Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
DEFINITIVE JUDGEMENT ON GEORGE ORWELL (no contradictions accepted)
In the last six “Something Old” postings in this blog, I have covered all of George Orwell’s book-length works of fiction and non-fiction, namely the novels Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying [which I reviewed years before the others] and Coming Up for Air, giving a reason why I made only passing comments on his most famous fictions Animal Farm and 1984; and I covered his non-fiction Down and Out inParis and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.
I had read most of these works years ago, including many of his essays. But I read them all again for a particular reason. I had just reviewed on this blog Anna Funder’s book Wifedom which set out to tell us that Orwell was a dreadful man in his private life, a sex fiend, misogynistic and exploitative of his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Anna Funder had done much detailed research and she made it clear that she admired most of Orwell’s writing, but her book still seemed to me to be mainly an attempt at taking Orwell down. In the end, I thought that, while she said many truthful things, her arguments were flawed for two reasons: (a.) because we should not judge books by the biography of the author; rather, we should judge a book by the words on the page; and (b.) my deeply-held belief that most genuinely creative people tend to be egotistical or self-obsessed anyway. Novelists mostly want quiet and no interruptions and [at least the males among them] often expect their wives or partners to do all the dull housework, cooking, child care etc. while they get on with their writing. Even if this was the attitude Orwell adopted, and even if it would now be abhorred, Orwell was acting as male writers of his era tended to do as a matter of course. He lived in his own times. I’m also wary of Funder’s idea that it took Eileen O’Shaughnessy to ignite Orwell’s writing – remember, Orwell was already an established, professional novelist who had had much published before Eileen came into his life. Orwell was hard-working and diligent in his output in the 1930s (four novels and three works of non-fiction). But later sickness – his worsening tuberculosis - and other commitments such as organising talks on the BBC meant that only two books - one novella, one full-length novel - were produced in the 1940s, although it was in the 1940s that he produced many of his best influential pamphlets and essays.
In one sense, Orwell has been victimised by some of his greatest fans. Orwell called out totalitarianism and especially Communism in Animal Farm and 1984. These became his most-read works. In the Cold War they were used as ideological weapons against the Soviet Union, with American interests (including the CIA) putting money into making film versions of the two books (one live-action starring Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith, and one a feature-length cartoon – both made in England). Just as terms such as “Kafkaesque” or “Shavian” were often used to characterise an author’s whole output, so people began to use the term “Orwellian” to suggest nightmare-ish oppressive regimes, typified by Communism, as if this was the only key Orwell ever played. All this ignored Orwell’s other interests and, of course, many of his admirers, especially in America, ignored the fact that Orwell remained a Socialist to the end of his days. It was Communism he was attacking, not Socialism.
As I read it, there are many contradictions in Orwell and his work. His experience in Burma did make him fervently anti-colonialist, seeing the building of empires as an exploitative racket promoted by people who worked to impoverish indigenous peoples by taking valuable minerals, oil, rubber, wood - indeed anything monetarily valuable – and all this under the hypocritical pretence of bringing “civilisation”. Yet many of his attitudes were, inevitably, very English. He always writes as if other countries will flourish if only they adopt English mores, and spends much time lauding English yeomen, English traditions, a good cup of tea or pint of beer and a good smoke. Very blokey. When he came to write two influential pamphlets during the Second World War - The Lion and the Unicorn and The English People – he promoted a welfare state and a levelling of the classes as much as possible. Very commendable, but still taking the English way as the template for the world. Yet before I get too snooty about this, it is interesting that Britain’s former colonies (India and Pakistan and many African states, not to mention Pacific nations), once given independence still embraced the British parliamentary system as their own.
Apart from his inevitably English outlook, it has to be noted that Orwell cradled many prejudices. Despite his respect for the Spaniards and Catalans he met in the Spanish Civil War, he was always ready to belittle or ridicule Americans, Catholics and more-or-less the French. You might remember, too, his rant in The Road to Wigan Pier where he damns “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-manic, Quaker, ‘Nature cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England” as if all these categories could be equated. And he often sneered at “pansy poets”, meaning homosexuals. In this he was targeting the likes of W. H. Auden whom he once described as “a sort of gutless Kipling”. It is good to know, however, that he later got on well with Auden.
