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Letters

By Our Readers, Bruce Robbins & Jeremy Bernstein

This article appeared in the December 27, 2004 edition of The Nation.

December 9, 2004

Link to original article.

SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS...

Washington, DC

Bruce Robbins is entitled to his roomtemperature resentment of me ["Prisoner of Love," Dec.6], but he makes a false allegation when he says that I have "repeatedly claimed Orwell's mantle." To the contrary, and leaving aside the fact that I don't believe in "mantles" anyway, I have taken every opportunity to disown this aspiration. My denial doesn't involve me in much immodest effort: Orwell suffered from censorship and hardship all his writing life and took a bullet from a Francoist while narrowly escaping another one in the back from Stalin's agents in Catalonia. My own life has been somewhat easier, and better rewarded. Moreover, Orwell wrote much better than I do and was capable of producing serious fiction, which I am not.

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About Bruce Robbins

Bruce Robbins, a professor of English at Columbia University, is the author, among other books, of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU). more...

About Jeremy Bernstein

Jeremy Bernstein's most recent book is a biography, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (Ivan R. Dee). He is currently preparing a monograph on the physics of Einstein's miracle year, 1905. more...

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