The BBC Radio Four has selected several works of George Orwell to celebrate the holding of a national day to mark his life under the title The Real George Orwell. Eric Blair has given us several cultural masterpieces with Animal Farm and 1984 and which together with Huxley’s Brave New World, say all there is to say about revolutions and the development of totalitarian states under dictatorships. More than this he wrote a number of semi autobiographical works and essays which provide us with an understanding of his development as a writer and indeed as a human being.
He tried to explain his reasons for being a writer in an essay (Why I write) in which he covered something of his childhood in which he felt isolated and undervalued and he discovered that he no only had a facility with words but was able to face unpleasant facts. He also admits to be a day dreamer and putting himself into situations, points which I shall come again when considering the BBC production Burmese Days in which the a different perspective and motivation is suggested. He also lists what he believes are his objective motives for being a writer at a time when he was an established writer and which I shall comment on in a separate writing
I do not know enough about his life to claim a great understanding of the man or the process by which he evolved but the BBC series has provide some key issues and turning points which I assume are factually based.
I have also noted some interesting parallels and points of connection between us especially the sense of isolation in childhood, the sudden wish to break out from the pattern of life that had been set out for him through his education and father’s work and the hope that his personal experiences would also contribute to the enlightenment of other on their separate journeys of self discovery and understanding of the earth world and its place in the universe.
I have yet to find out why birth registered as Eric Blair chose to write as George Orwell. In my instance the selection of Joseph Grech for my identity as a contemporary artist and writer became clear to me four years after the discovery at the age of 59 that the surname of my father was Grech, ‘of the Greeks’ and that Joseph my second name was the name of the parish church where he served as a priest for fifty years and where my mother and her family of six sisters and four brothers had commenced their education at the school attached to church where they had lived next door for a time, and where she had taught as a pupil teacher and later had played the piano and organ for school and church with other members of the family in the church choir. On my second visit to Gibraltar in 2004 and I stood at the top of the rock looking down not just on the rest of this small community but on the life, and the identity I should have had and wanted throughout my self aware consciousness till then, and vowed that for whatever years I had left they would be spent within the apparel of who I should have been although I also accepted what I had been and that I was as I had become.
Eric Arthur Blair was born into a very different world a few years before that of my birth and care mothers in 1903 (1907 and 1909 respectively) before the outbreak of World War I which changed the future of everyone so dramatically heralding the technological age of warfare and culture. One cannot underestimate the difference perspective between those who were brought up and reached adulthood before World War II and those whose childhoods were spent getting in and out of arid raid shelters, watching the rocket bombs pass over head and hen looking at the craters where there had once been homes.
Eric was born in India where his father worked for Colonial Office with responsibilities related to the manufacture and distribution of opium. His mother of French background was brought up in Burma and shortly after his birth his mother brought him and older sister by five years to England, to Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire. My mother left Gibraltar because of her pregnancy although five of her sisters were required to leave Gibraltar along with some ten thousand other citizens because of the declaration of one and the information that Germany was to take Gibraltar and had to neutral but fascists friendly Spain when the Germany defeated Britain and her colonial empire of territories, colonies and dominions. Gibraltar remains a disputed independent territory to this day.
I also have two connections with Henley on Thames in that of a year I made the fifty mile return three to four time a week late afternoon into evening to supervised a number of teenage boys for a colleague away in training in addition to the average 50 mile round trip a day work on my existing caseload of child care cases of children in care, fostering and adoptions as well as being the Court officer for the County Council at Witney and Burford where the benches were respectively chaired by the wife in law and son of the Duke of Marlborough. Later Henley was also the location of a month spent at an International Senior Management course which was to affect my life in a positive way.
Our first five years appear very different for although without his father apart from a brief visit which led to the birth of his younger sister, he grew up in a comfortable and socially involved environment compared to the deprivations of World War II time and the need for my existence to be kept secret so that all official documentation was removed or never existed in that I was not registered with a National health doctor until the family GP retired and the war was long over. My earliest memories are of seeing overhead flying V 1 rockets on the way to the garden shelter and looking at bomb craters subsequently at a time when financial poverty and food rationing limited the family tables and the war time restrictions limited discovery of the surrounding world although I was evacuated to officers married quarters at Catterick for a year missing most of the 140 rockets which fell on the neighbourhood, the biggest concentration in the UK because of our proximity to London’s main airport at Croydon.
