James Smith, British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930–1960

Review published in the Times Literary Supplement

Recording 'Voice' for the BBC Eastern Service. Orwell is third from the right. (Source)

From Alex Danchev (TLS) (link via Johann Gregory): ‘In 1941 Eric Blair became a temporary Talks Producer in the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, charged with shoring up support for the Allied war effort among the Indian intelligentsia. Blair himself was acutely conscious of the moral minefield into which he forward-marched. “If I broadcast as George Orwell I am as it were selling my literary reputation, which so far as India is concerned probably arises chiefly from books of anti-imperialist tendency.” It was precisely that reputation which attracted the BBC – “the propaganda advantages of Orwell’s name are obvious”, as a management memo put it. The organs of the state sought to claim him and perhaps to tame him, or at least to vet him and to chain him. The BBC was in every sense an Orwellian world.’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• George Orwell's Diaries
• Jonathan Rodden, The Unexamined Orwell
• W. H. Auden's University Syllabus
• W. H. Auden on Franz Kafka
• Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

David Lynch

Literature:

J. G. Ballard: William Boyd reads 'My dream of flying to Wake Island'
Books on the frontline defence of UK student protests
Christopher Isherwood: New York Times discovers Isherwood's encounter with Mick Jagger in the second volume of his Diaries
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Dostoyevsky's death mask
Will Self: Lengthy interview on the Sky Arts programme, In Confidence
J. D. Salinger: The New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross reflects on a long-standing friendship with the American author
Leo Tolstoy: Anatoly Naiman of the Moscow News reflects on 'the Tolstoy we have lost'
Mathias Énard: Stephen Mitchelmore reviews Zone
Saul Bellow: Saul Bellow reads from Humboldt's Gift (1988)
New Yorker compiles a year's reading
Philip Larkin: Unknown poem discovered in shoe box
Maud Newton launches a pop culture TUMBLR blog

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

FWSA Book Prize 2011
Yale University on iTunes U: A selection of downloadable podcasts
Maurice Blanchot: Jacky Wang on Blanchot and inventing language in an unfamiliar tongue
Erik Morse: On the cultural motif of the haunted house

Film:

David Lynch: Director, artist and musician David Lynch answers questions on Twitter
Ridley Scott: According to sources, Alien prequel to proceed under the title 'Paradise'
Alfred Hitchcock: Roundtable discussion: 'Finding equilibrium in Hitchcock's Vertigo'
Thomas Bernhard: Three Days, a documentary film by Ferry Radax, now available on DVD
The Art of Film Title Design

Television

David Lynch: John Coulthart revisits landmark television series, Twin Peaks

Art & Design

Miles Davis: Richard Williams reviews a recent collection of paintings by the American jazz trumpeter

Theatre

William Shakespeare: Alan A. Stone on King Lear and Humanity

Music

David Lynch: The Guardian's Jason Solomon interviews filmmaker David Lynch about his recent foray into pop music
David Lynch: Dazed Digital interviews David Lynch
Stephen Morris: Joy Division and New Order drummer selects his favourite albums

Thank you to all link contributions, which can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

Christopher Isherwood's California

The second volume of Isherwood's diaries is released

Christopher Isherwood, The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two - 1960-69
Edited by Katherine Bucknell

Richard Canning reviews the second volume of Christopher Isherwood's The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two - 1960-69:

'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' Anyone familiar with the declaration by the narrator of Christopher Isherwood's most enduring work of fiction, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), will be surprised by how uncinematic, indeed incomprehensive, his diary entries can be. There's a lot of thinking, and nothing like the gestures towards abandoning subjectivity and self-consciousness that Isherwood crafted into his novels, not least the one masterpiece penned during the period covered by this second collection - A Single Man (1964).

As in the first volume of diaries, published in 1996, Isherwood comes across as, by turns, rebarbative, loving, insecure, opinionated, self-critical, self-destructive, reticent, controlling and grand. His sing-song voice - caught in the 2007 documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story - is hard to square with these entries, which are rarely light-hearted.

What they are, however, is a huge relief after this book's thousand-page predecessor. Although the years which that book covered - 1939 to 1960 - brought large changes for Isherwood (the controversial flight to America at the outset of war; his developmental interest in Vedantism; most vitally, his meeting the nineteen-year-old Don Bachardy, who, thirty-four years his junior, became the love of his life), they were equally characterised by violent mood swings and heavy drinking. In the diaries, if not also in life, the dominant notes were bitterness and self-pity. Surely the chief reason for the relative calm, generosity and self-acceptance Isherwood shows in The Sixties was his realisation (more gradual than one might think) that Bachardy was not only his 'significant other' but also his lodestar, muse and - notwithstanding Bachardy's palpable insecurities on the matter - intellectual and artistic equal. [Read more]

Richard Canning, 'California Dreaming'

Literary Review, October 2010

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man

Disjecta: This week's links

Your guide to this week's best cultural links

Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg outside
City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco

Literature:

Maud Newton: 'On grief - and dying without finishing your book'
Joyce Carol Oates: American writer's summer reading
Paul Auster: Daniel Roberts reviews recent novel, The Invisible, at The Millions
Paul Auster: Review of Collected Prose
William S. Burroughs: On novelistic form
Virginia Woolf: BBC interview with Virginia Woolf, first broadcast in 1937
Christopher Isherwood: Interviewed by the BBC in 1959
Anthony Burgess: Interviewed by the BBC in 1989
Frank Kermode 1919-2010: Esteemed literary critic has passed away
Bob Dylan, the Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg's America
J. G. Ballard: First aired in 1989, BBC are streaming The Late Show: Face to Face with J. G. Ballard
My favourite font: A selection of writers select their preferred typefaces
Roger Ebert's Lovely, Sarcastic Tweets about E-Books
W. G. Sebald: An audio recording now available of Will Self's lecture on Sebald and the Holocaust

Philosophy & Critical Theory:

Is pop philosophy taking over the bookshelves?
Jacques Derrida: Kantian and Hegelian readings of Derrida's work
Jacques Derrida: What is literature?
Jacques Derrida: Is there anything outside the text?

Art, Design & Photography:

Robert Mapplethorpe: Arena documentary profile

Etc.

Stewart Lee on The Fall

Thank you to all link contributors, who can be found on the A Piece of Monologue Twitter page.

From Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man

The opening of Isherwood's short novel on loss and grief

A brief excerpt from Christopher Isherwood's superb novel A Single Man, recently adapted into a motion picture by Tom Ford:

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognised I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it had expected to find itself; what's called at home.

But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder; one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labelled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until - later or sooner - perhaps - no, not perhaps - quite certainly: It will come.

Fear teaks the vagus nerve. A sickish shrinking from what waits, somewhere out there, dead ahead.

But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has taken its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another; the legs stretch, the lower back is arched, the fingers clench and relax. And now, over the entire intercommunication-system, is issued the first general order of the day: UP.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man