Tag Archives: George Orwell

PEN

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PEN is not an acronym; it is a society of writers.

I found among papers an article about the 1986 PEN convention by Salmon Rushdie, published by the New York Times Book Review in 2005. It is a poor account of the meeting. There is an account to compare it to: The Prevention of Literature, Polemic, January 2, 1946, George Orwell.

Faults within Rushdie’s account: He was a new, mostly unknown writer. He dropped every name in one long column. He was overly impressed by all writers he saw, mostly foreigners, but he was more likely impressed by the size of their bank accounts and the scope of their marketing operations. There is not much to suggest that Rushdie was inspired by anyone’s facility of writing, the ponderous and combination of thoughts and visions and use of words and impressions formed by expression.

Indeed, Rushdie truncates speakers’ comments to uninformative sentences:

After Bellow made a speech containing a familiar Bellovian
riff about how the success of American materialism had
damaged the spiritual life of Americans, Grass…pointed out
that many people routinely fell through the holes in the
American dream, and offered to show Bellow some real
American poverty in… the South Bronx. Bellow, irritated,
spoke sharply in return…Grass returned to his seat, next to
me,… trembling with anger: “Say something,” he ordered.
…[Rusndie did as asked.] …why many American writers had
avoided …the task of taking on the subject of America’s
immense power in the world….
Enjoyable as such recollections are, the real significance of
the congress…

The tidbits recounted what Rushdie memorialized were noteworthy, unintentionally. Bellow raised the point that materialism diminishes the spirit and art, especially in the United States. He did not expand his comments to the world, among a meeting of international writers. Apparently there were no takers. Did anyone understand what Bellow was taking about? Gunter Grass was a blithering, ignorant idiot. He conceded the point that materialism (riches) are essential for advancement, which cannot happen from impoverished bases where people do not experience the American dream. The American experience demonstrates Grass is full of beans. The blues, jazz, rock and roll and nearly the whole twentieth century musical experience has come from foundations provided by African-American music of more than 120 years ago. Politically, the Civil Rights movement of mostly African-Americans of the South was successful under strong, low-income leaders.

Rushdie’s own participation in this petty PEN fiasco suggested insularity. America has too much power and influence; the world should be left to itself. Rushdie hardly speaks of a new world order, where people ought to communicate freely with one another, an American wish. I wonder if he approves of the Internet crossing borders (except where governments interfere with it). PEN and its members know what he thought in 1986. I wonder if he maintained his provincial thoughts in 2005? What about today, 2018?

Rushdie article supports on a foundation of quicksand his quoting Shelley: Writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In 2018 is any nation, other than America, spending as much time and money on entertainment, albeit most of it is short of literature but some of it passes for short stories? Great Britain and some British commonwealth countries are competitors because they have both the language and the heritage. But other countries? What writing goes on therein, and what media comes from those places? Perhaps those countries are too materialistic.

NOT ELEGANT AND BRILLIANT

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In the Wall Steet Journal, September 6-7, 2014, is a book report of Beyond the First Draft, John Casey. In the review is a quote from Casey’s book” “There is an appreciation of the Irish essayist, Hubert Butler, whom Mr. Casey rightly calls, “one of the great under appreciated writers of the twentieth century…elegant and brilliant…”

Has Casey or the reviewer ever ready any of Hubert Butler’s essays or other works? It seems unlikely. Upon reading that evaluation, I searched for Butler’s books – more than 6,000,000 in the Los Angeles County System. There were none. Pasadena bought one (selected essays, I supposed the best). But given the quality of the words and thoughts, that purchase is forfeited. UCLA had four books, most in the library reserves, 7,000,000 books known as the SRLF.

Butler is a provincial writer who inherited the family estate and didn’t have to make money so scribbled for 70 years. There’s never a sentence that is not overstocked with words. Paragraphs somewhat stick on course but drift. And throughout, Butler writes about “I,” I, I, I, I. Not many writers do that. They camouflage themselves within their stories and essays and never use I. Writers realized that use of “I” reveals poor writing and distracted story telling. Writers know that the author’s opinion and personality will emerge from any well written novel, short story, tale, essay or criticism. Indeed, using “I” is a redundancy. The reader assumes already that I – writer – author wrote it.

