the beginning of the map is broken. it would have been pretty easy just to push the frame down a little bit. i think the point is clear this is a break with tradition, this is new knowledge and it's exciting. >> more exciting and the stuff over on the left. people tend to forget that. this is a great discovery because it means you can sail from europe and into the indian ocean and beyond. even beyond that, is the fact that the map shows a full 360 degrees of longitude, one of the first to do that, as well. and maps prior to this one tended to leave a certain portion of the globe up mapped and implied on the back of the map, and the implication was it was just kind of uncharted oceanic space and you didn't need to try to depict it. here, is one of the first pictures of the world, laid out in a full 360 degrees, and what we are seeing, is a picture of the world, roughly, as we know

it today. it is obviously not fully correct. distorted and full of misconceptions and deliberately odd juxtapositions and is basically a vision of the world we have been refining ever since and to me, that was really what struck me. this is not just a map announcing the existence of the new world, it is declaring, now we can see the whole world for the first time. so, great story, and i thought it would be a great article and put clippings in an article idea folder i kept and got sidetracked fora couple of years and when ward came down the atlantic was going to be moved from boston to washington, i started to think about the map and i did, because i wanted to make a living in boston, not move to washington -- excuse me! [laughter]. >> and when i went back to my

folder, i had a brilliant idea, i would write a little book about the making of the map and it would come out in 2007, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the naming of america and i barely made to it 2009. so, what happened, why did it take me longer than i expected? the simple answer is i got sucked in. and, i thought when i came to the map, that i was going to be focusing on the new world and particularly the naming of america, and, very quickly, as john suggested, i started just seeing more and more in the map and feeling as though there was an opportunity to do a more c e comprehensive book to survey the map as a whole and could be an excuse for doing a kind of geographical and intellectual adventure story with the map, kind of as a back drop. what struck me most is it want

one world, it is many worlds, and, if you change your perspective this way or that it is like a kaleidoscope and you can tease out different stories, different collisions of ideas, and, different mysteries, as well. and, i wanted to do something that was sort of complex enough that it would do the map, in full, justice. even if you never saw this map before, or don't know maps of this period, it is easy i think to see what we are looking at. north is at the top and that in this period wasn't necessarily always the case, we assume today north is always at the top. but there were plenty of matches that didn't have it at the top and the east, and this is part of what we now call the pacific and china, and india, and central asia, and the middle east, and europe up here, and

then this, is the most famous part of the map, north america up here, and gulf of mexico here and the ieltdz of caribbean and the region, columbus explored and the big, big, long, thin line, that is south america. the dominant visual impression you get from looking at the new world is this giant southern place, and that is really what was making an impression on europeans in the early days of discovery, it wasn't so much the westness of the new world, it was obviously, columbus pioneered a new route across the atlantic but he thought he reached asia, he and just about everybody thought he confirmed old geographical ideas. south america, which amerigo vaspucci wrote about, extended far into the south, part of the

globe people tended to think there was not any land in and that made a big impression and we'll get back to that in a minute, and what dominates the map is the southern part and that is why the cartographer put the word, america, on the southern continent along with the shores that vaspucci sailed along and if you list the word america is here and i'll zero in on it. it is probably on what today would be considered brazil, right there, they made up the name and put it on the map. there is much, much more to the map than just the depiction of the new world and i wanted to do a world, for a general reader, something like me, reasonably well informed but didn't know anything about the map or history of world mapping would read and learn as much as possible from and wanted to come up with a way of making it a kind gripping narrative read, as many different stories as

possible, the way i came up with for organizing that was to use the map was the guide, as the back drop. the book is organized into chapter that move all over the map, each chapter starts with a little detail from the part of the map and starts in the 1200s in england at the western edge of the known world at the time, and then gradually moves across the map, through geography and history, as europeans gradually make their way out to central asia and to china, comes back to europe and then moves down along the coast of africa and, eventually moves across the atlantic and over to the new world. >> this was a portion of a back tv program. you can view then tire program and many other book tv programs, on-line. go to booktv.org, type the name of the author or book in the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page, select the watch link and now you can view then tire program

and you might also explore the recently on book tv box or the featured video box to find features programs. >> this week, george packer and christopher hitchins talk about george orwell and his washington

