Remembering George Orwell

George Orwell was born in June, 1903. No, he wasn’t. George Orwell was born in January, 1933. Actually, both are true. What; is there something Orwellian here; are we to entertain contradictory statements without being aware of the contradiction? Are we in the foothills of double-think? 

OK, then, let me clarify: Eric Arthur Blair, who was to become George Orwell, was indeed born in June, 1903. Although he had previously published some minor articles with the by-line E. A. Blair, the pen name by which he is best known comes with the publication in January, 1933 of Down and Out in Paris and London, his George Gissing-like odyssey into the nether world.

So this year is an anniversary in two senses – the one hundred and tenth of his birth and the eightieth of his first reasonably successful literary endeavour, the kind of perceptive, unadorned and matter-of-fact sociological analysis that he was to make a unique feature of his writing.

Orwell - like Charles Dickens a social analyst as well as a novelist - is one of my favourite writers. Like him, my own ambition is to make political writing into an art, an aim he set out in Why I Write, one of his most brilliant essays. Like him, I discovered the sheer joy of words when I was in my mid-teens. I first readAnimal Farm, his exposé of the fraudulent character of Soviet Communism, when I was fourteen. I have been reading his work on and off ever since, his novels, his reportage, his criticism, his occasional pieces and his journalism. 

This anniversary year I’ve been re-tracing my steps, overwhelmed by the sheer brilliance and insight in the likes ofCharles Dickens, a critical essay of outstanding ability. As with so much of his work there is a slight element of biography. I give you, from the conclusion, how Orwell saw Dickens and how I see Orwell:

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

I’ve been looking for this face also in biography. I looked for it in George Orwell by Gordon Bowker. This is not the first account of Orwell’s life that I’ve tackled. I read Bernard Crick’s study while I was still at school, though I remember little of it now. What can I say about Bowker? He has given us an honest and decent account of honesty and decency, the major themes, if you like, of Orwell’s literary career. What I do remember about Crick is that his book was primarily political in purpose. Bowker, I suppose, is more classic biography, a warts and all portrait. It’s a good workman-like effort, though I have to say I could have done without the occasional ‘he would have thought’, the kind of tiresome and speculative formula used to fill gaps in the narrative. This sort of thing simply will not do! 

I think I probably know as much about Orwell about as anyone, which is to say I’m not sure how much I really know. He certainly left traces, including Such, Such Were the Joys, his posthumous exposé of life at Saint Cyprian’s, his prep school, where he says that he does not want to make it sound like Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall and then makes it sound remarkably like, well, Dotheboys Hall! At other times he can be quite guarded, saying very little about his five years as an imperial policeman in Burma, his version, I think of Gorky’s ‘university.’ It left him with an abiding hatred of imperialism and left us with two superlative essays – A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, but not much more besides. It also gave us Burmese Days, his first novel and, in my estimation, his best. 

That’s the other thing about Orwell – he was an artist first and foremost, not beyond a certain amount of embellishment and poetic licence. Did he really shoot an elephant? Yes, it seems he did, but perhaps not in the way he suggested. I imagine the political symbolism was just a brilliant afterthought. 

As I say, Bowker gives us a decent warts and all portrait, not avoiding some of the less savoury aspects of the writer’s character, including his apparent homophobia, his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. Sex for Orwell seems to have been something of an imperial experience, picked up clearly during his formative years in Burma, quick possession and rapid fulfillment being the only aims! Ah, but he was man of his times, for all of his progressive attitudes, replete with the residual prejudices of his time and his class, things which have become rather amusing with the passage of time. His fulminations against fruit juice (fruit juice!) and nudism in The Road to Wigan Pier are a joy to behold. Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, was in the habit of pulling his leg over some of his more outrageous statements, which he took in good humour. 

When I think of Orwell I also think of Jonathan Swift, who just so happens to have been one of his favourite authors. Orwell was the Swift of the Age of Ideology, exposing in the most biting satire the lies and deceptions that had become part of contemporary political discourse. If Swift was a frustrated Tory, Orwell was a frustrated Socialist, more critical of his own side than the enemy. It was in Stalinism that he saw the greatest evil, particularly after his experiences in Spain, recorded so memorably in Homage to Catalonia Here, with language abused for political ends, with the truth turned inside out, with today’s orthodoxy becoming tomorrow’s heterodoxy, the foundations were laid for the Nineteen Eighty Four, the ultimate nightmare of the age.

