Orwell Reconsidered

Stephen Ingle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000692006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

George Orwell has had a profound influence on modern politics and culture. He is regularly invoked as an authority by journalists, commentators and politicians, and his works speak with increasing relevance to our polarised and media-saturated society.

Stephen Ingle explores Orwell's character, his life and his beliefs by guiding the reader through the main events, private and public, that shaped his life and major works. This includes his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as well as the writing of classics like Animal Farm and 1984. The book also reconsiders Orwell's legacy and contextualises his contemporary resonance. Orwell, it is argued, is more concerned with morality than ideology.

This book will be of significant interest to students and other readers interested in Orwell's life as well as his profound contribution to the history of social and political thought and English literature.

1
THE ROAD AHEAD

It is surprising given his celebrity that George Orwell wrote only nine major works: five novels (two he disowned), three autobiographical works (one he sought later to abridge) and one fable. He was only forty-six when he died in January 1950, and he had suffered intermittently from ill health for much of his life. The chief reason, however, for his relatively slim output in terms of major works was his commitment to journalism: he was a prodigious essayist and reviewer. Public recognition came late; it was Orwell’s penultimate book, the fable Animal Farm, which established his name and ensured the eager anticipation of his next (and last) book, 1984, and prompted a reassessment of his earlier work. Was his journalism a hindrance? Not at all – it sharpened his writing. Moreover some of his essays and reviews, illuminating a bewildering range of subjects, were amongst his finest work.

It was the Cold War that established Orwell’s world renown. He became the best known and most frequently quoted of all the Cold Warriors. Phrases such as ‘Newspeak’, ‘Doublethink’, ‘Big Brother is watching you’, ‘all animals are equal but. . . ’ have become parts of the common currency of popular discourse. But his reputation outlived the death of his nemesis Joseph Stalin, and indeed the later fall of the USSR itself, prompting us to ask why Orwell continues to be so widely read and even more widely quoted? At first sight three reasons suggest themselves: the memorable quality of his prose writing; the fact that his focus was moral rather than ideological; unlike political issues, which tend to lose salience with time, moral issues have always held our interest. Finally his rich life experiences, especially during the Spanish Civil War, endowed him with a clear if not always well-founded understanding of the relationship between ‘the truth’ and what today might be called fake truth and of how language might be used or abused by those in authority when disseminating these concepts.

Probing more deeply, it is clear that the lucid quality of Orwell’s writing – he aspired to write prose like a window pane – allowed him to communicate to an extensive readership. In the essay ‘Why I Write’¹ he elucidated four motives for writing which he believed were to be found, in different proportions, in every writer. These were: sheer egoism, the desire to be remembered after one’s death and talked about during one’s lifetime; aesthetic enthusiasm, pleasure taken in the impact produced by the juxtaposition of sounds, a sense of rhythm, and the desire to share this pleasure; historical impulse, best defined in his own words, a ‘desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and to store them up for the use of posterity’; and finally political purpose, an attempt to push the world in a certain direction, to change people’s ideas of what kind of society they should try to build. In his essay Orwell goes on to suggest that these motives don’t necessarily pull in the same direction; sometimes they may be at war with each other. In his own case he claimed that his personal involvement in the Spanish Civil War had reinforced the third and especially the fourth motives. In an overtly ‘political’ age such as the 1930s, he said, a writer who ignored politics was ‘either a footler or a plain idiot’, and he went on to claim that had he lived in other times, he would have been much more concerned with aesthetics and style. I think he was deluding himself: it was his intense commitment that gave wings to his writing. Far from preventing him from becoming a great writer, commitment made him a great writer. As his career progressed Orwell sought to an increasingly conscious degree to fuse aesthetic and political motivation, and who could doubt his success? Yet the enduring interest in his work is testament to more even than this. What concerned him weren’t so much the transient ideological or geopolitical issues of his time – although he did explore these – but something more enduring, more fundamental: what it means to be human and what should constitute the relationship between the individual human and the state. This is why his work has outlived the political circumstances that cajoled him into action.

Orwell has been claimed for liberalism, toryism, anarchism and Trotskyism, and it’s not hard to understand why. The man himself felt no such ambiguity declaring that after 1936, when he was thirty-three, every line he wrote was written to champion ‘democratic socialism’, as he understood it. His understanding of democratic socialism developed through the 1930s and 1940s: in fact it changed fundamentally. I shall be exploring the developments in his thinking as evidenced by his major works within the framework of his life.