and, talk about two recently published volumes, facing unpleasant facts and all art is propaganda and he, an essayist for the atlantic monthly is the author of "why orwell matters." >> welcome to c-span book tv's afterwards program, i'm christopher hitchens and i'm in the role of interviewer and producer, of my friend, and colleague, george packer. whose produced two volumes of the essays of george orwell, picked and introduced and commented upon and so, today, orwell is our subject and i wish we had more than an hour. i'm guessing that you will have read d. j. taylor's book on him. >> i haven't. >> it doesn't matter because what i wanted to say from his book was something that i have a

feeling that you will agree with, taylor writes and says whine read other people writing about george orwell, i think hey, this is my author you are talking about. do you ever get that feeling? >> i do, and we all have a -- you and i and a few other people, we know and some we don't know, are part of a really fanatical group of orwell lovers and it is personal, and i started reading orwell maybe late, in my 20s and it was a time when i needed a model and i needed to know how does one become a writer and i went straight through what was then the only collection of orwell's essays and journalism, the four volumes, collected essays, journalism and letters and read straight through, like reading an autobiography, and -- >> you found yourself being personally addressed? >> i felt close to the voice of those pieces and i think those

are where you get closest to orwell, to his voice, what is essential and really, what in his character is strong, and worth emulating and i became a slavish em later and imitator, for a while. in my 20s, and i think it is a good way to learn how to write, to find a writer you feel affinity for and just master their style and rhythms and get the cadences into your own nerve system and... and then try to find your own way into it. but, that is the closeness orwell produces in people like me and you and, yeah, we feel proprietary when we read other people writing about him, too, but not when those people get him right and i think your book, "why orwell matters" gets him right and you said he got the three basic questions of the 20th century right, imperialism, fascism and communism and that

sums up his political and literary achievement as well as any single... >> they derived from each other, in other words, from what he saw, about imperialism, the sexual repression and racism that it involved, and i think he found it quite easy to decode, the appeal of fascism and the danger of it and it was to some extent an extension of imperialism and not purely but to a good deal. to a good deal. in many ways, that was the case. and then, it is funny, he hardly writes about fascism and assumes everyone will know it is evil and needs to be fought against. >> that's right. >> nothing strange, always no analysis of it, he takes for granted it is completely unacceptable but is in the course of fighting it, he discovers, there are allies who are not and actually, there is and almost equally dangerous illusion taking place on the

other side of the urals? >> that's right and he turned the same withering scrutiny on his own side, that he had -- a much easier target, nazi germany, fascist italy and franco spain and that is when he made most of his enemies on the left and all the way to the end of his life. >> i read quite enough about you and i should have prefaced this, those who you don't know him already, mr. packer came to my attention as a novelist, writing from africa. and, and wrote of orwell and well as the essay, for which i think you are reaching' large audience, mr. packer's work, especially from iraq, and other parts of the world, especially iraq and new yorker has brought him a great deal of attention and i believe now you have a

collection of essays? >> i do. a book "interesting times" writings from a turbulent decade. but back to fiction. you probably overpraised me there. i did write two novels, they were read by about 35 people. and, although i learned a lot from writing them, i did not learn to be a novelist. and orwell wrote a batch of novels in the 1930s that were in the tradition of anglo american realism. and i loved them. i don't know how you feel about them. but for me, berme's days" the one that lasted the longest but you don't feel he's working in his most natural grain in those novels and feel the essay is pushing through the illusion of fiction all the time and he has something to say and he has an argument to make and he has something, a proposition about the world, all the time, and he

doesn't have the restraint and the patience of a natural fiction writer and that is why we can be grateful -- he once wrote in "why i write" if he had been left to his own devices, he would have been a british novelist like his hero, dickens, but the turbulence of the 1930s and the 1940s pushed him into becoming a pamphleteer. >> and, at least one of the very few completely unconvincing things...? >> absolutely, i was going say that. because, really, it was not to push him in that direction and it was his own inclination. >> and also, very rare case of him being too conceited, in other words, it wasn't for all these things i have to write, i could have been charles dickens, come on, that is a bit much and the burmese, burma, he familiaritied them by writing three novels about their country.