I believe that Orwell is best approached through his work. But if you are coming to him for the first time, or if you are looking for a thread through the labyrinth, then George Orwell is a useful companion. It’s well-situated, well-structured and well-written without a superabundance of detail. It’s a little lacking, perhaps, in critical analysis, but I do not believe that to be a great fault. 

For so many years success and recognition had eluded Orwell, often reduced to the same tenuous straights as Edwin Reardon in George Gissing’s New Grub Street. It came eventually, particularly after the publication of Animal Farm, but by now the author was approaching a premature death, carried away eventually by the lung aliment that had troubled him for most of his life. 

Just before Orwell’s death at the tragically early age of forty-six in January, 1950 Desmond MacCarthy, a distinguished editor and literary critic, wrote saying that he considered him “among the few memorable writers of your generation”, one who had left “an indelible mark on English literature.” It serves, I think, as an abiding epitaph. Bowker has done good service in reminding us just how memorable he was. 

No Statue for Orwell at the Ministry of Truth

Minitrue

The BBC has declined to have a statue to George Orwell, who once worked for them, erected outside its new headquarters at Oxford Circus.  Why?  Because he is far too ‘left wing’, at least that’s what Mark Thompson, the outgoing Director General, told Lady Joan Bakewell, herself a former beacon of the Beeb.   

Methinks this man doth protest too much.   It’s patently obvious that he knows absolutely nothing about Orwell, nothing about his writing or the timbre of his politics.  Of course there may be something else here, some hidden motive, but let me hold off on that for just a bit. 

Orwell is one of my favourite writers, something I’ve said here time and time again.  He is one of the great prose craftsmen, a defender of proper English usage.  More than that, he was an enemy of all forms of cant and dissimulation.  He was a ruthlessly honest observer, a critic of the right, yes, but an even greater critic of the left, of the hypocrisy and the cowardice of so many of the benighted intellectuals why slavishly followed a party line.  In the end what was important him was right and wrong, not right and left.

I can’t think of a single reason why conservatives would object to this statue, evidence by the fact that Daniel Hannan and Ed West in the Telegraph and Nigel Jones in the Daily Mail have, in the wake of this nonsense, written of their admiration for Orwell. 

I can think of lots of reasons why people like Thompson would object, though, why the socialist chattering classes in general would object.  Orwell's greatest work is an attack on the betrayal of thought; his greatest criticism directed at what we would now call political correctness, the very heart of BBC speak.  He is at his most brilliant, though, in his critique of faddish middle-class socialism, the very heart of the BBC social and intellectual milieu. 

Just think of his depiction of that awful utopia of nudism and right, sorry, left thinking in Lower Binfield in Coming up for Air, his last pre-war novel.  Just think of Homage to Catalonia, his greatest work of reportage, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, critiques of a particular form of betrayal and socialist totalitarianism.  He was among the first to discover the shabby lie behind communism in general and Stalinism in particular, a lie which seduced so many of his fellow writers on the left.    

And then there is the BBC, which he worked for during the Second World War, broadcasting morally uplifting propaganda to India.  It was all a fraud, as he himself recognised.  After he left he put his experience with the Corporation to good value, caricaturing it as the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Room 101, the ultimate torture chamber of the thought police, is said to have been based on a conference room at Broadcasting House where he attended meetings.  Yes, I can imagine: the worst place in the world! 

The brilliance of Orwell, the reason I love his work so much, is that he represents a uniquely English intellect, a kind of native genius that, while it may have embraced abstract and alien theories, it was never enthralled to them. Orwell was a journalist and an empiricist before all else. For him facts were always going to undermine bogus preconceptions and second-hand truths, all that dusty theoretical baggage lifted from the attic of the mind.  Small wonder that Thompson and the purveyors of Ingsoc at the BBC don’t want to see his statue on their premises. 

Orwell was at his most brilliant in analysing English eccentricities, a man who could write with utter conviction no matter the subject, whether it was patriotism or naughty seaside postcards, toads, stodgy puddings or the right way to make a cup of tea. He wrote as he pleased, and as he pleased has pleased me endlessly. 

He has been a huge influence on the way I write, if that does not sound too pompous! I love his prose, his simple, unfussy English style. I have no doubt that essays like Why I Write and Politics and the English Language will remain classics of their type. He said of himself that he wanted to make political writing into an art, an objective fully attained.  I don’t have to imagine what he would have made of the lamentable journalistic standards of the present-day BBC; I simply know. 

A trenchant critic of Stalinism and totalitarianism, at the height of the Cold War he had no hesitation in drawing up a list at the request of the security services of fifty writers whom he regarded as communists or fellow travellers, doubtless another black mark against him on the left. 

