Orwell
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The most interesting unpublished material printed in these volumes includes 284 letters (relatively few of them before Orwell became famous in his last years), the “War Diaries” (1940–42), the brief “Manuscript Notebook” (1949) and the Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm where he describes the original creative impulse of that book: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx's theory from the animals’ point of view.” Of less interest are “Clink,” “Hop Picking,” “The Road to Wigan Pier Diary” and “Notes on the Spanish Militias,” which are very similar to material already published in Orwell's early books. The remaining 1500 pages of previously published material consists of the 32 major essays (autobiographical, literary, sociological and political), 77 short articles and reviews, 73 (nearly all) of the “As I Please” column and all the 15 “London Letters.”
The most striking thing about this occasional journalism, produced in Grub Street fashion at the rate of three or four pieces a week, is how readable and interesting it still is, for Orwell is the great master of colloquial ease. His style is extremely flexible and far-ranging, from very close observation:
A few rats running slowly through the snow, very tame, presumably weak with hunger;
and witty aphorisms:
Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers;
Nine times out of ten a revolutionary is merely a climber with a bomb in his pocket;
to a strange Swiftian presentation of the seemingly familiar:
All our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible;
and the startling, almost Donne-like openings of his major essays:
As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me;
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
The only writer who approaches Orwell in both highbrow political analysis and intelligent literary criticism is Edmund Wilson, though D. H. Lawrence's Phoenix essays and Dwight Macdonald's political polemics are also comparable to Orwell's. His best characteristics are a Conradian concern with human solidarity; generosity of spirit that extends to enemy prisoners, French collaborators and Fascist war criminals; intellectual honesty in admitting his own mistakes; balanced judgment;4 and courage to speak out against any mean or cowardly attitude and to defend dangerous and unpopular views. As Orwell says, “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”
The dullest and most dated of the journalism are the “London Letters” and some of the more heavy-handed and repetitive political articles that often contain plodding uncharacteristic sentences like this one: “Though a collectivised economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of economic individualism.” The literary articles are much livelier and more original than the political ones; and the delightful “As I Please” column exhibits the uniquely random and miscellaneous quality of Orwell's mind (with some curious gaps—he has few philosophical or psychological interests), as he ranges from the New Year's Honours List to the ugliest building in the world, and seems to resemble his own description of Charles Reade: “a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information with a lively narrative gift.”
The volumes also have very considerable biographical interest, especially since no life of Orwell exists. I believe one is now being written, and it will certainly be welcome despite Mrs. Orwell's assertion that “there was so little that could be written about his life—except for ‘psychological interpretation’—which he had not written himself…. With these present volumes the picture is as complete as it can be.” This is hardly true, for there is a vast difference between a mere factual chronology of a life and a full-scale interpretive biography of a man and his age, especially a man like Orwell who was deeply involved in all the political controversies of his time and whose life of art and action was equaled only by T. E. Lawrence, Malraux and Hemingway. Though the books and autobiographical essays (“Such, Such Were the Joys,” “Shooting an Elephant,” “A Hanging,” “How the Poor Die,” “Bookshop Memories,” “Marrakech,” “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” and “Why I Write”) tell us a good deal about certain periods in his life, there are many large lacunae.
We know virtually nothing about Orwell's birthplace and earliest years. Like Kipling, he was born in India, spent his first years there, had an unhappy childhood,5 and went to school in England; and Orwell is undoubtedly thinking of himself when he writes of Kipling, “Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early.” The first chapters of Kipling's Something of Myself describe an Indian childhood while “Baa Baa Black Sheep” portrays the horrors of early youth. Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise gives a rather different and more pleasant picture of their prep school, St. Cyprian's, than Orwell does, and he also describes their later life at Eton.
The Burmese period is the next obscure phase of Orwell's life, and exactly why he chose the Burmese police instead of Cambridge or at least the political section of the Indian or West African Civil Service is, as Mr. Angus says, “not known.” Mr. A. S. F. Gow, Orwell's classical tutor at Eton, whom Orwell visited after Burma in 1927 and later corresponded with, has written to me (in a letter of January 1, 1969) that Orwell's father said he “could not go to a University unless he got a scholarship and … there was not the faintest hope of his getting one…. He had shown so little taste or aptitude for academic subjects that I doubted whether in any case a University would be worth while for him.” (Orwell had won scholarships to both St. Cyprian's and Eton but resolved to “slack off and cram no longer” after prep school. He writes of Eton, “I did no work there and learned very little, and I don't feel that Eton has been much of a formative influence in my life.”6 Mr. Gow also writes that Orwell's father then “spoke of the Burmese police”; and the job was undoubtedly secured through personal connections which, writes Orwell, his family had “with the country over three generations. My grandmother lived forty years in Burma.” His statement that when he was there “nationalist feelings in Burma were not very marked, and relations between the English and the Burmese were not particularly bad” is very different from the atmosphere portrayed in Burmese Days. Leonard Woolf's Growing and Philip Woodruff's The Men Who Ruled India describe the social and political background of Orwell's Burmese period.
