Read Online Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Julian Barnes
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British revolution he desired, with ‘blood in the gutters’ and the ‘red militias billeted in the Ritz’, as he put in private diary and public essay. And after the revolution:
The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten …
One out of four on the vision thing; and tractors were hardly a difficult pick.
Against such a background, it would be rash to try to predict the continuing afterlife of Orwell’s work. Many of his phrases and mental tropes have already sunk into the conscious and unconscious mind, and we carry them with us as we carry Freudian tropes, whether or not we have read Freud. Some of those English couch potatoes watch programmes called
Big Brother
and
Room 101.
And if we allow ourselves to hope for a future in which all of Orwell’s warnings have been successfully heeded, and in which
Animal Farm
has become as archaic a text as
Rasselas
, the world will have to work its way through a lot of dictators and repressive systems first. In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just a single novel about the country, but a trilogy:
Burmese Days
,
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.
Orwell shared with Dickens a hatred of tyranny, and in his essay on the Victorian novelist distinguished two types of revolutionary. On the one hand there are change-of-heart people, who believe that if you improve human nature, all the problems of society will fall away; and on the other social engineers, who believe that once you fix society – make it fairer, more democratic, less divided – then the problems of human nature will fall away. These two approaches ‘appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency toalternate in point of time’. Dickens was a change-of-heart man, Orwell a systems-and-structures man, not least because he thought human beings recidivist, and beyond mere self-help. ‘The central problem – how to prevent power from being abused – remains unresolved.’ And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will remain a living writer.
* Airport novelists irritated by their lack of status (a spectacle as comic as literary novelists moaning about their sales) habitually invoke one of two comparisons to prove their own worth: Dickens, who would have applauded their broad appeal, and Orwell, who would have approved their ‘plain’ (i.e. banal) style.
FORD’S
THE GOOD SOLDIER
T HE BACK COVER of the 1950s Vintage edition of
The Good Soldier
always made poignant reading. ‘Fifteen distinguished critics’ had been assembled to puff Ford Madox Ford’s novel of 1915. They had all subscribed to a single statement: ‘Ford’s
The Good Soldier
is one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century.’ And then the names, including Leon Edel and Allen Tate, Graham Greene and John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams and Jean Stafford.
There was something both heroic and hopeless about this, as there was much that was heroic and hopeless about Ford himself. Fifteen critics ought to be better than five, but somehow the number overpleads. ‘One of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels’ sounds as if it can’t make up its mind – again, a very Fordian vacillation, but one that weakens rather than strengthens the claim: ah, so Joseph Henry Jackson thinks it’s in the top fifteen, but Willard Thorp only ranks it in the top twenty? As for ‘in our century’ – that seemed rather presumptuous with four more decades of it still to run.
Yet the statement remains poignant because you can hear the literary virtue behind it: look,
we know
this guy is good, so will you please,
please
read him? Ford has never lacked supporters, but he has always lacked readers. In 1929 Hugh Walpole wrote that ‘there is no greater literary neglect of our time in England than the novels and poems of Ford’.
The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten …
One out of four on the vision thing; and tractors were hardly a difficult pick.
Against such a background, it would be rash to try to predict the continuing afterlife of Orwell’s work. Many of his phrases and mental tropes have already sunk into the conscious and unconscious mind, and we carry them with us as we carry Freudian tropes, whether or not we have read Freud. Some of those English couch potatoes watch programmes called
Big Brother
and
Room 101.
And if we allow ourselves to hope for a future in which all of Orwell’s warnings have been successfully heeded, and in which
Animal Farm
has become as archaic a text as
Rasselas
, the world will have to work its way through a lot of dictators and repressive systems first. In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just a single novel about the country, but a trilogy:
Burmese Days
,
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
.
Orwell shared with Dickens a hatred of tyranny, and in his essay on the Victorian novelist distinguished two types of revolutionary. On the one hand there are change-of-heart people, who believe that if you improve human nature, all the problems of society will fall away; and on the other social engineers, who believe that once you fix society – make it fairer, more democratic, less divided – then the problems of human nature will fall away. These two approaches ‘appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency toalternate in point of time’. Dickens was a change-of-heart man, Orwell a systems-and-structures man, not least because he thought human beings recidivist, and beyond mere self-help. ‘The central problem – how to prevent power from being abused – remains unresolved.’ And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will remain a living writer.
* Airport novelists irritated by their lack of status (a spectacle as comic as literary novelists moaning about their sales) habitually invoke one of two comparisons to prove their own worth: Dickens, who would have applauded their broad appeal, and Orwell, who would have approved their ‘plain’ (i.e. banal) style.
FORD’S
THE GOOD SOLDIER
T HE BACK COVER of the 1950s Vintage edition of
The Good Soldier
always made poignant reading. ‘Fifteen distinguished critics’ had been assembled to puff Ford Madox Ford’s novel of 1915. They had all subscribed to a single statement: ‘Ford’s
The Good Soldier
is one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our century.’ And then the names, including Leon Edel and Allen Tate, Graham Greene and John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams and Jean Stafford.
There was something both heroic and hopeless about this, as there was much that was heroic and hopeless about Ford himself. Fifteen critics ought to be better than five, but somehow the number overpleads. ‘One of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels’ sounds as if it can’t make up its mind – again, a very Fordian vacillation, but one that weakens rather than strengthens the claim: ah, so Joseph Henry Jackson thinks it’s in the top fifteen, but Willard Thorp only ranks it in the top twenty? As for ‘in our century’ – that seemed rather presumptuous with four more decades of it still to run.
Yet the statement remains poignant because you can hear the literary virtue behind it: look,
we know
this guy is good, so will you please,
please
read him? Ford has never lacked supporters, but he has always lacked readers. In 1929 Hugh Walpole wrote that ‘there is no greater literary neglect of our time in England than the novels and poems of Ford’.
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