The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  As I write, this room is rapidly filling up with the stench of smelly little orthodoxies, and they are all about me. Every neo-con, lib-lab, beard-bearing student-humping academic, every Nation-reader, language snob, think-tank barnacle, priest, admiral, Harvard child-psychologist, CEO is aware that I am high on the list of entirely O.K. writers. “Orwell” has become one of those magic words, like “Art”; say it and everything is fine. You have only to quote me and your case is made. The grandchildren of people who fifty or sixty years ago would have been pleased to wipe their boots on me are now forced to read me in paperback. It’s no use pretending that the sheer power of my writing has brought this about, or that such a diversity of admirers have all come round to my general views. The last man you want to trust is the man whom everyone thinks is admirable. “Saints,” I once wrote, “should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.” The same holds true for writers, except that, as any writer worth his salt will tell you, no good writer is ever innocent.

  In one of those complex, less-than-straightforward letters of rejection that publisher’s editors frequently find themselves writing to authors, T. S. Eliot, after rejecting Animal Farm on behalf of the firm of Faber & Faber, wrote to Orwell that he regretted the rejection and that “I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.” My guess is that Orwell would have had no difficulty accepting that as a fair description of the quality of his writing. It strikes me as dead on target: “good writing of fundamental integrity.” Nowhere did Orwell suggest that he thought himself a writer for the ages, a universal genius, a figure of the kind that, posthumously and through the vagaries of circumstance, he has become: translated into all languages, required reading for schoolchildren, quoted approvingly by natural enemies.

  How intricate and never quite arbitrary a thing is reputation in literature! In one instance it can be aided immensely by early death (James Agee), in another by longevity (Robert Penn Warren). Unpopular politics have crushed a writer’s reputation (Wyndham Lewis), while careful radicalism can elevate another writer’s reputation (Robert Lowell). Some writers appear to have gained as greatly by withdrawing from the scene (Thomas Pynchon) as others have by clever self-promotion (Truman Capote). Reading the recent obituaries for Mary McCarthy, one of the more famous serious writers of our day, it occurred to me that Miss McCarthy’s fame had always depended upon her being alive to reinforce it. Her early rise in reputation depended in part on her youthful good looks, no matter how clever she was as a critic. In the fiction of her early and middle years, she sustained her reputation by her continuing ability to outrage through gossip and scandal. In her later years, a doyenne now, it was her being outraged that people tended to be concerned about, for she could be enormously disapproving and had ample supplies of anger for those of whom she disapproved. But now that Mary McCarthy is dead, good looks, outrageousness, disapproval, anger—all count for nothing. Only the work remains—much of it in her case, as has been said before, destructive and marred by a falsely moral snobbery—and since this gives so little in the way of pleasure or instruction, it is likely soon to dissipate, then disappear.

  Mary McCarthy was among those who attacked Orwell. In 1969, she thought that he left no generative political ideas, that his concept of decency was badly in need of definition, that he was conservative by temperament and thus almost instinctively opposed to fashion, change, and innovation—that, finally and in 1969 devastatingly, he probably would have been on the wrong side in Vietnam. Others have written against Orwell: Anthony West attempted to diminish him by psychoanalyzing him; Kingsley Martin claimed that in Animal Farm he had lost faith not merely in the Soviet Union but in mankind; D. A. N. Jones felt that he unfairly blackened the picture against left-wing intellectuals and was father of the bashing of feminists, pacifists, homosexuals, and other left-minded groups that Jones views as part of the political distraction and irrelevance of the current day. Firing away with Howitzers, Uzis, and squirt guns, Raymond Williams, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Terry Eagleton have all, in their turn and in their different times, taken their shots at him. Still others have spat upon, bepissed, and whacked away at the statue of Orwell, but without in any serious way staining it, let alone tipping it over.

  No critic of high standing has ever claimed that George Orwell was a first-rate novelist, though John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and other distinguished writers have written approvingly of his novels. Orwell did not write enough literary criticism to qualify, strictly speaking, as a literary critic. When he did write about writers—as he did about Dickens, Kipling, Tolstoy, Henry Miller—his impetus was generally extra-literary. A number of his familiar and personal essays are immensely impressive, but the quantity of these essays is not great. As with every journalist who works on weekly and fortnightly deadlines—as Orwell did on the Tribune and the London Observer—some weeks he was much better than others, and on many of those other weeks he could be pretty thin. He was splendid as a critic of popular culture—was something even of a pioneer in this field—but he could also come near ruining his work here through the intrusion of his own often rather coarse politics. After his admirably lucid account of the widely read sub-literature known as boys’ weeklies, and a measured analysis of their social import, Orwell could not refrain from remarking that the stories in the boys’ weeklies lead their readers to believe “that there is nothing wrong with laissez-faire capitalism” and he ended his essay, most disappointingly, by suggesting that, given the significant impression that youthful reading tends to leave for life, it is surely time to develop left-wing stories for the boys’ weekly market.

  Orwell died, of tuberculosis, in 1950 at the much-too-early age of forty-six. In a relatively brief writing career, he produced a vast amount of work. Except toward the end of his life, when the royalties from Animal Farm began to arrive, he produced what he did under considerable financial strain. His wretched health increased the strain. Although Orwell much admired craft, and more than once wrote of the importance of the aesthetic element in his own writing, the circumstances under which he worked were always arduous and scarcely allowed for Flaubertian meticulousness. If not altogether by choice, he was much less the artist than the professional writer. He was also, as he came to learn, chiefly a political writer.

  When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, “I am going to produce a work of art.” I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

  Cyril Connolly later seconded this point, remarking that Orwell was “a political animal” who “reduced everything to politics. . . . He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.”

  “Good prose,” Orwell famously wrote, “is like a window pane,” and the absence of artful window dressing in his own prose has been part of Orwell’s attraction for many readers. He commanded a prose style that strongly implied truth-telling ought to take precedence over art. In some of his work—one thinks of the chapter on the role of the POUM in Homage to Catalonia (1938) that he acknowledges may ruin his book but must nevertheless be included to set the record straight—this seemed to set Orwell above art, which, from a certain point of view, isn’t a bad place to be.

  Not, however, in the opinion of everyone. Conor Cruise O’Brien, reviewing the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell when it appeared in 1968, interestingly noted that “plain language has a tendency to become extreme—which is why the other kind of language is generally preferred—and thus a laudable peculiarity of style made Orwell seem more extreme than he was.” It has also made arriving at anything like a consensus about his true literary quality difficult. No agreement exists, for example, about which of Orwell’s books is his best. Some profess admiration for Homage to Catalonia; some say the first, others the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) represents his
best work. Mary McCarthy called Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) Orwell’s “masterpiece”; Cyril Connolly felt the same book was not more than “agreeable journalism” done much better by Henry Miller. Most sophisticated readers, when asked where the best of Orwell is to be found, reply, the essays; but even here consensus never quite arrives. Edmund Wilson, while admiring Orwell generally, thought that in his literary essays he had “the habit of taking complex personalities too much at their face value, of not getting inside them enough.” Newton Arvin thought Orwell, as an essayist, “an excellent writer on certain sorts of subjects,” but not up to writing on figures of the high cultural complexity of Yeats. Evelyn Waugh noted of Orwell: “He has an unusually high moral sense and respect for justice and truth, but he seems never to have been touched by a conception of religious thought and life.” Apart from showing how discrepant opinions about Orwell can be, these views show how apt other writers were to read into Orwell, or discover missing from him, those qualities they thought most important in their own work. What was the quality in George Orwell that made other writers read him as if he were a Rorschach test? And might not this quality, too, be connected in some central way to the unflagging prominence of Orwell’s reputation?

  To get at the complex nature of Orwell’s reputation, clearly something like a book-length study is required, or so at least Professor John Rodden, who teaches rhetoric at the University of Virginia and who has recently written such a book, must have felt. The Politics of Literary Reputation, which carries the subtitle The Making and Claiming of “St. George” Orwell, is a vast production. The book is easily double the length of any single book its subject ever wrote, and carries behind it, in a giant academic caboose, more than twelve hundred footnotes, most of them discursive. Professor Rodden has to have read nearly everything ever written about or connected with or even loosely tangential to George Orwell, popular and academic, English, American, and European. The small-type index feels like the telephone directory of a small town. It is an exhaustive study.

  Professor Rodden writes well enough, in a style that combines intellectual journalism with a heavy though not deadly admixture of academic locutions. There is little about his book, like so much current academic criticism, that bears the unmarked but unmistakable legend “TO THE TRADE ONLY.” And yet there is something about The Politics of Literary Reputation that makes it the near reverse, in the cant phrase, of “a good read.” It is instead a rough and rambling read. Less like a “read” at all, it feels like a long career, in which all one’s movement is lateral. Professor Rodden views Orwell from every possible angle—as Rebel, as Prophet, as Common Man, as Saint—but somehow the portrait that emerges from all these angle shots comes out less rounded than blurred. Pace and progress seem to play no part in the argument. The struggle to get in everything is paramount. Rodden seems perpetually to be reconstructing “foil phases of Orwell’s reputation in postwar Germany,” or demarcating his “three Tribune ‘lives’ between 1937–47,” or noting that this or that critic’s “history of reception of Orwell’s work can be divided into four or five parts.” Near the close, Rodden refers to his book as “this project,” and project is how the reader—including the entirely interested reader—comes to view it, too. An exhaustive study, as I say.

  Yet, for all Professor Rodden’s labors, one feels that the job has not been done—that is, if the job has been to account for why a writer of George Orwell’s particular quality has loomed as large as he has in the contemporary world. We get a great deal of background on the issues, questions, and problems connected with Orwell’s career. We learn much about what he meant to his contemporaries, the generation immediately following them, and to the left-wing intellectuals of the current day. We are filled in on the dispute over the ultimate character of Orwell’s politics and hence over the matter of his political legacy. Professor Rodden takes positions, is not shy about announcing his own politics (“left-of-center white male of working-class origins, a post-Vatican II Catholic liberal”), or fearful of speculating upon why one critic found Orwell attractive and another finds him repulsive. Rodden glues literally hundreds of small mosaics to the wall, but, somehow, a picture refuses to cohere. What one is left with are data, a vaster collection of facts about the career of a single writer than has perhaps ever before been gathered in a single place. But data, however interesting, remain data.

  What is missing, I believe, is a stronger element of literary criticism than the author of The Politics of Literary Reputation chooses to provide. The choice was a deliberate one—“This book,” writes Professor Rodden, “aims chiefly to describe the making and claiming of a reputation, rather than to argue a specific case for its upward or downward revaluation”—but it is not clear that the two activities, criticism and description, are so easily separable. Insofar as one of the tasks of criticism is to establish the quality of a writer with a view toward placing him among his contemporaries and predecessors, the reputation of any serious writer is almost always best understood from the perspective of criticism. Another of the tasks of criticism—one of the major ones, surely—is to confer just reputation. An unjust literary reputation, as ought by now to be well-known, can be as easily built on a writer’s defects as on his strengths; see, not merely passim, the last thirty or so years of American novelists. In the case of Orwell, one wonders if the question of how he arrived at his extraordinary reputation isn’t bound up with the answer to the literary critical question of what kind of writer he was, strengths, defects, ambiguities, and all.

  George Orwell has become a hero of culture. Other literary men have been heroes of culture over the past century, Henry James, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot among them. But these men derived their status from their art, for which they made heroic sacrifices and on which they left a permanent impress. But Orwell is extraordinary among heroes of culture in not being exclusively an artist, or even, strictly speaking, a figure whose most strenuous efforts were invested in high culture. One might even say that Orwell’s status derives in good part from his very artlessness. Max Beerbohm once declared that “to be interesting, a man must be complex and elusive,” citing the examples of Byron, Disraeli, and Rossetti as among the most interesting men in nineteenth-century England. But Orwell’s power, much of his interest to us, comes from the reverse qualities: his simplicity and straightforwardness, at least as these are exhibited in the character he projected in his most powerful writing.

  George Orwell has become a hero of culture. From the standpoint of reputation, character has always been Orwell’s strongest asset. It was imputed to him early and continued to be conferred on him posthumously. “I was a stage rebel,” wrote Cyril Connolly, who went to St. Cyprian’s and then Eton with him, “Orwell a true one,” adding: “The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself.” The imputation of strong character would heighten over the years. When Lionel Trilling came to write about Orwell, in an introduction to a 1952 edition of Homage to Catalonia, character had turned into virtue. Trilling allowed that Orwell was “not a genius,” but emphasized that Orwell’s virtue comprised “not merely moral goodness, but also fortitude and strength in goodness.” That he was not a genius made him, in Trilling’s view, all the more important, “for he communicates to us the sense that what he has done any one of us could do.” (In Trilling’s essay there follows a paragraph of extraordinary qualification that begins, “Or could do if we but made up our mind to it,” which suggests most of us cannot; and here one senses how Lionel Trilling, that academic Demosthenes, his mouth filled not with pebbles but perpetual qualifications and hesitations, must have achingly envied Orwell’s plainspokenness and readiness to act on his views.) From boy of character to man of virtue, Orwell was next (though not in strict chronological order) transmuted into “the wintry conscience of a generation,” in V. S. Pritchett’s obituary article in the New Statesman of January 28, 1950, “a kind of saint,�
� a “Don Quixote” whose “conscience could be allayed only by taking upon itself the pain, the misery, the dinginess and the pathetic but hard vulgarities of a stale and hopeless period.” One would like to think that George Orwell, reading all this, would have been mildly amused.

  Yet these have been the terms in which, for the vast most part, Orwell has been judged. As Professor Rodden puts it,

  If we see Pritchett’s obituary [which also appeared in a somewhat different version in the New York Times Book Review] as one of those reception moments to which readers have repeatedly returned—like Trilling’s introduction to Homage to Catalonia and Connolly’s characterization of Orwell in Enemies of Promise (1938)—it offers further insight into the reputation process.

  Cyril Connolly, Lionel Trilling, and V. S. Pritchett make for a pretty fair triumvirate of testimonials, representing English and American literary criticism at its best from its aesthetic through its morally serious strain. Yet can the terms for judging Orwell that they have set down be sustained in our day?

  I do not, myself, think that they quite can be. I say this with no great glee, for Orwell has been one of a small number of modern writers from whom my own way of viewing the world derives. Although one is trained, in judging literature, to ignore the life of a writer and concentrate on the work, anyone with any normal human feeling is always secretly delighted to learn that a writer he admires is also a man or woman he can respect. Part of the attractiveness of Orwell has of course been the respect that the integrity of his life invites. No finality in biography is available, and it may yet turn up that Orwell perpetuated some hideously caddish acts. But just now it does seem that a good part of the reason for the reverence in which he is held is the stupidity-ridden, disgrace-laden, generally shameful history of intellectual life of the past half century or so, against which Orwell’s relative normality, common sense, and decency stand out.