by JULIAN SYMONS
AM. 4pg. 8 ½” x 11”. No date [circa 1978]. No place. A lengthy handwritten manuscript by Julian Symons, reviewing an Anthony Burgess novel 1985 that was released in 1978. Symons penned “The title Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell said to me, was devised from the fact that he was writing in 1948. He simply transpired the last two numerals. There was a little more to it than that, because the gap in time between 1948 and 1984 was great enough to permit the imagination to run free in creating a new society, a new world. Anthony Burgess’s new novel 1985, however, is set only a few years head. Orwell was creating the last and gloomiest Utopia. Burgess is engaging in political predictions, a guessing game like naming the next Prime Minister but one. Mr. Burgess preceeds his fictional account of Orwell’s book through which he suggest his own views of our present discontents. He is often extremely perceptive about the novel, pointing out that many of the details in the book are taken from what Orwell saw around him in 1948 – the meat rations down, one egg a month, no razor blades (I sharpened my style blade on a glass contraption called a lillicap…guaranteed to make a blade last for months)…That was the book’s physical background. Mentally it was an inversion of Wells’s ‘The Shape of Things To Come.’ Socialistic visions of Utopia has been optimistic, from William Morris through Edward Bellamy to Wells. They were about co-operation, where Orwell’s book was about power. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a book stamping on a human face – for ever…Burgess calls this vision a cacotopia, on the basis of cacophony, which doesn’t seem to take us much further. He is a…but slapdash and often maddening writer, liable at any time to extraordinary errors like his statement that the old English…was sensible because you could decide anything by three (we should try it with ten pence, new or old). He believes that Orwell ‘spoke with a patrician accent.’ He is captive of that extreme…Burgess has something in common with Orwell, who also said some outrageous things, and sees like Orwell that ‘freedom’ must always mean freedom to choose…”. The paper is in fine condition with a couple small staple holes. One British writer commenting on another. (Inventory #: 3079)