George Orwell.
Few writers of this century have been as thoroughly canonized as George Orwell.
He is one of that very small group whose names have been turned into household
adjectives. "Orwellian" stands with "Kafkaesque" as a kind of shorthand for
those forces of blind oppression and coercion that have dominated so much of
our century, that both writers did so much to expose. In hugely different ways,
of course: Orwell was the self-consciously political writer of the two. Indeed,
politics lay at the very heart of his creativity, and his whole adult life was
devoted to an exploration of its limits and possibilities. He was an eagle-eyed
observer of the political processes of his time, a profoundly committed and
outspoken commentator on the beliefs and the prejudices that governed those
processes, a sharp critic of the writings and behavior of his contemporaries
during the 1930s and 1940s.
This outspokenness made him many ideological enemies during his lifetime.
Since his death in 1950, however, his popularity has grown exponentially, so
that he is now universally hailed as a prophet, and a political genius of the
first order. This consensus may have something to do with the perceived decency
of Orwell, reinforced as it was by an English reticence and modesty in personal
matters that belied the fierceness of his polemical prose and impressed itself
on all who knew him. Richard Rees, an old friend, was not alone in calling him "
almost saintly" in his daily life.
Of greater consequence has been the rush by pundits of both right and left
to clothe themselves in the robes of "Saint George." To the right he has been
overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, the author of the two last books that made
him famous, Animal Farm and 1984, that is to say, a tribune of anti-communism
and a patron saint of the cold war. To the left he was above all the author of
such early books of searing social criticism as Down and Out in Paris and
London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Burmese Days, not to speak of the essays in
which he defended the rights of the downtrodden and called for a new socialist
order. In between, and largely ignored by the pundits, came the unsuccessful
novels and that enigmatic work on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia,
which seemed to point both ways at once.
It was not unusual, of course, for writers of Orwell's generation to make
the journey from youthful unorthodoxy to middle-aged conformity, or, in
political terms, from early socialism or communism to later conservatism.
Orwell was virtually unique, however, in avoiding extremes in his oscillation
between the left and the right. Unlike most of his peers, he never got
seriously involved with the Communist Party, nor did he ever become a
conservative or a right-wing anti-Communist in the usual sense of that term. He
was an English patriot and a lover of traditional values even while calling for
socialism to overthrow the tyranny of the bourgeoisie (Cyril Connolly, a friend
from prep school days, called him "a revolutionary in love with the 1900s"),
and he sided with the proletariat and the working class even while pillorying
Communists and the excesses of totalitarian party rule. He was never a
conformist.
In short, Orwell's complexity was not of the kind we usually associate
with political writers at all, and it was understandable for a literary
aesthete like Connolly, though quite wrong, to urge Orwell to abandon politics
and to devote himself to writing novels. For it was precisely in his political
writing that Orwell found himself. As he observed in his essay "Why I Write" in
1946, "I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I
wrote lifeless books." In the same essay e commented that he had striven most "
to make political writing into an art"; and the paradox is that it was
precisely in his political writing that he demonstrated the values of literary
modernism (which he admired every bit as much as Connolly), whereas in the
novels his "modernism" was contrived and unconvincing. Hence the nuanced
richness of his political thought that defies easy classification by labels of "
left" or "right," and hence, too, the difficulty of pigeonholing him either as
thinker or writer.
A sign of this complexity is the amazing proliferation of books of
biography, criticism, and commentary devoted to the task of understanding and
categorizing him. These products of a flourishing Orwell industry continue to
multiply by leaps and bounds, and now occupy four times as much space on
library shelves as the not inconsiderable works of Orwell himself. The latest
is a new book by the American scholar Michael Shelden, who cites Orwell's
complexity, plus his own dissatisfaction with the works that have appeared to
date, as his reason for undertaking yet another biographical study of Orwell.
Shelden's aim is both to offer the fruit of his own researches on Orwell's life
and to provide a kind of summation of everything that has emerged so far.
The work that Shelden's book is bound to be compared with is Bernard Crick'
s George Orwell, a Life, a monumental biography published only ten years ago to
wide acclaim. And some will remember that Crick was preceded by Peter Stansky
and William Abrahams, whose two books, The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell:
the Transformation (1979), laid down the essential outlines of Orwell's life up
to his Spanish adventures in 1937. It appears, however, that Orwell biographers
are a curmudgeonly crew. Crick, a political scientist whose book was
commissioned by Orwell's widow, Sonia, partly as a response to Stansky and
Abrahams's unauthorized excavations, was decidedly sniffy about his two
predecessors while drawing freely on their pioneering work. Shelden is even
sniffier about Crick, criticizing him for pedantry and impersonality, and
pillorying his laborious method of marshaling often contradictory sources and
refusing to adjudicate between them.
