GEORGE ORWELL: THE AGE'S ADVERSARY

Transcription

1 GEORGE ORWELL: THE AGE'S ADVERSARY

2 By the same author JONATHAN SWIFT: THE BRAVE DESPONDER

3 GEORGE ORWELL: THE AGE'S ADVERSARY Patrick Reilly M MACMILLAN

4 Patrick Reilly 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1986 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters Frome, Somerset British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Reilly, Patrick George Orwell: the age's adversary. I. Orwell, George-Criticism and interpretation I. Title 823'.912 PR6029.R8Z/ ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 To my children Edward,Joseph, Patricia,} ames, Roseanne and Annemarie

6 He who appeals to experience renounces faith. (Feuerbach) They lived at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and they didn't know it. (Coming Up for Air)

7 Contents Preface Acknowledgements Source Abbreviations IX xu X Ill PART ONE: THE MAN Introduction: The Awkward Oracle 2 The Honest Man 3 The Severed Wasp PART TWO: THE WORKS 4 Innocents Abroad 5 The Orphic Impulse 6 The Transient Paradise 7 The Secular Epiphany 8 The Utopian Shipwreck 9 The Deed's Creature Notes Index vii

8 Preface In Saul Bellow's novel Mr Sammler's Planet the aging hero is persuaded against his better judgement to give an evening lecture at Columbia University on the British political scene prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. He is incautious enough to praise George Orwell for his sanity and commits the unpardonable blunder of quoting Orwell's remark that British radicals in the 1930s were protected in their forthright views by the shield of the Royal Navy. Only later does he learn that he's filling in for someone whose subject was to have been 'Sorel and Modern Violence'. The violence is directed instead at Sammler as the radicals of the 1970s hurl abuse against both speaker and subject: 'Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counter-revolutionary. It's good he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.' 1 Later, Sammler's unscrupulous young impresario rebukes him for being so politically maladroit: 'Lots of young radicals see Orwell as part of the cold-war anti-communist gang. You didn't really praise the Royal Navy, did you?' 2 Orwell's gift for injury, that talent for unpalatable truth that drives the scandalised fanatic to excremental fury and his more sophisticated colleague to deprecations about breakdown and disease - all this is the irrefutable sign of a fierce relevance, a living presence, a writer who must be read, by opponents above all, if opposition is to be any more dignified than latrine abuse. Yet Orwell's greatness remains problematical, impossible to deny though difficult to explain. The claims advanced by Professor Crick in the Introduction to the biography are surely justified (Life, pp. xiii-xxii). Orwell is a political thinker of genuine stature and a supreme political writer, the finest in English since Swift, and Nineteen Eighty-Four does stand towards the twentieth century much as Leviathan did towards the seventeenth. He is, moreover, a great essayist and a brilliant journalist, and he did succeed, despite a tragically early death, in moving, even in his lifetime, from being a minor English writer to IX

9 X Preface being a world figure, a name to set arguments going wherever his books are read. Despite this, everyone who reads him remarks the artistic unevenness of his work, the obvious novelistic shortcomings, technical and imaginative, that makes it absurd to rank him with such giants as Joyce and Lawrence. 3 He himself, it should be noted, made no such claim- there is no harsher critic of Orwell the novelist than Orwell himself. Nevertheless, the aesthetic defects notwithstanding, Orwell's reputation and influence have increased since his death and show no sign of diminishing, and the very fact that Orwellian is now an adjective on a par with Swiftian or Johnsonian certifies that the greatness, however puzzling; has been achieved. To go on complaining that Orwell is notjoyce is unreasonable and otiose. Not the greatness, then, but its nature is what needs to be ascertained, and two very different men, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Carlyle, can help us unlock the secret. In An Ideal Husband the hero contradicts his father who has just praised a man for genius - Lord Goring prefers to commend him for the much scarcer commodity of pluck. 4 Carlyle, similarly, identifies sincerity as better than grace. 5 The central assumption of this book is that Orwell's greatness is intimately related to these qualities of pluck and sincerity - he is the outstanding twentieth-century example in English of the writer as hero, with the courage to speak the unfashionable, unwelcome truth. It is a moral rather than an artistic greatness. 6 Anyone who enters Ephesus to denounce Diana is worth a hearing; the Ephesians will, understandably, not like what they hear, but is it too much to ask them to listen? Orwell must be answered, not vilified. The key argument of this book is that few, if any, of the answers hitherto made have engaged Orwell with the full seriousness he deserves. His premonitions of disaster are not to be accounted for simply in terms of political and economic foul-ups - he himself despised and feared those who sought to explain man's predicament as a species of mechanical breakdown, errors of the surface, malfunctions in the social machine which the engineers could be left to correct. He dreaded, rightly or wrongly, a deformation of human nature, and traced it, astonishingly in view of his own atheism, to the fallout from the religious fission of the modern age. For almost two centuries social critics had warned that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral

10 Preface XI philosophy, and that, once this capital was depleted, bourgeois society would find its legitimacy ever more questionable. Orwell is the moral accountant who, having taken it upon himself to examine the books, brings the dire news of ethical bankruptcy. 7 In doing so he offends those who still believe that bourgeois, liberal society can satisfactorily survive on its own rational resources, its own utilitarian axioms, without any need of a faith that exalts love and community above egoism and self-interest. It is the ideological presuppositions of modernity itself that Orwell reveals as bankrupt. At the same time he affronts the radicals by declaring their cure for these evils to be even worse than the disease itself, since they are inevitably if heedlessly conducting us to a kingdom of terror where Big Brother rather than the forgotten Father of traditional religion is the savage God to whom all must submit. Liberals and radicals alike will not find their favourite predilections being flattered in Orwell, but those who prefer truth to flattery will not be deterred on that account. Flattery, says Burke, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; to read Orwell as he deserves is to preserve oneself from at least this particular corruption.

11 Acknowledgements My chief single obligation is to my colleague, Dr Philip Hobsbaum, for advice and encouragement; I thank him for his help while absolving him from all responsibility for the book's defects. I am grateful to the editors of Critical Quarterly, the Clergy Review and Was: Hefte fur Kultur und Politik, for permission to use material that has already appeared in their journals. I am especially indebted to my wife, Rose, for her patience and skill in preparing the manuscript for publication, and to my children for uncomplainingly accepting Orwell as a house guest demanding their parents' attention. The author and publishers wish to thank Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and A.M. Heath Ltd, on behalf of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Martin Seeker and Warburg Ltd, who have kindly given permission to quote extracts from the following works of George Orwell: Animal Farm; Burmese Days; A Clergyman's Daughter; The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vols 1-4; Coming Up for Air; Down and Out in Paris and London; Homage to Catalonia; Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Nineteen Eighty-Four; The Road to Wig an Pier; copyright 1933, 1934 by George Orwell; copyright 1946, 1949 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright 1952, 1968, 1977, 1980 by Sonia Brownell Orwell; copyright 1961, 1962 by Sonia Pitt-Rivers; copyright 1974 by Sonia Orwell. xu

12 Source Abbreviations References to Orwell's works and Crick's Life are so far as possible given within the text. Editions and abbreviations used are as follows. The Orwell editions used are all published by Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middx. ACD A-nimal Farm Aspidistra Burmese Days CEJL Coming Up Down and Out Homage Life Wigan Pier 1984 A Clergyman's Daughter ( 1964). Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1959). Keep the Aspidistra Flying ( 1962). Burmese Days ( 196 7). Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols (1970). Coming Up for Air ( 1962). Down and Out in Paris and London (1963). Homage to Catalonia ( 1962). Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1980). (Republished in Penguin, 1982.) The Road to Wig an Pier ( 196 2). Nineteen Eighty-Four ( 1958). X Ill