All Art Is Propaganda: Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell - George Packer Interview (2009)

welcome to c-span book TV's afterwards program my name is Christopher Hitchens and I'm here in the for me on a custom role of interviewer and producer of my friend and colleague George Patton who's produced two volumes of the essays and George Orwell appropriately picked and introduced and commented upon and so today or well as our subject so I I wish we had more than an hour you I'm guessing that you will have read DJ Taylor's book on George Orwell I haven't oh what a shame it doesn't matter because what I wanted to say from his some book was something that I have a feeling you'll agree with Taylor writes at one point says when I read other people writing about George Orwell I keep thinking hey this is my author you're talking yeah do you ever get that feeling um I do and it we all have a you know you and I and a few other people we know and some we don't know are part of a really fanatical group of Orwell lovers and it's very personal and I started reading more well maybe a little late it was in my early 20s but it was at a critical moment when I needed a kind of a model I needed to know how does one become a writer and so I just read straight through what was then the only collection of Orwell's essays in journalism the four volumes uh collected essays journalism and letters and just read straight through it was like reading a autobiography and the audio so being personally addressed I felt very close to the voice of those pieces and I think those are where you get closest to Orwell to his voice to what's essential to his really what in his character is strong and worth emulating and I became a slavish emulator and imitator for a while in my 20s I think it's a good way to learn how to write just to find a writer you feel some affinity for and just master their prose style their rhythms you get get the the the cadences into your own nerve system and and then try to find your own way into it but that's the closeness Orwell produces in people like me and you and so yeah we feel a little bit proprietary when we read other people right writing about them to it but not when those people get him right and I think your book why Orwell Matters gets him right you said in that book Orwell got the three basic questions of the 20th century right imperialism fascism and communism and that's that sums up his political and literary achievement as well as any single if I was feel they derived from each other in other words from what he saw about imperialism especially this sort of sexual repression and racism that it involved I think he found it quite easy to decode the appeal of fascism and the danger it is it was some extension extension of imperialist not purely but to a good deal yeah a to a good deal in many ways that was the case and then because it's funny he hardly writes anything about fascism he seems to just assume everyone will know that it's evil and needs to be fought against that's what was nothing strange there was no analysis of it um he takes it for granted that it's completely unacceptable but it's in the course of fighting against one kind of church at Arianism that he discovers that there are many people came into me as allies who are not yes and actually the visit was a an almost equally dangerous illusion taking place on the other side of the murals that's right and he turned the same withering scrutiny on his own side that he had turned in on a much easier target Nazi Germany fascist Italy Franco's Spain and that was when he made most of his enemies on the left and all the way to the end of his life yeah now I realize I haven't said quite enough about you I should process some of this at the beginning but those of you don't know him already or knows work mr. packer well first came to my attention actually as a novelist writing from Africa run facts and black oh well who is capable of fiction variably as the essay the long essay formed by which I would kill now pari reaching a large audience mr. Packers were especially from Iraq in other parts of the world but especially from Iraq in The New Yorker has got him a great deal of attention and I believe you now have a collection of essays we were in out you a new book out called interesting times writings from a turbulent decade but back to fiction you probably over praised me there I did write two novels they were read by about 35 people and although I learned a lot from writing them I did not learn to be a novelist I don't think Orwell wrote a batch of novels in the 1930s that were in the tradition of anglo-american realism and I love them I don't know how you feel about them but for me keep the aspidistra flying is just a marvelous book Burmese days is the one that really lasts the longest but you just don't feel that Orwell's working in his most natural grain in those novels you feel the essayist sort of pushing through the yeah the the illusion of fiction all the time he has something to say he has an argument to make he has something a proposition about the world all the time and he doesn't have the restraint and patience of a natural fiction writer and that's why we can be grateful that he once wrote in I think did why I write that if he been left to his own devices he would have been a kind of 19th century British novelist like his heroes Dickens and Gissing but events and the turbulence of the 30s and 40s pushed him into becoming what he called a kind of pamphlets be here yeah um and and by the way I should have to introduce it's one of the very few completely unconvincing things and again mostly I was just going to say that because really it was not events to push him in that direction it was his own inclination um his also it's a very rare case of it being too conceited in other words he said if it wasn't for all these polemics I have to write I