Shelden's approach, while not particularly original ("a biography must
have a strong narrative and provide some sense of the human character behind
the public face"), is sufficiently distinct from that of Crick or Stansky and
Abrahams not to need apologies or special pleading. In the context of recent
historical developments, moreover, Shelden's timing is extremely felicitous,
for the question of Orwell's stature has taken on a new interest and relevance
in the light of the recent changes in the East.
Whatever one's opinion of Orwell's position between left and right, it
cannot be denied that the postwar political struggle between the two
superpowers contributed enormously to the growth of his reputation. From this
point of view, the timing of his two last and most famous books was crucial.
Animal Farm came out in 1945, and 1984 in 1949, and together they swiftly
acquired a reputation as uniquely authoritative guides to, and commentaries on,
life in a totalitarian Soviet Union. Now the Soviet Union is no more, and
totalitarian society survives (for how much longer?) only in China, Cuba, and
North Korea. How will Orwell's reputation fare with communism crumbling and the
cold war gone? Will Animal Farm and 1984 retain their status as classics, or
will they fade with the historical and political circumstances that contributed
so much to their creation? And if they do, what of the "socialist" Orwell? Will
the early books fade too, or will they take on fresh relevance in a post-
Communist (and postmodern) era?
Shelden does not set out to answer these questions directly, but his
fluently written life provides an excellent foundation for the reader to
attempt to answer them for himself. Shelden states in his introduction that the
aim of the biographer should be "to look at the world through his subject's
eyes and to convey that experience to the reader" through "an extension of
sympathy and imagination." This he prettymuch succeeds in doing, especially in
the first half of his book, devoted to Orwell's early development as a man and
a writer. Shelden is treading ground well worn by his predecessors here, yet
his account of the progress of the young Eric Blair (Orwell's real name)
through prep school, Eton, and service in the Indian Imperial police is
surefooted and judicious, and gains considerably from Shelden's assiduity in
tracking down new sources, or creatively interviewing some of the old ones to
gain a new perspective. Shelden also produces a persuasive account of Blair's
literary apprenticeship, which coincided with his bitter disillusionment with
British rule in Burma (then a part of India), his resignation from the police
and return to England, and his seemingly quixotic decision to immerse himself
in the "lower depths" of Paris and London, which led to the publication of his
first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933.
This was a fateful step in the life of an upper-class ex-public schoolboy
and ex-colonial officer. It seems that Orwell was influenced in his decision to
explore the life of the poor by Jack London's similar experiment at the turn of
the century, which had resulted in People of the Abyss, a favorite book of
Orwell's, and by his reading of Shaw and Wells. But a contributing factor was
certainly a natural, instinctive sympathy for the downtrodden, which had been
developed and intensified by his experiences in Burma, where he came to hate
his role as an "oppressor" of the British empire's colonial subjects. Indeed,
Burma was to be the subject of his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), in which
Orwell described the increasing disillusionment of the protagonist with
colonialism in terms a touch too autobiographical and raw to make for
successful fiction, although some of its documentary pages were very powerful.
At this period Orwell regarded himself primarily as a fiction writer, and
went on to write two more novels during the mid-'30s: A Clergyman's Daughter
and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Both dealt with middle-class characters who
have difficulty reconciling themselves to conventional lives and who drop out
for a while before returning to a middle-class existence, and both had large
dollops of autobiography in them. Both also had pretensions to modernism, which
Orwell recognized as the dominant literary mode of the time and had begun to
write about as a reviewer for the British literary magazine Adelphi.
A Clergyman's Daughter in particular was written under the direct
influence of Joyce, whose Ulysses Orwell had smuggled in from Paris (it was
still banned in England as obscene) and admired to distraction. "I rather wish
I had never read it," he wrote to a friend around this time:
It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then
come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice
production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or baritone, but if
you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying was even less successful (Orwell later
dismissed it as a potboiler), but it did contain some effective polemics about
a "civilization founded on greed and fear" and the "cynical and hoggish money
code" by which most people lived.
