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Thursday 14 March 2024

Poet of the Month 089: EILEEN O'SHAUGHNESSY

 

EILEEN O'SHAUGHNESSY [BLAIR], c 1936


 

 

 

 

 

END OF THE CENTURY, 1984

 

 

 

Death

 

Synthetic winds have blown away

Material dust, but this one room

Rebukes the constant violet ray

And dustless sheds a dusty gloom.

Wrecked on the outmoded past

Lie North and Hillard, Virgil, Horace,

Shakespeare's bones are quiet at last,

Dead as Yeats or William Morris.

Have not the inmates earned their rest?

A hundred circles traversed they

Complaining of the classic quest

And, each inevitable day,

Illogically trying to place

A ball within an empty space.

 

 

Birth

 

Every loss is now a gain

For every chance must follow reason.

A crystal palace meets the rain

That falls at its appointed season.

No book disturbs the lucid line

For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought

To Telepathic Station 9

From which they know just what they ought:

The useful sciences; the arts

Of telesalesmanship and Spanish

As registered in Western parts;

Mental cremation that shall banish

Relics, philosophies and colds —

Mañana-minded ten-year-olds.

 

 

The Phoenix

 

Worlds have died that they may live,

May plume again their fairest feathers

And in their clearest songs may give

Welcome to all spontaneous weathers.

Bacon's colleague is called Einstein,

Huxley shares Platonic food,

Violet rays are only sunshine

Christened in the modern mood,

In this house if in no other

Past and future may agree,

Each herself, but each the other

In a curious harmony,

Finding both a proper place

In the silken gown's embrace.

 

 

 

(1934)

 

 

 

 

This poem was written in 1934 by Eileen O'Shaughnessy, first wife of George Orwell (AKA Eric Arthur Blair), for a commemorative volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her alma mater, the Sunderland High School for Girls.  

 

The poem was reprinted in the notes section of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life, a 2023 biography by Anna Funder that sets out to explain why Eileen — Mrs Blair as she was known after marrying her still obscure writer husband on 9 June 1936 — has been so thoroughly erased from the work he published under the pseudonym 'George Orwell' and why her invaluable contributions to both that work and his life have been consistently downplayed if not rigorously ignored by his numerous male biographers.  

 

Funder employs several techniques to do this, including trying to extrapolate Eileen's feelings about her life with Orwell from her surviving letters and 'recreating' key scenes from their marriage that, while engagingly written, are nonetheless speculations which cannot be said to have any firm basis in reality.  While insisting that her intention was not to 'cancel' Orwell — a writer she claims to have always admired — the picture Funder paints of his life with Eileen and his persistently shabby treatment of her is seldom a flattering or, indeed, a positive one.  Indeed, it shows Eric Blair/George Orwell to have been a classic example of a man who failed in his personal life to live up to the ideals he espoused in his public life as a novelist, journalist and broadcaster.  Blair/Orwell was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a shit who routinely put his own needs first and his wife's needs a distant second — an attitude that, while considered completely unacceptable in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was entirely typical of the male-dominated society of 1930s and 1940s England. 

 

The pity is that Eileen, who attended Oxford University where she read English and eventually graduated with an MA in Educational Psychology, wrote no memoir before her untimely death at the age of thirty-nine.  She was clearly an exceptional human being whose contributions to Orwell's work, both in England and in war-torn Spain where they went shortly after their marriage to support the anti-Franco Republican cause, were undoubtedly crucial to its success.  

 

I say 'probably' because, speculative biographies notwithstanding, Eileen O'Shaughnessy-Blair remains an elusive figure whose motivations for marrying and staying with such a difficult man can never be known for certain.  According to Charles Orr, a colleague of hers who worked with her in Spain creating propaganda on behalf of the Independent Labor Party, '[Eileen] could not resist talking about Eric — her hero husband, whom she obviously loved and admired.'  That does not sound like the behaviour of someone who regretted her marriage or her choice of life partner.  For all anybody knows, Mrs Blair may have preferred to keep a low profile, content to let Orwell receive all the attention while she focused on maintaining their often precarious household.  Not a particularly fulfilling role for someone possessed of her obvious intelligence and literary talent, but again a typical one for the majority of women, even educated women, of her class and generation after becoming wives all but robbed them of any sense of autonomy or individual identity.  