As a writer, an artist, a journalist, a novelist and an essayist he is among the most brilliant we have ever had.  His satire is as biting as that of Jonathan Swift, another great Tory radical.  What?  Tory Radical?  Well, he may not thank me for it but I think that was the general direction he was travelling in, a rightward journey that would have continued still further but for his tragically early death from TB at the age of forty-six.  He deserves his statue alright, he deserves to be remembered, but not at the BBC, not at the shabby Ministry of Truth. 

And so, what is Thompson’s hidden motive, something I alluded to above?  That’s simple.  Orwell’s supposed politics is just an excuse.  The space is reserved for somebody more in keeping with the Corporation’s political ethos.  I agree with Ed West here: Antonio Gramsci is as good a candidate as any.  

Duck Speak

I never tire of saying just how much I love the writing of George Orwell, particularly his essays, the true heart of his genius. His concerns are my concerns, especially when it comes to the question of good English usage, though I can only muster a fraction of his insight and literary brilliance.

I share the same passion for language, a belief that the corruption of language comes from a corruption of thought. He was writing at a time when the greatest threat to accurate and meaningful expression came from the malign ideologies that dominated the middle part of the last century. In Politics and the English Language, an essay published in 1946, he makes the following observation;

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Yes, that’s it exactly; language becomes ugly and inaccurate because thought is ugly and inaccurate, the one reinforcing the other in an ever tighter circles. The more extreme examples, the sort of thing favoured by Stalinist publicists, the sort of thing that Orwell proceeds to analyse, are gone. Or are they? Well, the stupid, like the poor, are always with us, so I think I might be able to amuse you with something I came across recently.

I should say that I was the target though I think it best if I avoid mentioning the context and the circumstances; it wasn’t here, that much I should make clear. I’ll just say it was in response to my efforts to add a little balance to the ongoing hysteria over Rupert Murdoch and News International. In reaction a barrage of meaningless, and contradictory, epithets were thrown in my general direction, to which I responded in general terms, drawing on the expressions themselves;

Meanwhile I shall continue to buy the Times in my corporate, right-wing, fascist, libertarian, anti-government, laissez-faire liar, anarcho-totalitarian manner! I sometimes think that George Orwell was never born or that stupidity really is the wave of the future, like a clown throwing verbal tomatoes at a face forever.

It was only after I published that comment that the players in Hamlet came to mind. Oh, how I regret not adding that I was the best in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.

Poem unlimited and speech unparalleled! That’s the thing about left-liberals – they are more ridiculous than dangerous. Yes, I do despise them but I laugh at their sheer intellectual incapacity far more than I frown at their ideas. They have no ideas, not an original thought, just a cycle of clichés, round and round for ever, as in a washing machine. They do not think; they are incapable of thought. The words come, yes, but from the vocal cords, not from the brain. They are the beetle people of Nineteen Eighty-Four, whose language is not New Speak; it’s Duck Speak. :-)

Orwell's Air

George Orwell has been a huge influence on the way I write, if that does not sound too pompous! I love his prose, his simple, unfussy English style. I have no doubt at all that he is one of the great craftsmen of our language, no doubt that essays like Why I Write and Politics and the English Language will remain classics of their type. He said of himself that he wanted to make political writing into an art, an objective fully attained.

Though I admire some of his novels it really is in his shorter work, in his essays that he is at his most brilliant. In addition to those I have already mentioned there is Such, Such Were the Joys, an account of his days in prep school, Inside the Whale, a critique of the work of Henry Miller, A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, either based on his experiences as a police officer in Burma or brilliant fabrications, Charles Dickens, the best examination of the author that I have ever read, Rudyard Kipling, The Art of Donald McGill, an examination of the message behind naughty seaside postcards, The Decline of the English Murder and much more besides.

My favourite is Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool, in which he takes up arms against none other than Leo Tolstoy, amongst whose works there is a rather silly demolition of Shakespeare. Orwell, in rebuke, compares Tolstoy himself to the character of King Lear with telling effect;

But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself?
There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because
the most impressive event in Tolstoy's life, as in Lear's, was a huge and
gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate,
his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt--a sincere attempt,
though it was not successful--to escape from his privileged position and
live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact
that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the
results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human
being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will
of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures
and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy
renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him
happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is
that he was NOT happy. On the contrary he was driven almost to the edge
of madness by the behaviour of the people about him, who persecuted him
precisely BECAUSE of his renunciation. Like Lear, Tolstoy was not humble
and not a good judge of character. He was inclined at moments to revert
to the attitudes of an aristocrat, in spite of his peasant's blouse, and
he even had two children whom he had believed in and who ultimately
turned against him--though, of course, in a less sensational manner than
Regan and Goneril. His exaggerated revulsion from sexuality was also
distinctly similar to Lear's. Tolstoy's remark that marriage is "slavery,
satiety, repulsion" and means putting up with the proximity of "ugliness,
dirtiness, smell, sores", is matched by Lear's well-known outburst:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends;
There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption, etc., etc.

