ORWELL

BOOKS BY JEFFREY MEYERS

Biography
A Fever at the Core: The Idealist in Politics
Married to Genius
Katherine Mansfield
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
Hemingway
Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle
D. H. Lawrence
Joseph Conrad
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy
Scott Fitzgerald
Edmund Wilson
Robert Frost
Bogart: A Life in Hollywood
Gary Cooper: American Hero
Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers
Wintry Conscience: A Biography of George Orwell
Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam
Somerset Maugham
Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt
Modigliani
Samuel Johnson: The Struggle
The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe

Criticism
Fiction and the Colonial Experience
The Wounded Spirit: T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom
A Reader's Guide to George Orwell
Painting and the Novel
Homosexuality and Literature
D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy
Disease and the Novel
The Spirit of Biography
Hemingway: Life into Art

Bibliography
T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography
Catalogue of the Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon
George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

Edited Collections
George Orwell: The Critical Heritage
Hemingway: The Critical Heritage
Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs
The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader
The W. Somerset Maugham Reader

Edited Original Essays

Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation
Wyndham Lewis by Roy Campbell
D. H. Lawrence and Tradition
The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence
The Craft of Literary Biography
The Biographer's Art
T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend
Graham Greene: A Revaluation
ORWELL
Life and Art

JEFFREY MEYERS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
 2010 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meyers, Jeffrey.
Orwell : life and art / Jeffrey Meyers.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03561-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-252-03561-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN13: 978-0-252-07746-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN10: 0-252-07746-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Orwell, George, 19031950Criticism and interpretation.
2. Authors, English20th centuryBiography.
3. JournalistsGreat BritainBiography.
I. Title.
PR6029.R8Z73555 2010
828'.91209dc22 2010030298
 For
Joseph Frank
CONTENTS