The bitterness that reviewers rightly detected in Aspidistra reflected
Orwell's desperation as an impecunious and struggling writer, who was too poor
to propose to a young woman he had recently fallen in love with. Eileen O'
Shaughnessy was a self-contained and mature young woman who had once had her
own business, and she was studying for an M.A. in psychology at London
University when Orwell met her. She was from the professional middle class but
was no better off than he was at the time of their romance. It was the middle
of the Great Depression -- popularly known as "the slump" in England -- when
millions of men were out of work, the streets were full of beggars, and even
the middle class led a pinched and squeezed existence: no time to be a
struggling free-lance writer. Thus there was a certain aptness in his first
publishers' commission, which was to travel to the industrial north of England
and write a report on the effects of unemployment and poverty on the lives of
the working class.
The result was The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell's second work of
autobiographical reportage, which appeared in 1937. It was, as Shelden makes
clear, a breakthrough book in every way. For a start, it was a superb piece of
documentary realism, in which Orwell described firsthand the hellish and
dangerous lives of the coal miners, the squalid and unsanitary houses to which
the families of the working class were confined, the disease and the hunger and
the privation that were the everyday accompaniments of millions of ordinary
people, whether they were employed or not, and above all the utter, degrading
demoralization of being out of work and on the dole. The book was also packed
with facts, figures, statistics, and tables to provide objective confirmation,
as it were, of the bleak picture painted by his prose. The whole added up to a
devastating indictment of British society that fully justified its choice by
Orwell's publisher, Victor Gollancz, for distribution by his recently
established Left Book Club, which was to cater to left-wing subscribers. In the
event, it sold more than 46,000 copies and established Orwell as a writer to be
reckoned with.
It was also the book in which Orwell "found himself" as a creative writer,
particularly in the more philosophical and political second part, in which he
mused on his own past experiences and compared them with what he had seen "up
north." Here Orwell analyzed that eternal British obsession, the class
structure, describing his own background as "lower-upper-middle class," which
he determined on the basis of his father's modest income. "Nevertheless," wrote
Orwell, "the essential point about the English class system is that it is not
entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking, it is a money-
stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste
system; rather like a jerry-built modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts."
He went on to describe the effect of this caste system on his school years,
when he was "an odious little snob" but poorer than most of his fellows and
therefore resentful:
On the one hand it made me cling tighter than ever to my gentility; on the
other hand it filled me with resentment against the boys whose parents were
richer than mine and who took care to let me know it. I despised anyone who was
not describable as a "gentleman," but also I hated the hoggishly rich.... The
correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no
money. This is part of the credo of the lower-upper-middle class. It has a
romantic, Jacobite-in-exile feeling about it which is very comforting.
That last sentence, undercutting the hint of self-righteousness that runs
through the rest of this passage, was what we have since come to recognize as
the authentic voice of the mature Orwell. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell
succeeded in breaking through to a form of mixed autobiography and journalism
that was much more suited to his talent than autobiographical fiction. In it he
found that individual tone of voice, polemical and sharp, yet at the same time
self-deprecating and candid, that henceforth would be unmistakably his. Forty
years later Tom Wolfe was to claim autobiographical reportage as an invention
of the "New Journalism" in America, forgetting that Orwell had gotten there
first.
Orwell had also found socialism, which was Gollancz's reason for
publishing the book, but Orwell's approach to socialism turned out to be as
candid and idiosyncratic as his attitude to everything else. Part two of Wigan
Pier contained a merciless analysis of English socialism that might well have
been written by a die-hard Tory, but in the end Orwell supported socialism as
the only possible answer to fascism. Even so, he was not spared the wrath of
Gollancz, who wrote a special foreword to the Left Book Club edition
disclaiming some of Orwell's more controversial views, and later issued part
one of the book on its own, leaving out the reflections on socialism altogether.
Orwell also incurred the wrath of the Communist Party, which was very strong
in British left-wing circles in the '30s, so that when civil war broke out in
Spain in 1937, and Orwell decided to oppose fascism in deed as well as by words,
the Party refused to supply him with the necessary recommendation, and he was
obliged to turn to the Independent Labor Party for help.
By now Orwell had earned enough from his royalties to marry Eileen O'
Shaughnessy, but marriage didn't stop him from rushing off to Spain as soon as
he could, and Eileen not only did not try to stop him, but herself got a job
with the ILP office in Barcelona and traveled out to join him. He became an
active soldier, fought at the front in Catalonia, and displayed great personal
bravery in more than three months of service, until a sniper's bullet pierced
his throat and he was evacuated to Barcelona for treatment. He was eventually
declared unfit for further service and returned to England.
