Orwell (34 page)

In his “Imaginary Interview” with Jonathan Swift, published in the
Listener
in November 1942, Orwell said that
“Gulliver's Travels
has meant more to me than any other book ever written. I can't remember when I first read it, I must have been eight years old at the most, and it's lived with me ever since so that I suppose a year has never passed without my re-reading at least part of it.” Swift, a major influence on Orwell's ideas about writing, also wrote three important essays about the need to preserve clear style and eliminate corrupt language. In “On Corruptions of Style” (1710)—essential reading for anyone who wants to write good prose—Swift, like Hobbes, followed the tradition of English plain style. He attacked senseless, convoluted “wit” and condemned “words and phrases that are offensive to good sense.”

Swift's “Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue” (1712) unrealistically hoped to arrest the decline of language and preserve (his editor wrote) “a sanctioned standard language, in order to give permanent life to all written records.” Anticipating Orwell's plan in “New Words” to create an informal academy to study language, Swift proposed a strict English Academy (modeled on the well-established Academy in France) dedicated to eliminating useless words. They “will observe many gross Improprieties, which however authorized by Practice, and grown familiar, ought to be discarded. They will find many Words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of Our language; many more to be corrected.”

In his “Letter to a Young Gentleman, lately entered into Holy Orders” (1721), Swift, an old gentleman, long in holy orders, expressed his clearest ideas about style, which he classically defined as “Proper Words in Proper Places.” (In “New Words” Orwell, echoing Swift, defines good style as “taking the right words and putting them in place.”) Swift emphasized clarity, particularly disliked the “use of obscure terms” and urged the young clergyman to address his congregation “in a manner to be understood by the meanest among them.”

Orwell's “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of
Gulliver's Travels
” considers “the inter-connection between Swift's political loyalties and his ultimate despair” and “the relationship between agreement with a writer's
opinions, and enjoyment of his work.” He discusses the changes in Gulliver's character in the four parts of this rancorous, reactionary and pessimistic book, as well as Swift's hatred of the human body, his paradoxical denunciation of oppression but dislike of democracy, his reverence for the past, lack of belief in religion or progress and his scorn for humanity. For Orwell the most significant aspect of
Gulliver's Travels
and “Swift's greatest contribution to political thought” is his attack on totalitarianism: “he has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted ‘police State,' with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials.”

Swift had a profound impact on Orwell's political fiction. Taking a hint from Swift's rational horses, he idealized the horses in
Animal Farm
, and transformed Swift's Floating Island of Laputa into the Floating Fortress in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He mentions that books were written by machinery in
Gulliver's Travels
and in “The Prevention of Literature” says it would “not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” Orwell, like Swift, was a “Tory anarchist,” a revolutionary in love with the past, but he was not a complete pessimist. In “Why I Write” Orwell states: “as long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects.” In “Politics vs. Literature,” by contrast, he emphasizes Swift's inability “to believe that life—ordinary life on the solid earth…—could be made worth living.”

Orwell owned hundreds of political pamphlets, and in his essay on pamphlet literature, published in 1943, he exclaimed: “the pamphlet ought to be
the
literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form.” His introduction to a co-edited anthology
British Pamphleteers
(1948) advocates (like “Good Bad Books”) another minor but valuable kind of writing. Closely connected—in comparative method and argument—to “Politics and the English Language,” it forcefully laments the current decay of English and the corresponding decline of the pamphlet. After defining the topical and polemical pamphlet, rarely concerned with evidence or truth and essentially a protest expressed through exuberant argument and scurrilous attacks, he sums up the horrors of capitalism in a single, rhetorically effective sentence. “Wherever one looks,” he exclaims, “one sees fiercer struggles than the Crusades, worse tyrannies than the Inquisition, and bigger lies than the Popish Plot.” His age (like ours) cries out for political pamphlets but the form, to Orwell's deep regret, has virtually died out.

Orwell's political point of view informed all his criticism and fiction. “Why I Write,” his retrospective artistic credo, begins with a brief account
of his early life, including a description of his first novel,
Burmese Days
, in order to explain his four great motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. In a letter of 1938 he added, in amusingly cynical American diction, “pulling in the dough.” He might also have mentioned, as he did in a review of John Galsworthy, “some minor trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness,” that gave him the urge to write. He called the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought on the Loyalist side and was shot through the throat, the great turning point in his life. After that, he said, every line of his serious work—and in his view no work could be serious without a political purpose—was written
“against
totalitarianism and
for
democratic Socialism.” His conscious aim was to transform “political writing into an art.”

Most of Orwell's essays on writing—particularly “New Words,” “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” and “Politics and the English Language”—prefigure the ideas that he dramatized in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Fond of making political prophecies and honestly willing to admit his mistakes, Orwell urged readers to keep a diary—as Winston Smith does in the novel—not only to recover and preserve the past, but also to maintain an accurate perspective on the truth: “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps towards it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.”