It has often been noted that Orwell, in his works, was always very alert to, and disgusted by, dirt, slovenliness, slime and general filth. When he mixed with the working classes he was often appalled by the low standards of hygiene they had to live with. This was in the context of his calling for better housing. There is the notorious passage (The Road to Wigan Pier again) in which he is disgusted to have touched something slimy (actually a wad of tobacco spat out by a miner) in the darkness of a coal mine. This has been ridiculed by those who say it really shows how bourgeois, fastidious and unused to proletarian ways Orwell was. I reply, of course, that you too would probably have flinched if your hand touched something slimy in the dark – including you, comrade. Nevertheless, one often gets the impression that while Orwell sincerely wanted to ally himself with the working-class, and often admired working-class strength and domestic behaviour, his middle-class feelings were still built on such concepts as decency, cleanliness, duty, order and hygiene. In effect, while he damned the wealthy, the plutocrats, the cranks and the conservatives, there was kind of dichotomy in his sympathies – an internal struggle in which his middle-class habits were in tension with his working-class sympathies.
Much more could be said of Orwell’s flawed attitudes, but what of the literary qualities of his work? Orwell was very aware of how language can easily be misused. His essay Politics and the English Language is a classic on the subject of language, noting (a.) how gobbledegook can be used to mislead people for propaganda purposes; and (b.) how simplicity in language is a virtue, but over-simplifying can lead to diminished quality in language. Such over-simplification leads to the abomination of “Newspeak” in 1984. Likewise another essay The Prevention of Literature criticised not only outright censorship, but also the way influential groups can close down writers who are not favoured or who express unpopular ideas. (A distant foreshadowing of “woke” and “cancel culture” perhaps?)
All of Orwell’s novels are in some ways polemical (and his non-fiction is certainly polemical.). Burmese Days condemns colonialism. A Clergyman’s Daughter has a go at many things - a fading Anglican church, the nastiness of cheap private schools, exploitation of workers in the hop fields and poverty in London. Keep the Aspidistra Flying targets both pretentious literary people and the advertising industry. Coming Up For Air laments both the decay of English countryside and the growing militarism that is preceding a coming war. And of course you already know how polemic Animal Farm and 1984 are. Orwell always has a “message” clearly spelt out. I also find it interesting that every one of his novels ends with defeat for the main character. John Florey commits suicide in Burmese Days. Dorothy Hare, after all her wild journeys, goes back to doing good works in her father’s parish in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Gordon Comstock gives up the arty-literary life he took to, and returns to the advertising agency he had escaped in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. George Bowling is completely disillusioned by his journey to his childhood town and returns to his nagging wife in Coming Up For Air. And you all know that the animals in Animal Farm are stuck with their horrible regime, while at the end of 1984, Winston Smith truly loves Big Brother.
I am bemused by the way Orwell leaves his protagonists in defeat. Does this mean that he was basically a pessimist? Or was he simply always facing the reality that most people have to get on with their lives, happy endings are rare, and there is not one great revolution coming along fix things? I have noticed that, while Hollywood cranks out happy endings in frivolous movies, it is especially in totalitarian countries that earnest films have happy endings, usually concluding with the state and its ideology neatly fixing things. (Over the years, I have been able to see some Stalinist Russian films that were made to this formula.) While Orwell wanted to improve the world, he was not a Utopian and was fully aware that making things better was going to be a long, hard struggle.
A difficulty in all Orwell’s novels is that, from Burmese Days to 1984, his narrative always hinges on just one main person. His novels are never told in the first-person but they might as well be. In this respect, Orwell’s novels are very like most of the novels of H. G. Wells [look him up in the index at right ]. It is well-known that Orwell liked books written in the Edwardian era (it is an Edwardian society George Bowling is futilely seeking in Coming Up For Air ) and he admired much of Wells’ earlier work. What it means, though, is we are getting one [usually male] character’s perspective. There is a real single-mindedness in Orwell’s work with an inability to step inside the minds of characters other than the protagonist. Hence a degree of flatness.
