Orwell's "Keep The Aspidistra Flying"

I've just finished it. It's very real, and you're wrung by the wretchedness of the lower-middle-class challenge to cling on to respectability by one's fingernails, and the hero's equally desperate attempt to hold to his socialist principles and manly independence. He wants, as my friend said, to be a Renaissance man, without enjoying the Renaissance man's income; and when his contradictions are broken by Life - literally, as his girlfriend has fallen pregnant - it comes as a relief: "He was thirty and he had grey in his hair, yet he had a queer feeling that he had only just grown up."

A Guardian review from 2003 says: "Orwell refused to allow either Keep the Aspidistra Flying or his first novel, the considerably weaker A Clergyman's Daughter, to be reprinted in his lifetime. His dislike of his early novels arose from his incredibly strong sense that he would always be a literary failure, which enabled him to empathise so strongly with his creations like Comstock."

That haunting self-distrust and obstinacy; was it like that for J K Rowling, fighting her dementors while writing her novel in the Elephant House tea shop?

"If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’"

- said Kipling, to whom Orwell the Empire-hater was nevertheless fair, for disillusioned though he was, Orwell always remained decent - that virtue sneered at by social superiors, the powerful and the politically subversive. Not for him the outright moral criminality of Donleavy's postwar Ginger Man.

Nor ironic, Genet-boosting existentialist, he; surely he would have resigned rather than step into the shoes of a deported Jewish professor, which is what Sartre did; and he really did shoot at Fascists, rather than fantasize about it in a philosophical-fiction tetralogy.

Orwell kept steering by his star. He remained authentic.


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Never a shortage of torturers

Tom Pride (a pseudonym) runs a satirical political blog titled "Pride's Purge", headed by this woodcut:

- which presumably indicates what he'd like to do the liars who rule us.

I was morbidly intrigued by the illustration. Was it some sixteenth century atrocity practised on a hapless South American tribesman? Was it one of those dreadful mediaeval European executions using molten lead?

No, not quite so bad as that. Image-matcher Tineye found me the whole picture:

(source: Wikimedia)

It's a waterboarding interrogation. But the eternal basics are there: the ruffian coolly willing to do dreadful things, the "potent, grave and reverend signiors" quietly instructing and recording, indicating by their weighty demeanour that this is a sad but necessary proceeding. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.

It comes from a book, Praxis rerum criminalium (1554) by the Dutch lawyer Joos de Damhouder, "which he almost entirely plagiarised from an unpublished text by Filips Wielant and from other works." Joos himself is pictured as sober-solemn:

Joos de Damhouder (Pic source)

But here's the man whose work he plagiarised - Filips Wielant, a fellow Dutchman (and fellow lawyer) born in the previous century, and whose own book was published only posthumously in 1558, four years after de Damhouder's:

Filips Vielant (Pic source)

- a petulant, sadistic face if you ask me. Look at that mouth and those eyes. Perhaps in the century that intervened, eminent personages learned the value of portraits as propaganda, for this one reveals too much.

There is no shortage of such people, or of the villains prepared to serve them. There's always some excuse for torture, and a crowd that can easily be provoked into saying you can wire him up for me, haw-haw, damn towelhead.

“And yet our personal experience and the study of history make it abundantly clear that the means whereby we try to achieve something are at least as important as the end we wish to attain. Indeed they are even more important. For the means employed inevitably determine the nature of the result achieved; whereas, however good the end aimed at may be, its goodness is powerless to counteract the effects of the bad means we use to reach it.”  - Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means" (1937).

William Blake: "A Divine Image" (pic source)

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Drawing profit from circumstances

source

Indifferent and passionate, he gave himself rein and drew back constantly, impelled by conflicting instincts, yielding to all, and then obeying, in the end, his own shrewd man-about-town judgment, whose weather-vane logic consisted in following the wind and drawing profit from circumstances without taking the trouble to originate them.

