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

Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors

Letters from Joyce, Gaddis, Woolf, McCullers and others

A young James Joyce (1902)

Flavorwire has posted a fan letter written by James Joyce to the playwright Henrik Ibsen (link via Johann Gregory):

Honoured Sir,

I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes. [Read More]

The site has also posted letters by William Gaddis (to Don DeLillo), Norman Mailer (to William Styron), Ray Bradbury (to Robert Heinlein), Charles Dickens (to George Eliot), Virginia Woolf (to Olaf Stapledon), W. H. Auden (to James Agee), Carson McCullers (to Henry Miller), George R. R. Martin (to Stan Lee), and William S. Burroughs (to Truman Capote). [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• James Joyce Centre: New Acquisitions
• James Joyce Manuscripts Online
• James Joyce and Walter Benjamin
• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce's Ulysses

W. H. Auden's University Syllabus

Over 6,000 words of required reading over one semester

W. H. Auden's course syllabus

From New York Daily News: ‘Poet W. H. Auden was a professor at the University of Michigan during the 1941-42 academic year, teaching "Fate and the Individual in European Literature." His syllabus required over 6,000 pages of reading including Dante's "The Divine Comedy," Dostoevsky's "The Brother's Karamazov" and Melville's "Moby-Dick."’ [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• W. H. Auden on Kafka

Granta Interview: Nick Papadimitriou

'Deep topographer' talks about his new book

Nick Papadimitriou

Granta talks to Nick Papadimitriou about his new book, Scarp:

This is your first book but it has had a long gestation period, both in terms of the writing time and the vast amount of walking you’ve done along this unusual and captivating landmass. To what extent do you find the two activities, of composing sentences and putting one foot in front of the other, are linked for you?

When I first began walking concertedly back in the late 1980s, I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw, the sensory experience of weather and light that buffeted me and the responses triggered by these. It was as if the land was trying to transmit a message through me, or as if I wanted to communicate to some as yet undiscovered loved one what it was I saw. This statement may seem to be unduly poetic or high-flown but it is the need to convey magnitude that concerns me here. It was inevitable that some sort of art would rise out of the encounter and Scarp is my first, faltering communiqué. However, this is only part of the story. Frequently I refuse to keep notes or other records of walks undertaken and as a result the memories of these fade and ultimately pass down into the land, and are forgotten. At some level I think this is as it should be. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• BBC Newsnight meets Nick Papadimitriou
• Nick Papadimitriou, Scarp
• Documentary: London Perambulator (2009)
• Will Self: Walking out of London
• Richard Long: Walking Artist

W. H. Auden on Franz Kafka

Is Kafka destined to be read by 'the wrong public'?

W. H. Auden

In a recent post, Times Flow Stemmed has quoted W. H. Auden's reading of Franz Kafka: 'I am inclined to believe that one should only read Kafka when one is in a eupeptic state of physical and mental health and, in consequence, tempted to dismiss any scrupulous heart-searching as a morbid fuss. When one is in low spirits, one should probably keep away from him, for, unless introspection is accompanied, as it always was in Kafka, by an equal passion for the good life, it all too easily degenerates into a spineless narcissistic fascination with one’s own sin and weakness.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Franz Kafka

Craig Raine on Harold Pinter

Craig Raine remembers Harold Pinter, who passed away in 2008

It's just over a year since Harold Pinter died. But I think of him in the present tense, at Lord's cricket ground, ebullient because he has conquered cancer, and the titles of his plays are up there on the scoreboard. He looks as if he is about to score himself – grinning, sexy, full of mischief, irrepressible.

As his art was irrepressible. The cliché is the pause. But it co-existed with the riff, a torrential thesaurus, a kind of dramatic Tourette's. This is the waiter in Celebration addressing his uncultured customers: "He [the waiter's grandfather] knew them all, in fact, Ezra Pound, WH Auden, C Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, George Barker, Dylan Thomas, and if you go back a few years he was a bit of a drinking companion of DH Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, WB Yeats, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy in his dotage." Just when the audience knows it's bullshit, an unlikely list, a glib, mechanical recitation, the phrase "in his dotage" is dropped. Hardy would have been very old, relative to the other literary celebrities. Pinter's plays are poker-faced, smiling enigmatically, daring us to call their bluff – disconcerting.

In New World Order, one of Pinter's darkly comic political sketches, two torturers are talking above a seated, silent figure – their potential victim. They might be surgeons chatting over an anaesthetised patient. It is a perfect, simple parable of power. When one of them mentions the victim's wife, the tone isn't menacing. It is indifferent, neutral, measured, contained, matter of fact and therefore menacing. Pinter knows the cliché – the muscular sadist – and instead gives us two dapper types, differentiating and making discriminations: "The terms are mutually contradictory." With, of course, the odd obscene expletive. Not just dapper either, but "pure" and sentimental, moved to tears by their political beliefs: "keeping the world clean for democracy." In New World Order, that punchline winds us like a blow. It is a synecdoche for the infliction of pain. And it is a typically candid Pinterian irony. There is no physical violence on stage, no action. But feeling "pure" is a demonstration of its opposite. Directors often talk these days about the "action" of any scene – meaning, what is the unspoken objective of the characters on stage? What is the subtext? It is a method invented initially, I would say, to explain Pinter.

Craig Raine, et al, 'Living in the memory'

The Guardian, 2 January 2010