Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

SHAPES OF THE SCULPTURE AND WORDS ON THE PAGE

            I’m going to beat a drum which I have beaten a number of times on this blog. It is the argument that we should judge art and literature by what is on the canvas, what the sculptor has created and what the words are on the page – not by what we know about the private lives of the painter, sculptor or novelist. You can see the argument made on this blog with the posting The Song Not the Singer, wherein the poetry of Philip Larkin was defended against those who would “cancel” his work because of his addiction to pornography and the many crass things he said in his diaries and letters; in the posting Let’s Empty Out the Galleries wherein the perverse private life of the sculptor Eric Gill was used by some as a signal to destroy Gill’s great work; and in the posting How Often Does This Have to be Said? wherein a number of creative people were defended against the ad hominem arguments that were raised against them. Of course the critic can call out foolish things writers say in their novels, ridiculous ideologies they endorse and destructive projects they propose, but that is not the same as attacking the author herself for whatever negative things she did in her private life. It’s quite another matter when we are reviewing biographies of authors which, after all, do have to reveal the negative things about the author whom the biographer is depicting. It’s also possible that we will admire an author less if we know of the negative things about her life, but that is still no grounds for cancelling or belittling her work.

            Why am I raking up these truths yet again? Two reasons. First, we recently saw the French film Rodin, a fictionalised account of the fin de siècle sculptor Auguste Rodin. It is clear that this biographic film was based on verifiable fact. Rodin really was a sexual exploiter of many of the young women who posed naked for him, neglected his wife, and ruined the career of the younger [woman] sculptor Camille Claudel, who was basically driven to a nervous breakdown. Personally, then, he was a bit of a swine. And yet there are his masterpieces. His Balzac, his The Thinker, his The Kiss, his Gates of Hell and his Burghers of Calais. Not a nice man, but the masterpieces are still masterpieces.

            More important, though, was my recent reading and reviewing Anna Funder’s Wifedom – Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life,  which concerns George Orwell’s relationship with his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. As Funder tells us, Orwell was misogynistic, had a very grubby sex-life, frequently cheating on Eileen and often being callous about her welfare, excising her from non-fiction works in which she had been a participant, and yet exploiting her as an unpaid household drudge. It seems that all these charges are verifiable. Funder announces clearly a number of times that she greatly admires Orwell’s work, saying “Orwell’s work is precious to me. I didn’t want to take it, or him, down in any way. I worried he might risk being ‘cancelled’ by the story I’m telling.” Yet, of course, the odds are that Funder’s revelations will encourage some to demonise Orwell and reject what he said truthfully about society, politics and totalitarianism. It will, most likely, be those on the extreme left who once again denigrate Orwell, especially those who still smart over the fact that he called out Stalinism and Communism in general.

To which I reply, regardless of whether Orwell was personally a man with many flaws, most of what Orwell wrote about politics, tyranny, totalitarian states, and the misuse of language is still relevant and still worth reading. It stands the test of time. Orwell wrote with clarity as when he criticises literary and artistic cliques (as he does in his semi-comic novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying).

One final thought. Anna Funder comes close to saying that Eileen O’Shaughnessy influenced the way Orwell wrote in the nine years that they were married – his style improved under her spell. Even if there is a core of truth in this, it was Orwell who wrote what he wrote, and not his wife. She might have inspired, but she did not write.

I am reminded that a couple of decades ago, a feminist scholar noted that Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth’s sister, had written vividly in her diary about seeing daffodils while on a walk with her brother. Suddenly it became the buzz to say that Dorothy, not William, had inspired and virtually written William’s best-known poem “Daffodils”. Sorry folks but it was William, not Dorothy, who organised and wrote the poem. And it was George Orwell who wrote what he wrote, not Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Let’s get things in proportion folks.