Writers and Writing Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS Dylan Thomas and George Orwell-So Different, Yet in One Way So Alike By Granville Hicks There has been considerable controversy over John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in...
...Brinnin believes that it grew out of the poet's realization that he had passed the peak of his creative powers, and this seems to be at least part of the truth...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS Dylan Thomas and George Orwell-So Different, Yet in One Way So Alike By Granville Hicks There has been considerable controversy over John Malcolm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America (Little, Brown, $4...
...Orwell hoped that no biography of him would be written, and Atkins has honored his wish...
...One cannot but feel that here, too, some impulse was at work that sought self-destruction...
...He has given no data from his personal acquaintance, presenting a critical study with only such biographical information as is already available in Orwell's writings...
...Some readers have been outraged by this intimate account of the poet's last years, with its revelation of his drunkenness, his behavior with women, his general irresponsibility...
...Second, he insisted on seeing things with his own eyes...
...For Brinnin, his association with Thomas from 1950 to the poet's death in 1953 was an experience of great intensity...
...he made the cultivation of it his life work...
...Thomas, on the other hand, was completely a poet...
...Orwell's path to destruction, needless to say, was more admirable than Thomas's, but the two men were not wholly dissimilar...
...Both were born dissenters...
...Thomas's dissent expressed itself in his poetry and in acts of personal defiance, which toward the end were increasingly childish...
...He felt that if he were successful, he might be tempted to abandon his quarrel with society...
...One wonders how many of the persons who have condemned Brinnin's book had never listened to the gossip about Thomas that ran through New York's literary circles...
...He was in bad shape physically, and a few weeks later he collapsed and, within a few days, died...
...Others feel that the story needed telling if only because of the spate of gossip in this country and the misunderstandings abroad...
...He was driven constantly toward what the world called failure, and when, in spite of this, he won the world's recognition, he was determined not to be corrupted by it...
...He could be simultaneously an intransigent radical and an old-fashioned moralist, a resolute socialist and a loyal patriot...
...And the appalling contrast between the poetry and the poet makes speculation legitimate...
...His flight to the Hebrides proved that he literally preferred death to corruption...
...He had taken his stand with the underdogs, and he wanted to be one...
...One feels that his imagery came to him out of some special vision of the world and that language was a different medium for him from what it is for the rest of us...
...too much of it consists of pedestrian summaries of Orwell's writings...
...Most people, whether pro or con, agree that Brinnin has told the story in a restrained and sympathetic fashion...
...After examining Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four in detail, he talks about Orwell as a literary critic and, finally, as a patriot...
...He was not only willing to suffer for his integrity...
...He not only wrote about the poor...
...think of Thomas's self-indulgence and irresponsibility, and of Orwell's stoicism and discipline...
...First of all, he insisted on always being himself and on saying what ha thought...
...As writers, Dylan Thomas and George Orwell were at opposite poles...
...Orwell shaped his dissent into a sensitive and flexible kind of democratic socialism...
...Within a few hours after Thomas's arrival, Brinnin found himself trying to cope with the task he had taken on, "whether it be that of reluctant guardian angel, brother's keeper, nursemaid, amanuensis, or bar companion...
...John Atkins's George Orwell (Ungar, $4.50) is a book of a very different sort...
...They also seem to have been at opposite poles as men, and in most respects they were...
...It is clear that Thomas, in the years described here, was driven by a powerful self-destructive impulse...
...his eagerness for active service, in spite of poor health, in the war against Fascism...
...Orwell was everything a writer can be without being a poet...
...Third, he rigorously disciplined himself to resist the temptations of the modern world, especially the temptations brought by success...
...The following spring, Thomas returned to the United States, this time with his wife, and domestic quarrels were added to Brinnin's burden...
...He made another tour a year later, and the following autumn crossed the Atlantic once more for the reading of his play, Under Milk Wood...
...It is easy to say that the events of a poet's life are unimportant, that only the poetry matters, but few persons can hold consistently to so austere a position...
...He had a horror of success," Atkins says...
...Atkins asks whether the burdens Orwell imposed upon himself were not excessive: the hardships he underwent in his experiment with poverty...
...Why this decline had begun before he was 40 is another question, which Brinnin does not examine...
...On the other hand, it is thorough, covering Orwell's journalistic pieces as well as his books, and it is clear...
...When his sympathy for Loyalist Spain was aroused, he enlisted in the Catalonian army as a private soldier...
...Atkins traces the development of Orwell's views on imperialism, poverty and the class system, showing how he became a socialist and what kind of socialist he became...
...And yet there is a point at which one finds a startling resemblance...
...When, in 1947, Animal Farm became a best seller, Orwell went to a bleak island in the Hebrides with a climate calculated to exacerbate his tuberculosis...
...He was incapable-even a little distrustful-of the evocative use of words...
...It is loosely organized, repetitious and carelessly written...
...Yet it seems that each of them, for whatever reason, had a quarrel with the world, and for both it proved fatal...
...If the problem is ever to be solved, we shall have to know much about Thomas's life...
...If a value seemed good to him, he clung to it, even if it seemed to conflict with other values...
...he shared their lot...
...Orwell developed the non-poetic use of language to a high point, but of Thomas's kind of magic he had none at all...
...Thomas behaved as badly as possible, getting drunk, scandalizing the faculties of the colleges he visited, and letting the money he had come to make-money his family needed-run through his fingers...
...In the summer of 1951, Brinnin visited the Thomases in Wales, witnessing some other aspects of the poet's deterioration...
...Those lovers of Thomas's poetry who never saw him cannot be blamed for wanting to know something about him...
...The book explains why Orwell was, as V. S. Pritchett put it, "the conscience of his generation...
...This was only the beginning...
...Except for an excellent first chapter, called "Decency the Foundation," the book is not distinguished criticism...
...the dangers and deprivations he courted in Spain...
...Brinnin's story has provided some of the necessary data...
...As director of the poetry center at the YM-YWHA in New York, he invited Thomas to this country in the spring of 1950 and arranged a series of engagements for him...
Vol. 38 • December 1955 • No. 51