Guy de Maupassant - Yvette (1884)

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Just perfect

William Blake: Eve tempted by the serpent (1799-1800)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"... of [Blake's poems] ... Wordsworth said after reading a number—they were the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience showing the two opposite sides of the human soul'—'There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott!' "

- Henry Crabb Robinson.

I stood in front of this painting for a long time. 

The perfection of woman, the unreproducible brilliance of the blue (tempera on copper).



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Why Boris Johnson may never be Prime Minister

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A new mode of ignorance

Why is it that when you twist things out of their natural order, when you become a little sophisticated and want more than you ever did before, the risk is relatively greater? So easy to become rotten. A tree never gets that way because it is a tree.

Sherwood Anderson – Dark Laughter (1925)

As age pulls back the social veils it becomes ever more difficult to admire - what? More difficult to admire anything.

I can’t tell if it is the internet or age-induced cynicism but I think much of it is the internet shining its pitiless light on people in the public arena who simply should not be there. People with nothing to offer but their vanity and a grim determination to claw their way up what is now a forest of greasy poles.

Ignorant pundits, political apologists, talentless celebrities, venal politicians, professional liars, grievance mongers, deranged activists, serial exaggerators, insane feminists, male feminists, social justice warriors, eco warriors, gender pundits, race baiters, celebrity celebrities, religious maniacs, atheist maniacs, sports pundits, poverty pundits, fashion gurus, doom mongers, economic fantasists, junk scientists, junk artists, pseuds of every description, bent councillors, sinecure seekers, dodgy charities, fake radicals and all the unlovely crew we would be far, far better off without.

So little to admire, so much to scorn. Was it always like this or has the digital revolution exposed just how bad it is?

Two trends seem to be emerging. Firstly the obvious one – the public arena is far bigger than it was only a few decades ago. More TV channels, more video on demand, more digital voices and many more ways to get a narrative across. As a result the public arena is more diverse with lower barriers to entry. Anyone may hit the right note and propel themselves into the digital arena, especially with professional assistance.

The second trend is paradoxical but it may be real and it is this. In an important sense people are becoming better informed and at the same time more ignorant. The public arena has become so vast and clamorous that many people seem to miss what might once have been called the narrow path of virtue. It may have been narrow but it imposed a kind of sanity we no longer have.

This second trend makes for a peculiar world where people are at the same time both less and more naive than their forebears. They are both less conservative and more conservative as they become less aware of what is worth conserving but more susceptible to wildly exaggerated risks spewed at them from the digital arena.

The digital revolution asks more of us. More time, more effort spent checking sources, a more circumspect and sceptical attitude to information and authorities. Unfortunately many of us do not do the spadework, including many members of the elite. Perhaps most of them.

The net result feels like an explosion of ignorance. Not the ignorance of the past where people were simply uninformed, but a new mode of ignorance where we fail to be adequately sceptical and selective as a brave new world busily wires up our minds.

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Don't be busy

General Slim's day in wartime Burma, fighting the Japanese, "the most formidable fighting insect in history":

6:30            get up
7:00            look at overnight messages
7.30 - 8.00   breakfast with air commanders and principal staff officers
8.30            attend joint air and land intelligence conference
                  other business
Lunch, talking shop with colleagues
                  more office business, then...
3.00            leave office
                  read a novel for an hour
                  tea
                  go for a walk in the cooler air, accompanied by a member of staff
7.30 - 9.30  dinner, then mess bar for a drink and talk
9.30            last visit to ops room
10.00          bed

"I had seen too many of my colleagues crack under the immense strain of command in the field not to realize that, if I were to continue, I must have ample leisure in which to think, and unbroken sleep. Generals would do well to remember that, even in war, 'the wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure.' Generals who are terribly busy all day and half the night, who fuss round, posting platoons and writing march tables, wear out not only their subordinates but themselves. Nor have they, when the real emergency comes, the reserve of vigour that will then enable them, for days if necessary, to do with little rest or sleep."

Field Marshal Viscount Slim, "Defeat Into Victory", Pan Books (1999 edn.), pp.222-223


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