>I've read a very few illuminating and tactful biographies, but on the whole
>I instinctively dislike this whole business of prying into a writer's life:
>it's fraught with problems and is most usually misleading rather than
>otherwise. Even more so when it happens in the mass media.

Well, I can agree with this, but given my lack of interest in biographies, much
less the mass media extensions of the interest in celebrity, I'm not the one you'd
have to persuade. That argument might be taken up with a publisher of shock
horror biographies, or a writer of one, or even a reader of biographies. In this
sense, I was just speculating about an interest for biography in others which I
don't share, so I was speculating that it's a human interest, a sort of predeliction
that goes back as far as Plutarch's Lives and is not likely to disappear anytime
soon and to the degree that writers reach the public eye for whatever reason an
interest that is not likely to exempt writers.


 Earlier, you
>said that it _did_ reflect on the work, since he was arguing for justice and
>yet behaving unjustly ("To give a list of names as traitors "fellow
>travellers" to the government seems to be that sort of extralegal process,
>ratting others out, making accusations in private, depriving those accused
>of defense or reply or public enquiry that at least has the possibility of
>other evidence being introduced, that is a totalitarian process, even when
>it serves a 'democratic government,' i.e., it's not so far from what's going
>on in Guantanamo now. So it seems that Orwell in his hatred of totalitarian
>governments, particularly in the list naming, of communist government was
>able to condone totalitarian process and practice in himself and in fighting
>that particular fight.") Ie, here's this great arguer against
>totalitarianism acting in a totalitarian way, so how can we trust what he
>says?

No, there's nothing in my quote which you included that argues for
reconsidering Orwell's work. And that's not an inevitable inference, that it turns
back upon the work and becomes a question of trusting what he says. My view
was rather that trusting what he says and given what he says, how did he do
this? How did this great arguer against totalitarianism, and given that I trust his
work on its terms, act in a totalitarian way in this instance? How does someone
else fall into his frailty? how do I? a questioning of a particular action that is
based upon a trust of the work. It's the action that I was questioning, a
particular shadow, and by the trust of the light in the work. Admittedly some
can turn the hinge the other way, and perhaps more do, but that's not the
direction of my questioning.

And, yes, I read the Ash piece and found it very interesting, for some of the
reasons you mention, the actual consequences or what was at risk for the
people so named, the various circumstances attendant. I knew that no one was
sent to the 'gulag', there were no 'gulags' in Britain then, that's a bit of verbal
exagerration on my part.

I don't know who came out with this story or why or why Kolyma is not as well-
known as Auschwitz or the Armenian genocide is erased from most memory,
but again, those seem interrogatories directed at someone else which I could
only speculate upon. I watched a number of documentaries about Kolyma
recently and the word makes me shiver, and if Orwell had made a list of Fascists
that he had been 'fellow travellers' with, I'd have wondered or been troubled in
the same way. It occurs to me that I am perhaps troubled by these various
things, for the way in which they intersect with various preoccupations in me,
and so wonder in that sense. Not as a journalist who 'seeded' the story or a
shock horror biographer or a producer of Entertainment Tonight or as a literary
critic who evaluates works on the basis of the latest breaking bio information or
...well, you get the idea, straw heads, and I can't really answer for all that.

Best,

Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 07:39:57 +1100
>From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: orwell
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>On 25/1/05 5:23 AM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Yes, I think the criticism of the work should originate in response to the
>> work,
>> but I wasn't arguing for a rereading of Orwell's work or that his works be
>> judged in the shadow of this action of his delivering a list of names to the
>> government. All of my preoccupation was with that action.
>
>> I see this though as human a trait or frailty as
>> the frailty that a writer may fall prey to, and would guess part of the
>> interest is
>> just that, the "human interest" angle, seeing what others do. And so while I'd
>> argue for reading the work, and not by the dim light of the personality, I
>> don't
>> expect it's an argument that will be successful, since in my view, people
>> write
>> and publish and read shock biographies from certain innate human
>> predilections and interests.
>
>"Human interest" is another journalistic term; it is used to mean the
>stories about firemen rescuing kittens used as column fillers or at the end
>of news broadcasts. It may be popular, even irresistible, but it's not a
>value. It's in the same world as "infotainment" and the cult of celebrity.
>I've read a very few illuminating and tactful biographies, but on the whole
>I instinctively dislike this whole business of prying into a writer's life:
>it's fraught with problems and is most usually misleading rather than
>otherwise. Even more so when it happens in the mass media.
>
>The problem is that this kind of revelation is very often (I would say in
>Orwell's case, certainly) used to discredit a person's work. Earlier, you
>said that it _did_ reflect on the work, since he was arguing for justice and
>yet behaving unjustly ("To give a list of names as traitors "fellow
>travellers" to the government seems to be that sort of extralegal process,
>ratting others out, making accusations in private, depriving those accused
>of defense or reply or public enquiry that at least has the possibility of
>other evidence being introduced, that is a totalitarian process, even when
>it serves a 'democratic government,' i.e., it's not so far from what's going
>on in Guantanamo now. So it seems that Orwell in his hatred of totalitarian
>governments, particularly in the list naming, of communist government was
>able to condone totalitarian process and practice in himself and in fighting
>that particular fight.") Ie, here's this great arguer against
>totalitarianism acting in a totalitarian way, so how can we trust what he
>says? Well, it may be a dubious action, but it's certainly not Guantanamo.
>
>Who, I wonder, seeded this story in the first place, and for what reasons?
>If the focus is on "human interest" rather than on what someone has actually
>written, it becomes very easy to smear a whole body of work. And, as they
>say, mud sticks.
>
>I thought Timothy Garton-Ash's article interesting for how it contextualised
>this action, which has clearly caused much fuss of the shock horror variety.
>First, because as TGA said, Orwell sent no one to a gulag (which was your
>immediate thought) and no one was arrested by secret police - it's hard to
>see how anyone materially suffered by his action. It seems he had a list
>written in his diary of people he thought were "crypto communists" or
>"fellow travellers". At the beginning of the Cold War, when he was dying of
>TB, he gave some names on this list to a friend, who worked in an anti
>communist propaganda unit. Orwell recommended that these people, being
>communists, should not be employed in such a unit. It seems to have been
>used for that purpose, if it was used at all. It wasn't given to some
>shadowy secret agent, but to someone he thought of as a "dear friend", and
>it was by no means written in certainty, but in doubt and anguish. He
>clearly knew it was going to the government, and what it would be used for:
>but beyond that, it's hard to judge his culpabilities, or his thoughts.
>
>The other point TGA makes is that if Orwell had made a similar list of
>people whom he thought were fascists, it's doubtful there would have been
>such a fuss. The gulags and forced famines of Stalin still don't occupy the
>same kind of imaginative place as the Nazi concentration camps, although in
>many ways they were just as horrific, and killed more people. Why doesn't
>the name Kolyma cause the same shudders as Auschwitz?
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com