Orwell: Life and Art
Jeffrey Meyers
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0252077466
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Wigan Pier (1937), which he had read in Spain. Orwell had been a policeman in Burma and assumed leadership of the British contingent. Frankford resented this, as well as Orwell's belief that “everything he did was right.” He was also annoyed that Stafford Cottman (another British member of POUM), rather than himself, had been invited to Spain for the Arena television program. He didn't seem to realize that his role in events in Barcelona precluded such an invitation. Frankford then described his
all husbands are henpecked; middle-aged men are drunkards; nudism is comical; Air Raid precautions are ludicrous; illegitimate babies and old maids are always funny—and nearly every one of them appears in Coming Up. Actually, Bowling's colloquial humor is far superior to these conventional jokes. He “baptizes” his new false teeth in a pub, compares Hilda's constriction to that of an “average zenana,” says that one old lady thought the Left Book Club had to do with books left in railway carriages,
slave for Houyhnhnms as animals do for pigs, and horses “milk their Cows, and reap their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands”5 just as “the pigs sent for buckets and milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well-adapted to this task.”6 He also has strong personal feelings about pigs. In Coming Up for Air (1939), Bowling is frightened by “a herd of pigs [that] was galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn't pig
wine in which “a vast bottle composed of electric lights seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass.” Virtually all the Outer Party members are swallowers of slogans: “War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength.” (Should not it logically be “Ignorance is Wisdom”?) As in a modern political campaign, the head of Big Brother (whose image is an amalgam of Stalin and Kitchener) appears “on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the
predatory creditors and tax demands, the literary hack tries in vain to write his way out of poverty as a book reviewer. Since most books are worthless yet somehow have to be praised, Orwell calls book reviewing “a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job.” To alleviate this tedium, he advocates fewer but longer reviews; and claims that the book reviewer is, at least, better off than the film critic (who has to praise a greater proportion of trash). Since there's an endless