Using I reveals the author has limitations, prejudices, biases, ignorance, blindnesses. Writers are not honest to tell the truth about themselves; immediately without candor there is routine, boredom and revelations of falsehood: I brushed my teeth; I dressed; I moved a trunk; I did the laundry. I ate breakfast. It is noon. An “I” author will not tell what happened what planned that morning: “I slipping on my butt while picking oranges for juice. The resulting back strain made trio-sex impossible. I couldn’t get into position for the best angle…”

Butler comes from that school of nonsense writers of this language requiring excavation and sometimes a backhoe to dig through sentences and a paragraph. In a “diary entry(?)”, he writes about Henry and Frances (1950) Butler quotes one sentence from a novel of Frances: “There is something extremely indelicate in professing a Passion for a virtuous Woman before we have undergone a sufficient Quarantine after the Contagion of an abandoned one, and Man in such a situation resembles a Centaur, half-humamn and half-brute.” Anyone who purports to understand this sentence and can explain it, send me $10.00.

In the sad end all is lost for Butler’s Henry and Frances: “But his marriage was still recent and wholly satisfying when Henry left Maidenhall. He must have felt that a turning point in this life had been reached and that a rather more solemn self-analysis than he had hitherto attempted should be undertaken. On leaving the house he made a will in favor of Frances and her infant son and wrote upon the wrapper the reasons for his marriage and his theological beliefs.”

This is not great storytelling. None of it is brilliant or elegant. It is doubly sad for readers of Henry and Frances who realized they were reading poorly written tripe usually found in tourist materials: “As for Maidenhall, it has not changed very much, it’s successive owners have always been poor and never had the money, to make many of the lavish improvements which were admired in Victorian times.”

Butler reveals obvious naiveté based upon ignorance common and accepted in Ireland to this day: “I believe passionately in Irish neutrality, not an ignoble one in Hitler’s War…” Irish sentiments were obvious when upon learning of Hitler’s death, the Irish Prime Minister signed the Condolence Book at the German Embassy in Dublin on May 4, 1945. In 1939 Britain offered Ireland the Six Counties [Northern Ireland] if Ireland would allow British use of Irish bases for the duration of World War Two. The identical offer was made after the Americans entered World War Two. Both times the Irish refused. It is no wonder the British resisted and over came the resistance during The Troubles 25-45 years later. (Crossing the Border and The Kagran Groupe discusses Irish sentiments. See also utter, foolish speculation about a German occupation of Ireland in The Invaders Wore Slippers.)

Butler writes magazine quality pieces about this place, that person, another trip, spontaneous comments about justifiably obscure persons, places and things. There is a lot of superficial, supercilious non-fictional impressions relying on conventional wisdoms, legends and myths. An essay at the end of this volume, Independent Spirits, Butler write a feeble recounting of a meeting of PEN (1966), relying on glibness to relay aspirations and approval of the proceedings, but giving no indication that he understood, cogently any issue or the proceedings in whole. Compare an essay about PEN proceedings (circa 1945) by George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature.

READ ORWELL – I

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I’ve mentioned that George Orwell is the best writer of the twentieth century, and most people never get past thinking, ANIMAL FARM(condemning Stalin) and 1984(condemning shrinking communications in a tri-polar world). Those are excellent books, each driving in demonic ways their points.

But Orwell wrote novels and books before World War II, and most of those make excellent reading. I recommend those. Where Orwell excelled was in preparation for the novels: essays. He wrote about almost everything with certainty and accuracy. He touched psychological and sociological issues beyond those found in novels and essays. Essays also discuss writing, business and politics. I wish I could write as well today, as topically, forcefully, completely and truthfully.