 

While it may console us to retrospectively apply today's moral standards to yesterday's events, doing so is largely an exercise in futility.  The past was what it was, just as the present is unfortunately and often very unfairly what it is.  Better to admit that women — not just the wives of illustrious if openly sexist writers like Orwell but in fact all women — got a raw deal back then and do whatever is necessary to prevent that from being the case today and on into the future.

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a review of Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, an earlier biography of EILEEN BLAIR (née O'SHAUGHNESSY) by SYLVIA TOPP published in 2020: 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 039: GEORGE ORWELL

 

 

The Write Advice 191: ANNA FUNDER

 

 

Poet of the Month 075: STEVIE SMITH

 

 

Thursday 7 March 2024

The Write Advice 193: CAN XUE

 

The particular characteristics of my stories have now been acknowledged.  Nevertheless, when someone asks me directly, 'What is really going on in your stories?  How do you write them?' I'm profoundly afraid of being misunderstood, so all I can say is, 'I don't know.'  From any earthly perspective, in truth I do not know.  When I write, I intentionally erase any knowledge from my mind.

      I believe in the grandness of the original power.  The only thing I can do is to devoutly bring it into play in a man-made blind atmosphere.  Thus, I can break loose from the fetters of platitudes and conventions and allow the mighty logos to melt into the omnipresent suggestions that inspire and urge me to keep going ahead.  I don't know what I will write tomorrow or
even in the next few minutes.  Nor do I know what is most related to the 'inspiration' that has produced my works in an unending stream for more than two decades. But I know one thing with certainty: no matter what
hardships I face, I must preserve the spiritual quality of my life.  For if I were to lose it, I would lose my entire foundation.

 

Interview [Manoa, Volume 18, Number 1 – 'Beyond Words: Asian Writers on their Work' – Summer 2006]

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and work of Chinese novelist (and recent Nobel Prize candidate) CAN XUE:




https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-67014660

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 105: SUSAN SONTAG

 

 

The Write Advice 128: GRACE PALEY

 

 

The Write Advice 147: BERNADINE EVARISTO

 

 
 

Friday 23 February 2024

Think About It 094: AMANDA MARCOTTE

 

For years, there's been an urge in the mainstream media to treat various right-wing ideologies as separate and distinct buckets of thought: the anti-abortion people.  Or the racists.  Or the anti-LGBTQ people.  Or the 'men's rights' people.  Or the people who want the Bible taught in biology classrooms.  But in truth, these groups have always been intertwined and overlapping, to the point where many of these distinctions are without difference.  Turns out the Christian right isn't just sexist and homophobic, but also incredibly racist.  Turns out that white supremacists also have rigid views about 'traditional' gender roles.  The enemy of fascism is never just one group of marginalized people, but anyone who steps outside of their strict ideas about racial, ethnic, religious, and gender hierarchy.

 

'Texas mall mass shooter: A familiar tale of the misogyny-to-fascism pipeline' [Salon, 10 May 2023]

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more articles by North American journalist and author AMANDA MARCOTTE:



https://www.salon.com/writer/amanda_marcotte

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday 16 February 2024

The Write Advice: CARTOON 022

 

© 1952 Writer's Digest


 

 

Caption:

'If you must be a writer's writer, you can at least write for the ones who can afford to buy books.'

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice: CARTOON 020

 

 

The Write Advice: CARTOON 012 

 

 

The Write Advice: CARTOON 002

 

  

Friday 9 February 2024

Poet of the Month 088: OSIP MANDELSTAM

 

OSIP MANDELSTAM, c 1921


 

 


CONCERT AT THE RAILWAY STATION

 

 

Can't breathe.  And the firmament seething with worms,

and not one star speaking.