And though Tolstoy could not foresee it when he wrote his essay on
Shakespeare, even the ending of his life--the sudden unplanned flight
across country, accompanied only by a faithful daughter, the death in a
cottage in a strange village--seems to have in it a sort of phantom
reminiscence of LEAR.

These are all to be found in the four volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, the author’s second wife. This also contains some of the book reviews that he wrote for Tribune, The New Statesman and other publications of the day.

The letters are interesting, going part of the way towards explaining Orwell’s background, motives and outlook. They are, however, only a small selection. I now have in my hand, as yet unread, the recently published Orwell: A Life in Letters edited by Peter Davison, which I hope will go part of the way towards the autobiography that he never wrote.

I would love to go and stay in Barnhill, the cottage on the Scottish isle of Jura where Orwell stayed intermittently in the last stages of his life, the place where he completed Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is possible to rent it but even now it’s almost impossibly remote, four miles from the nearest public road and still without mains electricity! Still if Orwell could do it I can do it. To breath the air the he breathed is encouragement enough.

Homage to Truth

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of his experiences as a volunteer on the republican side during the Spanish Civil War. But it's not just another memoir. No, it's far more. For it marks a decisive stage in his progress as a writer and a thinker. Indeed, if one wanted to understand the roots behind the major themes in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four this book is essential reading.

Orwell, who had developed a general but rather unfocused sympathy for socialism, came to Spain to fight against 'fascism' without any particular idea of what he was fighting for. Like the majority of the foreign volunteers he was likely to have ended up serving with the International Brigades, controlled by the communists and ultimately directed by the Comintern in Moscow. But he did not. Quite by chance he enrolled in the militia of the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista or POUM, a local Marxist and anti-Stalinist movement set up by one Andrés Nin, a former associate of Leon Trotsky. Yes, it was by chance, but politically and intellectually it was a decisive step in turning Eric Blair, the author's real name, into the mature George Orwell.

The Spanish Civil War was a struggle between the left and the right, between progress and reaction, between enlightenment and oppression. Well, no, it was far more complex than that. In 1937 on the republican side the struggle had become a war within a war, as Stalin decided to suppress all of the non-communist factions on the side of the government. This was the time of the Great Purge, of the Moscow Show Trails and the general attack on all 'Trotsky Fascists'. This was a time when every weapon was used in a campaign of disinformation, one based on the grossest abuse of language by the communist and socialist left, one based on the systematic rewriting of history. After all, he who controls the past controls the future.

Orwell, who had been serving on the Catalan front, returned to Barcelona in May of 1937. There he discovered that the free and comradely atmosphere that he had encountered when he first came to Spain had changed utterly. He was to be caught up in some extraordinary events now known as the Barcelona May Days, in which one left-wing faction fought against another left-wing faction. In the communist controlled press the POUM was denounced as 'fascist plotters'. With agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police at work, Nin was arrested along with many others, and subsequently murdered in custody. Orwell himself had to leave Spain in fear of his life.

Homage to Catalonia is a straightforward account of his experiences at the front and in Barcelona, packaged in some general political musings. The language, as one would expect from one of the great modern masters of English prose, is limpid. It's an honest book, too honest for some; Victor Gollancz, the left-wing publishing house for whom he had previously written, refused to accept his account of his Spanish experience even before a single word had been written. Why? Because he had served with the POUM, that's why. It should be remembered that Gollancz was not even controlled by the Communist Party. This attitude, this unwillingness to say anything critical of the official Soviet line, not stopping short of the Moscow Trials, was to be found right across much of the left-leaning and liberal opinion of the day. Of the British press Orwell was to write:

In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship that is implied by an ordinary lie...I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines."

Orwell, as I have said, went to Spain with his politics largely unfocused. He came back a committed anti-Stalinist. He came back believing that there was a standard of objective truth that had to be defended, a standard of truth that should corrupted by the demands of propaganda or the exigencies of dictatorship. He came back believing that two plus two equals four; and if that is granted all else follows.

