If you’ve been with Open Culture since our early days, you might remember I Met the Walrus, a short Oscar-nominated film that recalls the time when John Lennon granted an interview to a 14-year-old Beatles’ fan named Jerry Levitan. The animated film (which we still highly recommend) was the visual creation of Josh Ruskin and James Braithwaite, who have now teamed up to create “Our Public Library,” a short animated film that calls attention to the budget cuts that are undermining Toronto’s great public library system. Toronto’s lawmakers will be making key decisions about the fate of the library soon (something hopefully Mayor Rob Ford won’t be involved with, seeing that he seems prefer the pipe and drink to the book). For information on how to help protect Toronto’s public libraries, please visit the web site Our Public Library.
We’ve written recently about that most common occurrence in the life of every artist—the rejection letter. Most rejections are uncomplicated affairs, ostensibly reflecting matters of taste among editors, producers, and curators. In 1944, in his capacity as an editorial director at Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot wrote a letter to George Orwell rejecting the latter’s satirical allegoryAnimal Farm. The letter is remarkable for its candid admission of the politics involved in the decision.
From the very start of the letter, Eliot betrays a personal familiarity with Orwell, in the informal salutation “Dear Orwell.” The two were in fact acquainted, and Orwell two years earlier had published a penetrating review of the first three of Eliot’s Four Quartets, writing “I know a respectable quantity of Eliot’s earlier work by heart. I did not sit down and learn it, it simply stuck in my mind as any passage of verse is liable to do when it has really rung the bell.”
Eliot’s apologetic rejection of Orwell’s fable begins with similarly high praise for its author, comparing the book to “Gulliver” in what may have been to Orwell a flattering reference to Jonathan Swift. A mutual admiration for each other’s artistry may have been the only thing Eliot and Orwell had in common. “On the other hand,” begins the second paragraph, and then cites the reasons for Faber & Faber’s passing on the novel, the principle one being a dismissal of Orwell’s “unconvincing” “Trotskyite” views. The rejection also may have stemmed from something a little more craven—the desire to appease a wartime ally. As the Encyclopaedia Brittanica blog puts it:
Eliot, that Tory of Tories, did not want to upset the Soviets in those fraught years of World War II. Besides, he opined, the pigs, being the smartest of the critters on the farm in question, were best qualified to run the place.
The decision was probably not Eliot’s alone, and Eliot parenthetically disowns the opinions personally, writing “what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” Indeed. The full text of Eliot’s letter is below.
13 July 1944
Dear Orwell,
I know that you wanted a quick decision about Animal Farm: but minimum is two directors’ opinions, and that can’t be done under a week. But for the importance of speed, I should have asked the Chairman to look at it as well. But the other director is in agreement with me on the main points. We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane—and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.
On the other hand, we have no conviction (and I am sure none of other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm which pretends to other interests and motives than mere commercial prosperity, to publish books which go against current of the moment: but in each instance that demands that at least one member of the firm should have the conviction that this is the thing that needs saying at the moment. I can’t see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book—if he believed in what it stands for.
Now I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing. I think you split your vote, without getting any compensating stronger adhesion from either party—i.e. those who criticise Russian tendencies from the point of view of a purer communism, and those who, from a very different point of view, are alarmed about the future of small nations. And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
I am very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.
Miss Sheldon will be sending you the script under separate cover.
Yours sincerely,
T. S. Eliot
After four rejections in total, Orwell’s novel eventually saw publication in 1945. Five years later, a Russian émigré in West Germany, Vladimir Gorachek, published a small print run of the novel in Russian for free distribution to readers behind the Iron Curtain. And in 1954, the CIA funded the animated adaptation of Animal Farm by John Halas and Joy Batchelor (see the full film here). Yet another strange twist in the life of a book that could make discerning anti-communists as uncomfortable as it could the staunchest defenders of the Soviet system. You can find Animal Farm listed in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.
One day in November of 1970, Nobel prize-nominated author Yukio Mishima barricaded himself in the Eastern Command office of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and tied the commandant to a chair. Accompanied by a handful of young men from the Tatenokai, a student society-cum-militia, Mishima had launched a coup against the government. He followed in the tradition of literary radicals, whose ranks held writers as diverse as Alexander Pushkin and Pablo Neruda, with one key distinction: while Russian and Chilean authors sought leftward political shifts, Mishima espoused a jackboot brand of ascetic nationalism. If Mishima’s captivation with authoritarian politics seems out of character for a writer of such emotional depth, it is worth noting that his values were rooted in the honour code of the samurai, known as bushido. A rare clip of Mishima’s English interviews, above, makes the author’s beliefs about both art and honor palpably clear:
I think that brutality might come from our feminine aspect, and elegance comes from our nervous side. Sometimes we are too sensitive about defilement, or elegance, or a sense of beauty, or the aesthetic side. Sometimes we get tired of it. Sometimes we need a sudden explosion to make us free from it. For instance, after the war, our brutal side was completely hidden… I don’t like that the Japanese culture is represented only by flower arrangement—a peace-loving culture. We still have a very strong warrior mind.
