Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In the 1930's, coal “was by far the largest single industry, the only one employing more than a million workers. It had always been the symbol of class struggle.”31 Orwell's immersion in the reality of this struggle was his very deliberate attempt to overcome what he considered “the tragic failure of theoretical Socialism, to make contact with the normal working classes.”32 Orwell believes it is both his duty and responsibility to have first-hand experience in the slums and mines, and he cannot see the value of the more objective intellectual inquiry of Beatrice Webb, whom he calls a “high-minded Socialist slum visitor” (157). As he wrote to Richard Rees from Wigan, “Have you ever been down a mine? I don't think I shall ever feel quite the same about coal again.” Neither will his readers, for Orwell's acute observations on coal mining leave a vivid impression: “you have a tolerable sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it—all this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg” (22). His account of the miners crawling to work underground for two or three hours each day (without pay) is a powerful and disturbing revelation.

  Orwell's approach is documentary, empirical and pragmatic, filled with statistics, essential information and useful suggestions, and his view is, as far as possible, an “insider's” view.33 In praising people's patience with him, Orwell humorously describes his methods and their response: “If any unauthorized person walked into my house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell. This only happened to me once, and in that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a Means Test nark; but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I wanted” (65). Orwell constantly refers to his own practical knowledge (“you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet”) with phrases like “I have had just enough experience …” and “From my own observation …” and “Once when I was ….” The result of this approach is twofold: as in Down and Out, he questions common assumptions, discredits the illusion and shows the reality; and he also describes the most serious injustices he has lived through himself. He has a deep loathing of the ugliness, emptiness and cruelty of what he sees, but is not merely content to describe it—he wants to transform it radically.34

  The main effect of shattering illusions and enforcing reality is to convince the reader that he is profoundly ill-informed and must change his wrong-headed attitude about the working classes. Contrary to popular belief, Orwell finds that miners wash when they can; eat astonishingly little; are poorly paid; have impoverished landlords who cannot afford repairs; do mind dirtiness; favor slum clearance; dislike crowded areas; want to work and do not like unemployment; are sensitive and serious; do not smell; and lead an extremely hard life. In short, they are much like other people (“the interests of the exploited are the same” [203]), only worse off because of the inequity and iniquity of the capitalist system. By making readers understand the workers, Orwell alleviates their fears and engages their sympathy; by making them care about their countrymen, he pricks their social conscience and awakens their sense of justice.

  The great strength of Wigan Pier (and Down and Out) is that the economic injustices are always described in human terms. Orwell's vision of Wigan is like Blake's of London:

  I wander thro’ each charter'd street,

  Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,

  And mark in every face I meet

  Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

  For both writers a slum implies warped lives and ailing children. Orwell's moving theme is a fervent plea for human dignity and compassion, and against “the frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized struggles against economic laws, which he does not understand, the disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame” (131). He attacks Corporation housing because it is soulless and inhumane, and erodes both family and communal life; he criticizes the Means Test because it cruelly breaks up families; and he exposes the deadening effect of unemployment. His images of human degradation are the most powerful: the desolate drudgery of the exhausted young woman kneeling beside the blocked waste-pipe; the blank and aged grandmother with the yellow cretinous countenance; the worn skull-like face of the slum mother; and the dumpy shawled women crawling in the cindery mud in search of coal chips. (Orwell's contrasting image of human affirmation is the pavement-artist Bozo in Down and Out who gazes at the stars and is a free man in his own mind: “rich or poor, you can still keep on with your books and your ideas.”)35 Orwell's emphasis throughout the book is on the “ordinary decent person,” and the sense of human waste, shame and debasement that he conveys is overwhelming. As Orwell wrote during the War, “I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anybody else…. I wanted to think that the class distinctions and imperialist exploitation of which I am ashamed would not return.”

  Though Orwell writes “I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them” (102–103) and dissociates himself from a belief in the superiority of the proletariat, he too idealizes the manners, temperament, stoicism, family life36 and democracy of the working class.37 This is partly because he is intensely dissatisfied with his own middle-class origins and wants to transcend them. But more importantly, he feels, like Sartre and other French writers of the Thirties, that the working “class incarnates some deeply meaningful myth of suffering, and that in its emancipation lies the general ‘salvation of mankind.’”38 Victor Brombert's perceptive analysis of the basic attitude of French intellectuals toward Marxist beliefs applies with equal force to Orwell: “1. a characteristic, nearly pathological humility in the face of the Proletariat…. 2. the belief that the bourgeois intellectual can save his soul only by sharing the suffering of the working class and by imitating its ‘Passion’…. 3. the conviction that any present sacrifices, even self-destruction, will be eschatologically justified; that the intellectual's duty is to prepare the future…. 4. the concomitant quest for holiness by means of martyrdom.”39 (The fourth point is implicit in the imitation of the “Passion” and the sacrificial self-destruction.)

