by Leys, Simon
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All the diaries of Orwell that are extant (some were lost, and one was stolen during the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona by the Stalinist secret police—it may still lie today in some Moscow archive) were first published in 1998 by Peter Davison and included in his monumental edition of The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 volumes: 9,000 pages). They are now conveniently regrouped here in one volume, excellently presented and annotated by Davison. The diaries provide a wealth of information on Orwell’s daily activities, concerns and interests; they present considerable documentary value for scholars, but they do not exactly live up to their editor’s claim: “These diaries offer a virtual autobiography of Orwell’s life and opinions for so much of his life.” This assessment—as we shall see in a moment—would much better characterise the utterly fascinating companion volume (also edited by Peter Davison), George Orwell: A Life in Letters.
Orwell’s diaries are not confessional: here he very seldom records his emotions, impressions, moods or feelings, hardly ever his ideas, judgements and opinions. What he jots down is strictly and dryly factual, events happening in the outside world or in his own little vegetable garden: his goat Muriel’s slight diarrhoea may have been caused by eating wet grass; Churchill is returning to cabinet; fighting reported in Manchukuo; rhubarb growing well; Béla Kun reported shot in Moscow; the pansies and red saxifrage are coming into flower; the rat population in Britain is estimated at 4–5 million; in the slang of the East Enders the word tart is absolutely interchangeable with girl with no implications of “prostitute”—people speak of their daughter or sister as a tart; among the hop-pickers, rhyming slang is not extinct, thus for instance, a dig in the grave means a shave; (and at the end of July 1940, as the menace of a German invasion becomes very real) “constantly, as I walk down the streets, I find myself looking up at the windows to see which of them would make good machine-gun nests.” The state of the weather is recorded daily as well as the count of eggs laid by his hens and the quantity of milk yielded by his goat. To some extent, the diaries could carry as their epigraph Orwell’s endearing words, from his 1946 essay “Why I Write”: “I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue . . . to love the surface of the earth and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
Very rarely does the diarist formulate a socio-psychological observation—but then it is always strikingly original and perceptive. Thus, for instance, on the sexual life of tramps: “they talk on sexual subjects in a revolting manner. Tramps are disgusting when on this subject because their poverty keeps them off entirely from women, and their minds consequently fester with obscenity. Merely lecherous people are all right, but people who would like to be lecherous but don’t get the chance, are horribly degraded by it. They remind me of the dogs that hang enviously round while other dogs are copulating.” In his enquiry into the condition of workers in Northern England during the Depression, he displays sensitive empathy and a remarkable capacity for attention to other people’s predicament; thus, for instance, this subtle remark on a specific “discomfort of the working man’s life: waiting about. If you receive a salary it is paid into your bank and you draw it out when you want it. If you receive wages, you have to go and get them on somebody else’s time and are probably left hanging about and probably expected to behave as though paying your wages at all was a favour.” Then he describes the long wait in the cold, the hassles and expenses of journeys by tram to and from the pay office: “The result of long training in this kind of thing is that whereas the bourgeois goes through life expecting to get what he wants, within limits, the working man always feels himself the slave of a more or less mysterious authority. I was impressed by the fact that when I went to Sheffield Town Hall to ask for certain statistics, both Brown and Searle [his two local miner-friends]—both of them people of much more forcible character than myself—were nervous, would not come into the office with me, and assumed that the town clerk would refuse information. They said, ‘He might give it to you, but he wouldn’t to us.’ Actually the town clerk was snooty and I did not get all the information that I asked for. But the point was that I assumed my question would be answered and the other two assumed the contrary.” In turn, these observations develop into broader and bolder considerations:
It is for this reason that in countries where the class hierarchy exists, people of the higher class always tend to come to the front in times of stress, though not really more gifted than the others. That they will do so is taken more or less for granted always and everywhere. Note the passage in Lissagaray’s History of the Commune describing the shootings after the [Paris] Commune had been suppressed. They were shooting the ringleaders without trial, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class than the others would be the ringleaders. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he “had an intelligent face.”
The writing in the diaries is terse, detached and impersonal. I will give just one example—it is typical, as it expresses both the drastic limitations of the form adopted by the diarist as well as some remarkable features of his personality. It is the entry of 19 August 1947, dealing with the Corryvreckan Whirlpool accident: the entire episode is disposed of in eight lines—the style is as matter-of-fact and unemotional as that of a police report. It would be all too easy for the uninformed reader to overlook the whole incident, or at least to fail to grasp its dramatic and near-fatal nature. On that day, Orwell, his three-year-old son, his nephew and niece (respectively twenty and sixteen) all escaped near-certain death by drowning in the most terrifying circumstances. Yet to gauge the gravity of the episode (which was reported at the time in the Glasgow press) one must read the full account by Orwell’s nephew (in Orwell Remembered, eds A. Coppard and B. Crick, London: BBC Books, 1984, and quoted in large part by B. Crick in George Orwell: A Life, London: Secker & Warburg, 1980).