could have been Charles Dickens we'll come on yeah that's a pretty much um the Burmese say the same Burma that he flattered them by writing three novels about Bernie's days yeah Animal Farm an imaginary phone right I actually heard that line in Burma last year when I went through oh yes Orwell is still a huge presence in Burma all the more I think now there's a young generation who did not learn English well growing up they came after the generation that was schooled by the British they've been they've had their futures utterly blighted by the totalitarian regime there and Orwell speaks to them not just because he wrote about Burma but as you say because he wrote about totalitarians of 1984 has so many echoes in Burma today and so you can actually find Animal Farm being sold discreetly in book stalls on the streets of Rangoon and so he's a kind of he's reached a hero to these younger Burmese writers after being condemned for his supposed imperialism by the the hunter and while we're on contemporary to tell China's in which we might as well stay with a bit I've been in North Korea and you know when one goes as a reporter when hopes to avoid cliches so I thought I'm going to try not to mention 1984 because everyone says it's an Orwellian stage and funny use of the word of worrying yeah but in fact the great thing about totalitarianism is that it is a cliche it seems to do the same thing over and over again Kim il-sung founded North Korean state the same year that that 984 came out ranked and it's as if someone gave him the novel in Korean and said you think we could make this work and he thinks well a general will sure give it our best shot it's it's absolutely remarkable it-- imitated art yes it's the same when people in countries like this come across so well as the North Koreans one day we'll they're amazed I think the greatest compliment perhaps ever paid to one writer by another in the 20th century was by Cheswick me wash when he in the capture of mind when he wrote about the situation in Stalinist Poland he said there is a book in circulation it's called 1984 words you can only get it privately it's circulated with great secrecy and fear among the other party and he said I personally was very surprised as we all were to find out he'd never visited the Union because how could he get our texture how could you get the texture of it also right without having had this experience I've remembered Nigeria for is about the circulation of an illegal book within the inner party in my other Fingal's D so it's it's extraordinary that is a great question how did Orwell know he lived almost his entire life in England he travelled a bit through Europe at the end of World War two he had his years in Burma but other than that he was very parochial he was confined to the island and and yet he wrote in his essay on Arthur Kessler that the British writers of his generation had failed to understand totalitarianism because they had not lived the way Kessler Salone a Camus and other continental writers had and so he was sort of criticizing the you know what he called the parlor Bolsheviks Auden spender etc for not feeling what it is to live under that kind of regime Orwell felt it but he had the same other than his years in Burma and his suffering and hard times in the 30s which they did not have he had the same education and then lived in the same England that they did and yet he did feel it and that's a it's a bit of a mystery how he could have known it so well well I think I have a possible M and also slight correction to you in reverse order then or correction first not as insidious all that of what he did spend a lot of time in the Far East admittedly as a colonial policeman but I think being a colonial cop gave him an insight into the master servant yep indeed almost master/slave relationship is very useful in describing some of the again dirty secret sexual underlay of totalitarianism then he was in Spain and he was in Barcelona at a time when the Communist Party did briefly takeover and there was a police terror and third very important he noticed that all the truth about Spain had been written out of the record and he C wrote in looking back on the Spanish War he was really afraid this was becoming a habit now in Europe that if the leader says something never happened then it never did and you can see the germ of 1984 done partly by the father of your old nation colleague Claud Coburn father of Alexander yes and by not just by communists I mean quite a lot of other people fell for the line that the the Communist Party was the best defender of the Spanish Republic and it's only very recently that the archives of with Franco's system and the Stalinist system have been open and we do know what happened in those may days in Barcelona and actually what all said was happening was in every detail true yeah he refused the lie he would nd a second point I want to make is about going on with his insularity is his first a real book is written in French Karen out in Paterson and was originally French book he spoke very good friend she spoke at least to an Indian and Brandi's language it wasn't written in French he wrote the essays in it the sketches in English he wrote a couple of little essays for a small French publication called the pro Gracie week here act when he was in Paris and shooting along I see on colonialism and that's right that's right and then wrote the manuscript of down-and-out which he which was rejected by TS Eliot and some of the other major Genet rejection passed no it was rejected by um yeah I think it was Eliot he was at Faber in 1931 or 32 and and rejected and then rejected animal farm yes many years later ah so Ian or will had as did German action Harcourt brace in America one of the best rejection letters I think ever written every aspiring writer should have interjection that it pasted in their hat to consult it says Jim