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Thus, the Orwell who is regarded by some as being as English as roast beef and warm beer is born in Bengal and publishes his first articles in French.
It is a way of pushing exploitation beyond the point that is normally possible, by pretending that the exploited are not human beings.
‘In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia’ . . .
His favourite socialist politician was the great Aneurin Bevan, his editor at Tribune and a man of wide culture, who abominated all forms of authoritarianism and, even while fighting the entrenched medical lobbies in his effort to create the National Health Service, once remarked that the socialist movement was the only movement in human history that sought to attain power in order to give it away. For Orwell, there was always the hope that socialists could be for freedom, even if socialism itself had bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies.
My recent novel is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and fascism . . . 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.
And in another 1947 essay he concluded: Therefore a socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worthwhile political objective today.
The body-snatching of Orwell, however, is a much more specialized task and probably should not be attempted by any known faction. Least of all, perhaps, should it be undertaken by Tories of any stripe. George Orwell was conservative about many things, but not about politics.
Because of its long alliance with France, and because of its ancestry in the English revolution of the 1640s, the American revolution fully deserves its place in the pedigree of radical upheavals. It has had its full share of contradictions and negations — its original proclamation by slave holders who insisted that ‘all men are created equal’ is one of the first affirmations on record that some are more equal than others.
I think Labour has been reading Nineteen Eighty-Four — the book that introduced ‘doublethink’. You remember — doublethink is the trick of holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time — and accepting both. It was the brain-child of another public-school-educated Socialist. His name was George Orwell. But actually it wasn’t. That was his pen name. His real name was Eric. His surname? You’ve guessed it. It was Blair. Eric Blair. He changed his name. I can’t say the same thing about my opposite number. He’s changed everything else. His politics. His principles. His philosophy. But to the
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As Lady Oxford, Mrs Asquith had caught Orwell’s stern attention in June 1940. She had written to the Daily Telegraph, observing in what Joyce Cary would have called ‘a tumbril remark’ that: ‘Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining . . . in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.’ Of this splendid piece of aristocratic callousness Orwell commented in his diary that ‘apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist’. England, whose England?
Larkin was for Enoch Powell; Orwell defended the coloured subjects of the Empire at home and abroad. Larkin mourned the withdrawal from ‘East of Suez’; Orwell wanted the whole colonial racket wound up. Larkin famously reprobated family life and reproduction, recoiling especially from ‘kiddies’; Orwell thought the English were too scared to breed enough, and keenly wished to become a father himself. Larkin shuddered at the thought of the seaside in ‘Going, Going’; Orwell celebrated the brash vigour of Donald McGill’s end-of-the-pier postcards. Larkin was a law-and-order type who hated rioters
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Orwell pushed this analogy as far as he could, if not a little further, in his other wartime writings. England was a family with the wrong members in control, he wrote, with rich relations who are horribly kowtowed to, and poor relations who are horribly sat upon.
I don’t share the average English intellectual’s hatred of his own country and am not dismayed by a British victory. But just for the same reason I failed to form a true picture of political developments. I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anybody else. I wanted to think that we would not be defeated, and I wanted to think that the class distinctions and imperialist exploitation of which I am ashamed would not return. I over-emphasized the anti-Fascist character of the war, exaggerated the social changes that were actually occurring; and under-rated the enormous strength of
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The original idea of the aspidistra as a fetish came to Orwell by way of Robert Tressell’s celebrated proletarian novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, in which a starving carpenter is forced to pawn everything but clings to his potted shrub as an idiotic token of social status.
Orwell found himself employing what Campbell describes as an Etonian accolade when he said that miners had figures ‘fit for a guardsman’. (The National Union of Mineworkers was known until the mid 1980s as ‘The Brigade of Guards of the Labour movement’.)
George Orwell’s reputation as a left-wing icon took a body-blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he had cooperated closely with IRD’s Cold Warriors, even offering his own blacklist of eighty-six Communist ‘fellow-travellers’. As the Daily Telegraph noted, ‘To some, it was as if Winston Smith had willingly cooperated with the Thought Police in 1984.’
This instant of last-minute solipsism — observing the practical etiquette of life while hurtling towards death — recalls the superbly observed irrelevance of the condemned Burmese convict’s gesture in Orwell’s essay ‘A Hanging’: And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in
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So, not only did Orwell produce a brilliant satire on the self-negation of Communism, he even anticipated its eventual terminus in a robber-baron Mafia capitalist state. Counter-revolutions devour their children, too.
Orwell’s publisher Fredric Warburg wrote, when he had recovered from the shock, that ‘here is a study in pessimism unrelieved, except by the thought that, if a man can conceive “1984”, he can also will to avoid it’.)
Let me give a trivial illustration. In ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, a stupid English schoolboy does poorly in an examination and receives a terrific thrashing from the headmaster, after which he comments ruefully that he wishes he’d had the thrashing before the exam. The young Orwell notices how ‘contemptible’ this remark is. And here is the abject figure of Parsons, complete with khaki shorts and schoolboy manner, in the cellars of the Ministry of Love: ‘Of course I’m guilty!’ cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. ‘You don’t think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do
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Orwell: ‘Autobiography is not to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful’