berm police days, animal farm and 1984. >> i heard that, last year when i went - and orwell is still a huge presence in burma, and a young generation who didn't learn english well flowing up, came after the generation that was schooled by the british, and have had their futures utterly blighted by the totalitarian regime and he speaks to them not just because he wrote about burma but because he wrote about totalitarianism, 1984, has numb echos there and you can find animal farm sold discretely, on the streets of rangoon and emerged as a hero to the younger burmese writers after being come demmed for his suppose -- condemned for his exposed imperialism. >> and i have been in north korea, and, when one goes there

one hopes to avoid cliche and i'll try not to mention 1984, because everyone said it is an orwellian stage and funny use of that word, and in fact the great thing about totalitarianism is that it is a cliche. >> it seems to do the same thing over and over again. >> a north korean state was founded the same year, 1984 came out and it is as if someone gave him the book, and, said, can you make it work and i don't know...? >> life imitating art. >> and when people come across orwell as the north koreans one day will they are amazed and the greatest compliment, ever paid to one writer by another in the 20th century was by mewash, of "the captive mind" and he said there is a book in circulation, called 1984 and you can don't get it privately, circulated

with great secrecy and fear, and, he said i personally was very surprised, as we were to find out he never visited the soviet union, how could he get our texture and the texture and also right? and having had the experience? and remember, 1984 is about circulation of the medieval book with in the inner party. and it is -- >> but that is a great question, how did he know, he lived almost his entire life in england and traveled a bit through europe at the end of world war ii and had his years in burma but he was parochial and confined to the island yet he wrote in his essay on arthur kessler, british writers of his generation failed to understand totalitarianism because they had not lived it the way kessler and solanay and other continental writers had, and sort of criticizing this -- what he called the parlor

bolsheviks for not feeling what it is to live under that kind of regime, and orwell felt it, but he had the same -- other than his years in burma and suffering and hard times in the 1930s, he had the same education and lived in the same england they did yet he felt it and it is a mystery how he could have known it so well. >> i have a possible solution and a slight correction to you, in reverse order, then, or correction, first. he did spend a lot of time in the far east, as a colonial policeman but being a colonial cop gave him in sight into the master-servant and indeed, master-slave relationship inscribing the dirty secret sexual under lay. and, then, he was in spain, and he was there at a time when the communist party did briefly take over and there was a police

terror and third, very important, he noticed all the truth about spain had been written out of the record. and he wrote, looking back on the spanish war he was afraid it was becoming a habit in europe, if the leader says something never happened then it never did and you can see the germ of 1984. >> done partly by the father of your old nation colleague, the father of alexander colburn. >> and by not just by communists, a lot of other people fell for the line, that the communist party was the best defender of the spanish republic and it is only recently the archives, in the franco system has been opened and we know what happened in these maydays in barcelona and in every detail he refused the lie and the second point i want to make, is his first... real book is written in french. it was originally a french book,

he spoke regular freech and spoke at least two indian and burmese languages. >> it wasn't written in french, he wrote the essays and sketches in english and wrote a couple of little essays for a small french publication, and back when he was in paris. >> including a long essay on colonialism in burma. >> that's right and then wrote the manuscript of "down and out" which he -- which was rejected by t.s. eliot and some of the other major... into did he e recorrect -- >> no, it was rejected by, i think it was eliott, he was at faber in 1931 or 1932, and rejected and then rejected animal farm many years later. >> as did harcourt brace in america, one of the best rejection letters i think ever written, every aspiring writer should have it, pasted in, it

says dear mr. orwell thank you for letting us look at your manuscript, animal farm, unfortunately it is impossible to sell stories about animals in the u.s. and the country of disney, they could make such a remark and really thought it was a story of the farm. >> and animal farm became a good cartoon film. so, it is... they were wrong about that, too. >> by the cia... >> let's get back to the experience of reading orwell and the essays in the book. when i started reading him and i don't know if you had the experience, i didn't know much about fascism or communism or imperialism, i was looking more for an example of how a writer carried himself in the world, and how to transform, experience into sentences and how to do it into a way that didn't call more attention to the self than to the experience and again, in

"why i write" he wrote good propose is like a window pain and another, maybe dubious claim, but, helpful in the sense that his words are always pointing to the thing and not back to the self. and they reveal so much about a character, i mean, there is something almost -- you feel you know him. when you read his essay. you feel you know how he speaks, you can hear his voice and know his irritations and how he'll react, if you say something and he's almost alive with you and there is also a certain remoteness to him. he doesn't let you in on everything in his life. he doesn't talk about his marriage very much in his writing. he doesn't talk about his child. richard. and he doesn't talk about his parents, and some of the basic things that american memoirists make gold out of. are the up subjects of book