It is easier to categorise Orwell’s non-fiction. In descriptions of places and people he is often a master, but two of his non-fictions are very poorly organised. Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are both made of two incompatible halves. Down and Out in Paris and London appears to have been patched together to pad out a book that was regarded by his publisher as too short. The Road to Wigan Pier yields some of the best reportage Orwell ever wrote, but the second half is a rambling, often vague essay about socialism and types of people. It’s a mess and his publisher hated it. Only Homage to Catalonia stands up well as a unified and perfectly purposeful narrative. I regret that Orwell did not have the opportunity to write more in the same vein.
How do I sum up Orwell? He is certainly very readable, but his work does not amount to a great classic. It is very, very interesting to read about the times and places he depicts. He enlightens us on the era in which he lived. I do not believe he was a prophet as some of his most fervent admirers suggest; but he was absolutely right to call out a totalitarian idea which gullible people in the democracies had embraced. In the end, his work is most interesting not as literature but as history. Which, for all his flat characters, means he is still important.
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Here’s an odd little appendage related to Orwell which I’d like to bring to your attention. Sitting on my shelves, near books by or about Orwell, is a short little novel by David Caute called Dr. Orwell & Mr. Blair. It was first published in 1994. Born in 1936 and now an old man, David Caute, as well as being an academic, is a prolific novelist and writer of non-fiction. His political beliefs tend to lean to the Left (for two years he was literary editor for the New Statesman) but I was once told angrily by an ideologue that Caute was a traitor to the Left. I take this to mean that Caute does not belong to the Extreme Left. Some years back I read Caute’s non-fiction book The Fellow Travellers, which dealt with the many people in the West who never formally became Communists but who acted as promoters of Communism in various subtle and unsubtle ways. A very good book which I might enlighten you about sometime.
But to get back to Orwell. Dr Orwell & Mr. Blair is a kind of fantasia related to Orwell, and the author closes the book with the disclaimer that “The events described in Dr Orwell & Mr. Blair are entirely fictitious. None of it ever happened.”
Here’s how the plot runs. Things are going badly for Manor Farm. It increasingly looks derelict. Speculators are closing in, hoping to make a bargain by buying and then sprucing up the farm. Mr. Jones the farmer has had a blazing row with his wife after she’s suspected of him canoodling with a Land Girl (it’s wartime). Farmer and wife leave the farm and go their different ways. But left behind is their bewildered young son Alex Jones, who tries, in a primitive way, to keep the farm going.
Enters a guy called Eric but who sometimes calls himself George. Eric (or George), obviously a sick man with all his coughing, befriends young Alex and tells him a lot of stories, as well as making some suggestions about how a farm could be run. Eric (or George) is very much an admirer of the English farmer or yeoman, but Eric (or George) can also tell quite brutal stories about the life he has lived. He also admires some of the livestock on the farm such as the horse Boxer and the pigs Napoleon and Squealer and one which he eventually calls Snowball and…
Okay, okay. I’ll stop being cute and say the obvious. This is a fictitious account of how George Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm. It has a subplot of “Fred” (the publisher Frederic Warburg) trying, but failing, to catch up with Orwell and get him to sign a commission to produce a new book. Of course this short novel is crammed with quotations from Orwell’s published works and maybe there will be a sort of snobbery among some readers about identifying which quotation comes from which book by Orwell. Young Alex grows up to be a mature teenager (going first through a bratty delinquent stage) and after years have gone by he is able to visit the novelist when he is dying. Orwell bequeaths Alex a sort of sequel to Animal Farm which leaves the animals in a very different position from the one they were left in, in the original Animal Farm.
I’m not quite sure what David Caute was trying to say in this short novel (not short enough to be a novella) and in the end I can only see it as a piece of whimsy. As for the title Dr Orwell & Mr. Blair , I wildly suggest the Eric and George represent two different sides of Orwell – the patient man who mentors the farm boy and the combative polemicist who was often involved in quarrels. That’s the best I can do.
