A Voice Still Heard

by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)

  What, however, has really happened in countries like Algeria? The peasantry contributes men and blood for an anticolonial war. Once the war is won, it tends to disperse, relapsing into local interests and seeking individual small-scale owner ship of the land. It is too poor, too weak, too diffuse to remain or become the leading social force in a newly liberated country. The bourgeoisie, what there was of it, having been shattered and the working class pushed aside, what remains? Primarily the party of nationalism, led by men who are dedicated, uprooted, semieducated, and ruthless. The party rules, increasingly an independent force perched upon and above the weakened classes.

  But Fanon is not taken in by his own propaganda. He recognizes the dangers of a preening dictator. He proposes, instead, that “the party should be the direct expression of the masses,” and adds, “Only those underdeveloped countries led by revolutionary elites who have come up from the people can today allow the entry of the masses upon the scene of history” (emphasis added).

  Fanon wants the masses to participate, yet throughout his book the single-party state remains an unquestioned assumption. But what if the masses do not wish to “participate”? And what if they are hostile to “the”—always “the”—party? Participation without choice is a burlesque of democracy; indeed, it is an essential element of a totalitarian or authoritarian society, for it means that the masses of people act out a charade of involvement but are denied the reality of decision.

  The authoritarians find political tendencies and representative men with whom to identify in the Communist world; so do we. We identify with the people who have died for freedom, like Imre Nagy, or who rot in prison, like Djilas. We identify with the “revisionists,” those political marranos who, forced to employ Communist jargon, yet spoke out for a socialism democratic in character and distinct from both Communism and capitalism. As it happens, our friends in the Communist world are not in power; but since when has that mattered to socialists?

  In 1957, at the height of the Polish ferment, the young philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote a brief article entitled “What Is Socialism?” It consisted of a series of epigrammatic sentences describing what socialism is not (at the moment perhaps the more immediate concern), but tacitly indicating as well what socialism should be. The article was banned by the Gomulka regime but copies reached Western periodicals. Here are a few sentences.

  Socialism is not

  A society in which a person who has committed no crime sits at home waiting for the police.

  A society in which one person is unhappy because he says what he thinks, and another happy because he does not say what is in his mind.

  A society in which a person lives better because he does not think at all.

  A state whose neighbors curse geography.

  A state which wants all its citizens to have the same opinions in philosophy, foreign policy, economics, literature, and ethics.

  A state whose government defines its citizens’ rights, but whose citizens do not define the government’s rights.

  A state in which there is private ownership of the means of production.

  A state which considers itself solidly socialist because it has liquidated private ownership of the means of production.

  A state which always knows the will of the people before it asks them.

  A state in which the philosophers and writers always say the same as the generals and ministers, but always after them.

  A state in which the returns of parliamentary elections are always predictable.

  A state which does not like to see its citizens read back numbers of newspapers.

  These negatives imply a positive, and that positive is a central lesson of contemporary history: the unity of socialism and democracy. To preserve democracy as a political mode without extending it into every crevice of social and economic life is to allow it to become increasingly sterile, formal, ceremonial. To nationalize an economy without enlarging democratic freedoms is to create a new kind of social exploitation. Radicals and liberals may properly and fraternally disagree about many other things; but upon this single axiom concerning the value of democracy, this conviction wrung from the tragedy of our age, politics must rest.

  George Orwell: “As the Bones Know”

  {1968}

  GEORGE ORWELL WROTE with his bones. To read again his essays, together with previously uncollected journalism and unpublished letters, is to encounter the bone-weariness, and bone-courage, of a writer who lived through the Depression, Hitlerism, Franco’s victory in Spain, Stalinism, the collapse of bourgeois England in the thirties. Even when he wanted to pull back to his novels and even when he lay sick with tuberculosis, Orwell kept summoning those energies of combat and resources of irritation which made him so powerful a fighter against the cant of his age. His bones would not let him rest.

  For a whole generation—mine—Orwell was an intellectual hero. He stormed against those English writers who were ready to yield to Hitler; he fought almost single-handed against those who blinded themselves to the evils of Stalin. More than any other English intellectual of our age, he embodied the values of personal independence and a fiercely democratic radicalism. Yet, just because for years I have intensely admired him, I hesitated to return to him. One learns to fear the disappointment of lapsed enthusiasms.

  I was wrong to hesitate. Reading through these four large volumes1*—the sheer pleasure of it cannot be overstated—has convinced me that Orwell was an even better writer than I had supposed. He was neither a first-rank literary critic nor a major novelist, and certainly not an original political thinker; but he was, I now believe, the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr. Johnson. He was the greatest moral force in English letters during the last several decades: craggy, fiercely polemical, sometimes mistaken, but an utterly free man. In his readiness to stand alone and take on all comers, he was a model for every writer of our age. And when my students ask, “Whom shall I read in order to write better?” I answer, “Orwell, the master of the plain style, that style which seems so easy to copy but is almost impossible to reach.”