Introduction

I: THE LIFE

1. Orwell's Painful Childhood

2. Orwell's Burma

3. The Ethics of Responsibility: Burmese Days

4. Orwell: The Honorary Proletarian

5. Orwell and the Experience of France

6. An Affirming Flame: Homage to Catalonia

7. Repeating the Old Lies

II: THE ART

8. Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up for Air

9. Orwell as Film Critic

10. The Reluctant Propagandist

11. The Wind in the Willows: A New Source for Animal Farm

12. Orwell's Bestiary: The Political Allegory of Animal Farm

13. The Evolution of Nineteen Eighty-Four

14. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel of the 1930s

15. Miseries and Splendors of Scholarship

16. The Complete Works of George Orwell

17. Orwell: A Voice That Naked Goes

18. Orwell and the Art of Writing

19. Orwell's Satiric Humor

III: ORWELL AFTER ORWELL

20. Reviewing the Orwellians

21. True to Life: Writing Orwell's Biography

Epilogue

Notes

Sources and Jeffrey Meyers: Other Works on Orwell

Index
INTRODUCTION

George Orwell, the most widely read and influential serious writer of the twentieth century, has been my
lifelong interest. My dissertation and first book, Fiction and the Colonial Experience (1973), considered
cultural conflicts in the novels of Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene that
developed when European nations imposed their manners and customs, religious beliefs and moral values
on an indigenous way of life. My extensive travels in India and Africa, and professional interest in this
subject, led me to Burmese Days and to a passion for Orwell. I eventually wrote four books about him: A
Reader's Guide to George Orwell (1975), George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975), George
Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (with Valerie Meyers, 1977) andwhen dissatisfied
with all the previous biographiesa full-scale life: Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000).
The twenty-one essays in this volume were published over a period of forty years, between 1968 and
2009. I return to some striking passages several times, but interpret them differently in various contexts.
This book begins with an account of Orwell's autobiographical writings from the beginning of his career
through the Spanish Civil War; continues with analyses of his major works, and general essays on his
style, ideas about writing and quirky humor; and concludes by focusing on the six biographies of Orwell
including my own.
Orwell's literary qualitiesvigorous style, engaging honesty, sly witimmediately attract us. And his
personal qualitiesintegrity, idealism and commitmentshine through his writing like pebbles in a clear
stream. In his own lifetime Orwell's passionate desire to unite the disparate classes and create a just
society in England commanded respect and gave him a special aura. Though he was intensely
conscientious, he was hard on himself. His obstinate search for moral values animates his essays and
novels, and his lucid prose represents a triumph over the chaos and self-doubt that lies beneath the
surface. His legend was partly self-created, and his work has hadstill hasextraordinary political and
cultural influence. Orwell's books have not dated (though he was born more than a century ago), and we
can now see the complexity of his struggle and the greatness of his achievement.
Very few writers lives can stand up to the intense scrutiny of modern biographers, but the more I
studied Orwell, the more appealing he became. I found few flaws, and even those made him seem rather
eccentric, even charming. There is an admirable consistency between the values he advocates in his work
and those that guided his behavior, often under difficult and dangerous conditions, in his life. He was a
seeker after justice and truth, with an instinctive insight into the heart of social and political problems.
His vision is sharp, concrete and absolutely realistic. His political beliefs were determined by harsh
experience rather than by ideological considerations. His most impressive personal and literary
characteristics were a Conradian concern with human solidarity; generosity of spirit that extends to enemy
prisoners, French collaborators and Fascist war criminals; intellectual honesty in admitting his own
mistakes; balanced judgment; courage to speak out against any mean or cowardly attitude; and defense of
provocative and unpopular views.
 The recent Polish film Katyn is a striking example of the suppression of truth for political reasons by
those in power. Both the Russian murderers and (for once) the innocent Germans accused each other of
massacring thousands of captured Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia in the forest of Katyn,
near Smolensk, in April 1940. The Russians did not admit the truth about this mass murder until 1989.
Though he died sixty years ago, we need Orwell now more than ever.
Two passages from Anna Funder's brilliant memoir, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
(2003), suggest the lasting political influence of Orwell's final books. After noting that Orwell's works
were banned in East Germany, Funder suggests that a widely viewed television program cunningly
reflected the oppressive Communist state: Big Brother was a wildly popular reality tv program
screened here recently, where people were locked in a house together and filmed day and night by
security cameras. Named for the head of the surveillance regime in Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
the program offered a cash prize for the person who could survive the longest living with others under
such closed and scrutinised circumstances.
Funder tells the story of a friend who experienced a dangerous moment when the East German police
were going through all our drawers, everything on the desks, the record collection. One of them was up a
ladder searching the bookshelves when he found Orwell's Animal Farm, which, of course, was
blacklisted. We held our breath as he pulled it off the shelf. I remember the cover clearly: it was the pigs,
holding a red flag aloft. We watched as this young man looked at it, the pigs and the flag. Then he put it
back. Afterwards we laughed! We could only think that he saw the pigsthat was badbut that they were
holding a red flag, and they seemed to be on a collective farmhe must have thought that meant it was all
right! The subversive nature of Animal Farm, with its radical criticism of the Russian Revolution, gave
hope to East Germans who opposed the Communist regime. But the satire was so potent that merely
owning a copy could send people straight to prison.
At a time when virtually all significant works in the modern period have been exhaustively analyzed
and interpretive criticism has almost come to a dead endapart from the rare brilliant article, most
textual explications are either far-fetched or tediously familiarthe historical and biographical
approaches, which bring new facts and new learning (often based on archival material) to illuminate
literary works, seem to be the most innovative and useful way to discuss modern authors. I am
particularly interested in the life in the work, in the relations between biography, culture, politics and
literature. My critical position is similar to the one expressed in a letter of 1842 by the young cultural
historian Jakob Burckhardt: My own substitute [for abstract thought] is my effort to achieve with every
day a more intense immediacy in the perception of essentials. By nature I cling to the tangible, to visible
reality and to history. But I have a bent for incessantly looking for parallels in co-ordinating facts and
have thus succeeded on my own in arriving at a few generalized principles.

I'd like to thank John Rodden and John Knapp for their perceptive reports, which enabled me to improve
this book, and Willis Regier for his enthusiastic support.
THE LIFE
ONE

ORWELL'S PAINFUL CHILDHOOD

This essay compared Orwell's early years to those of Thackeray, Kipling and Durrell in India,
and to Dickens and Joyce in Britain. It argued that his work was rooted in his childhood, and in
the themespoverty, fear, guilt, masochism and sicknessthat were expressed in his
posthumously published essay about the cruelty in his prep school, Such, Such Were the Joys.
I might have added that Orwell also felt intensely guilty about his father's job in the Indian
Opium Department. The production, collection and transportation of opium to China was the
most vicious and indefensible kind of imperialistic exploitation.