after book and for orwell we are off limits and he's a bit constrained, maybe by late victorian chisvalry, and that i what drew me to him. >> i should have done this by now, for those of you, watching us, this is george's first selection. called, "all art is propaganda" about orwell's essay and another one, "facing unpleasant zant facts", his more political stuff. you might say and i comment on both the titles, when he writes about himself, he says when i got started, all i knew i had was literary ability and the power of facing unpleasant facts and i thought, the power of facing, and i wanted to call my book that for a while, something

almost biblical about it. >> it is an unusual phrase, isn't it? a power of facing, as if it is an active force, and gives you some advantage, which is true. he was able to look at things, at times, almost exaggerated the ugliness or the bad smell, seemed to seek them out with a kind of relish, but nonetheless, things in himself, in england, in democracy, in literature. >> in the working class. >> and in the working class which the famous line from his great book about coal mining, and coal miners, the working classes smell, which orwell said, isn't necessarily true, but it is what middle and upper class people think and is the reason why the class divide is such a hard thing to overcome in britain, because it is almost

physical. it is not just mental snobbery. and, i think that line, am i right, that that line really bothered victor galants. >> he said this is what orwell thinks about the working class and they smeared him with it but he doesn't romanticize when he's among the workers, that he's on their side. he doesn't -- nor does he romanticize the colonial subjects on his side he also is, and in a finds them repulsive. >> absolutely. the opening lines of, "shooting an elephant" which is the perfect orwell essay where you see his mastery of the form at its best. and i use to it teach the essay a lot, because students see how he does it so clearly but at the beginning he says with one part of my mind i hated british imperialism and with another part i thought the greatest pleasure would be toy stab my bayonet into a buddhist priest's

guts and that is a confession about himself and the burmese that may be painful personally, but, as -- from a literary point of view is powerful, because, it invites the reader, i have all sorts of conflicting feelings, and i'm going to own up to them and even make them the subject of the essay. >> and another thing you mentioned, his reticence. and neither tells us why he resigned from the burmese police. >> that's right. >> but my guess is that he was afraid if he carried on with it he'd become a sadist. >> he had a streak of that in him. he wrote once that to understand fascism you have to have a streak of fascism and he talked about jack london whose book, the iron heel was a prophesy of fascism but he might as well have been talking about himself, too, and that, too, i think is an answer to that question we talked about earlier, how could orwell have understood what was

happening behind the veil of terror of stalinist russia, nazi germany without direct personally experience of it, except as you pointed out in barcelona, and, i think it is partly because he had the sterner stuff in him, and... >> when you correctly said in your introduction most of the arguments were with himself, that was well encapsulated, because a l of people are, if you like, naturally liberal or naturally progressive and think, it is a nice way to be and he didn't think that at tall, had scorn for those who did, and i think he was fascinated, and is somewhat educating himself out of an -- he was told to look down and rather fear the lower orders and look on colored people in the empire as raw material, to be suspicious of jews and took him a long time to get over that. >> that's right, your book makes

that clear. >> sorry, excuse me, i get carried away with my own verbosity. and, then one very, very -- which he doesn't cure himself of is an absolute hatred and disgust of... >> he used the phrase the pansy left to talk about agden and women who thought he was a terrible missong nis and his misogyny, and julia in 1984 is not the most persuasive part of the novel but that that was part of why he ended with such a dark vision of the world. this is the subject of a book by daffy petai, the orwell mystique and i don't think that is right, it is giving totalitarianism not enough credit for being the

darkness that was surrounding europe at the end of his life. but, it is true, that he has a strange attitude. you might almost say towards individuals. unlike a journalist today, he doesn't spend a lot of time on characters in his nonfiction. you never get to know any coal miner by name. you don't get to know anyone in his outfit in the militia, in barcelona, particularly well. you learn a few of their names and sometimes he recites them like an honor roll but you don't get to the inside of their being. >> but, the soldier he meets, and feels a comrade ship with the firsthand shake. >> with the italian militiaman in barcelona and that is a beautiful moment at the beginning and at the end of the poem, that concludes that essay, looking back, on the spanish war.