is true well thank you for letting us look at your manuscript now more farm we unfortunately it's impossible to sell stories about animals in the United States yes right in the say in the country of Disney they could make such a factual small now they really thought it was a story about the phone and then Animal Farm became a very good cartoon film so it is they were wrong about that tuition bug suing yeah but just to get back to the experience of reading or well and and the essays in this book um when I started reading him and I don't know if you had this experience I didn't know much about fascism or communism or imperialism I was looking more for an example of how a writer carried himself in the world and how to transform experience into sentences and how to do it in a way that didn't call more attention to the self than to the experience and you in again and why I write Orwell wrote good prose is like a windowpane another may be dubious claim but helpful in the sense that his words are always pointing to the thing and not back to the the self and they reveal so much about a character I mean there's something almost you feel you know him when you read his essays you feel you know how he speaks you can hear his voice you know his irritations you know how he's going to react if you say something is almost alive with you even though there's also a certain remoteness to Orwell he doesn't let you in on everything in his life he doesn't talk about his marriage very much in his writing he doesn't talk about his child Richard or well he doesn't talk about his parents some of the basic things that American memoirists make you know gold out of that are the subjects of book after book for or well we're kind of off limits he was a bit constrained maybe by late Victorian shibboleths that way but nonetheless you had this very strong sense of the person behind the words and that was what first drew me to him and makes those essays you know worth reading over and over again I should press on this by now it's um just for those of you watching us this is George's first term selection it's called to all artists propaganda and it's about Orwell's essays and then another one called facing unpleasant facts which is his more political stuff we might say I've comment on both the titles but yeah when all world writes about himself he says well when I God started all I knew I had was little literary ability and a power of facing unpleasant facts I'm everything a power of facing very good I want you to call my book that for a while um it's all something almost biblical about it yeah it's an unusual phrase isn't it a power of facing as if it it's an active force it gives you some advantage which is true he was able to look at things at times almost exaggerated the ugliness or the bad smells I seem to seek them out with a kind of relish but nonetheless things in himself in England in democracy in literature in the working class and in the working class which the famous line from his great book about coal mining and coal miners the road to we can peer the working-class is smell you know which Orwell said isn't necessarily true but it's what middle and upper-class people think and it's the reason why the the the class divide is such a hard thing to overcome in Britain because it's almost physical it's not just a kind of mental snobbery and I think that line my right that that line will really bothered Victor Gallants who yeah sure of the Communists went on for the rest of his life saying this is what all we'll thinks about the working-class yeah exactly they smell him with it but he doesn't romanticism um the workers that he's on their side um he doesn't remind us that as in this hall nor does he remembers the colonial subjects on whose side he also that's very as it often finds them repulsive absolutely the opening lines of shooting an elephant which to me is almost that it's the perfect Orwell essay where you just see his mastery of the form at its best and I use it to teach the essay a lot because if students just see how he does it so clearly but in the at the beginning he says with one part of my mind I hated British imperialism with another part I thought the greatest pleasure would be to stab my bayonet into a Buddhist priests guts and that's a kind of confession about himself and about the Burmese that may be painful personally but as we from a literary point of view it's very powerful because it invites the reader and says I have all sorts of conflicting feelings and I'm going to own up to them and even make them the subject of this essay another thing you mentioned his reticence yeah that what about what she never says anything he never tells us why he resigned from the Burmese police that's right but I guess it's that he was afraid if he carried on with it he would become a sadist he had a streak of that in him you know um he wrote once that to understand fascism you have to have a streak of fascism he was talking about Jack London whose book the iron heel was a kind of prophecy of fascism but he might as well have been talking about himself too and that too I think is it is an answer to that question we were talking about earlier how could Orwell have understood what was happening behind the the veil of terror of Stalinist Russia Nazi Germany without direct personal experience of it except as you pointed out in in Barcelona and I think it's partly because he he had the sterner stuff in him though she's British will you break up you say in your video introduction that most of his arguments were with himself I thought that was very well encapsulated because a lot of people are if you like naturally liberals or naturally progressives they think it's just you know a nice way to be and he might dab so you didn't think like that at all had scorn for those who who did I think he what's fascinating is someone educating himself out of an upbringing