An Orwell Pilgrimage

Among all the many festivals and gatherings that now make British life so much more entertaining, it is rather surprising that –until now – there has never been one devoted to George Orwell, incontestably one of our greatest and most influential writers.

This year, in Letchworth Garden City, that has been put right. There's a very good Orwell Festival, or rather was, as it has just finished, in and around Letchworth in Hertfordshire. With a bit of luck, there will be another one in two years. I do hope they repeat the performance of 'The Last Man in Europe', a one-man show about Orwell's life that I didn't have the chance to see.

I like Garden Cities, mainly because of their slightly Edwardian art-and-crafts feel , relics of the age before the First World War, high-minded and benevolent, usually teetotal.  The paternalism is slightly worrying(though it's much stronger in company towns such as Port Sunlight). But there are, as we all now know, many worse things than paternalism.

Letchworth had a raw deal from Orwell himself. His famous explosion against sandal-wearers, polysyllable-chewing Marxists, escaped Quakers and bearded men in shorts is supposed to have been written after he encountered just such a group on a bus in Letchworth. He thought they agve socialism a bad name ( alas for him, they were true representatives of the cause, a fact he couldn't quite cope with). Garden Cities are also mocked as centres of weedy pacifism by John Buchan in one his least satisfactory Richard Hannay books, 'Mr Standfast' . This name is also used by George Smiley in 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier , Spy ', though I wonder how many modern readers realise it comes originally from 'The Pilgrim's Progress', a book once known and read in almost every English home, and now almost completely forgotten. (So, by the way. Does 'Vanity Fair' , which most people think is a magazine or, if they are reasonably well-educated, a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. They are right. But they are also not right, just like people who think that 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is a novel by Ernest Hemingway).

So when I was invited to talk about what Orwell would be writing about now, at the Orwell Festival in Letchworth, I very willingly said 'yes'. This wasn't one of those speaking engagements I sometimes lightly undertake, months in advance, and then regret later. It was fun to do, especially because among my fellow-panellists were Gordon Bowker, author of a biography of Orwell, and the Ukrainian journalist Vitali Vitaliev, who has embraced England so thoroughly that he has become a keen student of Orwell and is deeply knowledgeable about him and his writing.

Vitali kindly offered to drive me out to Wallington, the village where Orwell lived ( and ran the village shop) before the war, and where he wrote 'The Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Coming up for Air' – and where he is also thought to have had the original idea for 'Animal Farm' .But I was able to take my old bicycle up to Letchworth on the train, and road out there myself. I had wrongly thought the landscape was flat, but still managed to wheeze my way up and down the chalk downland (beautiful in the clear early autumn light, which gives a pinkish glow to these low hills as evening approaches).  The  village is still  much as Orwell knew it - though far more prosperous, and of course far less truly rural, its pubs and its farm labourers and its school all gone. The great barn, in which a key scene of Animal Farm takes place, is still there. So is Orwell's house, now attractively restored and thatched. In his day it had a corrugated iron roof, and the doors and windows didn't fit, so it was freezing cold and his weekend guests couldn't wait to get back to London, so uncomfortable were the arrangements.

There is also a particularly lovely church, one of so many beautifully proportioned, light-filled churches still to be found, tragically under-used in village England, full of the Holy Ghost and populated by centuries of prayer and song now coming, it seems to an inevitable end. Not that Orwell would have thought that, even though he was married there. He claimed to be Godless, as men of his type and era so often did, though he was in a way quite fond of the Church of England.

Copies of his marriage certificate are on sale, if you like that sort of thing. There is, I am glad to say, no Victory Tea Shoppe (or should that be 'The Chestnut Tree Café?), just a modest plaque and feeling of being very deep in the England Orwell loved above all things. If you do visit it please go, as I did, by bicycle, or on foot (there are good bridleways all around) so you won't wreck the peace you've come to experience.

Then I headed back to Letchworth, to what I believe is Britain's only vegetarian school, St Christopher's, to take part in the debate.

I did say at the beginning of my contribution to the discussion that I thought Orwell would have seen straight through the humbug of man-made global warming. And I also suspect , not just because it suits me, that he would have been very suspicious of the European Union's secretive and authoritarian nature. And we covered a lot of other ground, from toads and tea to the Internet. But what follows, is more or less what I said that night, for those of you who are interested.