George Orwell on the Road to Damascus

A day or two before the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact George Orwell had a dream. I imagine lots of other people had the same dream at the same time, one clearly born of acute anxiety. Of his particular dream Orwell later wrote:

What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage.

It was his intention, if he could, to fight; he no longer wished to sabotage. Sabotage? A rather odd choice of word, don't you think? Sabotage what, exactly? But you see that is exactly what he had planned to do, to sabotage a 'capitalist' war in a rather school-boyish cloak-and-dagger fashion. I'll come on to this in a bit but I should begin with a word or two about Orwell's political development in the period leading up to the Second World War.

Having served in Spain on the side of the Republic he came away with the abiding and deepening conviction that Communism was not just a lie but a murderous lie, one that would pervert even the simplest of truths-even language itself-to achieve its ends. Even so he still held to a form of socialism which placed no faith at all in 'bourgeois' democracy, which in his view was just another lie, one that would always lead to fascism, even in England. For him democracy and fascism were as 'Tweedledee and Tweedledum', a view he had expressed in 1937, the same year that he said that the 'moneyed classes' might very well trick England into a new 'imperialist war.'

So, while even some committed pacifists, members of the Peace Pledge Union, were opening to an understanding that the only way to resist Hitler was by violence, Orwell was opposed to any notion of a broad political front in favour of war; not exactly pacifism, just intense hostility to a particular kind of war. Also, it has to be said, he was deeply hostile to any notion of a 'popular front', another legacy of his Spanish experience.

I imagine those who have read this far are slightly frustrated by my failure to mention just exactly what form his proposed anti-war sabotage would take. Well, here we go! The details of what follows are all in volume one of The Collected Essays, Papers and Journalism.

There you will find open sentiments of his continuing opposition to war throughout 1939. In Not Counting Niggers, an essay published in the Adelphi in July, he calls for the creation of a mass party to oppose war, a sort of anti-Popular Front. It was this campaign of opposition by print that he believed would be threatened as war came closer. There are several references in his private correspondence on the need to prepare for an 'underground campaign', to prepare a secret printing press and the like, with financial support from sympathisers. The following is fairly typical of his mood and outlook;

I believe it is vitally necessary for those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to start organising for illegal anti-war activities. It is perfectly obvious that any open and legal agitation will be impossible...if we don't make preparations we may find ourselves silenced or absolutely helpless when either war or the pre-war fascizing process begins. (4 January)

We are therefore in either for war in the next two years, or for a prolonged war-preparation, or possibly only for sham war preparation designed to cover up other objects, but in any of these cases for a fascizing process leading to an authoritarian regime i.e. some kind of austro-fascism. (5 March)

The switch came suddenly. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but it is virtually certain that 'he saw the light' within days, if not hours, of the conclusion of the Hitler Stalin Pact.

In All of Orwell Clive James, another brilliant essayist, details the continuing political development of Orwell during the war itself, his admission, amongst other things, that he was wrong in saying that Hitler would only be defeated after a revolution in England. It went further. For, as James says, Orwell wrote less and less of 'bourgeois democracy', coming to suspect that the democratic part might very well depend on the bourgeois part.

The brilliance of Orwell, the reason I love his work so much, is that he represents a uniquely British intellect, a kind of native genius that, while it may have embraced abstract and alien theories, it was never enthralled to them. Orwell was a journalist and an empiricist before all else. For him facts were always going to undermine bogus preconceptions and second-hand truths, all that dusty theoretical baggage lifted from the attic of the mind.

Orwell and the Development of Despair

When I was in sixth form at school I wrote an essay for my Eng Lit class, to which I gave the rather grand title The Development of Despair in the Work of George Orwell. Yes, there is indeed a consistent theme in Orwell’s writing, which it is possible to pick up as early as Burmese Days, his first novel, through his essays and reportage, all the way to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The theme is one of cultural and political pessimism, of the little man drowning, of a world corrupted by the abuse and misuse of language, a world set on the destruction of individuality and all sense of the self.

Orwell manages to combine a belief in socialism-which barely lightens his deep sense of disquiet-with a kind of nostalgia for a world lost in the Great War;

From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breath forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates-an atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on the green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song.

In many ways his perspective is really that of an old-fashioned 'muscular Christian', standing on the island of simple decency, threatened by the rising waters of ideological intolerance of all kinds.