Not surprisingly, Orwell's Spanish experiences led to another book of
autobiographical reportage, Homage to Catalonia, in which he tried not only to
describe his own experiences, but to expose the horrible political infighting
that had gone on behind the lines between the Communists, who were being
manipulated by Stalin, and the other socialist contingents who had fought
alongside the Communist-dominated International Brigade. All this was described
in his book, but it was met with a chorus of denials from the left in Britain,
and he learned that an active campaign to discredit him had been launched by
the Communist Party based on an alleged statement in The Road to Wigan Pier to
the effect that "the working classes smell." What he had actually said was that
"middle-class people are brought up to believe that the working classes `smell,'
" which was quite a different thing, and he emphasized this in an indignant
letter to Gollancz. But he realized quite clearly that this campaign of
disinformation was aimed not at Wigan Pier as such, but at his credibility as a
witness on the events in Spain.
Gollancz refused to publish Homage to Catalonia on the grounds that it was
too critical of the Communists, and it was brought out by Warburg instead. In
fact it was not as good a book as The Road to Wigan Pier, and despite some
favorable reviews it sold very badly. But its best pages confirmed that Orwell'
s talent flourished when he mixed autobiography and reportage with personal
observation and commentary, and it was this combination that contributed so
much to the success of the wonderful series of mature essays and reviews that
he was to begin writing in 1939 and continue until his death. It can be said
that Orwell was instrumental in reviving the genre of the essay in English. It
is also worth noting that he anticipated the modern preoccupation of
semioticians and literary critics with popular culture. His pieces on "Boys'
Weeklies," "Good Bad Books," "Raffles and Miss Blandish," "The Art of Donald
McGill," and "The Decline of the English Murder" were the first by a prominent
English author to take such "trivial" subjects seriously. Most of them appeared
first in Connolly's pioneering magazine Horizon, and were collected and
published in book form in 1940 as Inside the Whale, the title of a long article
on Henry Miller.
One curious feature of Orwell's essays was the fierce patriotism and love
of English tradition that they revealed, unusual in such a strong supporter of
socialism, for socialism gloried in its internationalism (which Orwell had also
supported by going to Spain). And his exaltation of the pedestrian virtues of
daily English life was not just a literary pose. Already in 1936 he had moved
to a primitive seventeenth-century cottage in Wallington, thirty-five miles
north of London, and reopened the village store that had once occupied the
premises. He gloried in the fact that the cottage had no electricity, no hot
water, and no indoor toilet, somehow perceiving sterling yeoman values in these
privations. (Eileen, too, was expected to share these values when Orwell took
her there after their marriage.) He took up gardening, kept a goat for milk,
and even later, after moving to London, raised chickens in his backyard and
furnished a workshop in his basement so that he could practice carpentry and
build homemade furniture.
Orwell spent the first half of the war working for the Indian Service of
the BBC. When war was declared, he had rushed to enlist, feeling passionate
about the need to resist fascism in the most direct and active way, but was
turned down on medical grounds. He then joined the Home Guard, a sort of
defense militia consisting of men and women too old or unfit for active service,
and threw himself into organizing his local battalion in London, while writing
a series of articles and pamphlets on this subject. In one of them he urged the
government to "arm the people," envisioning a sort of urban guerrilla force
similar to those he had seen in Spain, and in another he wrote: "That rifle
hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage is the
symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."
In the event the Home Guard never got to fight, while he himself was
confined to conducting psychological warfare against the Germans and the
Japanese through his talks and features, though there were pitifully few
Indians with shortwave radio sets to justify the British government's
expenditure. In time Orwell also realized somewhat ruefully that the propaganda
that he was producing was not the sort to promote the interests of the working
class, but reflected those of the ruling class, which went against the grain of
almost everything he stood for. Toward the end of 1943, therefore, he resigned
from the BBC and began writing book reviews for the Sunday Observer. He also
became literary editor of the independent left-wing weekly Tribune, which was
socialist in orientation but not dominated by the Communists, and (at Clement
Greenberg's suggestion) began contributing London Letters to Partisan Review.
