Orwell (6 page)

Flory's inability to meet responsibility under the pressure of an overwhelming guilt is revealed in his relationships with Dr. Veraswami, whom he proposes to the Club only when it is too late; with his Burmese mistress May Hla, whom he abandons and then bribes after a mutually destructive relationship, and who decays in a brothel after exposing him before Elizabeth; and finally with Elizabeth herself, whom he can neither enlighten nor engage. His suicide, an appropriate gesture of physical courage and moral weakness, is his terrible protest against these failures.

But Orwell himself continued to bear that guilt he acquired in Burma and to defy that “whale” which swallowed up so many other writers. His whole life was a struggle against barbarism and for what he called “comparative decency”: a sane, clean, friendly world, without fear and without injustice. He felt it was his duty to prepare the future; he opened himself to the suffering
of others and changed the world in a small way. His one great motive for writing was a “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”
¹⁵
Is this sort of intense commitment, so desperately needed, still possible today, or have our Orwells been overwhelmed and extinguished by the increasing horrors of modern life?

This breakthrough review-article on Orwell's
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
(1969) was my first long piece, at the beginning of my
soi-disant
career, in a prestigious scholarly journal
, Philological Quarterly.
It enabled me to formulate my essential ideas about him and make a case for the importance of his minor works, and it became the solid basis of my later articles and books. I placed Orwell in the English moral tradition of Johnson, Blake and Lawrence (and later wrote lives of both Johnson and Lawrence). My Orwellian prediction that a definitive edition would appear in the future came true thirty years later when the 2,000 pages of this four-volume edition were expanded to 8,500 pages and twenty volumes.

The letter to me from his Eton tutor A. S. F. Gow (a friend of A.E. Housman) about why Orwell chose the Burmese police instead of going to university seemed definitive at the time. But I later discovered from interviews with Sir Steven Runciman, Orwell's classmate at Eton, and with Michael Meredith, the librarian at Eton, that Orwell could easily have won a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge.

 

When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity, I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed.

(Samuel Johnson, Diary, April 1775)

There has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling.

(George Orwell,
Diary
, early 1949)

These entries are remarkably similar in the fervor of their unjustified selftorment, and they suggest Orwell's close resemblance to Johnson as well as his place as the last of the English moralists—Johnson, Blake and Lawrence—whose passionate intensity is nearly prophetic. Both Johnson and Orwell had unhappy childhoods, struggled long with severe illness and bitter poverty, spent many years as hack journalists and did not achieve fame until their mid-forties. Both men were independent, combative, harsh on themselves and others, and often wrong-headed in a fascinating way. Both had limited imaginations but great critical faculties; and their satire was an expression of high principle, integrity and compassion. Both were pessimistic, patriotic, pragmatic, courageous, commonsensical, intellectually curious, scrupulously honest, fundamentally decent, oddly humorous and quintessentially English.

The new edition of Orwell's
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
enables us to sharpen our appreciation of Orwell and to place his life and works in a more precise perspective.
¹
Reviewing Orwell's posthumous essays in 1954, John Wain wrote, “It is clear enough that this will be the last volume of barrel-scrapings from the Orwell stock, so that anything not included here will have small chance of emerging in the future.”
²
In fact, only one third of Orwell's short articles and reviews have even here been included (about 230 out of 700) so that a definitive edition may still appear in the future. Orwell too would have been surprised by the existence of this collection, in which the majority of items are very short pieces, for he firmly stated, “I would never reprint in book form anything of less than 2000 words”; and he would have been amazed by the price (and royalties) of these four large volumes, for the ten dollars he received for each “London Letter” was probably his highest fee for a short article and he rarely earned more than four or five pounds a week until the success of
Animal Farm
in 1946. Nevertheless, we now have two thousand more pages of Orwell's writing, a quarter of it published for the first time, and it is first appropriate to state what has been omitted and what included.

The editors give no indication of exactly how much unpublished material has been excluded; two unpublished letters I remember are to Humphrey
Slater in September 1946, mentioning a draft of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, and to Leonard Moore in July (?) 1947, giving a chronology of his life. The BBC material and many trivial notes have been rightly omitted; and though Mrs. Orwell writes, somewhat unclearly, “there is nothing either concealed or spectacularly revealed in his letters,” the unpublished letters and papers in the Archive at London University are not available to scholars, while those in the New York Public Library and the University of Texas can be read but not quoted. Only selections from the last Notebook are published, so that Orwell's notes for a projected essay on Evelyn Waugh are printed while those for an essay on Conrad and a long short story are not.

Though Mrs. Orwell writes, “Anything he would have considered as an essay is certainly included,” the long political essays in
The Betrayal of the Left
and
Victory or Vested Interests?
, and the Introduction to
British Pamphleteers
(which is better than “Pamphlet Literature”) have been omitted. The following published though uncollected writings have considerable value and deserve to be printed in a fifth volume: the sixteen film and drama reviews for
Time and Tide
(1940–41); the fourteen war reports from France and Germany for the
Observer
and the
Manchester Evening News
(early 1945) which (pace Mrs. Orwell) are much more like “straight reporting” than his wartime “London Letters”; the very important book reviews on Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Butler, Edmund Wilson and F. R Leavis; the other interesting reviews of Milton, Byron, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Chekhov, Rilke, Mann, Hardy, Hopkins, Joyce, Silone and Richard Wright; and finally the shorter reviews on the subjects of his major essays in which he first worked out his ideas on novelists who influenced him: Dickens, Gissing and Koestler, and on those whom he criticized for their reactionary political views: Swift, Tolstoy, Kipling, Wells, Wodehouse and Henry Miller.
³

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.