Orwell's press card portrait, taken in 1933

From D. J. Taylor in The Times Online:

Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in theFor more…For more… NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man – Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Béla Kun – who had tracked down Orwell’s NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public.

Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? Most writers’ diaries are self-conscious affairs, where the reader ends up with a sneaking feeling that the real audience is only a remote posterity. Orwell’s are notably unvarnished, often no more than a mundane domestic record, and yet this doesn’t make them personally revealing. There is, for example, almost nothing in them about Orwell’s literary techniques. Neither is there very much in the way of confidential remarks. When he notes in 1941, out of nowhere, that he is “thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess, nor even see”, there is a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell – frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms.

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Aspiring fiction writers have been reading E. M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel” since it was first published in 1927. I can remember devouring it in 1960 or soon after; here was one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, the author of “A Passage to India,” divulging the secrets of the trade — or rather, expressing strong but always courteous opinions about the rival merits and methods of the important novelists of the past.

Here we first learned of “flat” (quickly sketched in) versus “round” (fully developed) characters and how every book needs some of both. Here we were told that Henry James’s decision in “The Ambassadors” to make his two chief male characters reverse positions by the end of the novel was a bad idea, a shoehorning of human vagaries into the rigors of unbending “pattern,” whereas Proust’s far better principle of composition was subject to a more fluid and spontaneous sense of “rhythm.” Forster gives as an example of rhythm Proust’s constant but never systematic or insistent return to the theme of the “little phrase,” a melody that the fictional composer Vinteuil serves up in various forms and that the characters hear at strategic moments. Forster writes of the melody, “There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.”

Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern. In “Concerning E. M. Forster,” Kermode sinks probes into Forster’s book about fiction (the first chapter is called “Aspects of Aspects”) and manages along the way to explore aesthetic questions, Forster’s life and Forster’s links to other writers, like Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

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