Thanks (to a man i admire)

It’s that season of solemn / ecstatic gratitude again, but i can’t bear to think about how lucky i’ve been this year (even though it’s been one of the hardest of my life), so rather than succumb to an inevitable paralysis of shame, perhaps i’ll steer away from personal matters and put forward an example of that for which any lover of beautiful, elegant prose can give thanks: a thick steak of pith.  

A few months ago, after exhuming it from the bottom shelf, behind a box, in a dusty basement corner of the venerable MacLeod’s (Vancouver’s oracle of lost, obscure and precious books), i sat down and began reading a short literary biography of one of the writers, and one of the men (i use the word consciously — it seems that, by far, most of my favourite thinkers and writers are women) whom i most admire: George Woodcock. I was just two or three stiff, yellow pages in when i began to feel new stirrings of affection, both for the subject and the biographer, Peter Hughes. Several of Hughes’ evocative phrases have stayed with me throughout the busy days since i first luxuriated in his prose, so i’d like to share a few paragraphs with you, my dear friends on the interwebs. Enjoy!

From Peter Hughes’ biography of George Woodcock
1974, McClelland & Stewart

     Soon after Peking and Washington refused him visas because of his anarchist involvements, the New Left attacked him as a reactionary because he questioned some of its despotic and philistine tendencies.^[2] Few writers could make that claim. Fewer still would want to.

     One of the few might be George Orwell, Woodcock’s friend and the subject of his finest biography. He too was awkwardly independent and paid for his integrity by living a “life against odds” that intersected Woodcock’s own life and sympathies at several points. Beyond all the tastes and views they shared, beyond the opinions they fought over — Woodcock was a pacifist, Orwell a fire­-breather, and their acquaintance began in a wartime Partisan Review controversy — both men upheld liberty and decency through writing that escapes all the mandarin categories of literary criticism.  

     Woodcock agrees with and expands the opinion that Orwell’s many works, essays, novels, stories, reportage, political memoirs, whatever their apparent differences in form and genre, are all of one kind. They are all polemic; each one has designs on the reader and tries to make him take sides in a serious dispute.^[3] In works as varied as Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm that attempt and those designs shape design in its other meaning of literary pattern and form. This notion of kind can also explain the bewildering diversity in Woodcock’s writing; for it helps to reveal the powerful impulses and interests that give consistency and depth to his work. He is not, however, with the exception of a few hectic editorials in his magazine Now, writing polemic. By the time he got down to full-time writing in the postwar forties political anarchism was a lost cause. Now a polemic delivered on behalf of a lost cause is an elegy or an epitaph, and the tone of Woodcock's biographies of the great anarchists is something quite different from either.

     What he really created was a kind that might be called persuasion, which Matthew Arnold somewhere describes as “the only true intellectual art.” It differs from polemic in stressing the good cause to the virtual exclusion of the usual assault on the bad. In reading the life of Kropotkin or Godwin or Proudhon we cannot forget the assorted evils of bourgeois reaction, but we are not allowed to think of them in those hackneyed terms. Most political propaganda allows nothing except hackneyed words and ideas. 

I was going to end there, because i think that last sentence deserves to echo throughout the land, however i’ll include a few more lest any reader be left with an impression of Woodcock that fails to capture his depth:

One result is the corruption of language through slogans, a process traced by Orwell in one of his essays. Another result is the erosion of independent thought in our time by what Woodcock attacks in an essay as “The Political Myth.” We shall see how deep and complex his writings about myth really are, but we should not be surprised that something as collective, irrefutable, and overpowering as myth would make Woodcock uneasy. It substitutes one kind of visceral appeal or another for persuasion, and tramples under truth, common sense, and liberty to satisfy a mass impulse.

…Wasn’t that tasty?

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Postscript:
I had no idea that David Suzuki was this year's winner of the George Woodcock lifetime achievement award! Check out this great picture of him with Margaret Atwood. 

read about it here.

: )