Eric then had a female childhood friend and they read and recited poetry together, and while I played cricket with a first cousin after the war there were no books in he household despite my mother being a primary school teacher. My cultural world opened up when we attended the local cinema on Mondays and Thursday, I went to the Saturday morning children’s shows and occasionally saw a fourth cinema programme in a week going to see the latest releases with first cousins in neighbouring towns, Croydon, Sutton and Purley and only later did I discover the world of the library when I found I was able to move from the children’s to the adult sections without questions.
The first point of similarity is that we both went to Catholic preparatory schools where the teachers were nuns although Eric was also became a boarder at another Preparatory school, St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne. He was able to gain scholarships to Wellington and hen when a place became available at Eton the most famous of British private schools where as although the John Fisher wanted to be recognised as a Public School, employing an international Olympic Athletics Coach, it never made it. In both instances we were dependent on having additional support for the required fees.
It was our respective years 18 to 21 which were so different in outward appearance yet we both gained experiences which were to govern the rest of our lives and make us individualist, slightly anarchistic socialists. As he approached his eighteenth year and University was considered the normal; next step he was unable to gained the scholarship and fees to attend a top class college considered the norm for Eton students and joining the Indian Police service, in Borneo because his mother’s family resided there and his father had returned to England and retirement. Eton was then an establishment geared up to providing young men to help rule the empire so his appointment was a natural progression.
In my instance I had panicked on first discovering my problem which short term memory learning so that despite hours of home work and continuous reading during he holiday I could not remember stuff when it came to examinations and given the mock general certificate of education results had opted out of Latin essential then for Oxbridge and then decided to seek employment without going into the sixth form and gained work in the Finance Department of Middlesex and then Croydon Councils before failing as Olivetti sales representatives and becoming Down and Out and becoming a leading activist in the non violent direct action movement against weapons of mass destruction and an executive committee member of the local Labour party and choosing to go to prison for six months rather than agree to stop my activities. Eric went to Burma and his account of the experience was broadcast by the BBC as part of its celebration of his work.
The first of the biographical programmes was Burmese Days and which I presumed was based on an autobiographical work. It begins with his disappointment that the female friend from his childhood (Jacintha Buddicom) was not interested in marriage and going to Burma to become with wife of a Colonial Policeman.
Jacintha Laura May Buddicom (10 May 1901 – 1994) was a poet and a childhood friend of George Orwell (Eric Blair). They first met in the summer of 1914 when he was standing on his head in a field at the bottom of their garden in Ship lake (Oxfordshire) south of Henley where the two families lived. One or both appear to have recorded that when she asked what he was doing he replied “You are "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up." The radio programme makes references to this moment when it covers their experience of growing up writing and reading together, although the relationship included his younger sister and her younger brother and sister.
Her main complaint stated in the programme is that she still had the intention to go to Oxford which he had now abandoned, maintain and develop her intellectual interests and write. When he persists she ridicules the notion going to Burma and playing eh role of a colonial wife to a policeman and attempts to force her to yield to him physically, something which she implies they willingly attempted before and it failed because they were more like brother and sister than potential lovers.
The programme also records, in a conversation Blair is said to have had with a stranger on his way to the frontier out post of Katha after an incident with an elephant which I will come to shortly, that he continued to write to her after his arrival in Burma but she did not reply because he says his letters were full of complaints about the life he had found for himself. The programme gives he impression that this was the end of their contact.
My understanding is that on his return from Burma and staying he visited the Buddicomes but Jacintha was not there because she was away after having a child (1927) from a relationship. She then had a relationship with an unnamed peer for 30 years and one source claims that she did not realise that that her childhood friend was George Orwell until shortly before his death but they did corresponded, telephoned and planned to meet. She attended his funeral (unnoticed) in 1950.
She wrote a book about their childhood together Eric and us in which she challenges the portrait he has left of his experience during the same years. She left the copyright of her book and papers to a relative who in 2006 published an updated version of the book which included the information that the reason why she had not replied to his letters was that he had attempted to rape her.