  Orwell is quite explicit about his humility: “if there is one type of man to whom I feel myself inferior, it is a coal miner” (102); and he exhibits an almost Lawrencean admiration for their earthiness and physical power: “underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel” (31). He is equally clear on the notion of penitential sacrifice among the “symbolic victims”: “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants…. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and … part of my guilt would drop from me” (130–131).

  The third point is twofold: the duty to prepare for the future and the idea of self-punishment. The whole force of Orwell's argument for “the ideal of Socialism, justice and liberty” (189) testifies to his compulsive desire to prepare for the future, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” And Orwell's entire life, a series of personal sacrifices for a higher cause, in Burma, France, Spain and England, testifies to his need for self-punishment. The words that provide the theoretical basis of these sacrifices were inscribed by Orwell in his diary during the grim days of June 1940, and they express, perhaps more than anything else he wrote, his personal courage and high moral principle: “Both E and G insistent that I should go to Canada if the worst comes to the worst, in order to stay alive and keep up propaganda. I will go if I have some function, e.g. if the government were transferred to Canada and I had some kind of a job, but not as a refugee, not as an expatriate journalist squealing from a safe distance. There are t
oo many of these exiled ‘anti-Fascists’ already. Better to die if necessary, and maybe even as propaganda one's death might achieve more than going abroad and living more or less unwanted on other people's charity.”40

  FIVE

  ORWELL AND

  THE EXPERIENCE OF FRANCE

  Orwell's austere existence in Paris provided a striking contrast to the glittering bohemian life of American expatriates in the 1920s. This essay described how the quintessentially English Orwell had extensive personal and professional connections with France, which inspired his first book. Paris made him even more English and gave him a new angle of vision.

  The now extinct World and I, a high-paying hodge-podge of a magazine, let me write about many different subjects: graduate school in Berkeley in the 1960s, my work in an English auction house, the Greek idea of madness and art, my biography of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, the pony express, my mother's physical and mental collapse, the attempt to murder my father, the futility of the war in Iraq (September 1998) and the impossibility of military victory in Afghanistan (January 2002). While the fact-checkers were sleeping at the switch, the editor published a misleading photo to accompany Berkeley in the ’60s, which was clearly taken in the ’50s. In this essay on Orwell he included a photo of “Henry Miller”—a thin grey man dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, wearing a goatee and looking like one of the Smith Bros. cough drop men. When I pointed out that this was not the notorious pornographer (whom he'd never heard of), the editor insisted that it was a man called Henry Miller and that no one would ever notice the difference.

  I

  George Orwell, author of the satiric fable Animal Farm and the prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, created an image of himself as a quintessentially English writer in his choice of pseudonym, in the subject-matter of his novels and essays, and in his political analysis of the English social scene. But his mother was wholly French in background, though from an expatriate family. His first published book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), told the story of his extended stay in Paris in the late 1920s, his menial jobs and descent into poverty. One of his best essays, “How the Poor Die” (1946) is a vivid account of how he came close to death in a Paris hospital. “Marrakech” (1939) gives a piercing snapshot of life in Morocco, then a French colony. Though his education and upbringing made him English, at a critical juncture in his life he chose to live in Paris. Why did Orwell go to live in France, what did he expect to find there, and how did this experience change his life and influence his work?

  A schoolboy during the Great War, Orwell was taught French at Eton by the highly eccentric and rather miserable Aldous Huxley, who later wrote the influential utopian novel Brave New World. Half-blind, inexperienced and insecure, Huxley was treated by the boys with appalling incivility. But Orwell, unlike his classmates, saw beyond Huxley's physical disability and pathetic attempts to keep order, and disliked their cruel jeers. He appreciated the quality of Huxley's mind, and admired his use of unusual words and phrases. Always defending the underdog, a school fellow recalled, “he rather stood up for Huxley because he found him interesting.” Huxley must have taught him well, for Orwell mastered spoken and written French, and later taught French and English at the coeducational Frays School, west of London. He later corresponded in French with the translator of Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War.

  On leaving Eton at eighteen Orwell had gone to Burma to serve in the British colonial police force, where he remained for five increasingly unhappy years. Both his parents had a colonial background, and the French side of his family had a long association with Burma. His maternal greatgrandfather, G. E. Limouzin, was born in France and became a prosperous shipbuilder and teak merchant in Moulmein. His grandfather, Frank Limouzin—spiky-haired and beetle-browed, with sharp nose, thin lips and severe expression—looked exactly like a rapacious miser in one of Honoré de Balzac's novels. Punning on the Limouzins’ exotic name, as a boy Orwell called them “Lemonskins” or “Automobiles.”