where he'd been taught to looked down on and rather fear the lower orders to look on colored people in the Empire as a raw material to be very suspicious of Jews just clearly took him a long time to get all the time that's the reason his way out that's right your book makes that clear sorry excuse me could carried away with my own velocity and then one very very enduring prejudice which he doesn't cure himself all this absolute hatred and disgust for homosexuality that's right he used that phrase the pansy left to talk about Auden and spender and yeah it was not the nicest side of him and their women who think that he was a terrible misogynist and even that his misogyny his inability to create convincing female characters for example Julia in 1984 is not the the most persuasive part of that novel but that that was part of why he ended with such a dark vision of the world this is the subject of a book by I think her name is Daphne Pitt either or weird-ass TKE I don't think it's right I think that's giving totalitarianism not enough credit for being the the darkness that was surrounding Europe at the end of war Welles life but it's true that um it has a strange attitude you might almost say toward individuals unlike a journalist today he doesn't spend a lot of time on characters in his nonfiction you you never get to know any coal miner that's true by name you don't get to know anyone in his outfit in the militia in in Barcelona particularly well you learn a few of their names sometimes he just recites them almost like an honor-roll but you don't get to it to the inside of there being nobody does the perf about the soldier he meets yeah and so feels at comradeship with the first country with the Italian militia managed our Salone yeah and that's a beautiful moment at the beginning of homage to Catalonia and then at the end of the poem that can that concludes that essay looking back on the Spanish war and that but he also says I didn't want to meet him again because if I did it would ruin my first impression which is that this is sort of the flower of the European working class and that I think is the way his mind always goes away from the individual and toward the social type toward the the political and social significance of digging coal underground also entry surface distance you see him he has one point he replies to someone who asks him if you'd like to come to dinner and meet Stephen spender then a famous poet of the Pierre addendum and he says no because I think I may want to write about him and I find it much harder and I think what I'm going to say it II disagree I've only much harder to do that once I've met someone that's her sort of both very human and also very inhuman saying I don't so trust myself to be in to mention because he knows that as he says he wrote in the essay and Gandhi being human means attaching yourself to other human beings and being willing to be broken down and even destroyed by your love for this individual he was that essay is quite harsh about Gandhi's impersonal love for all of humanity and his cruelty or neglect of his own family for Orwell this was a perverse inversion of the proper order of things which is you love the individual not mankind he was not a saint he was not a lover of mankind in that sort of Gandhian way although he's been sanctified by some people posthumously so it's absolutely true that that's where his feelings drive him but there's also a counter force that that cuts him off from those attachments and I think it may partly be simply because they get in the way of writing and writing honestly and so the individuals are missing strangely serious by the way is a good illustration of another point you make which is Boyle's ability to start with a very arresting opening sentence and that one on Gandhi as I know you know begins we're saying what all Saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent we could just swap Orwell openers here no the autobiography should be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful which is the beginning of his essay on dolly in will main and lower burner I was hated by large numbers of people the only time in my life I've been important enough for this to happen to me yes shooting and Ellsbury yes but I think with the Gandhi intro as well it shows something else which is his general distaste for the spiritual he was the Oh something shady or creepy about that and his general contempt for religion there we had a respect for it too I mean he obviously knows the Bible very well he quotes it a lot clearly from memory almost always WordPerfect well as as good as that's how I know it's from memory hasn't yeah there's a key moments his marriage to Aileen no Shaughnessy he insisted on having it done in the Church of England ceremony he was buried in the Church of England graveyard he liked the liturgy you feel it's a kind of cultural attachment to the the words the cadences and the traditions of the Church of England which has absolutely nothing to do with heaven which he describes somewhere as in the vulgar versions seeming like a choir practice in a jeweler shop so yeah he he was not a religious man there's no sign anywhere of a belief in in the afterlife but I think he had a strong feeling for the Protestant revolution however I mean it shows in his attachment to Milton who's the great bard of that but his favorite line was a line of Milton's which was by the known rules of ancient Liberty in other words that there is a human instinct for freedom and he writes about the Protestant centuries as he puts it in a positive way contributed the European enlightenment and I think in back to 1984 again the struggle against an alien language that's been imposed upon people that of Newspeak and the struggle to find out what is in the secret book that they'll either party has right is a very good analogy to the struggle of Wickliffe and with