Turning All History to Flesh

A biography of Agha Shahid Ali portrays the poet without paradox

- ABHRAJYOTI CHAKRABORTY

IN HIS 1940 ESSAY “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell appeared to champion something surprisingly un-Orwellian. You would think that the future author of Animal Farm and 1984—one of the twentieth century’s most raucous moralisers, the writer who famously declared that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”—would dismiss a book like Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s lusty auto-fictional journal about a group of idle Americans in Paris. Instead, he was taken in by the novel’s “preoccupation with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief side of life.” Years ago, the two writers had met in Paris, when Orwell had stopped over on his way to join the civil war in Spain. Miller presented Orwell with a corduroy jacket, but dismissed his political convictions. To Miller, Orwell’s “ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc, etc, were all baloney.” For a writer to go to Spain in the 1930s and join a militia combating General Franco’s takeover of a democratic regime was, in his view, not the best use of their talents.