INDEPENDENT SPIRITS
Filler, Louis
Independent Spirits The Orwell Reader: fiction, essays and reportage by george orwell. With an Introduction by Richard H. Rovere. Harcourt, Brace and Company. 456 pp. $5.95. A Piece of My Mind:...
...His Home to Catalonia, a drastic failure in 1938, is now highly esteemed...
...A Piece of My Mind: reflections at sixty, by Edmund Wilson...
...Italia added...
...Orwell himself made grim efforts to keep the life he lived in line with the ils he wrote...
...His essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham," should thoroughly sicken anyone with the "genius" of what Orwell once bluntly called the "Nancy-left," which made playthings of great human problems and catastrophes...
...Wilson claimed a bit more authority in poetry, and his most substantial literary work, Axel's Castle, dealt with the Symbolists...
...Such "criticism" creates categories of sensibility and achievement which become increasingly unreal, as the escapist (and, I think, disgraceful) James and Eliot and other booms continue to fizzle out...
...An essay he once wrote on his former schoolmate, T. K. Whipple, is a contribution to our larger knowledge of our criticism which may one day come...
...Orwell did not worry whether somebody might seem more of a "genius" than himself...
...He is always fairly interesting...
...The point is that Trilling's gross snobbishness and triviality cannot be fully understood without understanding what Trilling himself was about while Spain was dying in the hands of its administrators and foreign sympathizers...
...At this point, differences between Wilson and Orwell begin to multiply...
...They are self-appointed and self-perpetuating, and they will compel you to accept their authority...
...He thought, for example, that Burnham's mischievous blunderings derived from his Americanism...
...It would be developed by an "elite who know what they are talking about...
...But "they are geniuses and he is not...
...But to the extent that he finds it "downright embarrassing" to explain the "left" which Orwell exposed, his introduction becomes merely infirm...
...I would like, also, to dissociate myself from the Orwell fanciers and their cant about his honesty, virtue, and so forth...
...Orwell's unspiced prose has been held against him...
...What, then, is Orwell a "figure" of...
...He asked the questions which needed to be asked "in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly...
...3.75...
...I would like to think that Burnham is merely a measure of what we get by taking too indulgent a view of the role intellectuals may play in our national life...
...Rovere is more useful for some biographical passages...
...Wilson has never had any difficulty with his point of view, from the 1910's to the present, but only because his willfulness has never been called to serious account...
...so is another on Alexander WooIIcott...
...Orwell's ideas are often controversial...
...Take, for example, Orwell's courage, in defying "radical" and "liberal" cliches, and insisting on seeing the corruption in Spanish Republican ranks which lost Spain to the Fascists...
...I would be interested, for example, to know whether, in fact, the younger Englishmen in Burma had no choice but to squander "rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of crocodiles," and on no others...
...What an encouragement...
...His hunting scenes in Burmese Days are more sophisticated, meaningful, and intelligent than Hemingway's...
...In a 1941 lecture at Princeton, he charted a program lor revolutionizing our culture and giving "meaning to experience...
...He was guided by a sense of justice and equality, and this brought him to forthright judgments which could hurt, but might cauterize...
...And Orwell's criticism is subtler and more evocative than Wilson's...
...239 pp...
...In Keep the Aspidistras Flying, he portrays frustrated mediocrity infinitely better than does Kingsley Amis...
...He praises Orwell, which is neither here nor there, and deems him influential upon present-day writers, which is doubtful...
...But his views of Saroyan and others like him are picked out of anywhere, and his admiration for such friends as Paul Rosenfeld and Scott Fitzgerald is entirely uncritical...
...Not Edmund Wilson, who was one of the "leftists," and who is interesting here because he, too, has been touted as honest and individual, and the best of American critics to boot...
...For he must have known of Bernard DeVoto's careful, point-for-point consideration of the case...
...I cite Lionel Trilling's introduction to the resurrected Homage to Catalonia rather than Rovere's introduction to the present Reader because Trilling sums up so much better what passes for criticism today...
...I think he is, alas...
...A Piece of My Mind contains views on religion, war, his family, education (emphasizing proper methods of teaching Latin), sex (Wilson believes in selective breeding), and other subjects...
...I suggest that his book is not important...
...Both were independent spirits, "gentlemen," literary men who wrote novels, and passed dirough Marxist phases, and took the world for subject matter...
...Can anyone write Ninteen-Eighty Four...
...This lights up one of the more difficult aspects of Edmund Wilson's work—particularly that of his "Marxist" days, but almost as much of his more "democratic" phases...
...and to have passed it by, and patronized DeVoto as lacking literary "style"—by which he meant avant-garde status and pre-ciousness—is simply wrong-headed...
...He tried not to spare himself...
...One can only understand Orwell's achievement by comparing it with others...
...I have in mind not so much the droves of Animal Farm, who take Nineteen-Eighty Four to be an anti-communist sermon, but at least two of his associates whose writings contain tricky traits for which I lack space here...
...Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy...
...Orwell] is not a genius—what a relief...
...His Down and Out in Paris and London is shocking in its merciless determination to see his own experiences whole...
...Orwell was in search of reality, and to indict him on the grounds of lack of art is to fail to sense the depth of his intention, the enormous effort and fortitude which gave him, and can give us, his tales and essays...
...He tried hard to bend conjecture to reality...
...All of the above is out of Wilson's past...
...The answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more [sic] than one's simple, direct, undeceived intelligence...
...Trilling is plainer, in a manner of speaking, Orwell, he says, is, like T. E. and D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others, a figure...
...I suppose the moral is that no one can be held responsible for his followers and associates...
...Orwell may have had, among other debatable characteristics, a touch of unconscious anti-Semitism in his make-up...
...but who has undertaken to apply its analysis of Spanish conditions of the time to those back home...
...Reviewed by Louis Filler GEORGE ORWELL poses problems because, passed by in the Nineteen Thirties, when he could have been useful, he is already being misused by people who can claim relationship with him...
...For he communicates the sense that what he has done...
...Wilson has had range and intelligence, but his estimate of Van Wyck Brooks' The Ordeal of Mark Twain as a great book is typical of his method...
...anyone of us could do...
...Orwell did not believe that brains and knowledge and imagination and "style" belonged in different categories...
...and the differences between Orwell and Wilson are illuminating...
Vol. 21 • March 1957 • No. 3