In one of his most brilliant essays, that on Charles Dickens, published in 1939, he concludes by describing the face of the author which emerges from his writings;

It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

His experience of the 'smelly little orthodoxies' is fully described in Homage to Catalonia, his account of his own experiences during the Spanish Civil War. It was from this point that he began to perceive the corruption of language-and the deliberate rewriting of history-as a serious problem for the modern age. In his novels the type depicted most consistently is the 'little man', always from the same lower-middle class background (Orwell's own), who is being submerged by an impersonal modern world.

As novels most of them are actually not of a particularly high order, especially Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with the tiresome and self-pitying Gordon Comstock, a character later to emerge as George Bowling and, later still, as Winston Smith, his final hero. But the novel, it seems to me, that reveals most about Eric Blair the man, as opposed to George Orwell the author, is Coming Up For Air, by far his best since Burmese Days, and the one that anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is in a sense Orwell's David Copperfield, combining his political ideas, his personal experiences, his sense of the 'powerlessness' of the individual, his nostalgia and his fears about the future;

I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it is this. It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. I know it's all going to happen. I know it-at any rate I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen

Oh, my, how I knew it all. :-))

Such, Such Were the Joys

Anyone reading Orwell's early work will be aware of his hostility to all things Scottish, which takes various forms, most particularly his deliberate use of the word 'Scotch' instead of 'Scots', because he was fully aware of how much annoyance this caused. I used to believe that this dislike dated from his time in the Burmese Police, where he encountered a particular kind of Scotsman, once common in the Imperial service. It was only after reading Such, Such Were the Joys, his essay on St. Cyprian's, his prep school, that I became aware of the true cause.

Cicely Ellen Philadelphia Vaughan Wilkes nee Comyn, the co owner of the school, better known to Orwell, or Eric Blair, I should say, as Flip deliberately encouraged a 'cult of Scottishness', in part derived from her pride in an assumed Scottish ancestry.

The Comyns were one of the great nobel houses of Medieval Scotland, and one-time rivals to King Robert Bruce. But more than that the cult, brought out all of Flip's latent snobbery, and left poor Eric with a deep sense of resentment:

The School was pervaded by a curious cult of Scotland, which brought out a fundamental contradiction in our standard of values. Flip claimed Scottish ancestry, and she favoured the Scottish boys , encouraging them to wear kilts in their ancestral tartan instead of school uniform, and even christened her youngest child by a Gaelic name...But underlying this was something quite different. The real reason for the cult of Scotland was that only very rich people could spend their summers there...Flip's face always beamed with innocent snobbishness when she spoke of Scotland. Occasionally she even attempted to trace a Scottish accent. Scotland was a private paradise which few initiates could talk about and make outsiders feel small.

If anyone is puzzled by this (Scots most of all!) I should make it clear that this 'Scotland' is not to be found in the backstreets of Glasgow, Edinburgh or Dundee, but on the grouse moors and by the salmon rivers, where the only Scots to be seen were beaters, game-keepers and ghillies! Such, indeed, were the joys

When I was sent away from home for the very first time I must confess I was a little bit tearful and fearful, but before this I used to soak up stories about girls' boarding schools and quickly learned to make the most of the opportunities offered by Wycombe Abbey, my old school, which I came to adore. But Eric, promising as he was as a scholar, was socially and personally slighted, embarrassed by his rather down-at-heel middle class origins. Because of the perceived insults he received at the hands of the Wilkes a 'Bolshie' attitude began to form, fully developed by the time he went to Eton, an attitude seems to me operating like a form of emotional armour, more than anything else.

I can only speculate here, but the English class system was much more rigid in his day, and I think he always felt himself to be an outsider; an outsider from his own middle-class milieu and an outsider from the working-class he adopted but never really seemed to like. The protagonists in his novels are always the same lower middle-class types, which is really no surprise. What is revealing is the way that some become such self-pitying egocentrics. Just think of the tiresome Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who digs his own social grave then blames everybody else when he lies in it! Please do not think I am hostile to Orwell; I'm not-I love his work, though some parts more than others, and the essays more than most of the fiction

Orwell and Spain-the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four

I wrote this piece on the suggestion of a user I met on another website. For me it’s also a kind of exegesis, based on the discoveries I’m making in reading Orwell’s journalism and essays, in every way more revealing than his novels. Before proceeding I should say that the most important book to read on the issues I’m about to explore is Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his experience in Spain, where he served with a Marxist militia until the summer of 1937, when he fled the Republic in fear of his life, not from the fascists but from the communists.

