Foreword "There is a Photograph"

[MalignD at aol.com]

In a message dated 4/27/03 11:58:26 AM, davidmmonroe at yahoo.com writes:


>   "There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in
> Islington, of Orwell with his adopted son, Richard
> Horatio Blair.  The little boy, who would have been
> around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded
> delight.  Orwell is holding him gently with both
> hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so--it is
> more complex than that, as if he has discovered
> something that might be worth evn more than anger--his
> head titletd a bit, his eyes with a careful look that
> might remind filmgoers of a Robert Duvall character
> with a backstory in which he has seen more than one
> would have preferred to.  Winston Smith 'believed that
> he had been born in 1944 or 1945 ...'  Richard Blair
> was born May 14, 1944.  It is not too difficult to
> guess that Orwell, in 1984, was imagining a future for
> his son's generation, a world he was not so much
> wishing upon them as warning against.  He was
> impatient with predictions of the inevitable, he
> remained confident in the ability of ordinary people
> to cahneg anything, if they would.  It is the boy's
> smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and
> radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that
> the world, at the end of the day, is good, and that
> human decency, like parental love, can always be taken
> for granted--a faith so honorable that we can imagine
> Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment
> anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep
> it from ever being betrayed." ("Foreword," xxv-xxvi)
> 
This sounds like Pauline Kael.
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