um Coverdale and Tyndale to have the Bible translated into English which they were all market and the English revolution was important I think there's an essay called the Prevention of literature which is about the effective of not just totalitarian countries but it the internal censorship that came with the the totalitarian ization of British intellectuals and that essay begins as the effect on literature the effect on books he says son you know books like some wild animals can't breed in captivity it kills the imagination and that essay begins with a sort of a scene from a gathering of pen the writers organization that were well attended it's an unusual case in which he actually places himself at a some sort of public meeting as an example off point for the essay and at this pen meeting no one is able to stand up and defend free expression everyone is defending the right of the Soviet Union to do this or it reminds me kind of the worst of sort of identity politics when it invaded writers organizations in this country in the 80s and 90s suddenly the last thing anyone wants to speak up for is free expression I think a good example which is very near to your heart is when Salman Rushdie came under the fatwa from the Iranian government and it was hardly any writer who was able to say this is an absolute atrocity except you did oh that's too kind to me I mean there were lot of people who did very well member Susan Sontag actually convened a very good nation actually of I think you were among the very first but well but back to or well that essay then continues to imagine what if Milton were to come back today and attend this pen meeting he'd be astonished and no one at the meeting in nineteen forty five or six was able to defend free expression with the unqualified force of Milton three hundred years earlier so I think you're absolutely right that that period was a kind of a touchstone for him in the in the struggle for to the title of your line other morning we say all ours propaganda I have a question to ask you I know that he wrote that in wartime she wrote in 1941 in wartime all writing is now propaganda it's in an attack I think on Alex comfort and his pacifism and that is right that's right where does this come yes it he says it's in several places he says it for example in his essay on Dickens and does he does he does but what he means by it and he says it also I full said begins very brilliantly Dickens is one of those authors is well worth stealing there you go I knew we could have a little ping-pong game of opening liners no it's fun um he I think he might say it in another essay called a meaning of a poem for him it means and the reason I gave the book this title not that all art it could have been written by you know the minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels or even the Ministry of Information in wartime England but that all art implicitly has a point of view it has something to say about the world and as he says it's trying to push ah one's view in a certain direction it has a persuasive function it has a uh if it's worth anything it has a kind of a world view that it is advocating and I think it's not a resignation to the crudeness of wartime propaganda it's more his sort of smoking out the art for art's sake crowd who would like to have art be a separate from the world of ideas and politics and events and he's saying especially in a time like his the 40s yes it was impossible to be a serious artist and not have something to say about events even if you're writing very internal he makes that confession for himself and says every line I've ever written in the last twenty years were they were very on a serious topic or any serious line his written with hope of forwarding the course of journal clerics action in democratic socialism is the phrase uses and against totalitarianism I mean not every writer is going to be as explicitly political as Orwell nor nor do we want them to be but I think it's his technique as a literary critic and as a critic of a field he practically invented which is popular cultural criticism to find the implied or hidden worldview in what seems to be a kind of benign or not particularly pointed realm of art or culture like the postcards of sort of donald mcgill postcards that are sort of semi pornographic or at least mildly risque that were sold in England at that time monotonous ly indecent eat not that's a great phrase for it or the boys weeklies or the detective novels in his essay raffles and Miss blandish he's always that essay is a good example what are you going to do with an essay that basically compares a two different eras in British detective fiction raffles from the turn of the century and a novel called no orchids for Miss blandish which apparently was rather popular around 1943 and the point he comes to is there's a shift in moral point of view between these two raffles has a code which is not a particularly lovable code it's the code of a hypocritical English gentleman but nonetheless it's a code and so there's certain things that can't be done whereas no orchids for Miss blandish the only code is power and the pursuit of it and that's what should be admired and the great passage in that essay where he says people appreciate power at the level at which they can understand it and he has a boy and in Glasgow slum worships Jack Dempsey a student at a Business College worships Lord somebody or other a reader of the New Statesman worships Stalin it's a difference in intellectual level but not in moral outlook and that's how he finds sort of the I'd say the moral implications of something that seems as trivial as detective fiction I'm so glad you bring this up because it brings me quicker than I wanted to but that's to acknowledge or something I wanted to raise a lot of his writing about ethical codes and reticence and discretion zone versus ruthlessness and the