Orwell was always extremely reticent about his personal affairs, so we know virtually nothing about how
his character was formed in his earliest years. He was born in 1903 in Motihari, situated on the bank of a
lake in the state of Bihar, between Patna and Katmandu. His father was a sub-deputy agent in the Opium
Department of the Indian Civil Service, and Orwell's family was part of that upper-middle class, which
had its heyday in the eighties and nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, and was a sort of mound of
wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded.1
Thackeray, Kipling and Durrell spent their first years in India before being sent to England to begin
school. Orwell's mother took him to England when he was one year old. Kipling's Something of Myself
gives a lyrical description of a secure Indian childhood, protected by the gentleness and affection of
bearer and ayah; and Fraser writes of Durrell that the Indian childhood, the heat, the colour, the
Kiplingesque social atmosphere, deeply affected his childish imagination.2 But both Thackeray and
Kipling stress the wrenching trauma of leaving India at five years old. In The Newcombes, Thackeray
writes: What a strange pathos seems to me to accompany all our Indian story! The family must be
broken up. In America it is from the breast of a poor slave that a child is taken; in India it is from the
wife.3 Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep describes his sudden and painful departure from servants and
parents (through no fault of their own, they had lost all their world), and the horrors of an alien family
that engulfs him with meanness and cruelty. Like Orwell, Kipling endured inexplicable accusations of
crimes, constant fear of punishment, unjust beatings, terrifying threats of hell and utter despair, and he
concludes that when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all
the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.4
Orwell attended the local grammar school at Henley-on-Thames and lived in that strangely artificial
atmosphere that Anglo-Indian families recreated for themselves at home. George Bowling, the hero of
Coming Up for Air, married into one of these families and describes it with satiric wit: As soon as you
set foot inside the front door you're in India in the eighties. You know the kind of atmosphere. The carved
teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot
pickles, the yellow photographs of chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you're expected to
know the meaning of, the everlasting anecdotes of the tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona
in 87. It's a sort of little world of their own that they've created, like a kind of cyst.5
Orwell writes in Such, Such Were the Joys that, even while at home, my early childhood had not
been altogether happy. One ought to love one's father, but I knew very well that I merely disliked my
own father, whom I had barely seen before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced
elderly man forever saying Don't.6 Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive
from the age of seven or eight onwards. I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person,
except my mother, and even her I did not trust.7
An archetypal image of a warm and secure family hearth, which Orwell never had and always
wanted, appears again and again in his works as an idealized domestic portrait that reflects his
deprivation: In a working-class home you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which is
not so easy to find elsewhere. On winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and
dances mirrored in the steel fender, Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking-chair at one side of the fire
reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing.8 Orwell states that at eight years
old he was suddenly separated from his family and flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy,
like a gold-fish into a tank full of pike.9
Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell won a scholarship to a mediocre prep
school that intended to exploit his intelligence. His family, who made financial sacrifices for his
education, counted on him to succeed and retrieve their diminishing fortunes. He spent the crucial
adolescent years from eight to fourteen in Eastbourne at St. Cyprian's school, which he anatomized,
condemned and attempted to exorcize in Such, Such Were the Joys.
This essay, Orwell's most poignant and (after Animal Farm) his most perfect work, is of the greatest
value for an understanding of his character, life and works. Just as Nineteen Eighty-Four is a final
synthesis of all Orwell's major themes, so Such, Such (which was written at the same time) reveals the
impetus and genesis of these ideas. Its central themespoverty, fear, guilt, masochism and sicknessare
manifested in the pattern of his life and developed in all his books.
Orwell confesses that he was lonely, and soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me
unpopular throughout my schooldays; and he states that one of the school codes (which he accepted) was
an almost neurotic dread of poverty, and, above all, the assumption that money and privilege are the
things that matter. In school, Orwell felt guilty because he did not have money and also because he
