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:
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)
“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)
“I would observe to you that what is called style in writing or speaking is formed very early in life while the imagination is warm, and impressions are permanent.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)