Like Gordon Comstock in
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
, Winston Smith is absorbed into the hateful system he'd once opposed, and expresses his anxiety in two kinds of composition. He professionally destroys the work of others while secretly writing his own work. In his job Winston alters the records of the past to fit Party policy. In private, he writes on the creamy paper of an old diary with an old-fashioned pen and ink. The first kind of writing (like Orwell's at the BBC) is mechanical and exhausting, the second (like Orwell's own creative writing) is psychologically liberating, but also sets off disturbing memories and dreams. The first is systematic lying in Newspeak, the second a passionate search for truth in Oldspeak. Orwell contrasts the mindless, bureaucratic attitude Winston needs to do this work with his panic at the blank sheet of paper, his poor handwriting, his mental and emotional confusion when he starts writing for himself. Winston's work forces him to practice “Doublethink,” the ability to hold simultaneously two contradictory opinions which cancel each other out. Winston has to believe that he's rectifying errors, yet also knows that he's falsifying information. Each kind of writing forces him to find a plausible formula to disguise the
truth. Winston is manipulated by the system and, in his role of Outer Party intellectual, is also part of the system that manipulates others.

The word “Orwellian” constantly appeared in 2003, Orwell's centenary year, and has become essential to our political discourse. But the term is ambiguous. In the negative sense, it stands for the kind of oppressive totalitarian regime that he created in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, especially political manipulation of the media to deceive the public. In the positive sense, it suggests the personal honesty, bravery and idealism in both his life and his writing. For Orwell, writing has two essential aspects. The first concerns an individual writer (like Winston Smith) who sits down alone to communicate his most secret thoughts, even to an unknown future reader. He must have courage and dedication, and an optimistic belief in his own ideas. The second concerns the writer's desire and power to ameliorate society. For Orwell clear language and independent thought were an aesthetic as well as a moral responsibility.

Ironically, Orwell's subtle and morally acute lessons on how to read and write have been misunderstood and misapplied after his death. Neoconservatives have singled out his warnings about the totalitarian aspects of the Socialist state and claimed him as one of their own. A recent account of the Cold War described
Nineteen Eighty-Four
as “the canonical text” of conservative anti-Communism, as “the key imaginative manifesto of the Cold War” and gave Orwell credit for having “invented … a complete poetics of political invective.” Willfully obscuring the complexity of its vision, this reduces the novel to a clever piece of propaganda. More grotesquely, the John Birch Society used to sell his novel in its Washington office and even used 1984 as the last digits of its telephone number.

Since Orwell himself was so scrupulous about his own limitations as a political observer and criticized the Left as sharply as the Right, it is easy to cite his ideas out of context and simply ignore his professed belief in democratic Socialism. Like devout Mormons baptizing their helpless ancestors, the neo-cons, by trying to co-opt him, have missed the whole point of his life and work. In an anxious, atheistic age like our own, he resisted the temptation to submit to religious or political dogma, and believed that ordinary people had to participate in the conduct of political life. Despite his vast influence, Orwell was never part of a movement, and remained a solitary, individualistic writer with a stubborn message: think for yourself and write the truth.

In a famous statement the eighteenth-century French naturalist Count Buffon said: “the style is the man himself.” Like his hero Jonathan Swift and other writers of the Enlightenment, Orwell derived his clear style from moral integrity.
There was in Orwell an unusual consistency between the gritty, combative persona that emanates from his lucid writing and his courageous, civilized and intellectually truthful character. His description of Charles Dickens, another of his literary heroes, applies equally to himself: “In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root…. The strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny…. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.” Dickens, Orwell observes, has “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
—… a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” Irving Howe summed up Orwell as “craggy, fiercely polemical, sometimes mistaken, but an utterly free man. In his readiness to stand alone and take on all comers, he was a model for every writer of our age.” Orwell belongs with Johnson, Blake and Lawrence in the great English tradition of prophetic moralists.

 

 

 

 

My three general essays (of which this is the third) were written after my analyses of Orwell's major works. Though it's difficult to explain jokes, this piece showed that “Gloomy George” could be quite funny and lightened his dark warnings with sardonic wit. He used many different kinds of humor—from puns and obscenities to sexual innuendoes and suggestions of perversity—to express his political beliefs.

Orwell called the doom-laden Thirties “a riot of appalling folly that suddenly becomes a nightmare, a scenic railway ending in a torture-chamber,” and wrote that “since about 1930 everyone describable as an ‘intellectual' has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.” “Everywhere,” he exclaimed in 1940, “there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm.” For him, to think was to be miserable.

Gloomy George (as friends called him) was tubercular, guilt-ridden, masochistic and self-destructive. He relished physical discomfort and was extremely pessimistic. John Carey writes that Orwell was personally “prickly, diffident, ill at ease with ordinary people.” His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin called him “a skeleton at the feast” and recalled that in pubs Orwell “used to sit in a corner by himself, looking like death.” Noel Annan said that he “remained a biting, bleak, self-critical, self-denying man.”

Though never a bundle of laughs, Orwell had a lively sense of humor. He revealed another, more human, side of his austere character when he lightened his dark warnings with an idiosyncratic, sardonic English wit. Using different voices, from charming to cruel, and always finely tuned to the chronic problems of his age, he consoled his readers for his grim message
that conditions would not change and might even get worse. His humor expressed his intelligence and showed that he was still alive and protesting, no matter how grim the state of the world.