A Kind of Compulsion, The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. X (1903–1936), artikel 176, s. 316-17.
Brev till Brenda Salkeld, juni 1933.
[W]ith me almost any piece of writing has to be done over and over again. I wish I were one of those people who can sit down and fling off a novel in about four days.
[…]
A few years ago I thought it rather fun to reflect that our civilisation is doomed, but now it fills me above all else with boredom to think of the horrors that will be happening within ten years — either some appalling calamity, with revolution and famine, or else all-rund trustification and Fordification, with the entire population reduced to docile wage-slaves, our lives utterly in the hands of the bankers, and a fearful tribe of Lady Astors and Lady Rhonddas et hoc genus riding us like us like succubi in the name of Progress. Have you read ‘Ulysses’ yet? It sums up better than any book I know the despair that is almost normal in modern times.
Detta kan relateras till min tidigare jämförelse mellan Orwell och Huxley.
Artikel 179, s. 320. Brev till Eleanor Jaques, 20 juli 1933.
I have been reading in D.H. Lawrence’s collected letters. Some of them very interesting — there is a quality about L. that I can’t define, but everywhere in his work one comes on passages of an extraordinary freshness, vividness, so that tho’ I would never, even given the power, have done it quite like that myself, I feel that he has seized on an aspect of things that no one else would have noticed.
Björn Östbring 