A Voice Still Heard

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

  One reason these uninteresting letters do finally hold our attention is that they put to rest the notion that Orwell’s prose was an achievement easily come by. The standard critical formula is that he wrote in a “conversational” style, and he himself is partly responsible for this simplification. I think, however, that Yvor Winters was right in saying that human conversation is a sloppy form of communication and seldom a good model for prose. What we call colloquial or conversational prose is the result of cultivation, and can be written only by a disciplined refusal of the looseness of both the colloquial and the conversational. If you compare the charged lucidity of Orwell’s prose in his best essays with the merely adequate and often flat writing of his letters, you see at once that the style for which he became famous was the result of artistry and hard work. It always is.

  In an essay called “Why I Write,” Orwell ends with a passage at once revealing and misleading:

  All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. . . . Good prose is like a window pane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages. . . .

  Orwell is saying something of great importance here, but saying it in a perverse way. (After a time he relished a little too much his role of embattled iconoclast.) He does not mean what some literary people would gleefully suppose him to mean: that only tendentiousness, only propaganda, makes for good prose. He deliberately overstates the case, as a provocation to the literary people he liked to bait. But a loyal reader, prepared to brush aside his mannerisms, would take this passage to mean that, once a minimal craftsmanship has been reached, good writing is the result of being absorbed by an end greater than the mere production of good writing. A deliberate effort to achieve virtuosity or beauty or simplicity usually results in mannerism, which is often no more than a way of showing off.

  In his best work Orwell seldom allowed himself to show off. He was driven by a passion to clarify ideas, correct errors, persuade readers, straighten things out in the world and in his mind. Hemingway speaks of “grace under pressure,” and many of his critics have used this marvelous phrase to describe the excellence of his style. What I think you get in Orwell at his best is something different: “pressure under grace.” He achieves a state of “grace” as a writer through having sloughed off the usual vanities of composition, and thereby he speaks not merely for himself but as a voice of moral urgency. His prose becomes a prose of pressure, the issue at stake being too important to allow him to slip into fancies or fanciness. Moral pressure makes for verbal compression, a search like Flaubert’s for le mot juste, but not at all to achieve aesthetic nicety, rather to achieve a stripped speech. And the result turns out to be aesthetically pleasing: the Christians, with much more to be risked, understood all this when they spoke of “dying into life.”

  Good prose, says Orwell, should be “like a window pane.” He is both right and wrong. Part of his limitation as a literary critic is that he shows little taste for the prose of virtuosity: one can’t easily imagine him enjoying Sir Thomas Browne. If some windows should be clear and transparent, why may not others be stained and opaque? Like all critics who are also significant writers themselves, Orwell developed standards that were largely self-justifying: he liked the prose that’s like a window pane because that’s the kind of prose he wrote.

  His style doesn’t seem to change much from early essays to late, but closely watched it shows significant modulations. At the outset his effort to be clear at all costs does involve him in heavy costs: a certain affectation of bluntness, a tendency to make common sense into an absolute virtue. But by the end, as in the superb prose of “Such, Such Were the Joys,” there has occurred a gradual increase of control and thereby suppleness.

  “Pressure under grace” brings rewards. Orwell learns to mold the essay into a tense structure, learns to open with a strong thrust (“Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing”), and above all, to end with an earned climax, a release of the tension that has been accumulating and can now be put to the service of lucidity. I think a useful critical study could be made of the way he ends his essays. Here is the last paragraph on Dickens:

  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. . . . 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’ photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high color. 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.

  The passage is marvelous, but if a criticism is to be made, it is that Orwell has composed a set piece too easily lifted out of context and in the final sentence has allowed himself to turn away from his subject in order to take a smack at fanatics of left and right. Yet this self-indulgence, if it is one, works pretty well, mainly because Orwell has by now so thoroughly persuaded his readers that the qualities he admires in Dickens are indeed admirable.

  Here is another Orwell ending, this time from the essay on Swift, “Politics vs. Literature,” published some seven years after the one on Dickens. Orwell makes some important observations on the problem of “belief” in literature:

  In so far as a writer is a propagandist, the most one can ask of him is that he shall genuinely believe in what he is saying, and that it shall not be something blazingly silly. Today . . . one can imagine a good book being written by a Catholic, a Communist, a Fascist, a Pacifist, an Anarchist, perhaps by an old-styled Liberal or an ordinary Conservative; one cannot imagine a good book being written by a spiritualist, a Buchmanite or a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The views that a writer holds must be compatible with sanity, in the medical sense, and with the power of continuous thought: beyond that what we ask of him is talent, which is probably another name for conviction. Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision. . . . The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.

