可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... West | Paperback | 92 OR | 1 | Biography Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
评论 (1)
Kirkus评论
London University professor Crick (In Defense of Politics) here completes--and complements--the picture formed by Abraham and Stansky's two volumes on the emergence of George Orwell out of Eric Blair. Placing Orwell's writings at the center of his story, Crick sets out to prove that Orwell was a socialist of the individualistic, egalitarian sort that in Britain traces its lineage through Aneurin Bevan and William Morris to the Diggers--and that he remained so even in the writing of Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). This is the identity that Abraham and Stansky establish for Orwell up through Homage to Catalonia (1938), and Crick's version follows theirs to that point. Thereafter, he can justifiably cite Orwell's membership in the Independent Labor Party and his position as Literary Editor of Bevan's paper, The Tribune--as well as a series of letters in which Orwell makes his intentions plain: Nineteen Eighty-four was meant to be a projection of the tendencies of industrial society--not inevitabilities, that is, but trends to be combated. And it was not meant to be a one-sided attack on communism, as many have assumed. Further evidence is a sketch for what was clearly to become Nineteen Eighty-four in one of Orwell's 1943 notebooks, well before Orwell can possibly have undergone a political change-of-heart. Crick also disputes the view that Orwell's early school experiences at St. Cyprian's, as depicted in his posthumously published ""Such, Such Were the Joys,"" form the experiential background for the Nineteen Eighty-four totalitarian nightmare. Such a view, to Crick, mistakes the artist's recreation of memory for the real thing; and also hinges on a mistaken dating of the essay, which Crick believes was written in 1940, not just before the great novel. All this is Crick's way of writing Orwell's biography from the outside; he resolutely refuses to psychoanalyze or otherwise try to get inside Orwell's character, preferring instead to let Orwell and his intimates speak for themselves. As Crick notes, the picture is not always pleasant: Orwell had a way of ignoring his own well-being and a ""stoic"" refusal to show pain over, for example, his first wife Eileen's death (which Crick shows to have been from a more serious operation than hitherto thought), that don't endear him. But the political focus on a man who wanted to raise political writing to an art is an altogether perfect focus. A fine biography fully worthy of its distinguished predecessors. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.