Barbara and I were at a dinner last night held for Lord Briggs of Lewes (Professor Asa Briggs), official historian to the BBC amongst many other things. I had a chance to buttonhole him about Orwell; he only met him once, although he knew Sonia quite well (natch); and their main interaction seems to have been GO's rather sniffy rejection of an idea for a radio talk when he was a programme developer for the India Section. Professor Briggs admired Orwell's taste for ephemera (which he shares) and his pioneering cultural studies work, but didn't care much for Burmese Days, thinking (and who doesn't) that it was too soaked in GO's obsessive working-out of his messy childhood experiences.
Posted by Alan Allport at December 6, 2004 06:45 AMChapter Five is nearly devoted to his sense of occupier as victim ('...he had grasped the special nature of the hell that is reserved for Anglo-Indians...').
In Chapter Six, making conversation with Elizabeth '...he described the murder of an elephant which he had perpetrated some years earlier.' Which left me thinking, man, he never got over that elephant.
By the way, I rereading Burmese Days online (the story of my copy is just that: a story). Never read a whole book online before. Not sure I'm going to succeed.
Posted by: Bobby Farouk at December 6, 2004 11:40 AMCongrats on the dinner, first of all. What did he have to say other than about Orwell?
Re: Burmese Days & future communal book-readings: would it be possible to put a "Currently Reading..." box in, say, the upper right corner of this site's front page, to sit for the duration of the reading discussion so it wouldn't be pushed downwards by subsequent new items?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 6, 2004 01:24 PMI've put together something along those lines.
Posted by: Alan Allport at December 6, 2004 01:57 PMThanks. Looks really nice, except could you link to the discussion thread as well as the book itself?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 6, 2004 04:42 PMBetter to have new postings as people feel like it rather than an enormous, unwieldy single comments thread.
Posted by: Alan Allport at December 6, 2004 05:14 PMFair enough. But is there some way to explain that to newcomers? (See, I'm an inveterate optimist: I think we have newcomers.)
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at December 6, 2004 05:52 PMI'm fine with the way it's displayed. It will keep me honest to keep posting and thus have something current up every few days!
Posted by: Graeme Burk at December 6, 2004 06:06 PM