cult of violence reflect hostility to the United States yeah say that look at the comics the British boys read look at the American ones that are coming into the full sadism and gangsterism and exactly so we we began by saying well you began by saying of my book that I said he got three great questions of the 20th century rise yeah but I add that he got on one of them I think not totally wrong but the importance of America here was something that he didn't write enough about when he did it was rather sketchy and all the condescension you have a chapter on poor well in America which he never visited he loves some American writers Mark Twain Moshe Jack London Henry Miller oddly enough but I think for Orwell America was pain Thomas Paine absolutely British born but I think for Orwell America was it didn't have the things that he was attached to and that are the things Winston Smith in 1984 is clinging to for sanity the the odd traditions the things passed on from one generation to another like the lyrics of of a nursery rhyme or a song old books that and bookstores that trade in old books of course some of these things are available here he wouldn't have moved little country churches with brass rubbings you got it the the yew tree in the country church yard for while those things were sort of the bulwark against the monolithic paving over of everything by not just totalitarianism but by modern life I mean he hated concrete he hated central heating he hated most mechanical entertainment he hated advertising and all these things seemed to be coming not just from the east in the Soviet Union but from the West in the United States and and his in this sense there was something parochial about he did dislike country Americanism yes that's right was then beginning to become a disease on the left because I think he understood it to be a kind of anti liberalism and a refuge of of a particular kind of snobbery that you find on the left which sees America as the vulgar ization of all good things that it's connected I think to the that plus conservative version cowboy ISM yes but you're I think the point you made in your book and you're making was absolutely right he didn't see America as a guarantor of the things that he cared most about it culturally especially it was an alien and distasteful place to him it's a pity that he died when he did because his friends at partisan review knowing he was unwell TB I'm trying to get him to come to us firstly for treatment really ideal because structure might seems easy to get yeah I'm very hard to get but he died but poppy in fact I don't know as Dickensian death yeah and they said come over and you'll like it and it would have been a great addition to the partisan review crap and he at one point he contemplated making a voyage down the Mississippi which makes it nice to have well going on since 1884 his next book would have been about the Mississippi now yeah I've got something for you on the American this is very suggestive slight but I think you might like it you will have no difficulty in telling me what the opening sentence of 1984 is the clocks were striking thirteen it was a bribe as a bright cold day in April and the clock was running thirteen yeah that's right I was reading John Adams daily day and he was writing about how to get the colonies together and how to coordinate a revolution against British power and he says it'll be very difficult to get all thirteen clocks to strike at the same time and there you go and then at the end of the book in the dictionary of Newspeak at the end of March 84 they have he shows how the attempt is made to obliterate all the possibility even thinking about freedom from the language and just to make it impossible even to formulate the thought and he gives an example of a sentence that couldn't be translated into new speak and it is yeah we hold these truths to be self-evident that's created and the following music you know you know there is this possible one certainly possible to and certainly one implied compliments to America and that but just imagine Orwell traveling through early 50s America know the America of a Lolita the America of the Eisenhower years when the suburbanization of the country was happening the highway system was in play was being put in place intellectuals were beginning to leave part in review leave Greenwich Village and take some comfort and and security in universities it I it's it's almost unimaginable it's like a whole different era had begun by that time in Orwell to me belong so completely to a previous era that was harder more exacting is it more austere yeah and and and all the the abundance and comfort of of post-war America would have think would have left him pretty cool although you're right he would have found places to love I think the Mississippi is one maybe the West with its affluent I would've thought New York - I totally not San Francisco he did love London I mean he lived in London and he worked in London he even made a point of staying in London during the Blitz when other people were leaving there but once London was no longer at risk it's uh its charms for him wore off which tells you something about the way in which he actually pursued hard experience actively rather than simply not avoiding it and so instead he moved to one of the hardest places in the British Isles the Isle of Jura off the coast of Scotland where he lived his last years probably hastened his death in 1984 but this I don't know if you saw this his son Richard or well his adopted son had kind of maintained his silence for 60 years and we only knew he existed we didn't know anything about him and he gave an interview about a year ago he's I think an agricultural engineer somewhere in English news which is kind of what you'd expect and he describes being Orwell's son in those years in Jura and far from being this gloomy apocalyptic you know