The samurai ethos was a critical component of Mishima’s most moving works, including The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and Patriotism. In the film adaptation of Patriotism, below, Mishima shows that to him, even love is subordinate to—or perhaps greatest when it works alongside—honour. While the film’s theatrical production and graphic nature may not be for everyone’s tastes (we also note that the clip below has been re-scored, with the original film available here), the ritual suicide it depicts offers some insight into the author’s psyche—after his failed coup,Mishima plunged a blade into his stomach, and had one of the Tatenokai members behead him. He was 45 years old.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Today, as you must surely know, marks the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and also surely marks a revival of interest in the myriad conspiracy theories that abound in the absence of a satisfactory explanation for the events at Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963. One theory I’ve never heard floated before comes to us via Andy Martin, lecturer in French at Cambridge University and author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre vs Camus. In an article for Prospect magazine, Martin writes:
To the massed ranks of the CIA, the Mafia, the KGB, Castro, Hoover, and LBJ, we can now add: Jean-Paul Sartre. FBI and State Department reports of the 1960s had drawn attention to Sartre’s membership of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which Lee Harvey Oswald was also a member. And—prophetically?—Sartre had “dismissed the US as a headless nation.” […] Could he, after all, have been the Second Shooter?
It’s probably fair to say that Martin’s tongue is wedged firmly in his cheek throughout this opening of his fascinating chronicle of the FBI’s surveillance of Sartre and his onetime friend and editor Albert Camus. But Martin’s interest in the misalliance of Sartre and the Feds is very serious. What he finds during his investigation of the FBI files on existentialism is that “the G‑men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.”
While we have become accustomed, since the days of Joe McCarthy, to ideological witch hunts, it seems that Sartre and Camus served as test cases for the sort of thing that frequently plays out in overheated Congressional hearings and media denunciations—agents with furrowed brows and little philosophical training desperately trying to work out whether such and such abstruse academic is part of a grand conspiracy to undermine truth, justice, the American Way, etc.. Sartre appeared early on the anti-Communist radar, though, ironically, he did so as a plant of sorts, brought over in 1945 by the Office of War Information as part of a group of journalists the United States’ government hoped would put out good propaganda.
“Hoover wondered,” however, writes Martin, “what kind of good propaganda you can hope to get out of the author of Nausea and Being and Nothingness.” It turned out, not much, but a year later Hoover latched on to Sartre’s friend and editor Albert Camus, whose name he and his agents spelled, variously, as “Canus” or “Corus.” Where Sartre had breezed into the country—smitten by its literature and music—Camus was held at immigration on Hoover’s orders. He would spend a brief, depressing time and never return.
How we get from post-war surveillance of French existentialist philosophers to Sartre and the grassy knoll is a long and complicated tale, befitting the paranoid imaginings of J. Edgar Hoover. He was, after all, the conspiracy theorist par excellence and “he needed to know,” writes Martin, “if Existentialism and Absurdism were some kind of front for Communism. To him, everything was potentially a coded re-write of the Communist Manifesto.” What Hoover feared from Sartre, however, was that the latter was himself an influential believer in a conspiracy, one that cast doubt on the FBI’s strongly-held belief that Oswald was the lone gunman.
Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist.” The black-and-white, spy-vs-spy world of the FBI left little room for philosophical nuance and literary ambiguity, after all. But they never stopped watching Sartre, convinced that “there must be some kind of conspiracy between communists, blacks, poets and French philosophers.” As it turns out, there were several—political and aesthetic conspiracies involving such terrifying figures as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. These poets and close relations of Sartre did, indeed, help foment revolution in the Caribbean and elsewhere—but theirs are stories for another day.
On a Thursday afternoon in November of 1863, Edward Everett took to the stage in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to deliver the main address at the Consecration Ceremony of the National Cemetery. Everett was a politician who had served as both a classics professor and president of Harvard University, and was also a renowned orator. His address to the 15,000-strong crowd began on the following grandiloquent note, which Everett proceeded to hold for two hours:
“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.”
Despite this wave of lofty sentiment, Everett’s speech was overshadowed by the 278-word formulation that would forever commemorate that day, delivered by Abraham Lincoln.
Unlike Everett’s remarks, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (whose five versions can be found here) has shown little wear since its delivery on November 19, exactly 150 years ago. While there is some evidence to suggest that the audience was initially nonplussed by the speech’s simple language and striking brevity, today Lincoln’s words are considered to be among the most finely wrought rhetoric in the Western canon: they remain accessible to all, yet seamlessly entwine the thread of equality that ran so clearly through the Declaration of Independence with the idea of the war being essential to the preservation of the Union. One cannot help but suspect that honest Abe failed to grasp the impact that his pithy oration would have; Everett’s subsequent comments to the President, however, prefigured the speech’s historical arc:
“I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
In honor of the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg address, documentarian Ken Burns has embarked on a project called Learn The Address in an attempt to get Americans to record their recitations of the speech. In the mashup below, Burns provides footage of politicians, entertainers, and journalists giving their renditions. We’ve also included some of our favorites, including Stephen Colbert’s highly comical monologue (top) and Jerry Seinfeld explaining the significance of the address to Louis CK, right above.