  What grips our attention here is the ferocity with which Orwell drives home his point—by reaction, we almost see old Tolstoy rising from his grave to thunder against this heresy. Rhetorically, the passage depends on the sudden drop of the last sentence, with its shocking reduction of the preceding argument—so that in the movement of his prose Orwell seems to be enacting the curve of his argument. It is a method he must have picked up from Swift himself.

  And, finally, here is the ending of his great essay, “How the Poor Die”:

  The dread of hospitals probably still survives among the very poor and in all of us it has only recently disappeared. It is a dark patch not far beneath the surface of our minds. I have said earlier that, when I entered the ward at the Hospital X, I was conscious of a strange feeling of familiarity. What the scene reminded me of, of course, was the reeking, pain-filled hospitals of the nineteenth century, which I had never seen but of which I had a traditional knowledge. And something, perhaps the black-clad doctor with his frowsy black bag, or perhaps only the sickly smell, played the queer trick of unearthing from my memory that poem of Tennyson’s, “The Children’s Hour,” which I had not thought of for twenty years. It happened that as a child I had had it read al
oud to me by a sick-nurse. . . . Seemingly I had forgotten it. Even its name would probably have recalled nothing to me. But the first glimpse of the ill-lit, murmurous room, with the beds so close together, suddenly roused the train of thought to which it belonged, and in the night that followed I found myself remembering the whole story and atmosphere of the poem, with many of its lines complete.

  This ending seems to me a triumph of composition. All that has been detailed with such gruesome care about the terribleness of a French hospital is brought to imaginative climax through the anecdote at the end. Proust could hardly have done better.

  Orwell died, in 1950, at the age of forty-six, stricken by tuberculosis. It is depressing to think that if he had lived, he would today be no more than sixty-five years old. How much we have missed in these two decades! Imagine Orwell ripping into one of Harold Wilson’s mealy speeches, imagine him examining the thought of Spiro Agnew, imagine him dissecting the ideology of Herbert Marcuse, imagine him casting a frosty eye on the current wave of irrationalism in Western culture!

  The loss seems enormous. . . . He was one of the few heroes of our younger years who remains untarnished. Having to live in a rotten time was made just a little more bearable by his presence.

  Note

  1* The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).

  The New York Intellectuals

  {1969}

  THE SOCIAL ROOTS of the New York writers are not hard to trace. With a few delightful exceptions—a tendril from Yale, a vine from Seattle—they stem from the world of the immigrant Jews, either workers or petty bourgeois.1* They come at a moment in the development of immigrant Jewish culture when there is a strong drive not only to break out of the ghetto but also to leave behind the bonds of Jewishness entirely. Earlier generations had known such feelings, and through many works of fiction, especially those by Henry Roth, Michael Gold, and Daniel Fuchs, one can return to the classic pattern of a fierce attachment to the provincialism of origins as it becomes entangled with a fierce eagerness to plunge into the Gentile world of success, manners, freedom.

  The New York intellectuals were the first group of Jewish writers to come out of the immigrant milieu who did not define themselves through a relationship, nostalgic or hostile, to memories of Jewishness. They were the first generation of Jewish writers for whom the recall of an immigrant childhood does not seem to have been completely overwhelming. That this severance from Jewish immigrant sources would later come to seem a little suspect is another matter. All I wish to stress here is that, precisely at the point in the thirties when the New York intellectuals began to form themselves into a loose cultural-political tendency, Jewishness as idea and sentiment played no significant role in their expectations—apart, to be sure, from a bitter awareness that no matter what their political or cultural desires, the sheer fact of their recent emergence had still to be regarded as an event within Jewish American life.

  For decades the life of the East European Jews, in both the old country and the new, might be compared to a tightly gathered spring, trembling with unused force, which had been held in check until the climactic moment of settlement in America. Then the energies of generations came bursting out, with an ambition that would range from pure to coarse, and indeed would mix all these together, but finally—this ambition—would count for more as an absolute release than in any of its local manifestations. What made Sammy run was partly that his father and his father’s father had been bound hand and foot. And in all the New York intellectuals there was a fraction of Sammy.

  The youthful experiences described by Alfred Kazin in his autobiography are, apart from his distinctive outcroppings of temperament, more or less typical of the experiences of many New York intellectuals—except for the handful who involved themselves deeply in the radical movement. It is my impression, however, that Kazin’s affectionate stress on the Jewish sources of his experience is mainly a feeling of retrospect, mainly a recognition that no matter how you might try to shake off your past, it would still cling to your speech, gestures, skin, and nose; it would still shape, with a thousand subtle movements, the way you did your work and raised your children. In the thirties, however, it was precisely the idea of discarding the past, breaking away from families, traditions, and memories which excited intellectuals.