wanted it. (When Orwell doubles his father's income, a Russian boy calculates that his father has more
than two hundred times as much money.)
The experiences Orwell describes in Down and Out in Paris and London are a direct reaction
against and refutation of this privileged school ethos, just as his use of a pseudonym (George is the patron
saint of England, Orwell an East Anglian river) beginning with that book is an attempt to abandon that
hateful part of his life he associated with St. Cyprian's, Eton and Burma. People always grow up like
their names. It took me nearly thirty years to work off the effects of being called Eric, he writes; and
when he gave up the family name of Blair, he rejected the Scottish birth of both parents and the odious cult
of Scotland that pervaded his snobbish school. The hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying admits that
Gordon Comstock was a pretty bloody name, but then Gordon came of a pretty bloody family. The
Gordon part of it was Scotch, of course.10 Comstock's experience at a school where nearly all the boys
were richer than himself and tormented him because of it has led to his renunciation of ambition and the
world of money. As Comstock says, Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it
to a school among children richer than itself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies
such as a grown-up person can scarcely even imagine.11 In this respect, Orwell's childhood was like that
of Dickens, who had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, for they both came from a
middle-class family going into decline. Orwell's painful treatment at school was the emotional equivalent
of Dickens servitude in the blacking factory (which occurred at the same age), and both men bore the
scars of early poverty throughout their entire lives. Dickens prayed when I went to bed at night to be
lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before,12 and
Orwell writes of suffering horrors which [he] cannot or will not reveal.13
The hideous birthmark of Flory in Burmese Days is the symbolic equivalent of Orwell's feeling that
he was an ugly failure, and Flory also suffers agonies of humiliation at school. Certain aspects of St.
Cyprian's (The school still had a faint suggestion of the Victorian private academy with its parlour
boarders) reappear significantly in Ringwood Academy where Dorothy teaches in A Clergyman's
Daughter. And its psychological atmosphere is reproduced and intensified in Nineteen Eighty-Four,
where the guilt is familial as well as political. Winston feels regret about stealing his sister's food and
feels responsible for the tragic disappearance of his family in the purges, and this guilt is expressed in his
recurrent nightmare about his drowning mother and sister. The overwhelming doom that threatens Orwell
at school also threatens Bowling in Coming Up for Air; and the fearful oppression by one's fellows recurs
in Animal Farm. The lonely Orwell's desperate need for human sympathy, comradeship and solidarity is
at the emotional core of Homage to Catalonia; and a deep sympathy for the oppressed underdog sent
Orwell to Spain and put him on the road to Wigan Pier. At school Orwell learned the good and the
possible never seemed to coincide, and in an important sense, his whole life was an attempt to bring
them together. Oppression and humiliation formed the dominant pattern of his personal life at the time
when Europe was being dominated by Communism and Fascism.
In his essay on Dal, Orwell states: Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something
disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed
from the inside is simply a series of defeats. Orwell's feelings in Such, Such were so intense, his
revelations so personal, that he never published the essay during his lifetime. Cyril Connolly's Enemies of
Promise gives a rather different and more promising picture of their prep school, and when his book was
published Orwell wrote to him, I wonder how you can write abt St Cyprian's. It's all like an awful
nightmare to me.
The horrors that Orwell suffered represent an archetypal childhood trauma and are similar to those in
Dickens and Joyce, which illuminate his condition. Orwell compares St. Cyprian's to Dotheboys Hall in
Nicholas Nickleby, and that infamous school, where lasting agonies and disfigurements are inflicted
upon children by the treatment of the master,14 probably influenced Orwell's portrayal of his school as a
reactionary and barbaric Victorian institution. Mrs Squeers feeds the boys brimstone and treacle because
it spoils their appetites and comes cheaper than breakfast and dinner,15 and Orwell writes that Only a
generation earlier it had been common for school dinners to start off with a slab of unsweetened suet
pudding, which, it was frankly said, broke the boys appetites. Mrs Squeers taps the crown of the boys
heads with a wooden spoon just as Sambo taps away at one's skull with his silver pencil. And the scene
where Squeers flogs the helpless boy, who has warts on his hands and who has failed to pay his full fees,
is psychologically similar to Orwell's caning for bed-wetting, since both boys must confess to an
imaginary dirty crime while suffering unjust punishment.
Such, Such and the school chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both discuss the
themes of authority, guilt, cruelty, punishment, helplessness, isolation and misery. Both Stephen and