The main part of the BBC programme covers two situations during his years in Burma. He was called to act in a situation where an elephant had run amok and flattened and killing a man as well as destroying building. He was under great pressure to shoot the animal from his white subordinate and his local police contact although he is reported as reluctant but agrees to do so when he told to do otherwise would involve a loss of face before the increasingly large crowd when the elephant is cornered and quietened down. He has to send for a larger gun and although the first shot stops and then drops the creature he has to fire several rounds from two weapons before the animal dies after half an hour although before this the locals have begun to cut up the creature for its meat. He expresses considerable regret noting that for decades the creature had served men and did not deserve to be treated in this way. He is then summoned to see his chief to says a complain has been made by the firm who owned the elephant demands that action is taken against he officer and this the reason for his being sent to the backwoods, effectively ending his career.
It is on his way to the posting that he meets a philosophical teacher of the locals. They meet when Eric enters the compartment after having a physical confrontation with some local young men who are angry with the continuing presence of white colonials in their country, he loses his temper and beats the most vociferous. He expresses shame at having behaved in this way although as he a admits he has beaten native prisoners as part of his official duties.
He explains his dislike for the country and his role and that his life blood is reading novels which are sent out, His reading distinguishes himself from his colleagues who read for entertainment and passing the time while his is more discerning and critical. The companion is clearly a communist who sympathises with Blair’s apparent distrust of the locals but which the Scotsman from Aberdeen pointedly explains the consequential reaction to colonialism and the exploitation of the mineral and occupational wealth of the country for the City of London. This is something which his boss had also explained was the purpose of their presence to protect the commercial interests of the empire. The teacher was employed in native education and expressed surprise that the people appeared to accept their exploitation for the profits of a few without rising up. He explains that his father had a job with the port authority which required him to ask the masters their port of destination and this has fuelled his desire to visit the places for himself.
Blair puts the blame for his presence on his father and the rejection of his suit by Cynthia who cried when he when he went shooting but did not respond to his advances. He said he did not understand women. The stranger suggests he will have made do with a native woman, who cooks and cleans and does not answer back. Blair reacts to this accusation, but in the programme he also does not deny. Blair sounds self piteous and questions the purpose of existence, cogs in the wheels of evolution. The stranger challenges this concept and tells him to go outside his experience of education and society of his peers and find out how the rest of world live and tells him to read the 11th Theses ( of Karl Marx) although they part without stranger explaining what it is in anyway.
The programme then includes experiences from being Down and Out in London and the in Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia and where he asks a Communist does he know what is the 11th theses and who explains this where Marx argued against the Philosopher Feuerbach. This was written in 1845 but not published until 1924 the main point the 11th in this short work is his conclusion that philosophers attempt to describe the world as it from different perspective but not to change it The stranger was telling Orwell he needed to act and not just think and talk about it. Orwell was already conscious of this because previously he talks of the need to feel and be in reality to feel alive rather than existing. I also felt like that then and look at trouble it got be into! And for Orwell he needed to take a very different pathway (Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx Google it)
My understanding is that Blair was trained at Mandalay in 1922 after travelling via the Suez canal and that after a period at the principal hill station was posted to the frontier outpost in 1924. He was responsible for the security of two hundred thousand people and from there he became an Assistant Division Inspector to a town with an oil refinery close to Rangoon. In 1925 he moved again to a town with the second largest prison and then in 1926 to where his maternal grandmother lived and it was towards the end of that year he was assigned to Katha the location of his first novel Burmese Days. In 1927 he developed a fever and because he was entitled to leave in England (after five years) and returned to his family to recover and while on holiday with them decided to change his life and resigned from the police. It was while on in France swimming naked the pool villa while the rest of the family were out and I spent the day eating crusty French bread, olives and salami drinking wine looking down the valley in 1991 that I reappraised my life and determined to write the novel that had fermented inside me for the previous thirty years. It was written in 1994 and I keep rewriting the opening chapter from year to year or two. It is set
The novel Burmese Days was not published until 1934 and according to once source it is a portrait of Imperial Britain although Orwell attempts to present a wide perspective from the naked exploitation and commercialism to the provision of health and education, and order and security. The widespread racism of predominantly white Britain is reflected not surprising given the country that produced the biggest slavers in the Caribbean and the USA and the superiority of the white races over others but also those who rejected such prejudices or were indifferent to the issue. The others issue was identity and its collapse of the basis on which the central character had built his life. It is not a book preaching revolution or major change, or promoting socialist or communist ideas. I have not placed the book on my reading list. I still do not know why he commenced to break in such a fundamental way from the belief system created for him by his family, education and social structure and which would lead him to abandon his attractive young wife to kill fascists.