I’ve heard it said that Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s nightmare dystopia, represents an amalgam of totalitarian thought; a synthesis, if you like, of fascism and communism. It's not: this is a future based on Stalinism and Stalinism alone. Why should this be? Precisely because Orwell saw Stalinism in action in Spain; he saw the terror, the abuse of power, the murder of opponents, the adulation of a god-like leader, the torture of language and simple truths; he saw two plus two being made to make five.

It’s still believed-and I’ve noted this from comments I read elsewhere-that the Soviets supported the Spanish Republic with the intention of advancing a social revolution; they did not. When they came to Spain a revolution was already underway, guided by the native anarchist movement, always much stronger than the communists, and by local non-Soviet Marxist parties like the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista, known simply as the POUM, in whose militia Orwell served, though by accident rather than design. The Soviets came not to start a revolution; they came to stop one.

In 1933 Stalin got what was perhaps the greatest political shock of his life when Hitler came to power, destroying the KPD in the process, the strongest communist party outside Russia. It made nonsense of the Comintern’s ultra-left ‘Third Period’ strategy, which saw the principal enemy as democratic socialists, not fascists. It also considerably weakened the security of the Soviet state. So, in response, he moved towards a new strategy, that of the popular front, uniting all ‘democratic’ opinion, from liberals to communists, in an attempt to arrest the further advance of the right. Stalin was determined before all else to obtain the support of ‘bourgeois’ parties and ‘bourgeois’ governments. Spain saw this policy in action. It also suited his ends to turn on other groups on the Marxist left, groups like the POUM, who were accused of being ‘Trotsky Fascists’ on much the same basis as those accused in the Moscow show trials.

So, Orwell found himself caught in the currents of history. He found himself involved in a civil war within a civil war, as the communists in the International Brigades turned their guns on the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. He saw the NKVD in action, with people-socialists and anarchists-imprisoned without trail, including some of his friends. He saw black turned into white and back into white again. He saw history rewritten and language abused, with yesterday’s orthodoxy becoming today’s heresy.

Consider this passage from his essay "Inside the Whale":

…the USSR is no more scrupulous in its foreign policy than the rest of the Great Powers. Alliances, changes of front, etc. which only make sense as part of a game of power politics have to be explained and justified in terms of international Socialism. Evert time Stalin swaps partners, ‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape. This entails sudden and violent changes of ‘line’, purges, denunciations, systematic destruction of party literature, etc. etc. Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday.

This is it: this is the world of Big Brother, of the Ministry of Truth, of Newspeak. There is no Nazi component-beyond simple totalitarianism-because, you see, Hitler said what he thought and thought what he said. There were no intellectual perversions in National Socialism because there was no intellect. There was in communism. Without communism, the communism of Stalin, I would go so far as to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been inconceivable, inconceivable by Orwell anyway. That would only have left Yevgeny Zamyatin to point to a possible future based on a murderous present.

Orwell and Ingsoc

As part of my holiday reading I’ve been glancing over the essays and correspondence of George Orwell, one of the true artists of English prose. Two of his pieces in particular, Why I Write and Politics and the English Language, should be compulsory reading for all those in public life.

Anyway, my explorations caused me to think specifically of the author’s political commitments, his commitment to what he calls ‘democratic socialism.’ It seems to me that his choices are at variance with his deepest sympathies: he says he is a socialist, yes, but he does not seem to like socialists or socialism. I would go even further: he seems to despise the practitioners and distrust the promise.

For me Orwell is a natural Tory in the way I would like to perceive all Tories: clear-sighted, honest and direct; people who embrace and preserve what is good in the past while always looking for ways of improving the present. Orwell’s commitment to honesty and sincerity in politics are almost palpable in his writings. I feel sure that he would have loathed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, those purveyors of the modern forms of Newspeak. I feel sure that he would have hated the lies, the hypocrisy, the spin and the deceit that are such a part of whole New Labour phenomena.

Consider this. Orwell’s utopias are past and conservative; his dystopias are future and socialist. Take, for example, Coming Up for Air, his last pre-war novel. In this George Bowling, disillusioned with modern life, with his life, comfortable as it is, goes of in search of the past, his memories of a particular time and a given place: a piece of Edwardian England just before the First World War, the world of his childhood. But Lower Binfield, the place he returns to, has changed beyond recognition. The thing he came to look for in particular, a pond full of fish, has gone, replaced by a rubbish dump. It’s there to serve a new housing development, populated by progressive oddities: vegetarians, nudists and socialists! Bowling retreats, with echoes of Nineteen-Eighty Four in his head.