“The Prevention of Literature,” January 1946 is about the forces affecting writers and publishing. I’ll give background and a smattering. It’s the 300th anniversary of John Milton’s Areopagitica pamphlet in defense of freedom of the press celebrated by the group of British writers called PEN. Orwell is disappointed that this group of leftists are so far removed from reality they are dishonest. He’s a leftist himself but believes in personal liberty. The speeches at the PEN gathering include: Freedom of the Press in India; general comments on the goodness of liberty; no obscenity laws; and defending the Russian purges (1936-1939).

Orwell writes, “Of…several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”… “There was nothing particularly surprising in this.”

The writing trade “is under attack from two directions…it’s theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and…it’s immediate practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy…”

Orwell goes on to define and tell why writers are the most exposed artists – not painters, musicians, poets, sculpturers. He has choice words or criticism about poets and poetry, which go beyond Mark Twain’s, “Poets are too lazy to write complete sentences.”

About the monopolies and bureaucracies affecting writers, in 1946 Orwell writes,

“…apart from newspapers it is doubtful…whether the great mass of people in the industrial countries feel the need for any kind of literature…Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio production. Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyer-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.

“It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films…are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are….So also with the innumerable books and pamphlets commissioned by government…Even more machine-like is the production of short stories…Papers such as the WRITER abound with advertisements of Literary Schools, all of them offering…ready-made plots….algebraical formula…packs of cards marked with characters and situations…to be shuffled…”

Orwell wrote this in 1946, and for the most part the world has seen literary production fall off since World War II. A friend of mine wrote read the first Best Seller of well-known author a few decades ago. She read the second book, and stopped a third of the way through. It was the first book rewritten; that author was writing FORMULA: This happens on page 24; that happens on page 67; crisis by page 189.

Has anyone ever gone to a film class or tried writing a screenplay. First advice: Read this book which is complete nonsense, unreadable by anyone with any ability to understand this language and any readingcomprehension. All the screenplay books are poorly written and full of crap. FORMULA for film is everywhere; there’s even a preferred word processing “format.” Yet, FORMULA is killing film. Every year Entertainment puts out the same films, different titles, different actors, different production people. Advertisements and promotion rely on the people involved in the production, not on the quality of the production, an expensive experiment. Entertainment is also trying to mine TV programs for films which fortunately has been unsuccessful. They’re going after the comic books. Except for characters in costume on Hollywood Boulevard I want everyone to know that Superman, Spider Man, Batman, Iron Man, and others I don’t want to know of, are NOT REAL. No one will fly through the air and save you, not Matt Damon playing Jason Bourne in Tangiers, not James Bond, not the next sequel hero. 

Orwell talks about totalitarianism and shrinking liberty of thought and action, and in his day the Soviet Union was a target just as been Nazi Germany. Today the Russians are flirting with that type of government and certainly the Chinese are living with it. But people of other nations are  confined within limits or norms whether it be from a strict religions doctrine, from social controls, from ignorance, from commercial controls and financial limits. Many of the latter countries are obscurantist, which will put back human beings there 1000 years. The tragedy is the rulers of those latter countries, sometimes aided and abetted by the totalitarian regimes, have no concern for their own people of their futures.

I want to know whether someone among the powers that be, dropped George Orwell into the Twenty-First Century, let him look around and take all the notes he wanted. He was to return to his time to warn people: This is not the best use of human and physical resources to produce what’s coming (in society called civilization). Orwell is focused on the tradition he came from – Western Culture. He uses it as an example. In another essay he identifies obscurantist forces affecting us in “Pleasure Spots.” It is a short essay, January 1946. I’ll quote,

“The music…is the most important ingredient…The radio is already consciously used for this purpose by innumerable people. In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out…I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought….It is difficult not to feel that the unconscious aim…is a return to the womb…

“The question…arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness…” 

Orwell describes more than half the people I know – whether they have the radio turned, whether it is DVD, whether it is a TV, whether it is at home, in the car, at the office or on the sidewalk.

Read Orwell.