He tried to explain his reasons for being a writer in an essay (Why I write) in which he covered something of his childhood in which he felt isolated and undervalued and he discovered that he no only had a facility with words but was able to face unpleasant facts. He also admits to be a day dreamer and putting himself into situations, points which I shall come again when considering the BBC production Burmese Days in which the a different perspective and motivation is suggested. He also lists what he believes are his objective motives for being a writer at a time when he was an established writer and which I shall comment on in a separate writing
I do not know enough about his life to claim a great understanding of the man or the process by which he evolved but the BBC series has provide some key issues and turning points which I assume are factually based.
I have also noted some interesting parallels and points of connection between us especially the sense of isolation in childhood, the sudden wish to break out from the pattern of life that had been set out for him through his education and father’s work and the hope that his personal experiences would also contribute to the enlightenment of other on their separate journeys of self discovery and understanding of the earth world and its place in the universe.
I have yet to find out why birth registered as Eric Blair chose to write as George Orwell. In my instance the selection of Joseph Grech for my identity as a contemporary artist and writer became clear to me four years after the discovery at the age of 59 that the surname of my father was Grech, ‘of the Greeks’ and that Joseph my second name was the name of the parish church where he served as a priest for fifty years and where my mother and her family of six sisters and four brothers had commenced their education at the school attached to church where they had lived next door for a time, and where she had taught as a pupil teacher and later had played the piano and organ for school and church with other members of the family in the church choir. On my second visit to Gibraltar in 2004 and I stood at the top of the rock looking down not just on the rest of this small community but on the life, and the identity I should have had and wanted throughout my self aware consciousness till then, and vowed that for whatever years I had left they would be spent within the apparel of who I should have been although I also accepted what I had been and that I was as I had become.
Eric Arthur Blair was born into a very different world a few years before that of my birth and care mothers in 1903 (1907 and 1909 respectively) before the outbreak of World War I which changed the future of everyone so dramatically heralding the technological age of warfare and culture. One cannot underestimate the difference perspective between those who were brought up and reached adulthood before World War II and those whose childhoods were spent getting in and out of arid raid shelters, watching the rocket bombs pass over head and hen looking at the craters where there had once been homes.
Eric was born in India where his father worked for Colonial Office with responsibilities related to the manufacture and distribution of opium. His mother of French background was brought up in Burma and shortly after his birth his mother brought him and older sister by five years to England, to Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire. My mother left Gibraltar because of her pregnancy although five of her sisters were required to leave Gibraltar along with some ten thousand other citizens because of the declaration of one and the information that Germany was to take Gibraltar and had to neutral but fascists friendly Spain when the Germany defeated Britain and her colonial empire of territories, colonies and dominions. Gibraltar remains a disputed independent territory to this day.
I also have two connections with Henley on Thames in that of a year I made the fifty mile return three to four time a week late afternoon into evening to supervised a number of teenage boys for a colleague away in training in addition to the average 50 mile round trip a day work on my existing caseload of child care cases of children in care, fostering and adoptions as well as being the Court officer for the County Council at Witney and Burford where the benches were respectively chaired by the wife in law and son of the Duke of Marlborough. Later Henley was also the location of a month spent at an International Senior Management course which was to affect my life in a positive way.
Our first five years appear very different for although without his father apart from a brief visit which led to the birth of his younger sister, he grew up in a comfortable and socially involved environment compared to the deprivations of World War II time and the need for my existence to be kept secret so that all official documentation was removed or never existed in that I was not registered with a National health doctor until the family GP retired and the war was long over. My earliest memories are of seeing overhead flying V 1 rockets on the way to the garden shelter and looking at bomb craters subsequently at a time when financial poverty and food rationing limited the family tables and the war time restrictions limited discovery of the surrounding world although I was evacuated to officers married quarters at Catterick for a year missing most of the 140 rockets which fell on the neighbourhood, the biggest concentration in the UK because of our proximity to London’s main airport at Croydon.