On the island of Jura (Hebrides), in the solitary Spartan and beloved Scottish hermitage where, in the final years of his life, Orwell spent most of his time—at least when he was not in hospital, for his failing health had already reduced him to semi-invalidity—he used a small rowing boat equipped with an outboard engine both for fishing (his great passion) and for short coastal excursions. Returning from one of those excursions with his little son, nephew and niece, he had to cross the notorious Corryvreckan Whirlpool—one of the most dangerous whirlpools in all British waters. Normally, the crossing can be safely negotiated only for a brief moment on the slack of the tide. Orwell miscalculated this—either he misread the tide chart or neglected to consult it—and the little boat reached the dangerous spot at exactly the worst time, just in the middle of a furiously ebbing tide. Orwell realised his mistake too late: the boat was already out of control, tossed about by waves and swirling currents; the outboard engine which was not properly secured was shaken off its sternpost and swallowed by the sea; having lost all steering the little boat overturned, spilling its occupants and all their gear into the waves. Luckily the wreck occurred near a small rocky islet; Orwell managed to grab his son who had remained trapped under the boat, and the entire party swam safely ashore. Perchance the weather was sunny; Orwell proceeded immediately to dry his lighter and collect some fuel—dry grass and peat—and soon succeeded in lighting a fire by which the castaways were then able somehow to dry and warm themselves. Having gone to inspect the islet, Orwell discovered a spring of freshwater and an abundance of nesting birds. Under his unflappably calm and thoughtful direction the little party settled down in an orderly fashion. Some hours later, by extraordinary chance in such forlorn waters, a lobster-boat that was passing by noticed their presence and rescued them.
Virtually nothing of this dramatic succession of events is conveyed in Orwell’s desiccated note: half of the diary entry is devoted to naturalist’s observations on the isl
et puffin burrows and young cormorants learning to fly. To get the full picture, as I just said, one must read the nephew’s narrative. There, one is struck first by Orwell’s total absence of practical competence and of simple common sense[1]—and secondly by his calm courage and absolute self-control, which prevented the little party from panicking. And yet, at the time, he entertained no illusions regarding their chances of survival: as he simply told his nephew afterwards: “I thought we were goners.” And the nephew commented: “He almost seemed to enjoy it.”
Conclusion: if one had to go out to sea in a small boat, one would not choose Orwell for skipper. But when meeting with shipwreck, disaster or other catastrophe, one could not dream of better company.
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Orwell left explicit instructions that no biography be written of him, and even actively discouraged one early attempt. He felt that “every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate.” And yet the posthumous treatment he received from his biographers and editors is truly admirable—I think in particular of the works of Bernard Crick and of Peter Davison, which are models of critical intelligence and scholarship.
John Henry Newman said: “It has ever been a hobby of mine (unless it be a truism, not a hobby) that a man’s life is in his letters.” This selection of Orwell’s correspondence splendidly verifies Newman’s observation—which otherwise may not be true for many letter-writers and especially not for “men of letters,” who tend to adjust their tune to the ears of those whom they address. But Orwell is always himself and speaks with only one voice: reserved even with old friends; generous with complete strangers; and treating all with equal sincerity.
The letters illustrate all his main concerns, interests and passions; they also illuminate some striking aspects of his personality.
POLITICS
Orwell’s old schoolmate and friend Cyril Connolly famously stated: “Orwell was a political animal. He reduced everything to politics . . . He could not blow his nose without moralising on the conditions in the handkerchief industry.” This observation has a point, yet it could also be very misleading. Eileen, his wife—probably the only person who ever understood him in depth, since she managed to love him and live with him (while being herself the very opposite of a doormat)—had a much clearer view of the matter. She said that happiness for Orwell would have been to live in the country (he hated modern urban life and detested London), cultivating his vegetable garden and writing novels. Orwell himself repeatedly said very much the same thing—and proved it during the last years of his life, when he settled in his beloved (and very inaccessible) island of Jura. He had already expressed it in an earlier poem (1935)—Orwell’s poems may not be great poetry, but they always reveal his innermost feelings:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time
I missed that pleasant haven . . .
