Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In his 2002 mem­oir, Trav­els, Michael Crich­ton took his read­ers back sev­er­al decades, to the ear­ly 1960s when, as a Har­vard stu­dent, he tried an inter­est­ing lit­tle exper­i­ment in his Eng­lish class. He recalled:

I had gone to col­lege plan­ning to become a writer, but ear­ly on a sci­en­tif­ic ten­den­cy appeared. In the Eng­lish depart­ment at Har­vard, my writ­ing style was severe­ly crit­i­cized and I was receiv­ing grades of C or C+ on my papers. At eigh­teen, I was vain about my writ­ing and felt it was Har­vard, and not I, that was in error, so I decid­ed to make an exper­i­ment. The next assign­ment was a paper on Gul­liv­er’s Trav­els, and I remem­bered an essay by George Orwell that might fit. With some hes­i­ta­tion, I retyped Orwell’s essay and sub­mit­ted it as my own. I hes­i­tat­ed because if I were caught for pla­gia­rism I would be expelled; but I was pret­ty sure that my instruc­tor was not only wrong about writ­ing styles, but poor­ly read as well. In any case, George Orwell got a B- at Har­vard, which con­vinced me that the Eng­lish depart­ment was too dif­fi­cult for me.

I decid­ed to study anthro­pol­o­gy instead. But I doubt­ed my desire to con­tin­ue as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in anthro­pol­o­gy, so I began tak­ing premed cours­es, just in case.

Most like­ly Crich­ton sub­mit­ted Orwell’s essay 1946 essay, “Pol­i­tics vs. Lit­er­a­ture: An Exam­i­na­tion of Gul­liv­er’s Trav­els.”  He even­tu­al­ly went to Har­vard Med­ical School but kept writ­ing on the side. Per­haps get­ting a grade just a shade below Orwell’s B- gave Crich­ton some bizarre con­fir­ma­tion that he could one day make it as a writer.

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via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Edi­tor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trot­skyite” Nov­el Ani­mal Farm (1944)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

George Orwell’s Har­row­ing Race to Fin­ish 1984 Before His Death

A few weeks ago, we fea­tured George Orwell’s 1944 let­ter reveal­ing the ideas that would lead him to write his still wide­ly read, and even more wide­ly assigned, nov­el­/an­ti-author­i­tar­i­an state­ment 1984. The book would come out five years lat­er, in 1949, sug­gest­ing that Orwell worked at a pret­ty good clip to turn out a book of such high stature. Alas, he nev­er lived to see it attain its cur­rent place in the cul­ture, and bare­ly even to see its pub­li­ca­tion. It turns out Orwell had to work faster than you may expect; beset by poor health in var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions, he had to fin­ish off the nov­el­’s man­u­script, which he had then ten­ta­tive­ly titled The Last Man in Europe, before his con­di­tions fin­ished him off. “I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolute­ly dis­sat­is­fied,” he wrote his agent of the rough draft. “I think it is a good idea but the exe­cu­tion would have been bet­ter if I had not writ­ten it under the influ­ence of TB.”

That typ­i­cal­ly gray but hardy Blairi­an obser­va­tion (as in Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell’s giv­en name, tak­ing into account that “Orwellian” has, owing to 1984, a mean­ing of its own) comes from Robert McCrum, writ­ing in The Guardian of the author’s strug­gle to com­plete the book by the end of 1948. “It was a des­per­ate race against time. Orwell’s health was dete­ri­o­rat­ing, the man­u­script need­ed retyp­ing, and the Decem­ber dead­line was loom­ing.” Feel­ing beyond help, he “fol­lowed his ex-pub­lic school­boy’s instincts: he would go it alone. [ … ] Sus­tained by end­less roll-ups, pots of cof­fee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraf­fin heater, with gales buf­fet­ing [his bor­rowed house on a remote Scot­tish island] night and day, he strug­gled on. By 30 Novem­ber 1948 it was vir­tu­al­ly done.”  On June 8th, the book appeared in Eng­land’s book­stores, met by acclaim from Win­ston Churchill him­self on down. Orwell died on Jan­u­ary 21, 1950, 64 years ago this past Mon­day.

Above, we’ve includ­ed images of 1984’s man­u­script from GeorgeOrwellNovels.com (click on each for a larg­er ver­sion), and you can learn more about it at The Fic­tion Desk. Do con­sid­er giv­ing a read — or, bet­ter yet, a re-read — to Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write,” from which McCrum quotes to illu­mi­nate the writer’s dri­ve to com­plete this har­row­ing final work: “Writ­ing a book is a hor­ri­ble, exhaust­ing strug­gle, like a long bout of some painful ill­ness. One would nev­er under­take such a thing if one were not dri­ven by some demon whom one can nei­ther resist or under­stand.”

