marxist and the Saint (he's a big one for tax-Isaac Deutscher described Nine- onomies...

...It can be expected that those who helped create Orwell's reputation will differ on what socialism means, but, in a book that begs the question of Or-well's political allegiances on every page, one expects to see the issue of his socialist sympathies better defined...

...His claiming of Orwell doesn't sound "audacious" to me...

...both an expanded critical bibliography Rodden pairs and contrasts Howe's and a systematic study of reputation as reception of Orwell with Norman a literary issue...

...There (ben trovato...

...As for where he would have stood today, Orwell was anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-Scots, anti-Irish, anti-Indian, anti-homosexual (he referred to Oxbridge Marxists as "the pansy Left"), rabidly anti-Catholic, and probably anti-Semitic, views which would certainly have excluded him from the special-interest politics of the Dukakis-era Democrats or the Kinnockera Labour party...

...as the Marcos government needed to get away from politics...

...portant than figuring out whether Jesus was black or whether God is a woman...

...collapses, a newspaper writes, "Or- Howe subtly catches a key to Orwell's well Takes Over as Philippine Society status as the only beloved political Crumbles...

...How could [Gollancz] publish a book which, brilliant as it was, was all the same violently anti-socialist...

...A onetime compatriot of Leon Trotsky recounts his early days in the Party, examines Trotsky's writings, describes his years of exile, and vividly narrates his dramatic deposition at the Dewey Commission Hearings in Mexico City...

...He didn't like progress...

...Reagan be Reagan, but it is frighten- "I came to appreciate," says Howe, ing to think about letting Reagan be "the side of Orwell that wanted and Orwell...

...likely be solved in pubs than in parThe Politics of Literary Reputation is liaments...

...R odden, who describes himself as a "left-of-center white male of working-class origins, a post-Vatican II Catholic liberal, an academic in English and Communication Studies, and an American who came to Orwell's work in the 1970s," claims not to carry a brief for any political camp, and for the most part he is scrupulously fair-minded...

...Orwell was uncomfortable with the 50English class system, which has no read him alongside the explicitly politiequivalent in this country, and Rodden cal literature of his era, like those could have done a better job in distill- "socialist realism" novels in which the ing Orwell's class obsessions from his guy who gets the girl is the one who economic ones and acknowledging the requisitions the most grain, is to realize difference...

...write poetry, go to whores, play polo, Orwell used political terms with a gamble, pick hops, have bad teeth, similar vagueness...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989...

...he devotes several pages setting our hero's house in order...

...Under such a vague rubric how rare it is for political writers to it's no more difficult to claim Orwell think about human beings...

...Rodden's unwillingness to define the term "socialism" is itself a grave failing...

...The Orwell Howe knows is the versions Orwell's name has undergone: fullest in the book, largely because Senator Kennedy tells the National Rodden gives him the breathing room Press Club, "We might agree to let to expatiate on the nonpolitical Orwell...

...If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were `decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible...

...Rodden never makes clear whether he's referring to Mrs...

...Orwell's as a socialist than it is to claim him as characters fish, drink, swindle, pray, an Englishman with a moustache...

...a believer in `.`common is little of the man here...

...Except where he made only tentative recommenda- political change is no longer the prerogtions for any political program, and in ative of human beings, readers of every his novels political ideals are always political stripe are going to want to running up against human frailties...

...14215 #20128 49 diffident" about claiming Orwell as a nonsocialist, and didn't press the point, aside from citing the famous remark from The Road to Wigan Pier that "the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England...

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...Rodden's reading of Podhoretz THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989rests on a controversial 1983 Harper's article, "If Orwell Were Alive Today," in which Podhoretz claimed Orwell would have been a neoconservative...

...Rodden is far Christian and Jewish fundamentalists more concerned with Orwell's "recepsee Nineteen Eighty-Four as an Ar- tion history," and for long passages the mageddon prophecy...