The phrase ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ may have been coined by Mark Twain, but Orwell’s exploration of the relationship amongst the three is more memorable. In his delightful novel Scoop Evelyn Waugh showed how the circumstances surrounding the reporting of battles encourage ‘creative’ war journalism amongst unscrupulous reporters. Orwell’s accounts of the reporting of events in the Spanish Civil War tell of a much more brutal manipulation of facts for political ends, and he shows how important language and its forms can be in this exercise. 1984, his final novel, provides a terrifying testimony to the management of ‘facts’. His analysis of the use of language has become of special relevance following the development of the internet and its dominance by a few giant corporations but perhaps never more so than in the period following the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election and the subsequent international debate over alternative facts and fake news.

To explore the development of his thinking, I shall examine what was going on around Orwell: the experiences, people and events that shaped him as a person. The book comprises seven chapters, chronologically arranged, and each comprises two sections. In Chapters Two through to Six the first section will concentrate on discrete periods in his life and the second on the work that emerged in each. Chapter Two deals with Orwell’s family and background and his early years. The chapter covers his childhood, youth and young adulthood, including his service with the Imperial Police in Burma and his subsequent return to Britain. The works to be examined are the essays ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’ and the novel Burmese Days. Chapter Three concerns Orwell’s attempt to establish himself as a writer and follows his journey to what he called the bedrock of Western civilisation – the world of poverty in London and Paris – and shows him learning his craft as a writer. The works to be considered are Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman’s Daughter. Chapter Four focuses on Orwell’s commission to visit the north of England to undertake a survey of poverty and unemployment for the publisher Victor Gollancz. This period produced the Orwell we think we know – both the democratic socialist and the literary persona. Orwell married on his return from the north, although he wasn’t to enjoy wedded bliss for long. He was so convinced of the importance of his newly discovered democratic socialism that he went off to Spain to fight for it. I shall discuss Orwell’s five months on the Aragon Front during the Civil War and assess the consequences for his life, his writing and his thinking, especially in the brief period between Spain and the Second World War, when he came out as a champion of pacifism. The works to be examined are The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia and Coming Up for Air.

Chapter Five concerns the war years when Orwell takes on the mantle of patriotism. Before the war ended, his life had been transformed by the adoption of his son Richard and, not long after, the tragic death of his first wife Eileen. I shall examine his hopes and fears for the post-war world, irrevocably bound up with democratic socialism’s struggle against the USSR and its supporters in the West, the so-called fellow travellers. The works I shall be considering are the patriotic essay ‘England Your England’ and the brilliantly imaginative demolition of the Russian Revolution and subsequent developments in the USSR, Animal Farm. Published as soon as the war ended, it was this fable that brought him sudden international acclaim. Chapter Six concerns the period between the end of the war and Orwell’s death and dwells principally on his struggle against growing ill health whilst completing his final, most important book, a savage attack on totalitarian power structures everywhere, but especially in the USSR. The chapter concludes with the writer’s second marriage and untimely death in January 1950. Naturally the primary work to be discussed is Orwell’s best-known work, the dystopian novel 1984, and as a prelude, a short essay on what might be called the totalitarian mindset, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, will be examined. Chapter Seven, the concluding chapter, also comprises two sections, the first considering Orwell as a political thinker, as a moralist and as a writer. The second section seeks to consider his legacy, and his contribution to modern political discourse, and to assess whether it amounts to a coherent set of beliefs that we might call ‘Orwellism’. Finally a timeline of Orwell’s life and principal publications, and some suggestions for further reading will be attached.

This book is an introduction to Orwell, and I have tried to keep the reader’s path as clear as uncluttered as possible, so I have avoided lengthy direct quotations from the many reference works which I have consulted over a period of years and have instead attempted to distil the arguments that have helped shape my own thinking. As will be clear the conclusions that I draw are very much my own. Those who might wish to take their studies of Orwell to a deeper level can make use of my suggestions for further reading. For everybody, though, the journey begins here.

Note

1 George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, Harmondsworth, Penguin, n.d., pp. 1-6. This is the source of all the quotations which follow in this chapter.