and that -- but he also says, i didn't want to meet him again, because if i did, it would ruin my first impression, which is that this is sort of the flower of the european working class. and that i think is the way his mind always goes away from the individual, and toward the social type. toward the political and social significance of digging coal underground. >> to preserve his own distance, you see, and at one point he replies to someone who asks him, if he'd like to come to dinner and meet steven spender, and... and he says, no. because i think i may want to write about him and i find it much harder and i think what i'm going to say is -- i find it harder to do that once i have met someone. >> that's right. >> and it is very human and also, very inhuman, saying i don't trust myself. >> because he knows that as he wrote in the essay on ghandi, being human beanmeans attaching

yourself to other human beings, and being broken down and even destroyed by your love for this individual and that essay is quite harsh about ghandi's impersonal love for all of humanity and his cruelty or neglect of his own family, and for orwell it was a perverse inversion of the proper order of things which is, you love the individual, not mankind, and he was not a saint, he was not a lover of mankind in that sort of ghandiany way though he is sanctified by some people posthumously and it is true that that is where his feelings are but there is also a counter force that cuts him off from those attachments and i think it may be simply because they get in the way of writing and writing honestly. so the individuals are missing, strangely... >> the essay is a good illustration of another point you make, which is or well's ability to start with a very

arresting opening sentence, and the one on ghandi as i know you know, "what all saints should be considered guilty until proven innocent". >> we could swap orwell openers here, no autobiography should be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful, his essay on ghandi, and i was hated by large numbers of people, the only time in my life i have been important enough for this to happen for me. >> but with ghandi it shows something else, his general distance taste for the spiritual -- distaste and he felt there was something shady or creepy about that and he had a respect for it, too and knows the bible very well. and quotes from it a lot, from memory, almost always word-perfect, as good -- from memory. >> at key moments, his marriage to ilene o'shaughnessey, he

insisted on having it done in the church of england ceremony and was buried in a church of england graveyard. >> he liked the liturgy. >> it is a cultural attachment to the words, cadences and the traditions of the church of england. which has absolutely nothing to do with heaven which he describes somewhere in the vulgar version seemed like a choir practice in a jeweler shop, and, yeah, he was not a religious man, there is no sign anywhere of a belief in the after life. >> but i think he had a strong feeling for protestant revolution, however. and it shows in his attachment to milton, the bard, his favorite line, was a line of milton's, by the known rules of ancient liberty, there is a human instinct for freedom, and he writes about the protestant sent tris, contributing to the

enlightenment, and i think in 19 -- back to 1984, the struggle against the languages being imposed upon people, that of news speak, and the struggle to find out what is in the secret book, only the party has, is a very good analogy to the struggle of whitcliff and coverdale and to have the bible translated into english, for which they were all martyred. >> there is an es say, the prevention of literature which was about the effect of not just totalitarian countries, but, the internal censorship that came with the totalitarianization of british intellects choose and that -- the effect on literature and books, he says, books likes some wild animals cannot breed in captivity. it kills the imagination and that essay begins with a sort of a scene from a gathering of pen,

the writer's organization that orwell attend. an unusual case in which he actually places himself at some sort of public meeting, as an -- jumping off point for the essay and at the meeting no one is able to stand up and defend free expression and everyone is defending the right of the soviet union to do this or... it reminds me kind of the worst of identity politics when it invaded writers organization, in this country in the 1980s and 1990s, suddenly the last thing anyone wants to speak up for is free expression, and i think a good example which is very near to your heart is when sale mon rushdie came under the fatwa from the iranian government and there was hardly any writer who was able to say, this is an absolute atrocity. except you did. >> that is too kind to me, there were a lot of people who did and sunni sontag convened a -- >> you were among the first. but back to orwell, the essay then continues, to imagine what

if milton were to come back and attend the pen meeting he'd be astonished. and no one at the meeting in 1945 or 1946 was able to defend free expression with the unqualified force of milton. 300 years earlier, so i think you are right, that that period was a kind of a touch stone for him. in the struggle for -- >> you say all... he wrote in war time. >> guest: as he wrote in 1941:all writing is now propagan propaganda, and is an attack on alex comfort and his propagan propagandaism. >> he says it in several places, like in his essay on dickens, he does, he does, but what he means by it and says it also -- >> also begins brilliantly,

dickens is one of those authors, who is well worth stealing. >> there we go, we could be have a ping-pong game of opening lines. >> sorry -- >> no, it is fun! i think he might say it in "a meaning of a poem" and the reason i gave the book this title, not that all art could have been written by, you know, the minister of propaganda, joseph gerbels, but that all art implicitly has a point of view and has something to say about the world and is trying to push one is a view in a certain direction. it has a persuasive function, it has a -- if it is worth anything it has a world view, that it is advocating. and, i think it is not a resignation to the crudeness of war time propaganda, it is more his sort of smoking-out the art for art's sake crowd, who would