But as God's our witness, there's music above us—

The Aeonian maids, at whose song the station trembles,

and again the violin-laden air is sundered

and fused together by the whistles of trains.

 

Immense park.  The station a glass sphere.

A spell cast again on the iron world.

The train carriage is borne away in state

to the echoing feast in misty Elysium.

Peacocks crying, a piano's bass notes—

I'm late.  I'm afraid.  This is a dream.

 

And I enter the station, the glass forest.

The harmony of violins is dishevelled and weeping.

The savage life of the night choir,

a smell of roses from rotting beds,

where the beloved shade passed the night

under the glass sky, among the travelling clouds.

 

And I think, how like a beggar the iron world

shivers, covered with music and froth.

And I go out through the glass passage.  The steam

blinds the pupils of the violin bows.  Where are you off to?

It's the funeral feast of the beloved shade.

It's the last time the music sounds for us.

 

 

 

1921

from Poems (1928)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by

CLARENCE BROWN 

and  

WS MERWIN

 

 

 

 

'Only in Russia is poetry respected,' the poet Osip Mandelstam once observed'Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?'  

 

Like his former lover Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) and his close friend (and possible lover) Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), Mandelstam was ruthlessly persecuted by the Soviet state for no better reason than that his poetry was considered a threat to the popularity of its leader Josef Stalin.  Like his fellow poets, Mandelstam fell under the personal scrutiny of Stalin who treated him, as he treated many of Russia's greatest creative artists, as a disposable plaything whose fate was entirely subject to his own unpredictable whims.

 

Mandelstam first ran afoul of the authorities in May 1934 when he was arrested by the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs which functioned, essentially, as both the everyday and the 'secret' police responsible for overseeing and implementing all forms of political repression and torture) for having written a satirical poem known as the Stalin Epigram the previous November.  This four stanza poem, which had never appeared in print, had been committed to memory by several of Mandelstam's friends as was common practice at the time in order to avoid the risks associated with trying to publish and distribute unsanctioned works of literature.  Scholars now believe that one of the poet's friends — someone whose identity remains unknown to this day — was responsible for providing the NKVD with a written copy of the poem.

 

Mandelstam, who was born to Jewish parents in the Polish capital Warsaw on 14 January 1891 and taken by them to the Russian capital St Petersburg soon afterwards, was considered one of Russia's most important poets in 1934, a founding member of the Acmeist movement which prized 'compactness of form and clarity of expression' and was loosely affiliated with the contemporaneous Symbolist movement.  

 

Mandelstam, who had converted to Methodism in 1911 so he could attend St Petersburg University, had become, by the end of the 1920s, the well-regarded and well-known author of five poetry collections and several works of prose including collections of autobiographical and travel sketches plus a short novel.  He fully expected to be executed for having dared to criticize the Soviet dictator in verse form.  But in typically capricious fashion, Stalin defied Mandelstam's expectations by exiling him to the small town of Cherdyn in the remote Northern Ural region of the eastern USSR rather than condemning him to death or sending him to the gulag (a slightly more prolonged but no less effective form of death sentence).  

 

The psychological strain of being arrested and exiled proved too much for Mandelstam who, shortly after his arrival in Cherdyn, attempted suicide by jumping from the window of a hospital room he was sharing with his wife Nadezhda.  Following a heartfelt appeal by his brother to the Soviet authorities, the distraught poet was granted permission to choose his own place of exile on condition that he not ask to reside in any of the country's twelve largest cities.  Mandelstam and his wife — who made it her mission in life to memorize as much of his work as she could and lived long enough to supervise the first clandestine printings of it in the 1970s — eventually chose the southwestern town of Voronezh as their new home, allegedly because the poet found its name appealing.  It was here that Mandelstam wrote his Ode to Stalin, a laudatory work he hoped would protect him from further persecution by showing him to be a loyal Soviet citizen.