2
THE MAKING OF AN OUTSIDER

George Orwell is usually considered to be the quintessential liberalminded, middle-class Englishman, an especially perceptive and acute observer of a dangerous world. We will leave his liberal mindedness till later. For now we can say that ‘perceptive and acute and observer’ describe him well, but the ‘quintessentially middle-class English’ bit needs some qualification: he would have been an excellent subject for the TV programme Who Do You Think You Are? Firstly, consider his name – George, the name of six British monarchs and Orwell – a quiet river flowing through the Suffolk countryside. How appropriately English! But of course this wasn’t his name at all. He was born Eric Arthur Blair, signalling Scots and not English heritage. Secondly he was born in India, not in rural England. Thirdly, Blair’s mother was of French extraction – her maiden name was Limouzin. Blair’s heritage contains other surprises: his grandfather had been a minister in the Church of England; his great-grandfather had been a Jane Austen character – a captain in the Fourth Dragoon Guards who retired to Bath; his great-great-grandfather, an absentee landlord who held Jamaican sugar plantations worked by slaves, took the family into the aristocracy when he married the daughter of the eighth earl of Westmorland. Moreover, when the Blairs left India and moved to England, the two-year old Eric hardly saw his English father for seven years. He was nurtured within the rather Bohemian tradition of his mother’s Gallic family and not the subdued respectability of his father’s typical English middle-class home. Indeed his mother Ida and her sisters attended suffragette meetings and moved in Fabian circles. For all these reasons we need to be conscious of what is omitted in that phrase ‘quintessentially middle-class Englishman’. In fact under today’s rules, he might have qualified to play rugby for France.

This chapter is titled ‘The making of an outsider’. Why might Orwell be called an outsider? Clearly no orthodoxy or class could claim him. He liked to proclaim his anti-establishment credentials by drinking tea from a saucer, as he imagined working men would, and yet when a working-class communist attacked the middle classes in his company, he threatened to punch the man. He was a refusenik who would often wave two metaphorical fingers at the ruling class – of which by birth and education he was ostensibly a member – and shout something scurrilous. He would savage the very nature of imperialism and then later declare that neither India nor – especially – Burma – was ready for independence.¹ It’s hard to think of an orthodoxy he didn’t attack at one time or another. But nobody is born an outsider; this chapter tries to show how and why he became one.

Orwell’s father was a civil servant of the Raj, trained as indeed Orwell himself would be one day, as an administrator in Britain’s great imperial enterprise. Richard Walmsley Blair was the tenth and youngest child of a Dorset vicar. He was to devote his life to an undistinguished and somewhat obscure branch of the Indian civil service, the Opium Department. As its title suggests, the job of that department was to oversee the production, collection and transportation of Indian opium to China. This trade, with its disastrous consequence for considerable numbers of Chinese, produced a profit equivalent to approximately one-sixth of the entire government revenue in British India. Richard Blair’s task then was to help organise what is often regarded as one of the worst evils of the British colonial system. Orwell was never to reflect in print on his father’s role, so we can only speculate as to his thoughts on the matter. It should be said though that Richard was no powerful mandarin. He began his career in 1875 as assistant sub-deputy agent (fifth grade), and when he left the service thirty-seven years later, he was still only a sub-deputy agent, although he had clawed his way to first grade.² Arriving in India to take up his post at the age of eighteen, he then travelled around the stations of rural India for twenty years as a bachelor before, in 1896, at the age of thirty-nine, marrying Ida Mabel Limouzin, the daughter of a French father and English mother who, although born in England, had grown up amongst her French relations in Moulmein (now Mawlamyine) in Burma (now Myanmar). where her father was a teak merchant.

Before we begin Orwell’s story, we need to decide what we are to call him. I have chosen to call him Eric Blair until he himself decided to adopt a pseudonym in 1933. However, whenever I discuss his writing, I shall refer to him as ‘Orwell’, even when he is writing about events prior to 1933. So, Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, in what was Bengal and is now Bihar, near the Nepalese border, on 25 June 1903. He was his parents’ second child and only son. His older sister Marjorie had been born in 1898, and in 1908 there would be a second daughter, Avril. Although she knew the East and was no wilting rose, his mother Ida chose to go to England to plan for life after her husband’s retirement seven years before he finally retired. When they left for England, Eric had not yet reached the age of two. His father would spend only one period of leave at home before finally retiring. The family settled in Henley, where Avril was born. Eric was five years younger than Marjorie and five years older than Avril, too far away from each for much intimacy, and so was a lonely child who didn’t enjoy the best of health. In Henley young Eric became fri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author profile
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The road ahead
• 2 The making of an outsider
• 3 The abyss
• 4 Taking sides
• 5 The world set free?
• 6 Two plus two
• 7 The heart of the matter
• Timeline for George Orwell
• Further reading
• Index