Jeremiah of totalitarianism Orwell was just a lot of fun he took him fishing he took him boating they went on all these adventures they nearly got killed a bunch of times it wasn't physically easy but or what was completely attuned to the natural world and to his son and shared his love of of physical things and of nature with Richard and it's for me gives me a lot of pleasure to know that or what was it was a good father if I'm not supposing the rulebook first he had had a very bleak childhood himself obviously didn't like his father yeah when he mentions the analogy of a family for bridge Society it has every figure in it except a daddy which is a kind of strange omission right a family with the wrong people in charge that he mentions maintenance and distant cousins in which bono they're no fun that's right second though it's very rare have find a joke in Georgia oh well that when they do occur they're quite funny they're very dry um I'm trying to think of one well in Animal Farm when the when the animals take over one of the things they do is go into the smokehouse and take out the hams and give them a decent burial I thought it was quite funny yeah and his essay on confessions of a book reviewer is extremely funny yes yeah the picture but generally pretty bleak um how do you come out on the question of Lionel trilling who says of all that the great thing about him is he's not a genius he is I think extraordinary thing is how someone so relatively ordinary could just by refusing to lie and working very hard and not caring whether he lost a job or or his or Ellen got his book published oarsmen was able to change in the 20th century in other words qualities of character alone are sufficient to become a great writer and to become one of the most important writers of the century yes and no part of what drew me to Orwell back in my 20s was this sense that this is available this is not the mad brilliance of Saul Bellow this is not Faulkner's you know arabesques this is not this isn't even Hemingway's you know highly self-conscious stylized prose this is it felt like natural prose I mean that is a conceit because that's not it doesn't make you feel as you do when you're reading a book Oh for example why do I bother why do i it's impossible I can admire but I also you know can feel sort of discouraged by know with Orwell you feel encouraged by it you want to go do it yourself that's the feeling that that he gives me you want to try to write an essay like that you because the prose is simple it has that that the plain style and it and it seems like the leading characteristic of it is honesty which one ought to be capable of on the other hand I think trilling might go a little too far in just in the sense that decency alone that's that I think the word he uses about me well is not it's a key or well word common decency and it's important one but Orwell was an eccentric Orwell was a difficult man he had his incredible full of contradictions he was not so simple and good I think as trilling would have you think and you alluded earlier to some of his antipathies and his he was a man of violent dislikes and in some of his earlier work before I think he calmed down with a certain amount of self-assurance denunciation was his characteristic mode yeah so he's not so he's certainly not a saint and he's just he's not simply a good man whose qualities of character allowed him to write great books but those but there's enough truth to that that he is sort of a model available to everyone especially when she's writing is very difficult to measure him being afraid say yeah exactly or if he was afraid whether physically or morally he then would have noted it and forced himself to overcome it power face yeah exactly well we've only got about ten more minutes and what I thought I would do is take up the idea of Dickens being a writer worth stealing seeing the world call him and talk about attempts to appropriate oh well yeah the other meaning of Orwellian it's not usually used to describe a totalitarian state is in some sense someone who stands for a certain set of principles that's the news I like it the positive use of it and he's often invoked I mean he was very he was invoked against his will somewhat in the early days of the Cold War the only ones he saw by people who thought that Animal Farm initiated for was specifically attacks on socialism which he he didn't want that's right and he had to actually write a statement saying I'm a supporter of the Labour Party and in sauk is not an indictment of English socialism it's a warning about the tendency of all modern political thought to move toward yeah talent is it by the way he added and he was very firm to the English it was to show that the English were no better than Abel that's right that's right um well the best way we could take this on the chin you and I since different times we both viewed with favour the removal of Saddam Hussein from power yeah and I think a well was in our minds but different times and certainly I know of other people who will try is it worth asking do you think what would all well another one but just to finish the little history you started he was also claimed by Norman Podhoretz of commentary a Shanda in an essay called if Orwell had lived basically for we live here he would have been a neocon he would have been Norman Podhoretz well on that I can't pronounce because put on it's thought that well would have taken the American side in Indochina and I think I could be certain that that's not so but because of his anti-imperial because he was very strongly actually colonial especially in that part of Asia which he knew so you know yeah and he actually mentions when he's in Paris at the end of the war the revival of us of left opposition type anti-stalinist paper and one of the great essays that it's printed which is about the attempt to restore French colonialism in