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Chapter Eight: Unlessons from My Intellectual Big Brother
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D ear George, Until you entered my life, I vaguely imagined I would become a professor much like those whom I had admired as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, a specialist in Wordsworth’s Prelude or a scholar who had mastered the minutiae of literary modernism. Your work and legacy have served as my introduction to intellectual life, indeed my passport to contemporary cultural history. I am often asked what it was that drew me to you. After all, I’ve been reading and pondering your work for a long time; indeed, I’ve written hundreds of pages about your life and work. The answer that I find myself giving is that you inspired me—because you lived what you wrote and you wrote out of the depths of your experience. As I delved more deeply into your life and work, I also discovered a few surprising personal links between us. In fact, my father worked as a day laborer just two miles away from the Gloucestershire working-class hospital in Scotland in which you convalesced. His peasant father in County Donegal, Ireland, felt sympathy with Irish nationalists (like Sean O’Casey, whom you reviled) and flirted with communism. Certainly you would have castigated my grandfather as a kneejerk socialist and an Irish revolutionary agitator. (And what about me? Would you, George Orwell, have liked me? I’m a vegetarian, a sandal-wearing religious believer, an Irishman, a Catholic. The odds are against it!) You also led me to numerous discoveries. Thanks to you, I have met so many interesting people. The portrait that I have painted of you is not altogether flattering , but you wouldn’t want that, would you? I do hope that it conveys your courage , your steadfastness, your passion, your faith in a better future, and above all, your intelligence and intellectual integrity. To demonstrate my gratitude, I periodically come to the defense of your reputation. chapter eight Unlessons from My Intellectual Big Brother 168 orwell’s literary siblings today Now, in this final chapter, let me share directly how you have influenced me. My own case is less important for itself than for what it represents about the changing condition of intellectual life in the half-century since your death. i How does one become a writer, or indeed (to use an old-fashioned phrase) a man or woman of letters today? Or, for that matter—to use a newfangled term—a “public intellectual”? It’s not possible in quite the way that it used to be for thinking persons of your generation. The culture of Anglo-American intellectual life has altered permanently and irrevocably from the post–World War II era of your day—the age of the intellectual coteries, little magazines, and highbrow literary quarterlies. Those institutions formed literary journalists, intellectuals, and even men and women of letters like you a half-century ago. Today they don’t. Nor does any other literary institution or group or setting. And nothing since has replaced them—not universities, not think tanks, not Internet chat rooms. No wonder that no intellectual since then has replaced you either. How does a serious reader with aspirations to contribute to cultural life become an “intellectual” nowadays? Is it actually possible, in the age of academe, to become an engaged critic? A political writer? A man or woman of letters? Indeed: an “American Scholar,” in the broad, Emersonian sense? No graduate programs exist to develop such a being; graduate education in the humanities fosters specialists. There were no creative writing programs in your time, and none of today’s creative writing workshops cultivates intellectual breadth and daring—in fact, nonfiction is typically excluded altogether from creative writing programs. “Journalism school” is not the place—and certainly not law school. The think tanks are oriented toward policymaking, social science research, or ideological agendas—and are typically unreceptive to younger writers. Younger people today have been shaped by a system of mass higher education , not the world of books and little magazines. The university has expanded, and corporate journalism has become omnipresent, absorbing all these people who in an earlier age might have aimed a little higher. A number of intellectual magazines still thrive today, in and out of the academy, but none bring together a group in quite the way that Partisan Review once did, not Commentary, Dissent, the Weekly Standard, the New York Review of Books, or the book review section of the New Republic. [34.228.43...