Another obscure phase of his life is his decision in 1946 to live the extremely arduous and exhausting existence on the remote island of Jura in the Hebrides. Mr. Angus’ explanation that he had gone to Jura “to find some peace away from journalism, the telephone, etc.” is clearly unsatisfactory since an equally quiet place could be found in a more salubrious climate, closer to medical assistance and away from the country that Orwell professed to dislike (see Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 42). The terminal phase of Orwell's very serious illness (he could speak, like Pope, of “this long disease, my Life”) dates from the winter of 1946, part of which he spent on Jura.
One pattern that emerges from these volumes is the terrible state of Orwell's health. Like D. H. Lawrence, he seems to have had defective lungs since boyhood—“after about the age of ten, I was seldom in good health…. I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung that was not discovered till many years later”—which tormented him for the rest of his life. The Burmese climate ruined his health, he had pneumonia in February 1929 (see “How the Poor Die”), was shot through the throat in Spain in May 1937, had tuberculosis i
n March 1938, was unfit for service in the Second World War due to bronchiectasis and was gravely ill during the last three years of his life.
Orwell's published letters, like Conrad's, are strangely impersonal, rather pedestrian and unvarying with each correspondent, but they become extraordinarily moving during the last months of his life when he faces the gravity of his disease with a Keatsian courage. He was deeply devoted to his adopted son, Richard, and poignantly writes: “I am so afraid of his growing away from me, or getting to think of me as just a person who is always lying down & can't play. Of course children can't understand illness. He used to come to me & say ‘Where have you hurt yourself?’” In May 1949 he admits: “I am in most ghastly health…. When the picture is taken I am afraid there is not much doubt it will show that both lungs have deteriorated badly. I asked the doctor recently whether she thought I would survive, & she wouldn't go further than saying she didn't know…. Don't think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive. But I want to get a clear idea of how long I am likely to last, & not just be jollied along the way doctors usually do.” In August he announces, rather surprisingly: “I intend getting married again (to Sonia) when I am once again in the land of the living, if I ever am. I suppose everyone will be horrified.” And in October he writes: “I am still very weak & ill, but I think better on the whole. I am getting married very unobtrusively this week. It will probably be a long time before I can get out of bed.” He died three months later, in January 1950.
Future biographers will certainly be interested in Orwell's unusual second marriage, just as Orwell, in discussing Carlyle's marriage, was interested in “the frame of mind in which people get married, and the astonishing selfishness that exists in the sincerest love.”
The other dominant pattern in Orwell's life (closely related to his illness) is the series of masochistic impulses for a higher cause that testifies to his compulsive need for self-punishment: in school; in the Burmese Police; among scullions and beggars; in squalid doss houses and inside mines; with the ragged, weaponless army of the Republic in Spain; in propagandistic drudgery for the wartime BBC (a “whoreshop and lunatic asylum”); in thankless and exhausting political polemics; and finally in that mad and suicidal sojourn amidst the damp, bleak and isolated wastes of Jura. In Wigan Pier Orwell states, “I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate” and explains that this guilt derives from his experience as a colonial oppressor.7 But it seems that the source of this guilt, which he could never extinguish (see his “Diary,” quoted in the epigraph), was both earlier and deeper than Orwell suggests (“Such, Such Were the Joys” describes his deep-rooted childhood guilt). Though no specific evidence yet exists, it is possible to imagine an early Lord Jim syndrome, a kind of moral self-betrayal or dishonorable fall from self-esteem that is a truer source of his masochistic guilt. But whatever the source, Orwell's writing is manifest proof of his ability to transcend this personal guilt by channeling it into effective social and political thought and action.