Indochina yeah which is the ancestor of the American and exactly he would have regarded it also seen it as a colonial war as a bad news for that reason he would have been I think you're absurd in Iraq is different because it was not a colonial war you know there's in a way there it's very hard to say and it's a little dangerous to claim but we can speculate because because we have to there's two different arguments to be made about that one is that or what would have seen in Saddam's rule other than perhaps North Korea the nearest thing to the world he imagined in 1984 I mean you say that totalitarianism is a cliche Iraq is a great example Saddam was big brother he had big brothers mustache his face was on posters all over Baghdad it was on television all the time you could not escape the eye of Saddam's many secret police Iraqis used to say they thought he knew what they were dreaming exactly and and that he was inside them and that even after he was overthrown they felt they they continued to suffer from the effects of death when we were in action and was the pornographic government apart we never been more horrible I mean Saddam's son was sort of the human incarnation of the pornography of totalitarianism with rape and all kinds of crimes so that that one is easy to say that or what would have seen that regime as it was it would have been no defenses of sovereignty or state sovereignty or of you know that this somehow was an anti-islamic war that this is an anti Arab or he would have seen that regime as a modern secular totalitarian regime which is what it was on the other hand I would say not so secular it's the damn Hussaini poised Allahu Akbar on the Iraqi flag and yeah you know for the end he you landed in Sunni Islam for his purposes that's right the other side of it is the language used by the Bush administration both before the war and after the invasion which in many ways was mendacious was euphemistic was misleading was bad language it was the kind of bad language that allows bad political thought which is the subject of politics and the English language may be the best known of Orwell's essays and I think oral would have been merciless in stripping away the rhetoric of George Bush Dick Cheney Don Rumsfeld and Karl Rove for that matter and so which Orwell would have had his fun the vote though the anti totalitarian or well who would have seen Iraq exactly as it was and known that to stand up against Saddam was to stand up for the Kurds to stand up for masses of Iraqis who did not want to continue this way and he would have understood something that one learned upon going to Iraq which the many most Iraqis were relieved to have that regime undefeated let's not forget yeah exactly that's been forgotten on the other side the or well who hated political lying and and and political of a gun and propaganda exactly so hard to say well I didn't see yeah what uh it's it's also hard because you never really wrote anything much about the Middle East and hadn't been he was very skeptical about the foundation of the State of Israel which was the big argument going on in the closing years of his life he wasn't very drawn by the promises ioan ISM and you sympathetic to the Arabs of Palestine do you think he believed that democracy and and the freedoms that you know that Milton I stood for could take root in non-western countries is there evidence that he lived in the universality of I'm not quite sure of it I mean this was actually one thing we really have been a couple of minutes I'm sorry but by way of illustration he writes to his friend his Indian friend milk Raj Anand Dhoni died a couple of years ago yeah um budding novelist and essayist and who gets attacked in India for writing in English using the conquerors language and gets mocked in England for being a sort of white Indian or I'm sure or two nationalists in ship and all says don't worry about this you're bound to get both those things but I'll tell you what I think one day there will be the will being the Department of English literature as a special subset of it written by Indians in English and of course now you can't go into a decent bookstore I've seen five or six brilliant Indian or Pakistani writers writing in English writing so much very often better than English people yeah and so Naipaul would have been kind of the following in the line what rifles from Trinidad reviews Indian but I mean I was think people literally from soca so none obviously honey fleshy Arundhati Roy says he comes age so certainly there's the he was he was not a little Englander in his view of culture and his view of expression but one pernicious idea that's resulted from the disaster Ron George I'm not a great master of ceremonies this organic why it was a real conversation I wouldn't be saying yeah you'll have to condense this in less than a minute I'll do that is gonna the last word is that people who don't look like us can't do this and that's a terrible mistake and I don't think war would have fallen into that trap of imagining that freedom is only for for white people which is would you wrote messages

Channel: The Film Archives

Views: 415,132

Rating: 4.8818407 out of 5

Keywords: All Art Is Propaganda, George Orwell (Author), Interview (Ontology Class), George, Jerry, Bruce, Society, Honor, Andrew, Tommy, Lewis, Lopez, Jason, Brandon, Jones, Evans, Sampson, Bruno, Richard, Honor Society, Brüno (Film), Alexander, Elaine, Gerald Brisco (Solo Wrestler Or Team), Kramer, Jamie, Film (Film), Curtis, Clooney, Strait, Mason, Peggy, Lee's, Spike, Curious, Peggy Lee (Musical Artist), Rosen

Id: W32BEjvU7QM

Length: 51min 52sec (3112 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/TEKrific]

This is a brilliant conversation. Although this has been posted here many times before, I'm going to upvote this every time it is posted. For those who haven't seen it already, you're in for a treat.