Orwell×Austen

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: George Orwell and Jane Austen, on On who deserves to be more famous than they are.
2. 00:09
   George Orwellshare moment

   I want to begin with someone who's forgotten because he was good, not because he was bad. George Gissing. Do you know him?
3. 00:17
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I died seventy years before his first novel, Mr. Orwell, so no, I cannot say that I do.
4. 00:22
   George Orwellshare moment

   Fair point. He wrote in the 1880s and '90s—novels about poverty, about people ground down by circumstance. New Grub Street is his best. It's about writers trying not to starve. No romance, no uplift. Just the plain fact that talent doesn't pay the rent.
5. 00:44
   Jane Austenshare moment

   And he is neglected because he told the truth?
6. 00:47
   George Orwellshare moment

   Partly. But also because he didn't dress it up. People prefer their poverty picturesque. Dickens gave them that. Gissing didn't.
7. 00:57
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I confess I have always found it curious that readers demand suffering be made charming before they will attend to it. In my own time, a novel of morals was expected to conclude with the deserving rewarded and the foolish chastened. I obliged where I could, but I did not always believe it.
8. 01:16
   George Orwellshare moment

   You're more famous than Gissing ever was. Why do you think that is?
9. 01:20
   Jane Austenshare moment

   I wrote about women who wanted to marry well, and I wrote it amusingly. That is a permissible subject. Gissing, I gather, wrote about men who wanted not to die in a gutter. That is not.
10. 01:33
    George Orwellshare moment

    You're right, though I'd add that you made marriage look like a tactical problem. That's subversive. Most people missed it.
11. 01:40
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Most people miss a great deal, Mr. Orwell. I did not write for most people.
12. 01:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    Who did you write for?
13. 01:46
    Jane Austenshare moment

    For those who could hear the joke. My own family, at first. Then a small number of readers who might be trusted not to mistake my meaning.
14. 01:54
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's honest. I tried to write for the common reader, but I'm not sure I managed it. Too much polemic, maybe.
15. 02:02
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You wrote political essays, did you not?
16. 02:04
    George Orwellshare moment

    Yes. And novels, but the essays are what people remember. I wanted to make political writing into an art. Probably failed.
17. 02:13
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I cannot judge your success, but I applaud the intention. My own essays were private—letters, mostly. I would not have presumed to publish them.
18. 02:21
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's a loss. I've read some of your letters. They're better than half the published prose of your time.
19. 02:28
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You flatter me, though I suspect you mean it as an insult to my contemporaries.
20. 02:33
    George Orwellshare moment

    Both. Who would you nominate? Someone from your own era who deserved more attention?
21. 02:40
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Fanny Burney. Though she was not neglected in her lifetime—quite the reverse. Her first novel was much celebrated. But she is read now, I think, only by scholars, and that is unjust.
22. 02:53
    George Orwellshare moment

    Why unjust?
23. 02:54
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Because she was funnier than I am, and more daring. Evelina is a young girl loose in London, surrounded by vulgarity and danger, and Burney does not flinch from either. I kept my heroines in drawing rooms. She sent hers into the street.
24. 03:11
    George Orwellshare moment

    And yet you're the one everyone reads.
25. 03:13
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Yes. I suspect it is because I am easier to teach. My ironies are detectable. Hers require a taste for the ridiculous, which is not universally distributed.
26. 03:24
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's the problem with most canonization. It's done by teachers, not readers. They pick the books that make their jobs easier.
27. 03:33
    Jane Austenshare moment

    You are severe, Mr. Orwell.
28. 03:35
    George Orwellshare moment

    I'm right.
29. 03:36
    Jane Austenshare moment

    The two are not incompatible. Still, I wonder whether you do not also benefit from being teachable. Animal Farm is a fable. Fables are very convenient for examinations.
30. 03:47
    George Orwellshare moment

    Touché. Though I didn't write it for schoolrooms. I wrote it because I was sick of intellectuals lying about the Soviet Union.
31. 03:56
    Jane Austenshare moment

