The Nation, December 11th, 2000
RIMBAUD. By Graham Robb. Norton. 551 pp. $35. ORWELL: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. By Jeffrey Meyers. Norton. 380 pp. $27.95.
They laughed when I sat down with these two writers--and never mind that both books arrived in the same box. The bad gay boy and the cold war saint! The apostle of derangement and the lexicographer of Newspeak! The red cape and the tweed jacket, the rotting knee and the lousy lung, the drunken boat and the memory hole! "I came to find my mind's disorder sacred," said the poet on a camel. "Good prose is like a window pane," said the novelist who shot elephants. ...
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