What George Orwell would write about today.

There's a temptation here to say that Orwell would have been just like us.  Or, to be more specific, just like me, me,  me.

Many modern writers would greatly like to consider themselves to be the New Orwell.

However, reputation, like truth, is the daughter of time. Best not to make any hasty judgements.

In any case, there were many Orwells. There was the pacifist Orwell, now forgotten. There was the nostalgist Orwell of 'Coming up for Air', in my view by a long chalk his best novel, once you have excluded the mighty works of 'Nineteen Eighty Four' and 'Animal; Farm'.

Then there was Orwell the policeman and anti-imperialist, Orwell the tramp and the Paris  plongeur,  Orwell the voluntary slum-dweller of the 'The Road to Wigan Pier' Orwell the literary reviewer and admirer (bafflingly to me) of Henry Miller and James Joyce's Ulysses.

And then there was the Orwell of the POUM Militia, who discovered at first hand the horrible truth about official Communism – and the even more creepy truth about how many people, from Victor Gollancz to T.S.Eliot, would find it politic to suppress criticism of Moscow.

And on top of that there was Orwell the Old Etonian, and Orwell the author of 'Politics and the English Language', a sermon on purity of writing so severe that no honest scribbler can read it without recognising some of his own recent faults in it.

And finally there was Orwell the lover of England, paradoxically revolutionary, with his batty dreams of Red Militias billeted in the Ritz, but his view of this country as a family, with the wrong members in control, of railway cuttings choked with wildflowers, red pillar boxes, blue policemen, all of them sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England – and a capital so peaceful and civilised that a blind man could cross it from side to side without being molested.  There's the Orwell who instinctively disliked the metric system, who liked proper pubs, strong brown tea and the magical appearance of toads in the English countryside in the early spring. And the Orwell who couldn't abide Scotsmen.

Finally, there's an Orwell I have always objected to – the Orwell who completely misunderstood the relationship between sexual freedom and real freedom, and who imagined that a future left-wing dictatorship would have an Anti-Sex League and raid illicit lovers in their bedrooms.

 

To give an honest answer to this question, I have to consider which of these Orwells would have most disliked me, if we both lived at the same time.

 

Might he have approved of liberal intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya?

I suspect he might. After all, he himself took part in the prototype liberal intervention in Spain.

Might he have approved of the sexual revolution? I am sure he would, at least to begin with.

Would he have looked down his nose at conservative popular newspapers such as mine?

I am more or less sure of it. An Etonian revolutionary could hardly be expected to do anything else.

Would he have supported comprehensive education? Yes, I think the man who wanted London's squares stripped of their railings would have seen this as a liberating measure.

Would he have favoured large-scale immigration into this country? Very possibly. He would have instinctively sided with the person he regarded as the underdog, perhaps not seeing that when mass immigration comes to a country, both migrants *and* hosts are underdogs.

Would he have supported relaxed drink licensing laws? I think so. He viewed such things as silly and puritan.

Would he have fervently opposed smoking bans? Without a doubt. His generation viewed smoking as a normal human activity.

In all these matters, it is only right to consider him as a whole, as a man of his place and time, the very things which forged the steely core of him.

But there are one or two issues on which, willy nilly, we would have found ourselves on the same side. I believe that the man who wrote so cleverly about Newspeak would have seen the speech codes and inclusive language of political correctness for the sinister linguistic prisons that they are.

I believe he would have loathed the attempt to introduce identity cards.

I believe he would have supported Steve Thoburn and the metric martyrs against concrete-headed attempts to prosecute them for selling bananas by the English pound.

And I think he would have hated motorways, and the devastation of the railways, and the grisly new liturgy of the Church of England, and the insane massacre of healthy trees by health and safety fanatics.

And he would have absolutely loathed Anthony Blair.

None of us here would ever have found him entirely convenient, or comforting, or a certain ally. He had that genuine independence of mind whose unfailing magnetic north is a love of truth and a loathing of humbug and which scorns all conventional wisdom. That's why, knowing that he would probably have scorned me and everything I ever wrote or said, I'm still very proud to be associated with his name here today.