R. Paul quotes >>I'm going to re-read George Orwell's Brave >>New World, >>this time as a comedy. and writes: >I'd suggest Huxley's 1984, >though, when you finish Orwell. Small world. Indeed: yesterday, I was reading Orwell's bio -- written by Bernard Crick (and published by Penguin). I got into Orwell recently through seeing the DVD, "A Merry War" (shown in the UK as "Keep the Aspidistra Flying"), an excellent production starring Robert E. Grant (as Gordon Comstock) and Helena Bonham-Carter (as Rosemary Waterlow). Much of "Keep of Aspidistra Flying" -- I have now found a copy of the novel -- is 'autobiographical', with only minor changes effected: e.g. Keats Grove, in Hampstead, becomes "Coleridge Grove", etc. There's this acronym "B. F.", used systematically. I wonder what it means (or meant). It's also used in Crick's biography. Anyway, Crick's bio maked for rather sad reading, especially about the last days of Orwell, dying at age 47 of TB, and not being able to work properly, etc. I especially enjoyed the fresh letters he wrote to his mother as a child (Orwell, not his mother) going to Eton. Crick writes, "These letters lack literary value, so it is understandable they were never published", or words to that effect. The letters mainly deal with football, and the weather, and have the occasional typo, but then they were handwritten. Orwell called his novel, finally, "Nineteen Eighty-Four". He thought of calling it "1984", and "The Last Man in Europe". He worked very hard through the manuscript for it. He had a house in Scotland and was hospitalized in Glasgow and visited Craighouse: "Bill and Avril were to drive him down to spend the night at the hotel in Craighouse before catching the morning boat. Starting rather late in the day the car slipped in the dusk into an enormous pot-hole. On a wet and bitterly cold night, leaving Orwell in the caar to comfort Richard, Bill and Avril walked back four miles to Ardlussa to get help." (Crick, p. 552). My favourite line in "A Merry War" is when Gordon Comstock ("the best angry young man before Porter", writes Crick) recites Elegy written in a country churchyard, changing just the last line of the quartet -- he is working in a publicity agency: '... and leaves the world to Botox and to me." Great minor characters, too, like the many Lambeth types -- though I suspect Lambeth was never as 'terrific' (in the wrong sense) as Orwell (in 1936) painted it as? I note that the OED recognises now 'aspidistral' as a word -- and quotes Orwell on it. There's a reference to the OED in "Keep the aspidistra flying" when the publicity agency are thinking of a slogan for "PP" -- pedic perspiration" (smelly feet). Comstock is said to have checked the OED to find there's no entry for 'pedic', but it did not seem to matter 'and everyone in England was talking about PP" -- but then this is fiction. Cheers, JL ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html