Orwell's Revenge (49 page)

There is, Orwell suggests, a distinct (and clearly inferior) “American language” (“Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1941),
Essays,
I, pp. 138, 140). Orwell excoriates the “enormous literature” in America “plainly aimed at sadists and masochists” (“Raffles,” p. 140). He regrets the “great numbers of English people who are partly Americanised in language and, one ought to add, in moral, outlook” (“Raffles,” p. 141). See also “Decline of the English Murder” (1946),
Essays, IV,
p. 13: “The most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized”; “As I Please” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 169: “In America even the pretence that hack reviewers read the books they are paid to criticise has been partially abandoned”; “As I Please” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, pp. 234-235: “[T]o a casual glance he looks as though he were kissing the hem of the woman's garment—not a bad symbolical picture of American civilisation, or at least of one important side of it.”

Ironically but quite predictably, Orwell becomes somewhat more favorably disposed toward America when English public opinion grows more hostile—which is to say, during the war years, when boisterous American troops are stationed in large numbers in England. See, e.g., “London Letter to
Partisan
Review” (1945)
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 298: “I would like to add, without flattery, that judging
from such American periodicals as I see, the mental atmosphere in the USA is still a good deal more breathable than it is in England.” “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus” (1948),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 397:
“Tribunes
anti-Americanism is not sincere but is an attempt to keep in with fashionable opinion. To be anti-American nowadays is to shout with the mob. Of course it is only a minor mob. . . . I do not believe the mass of the people in this country are anti-American politically, and certainly they are not so culturally.” “In Defence of Comrade Zilliacus,” p. 398: “[W]e shall be obliged, in the long run, to subordinate our policy to that of one Great Power or the other. . . . And in spite of all the fashionable chatter of the moment, everyone knows in his heart that we should choose America.”

and English-killing new-speaker:
In a 1944 criticism of American English, Orwell supplies a clear preview of the Newspeak Appendix to J984, complete with the promise of “a huge loss of vocabulary” if American habits are adopted. Americans form verbs “by adding ise to a noun,” they ignore the differences between transitive and intransitive verbs, they “replace strong primary words by feeble euphemisms.” American English is “terribly poor in names for natural objects and localities.” The American tendency is “to lump the lady-bird, the daddy-longlegs, the saw-fly, the water-boatman, the cockchafer, the cricket, the death-watch beetle and scores of other insects all together under the inexpressive name of bug.” “The English People” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, pp. 28-29. Cf.
1984,
p. 51: “We're destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day,” Syme happily informs Winston Smith in
1984.

exploiting of cheap immigrant labour:
“Inside the Whale,” pp. 217218.

or perhaps a musician:
1984,
pp. 93-94.

you don't feel the same:
1984,
p. 294.

to be dismembered by the wind:
1984,
p. 293.

fastening ones love upon other human individuals:
“Reflections on Gandhi” (1949),
Essays,
I, p. 176.

among children richer than itself:
1984,
p. 41.

made Gordon shudder:
1984,
p. 42.

It is George Orwell:
“Charles Dickens” (1939),
Essays,
I, p. 54.

two decades after his death:
“Such, Such Were the Joys” (1947),
Essays,
I, p. 1.

before going on to Eton:
The school's real name was St. Cyprian's, see Shelden, p. 23.
Clergyman's Daughter
develops the same theme at length.

but to have no money:
Wigan
Pier,
p. 137.

elevated into a religion:
Aspidistra,
p. 43.

the Crossgates money-culture:
Cf.
Lion,
p. 107: “We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public (for American readers ‘private') schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability.”

the sensitive, beauty-loving Flory:
Elizabeth's “whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good ('lovely' was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad ('beastly') is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious.”
Burmese Days,
p. 90. In
Aspidistra,
p. 97, Hermione is the perfectly self-centered, rich girlfriend of a rich (but otherwise sensitive) magazine editor whose hobby is socialism. “Of course I know you're a Socialist,” she tells him. “So am 1.1 mean we're all Socialists nowadays. But I don't see why you have to give all your money away and make friends with the lower classes. You can be a Socialist and have a good time, that's what I say.”

at the bottom of them all:
Aspidistra,
p. 78.

Orwell wants collectivism:
Orwell, for example, generally approved of the wartime economy, in which free market commerce had been replaced by central command. Here's his socialist summary of the change: “Before the war there was every incentive for the general public to be wasteful, at least so far as their means allowed. Everyone was trying to sell something to everyone else, and the successful man, it was imagined, was the man who sold the most goods and got the most money in return. We have learned now, however, that money is valueless in itself, and only goods count.”
Broadcast,
p. 73.

native inequalities of talent:
1984,
p. 205.

His Politics and the English Language quotes:
“Politics and the English Language” (1946),
Essays,
I, p. 163.

biblical texts, which he uses frequently:
The front page of Keep
the Aspidistra Flying,
for example, is 1 Corinthians 13: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love . . .” but with the word “money” substituted all the way through for “love.”

that's the way to bet it:
Quoted in Russell Baker, “Usuality as Usual,” New
York Times,
March 14, 1992, p. 25.

material sufficiency and economic equality:
“All that the working man demands,” Orwell says in a 1943 essay, is “enough to eat, freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn't leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is done”— the “indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.” “Looking back on the Spanish War” (1943),
Essays,
I, pp. 207-208.
1984,
p. 190, contains a very similar passage: “In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.”

chosen for you from above:
“England, Your England” (1941),
Essays,
I, p. 256.

has been told about them is lies:
1984,
p. 197.