Read more about this sto­ry at The Guardian.

via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writ­ing and speech—as myth­ic invo­ca­tion, as seduc­tion, chat­ter, and rhetoric, ful­some and emp­ty. Words—two-faced, like open books—carry with them at least two sens­es, the mean­ing of their present utter­ance, and the ver­so shades of his­to­ry. This is at least part­ly the import of Joyce’s myth­i­cal method, as it is that of all expos­i­tors of ancient texts, from preach­ers and the­olo­gians to lit­er­ary crit­ics. It seems par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant, then, that the pas­sage Joyce chose for the one and only record­ing of a read­ing from Ulysses comes from the “Aoelus” episode, which par­o­dies Odysseus and his com­pan­ions’ encounter with the god of wind.

Joyce sets the scene in the news­pa­per offices of the Freeman’s Jour­nal, epit­o­me of writ­ing in the present tense, where reporters and edi­tors give puffed-up speech­es punc­tu­at­ed by reduc­tive, pithy head­lines. Amidst this busi­ness, eru­dite pro­fes­sor MacHugh and Stephen Dedalus wax lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal, mak­ing con­nec­tions. MacHugh recites “the finest dis­play of ora­to­ry” he ever heard—a defense of the revival of the Irish lan­guage that com­pares the Irish peo­ple to Moses and the ancient Hebrews spurn­ing the seduc­tions of an oppres­sive empire in the per­son of an Egypt­ian high­priest: Vagrants and day­labour­ers are you called: the world trem­bles at our name.

Joyce record­ed the pas­sage in 1924 at the urg­ing of Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny founder Sylvia Beach, who per­suad­ed the HMV gramo­phone stu­dio in Paris to make the record, under the pro­vi­sion that she would finance it and that the studio’s name would appear nowhere on the prod­uct. Ulysses, recall, was in many places under a ban for obscen­i­ty (not lift­ed in the U.S. until 1933 by Judge John Woolsey). The record­ing ses­sion was painful for Joyce, who need­ed two attempts on two sep­a­rate days to com­plete it, plagued as he was by his fail­ing eyes. And yet Joyce, Beach wrote in her notes, “was anx­ious to have the record­ing made… He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only read­ing from Ulysses… it is more, one feels, than mere ora­to­ry.” You can read the speech here while lis­ten­ing to Joyce read above. Beach called Joyce’s read­ing a “won­der­ful per­for­mance.” “I nev­er hear it,” she wrote, “with­out being deeply moved.”

While Beach may have been sat­is­fied with the record­ing, her friend, lin­guist C.K. Ogden pro­nounced it “very bad,” mean­ing, writes Beach, “it was not a suc­cess tech­ni­cal­ly” (though it was not, in any case, “at all a com­mer­cial ven­ture”). You will notice this imme­di­ate­ly as you strug­gle to hear Joyce’s mut­ed read­ing. Anx­ious to pre­serve his voice in a clear­er doc­u­ment, Ogden cap­tured Joyce read­ing from Finnegans Wake five years lat­er at the stu­dio of the Ornitho­log­i­cal Soci­ety in Cam­bridge (he boast­ed of own­ing “the two biggest record­ing machines in the world”). By this time, Joyce’s eye­sight had almost com­plete­ly dimmed. Ogden pho­tographed the text and enlarged it so that the let­ters were a half-inch tall, yet Joyce still could bare­ly make them out and “sup­pos­ed­ly need­ed some­one to whis­per along” (Beach, who was not present, imag­ined he must have known the pas­sage by heart).

Joyce chose to read from the “Anna Livia Plura­belle” sec­tion of the exper­i­men­tal text—a pas­sage “over­flow­ing,” writes Men­tal Floss, with “allu­sions to the world’s rivers.” He reads in the voice of an old wash­er­woman, and begins with a most suc­cinct state­ment of the tem­po­ral dimen­sions of lan­guage: “I told you every telling has a tail­ing.” Where Ulysses fore­grounds lit­er­ary his­to­ry, Finnegans Wake dives deep into geo­log­ic time, and priv­i­leges the oral over the writ­ten. These are the only two record­ings Joyce ever made, and they sure­ly mark what were for him cen­tral loca­tions in both books, though he also chose them for their ease of read­ing aloud (and, per­haps, mem­o­riz­ing). The Mod­ern Word col­lects infor­ma­tion on the var­i­ous com­mer­cial releas­es of the Joyce record­ings, many of which include read­ings of Joyce poems and sto­ries by Frank McCourt, Colm Meany, Stephen Rea, and oth­ers. And while many of those read­ings are very good, none of them can match the thrill of hear­ing Joyce him­self speak from the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

Find works by James Joyce in our  Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness