Losing Critical Perspective

...Actually, at the recording sessions we had to read a prepared script that a censor had approved, and we were expected not to stray by a word in the course of this "spontaneous" performance...

...Such policies indicate that Orwell really did not need much inventiveness to transform wartime British institutions into the horrific ministries of Nineteen Eighty-Four...

...The best of the lot, nine talks on literature and other subjects, really are miniature essays and seem to be forerunners of Orwell's "As I Please" columns in the Left-wing weekly Tribune...

...West has put together his potpourri without a shade of the ruthless judgment Orwell applied to himself...

...the only people who might benefit are scholars and biographers, and they would have been as well served if the material had been moved into a carefully catalogued archive...

...This was written simply as an exercise, and I oughtn't to have published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn't a book in me, but I was half-starved and had to turn out something to bring in ?100 or so.' The two novels have now been reprinted and sell widely in paperback editions as Orwell classics...

...Then, when they went on the air, silling alongside them was a "switch censor" who would immediately cut off a program if a speaker deviated from the approved text...

...Thus we have in the present volume a collection of the less cohesive material...

...Especially interesting are their recollections of how uneasily Orwell fitted into the routine, how difficult he found it to reconcile patriotic duty with his hatred for any kind of intellectual restriction, and hence how perpetually suspect he was to the people in the War Office and the Ministry of Information who kept watch over broadcasts to India...

...Forster, who delivered a weekly commentary on recent books...

...Then there arc those painfully done I'o/iv scripts...

...The different requirements of the ear and the eye—the time, for instance, the eye can linger compared with the ear—necessarily diminish the lasting value of most radio writing...

...To publish it as a book is an insult to Orwell's idea of what a book should be, and therefore, obliquely, to his values as a writer...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell," "The Writer and Politics" One reads this book with a sinking heart, yet with amorbid kind of fascination...

...Perhaps he might have agreed to the publication of a few of the talks, but even that is questionable because he did not keep copies of them...

...Both the Ministry of Information and the BBC censors vetted their scripts...

...I strongly doubt, though, that he would have wanted the process preserved in black and white...

...But there are a few good ones from literary celebrities, notably E.M...

...He answered: "I havzri'ta.copyoiKeeptheAspi-distra Flying...

...An observation in one of Forster's letters neatly summarizes my attitude toward West's project...

...Four pedestrian adaptations of short stories for dramatic readings serve merely to demonstrate Orwell's inadequate sense of dramaturgy...

...I suspect Orwell' s experience was similar to mine...

...Through clues in the discovered documents, he was led to a number of Orwell's BBC associates whom Bernard Crick, the writer's biographer, had not tracked down...

...Anyone familiar with writing for radio will know exactly what Forster meant...

...In 1946, while writing an essay about his work, I was unable to find the later novel and dropped him a note asking if he had a copy...

...No reader is going to gain much edification or pleasure from it...

...Westhasuncoveredagreatmass of Orwell material—long suspected but never confirmed to exist—filed under wrong headings in the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Archives...

...Orwell had suggested to Forster that some of his talks might be published in a pamphlet, and Forster replied: "I don't much like other people's reprinted talks—they read so chatty and scrappy—and I don't recall six presentable talks of my own...

...West points to one of them, an adaptation of Ignazio Silone's "The Fox," as having inspired A nimalFarm, yet all the two works have in common is that they are situated on a pig farm...

...Orwell was extremely self-critical...

...There are two or three books which I am ashamed of, and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that is one of them...

...We are treated to mostly minor literary bric-a-brac that happens to have been written by or was connected with a prominent writer in a period of patriotic hackwork...

...I do not believe Orwell would be pleased...

...The demands of the electronic medium, however, almost invariably result in prose that is too loose and tentative—or in For-ster's words, "chatty and scrappy"— to stand up to publication...

...There is an even worse one called A Clergyman's Daughter...

...as statements, the two surely can be of equal weight...

...Although it has biographical value, as literature it is arguably the worst Orwell work to appear to date...

...Far worse, however, were the restrictions applied to those who dealt with potentially controversial political topics...

...Theoretically, these shows engaged poets in ad lib discussions of politically neutral subjects...

...It is not that what you say on the air is intrinsically less important than what you commit to print...

...And I am virtually certain he would be displeased to find the sweepings of his broadcasting career reproduced as unselecti vely as they have been in George Orwell: The Lost Writings...

...West explains the background to his enterprise in a 60-page Introduction...

...My involvement was limited to a highly fabricated program called Voice, one of several series produced by Orwell for broadcast to India...

...One of his informants (an old friend of Orwell's and mine), evidently deciding he had a fine opportunity for self-glorification, told some splendid tall tales...

...I found its revelations about the extent of the Ministry of Information's World War II radio censorship astonishing, for example, despite having been an occasional broadcaster myself at the time...

...West's uncritical acceptance of these statements suggests the limitations of his biographical judgment...

...Unfortunately, West's account contains a few major inaccuracies, and numerous small mistakes as well...

...Besides providing us with an intriguing story of literary archaeology, West's find does add significantly to our knowledge of the conditions Orwell worked under during the three years he spent at the BBC...

...I was thrown into even greater doubt about his literary judgment—indeed, about the wisdom of the whole undertaking—once I got beyond the Introduction and read the "lost writings" themselves...

...Most of these letters are so mundane, they would be of little interest to a biographer...

...Finally, a hundred pages are devoted to correspondence between Orwell and various individuals he persuaded, or tried to persuade, to take part in his programs...

...Significantly, his high period of journalism, when he developed that marvelous colloquial manner, began immediately after his arrival at the Tribune from the BBC...

...He refused to allow the reissue of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) during his lifetime...

...To begin with, not everything West discovered is included here: A second volume will contain 7 5 weekly commentaries on the War's progress that Orwell prepared (mainly for reading by others, since he had a poor radio voice) during his tenure at the BBC...

...Critical integrity clashes at times with antiquarian thoroughness...

...His broadcasting career was important mainly for the nightmarish images it later inspired in his most famous book...

...Nevertheless, I rarely felt that the pieces I produced specifically for reading or performance were suitable for print...

...Three years of radio work clearly helped loosen his style...

...In my own case, I think turning out radio scripts did indirectly help give my other writing a conversational fluency...