  In July 1927, sailing home after five years in Burma, Orwell disembarked in Marseilles, planning to travel across France by train. There he witnessed a massive political protest in what was for him a defining moment. A vast crowd had turned out to support Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a highly controversial case. “All these people,” Orwell wrote, “—tens of thousands of them—were genuinely indignant over a piece of injustice, and thought it quite natural to lose a day's wages in order to say so.” He contrasted the passion of the French crowds to comments of the English bank clerks in Marseilles, who didn't care if the men were guilty or innocent, and crassly exclaimed: “Oh well, you've got to hang these blasted anarchists.” He admired the instinctive sense of justice in the French people.

  After returning from Burma Orwell became estranged from his parents, who were furious when he gave up his secure government job. They felt they had done their best for him, and had no sympathy with his ambitions to be a writer or with his political views. In the spring of 1928 the twenty–fiveyear–old Orwell put some distance between himself and his disappointed family, went to Paris to test his resolve and his abilities, and lived there for nearly two years. In 1929 he saw Philippe Pétain, the defender of Verdun, at the state funeral of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme commander of the victorious French armies in World War I. He contrasted his own experiences in Paris with that of thousands of American expatriates who flocked there in the 1920s, when everything was cheap for those with dollars to spend. As he wrote in his essay on the controversial American novelist Henry Miller: “During the boom years, when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchés and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen.”

  Orwell's Paris was altogether different from that of the expatriate authors Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, and he had no contact with French or English-speaking intellectuals. He lived in the squalid rue Pot de Fer (Iron Pot Street) in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway had lived in the district with his first wife in the early 1920s, but by the time Orwell arrived he'd moved on to a richer wife and a better address. Orwell did not frequent the fashionable restaurants and cafés, though he thought he once saw Joyce in one of his favorite hangouts, the café Deux Magots (Two Apes). Other expatriate writers wanted to enjoy the good life for very little money. Orwell wanted to endure a harsh life with no money at all.

  Orwell's grim experiences in Paris gave him the right to condemn the English Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton, who ignorantly idealized “Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not spent much time in France, and his picture of it—as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine—had about as much relation to reality as [the popular musical] Chu Chin Chow has to every-day life in Baghdad.” Reviewing Cyril Connolly's hedonistic novel The Rock-Pool, which takes place among expatriates in the south of France, Orwell—in a finely tuned sentence—defined the moral chasm between himself and his comfortably decadent old school friend: “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.” Orwell was interested in French politics and literature but he did not go to France for pleasure. When contemporaries like Connolly were studying at Oxford and spending the long summers enjoying art, architecture and music in Paris, the food, the scenery and the shimmering beaches of Provence, Orwell was doing a tough and lonely job in Burma.

  For most of his time in Paris Orwell survived on his savings, supplemented by teaching English. “When you are in a foreign country,” he observed, “unless you are there because you are obliged to work there, you do not live fully and you do not usually mix with ordinary people. You tend to spend your life in cafés or brothels or picture galleries rather than in ordinary homes, and if you're also short
of money your experiences will be more sordid than they would be in your own country.” He lived a more or less solitary existence, finding his own kind of dissipation in low life. Instinctively masochistic, he sought out the most uncomfortable place he could find and reveled in his ability to live on only a few francs a day. We know almost nothing about the first twenty-two months of Orwell's life in Paris, nothing about the ordinary people he met and homes he visited while teaching English. He made no lasting friends and had no serious relationships with women. He wrote two novels, but threw them away. He didn't think his commonplace existence was worth mentioning in Down and Out. His money dwindled, he became ill and he was robbed. First he pawned most of his belongings, then he got work as a dishwasher. He couldn't admit failure and ask his parents for money.

  Orwell used to visit his mother's bohemian sister, Nellie Limouzin, a militant Socialist and suffragette. Though he rarely sought her help, his aunt could always be counted on for a small handout. She'd acted in vaudeville and was married to a Frenchman, Eugène Adam, who'd been involved in the Russian revolution in Petrograd in October 1917. “The marriage was not happy,” according to one of their friends. “She had no character. She was soft, without backbone, without willpower.” Adam, a fanatic who refused to speak any language but Esperanto, later abandoned Nellie, wound up in Mexico and killed himself in 1947. If Orwell had gone to Paris with the idea of exploring the French half of his heritage, he must have been disappointed, for he had little contact with French people of his own social class. He inhabited the underworld of downtrodden foreign workers, and Paris reinforced his Englishness.