It was around that time that Orwell started work on the short book that
was to make him famous. He had had the idea of writing something about
Stalinism ever since his experiences in Spain, when he had witnessed firsthand
the way in which an entire revolutionary movement had been taken over by a
dictatorship based a thousand miles away. He also despised the way in which the
English left had been taken in by the myth of the Soviet revolution and was
prepared to turn a blind eye to the evil of Stalin's purges and show trials.
And he had himself been pilloried as a class enemy because of his refusal to
share in the blindness. Even in bourgeois Britain the Communists were
exercising an influence that was out of all proportion to their numbers or to
the real strength of their ideas, and this influence was intensified by the
fact that the Soviet Union had become an ally in the struggle against Nazism.
Orwell, meanwhile, had also not given up on his old dream of finally writing a
successful novel, and in the allegory (the book was subtitled "a fairy tale")
that he produced about a bunch of farm animals who at first conduct a
successful revolt against their exploitative master and then get taken over by
an even more exploitative group of pigs, he at last found a way to let his
genius for political analysis dictate a suitable fictional form.
Animal Farm was quite different in genre from Wigan Pier and his essays,
but it was informed by the same fierce devotion to justice and hatred of
oppressors that had inspired all his best work. "All animals are equal but some
are more equal than others" summed up the sophistry of the Bolsheviks and made
the betrayal of their revolutionary ideals crystal clear. The book was finished
in the summer of 1944, but it immediately ran into difficulties with publishers.
Gollancz rejected it out of hand, on the grounds that it was disloyal to an
ally (the Soviet Union) and "played into the hands of the Nazis." Three others
turned it down for more or less the same reason, including T.S. Eliot at Faber
and Faber, who had the distinction of also rejecting Down and Out in Paris and
London.
When Animal Farm was finally published by Secker and Warburg a year later,
in August 1945, it had been deliberately held up until the war in Europe was
over so that any offense to Stalin did not matter. It was an instant success in
Britain, selling ten times the usual number for one of Orwell's books, and in
the United States it was a colossal best seller, with sales of more than half a
million. Edmund Wilson compared its author to Voltaire and Swift (a boyhood
idol of Orwell's), and declared that it was time to reconsider Orwell and
regard him as a major writer of the times.
Orwell was at the zenith of his career, yet that career was already being
overshadowed by tragic developments in his personal life. In 1943 his mother
had suddenly died of heart failure. In 1944 Orwell, who passionately wanted
children but believed himself to be sterile, had persuaded his reluctant wife
to give up her job at the Ministry of Food and adopt a baby son. She did, but
in March 1946, before the child was 2 years old, she died on the operating
table while undergoing a hysterectomy. Meanwhile Orwell himself was suffering
from a recurrence of lifelong problems with his lungs. Even as a baby he had
endured bronchitis, and later he was discovered to have defective bronchial
tubes and a lesion in one lung. By the time he was 28 he had had four bouts of
pneumonia, each more serious than the last, and in 1937, at the age of 32, he
had been hospitalized for several weeks with suspected tuberculosis. (Given the
state of British medicine at the time, it could never be confirmed.) Ten years
later, when he was in the middle of what was to be his last and finest novel,
1984, tuberculosis was finally diagnosed as being the cause of his troubles,
and despite treatment with the best available drugs, he died eighteen months
later, in January 1950, six months after 1984 had been published and taken the
literary world by storm.
1984 was undoubtedly Orwell's crowning achievement. It had a prophetic
force that was to resonate ever more richly with each new generation of readers.
A world divided into three great powers (Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in the
novel) perpetually at war with one another has not been difficult to recognize
in the modern era, even if that war has been "cold" rather than hot. But will
future generations brought up in a post-Communist, post-cold war world read of
these things with that same chill of recognition that we do today, and that
marks our encounters with all literature that transcends the ephemeral to touch
us at the deepest level of our experience?
We cannot know for sure, of course, and Shelden pretty much ignores the
question in his biography, perhaps because he takes a positive answer for
granted. His treatment of both the last novels is surprisingly perfunctory.
Still, it is possible to construct an answer to this question, and one that
might also solve the riddle of Orwell's "left" or "right" orientation.
The place to look, it would seem, is not so much at the obvious political
targets of 1984, but rather at its sources, for the point is, as Shelden
rightly indicates, that the roots of Orwell's nightmarish vision were firmly
rooted in his own personal past. Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, is
clearly related to Orwell's earlier middle-class heroes and to Orwell himself,
with his nostalgia for an English "golden age" and his yearning for the more
innocent world of his Edwardian childhood. Smith's romance with Julia also
echoes themes from Orwell's life and earlier works, while Smith's championing
of the "proles" (proletarians) exactly parallels Orwell's preoccupation with
the rights of the working class.
