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:
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)