Style
In their 1972 study of Orwell, The Unknown Orwell, the writers Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, described the novel as Wellsian. Whilst at his prep school in Sussex (1911-1916), Wells had been a favourite author of Eric Blair/Orwell. As with other writers he had read while at St Cyprian's Prep school, - Kipling, Wodehouse, Swift, Shaw, Thackeray - his loyalty, "was virtually unwavering. What he valued in Wells was not the later polemicist, but the novelist whose evocation of certain aspects of life in England before the First World War recalled to Orwell comparable experiences of his own. He and Connolly would leave the school grounds and set out across the Downs to Beachy Head, or far along the plunging leafy roads that led deep into the Sussex countryside, to villages that might have figured in a Wells novel: Eastdean and Westdean and Jevington. They would pause in each, and buy penny sweets and various fizzy drinks. This was the plain, decent, bread-and-sunlit world that Orwell recalled so nostalgically the further it retreated from him; eventually he would write Wellsian, in Coming Up For Air. "
The writer Michael Levenson remarked upon the influence at this period in Orwell's life, of Henry Miller, and Miller's attitude to what was happening in the world. Miller sees what is happening, but is inside the whale, he " feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting - even when this means accepting "concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes." "George Bowling is Orwell's Jonah, and Coming Up For Air is in significant respects a contribution to the 'school of Miller'. Hemmed in on every side -by job, home, history - Bowling neither comprehends the political world nor tries to change it. He merely wants to rediscover the grounds of happiness. In its central movement, Coming Up For Air is an unembarrassedly affirmative recovery of early-century innocence:boyhood, family life and country rambling in the town of Lower Binfield. Fishing in Coming Up For air is what sex was in Tropic of Cancer. 'Fishing', as Bowling puts it, 'is the opposite of war'.
Read more about this topic: Coming Up For Air
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“I concluded that I was skilled, however poorly, at only one thing: marriage. And so I set about the business of selling myself and two children to some unsuspecting man who might think me a desirable second-hand mate, a man of good means and disposition willing to support another man’s children in some semblance of the style to which they were accustomed. My heart was not in the chase, but I was tired and there was no alternative. I could not afford freedom.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)