  If you look through them casually, the earliest of Orwell’s essays seem to share that blunt clarity of speech and ruthless determination to see what looms in front of one’s nose that everyone admires in his later work. The first important essay came out in 1931, when Orwell was still in his late twenties, and is called “The Spike.” It describes his experience as an unemployed wanderer on the roads of England, finding shelter in a “spike,” or hostel, where the poor were given a bed and two or three meals but then required to move along. The piece makes one quiver with anger at the inhumanity of good works, but it is absolutely free of sentimentalism, and almost miraculously untainted by the sticky luving condescension of 1930s radicalism.

  Any ordinary writer should be willing to give his right arm, or at least two fingers, to have written that piece. Yet a close inspection will show, I think, that it doesn’t reach Orwell’s highest level of social reportage. There is still an occasional clutter of unabsorbed detail, still a self-consciousness about his role as half-outsider barging in upon and thereby perhaps subtly betraying the lives of the men on the road. The discipline of the plain style—and that fierce control of self which forms its foundation—comes hard.

  For Orwell, it also came quickly. In a piece called “Hop Picking,” written a few months later but now published for the first time, Orwell describes some weeks spent as an agricultural worker in the hop fields. The prose is now keener:

  Straw is rotten stuff to sleep in (it is much more draughty than hay) and Ginger and I had only a blanket each, so we suffered agonies of cold for the first week. . . .

  Dick’s Café in Billingsgate . . . was one of the very few places where you could get a cup of tea for 1d, and there were fires there, so that anyone who had a penny could warm himself for hours in the early morning. Only this last week the London County Council closed it on the ground that it was unhygienic.

  In “
Hop Picking” Orwell had already solved the problem of narrative distance: how to establish a simultaneous relationship with the men whose experience he shared and the readers to whom he makes the experience available. “Hop Picking” was a small effort in the kind of writing Orwell would undertake on a large scale a few years later, when he produced his classic report on the condition of English miners, The Road to Wigan Pier. What Orwell commanded, above all, was a natural respect for the workers. He saw and liked them as they were, not as he or a political party felt they should be. He didn’t twist them into Marxist abstractions, nor did he cuddle them in the fashion of New Left Populism. He saw the workers neither as potential revolutionists nor savage innocents nor stupid clods. He saw them as ordinary suffering and confused human beings: rather like you and me, yet because of their circumstances radically different from you and me. When one thinks of the falseness that runs through so much current writing of this kind it becomes clear that Orwell was a master of the art of exposition.

  Other sides of Orwell’s talent soon begin to unfold. He develops quickly: the idea of pressure is decisive. His career can be understood only as a series of moral and intellectual crises, the painful confrontation of a man driven to plunge into every vortex of misery that he saw, yet a man with an obvious distaste for the corruptions of modern politics.

  Even in casual bits of journalism, his voice begins to come through. As a literary critic he seldom had the patience to work his way deeply into a text, though he did have an oblique sort of literary penetration. He remarks, in an otherwise commonplace review, that George Moore enjoyed the advantage of “not having an over-developed sense of pity; hence he could resist the temptation to make his characters more sensitive than they would have been in real life.” In “Bookshop Memories,” never before printed in a book, Orwell shows the peculiar sandpapery humor that would emerge in his later writings:

  Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. . . . The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

  In another early piece, not otherwise notable, there suddenly leaps out a sentence carrying Orwell’s deepest view of life, his faith in the value and strength of common existence: “The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a life-belt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive.”

  Orwell’s affectionate sense of English life, its oddities, paradoxes, and even outrages, comes through in an anecdote he tells:

  . . . the other day I saw a man—Communist, I suppose—selling the Daily Worker, & I went up to him & said, “Have you the DW?”—He: “Yes, sir.” Dear Old England!

  There are even a few early poems, slightly this side of Weltschmerz, which I rather like:

  I know, not as in barren thought,

  But wordlessly, as the bones know,

  What quenching of my brain, what numbness,

  Wait in the dark grave where I go.

  Orwell’s first fully achieved piece of writing appears in 1936: “Shooting an Elephant,” a mixture of reminiscence and reflection. The essay takes off from his experience as a minor British official in Burma who, in the half-jeering, half-respectful presence of a crowd of “natives,” must destroy a maddened elephant; and then it moves on to larger issues of imperialism and the corruption of human nature by excessive power. For the first time, his characteristic fusion of personal and public themes is realized, and the essay as a form—vibrant, tight-packed, nervous—becomes a token of his meaning. The evocation of brutality is brought to climax through one of those symbolic moments he would employ brilliantly in his later pieces: “The elephant’s mouth was wide and open—I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat.”