like to have art be a separate -- separate from the world of ideas and politics and events and he's saying, especially, in a time like his, the 40s, it is impossible to be a serious artist and not have something to say about events, even if you are writing -- >> he makes the confession for himself, he says, every line i've written in the last 20 years, is -- any sears serious topic is wrote... democratic socialism. >> and totalitarianism, and not every writer will be as explicitly political as woirorw nor do we want them to be, but, the field he practically invented, popular cultural criticism, to find the implied or hidden world view, in what seems to be a kind of benign or

not particularly pointed realm of art or culture like the postcards of sort -- donald mcgill postcards, that are sort of semi pornographic, or at least, mildly risque and were sold in england -- >> monotonously indecent time. >> that is a great phrase, or the detective novels, his essays... that essay is a good example. what willed you do with an essay, that basically compares two eras in british detective fiction, and no or chads for ms. blan dish, which was popular in 1984, there is a shift in moral point of view between these and rahlves has a code, which is, not a particularly

loveable code, the code of a hypocritical english gentleman but nonetheless is a code and, "no orchids for ms. blandish" is power and the pursuit of it and the great passage in the essay where he says, people appreciate power at the level at which they can understand it, and, he has a boy in a glasgow slum worships jack dempsey, and a student a business college, lord somebody or other and a leader of the new states man worships stand and it is at intellectual level but not moral outlook and that is how he finds the moral implications of something that seems as trivial at detective fiction. >> i'm glad you bring this up, because it brings me, quicker than i wanted to, but, something i wanted to raise. in all of his writing about

ethical codes, and reticence and discretion, and ruthlessness and the code of violence, reflecting hostility to the united states. and, look at the comics, the british boys read and the americans ones coming in, full of sadism and gangsterism and so on. >> exactly. >> so we began by saying -- you began by saying, the essay got three questions of the 20th century right by the add, he got one of them, not totally wrong, but, the importance of america was something that he didn't write enough about and when he did it was rather sketch e and condescending. >> you have a chapter on orwell in america which he never visited. he loved some american writers, mark twain, and jack london. >> oh, sure. >> henry miller, oddly enough. but, i think for orwell -- >> thomas paine. >> thomas paine, absolutely.

british-born. but i think for orwell, america was -- it didn't have the things that he was attached to. and that are the things winston smith in 1984 is clinging to, for sanity, the odd traditions. the things passed on from one generation to the other like the lyrics of a nursery rhyme or a song. old books that -- and book stores that trade in old books. of course, some of these things are available here. >> churches with brass rubbings. >> and the country church yard, and for him those things were sort of the bulwark against the monolithic paving-over of everything by not just totalitarianism but by modern life. he hated concrete. he hated central heating.

he hated mechanical entertainment and advertising and all of these things seemed to be coming not just from the east and the soviet union but from the west in the united states, and his -- in this sense there was something parochial about it. >> he did dislike anti-americanism very much. which was then becoming a disease on the left. >> because i think he understood it to be a kind of anti-liberalism. and a refuge of a particular kind of snobbery you find on the left which america has -- the vulgarization of all good things, it is connected, i think, to the conservative version. >> cowboyism. >> but the point you made in your book and you are making is absolutely right. he didn't see america as a guarantor of the things that he cared most about, culturally, especially, it was an alien and distaste. place to him. >> it is a pity he died when he

did, because his friends knew he was unwell, tb and tried to get him to come to the u.s., firstly for treatment. >> really? i didn't know that. >> and streptomycin was easy to get and hard to get in britain. and he died... and they said, come over and you will like it and, he'd be a great addition to the crowd and at one point he contemplated a voyage to mississippi, which is sad, it would have been nice to have him going down -- >> after 19 84, his next book would have been on the mississippi. >> i have something, to suggest to you, you will have no difficulty in telling me what the opening sentence of 1984 is. >> bright cold day in april and the clock striking 13. that's right. >> i was reading john adams the other day and he was writing how to get the colonies together, and how to coordinate a revolution. against british power and he

says it will be difficult to get all 13 clocks to strike at the same time. >> there you go. >> and at the end of the book in the dictionary of news speak at the end of 1984, it shows how the attempt is made to obliterate all of the possibility even of thinking about freedom from the language, just to make it impossible, even to formulate the thought and he gives an example of the sentence that couldn't be translated into news speak and it is... we hold these truths to be self-evident and so there is... there is a possible one, certainly, possible two, and certainly one implied compliments to america in that. >> just imagine orwell traveling through early 1950s america. the america of lolita, the america of the eisenhower years, when the suburbanization of the country was happening and the highway system was being puts in place, intellectuals were beginning to leave, partisan review and leave grenwich

village and take some comfort and security in universities. it is almost unimaginable, like a whole different era had begun by that time and or well to me belongs so completely to a previous era, harder, more exacting, more austere, and all of the abundance and comfort of postwar america would have, i think, left him pretty cold though you are right. he would have found places to love, the mississippi is one and maybe the west, with its landscape. >> i would have thought new york, too. >> i -- >> probably not san francisco. >> he didn't love london. i mean, he lived in london and he worked in london and even made a point of staying in london during the blitz, when other people were leaving, but, once london was no longer at risk, its charms for him were off which tells you something about the wa in which he actually pursued hard experience actively, rather than not

avoiding it and so, instead, he moved to one of the hardest places in the british isles off the coast of scotland where he lived his last years, probably hastened his death, and wrote 1984. but i don't know if you saw this. his son, richard orwell, his adopted son maintain his silence for 60 years and we didn't know anything about him and he gave an interview a year ago. he's an agricultural engineer somewhere in england and kind of what you would expect and he describes being orwell's son in those years, and far from being this gloomy apocalyptic jeremiah of totalitarianism, he was a lot of fun here, took him fishing and boating and they nearly got killed a bunch of times and it wasn't physically easy but he was completely atuned to the natural world and to his son and shared his love of physical

things, and of nature with richard and for me, it gives me light of pleasure to know that he was a good father. >> i didn't find that surprising at all. because, first, he had a very bleak childhood himself and didn't like his father. in fact when he mentions, the analogy of a family, for british society, it has every figure in it except a daddy, which is a strange admission. >> a family with the wrong people in charge. >> and maiden aunts and distant cousins and it is hard to find a joke in george orwell and when they occur they are quite funny and they are very dry. i'm trying to thing of one, on mal farm when the animals take over, they go into the smoke house and take out the hams and give them a decent burial, i thought that was quite funny and his essay on confessions of a book reviewer. >> yes. and the picture -- >> but generally it is bleak and

how do you come out on the question of lionel triing, who said the great thing about orwell is he is not a genius, the extraordinary, how someone, relatively ordinary could, just by refusing to lie, and working very hard, and not caring whether he lost a job or got his book published or... was able to change the 20th century. >> qualities of character alone are sufficient to become a great writer and to become one of the most important writers of the century. yes, and no. part of what drew me to orwell in my 20s was the sense that this is available, this is not the mad brilliance of saul bellow. this is not faulkener's air bess, and it felt like natural

prose and that is -- >> doesn't maky feel as you are reading the book, why do i bother. >> impossible. i can admire but i also, you know, can feel sort of discouraged by it. with him you feel encouraged by the and want to do it yourself. that is kneeling that he gives me, wants you to try -- the feeling that he gives me, you wanted to try to write an essay like that because the prose is simple and has the plain style and it seems like the leading characteristic of it is honesty, which one ought to be capable of. on the other hand, i think triing might go too far in the the sense that decency alone, i think the word he uses about orwell, it is a key orwell word, common decency and it is an important one but he was an eccentric. orwell was a difficult man. he had -- full of contradictions and he was not so simple and

good, i think as trilling would have you think and you alluded to his antipathies and he was a man of violent dislikes and some of his earlier work, before i think he calmed down, with a certain amount of self-assurance, denunciation was his characteristic the most and so he's not so -- certainly is not a saint, and he's just -- not simply a good man whose qualities of character allowed him to write great books. but there is enough truth to that that he is a model available to everyone. >> and would you imagine him being afraid, say. >> yes. exactly or if he was afraid, whether physically or morally, he didn't want to -- he would have noted it and forced himself to overcome it. >> power of facing it. we only have 10 minutes and i

thought i would take up the idea of dickens being a writer worth stealing. and, talk about attempts to appropriate orwell and the other meaning of orwellian, used to describe a totalitarian state and a person who stands for a certain set of principles. >> that is the sense i like, the positive use of the word. >> and he was invoked, against his will, somewhat in the early days of the cold war, by people who thought that animal farm in 1984 was attacks on socialism which he didn't want. >> that's right and had to actually write a statement, saying i'm a supporter of the labor party and ingsoc is not an indictment of english social itch but it is a warning of a tendency of all modern political thought to move toward totalitarianism. >> and he added and, to show the english were no better than anybody else. >> that's right. that's right. >> and the best way we could