Somewhat less obvious is the way in which the nightmarish apparatus of
oppression portrayed in the novel, most readily associated with totalitarian
Communist societies, represents a creative and original transformation of
Orwell's own experiences. These had begun when, in the traditional English
manner, he was packed off to an expensive preparatory boarding school (St.
Cyprian's) at the tender age of 8, where he was crammed with a classical
education. He spent five miserable years at St. Cyprian's, about which he later
wrote one of his most searing and impassioned essays, "Such, Such Were the Joys,
" in which he described his detestation of the school's spartan living
conditions, its crippling tyranny over its youthful charges, and the addiction
of its proprietors to corporal punishment. Lonely children like himself, for
instance, who were unfortunate enough to wet their beds, were publicly
humiliated and mercilessly caned until they stopped; and all manifestations of
spontaneity or independence were ruthlessly crushed. It was a totalitarian
society in miniature. The mature Orwell was to recall its cruelties with the
same fear and loathing that he had experienced as a small boy.
Just as pertinent were his years as a policeman in Burma, where he had
learned the bitter truth of what it meant to be an oppressor: that doing "the
dirty work of the empire" was morally corrupt, that it enslaved the masters as
much as it did their Burmese subjects. It was there that he witnessed torture
being applied to prisoners, and saw the effect it had not only on the tortured,
but also the torturers. Oppression became a topic that was to obsess him for
the rest of his life, leading to the composition not only of Burmese Days, but
also to some of his most memorable essays, such as "A Hanging" and "Shooting an
Elephant." "When the white man turns tyrant," he wrote in the latter essay, "it
is his own freedom that he destroys." Even at the end of his life, according to
Shelden, Orwell was trying a second novel about Burma.
There were also Orwell's experiences of censorship throughout his career
as a writer. These had reached a kind of climax during his spell as a writer at
the BBC. True, he was there during wartime, when even liberal governments
resort to censorship. Still, the repeated attempts to control his work in even
the most petty details and the all-pervading insistence on the BBC's role as an
instrument of propaganda were anathema to his need for intellectual
independence and creative freedom. It was not for nothing that he modeled the
headquarters of the Ministry of Truth in 1984 on Broadcasting House in London,
since it was there that he came to realize that censorship and thought control
attain a kind of perfection when they can be achieved by a raised eyebrow or a
silent shake of the head, the classic British manner.
Nor was censorship in Britain a monopoly of the BBC. Orwell had been badly
shaken one day in 1940 when the police showed up at his Wallington cottage with
a search warrant and confiscated some "obscene" books from his study. He had
been foolish enough to plan an article on Henry Miller and had ordered the
necessary books from Paris, but his letter had been intercepted and read by the
postal authorities. Some, but not all, of the books were returned, and he
received an official warning that he was liable to prosecution. This was just
before the war. About a year later, after the war had started, Orwell
discovered that the London Letters he was sending to Partisan Review were not
only being censored by the Ministry of Information [sic], but in some cases
were being retyped, so that the recipients did not even know that they had been
censored. He also noted that the telegraphic address on a communication from
the ministry was "miniform."
From the very beginning of his literary career, in fact, Orwell had been
dogged by various kinds of censorship. Ever since submitting the manuscript of
Down and Out in Paris and London he had had to struggle with Gollancz over
repeated attempts to cut and distort his work for fear of the dreaded libel
laws (far worse in Britain than in America, then and now, and convenient for
publishers to hide behind). He was also aware that the reasons several of his
works had been refused by publishers were political rather than aesthetic; and
his freshest memories, of course, were of rejections of Animal Farm on the
ground that it was "offensive to an ally." Even "Such, Such Were the Joys," his
article on his prep school experiences, could not be published for fear of
libel action by the school's former proprietors. It was obvious enough that
even if the war constituted a reasonable pretext for the exercise of censorship,
censorship was, to borrow a phrase, as British as apple pie.