  During these years, the late thirties, Orwell went through a rapid political development. He kept assaulting the deceits of Popular Frontism, and this brought him even more intellectual loneliness than it would have in America. He tried to find a tenable basis for his anti-Stalinist leftism, a task at which he encountered the same difficulties other intellectuals did—which, after all, were intrinsic to a world-wide crisis of socialist thought. For a while he fought in Spain with the militia of the POUM, a left-wing anti-Communist party, and suffered a throat wound; back in England he spoke some painful truths about the Stalinist terror launched against dissident leftists on the Loyalist side, and for this he was hated by the New Statesman and most of the Popular Front intellectuals. He published one of his most valuable and neglected books, Homage to Catalonia, the record of his experience in Spain. He went through a brief interval in which he put forward a semi-Trotskyist line, denying that the bourgeois West could successfully oppose Hitlerism and insisting that the prerequisite for destroying Fascism was a socialist revolution in England. But when the war broke out, he had the good sense—not all his co-thinkers did—to see that his earlier views on combating Fascism had been abstract, unreal, ultimatistic. He supported the war, yet remained a radical, steadily criticizing social privilege and snobbism. Here is a passage in his previously unpublished “War-Time Diary,” breathing his ingrained plebeian distaste for the English upper classes:

  From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph:

  “Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining . . . in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”

  Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exists.

  The high plateau of Orwell’s career as essayist—and it is as essayist he is likely to be remembered best—begins around 1940. He had by then perfected his gritty style; he had settled into his combative manner (sometimes the object of an unattractive kind of self-imitation); and he had found his subjects: the distinctive nature of English life and its relation to the hope for socialism, a number of close examinations of popular culture, a series of literary studies on writers ranging from Dickens to Henry Miller, and continued social reportage on the life of the poor. His productivity during the next five or six years is amazing. He works for the BBC, he writes a weekly column for the socialist Tribune, he sends regular London Letters to Partisan Review in New York, he keeps returning to his fiction, and he still manages to produce such extraordinary essays as the appreciation of Dickens, the piquant investigation of boys’ magazines, the half-defense of and half-assault on Kipling, the brilliant “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” the discussion of Tolstoy’s hatred for Shakespeare—to say nothing of such unknown gems, rescued from little magazines, as his moving essays on writers so thoroughly out of fashion as Smollett and Gissing.

  We see him now in his mature public role. There is something irascible about Orwell, even pugnacious, which both conventional liberals and literary aesthetes find unnerving. He is constantly getting into fights, and by no means always with good judgment. He is reckless, he is ferociously polemical, and when arguing for a “moderate” opinion he is harsh and intransigent in tone.

  My sense of Orwell, as it emerges from reading him in bulk, is rather different from that which became prevalent in the conservative fifties: the “social saint” one of his biographers called him, the “conscience of his generation” V. S. Pritchett declared him to be, or the notably good man Lionel Trilling saw in him. The more I read of Orwell, the more I doubt that he was particularly virtuous or good. Neither the selflessness nor the patience of the saint, certainly not the indifference to temporal passion that would seem a goal of sainthood, can be found in Orwell. He himself wrote in his essay on Gandhi: “No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things a saint must avoid, but sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid.”

  As a “saint” Orwell would not trouble us, for by now we have learned how to put up with saints: we canonize them and are rid of them. Orwell, however, stirs us by his all too human, his truculent example. He stood in basic opposition to the modes and assumptions that have dominated Eng
lish cultural life. He rejected the rituals of Good Form which had been so deeply ingrained among the English and took on a brief popularity among us in the fifties; he knew how empty, and often how filled with immoderate aggression the praise of moderation could be; he turned away from the pretentiousness of the “literary.” He wasn’t a Marxist or even a political revolutionary. He was something better: a revolutionary personality. He turned his back on his own caste; he tried to discover what was happening beyond the provincial limits of high-brow life. If he was a good man, it was mainly in the sense that he had measured his desperation and come to accept it as a mode of honor. And he possessed an impulse essential to a serious writer: he was prepared to take chances, even while continuing to respect the heritage of the past.

  Both as writer and thinker, Orwell had serious faults. He liked to indulge himself in a pseudo-tough anti-intellectualism, some of it pretty damned nasty, as in his sneers at “pansy-pinks”—though later he was man enough to apologize to those he had hurt. He was less than clear-sighted or generous on the subject of the Jews, sharing something of the English impatience with what he regarded—in the 1940s!—as their need for special claims. He could be mean in polemics. During the war he was quite outrageous in attacking English anarchists and pacifists like Alex Comfort, Julian Symons, and George Woodcock for lending “objective” comfort to the Nazis. Yet it speaks well for Orwell that in a short time at least two of these men became his friends, and it isn’t at all clear to me that in his angry and overstated denunciation, Orwell wasn’t making a point against them and all other pacifists which must be seriously considered.

  Meanwhile, one suddenly comes to a stop and notices that those of Orwell’s letters reprinted in the few volumes of his collected prose are not, as letters, particularly interesting or distinguished. At first, this comes as a surprise, for one might have expected the same pungency, the same verbal thrust, as in the public writing. There is, however, nothing to be found of the qualities that make for great letter writing: nothing of the brilliant rumination of Keats in his letters, or the profound self-involvement of Joyce in his, or the creation of a dramatic persona such as T. E. Lawrence began in his. He seems to have poured all his energies into his published work and used his letters simply as a convenience for making appointments, conveying information, rehearsing opinion. Perhaps it’s just as well, for he had a horror of exposing his private life and asked that no biography be written about him. In these days of instant self-revelation, there is something attractive about a writer who throws up so thick a screen of reticence.