Orwell's books deal with two dominant themes—poverty and politics—or as he put it, “the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare of State interference.” The autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the novels A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and the reportage The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) deal with the first theme; Burmese Days (1934), Homage to Catalonia (1938), Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) with the second; while Coming Up For Air (1939) is a transitional work that concerns an unsuccessful attempt to escape from both nightmares. The rest of this essay concentrates on the first phase of Orwell's career; I do not discuss A Clergyman's Daughter, his weakest book.
“We all live in terror of poverty,” writes Orwell, and its psychological and social effects are his great theme. Though almost all his books treat this question in a significant way (the exploited natives in Burmese Days, the plight of the common soldier in Homage to Catalonia and of the dehumanized proles in Nineteen Eighty-Four), Orwell's three books of the depressed mid-thirties are completely devoted to the exploration of this theme. Works like New Grub Street, The Spoils of Poynton, Nostromo, Howards End and Major Barbara all deal, in their different ways, with the corruption of capitalistic society; Orwell's books consider the working classes who are exploited by this corrupt society.
One of Orwell's main ideas can be found in Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara (1907): “The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”8 Shaw, a half-century before Orwell, “was drawn into the Socialist revival of the early eighties, among Englishmen intensely serious and burning with indignation at the very real and very fundamental evils that affected all the world.”9 Orwell's way of dealing with these evils is to experience them personally and directly, to break out of the emotionally shallow and sheltered state of the middle classes and make contact with physical reality, “to look down at the roots on which his existence is founded.”10 As Orwell explains in the autobiographical section of Wigan Pier:
I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants…. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes…. I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and—this is what I felt: I was aware even then it was irrational—part of my guilt would drop from me…. And down there in the squalid and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure, which seems absurd when I look back, but which was sufficiently vivid at the time. (130–131, 134)
Many of Orwell's most characteristic ideas are stated in this passage: the desire to have immediate and actual experience, to see things from the inside rather than from a purely theoretical viewpoint; to fight, like Dickens, “on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere,” and to agonize over their sufferings; to extinguish, among out-castes, the sense of social class; to feel the pleasurable relief, the anxiety and guilt-annihilating euphoria of going to the dogs and knowing you can stand it; to undergo the excitement of a sortie to the lower depths.
Orwell felt, in Burke's words, “I must see the things; I must see the men.”11 Books like Johnson's Life of Savage, Zola's Germinal, Hamsun's Hunger, Crane's Maggie, Gorki's The Lower Depths, Davies’ Autobiography of a Super Tramp and Jack London's The Road, which had vividly portrayed the outcasts at the extreme fringe of society, were pioneering works of intensely personal social protest. But the most immediate influence on Down and Out was London's The People of the Abyss. In his Preface, London likened himself to an explorer of the underworld and wrote, “what I wish to do, is to go down into the East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how these people are living there, and why they are living there, and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.”12
Orwell lived first in a working class quarter of Paris and worked as a dishwasher (“a slave's slave”) in 1928–29, just after he returned from five years in Burma as a policeman. The similar injustices to the workers in both countries are suggested in Down and Out though this idea is not fully developed until Wigan Pier. When Orwell writes of the English tramp Paddy, for example, “Seeing him walk, you felt instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one” (109), it is clear that this “instinctive” feeling grew directly out of his nasty experiences in Burma where he did the dirty work of Empire, was responsible for “the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos” and saw “louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants.”13 This made him burn with hatred of his countrymen and of himself. Similarly, the equation of exploitation with luxury in his analysis of the upper class attitude toward the poor—“since evidently you
must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you” (87)—again recalls the colonial parallel: “As the world is now constituted, we are all standing on the backs of half-starved coolies.”14
In his summary chapter of the Paris section, Orwell compares the slavery and suffering of a plongeur to that of an Indian rickshaw puller and a coal miner, which both looks back to Burma and anticipates Wigan. The most striking aspect of the continuity of Orwell's books in this period is that his description of the infernal plongeur's cellar is extraordinarily like the hellish mine in Wigan:
[I came] into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages—actually, I suppose, a few hundred yards in all—that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise…. It was too low for me to stand upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit…. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires. (Down and Out, 41–43)
Most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and above all, unbearably cramped space…. You can never forget … the line of bowed, [naked], kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed. (Wigan Pier, 19–21)
The theme of class exploitation is dramatized most vividly amidst the luxury and squalor of the grand hotel where the splendid customers sit just a few feet away from the disgusting filth of the kitchen workers. The only connection between these two worlds is the food prepared by one for the other, which often contains the cook's spit and waiter's hair grease. From this fact Orwell posits a wonderfully ironic economic law: “the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it” (59).