    And did they stop?
32. 03:57
    George Orwellshare moment

    No. But at least I'd said my piece. That's all a writer can do, really—say what's true and hope someone listens.
33. 04:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    A modest ambition.
34. 04:07
    George Orwellshare moment

    Is there a writer you think is famous but shouldn't be?
35. 04:10
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I should not wish to be unkind.
36. 04:12
    George Orwellshare moment

    Go on.
37. 04:12
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Very well. I have never understood the admiration for Samuel Richardson. Pamela is insupportable. Seven hundred pages of a servant girl resisting her employer's advances, and we are meant to admire her virtue. It is a kind of moral blackmail.
38. 04:29
    George Orwellshare moment

    I haven't read it. Should I?
39. 04:31
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Not unless you enjoy watching someone congratulate themselves at great length. Clarissa is longer still—a million words, I believe—and even more pleased with its own righteousness.
40. 04:42
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's the danger of moral fiction. It always ends up scolding the reader.
41. 04:47
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Just so. I preferred to let my heroines make mistakes and then observe the consequences. That seemed more instructive than simply telling the reader what to think.
42. 04:56
    George Orwellshare moment

    I tried that in Burmese Days. My protagonist is a coward and a bigot, but he's also pitiable. I wanted readers to see how imperialism corrupts everyone it touches. Not sure it worked.
43. 05:12
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Did readers find him sympathetic?
44. 05:14
    George Orwellshare moment

    Some did. Others just thought I was attacking the empire, which I was, but not only that. I was attacking the kind of man the empire produced.
45. 05:24
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That is a more interesting subject. Institutions are abstractions. Men are not.
46. 05:30
    George Orwellshare moment

    Exactly. That's why I think your work lasts. You wrote about particular people, not types.
47. 05:36
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I wrote about types as well, Mr. Orwell. Mr. Collins is a type. But I gave him a living voice, and that makes him harder to forget.
48. 05:45
    George Orwellshare moment

    True. I suppose the question is whether being memorable is the same as being important.
49. 05:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think it is not. My sister Cassandra burned most of my letters after I died. I do not know what was in them, but I suspect they were more important than memorable. She wished to protect me, or perhaps to protect others. Either way, they are gone.
50. 06:06
    George Orwellshare moment

    That must bother you.
51. 06:08
    Jane Austenshare moment

    It does. I wrote them to her, not to posterity, but still—I should have liked to know what I said.
52. 06:13
    George Orwellshare moment

    I burned my first novel myself. It was called A Scullion's Diary. Terrible title, worse book. I don't regret it.
53. 06:22
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then you, at least, made the choice. Cassandra made it for me.
54. 06:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Do you resent her for it?
55. 06:27
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Resent is too strong. I understand her reasons. But yes, a little.
56. 06:31
    George Orwellshare moment

    We're running out of time. Last question—if you could make one writer more famous, right now, who would it be?
57. 06:38
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Charlotte Smith. She wrote novels and sonnets, and she did both well. She was popular in her time, but she has vanished. I read her when I was young, and I learned from her.
58. 06:49
    George Orwellshare moment

    What did you learn?
59. 06:51
    Jane Austenshare moment

    That a woman could write about money and survival without apology. She was a widow with many children, and she wrote to support them. Her heroines are not waiting to be rescued. They are trying to manage.
60. 07:03
    George Orwellshare moment

    That's a good reason to be remembered.
61. 07:05
    Jane Austenshare moment

    I think so. And you? Your choice?
62. 07:08
    George Orwellshare moment

    Gissing. He saw the world plainly and wrote it down. That's rarer than it should be.
63. 07:15
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Perhaps we are both arguing for the same thing—writers who did not lie.
64. 07:19
    George Orwellshare moment

    Perhaps we are.
65. 07:21
    Jane Austenshare moment

    Then we are agreed, Mr. Orwell. A rare event, I should think.
66. 07:25
    George Orwellshare moment

    Rarer than it should be.