Some thoughts on George Orwell

I’ve always enjoyed writing book reviews, especially of biographies, where it is an opportunity to crystallize the subject’s life and offer a personal take on it, as well as discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the particular biographer’s approach. I’ve got dozens of old reviews languishing on my computer, many from the days when, under the superb editorship of first Miriam Gross and then Michael Prodger, I was lead literary reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. Back in the 20th century, critics such as John Carey and Frank Kermode would periodically gather their old reviews into a fat volume of essays. Carey - so sad that he died recently - even recycled some of his into his lovely memoir, The Unexpected Professor. Now, though, what with the internet and the much diminished market for literary criticism - perhaps indeed for any kind of serious of non-fiction, such collections are no longer viable. So a couple of years ago, I thought I’d try rewriting some of my old reviews, making them more generally about the author in question rather than focusing on a particular biography or study. My plan was to turn them into a regular blog on my website. I got around to writing just four of them before becoming so absorbed in research for the ridiculously over-ambitious book that has been my main writing task for the last four years. And no one reads a blog on a website any more, either. But it seems that people do read a Substack, so before removing the blog from the website, I’m going to put those four pieces up here. The first of them is on the perennially relevant George Orwell.

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GEORGE ORWELL embodied the English qualities of independent thought, clarity of expression and intolerance of cant. As an observer of social deprivation and a rebel against Edwardian conformity, he was admired by the political left. At the same time, he wrote the definitive satire on Stalinism (Animal Farm) and one of the greatest of all novels about totalitarianism (Nineteen Eighty-Four) – which seems more prescient than ever in our age of surveillance, division and “fake news.” Remember the three slogans of the Ministry of Truth: WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Perhaps most importantly for our age of technobabble, spin and jargon, he spoke through both precept and example for the virtues of clear plain prose. He reinvigorated the venerable literary genre of the essay and as both broadcaster and magazine writer represented the craft of journalism at its best. The debasement of language for the sake of political manipulation (or obfuscation) was a constant Orwellian theme, perhaps most notably in his essential essay “Politics and the English Language.”

He was a passionate Europhile, who would have loathed Brexit, but also an eloquent eulogist of England – Conservative Prime Minister John Major’s vision of warm beer, cricket on the village green and a redoubtable maiden aunt bicycling to morning communion through the mist was borrowed from Orwell.

Eric Blair – his real name – was born on June 25, 1903. His father held the modest rank of Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, 5th grade, in the Indian Civil Service, but managed to send Eric to Eton as a scholarship boy. Scholars were looked down upon by the elite and often aristocratic fee-paying pupils, but young Eric got his revenge on one of them when, in an incident curiously reminiscent of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, together with his friend Steven Runciman (who became a distinguished Byzantine scholar), he cast a magic spell on the boy, who promptly broke his leg, then died of leukemia.

There was not enough money for university, so on leaving school Eric went to Burma and enrolled in the police force. His brief and unhappy career there gave him the material for his wonderfully perceptive essay “Shooting an Elephant” and his not especially successful first novel Burmese Days. The magazine essay – shrewdly observed, cleanly written, full of common sense – remained the literary form in which he excelled.

Back in England, he decided to become a writer, making his name with two works of reportage based on his travels among the under-class during the depressed Thirties, first Down and Out in Paris and London, then The Road to Wigan Pier. The latter was published by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, but with a publisher’s preface explaining that it did not really accord with the Club’s policy of “equipping people to fight against war and Fascism” and that readers should be wary of the distinctive version of socialism propounded by the author, who was a member of “the lower-upper-middle class”.

Orwell’s uneasy relationship with the orthodox political left was further complicated by his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He proved the impeccability of his anti-fascist credentials, but was shocked to witness a Soviet-backed communist purge of the Trotskyite Workers’ Party in Barcelona with which he had allied himself. His work as a war correspondent led to him being spied on by a Soviet agent fittingly called Crook.

The Soviet betrayal of the Catalan Workers’ Party was the key to Orwell’s subsequent political and literary development. It galvanized the writing of Homage to Catalonia - which many readers (including me) consider his best work - and it set him on the road to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the book (completed, of course, in 1948) that made his world-wide reputation and gave us such immortal ideas as Big Brother, Room 101, The Ministry of Truth, Newspeak and Airstrip One. Pulmonary tuberculosis took Orwell’s life early in 1950, less than a year after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, thus depriving him of both the pleasure of Pravda’s review (“a squalid and filthy book”) and the more dubious accolade of an endorsement from J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.

To my mind, Orwell is best understood as Rudyard Kipling’s rebellious son (think India, Englishness, beast-fable, male bonding, not very good at getting inside women): the experience of both empire and war gave them a truly global perspective (Kipling never recovered from the death of his son in the First World War, while Orwell was at his best in his anti-Nazi journalism in magazines and for the BBC during the Second). The two writers were both deeply English – Orwell was once a village shopkeeper, while Kipling found a home in Sussex where he could become a country gentleman, rooted in love of the land and respect for the traditions and knowledge of rural folk, even as his traditional belief-system smacked of ancient feudalism. At the same time, they both acknowledged that Englishness was built on the empire and yet that the traditional “island story” of the nation failed to address the barbarity of settler colonialism. As Kipling put it in his poem “The English Flag”: “I raped your richest roadstead—I plundered Singapore!” It was Kipling the globalist who in that same poem asked of parochial Little Englanders: “What should they know of England who only England know?”

Orwell, in a superb essay on Kipling, in which he condemned his great predecessor’s racism and jingoism while praising his humanity and literary art, complained that most British people did not know, or chose to ignore, how their prosperity depended on exploitation of what we now call the Global South (forgive him for his use of a term that is now a racial slur):

Because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which “enlightened” people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are “enlightened” all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our “enlightenment”, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep”. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

George Orwell is buried in the parish churchyard of an ancient southern English village called Sutton Courtenay. On one side of him is the grave of Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916. On the other is the plot of a family of local gypsies: an Edwardian liberal grandee on one side, travelers and hop-pickers on the other. There could be no more fitting place of rest.