For more versions of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, including those by President Obama, Conan O’Brien, and Bill O’Reilly, head to Ken Burn’s Learn The Address site.
Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.
Missing for almost a month, imprisoned Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has been reported by her husband as recovering in a Siberian hospital from issues related to her hunger strike. As The Guardian reports, Tolokonnikova didn’t only resist by refusing to eat, she also kept up a lively correspondence with Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek while enduring reported abuse at the penal colony in Mordovia where she had been sentenced. It seems from the edited correspondence published by The Guardian that Žižek began the conversation in early January. “All hearts were beating for you” he writes, until “it became clear that you rejected global capitalism.” In a later, April 16 reply, Tolokonnikova explains exactly what Pussy Riot rejects:
As a child I wanted to go into advertising. I had a love affair with the advertising industry. And this is why I am in a position to judge its merits. The anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are its successful ad campaign. Modern capitalism has to manifest itself as flexible and even eccentric. Everything is geared towards gripping the emotion of the consumer. Modern capitalism seeks to assure us that it operates according to the principles of free creativity, endless development and diversity. It glosses over its other side in order to hide the reality that millions of people are enslaved by an all-powerful and fantastically stable norm of production. We want to reveal this lie.
Every time I’ve taught George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on misleading, smudgy writing, “Politics and the English Language,” to a group of undergraduates, we’ve delighted in pointing out the number of times Orwell violates his own rules—indulges some form of vague, “pretentious” diction, slips into unnecessary passive voice, etc. It’s a petty exercise, and Orwell himself provides an escape clause for his list of rules for writing clear English: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But it has made us all feel slightly better for having our writing crutches pushed out from under us.
Orwell’s essay, writes the L.A. Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik, “stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Where Twain’s essay takes on a pretentious academic establishment that unthinkingly elevates bad writing, “Orwell makes the connection between degraded language and political deceit (at both ends of the political spectrum).” With this concise description, Hiltzik begins his list of Orwell’s five greatest essays, each one a bulwark against some form of empty political language, and the often brutal effects of its “pure wind.”
One specific example of the latter comes next on Hiltzak’s list (actually a series he has published over the month) in Orwell’s 1949 essay on Gandhi. The piece clearly names the abuses of the imperial British occupiers of India, even as it struggles against the canonization of Gandhi the man, concluding equivocally that “his character was extraordinarily a mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad.” Orwell is less ambivalent in Hiltzak’s third choice, the spiky 1946 defense of English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse, whose behavior after his capture during the Second World War understandably baffled and incensed the British public. The last two essays on the list, “You and the Atomic Bomb” from 1945 and the early “A Hanging,” published in 1931, round out Orwell’s pre- and post-war writing as a polemicist and clear-sighted political writer of conviction. Find all five essays free online at the links below. And find some of Orwell’s greatest works in our collection of Free eBooks.
We don’t often write up videos posted by 9–11 Truthers, but you can watch an interesting exchange when this particular Truther confronts well-known linguist and political observer Noam Chomsky during the question session after the latter’s talk at the University of Florida. “You’ve mentioned quite a few contradictions from the media and their presentations on things, and I think the most notorious case of this is with September 11, 2001,” says the Truther after taking the microphone. “You wanted to see a consensus of engineers and specialists that understand the actual structures of these buildings and their possible collapse, and there is such a group. It’s called Architects and Engineers for 9–11 Truth.” As the Truther gets into the “consensus of over 2000 of them,” the moderator interrupts, wondering if he actually has a question. (Surely we’ve all endured these moments in question segment.) But the Truther continues: “This consensus shows that Building 7, the third building that fell on 9/11, fell in freefall speed as the [National Institute of Standard and Technology] report acknowledges. Are you ready to come forward and jump on board with 9/11?” Thus asked to comment on whether the media has covered up the manner in which this particular building collapsed, Chomsky replies with a defense of standard scientific procedures.
“In fact, you’re right that there’s a consensus among a miniscule number of architects and engineers. They are not doing what scientists and engineers do when they think they’ve discovered something. What you do is write articles in scientific journals, give talks at the professional societies, go to the civil engineering department at MIT or Florida or wherever you are, and present your results, then proceed to try to convince the national academies, the professional society of physicists and civil engineers, the departments of the major universities, that you’ve discovered something. There happen to be a lot of people around who spend an hour on the internet and think they know a lot physics, but it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.” But hasn’t the government intimidated those who know the real story from speaking out against the official line? “Anybody who has any familiarity with political activism knows that this is one of the safest things you can do. It’s almost riskless. People take risks far beyond this constantly — including scientists and engineers.” Chomsky has more to say about the facts we can use, the opinions he disavows, and the forces driving the Iraq War in the remainder of the seven-minute clip. “We will let you be the judge of his response,” say the video’s notes. Indeed.
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