He once defined himself half in jest—but only half—as a “Tory Anarchist.” Indeed, after his youthful experience in the colonial police in Burma, he knew only that he hated imperialism and all forms of political oppression; all authority appeared suspect to him, even “mere success seemed to me a form of bullying.” Then, after his enquiry into workers’ conditions in northern industrial England during the Depression, he developed a broad non-partisan commitment to “socialism”: “Socialism means justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped of it.” The decisive point in his political evolution took place in Spain, where he volunteered to fight fascism: first he was nearly killed by a fascist bullet, then he narrowly escaped being murdered by Stalinist secret police: “What I saw in Spain and what I have seen of the inner-workings of left-wing political parties have given me a horror of politics . . . I am definitely ‘left,’ but I believe that a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free from Party labels” (my emphasis).
From then on he considered that the first duty of a socialist is to fight totalitarianism, which means in practice, “to denounce the Soviet myth, for there is not much difference between Fascism and Stalinism.” Inasmuch as they deal with politics, the Letters focus on the anti-totalitarian fight. In this, the three salient features of Orwell’s attitude are his intuitive grasp of concrete realities, his non-doctrinaire approach to politics (accompanied with a deep distrust of left-wing intellectuals) and his sense of the absolute primacy of the human dimension. He once identified the source of his strength: “Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than the so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in.” This uncanny ability received its most eloquent confirmation when Soviet dissidents who wished to translate Animal Farm into Russian (for clandestine distributors behind the Curtain) wrote to him to ask for his authorisation: they wrote to him in Russian, assuming that a writer who had such a subtle and thorough understanding of the Soviet reality—in contrast with the dismal ignorance of most Western intellectuals—had naturally to be a fluent Russian speaker!
Non-doctrinaire approach: In a letter to an old schoolmate (1 January 1938), Eileen wrote that they called their little dog “Marx” “to remind us that we had never read Marx, and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him.”
Orwell’s revulsion towards all “the smelly little orthodoxies that compete for our souls” explains also his distrust of and contempt for intellectuals. This attitude dates back a long way, as he recalls in a letter of October 1938: “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen. I was always struck by this when I was in Burma and used to read anti-imperialist stuff.” If the colonial experience had taught Orwell to hate imperialism, it also made him respect (like the protagonist in a Kipling story) “men who do things.” “Intellectuals depress me horribly” is another theme often encountered in the Letters. “Intellectuals are more totalitarian”; “the danger is that some native forms of totalitarianism will be developed here, and people like Laski, Pratt, Zilliacus, The News Chronicle and the rest of them seem to me to be simply preparing the way for this.” If the situation was depressing in London, in Paris (which he visited in 1945) it was dismal: “Sartre is a big bag of wind”; “French publishers are now commanded by Aragon [famous writer and leading member of the Communist Party] and others not to publish undesirable books.” His own Animal Farm was being translated into nine languages, but “the most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was ‘impossible for political reasons.’” “In France I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the Press, etc. The Occupation seemed to me to have had a terribly crushing effect upon people or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war.” (Though he adds: “The queer thing is that, with all this moral decay, there has over the past decade or so, been much more literary talent in France than in England, or than anywhere else I should say.”) He unfortunately missed meeting Camus at the time, which he regretted. These two men would have found a common language. In a letter of May 1948, he launched a well-aimed attack against Emmanuel Mounier and his flock of Christian fellow-travellers: “It’s funny that when I met Mounier for about ten minutes in 1945, I thought to myself, that man’s a fellow-traveller. I can smell them.” (And—if I may intrude here with a personal experience—how I know them myself! My benighted co-religionists, cretinous clerics and other Maoist morons who, twenty years later, were to preach the gospel of the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” . . .)
One last note on the subject of Orwell’s politics: in the end, he seems to have essentially reverted to his original position of “Tory Anarchist.” In a letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (4 December
1948—it resurfaced very late and, unfortunately, is not included in Davison’s edition of the Complete Works, nor in Life in Letters; it was reproduced in the Times Literary Supplement when the Complete Works first appeared), there is a statement that seems to me of fundamental importance: “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
THE HUMAN FACTOR
Even in the heat of battle, and precisely because he distrusted ideology—ideology kills—Orwell always remained acutely aware of the primacy that must be given to human individuals over all “the smelly little orthodoxies.” His exchange of letters (and subsequent friendship) with Stephen Spender provides a splendid example of this. Orwell had lampooned Spender (“parlour Bolshevik,” “pansy poet”); then they met. The encounter was in fact pleasant, which puzzled Spender, who wrote to Orwell on this very subject. Orwell replied:
