Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Reach-Me-Down Romantic
Terry Eagleton
George Orwell by Gordon Bowker
Little, Brown, 495 pp, £20.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 316 86115 4
Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor
Chatto, 448 pp, £20.00, June 2003, ISBN 0 7011 6919 2
Orwell: Life and Times by Scott Lucas
Haus, 180 pp, £8.99, April 2003, ISBN 1 904341 33 0
He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England
background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop
later on. A passionate left-wing polemicist, he nonetheless retained more than a
few traces of his public-school breeding, including a plummy accent and a horde
of posh friends. He combined cultural Englishness with political
cosmopolitanism, and detested political personality cults while sedulously
cultivating a public image of himself. From a vantage-point of relative security, he
made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep
his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with
precious journalistic copy. Coruscatingly intelligent though not in the strict sense
an intellectual, he had the ornery, bloody-minded streak of the independent
leftist and idiosyncratic Englishman, as adept at ruffling the feathers of his fellow
socialists as at outraging the opposition. As he grew older, this cussedness
became more pronounced, until his hatred of benighted autocratic states led him
in the eyes of many to betray his left-wing views altogether.
The case for the defence is that Orwell was a magnificently courageous
opponent of political oppression, a man of unswerving moral integrity
and independence of spirit who risked his life fighting Fascism,
narrowly escaped death at the hands of Stalin’s agents in Spain, and
denounced an imperialism of which he had had unpleasant first-hand
knowledge as a young policeman in Burma. In the meantime, he
managed to pioneer what is now known as cultural studies. In a
remarkable feat of self-refashioning, he turned his back on a life of
middle-class privilege and chose for his companions tramps, hop-
pickers, Catalonian revolutionaries, louche artists and political
activists.
Like any self-transformation, this one was imperfect. Orwell may have
castigated Britain’s class-ridden education system, but he put his
adopted son down for Wellington and kept up his Etonian contacts to
the end. Some Old Etonians have even claimed that they could identify
him as one of their own from his writings, a hard case to credit unless
Eton was stuffed with budding critics of saucy postcards and analysts
of dirigiste economics. Like most of us, however, he loved Big Brother
more than he admitted. He portrayed his prep school, run by a couple
named Wilkes, as a brutal place, but D.J. Taylor thinks this is typical of
his self-pitying image as the victimised outsider. (A sentence of
Taylor’s beginning ‘Though presumably touched up by the Wilkeses’
turns out to concern Orwell’s letters home rather than his person.) One
friend considered him conservative in everything but politics. This is
not entirely paradoxical, since Orwell saw socialism as all about
preserving traditional decencies. He knew a strange amount about
ecclesiastical affairs, preferred Housman and Kipling to Yeats and
Pound, and fretted about the quality of tea he would get in Spain. After
resigning from the colonial service in Burma, where he had been in
charge of 200,000 people at the age of 20, he described imperialism as
‘that evil despotism’; but he also admired empire-builders for their
practicality, and thought that a clip around the ear might do the
natives no harm at all. In Burma he had used the left-
wing Adelphimagazine for target practice.
Orwell was a tender father to his son, Richard (on being complimented
on the fact, he replied absently that he had always been good with
animals), and was too soft-hearted to reject much of the execrable
material submitted to him as literary editor of Tribune. In the words of
the youngish Raymond Williams, who knew Orwell and later wrote of
him much more resentfully, he was ‘brave, generous, frank and good’.
Despite being chronically sick and temperamentally standoffish, he
was astonishingly engaged and industrious; in one year he produced
an article every two or three days, and Taylor provides us with the
surreally useless bit of information that his oeuvre, if spread out sheet
by sheet, would occupy an area roughly the size of Norwich town
centre.
Orwell detested those, mostly on the Left, who theorised about
situations without having experienced them, a common empiricist
prejudice. There is no need to have your legs chopped off to
sympathise with the legless, and no reason why being legless yourself
should necessarily entail compassion for those in a similar state. ‘In
order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it,’ Orwell wrote,
which is plainly false: being part of it in the way he was is as likely to
blunt your hatred as to sharpen it. This, in fact, is just the kind of
slipshod generalisation that Orwell’s cult of the particular is supposed
to resist. It is good, of course, for the nobs to get about a bit and see
how the other half lives; but this will not necessarily benefit anybody
but themselves, whereas joining a political organisation might bring
the masses real gains. Orwell in fact joined two, one in Spain and one
at home (the Independent Labour Party); but he suffered from the
empiricist illusion that what was real was what you could smell with
your own nose and feel with your own fingers. Samuel Johnson held
much the same view – and if Johnson is the kind of ‘character’ the
English adore, it is not only because they take a stoutly individualist
delight in the idiosyncratic, but because a ‘character’ represents the
tangible truth of a person rather than the abstract truth of an idea.
Orwell was for the most part incapable of giving an oblique answer to a
question, just as Derrida is incapable of giving a straight one. One
should be cautious of those who loudly insist on cutting the crap and
telling it like it is, just as one should beware of those who find things
too exquisitely complex for definitive judgment. Orwell seems to have
felt a rather puritanical sense of guilt about his own relish for language
(he was an admirer of James Joyce), and believed he had to repress it
in the interests of political utility. Such an attitude is scarcely
conducive to producing major fiction. Fiction is a problem in a puritan
nation, even if English literature is strewn with instances of great
novels (Clarissa, Tristram Shandy) which revolve on the tragic or comic
artifice of writing itself. For all his stylistic tics, however, Orwell told the
truth about the Stalinist subversion of the revolution in Spain when
others were busy suppressing it, just as he spoke up for the victims of
Stalinism when most of the comrades were staring studiedly the other
way. Such writers can be forgiven the odd intemperate epithet, just as
E.P. Thompson can be.
As a public schoolboy turned imperial lackey, Orwell felt cut off from
his own country, and spent a lifetime seeking to get in touch with it. He
was an internal exile in England, as Wilde, James, Conrad and T.S. Eliot
were literal exiles; and like them he had to make the place his own in
an act of conscious adoption from which the insider is absolved. Like
them, too, this meant that he was both more passionate about it and
more able to view it at a distance. He knew that the ruling class are in
some ways as much outsiders as vagrants and dossers, which is why
the landowner has a sneaking sympathy for the poacher. To be in
charge of the system is to be as free of its conventions as those who
fall right through them. The ruling-class outsider had to be converted
into the revolutionary one – a shift aided by the curious irony that, in
class societies, an actual majority of the people are in some sense
excluded.
Yet if the politics of rupture are too suspicious of the present, this vein
of leftism can be too credulous of it. As Williams himself occasionally
pointed out, you cannot extend existing values to new social groups
without seeing them transformed in the process. Socialism has its
‘continuist’ strand, acknowledging its indebtedness to a precious
heritage of popular sentiments and middle-class liberalism without
which any socialist order is likely to be stillborn. But it has its Modernist
or avant-garde dimension as well, envisaging as it does a transfigured
human individual whom the language of the present cannot
encompass; and Orwell, unlike D.H. Lawrence, had as little feel for this
revolutionary avant-gardism as he did for most avant-garde art. The
Stalinism he fought displayed in this respect the worst of both worlds:
conservative, philistine, hidebound and hierarchical,and damagingly
bereft of a liberal inheritance.
Gordon Bowker’s and D.J. Taylor’s Lives appear in the centenary of
their protagonist’s birth, and are shrewd, readable, well-researched
studies. They are largely favourable to their subject without being blind
to his shortcomings, though both books suffer from the usual
biographical defect of sacrificing the wood to the trees. Taylor is a
shade more sprightly and witty (Orwell’s Etonian drawl, he observes,
‘immediately enveloped its owner in a pair of spiritual plus-fours’),
while Bowker is rather more fascinated by his subject’s interest in the
occult and supernatural, as well as by his fairly lurid sex life. He is also
more psychologically inclined, suspecting Orwell of sadism, paranoia
and self-hatred while admiring him all the same. Both authors,
however, have been digging in much the same archives and deliver
much the same narrative, so that the world is too big, and life too
short, for both of these impressive volumes. Perhaps some kind soul
should have put the two men in touch with each other.
In contrast with these two big-hearted biographies, Scott
Lucas’sOrwell is a resolute hatchet job. There is indeed much in Orwell
to be hatcheted, and Lucas does it with remarkable efficiency. He
lambasts his lack of political analysis and constructive proposals, his
insulting equation of Second World War pacifism with pro-Fascism, his
patrician nostalgia for Anglo-India, his absurd assertion that it is ‘the
people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who
will flinch from revolution when the time comes’. Lucas rightly points
out how methodically Orwell excludes the militant working class
fromThe Road to Wigan Pier, lest it undermine his disingenuous thesis
that socialism is entirely a middle-class affair. He has a properly brisk
way with Orwell’s homophobic horror of the ‘pansy Left’, the virulent
misogyny of 1984, and the shameful episode in which, towards the end
of his life, he handed over to the authorities a list of more than a
hundred leftists on whom they should keep a careful eye.
Despite a perfunctory piece of hat-tipping at the outset to Orwell’s
achievements, and the odd acknowledgment that he may occasionally
have written something valuable, Lucas is too carried away by his own
animosity to be judicious. This is at least one way in which he
resembles his subject. An Orwellian polemic against mass-market
journalism, of which one would expect the left-wing Lucas to approve,
reveals a ‘righteous’ hatred. ‘Self-righteous’, one suspects he means to
insinuate, and speaking of self-righteousness, when Orwell candidly
owns up to his political ambivalences as an Old Etonian socialist, he is
sternly taken to task for them. The former Burmese colonial official is
said ‘to criticise the Empire that he had only recently served’, as
though there is a whiff of hypocrisy about his volte face. A piece which
‘ostensibly’ calls for Indian independence actually does so. When
Orwell supports the Allies’ war against Fascism, he is dubbed a
‘warmonger’.
Lucas is right that Orwell is far more impressive as a moral critic than
as a constructive political thinker. But it is perverse to judge him as
though he were a Marxist-Leninist theoretician from whom marks must
be deducted for falling down on the job. We are told that he disliked
class culture but refused to join any organised political opposition to it,
which may be true of the Orwell of Wigan Pier but hardly of the later
ILP-er. There is, Lucas tut-tuts, no knowledge of Marx, Keynes or
political history underlying Wigan Pier, but he confesses a moment
later that ‘Orwell did not have to be an intellectual’ to make it an
important book, and that ‘no theory’ was needed for this purpose. He
endorses more than once Williams’s curious assertion that Orwell was
never able to see capitalism as a system, as though he indulged some
naive early Dickensian fantasy that it was simply the work of wicked
individuals.