 

Mandelstam was allowed to remain in Voronezh and write virtually whatever he liked until May 1937 when Stalin, seeking to consolidate his increasingly tyrannical grip on power, was in the midst of carrying out what came to be known as the 'Great Purge' of Soviet society.  Designed to permanently eliminate the threat posed to his rule by his former ally Leon Trotsky, it saw a wave of mass arrests and show trials occur throughout the USSR, with many prominent political and cultural figures either being executed or sent to correction camps in Siberia or other, equally desolate locations.  

 

One of the more notable victims of Stalin's wrath was Nikolai Bukharin, a revolutionary and renowned Marxist economist who had served as Mandelstam's protector prior to his own arrest in March 1938.  Bukharin recived a sentence of death, prompting Vladimir Stavsky, head of the all-powerful Soviet Writer's Union, to denounce his former protégé Mandelstam — now living in hiding with friends on the outskirts of Moscow — as a traitor and have him arrested on 5 May for supporting 'counter-revolutionary activities.'  

 

In August, with no powerful friends left to speak up on his behalf, Mandelstam was sentenced to five years in a correction camp and transported east, arriving in a transit camp near the city of Vladivostok shortly afterwards.  He died here, a few days before what would have been his forty-eighth birthday, on 27 December 1938, his fellow inmates preferring not to immediately report his death so they could continue to receive and share his meagre ration of food for as long as possible. 

 

The poet was survived by his wife Nadezdha who, as noted, devoted the rest of her life to memorizing his work and preserving as many of his original manuscripts as she could, all the while living a perilously nomadic life that saw her narrowly evade arrest and almost certain execution on several occasions.  She also wrote two harrowing but historically important memoirs of her life with her husband titled Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned that were translated into English and first published in the West in 1970 and 1974 respectively.  Nadezdha lived until 29 December 1980, seven years before Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev officially exonerated Mandelstam of treason and all the other crimes Stalin had accused him of having committed against the people of the Soviet Union.  

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more translated poems by Russian poet OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891–1938):



https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/osip-mandelstam#tab-poems

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday 2 February 2024

The Write Advice 192: EVELYN WAUGH

 

What I think is true is there are only a very limited number of characters in the world, certainly only a very limited number that one man can cope with.  And even [in the work of] the greatest novelists you'll find the same characters turning up again with different names, just as there are very few faces in the world, very few stories in the world… The great thing is never kill your characters.  That's where someone like PG Wodehouse has been so brilliant.  He has a limited number of characters and he's now, what, over eighty, and still producing work as clever and fresh as he was doing sixty years ago… Because he knows his scope and never kills them off.  And there's the awful temptation that a novelist has as he gets towards the last chapter, of thinking, well, 'Finished with them, off with their heads, kill them off, throw one over a precipice, have a motor car accident, do anything, just get rid of them.'  Then he finds [when] he writes his next novel he can't think of anybody else to write about so he has to produce these same people with different names and different circumstances.

 

Monitor [BBC TV, 1964]


 

 

 

Use the link below to read an article about the ninetieth anniversary of Black Mischief, a 1932 novel by British novelist EVELYN WAUGH, published online by Australian academic NAOMI MILTHORPE:

 

 

https://theconversation.com/ninety-years-on-what-can-we-learn-from-reading-evelyn-waughs-troubling-satire-black-mischief-190441

 

 


 

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Thursday 25 January 2024

Think About It 093: HENRY ROLLINS

 

It is no surprise to me that hardly anyone tells the truth about how they feel.  The smart ones keep themselves to themselves for good reason.  Why would you want to tell anyone anything that's dear to you?  Even when you like them and want nothing more than to be closer than close to them?  It's so painful to be next to someone you feel strongly about and know you can't say the things you want to.

 

Solipsist (1998)

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American vocalist/musician, activist, writer, actor and comedian HENRY ROLLINS:



https://www.henryrollins.com/

 

 

 

 

 

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