George Orwell: A Life in Letters by Peter Davison Read Free Book Online Page A

Judgement’. 2 I believe there could be a public for that kind of thing again nowadays.
    As to New Road . I am much impressed by the quantity and the general level of the verse you have got together. I should think half the writers were not known to me before. Apropos of Aragon 3 and others, I have thought over what you said about the reviving effect of defeat upon literature and also upon national life. I think you may well be right, but it seems to me that such a revival is only against something, ie. against foreign oppression, and can’t lead beyond a certain point unless that oppression is ultimately to be broken, which must be by military means. I suppose however one might accept defeat in a mystical belief that it will ultimately break down of its own accord. The really wicked thing seems to me to wish for a ‘negotiated’ peace, which means back to 1939 or even 1914. I have written a long article on this for Horizon apropos of Fielden’s book on India, but I am not certain Connolly will print it. 4
    I am going to try to get Forster to talk about New Road , together with the latest number of New Writing , in one of his monthly book talks to India. If he doesn’t do it this month he might next. 5 There is no sales value there, but it extends your publicity a little and by talking about these things on the air in wartime one has the feeling that one is keeping a tiny lamp alight somewhere. You ought to try to get a few copies of the book to India. There is a small public for such things among people like Ahmed Ali 6 and they are starved for books at present. We have broadcast quite a lot of contemporary verse to India, and they are now doing it to China with a commentary in Chinese. We also have some of our broadcasts printed as pamphlets in India and sold for a few annas, a thing that could be useful but is terribly hard to organise in the face of official inertia and obstruction. I saw you had a poem by Tambimuttu. If you are bringing out other numbers, you ought to get some of the other Indians to write for you. There are several quite talented ones and they are very embittered because they think people snub them and won’t print their stuff. It is tremendously important from several points of view to try to promote decent cultural relations between Europe and Asia. Nine tenths of what one does in this direction is simply wasted labour, but now and again a pamphlet or a broadcast or something gets to the person it is intended for, and this does more good than fifty speeches by politicians. William Empson 7 has worn himself out for two years trying to get them to broadcast intelligent stuff to China, and I think has succeeded to some small extent. It was thinking of people like him that made me rather angry about what you said of the BBC, though God knows I have the best means of judging what a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum it is for the most part.
    Yours sincerely
    Geo. Orwell
    [XV, 2185, pp. 168–9; typewritten]
    1 . See Orwell’s verse-letter, ‘As One Non-Combatant to Another (A Letter to “Obadiah Hornbrooke”)’, XV, 2138, pp. 142–5 (and Comfort’s initial verse-letter, pp. 138–141).
    2 . When George III died, Robert Southey, the poet laureate, wrote a conventional elegy, Vision of Judgement (1821). To this, Byron wrote a devastating rejoinder, The Vision of Judgement . Its satire was so biting that John Murray refused to take the risk of publishing it, and when Leigh Hunt, editor of The Liberal , printed it in 1822, he was fined £100.
    3 . Louis Aragon came to the fore after the collapse of France, through his patriotic poems – Le Crève-coeur (1941) and Les Yeux d’Elsa (1942) among them. (See also 9.4.46 to Philip Rahv. n. 3.)
    4 . Lionel Fielden (1896–1974), after serving in World War I (including Gallipoli) and working for the League of Nations and the High Commission for Refugees in Greece and the Levant, joined the BBC in 1927. He served as a staff officer in Italy in 1943