take this on the chin, you and i, since at different times we both viewed with favor the removal of saddam hussein from power, and, i think orwell was in our mind, at different times and certainly, i know of other people, who... is it worth asking, do you think, what would orwell have thought? >> but, just to finish the little history you started, he was also claimed by norman pedoritz, of commentary, in an essay called, if orwell had lived, basically if he had lived he would have been a neocon and would have been norman pedoritz. >> and he felt orwell would have taken the american side in indochina and i can be certain that was not so because he was strongly colonial, and he actually mentions when he is in paris at the end of the war, the

revival of the left opposition-type anti-saul innist favor and one of the great essays printed, the attempt to restore french colonialism into china which is -- i think he would have regarded -- >> seen it as a colonial war and for that reason, i think you are absolutely right. and iraq is different. it is not -- not colonial war. you know, in a way, there are -- it is very hard to say and is a little dangerous to claim but we can speculate because we have to. there are two arguments to be made about that. one is, that he would have seen in saddam hussein's rule other than perhaps north korea the nearest thing to the world he imagined in 1984. i mean, you say that totalitarianism is a klee tay and iraq is a great example, saddam was big brother and he had big brother's mustache.

his face was on toasters all over baghdad, and it was on television all the time -- posters all over baghdad and it was on television all the time and you couldn't escape the eye of saddam's many secret police. >> iraqis used to say they thought he knew what they were dreaming. >> and he was inside them, even after he was overthrown they continued to suffer from the effects of... >> and we both saw it in action and the pornographic element of power, had never been -- >> and saddam's son was sort of the human incarnation of the pornography of totalitarianism, with rape and all kinds of crimes. so that one is easy to say. orwell would have seen that regime as it was, and there would have been no defenses of sovereignty, or state sovereignty, or of, you know, it somehow is an anti-islamic war, an anti-arab war and would have seen the regime as a modern

secular totalitarian regime which -- >> i would say not so secular, with the iraqi flag... >> toward the end he used sign islam for his purposes, that's right and the other side of it is the language used by the bush administration. both before the war and after the invasion. which in many case was men mendacious, and misleading and bad language, the kind of bad language that allows bad political thought, which is the subject of politics in the english language, maybe the best known of orwell's essays and i think he would have been merciless in stripping away the rhetoric of george bush, dick cheney, don rumsfeld, and karl rove, for that matter. and so, which orwell would have

had his -- the vote, the anti-totalitarian orwell who would have seen iraq exactly as it was and known that to stand up against saddam was to stand up for the kurds? to stand up for masses of iraqis, who did not want to continue this way? and he would have understood something one learned upon going to iraq, most iraqis were relieved to have that regime unseated. >> let's not forget. >> exactly. that has been forgotten. on the other side, the orwell who hated political lying and political... >> propaganda, exactly. >> propaganda, exactly. >> and inconsistency. >> yes. >> it is also hard because he never wrote much about the middle east, and he was skeptical about the foundation of the state of israel, which

was the argument going on in the closing years of his life, he wasn't very drawn by the promise of zionism and was sympathetic to the arabs of palestine. >> he believed that democracy and the freedoms that milton stood for, could take root in nonwestern countries. is there evidence that he believed in the universality of -- >> i'm quite sure of it and one thing we really, only have a couple of minutes, i'm sorry. but by way of illustration, he writes to his friend, indian friend, and, he died a couple of years ago. budding novelist and essayist who gets attacked in india for writing in english and is mocked in england for being a white indian, and -- or too nationalist and, orwell said, are bound to get both those things but i tell you what, i think one day there will be an -- a department of english literature, as a special subset

of it, written by indians and in english and now you cannot go into a decent bookstore without seeing five or six brilliant indian or pakistani writers. >> writing in english. >> and very often better than english people. >> and, he would have been the -- following in the line -- >> and he's indian but i think -- and vikram payet. >> and so, certainly, there was -- he was not a little englander in his view of culture and his view of expression. but, one pernicious idea that resulted from the -- >> i'm not a great master of ceremonies. >> wind it up. >> if it was a real conversation i wouldn't be saying you have to condense it into less than main and i'll give you the last word. >> people don't look like us can't do this. and, that is a terrible