Eric then had a female childhood friend and they read and recited poetry together, and while I played cricket with a first cousin after the war there were no books in he household despite my mother being a primary school teacher. My cultural world opened up when we attended the local cinema on Mondays and Thursday, I went to the Saturday morning children’s shows and occasionally saw a fourth cinema programme in a week going to see the latest releases with first cousins in neighbouring towns, Croydon, Sutton and Purley and only later did I discover the world of the library when I found I was able to move from the children’s to the adult sections without questions.
The first point of similarity is that we both went to Catholic preparatory schools where the teachers were nuns although Eric was also became a boarder at another Preparatory school, St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne. He was able to gain scholarships to Wellington and hen when a place became available at Eton the most famous of British private schools where as although the John Fisher wanted to be recognised as a Public School, employing an international Olympic Athletics Coach, it never made it. In both instances we were dependent on having additional support for the required fees.
It was our respective years 18 to 21 which were so different in outward appearance yet we both gained experiences which were to govern the rest of our lives and make us individualist, slightly anarchistic socialists. As he approached his eighteenth year and University was considered the normal; next step he was unable to gained the scholarship and fees to attend a top class college considered the norm for Eton students and joining the Indian Police service, in Borneo because his mother’s family resided there and his father had returned to England and retirement. Eton was then an establishment geared up to providing young men to help rule the empire so his appointment was a natural progression.
In my instance I had panicked on first discovering my problem which short term memory learning so that despite hours of home work and continuous reading during he holiday I could not remember stuff when it came to examinations and given the mock general certificate of education results had opted out of Latin essential then for Oxbridge and then decided to seek employment without going into the sixth form and gained work in the Finance Department of Middlesex and then Croydon Councils before failing as Olivetti sales representatives and becoming Down and Out and becoming a leading activist in the non violent direct action movement against weapons of mass destruction and an executive committee member of the local Labour party and choosing to go to prison for six months rather than agree to stop my activities. Eric went to Burma and his account of the experience was broadcast by the BBC as part of its celebration of his work.
The first of the biographical programmes was Burmese Days and which I presumed was based on an autobiographical work. It begins with his disappointment that the female friend from his childhood (Jacintha Buddicom) was not interested in marriage and going to Burma to become with wife of a Colonial Policeman.
Jacintha Laura May Buddicom (10 May 1901 – 1994) was a poet and a childhood friend of George Orwell (Eric Blair). They first met in the summer of 1914 when he was standing on his head in a field at the bottom of their garden in Ship lake (Oxfordshire) south of Henley where the two families lived. One or both appear to have recorded that when she asked what he was doing he replied “You are "You are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up." The radio programme makes references to this moment when it covers their experience of growing up writing and reading together, although the relationship included his younger sister and her younger brother and sister.
Her main complaint stated in the programme is that she still had the intention to go to Oxford which he had now abandoned, maintain and develop her intellectual interests and write. When he persists she ridicules the notion going to Burma and playing eh role of a colonial wife to a policeman and attempts to force her to yield to him physically, something which she implies they willingly attempted before and it failed because they were more like brother and sister than potential lovers.
The programme also records, in a conversation Blair is said to have had with a stranger on his way to the frontier out post of Katha after an incident with an elephant which I will come to shortly, that he continued to write to her after his arrival in Burma but she did not reply because he says his letters were full of complaints about the life he had found for himself. The programme gives he impression that this was the end of their contact.
My understanding is that on his return from Burma and staying he visited the Buddicomes but Jacintha was not there because she was away after having a child (1927) from a relationship. She then had a relationship with an unnamed peer for 30 years and one source claims that she did not realise that that her childhood friend was George Orwell until shortly before his death but they did corresponded, telephoned and planned to meet. She attended his funeral (unnoticed) in 1950.
She wrote a book about their childhood together Eric and us in which she challenges the portrait he has left of his experience during the same years. She left the copyright of her book and papers to a relative who in 2006 published an updated version of the book which included the information that the reason why she had not replied to his letters was that he had attempted to rape her.
The main part of the BBC programme covers two situations during his years in Burma. He was called to act in a situation where an elephant had run amok and flattened and killing a man as well as destroying building. He was under great pressure to shoot the animal from his white subordinate and his local police contact although he is reported as reluctant but agrees to do so when he told to do otherwise would involve a loss of face before the increasingly large crowd when the elephant is cornered and quietened down. He has to send for a larger gun and although the first shot stops and then drops the creature he has to fire several rounds from two weapons before the animal dies after half an hour although before this the locals have begun to cut up the creature for its meat. He expresses considerable regret noting that for decades the creature had served men and did not deserve to be treated in this way. He is then summoned to see his chief to says a complain has been made by the firm who owned the elephant demands that action is taken against he officer and this the reason for his being sent to the backwoods, effectively ending his career.
