‘Chubby Boy’ Orwell’s Earworm . . . Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer . . . ?

Has any Orwellian scholar, I wonder, checked the verses of their subject against the Suffolk heritage of his youth? 

As it is, I believe this dedicated champion of the proletariat most probably heard a neural echo of certain lines composed by a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier and ‘the first of Rural Bards’*, when he (George Orwell) wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem that must have persisted like an earworm from his days in Southwold . . . 

        When good King Edward ruled the land
        And I was a chubby boy.

Compare, then, this palimpsestic (?) verse with Robert Bloomfield’s Suffolk Dialect Ballad . . .

     When once a giggling Mawther [girl] you,
     And I a red-faced chubby boy. 

A couplet from Bloomfield’s Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs 1802. (The Walk to the Fair, page 5.)


* The poet Robert Bloomfield, of humble parentage, was celebrated as the author of The Farmer’s Boy (published in 1800 with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick); he was born in Suffolk two hundred and fifty years ago, in December 1766, and has a lasting reputation as one of the most significant of the uneducated rustic poets of the English tradition.  

The poet John Clare, (‘a poetical genius . . . in the humble garb of a farm labourer’) called Bloomfield ‘the first of Rural Bards’ and recognised his mastery of rustic descriptive verse.

•

As I have conceded readily enough in earlier posts, I am very much an amateur literary sleuth hound, but I would be interested to know whether the Bloomfield/Orwell connexion has ever been made by contributors to the Orwell Foundation at University College London.  

For more literary sleuthing, see . . .
Grim Secrets of Room 101 which traces the horrors of the Ministry of Truth to their source in the works of the Hungarian Tabori Brothers
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/06/grim-secrets-of-room-101-is-it-time-to.html
and
Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/year-zero-thing-with-one-face-prescient.html
Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image? A Bicentennial Investigation
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/maimed-hero-frankenstein-exhumed-tragic.html
and
Three haikus in homage to John Clare
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/three-haikus-in-homage-to-john-clare.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith.

To my mind, in literary terms, there are two epochs that begin with Year Zero. 

The first Year Zero I have mentioned a number of times in these posts – 1888 – defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values).

But rereading the October–December 1944 issue of Penguin New Writing I stumbled on a date whose similarly reduplicative digits reminded me that George Orwell had predicted Year Zero to be almost certainly 1944 for the Revaluation of All Values for a Generation  . . . for the citation refer to Chapter One of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Winston’s first entry in his diary . . . 

April 4th, 1984.                                                                                                     He [Winston Smith] sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

So for Winston, the Epoch of The Last Man in Europe (being the dystopian novel’s original title) commenced no earlier than 1944.

How prescient, then, of Louis MacNeice to publish his Prayer before birth in that same year (in Penguin New Writing four years before the drafting of Nineteen Eighty-Four), almost you would think as a godfatherly charm against O’Brien’s vision of totalitarian tyranny : ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

The precursors of Winston’s future plight in Big Brother’s dystopia are truly remarkable . . . the threats to ‘freeze my humanity . . . . dragoon me into a lethal automaton’ . . . rats, truth drugs, and the ‘wise lies’ of propaganda . . .   and the lure of the elusive pastures of the Golden Country . . . and the menacing Man Who Thinks He is God . . .  

Prayer before birth

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me.
                             Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
                                   club-footed ghoul come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; console me.
                             I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
                                   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
                                         on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

                             I am not yet born ; provide me
                             With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
                                   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
                                          in the back of my mind to guide me.

                             I am not yet born ; forgive me
                             For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
                                  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
                                        my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
                                             my life when they murder by means of my
                                                   hands, my death when they live me.

                             I am not yet born ; rehearse me
                             In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
                                  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
                                       frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
                                             waves call me to folly and the desert calls
                                                  me to doom and the beggar refuses
                                                         my gift and my children curse me.

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me,
                             Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
                                   come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; O fill me
                             With strength against those who would freeze my
                                   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
                                        would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
                                              one face, a thing, and against all those
                                                   who would dissipate my entirety, would
                                                          blow me like thistledown hither and
                                                               thither or hither and thither
                                                                   like water held in the
                                                                         hands would spill me.

                             Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
                             Otherwise kill me. 

    Louis MacNeice                             
(1944)                             

Let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

            

                

Nonplatonic Cosmodemonic Histrionics . . . and an oxymoronic Feminist Bigamist . . .

After the rather sophomoric observation I recorded in my preceding post, see ladies’ bikes http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/desperately-platonic-fens.html
I thought I’d redress the balance with an altogether unplatonic mount, namely one that recalls the Western Union Telegraph Company, a.k.a. the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, Henry Miller’s employer in his Tropic of Capricorn... unplatonic because I can’t remember, frankly, any relationship in the Anaïs Nin-Henry Miller axis that was not full blooded carnality, including Nin’s (alleged) seduction by her own father.

Please stifle that yawn. We are perfectly aware your palate is too jaded to recognise any new piquancy but should you ever be seeking in a desultory sort of way a rôle model for that rare oxymoron, a feminist bigamist, the name of Anaïs Nin will satisfy that want.

 

Curiously, one learns, an unlikely friend and admirer of Henry Miller in Paris was the iconoclast George Orwell . . . see my Grim Secrets of Room 101 . . . 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/06/grim-secrets-of-room-101-is-it-time-to.html 

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html