Orwell’s experience of socialism is one of constant and continuing disillusionment. So, why did he embrace it at all, and why did he adhere to it? First, I largely suspect for personal reasons, rather than reasons of deep conviction. If one reads Such, Such Were the Joys, his account of his time at Saint Cyprian’s, his prep school, it’s clear that Orwell, who came from a respectable but rather down-at-heel family, felt slighted by the prevailing snobbery of the place, the cult of money and connections. He became something of an ‘outsider’, if you like, amongst his own class, the better-off members of his class. He did well enough in crammers to get into Eton, but he did not shine at Eton, deepening his sense of alienation. Socialism became the political expression, if you like, of his mood of personal resentment.

So, to take the second dimension, why did he continue to embrace socialism when he saw what socialism was in practice? Simply because he was filled with a bogus sense of historical inevitability, the sense that the old had to give way to the new, and the new had to take the form which left him and others like him looking for a place; déclassé intellectuals who had nothing to fear but dropping their aitches! He held to socialism because he hoped to humanise socialism. If he had lived just a little longer I feel sure that he would have returned to his natural political home. But, whatever direction he may have travelled in, he deserves to be placed alongside Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift, alongside the best of our critics and satirists.

Orwell and Communism

I have always felt it to be wrong that Orwell has been classified as an anti-Stalinist, when a reading of his work gives plenty of indications that he was opposed to Communism in general. Even Animal Farm is only in a partial sense a parable against Stalinism, though this is the form in which it is generally understood. But careful reading will show that the ideal is corrupted well before Napoleon takes absolute power.

On the wider point, let the author speak for himself;

It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would have been preferable to Stalin. (New English Weekly, January, 1939)

The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is absolutely false, creates the impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to communism; but it is doubtful if there is much difference. (Notes on Nationalism, October 1945)

Now, as far as his membership of the Marxist POUM during the Spanish Civil War is concerned, this seems to have come about largely by accident;

I was associated with the Trotskyists in Spain. It was chance that I was serving in the POUM militia and not another, and I largely disagreed with the POUM 'line' and told the leaders so freely...(Partisan Review, Sept.-October, 1942)

Orwell's own politics are neatly summarised in two of his essays, The Lion and the Unicorn and The English People. He draws his inspiration from a long native radical tradition, a tradition deeply hostile to the abstractions of alien political theories;

The various other Marxist parties, all of them claiming to be the true and uncorrupted successors of Lenin, are in an even more hopeless position. The average Englishman is unable to grasp their doctrines and uninterested in their grievances. And in England the lack of a conspiratorial mentality which has developed in police-ridden European countries is a deep handicap. English people in large numbers will not accept any creed whose dominant notes are hated and illegality. The ruthless ideologies of the Continent-not merely Communism and Fascism, but Anarchism, Trotskyism, and even ultramontane Catholicism-are accepted in their pure form by only the intelligentsia, who constitute a sort of island bigotry amid the general vagueness. (The English People).

Burke and Orwell

This is the bicentenary of the death of Thomas Paine, a political writer I have no particular respect for, despite the modish enthusiasm, I thought I would add a piece on the two I admire most: Edmund Burke and George Orwell.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Reflections on the Revolution in France might be read as prophecies and warnings. Orwell's chief concern is with the globalisation of totalitarianism. Edmund Burke, writing in 1790, warned that the upheavals in France would only lead to further political destruction, terror and dictatorship.

Both men also expressed views that were not wholly welcome in their own political and intellectual milieus; in the case of Burke, the radical Whigs of Charles James Fox; and in the case of Orwell, the circle most associated with the left-wing demimonde. Their critiques were thus all the more trenchant because they were made from within the citadel, so to speak, not from the perspective of the establishment.

Orwell and Burks also shared a distrust of their fellow intellectuals. Orwell expressed his contempt of a certain kind of 'Bloomsbury highbrow' in The Lion and the Unicorn, his wartime essay on socialism and patriotism, just as Burke disliked Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'literary cabal', as he put it, of the French philosophes. On the fate of Marie Antoinette he wrote "But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded."

Both Burke and Orwell, two of the greatest political writers in the English language, were, in essence, defending human values threatened with destruction by waves of violence and intolerance. Both stand against the notion that cruel means justify abstract ends. I'm reminded, in particular, of Burke's warning in Letters to a Noble Lord to those aristocrats of his day who embraced radical chic-"...these philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump."

But it is in his riposte to Rousseau, the grandfather of Fascism and Communism, that he is at his greatest: "Society is indeed a contract...but becomes a partnership...between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." You will find an echo of this in Orwell’s defence of patriotism as "…the bridge between the future and the past."