The Profession of Author

Abstract

Reviewing Alex Comfort’s No Such Liberty in October 1941 (855) Orwell commented, ‘I think I am justified in assuming that it is autobiographical, not in the sense that the events described in it have actually happened, but in the sense that the author identifies himself with the hero, thinks him worthy of sympathy and agrees with the sentiments that he expresses.’ This takes us back to the subtitle of ‘Short Story’, which Orwell wrote in Paris: ‘This never happened to me, but it would have if I had had the chance’ (p. 27 above), and forwards to his autobiographical fictions of the thirties, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and Coming Up for Air, and then to ‘The Prevention of Literature’, January 1946, in which he declares that the imaginative writer ‘may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind’ (CEJL, iv.88). The degree to which he is in sympathy with his principal characters varies. There is, I think, a very close association between Orwell and Dorothy despite the gender difference, but an ironic detachment from Gordon Comstock. Studies such as Lynette Hunter’s George Orwell, The Search for a Voice and her essay, ‘Stories and Voices in Orwell’s Early Narratives’, both 1984, and more recently, Bernard Gensane’s George Orwell: Vie et écriture, 1994, have considered Orwell’s ‘search for a voice’. Of Down and Out in Paris and London, Lynette Hunter justly remarks that it is ‘not a “naïve” story, but a study of varied ways of telling and writing in the first person. The same experimentation with voice is found in Burmese Days.’1 Gensane endeavours to tease out the distinctive characters that make up ‘Orwell’ and the voices that give expression to his biological self (Blair), and the various masks he adopted as a writer. Thus, in his headings, he subtly distinguishes between ‘“Je” ou “Moi”’, ‘Vous et moi’, ‘“Je” et “je”’, ‘Blair, “Orwell”, Orwell’, ‘Auteur/Narrateur’, and there are headings such as ‘Quel “je” fictif?’ and ‘Sur deux glissements’. The third and final part of his book is given the title, ‘Voies d’une voix, voix d’une voie’.1KeywordsAmerican EditionLiterary LifeRickshaw PullerGreen LawnItalian EditionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.