It is on his way to the posting that he meets a philosophical teacher of the locals. They meet when Eric enters the compartment after having a physical confrontation with some local young men who are angry with the continuing presence of white colonials in their country, he loses his temper and beats the most vociferous. He expresses shame at having behaved in this way although as he a admits he has beaten native prisoners as part of his official duties.
He explains his dislike for the country and his role and that his life blood is reading novels which are sent out, His reading distinguishes himself from his colleagues who read for entertainment and passing the time while his is more discerning and critical. The companion is clearly a communist who sympathises with Blair’s apparent distrust of the locals but which the Scotsman from Aberdeen pointedly explains the consequential reaction to colonialism and the exploitation of the mineral and occupational wealth of the country for the City of London. This is something which his boss had also explained was the purpose of their presence to protect the commercial interests of the empire. The teacher was employed in native education and expressed surprise that the people appeared to accept their exploitation for the profits of a few without rising up. He explains that his father had a job with the port authority which required him to ask the masters their port of destination and this has fuelled his desire to visit the places for himself.
Blair puts the blame for his presence on his father and the rejection of his suit by Cynthia who cried when he when he went shooting but did not respond to his advances. He said he did not understand women. The stranger suggests he will have made do with a native woman, who cooks and cleans and does not answer back. Blair reacts to this accusation, but in the programme he also does not deny. Blair sounds self piteous and questions the purpose of existence, cogs in the wheels of evolution. The stranger challenges this concept and tells him to go outside his experience of education and society of his peers and find out how the rest of world live and tells him to read the 11th Theses ( of Karl Marx) although they part without stranger explaining what it is in anyway.
The programme then includes experiences from being Down and Out in London and the in Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia and where he asks a Communist does he know what is the 11th theses and who explains this where Marx argued against the Philosopher Feuerbach. This was written in 1845 but not published until 1924 the main point the 11th in this short work is his conclusion that philosophers attempt to describe the world as it from different perspective but not to change it The stranger was telling Orwell he needed to act and not just think and talk about it. Orwell was already conscious of this because previously he talks of the need to feel and be in reality to feel alive rather than existing. I also felt like that then and look at trouble it got be into! And for Orwell he needed to take a very different pathway (Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx Google it)
My understanding is that Blair was trained at Mandalay in 1922 after travelling via the Suez canal and that after a period at the principal hill station was posted to the frontier outpost in 1924. He was responsible for the security of two hundred thousand people and from there he became an Assistant Division Inspector to a town with an oil refinery close to Rangoon. In 1925 he moved again to a town with the second largest prison and then in 1926 to where his maternal grandmother lived and it was towards the end of that year he was assigned to Katha the location of his first novel Burmese Days. In 1927 he developed a fever and because he was entitled to leave in England (after five years) and returned to his family to recover and while on holiday with them decided to change his life and resigned from the police. It was while on in France swimming naked the pool villa while the rest of the family were out and I spent the day eating crusty French bread, olives and salami drinking wine looking down the valley in 1991 that I reappraised my life and determined to write the novel that had fermented inside me for the previous thirty years. It was written in 1994 and I keep rewriting the opening chapter from year to year or two. It is set
The novel Burmese Days was not published until 1934 and according to once source it is a portrait of Imperial Britain although Orwell attempts to present a wide perspective from the naked exploitation and commercialism to the provision of health and education, and order and security. The widespread racism of predominantly white Britain is reflected not surprising given the country that produced the biggest slavers in the Caribbean and the USA and the superiority of the white races over others but also those who rejected such prejudices or were indifferent to the issue. The others issue was identity and its collapse of the basis on which the central character had built his life. It is not a book preaching revolution or major change, or promoting socialist or communist ideas. I have not placed the book on my reading list. I still do not know why he commenced to break in such a fundamental way from the belief system created for him by his family, education and social structure and which would lead him to abandon his attractive young wife to kill fascists.
No comments:
Post a Comment