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Originally Posted by Ak Mike
Harmon - I see on rereading that essay on Twain that Orwell is actually tougher on Twain than I had remembered. He says that Twain worshipped success, that he switched sides in the Civil War when he saw the North was going to win, that he could not resist what you call the "practical financial calculation" - that he had none of the courage of the real artist. An interesting essay.
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I tend to agree that Twain lacked artistic courage, but that's probably because he was not a first rate writer. He was, essentially, a village explainer. I don't know about physical courage - his side switching strikes me as more of a lack of a dog in the fight. I intend to read the essay, though. I have the collected essays in Everyman, & have downloaded the .prc. I'll bet that Twain was good company, though.
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As to Orwell as a novelist, your comments are just - and yet. . . . I disagree that politics has to make for poor novels. I don't think Catch 22 is a poor novel, for all that it is driven by a political perspective. I don't think 1984 is a poor novel despite being as you correctly (though implicitly) point out, essentially a dark political tract. It's just a different kind of novel.
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I don't think that in either C22 or 1984, we put down the book with a sense of having learned to know a character, or having been living in the book. Both those novels are propositional, and when novels go in that direction, they elevate an idea over the reality of human existence. C22 is absurd, and its characters are stick figures. And I can't even remember anything about the protagonist of 1984, not even his name, because the reader never really gets to know him. (Not that I don't enjoy both books!)
Let me put it this way. If you are on a desert island, do you really want C22, or 1984? Or do you want Anna Karenina or Middlemarch or even LotR? Which one are you going to reread with pleasure, and find yourself more deeply engaged with each rereading?