Orwell concedes they aren't:
“England, Your England,” p. 252.

ruled by foreigners:
“The English People” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 7.

superior weapons and political unity:
“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 204; “England, Your England,” p. 255.

a herd of cattle facing a wolf:
“England, Your England,” p. 264.

as the Gadarene swine:
“England, Your England,” p. 265.

foreign phrases from our writing:
“Politics and the English Language,” p. 169.

he excoriates rentier capitalism:
“Looking Back on the Spanish War,” p. 191.

the rentier-professional class:
“Inside the Whale,” p. 222.

and the rentier-intellectual:
“Inside the Whale,” p. 230.

he is a small investor:
The New Cassell's French Dictionary
(1971), p. 639. Orwell describes the rentier thus: “A rentier is part of the possessing class, he can and, almost without knowing it, does make other people work for him, but he has very little direct power.” “Charles Dickens,” p. 53. Orwell usually has in mind the “second-generation rentier” who is “living on inherited money.” “Review,
Personal Record,
by Julian Green” (1940),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 20. But he has quite as much disdain for the first-generation fortune of the “American millionaire.” See, e.g., “Letter from England to
Partisan Review”
(1943),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 282: “[T]he dreary world which the American millionaires and their British hangers-on intend to impose upon us begins to take shape”; “Letter to H. J. Willmett” (1944),
CEJL,
Vol. 3, p. 148: “Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuehrers of the type of de Gaulle.” By 1943, Orwell is in fact describing the economic enemy as the “American millionaires and their British hangers-on.” “Letter from England to
Partisan
Review” (1943),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 282.

decayed throw-outs:
Coming Up for Air,
p. 139. Orwell sees colonialism—Britain's “looting of Asia and Africa”—as just another manifestation of rentier capitalism, a scheme for boosting national income with “interest from foreign investments.” “Writers and Leviathan” (1948),
Essays,
III, p. 462.

fleas are to a dog:
“England, Your England,” p. 269. They are also “too civilised to work, fight or even reproduce themselves.” “Review,
Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages,
by T. S. Eliot” (1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, p. 238. In his Dickens essay Orwell states: “But in these books [by Dickens] the good rich man has dwindled from a ‘merchant' to a rentier. This is significant.” “Charles Dickens,” p. 53.

mind and money walk hand in hand:
He was equally interested in how the economic environment affected the progress of science. While at the BBC he asked one prospective speaker for a talk on the “effects of capitalism on science, the extent to which it has
stimulated its development, and the point at which it becomes a retarding influence.”
Broadcast,
p. 185. Another BBC talk he commissioned was on ‘The Economic Basis of Literature” (p. 31).

without drifting toward Big Brother:
As Orwell acknowledges in his 1946 essay on Burnham, “it has always been obvious that a planned and centralised society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship.” “Second Thoughts on James Bumham” (1946),
Essays,
II, p. 338.

boy's father of course did not own:
“Such, Such Were the Joys,” p. 35.

indifferent to economic justice:
“Review,
Communism and Man,
by F. J. Sheed” (1939),
CEJL,
Vol. 1, p. 384.

boyhood face in the mirror:
“In Front of Your Nose” (1946),
CEJL,
Vol. 4, p. 123.

going to be owned:
During the Spanish civil war, Orwell himself even participates in a gunfight for control of the telephone exchange in Barcelona.
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 121.

as his own father did:
Shelden, p. 312. Eric Blair was born June 25, 1903. His father, Richard, was born January 7, 1857, and died on June 28, 1939, aged 82 years and 5 months.

as a Tory Anarchist:
Shelden, p. 219. See also Bernard Crick's Introduction to
The Lion and the Unicorn,
p. 10. Crick explains that Orwell “was an individualist who resented one man or one culture imposing its values on another, and above all resented servants of the state moralizing their power with talk of ‘responsibility.'” But neither Shelden nor Crick notes that Orwell gave the phrase a somewhat more cynical (and pessimistic) definition of his own when applying it to Jonathan Swift.

while disbelieving in liberty:
“Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gullivers Travels,” p. 386.

people who are not fighting:
Homage to Catalonia,
p. 65.

reflecting on that irony:
“War-time Diary” (1942),
CEJL,
Vol. 2, pp. 415-416.

Orwell learns he has tuberculosis:
Shelden, p. 332.

unavailable in England:
Shelden, p. 424.

shipment sent to Orwell's hospital:
The drug arrives in early 1948 and Orwell is given regular doses of it. Shelden, p. 424.
Mean-while, in February 1948, Orwell writes another letter in which he states: “If anything should happen to me I've instructed Richard Rees, my literary executor, to destroy the [manuscript of
1984]
without showing it to anybody” “Letter to F. J. Warburg,” p. 404.