1984, then, was animated by memories of Western (and specifically British)
society as much as by reflections on developments in the Soviet Union at the
time. That is why the ideology of the ruling party in Oceania was described as "
Ingsoc," an abbreviation of "English Socialism," and why the dreary daily
existence of Winston Smith and his fellow citizens was modeled on life not only
in wartime Britain, as Shelden suggests, but in Britain before the war, as it
was experienced by millions of its poorer citizens. Orwell himself was clear
about his intentions in this regard. "The scene of the book is laid in Britain
in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better
than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could
triumph anywhere," Orwell wrote to the American union leader Francis A. Henson
soon after the book was published. And elsewhere he added: "I don't believe
that the kind of society I describe will arrive, but I believe something
resembling it could arrive. Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of
intellectuals everywhere and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their
logical consequences."
Orwell was seized (if not obsessed) by the fear that in the very struggle
of the liberal democracies to oppose fascism, they would increasingly resort to
fascist methods (censorship, thought control, preventive detention) to assure
victory, and he foresaw that the same danger would recur in a future struggle
against communism. 1984, therefore, was intended as a warning. It takes its
place as an anti-utopia, or a dystopia, in a long line of twentieth-century
dystopias by authors beginning with Wells and London and continuing with
Zamyatin and Huxley. All these authors were admired by Orwell, and seem to have
influenced him in some way, but pride of place must go to Zamyatin's We, which
Orwell reviewed (in a French translation) in 1945.
There is an instructive parallel between the two works. Zamyatin's novel,
like Orwell's, is popularly read as a satire on Soviet communism, mainly
because so many of the negative phenomena described in it were subsequently
embodied in the Soviet state. But Zamyatin was writing in 1920, when only the
barest outlines of Lenin's new order were coming into view. What is frequently
forgotten is that Zamyatin had also spent a year in the industrial city of
Newcastle in northern England (he was there during the Russian revolutions) and
had been stunned by the soulless mechanization and stunted emotional life of
capitalist, industrialized Britain. Like Wells before him and Orwell after him,
Zamyatin found a large part of his inspiration in modern industrial society in
its most advanced and pitiless form -- that is, not in the fledgling Soviet
state, but in England.
Thus the tradition in which Orwell was writing was well defined and was
not at all dependent on the existence of a concrete totalitarian state for its
force, relevance, and vitality. On the contrary, it drew (and still draws) its
power from its ability to mirror and to reinterpret imaginatively some of the
deeper currents of modern Western society, which in turn reflect enduring
impulses in human nature everywhere. From this point of view, the Soviet state
under Stalin (and its later imitators) represented a kind of laboratory in
which many of the tendencies of modern industrial society were concentrated to
an incredibly intense degree, resulting in a kind of distillation, but also a
monstrous parody, of Western institutions in the twentieth century. It was
itself a kind of grotesque Gesamtkunstwerk, as Boris Groys has written,
simultaneously confirming the cautionary vision of works like Animal Farm and
1984 and outdoing them in its horrors. It may be that the example of the Soviet
Union will work as an antidote to the social and political poisons that have
flowed so freely through our lives at least since the First World War; but this
will be the end of only a very brief phase of history, even if it has spanned
the lifetimes of many of us.
Orwell's vision will remain relevant because it is rooted in a perception
that the enduring human impulse to create a more perfect society is fraught
with terrible risk, and is in constant danger of toppling into the very tyranny
it most fears and despises. But Orwell remained convinced that the risk was
worth taking, that to do nothing was even worse than to make even terrible
mistakes. In this context it is worth recalling that all the great twentieth-
century dystopians have been socialists, and Orwell was no exception. The road
that led to Wigan Pier was the same road that led to Mr. Pilkington's farm and
the nightmare world of Oceania in 1984. There is no contradiction between the
socialist Orwell and the anti-Communist Orwell, no need to choose between them.
As for the implications of Orwell's vision, he expressed them best in an
essay on his fellow socialist and fellow warrior Arthur Koestler in 1944:
It is quite possible that man's major problems will never be solved. But
it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look at the world of today
and say to himself, "It will always be like this: even in a million years it
cannot get appreciably better"? So you get the quasi-mystical belief that for
the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless but that
somewhere in space and time human life will cease to be the miserable brutish
thing it now is. The only easy way out is that of the religious believer, who
regards this life merely as a preparation for the next. But few thinking people
now believe in life after death.... The real problem is how to restore the
religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can only be happy when
they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
By Michael Scammell Michael Scammell, professor of Russian literature at
Cornell University, is writing a biography of Arthur Koestler.
Scammell, M., Sense and censorship.., Vol. 206, New Republic, 06-15-1992, pp 31.