  The Jewish immigrant world branded upon its sons and daughters marks of separateness even while encouraging them to dreams of universalism. This subculture may have been formed to preserve ethnic continuity, but it was a continuity that would reach its triumph in self-disintegration. It taught its children both to conquer the Gentile world and to be conquered by it, both to leave an intellectual impress and to accept the dominant social norms. By the twenties and thirties the values dominating Jewish immigrant life were often secular, radical, and universalist, and if these were conveyed through a parochial vocabulary, they nonetheless carried some remnants of European culture. Even as they were moving out of a constricted immigrant milieu, the New York intellectuals were being prepared by it for the tasks they would set themselves. They were being prepared for the intellectual vocation as one of assertiveness, speculation, and freewheeling; for the strategic maneuvers of a vanguard, at this point almost a vanguard in the abstract, with no ranks following in the rear; and for the union of politics and culture, with the politics radical and the culture cosmopolitan. What made this goal all the more attractive was that the best living American critic, Edmund Wilson, had triumphantly reached it. The author of both The Triple Thinkers and To the Finland Station, he gave this view of the intellectual life a special authority.

  That the literary avant-garde and the political left were not really comfortable partners would become clear with the passage of time; in Europe it already had. But during the years the New York intellectuals began to appear as writers and critics there was a feeling in the air that a union of the advanced—critical consciousness and political conscience—could be forged.

  Throughout the thirties the New York intellectuals believed, somewhat naively, that this union was not only a desirable possibility but also a tie both natural and appropriate. Except, however, for the surrealists in Paris—and it is not clear how seriously this instance should be taken—the paths of political radicalism and cultural modernism have seldom met.

  The history of the West in the last century offers many instances in which Jewish intellectuals played an important role in the development of political radicalism; but almost always this occurred when there were sizable movements, with the intellectuals serving as propagandists and functionaries of a party. In New York, by contrast, the intellectuals had no choice but to begin with a dissociation from the only significant radical movement in this country, the Communist Party. What for European writers like Koestler, Silone, and Malraux would be the end of the road was here a beginning. In a fairly short time, the New York writers found that the meeting of political and cultural ideas which had stirred them to excitement could also leave them stranded. Radicalism, in both its daily practice and ethical biases, proved inhospitable to certain aspects of modernism—and not always, I now think, mistakenly. Literary modernism often had a way of cavalierly dismissing the world of daily existence, a world that remained intensely absorbing to the New York writers. Literary modernism could sometimes align itself with reactionary movements, an embarrassing fact that required either tortuous explanations or complex dissociations. The New York writers discovered, as well, that their relationship to modernism as a purely literary phenomenon was less authoritative and more ambiguous than they had wished to feel. The great battles for Joyce, Eliot, and Proust had been fought in the twenties and mostly won; and now, while clashes with entrenched philistinism might still take place, they were mostly skirmishes or mopping-up operations (as in the polemics against the transfigured Van Wyck Brooks). The New York writers came at the end of the modernist experience, just as they came at what may yet have to be judged the end of the rad
ical experience, and as they certainly came at the end of the immigrant Jewish experience. One shorthand way of describing their situation, a cause of both their feverish intensity and their recurrent instability, is to say that they came late.

  During the thirties and forties their radicalism was anxious, problematic, and beginning to decay at the very moment it was adopted. They had no choice: the crisis of socialism was worldwide, profound, with no end in sight, and the only way to avoid that crisis was to bury oneself, as a few did, in left-wing sects. Some of the New York writers had gone through the “political school” of Stalinism, a training in coarseness from which not all recovered; some had even spent a short time in the organizational coils of the Communist Party. By 1936, when the anti-Stalinist Partisan Review was conceived, the central figures of that moment—Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Sidney Hook—had shed whatever sympathies they once felt for Stalinism, but the hope that they could find another ideological system, some cleansed version of Marxism associated perhaps with Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg, was doomed to failure. Some gravitated for a year or two toward the Trotskyist group, but apart from admiration for Trotsky’s personal qualities and dialectical prowess, they found little satisfaction there; no version of orthodox Marxism could retain a hold on intellectuals who had gone through the trauma of abandoning the Leninist weltanschauung and had experienced the depth to which the politics of this century, notably the rise of totalitarianism, called into question Marxist categories. From now on, the comforts of system would have to be relinquished.