Dear Editor
Dear Editor Orwell In her excellent review of Peter Slansky and William Abrahams' biography. The Unknown Orwell ('The Unmaking of a Gentleman." NL, October 30). Pearl K. Bell accepts the view that...
...It made him miss the point that the book is pure fiction, and is not about India but about human life on this earth...
...But that is no reason not to say it again and again, because I fear there are many people who do not know it...
...a child is born...
...Representing the human condition is an Indian servant family...
...George, being about as patriotically British a name as one could find, has led many to conclude he was simply showing his desire to be identified as English...
...The theme and subject of the book is life-not India's social or political system...
...Vice President Agnew has exposed the doggedly Democratic dispositions of most reporters and editors in their treatment of the news, and so magazines such as The New Leader have resorted to other, more subtle, means of distortion...
...London Michael Smith The Human Condition I am sorry that George Woodcock's review ("Asia in the Raw," NL, November 13) got stuck on the unfortunate subtitle of my book, Earth Below, Heaven Above: A Portrait of India...
...On page 5 is a beaming, almost cherubic McGovern, while the cover presents a beady-eyed and ominous Nixon...
...Obviously it will take more than mere warnings to achieve some objectivity from the press...
...Strauss has completely misread my review if she thinks I "chide"' the "American protagonist" of Earth Below, Heaven Above for anything...
...A young man dies...
...Why George Orwell...
...Or whether he is dying of starvation, victimized by war...
...Strauss must have my meaning spelled out...
...as he [Orwell] knew, his own change of nam de guerre surely also represented a deliberate act to cut loose from the past, from his childhood, from certain unresolved conflicts which he could never quite shake off...
...Warning The drawings in your October 16 issue were yet further examples of the media's outrageous bias against President Nixon...
...I wanted to somehow get past the purely intellectual...
...Cultural differences make not a whit of difference to death-or to the person facing death-whether he be Indian, Pakistani or American...
...Clark Edmundson Correction In the second paragraph of Walter Goodman's column...
...T. R. Fyvel has pointed out, "Names are highly symbolical things and...
...a man and woman fall in love...
...Pearl K. Bell accepts the view that Eric Blair's pen name was "hastily improvised...
...or suffering from some avoidable illness...
...I deliberately wrote a simple story, sensuous and emotional, in the hope that my perception of the miracle of existence would reach the reader somewhere in the gut-where he lives, as it were...
...Though it may have been selected in some haste, there is reason to believe that the author gave the matter careful thought, and those who knew him saw great significance in his choice...
...The theme I have illustrated is a simple one, but it is not simplistic...
...Orwell was the name of an English river near which he once lived and of which he was quite fond...
...Berkeley, Calif...
...Like Woodcock, for example...
...Chicago, Ill...
...The saving of that human life, no matter what, has to come first...
...Strauss' "perception of the miracle of existence" but with her failure to present that perception in a way that is either rationally or esthetically convincing...
...In other words, if Mrs...
...Orwell himself explained that he dropped his real name because he did not like the Scottishness of Blair or the Norseness of Eric, associating these nationalities with unpleasant childhood experiences...
...and if it is either, my concern is not with Mrs...
...It is that life is the most precious thing we have, and I am well aware that it has been said before, and not only by Waiter Pater...
...The rather passionate quality of Woodcock's protest suggests to me that I may have succeeded...
...But perhaps Chris Hollis has come closer to the mark, noting that in George, Blair "chose a name that by its Greek etymology linked him with the land"and thereby associated himself with the proletariat...
...I am unaware of my review's being 'passionate" or a "protest...
...I merely summarize the plot as the author has it, and any "chiding" I may do is not of the characters-who after all are blameless for their creator's faults-but of Mrs...
...1 think she has written a shoddy, amateurish book that does little justice to the experience she may be trying to project...
...The more specific connotations it held for him is a question his biographers might well investigate...
...He chides the American protagonist for trying to save a life when the money spent on the drugs could have been used to better effect...
...Fair Game" (NL, December 25), the phrase reading "a stole work drawn from Bentley's recent book" should have read: "a stage work drawn from Bentley's recent book...
...Strauss herself for having wasted on a poor and sentimental novel the kind of talent that might have produced a modest yet descriptive travel book...
...Carolyn North Strauss George Woodcock replies: I fear Mrs...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 1