Orwell are bullied by the older stronger boys: Stephen is pushed into the cold slimy water by Wells, and
Orwell fears the daily nightmare of footballthe cold, the mud the gouging knees and trampling boots
of the bigger boys. That was the pattern of school lifea continuous triumph of the strong over the
weak. The innocent Stephen is abused and beaten by Father Dolan: Lazy idle little loafer! cried the
prefect of studies. Broke my glasses! An old schoolboy trick! Out with your hand this moment!16 just as
Orwell is by Sambo: Go on, you little slacker! Go on, you idle, worthless little boy! The whole trouble
with you is that you're bone and horn idle. And both boys are threatened with damnation and terrified by
vivid sermons: up to the age of about fourteen I officially believed in [Hell]. Almost certainly Hell
existed, and there were occasions when a vivid sermon could scare you into fits.17
Orwell's reaction to this nightmare, a self-destructive expression of protest and fear, is recorded in his
startling opening sentence: Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's I began wetting my bed. The result of
this shameful practice was two beatings which caused that deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood
and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a
hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible
for me to keep them. I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to
have felt before. This acceptance of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years. It was
unnoticed, that is, during the whole course of his life, from schooldays until he tried to purge this guilt by
writing the essay in the forties.
The bed-wetting was only the first of endless episodes that made Orwell feel guilty: he was poor, he
was lazy and a failure, ungrateful and unhealthy, disgusting and dirty-minded, weak, ugly, cowardly,
smelly. Flip and Sambo caned, reproached, abused and humiliated him throughout the six years, and
Orwell developed the profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my
talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitudeand all this, it seemed, was
inescapable. After a homosexual scandal, guilt seemed to hang in the air like a pall of smoke. Till
then I had hoped that I was innocent, and the conviction of sin which now took possession of me was
perhaps all the stronger because I did not know what I had done. These disturbing passages have
metaphysical implications and suggest the guilt, absurdity, confusion and anxiety of the world created by
Franz Kafka. And in this world the childcredulous, weak and vulnerableis the ready and constant
victim. He lacks any sense of proportion or probability and is forced to live with the constant dread of
offending against mysterious, terrible laws.
The dominant pattern in Orwell's life that emerges from Such, Such is the series of masochistic
impulses for a higher cause that testifies to his compulsive need to assuage his intense guilt by self-
punishment: at St. Cyprian's; in the Burmese police; among scullions and beggars; in squalid doss houses
and inside mines; with the ragged, weaponless army of the Spanish Republic; in propagandistic drudgery
for the wartime BBC (a whoreshop and lunatic asylum); in thankless and exhausting political polemics;
and finally in that mad and suicidal sojourn amidst the bleak and isolated wastes of Jura. In Wigan Pier
Orwell states that he was haunted by a sense of guilt (127), and he explains that this guilt is political
and derives from his experience as a colonial oppressor. But it seems that the cause of this guilt, which he
could never extinguish, occurred earlier than Orwell suggests and had its deep roots in his childhood.
Though this masochistic strain existed, Orwell's writing is manifest proof of his ability to transcend this
personal guilt by channeling it into effective social and political thought and action. His own suffering led
to a feeling of responsibility for the suffering of others.
TWO

ORWELL'S BURMA

My trip to Burma in August 2000 fulfilled a longstanding ambition, and I was the first Orwell
scholar to visit that country (just as I was the first Lawrence scholar to go down a coal mine).
Despite its extreme poverty, authoritarian regime and oppressive atmosphere, I found Burma
extremely appealing. Like the Greek islanders of the 1960s, the people were among the nicest I'd
ever met, and it was the most rewarding and interesting of my forty trips abroad. I confirmed at
first hand that a Burmese student had never (as Maung Htin Aung claimed and I had doubted)
pushed Orwell down a staircase in Rangoon.
The Orient-Express company asked me to pay my own plane fare to Burma, but gave me a free
cruise on the Irrawaddy River from Pagan to Bhamo, near the Chinese border. They said I would
not have to give any lectures, but once aboard (and with no notes) I had to give two
extemporaneous talks. Cond Nast Traveler did not respond to my original proposal and my
essay was not commissioned. But when I came home, they bought it and kept it for a year. They
finally published it in November 2001but left me out of the table of contents and contributors
notes.

It was not easy to follow George Orwell's footsteps in Burma. Not that I was hampered by a lack of
freedom to travel. While the country's military junta was still limiting the movements of the courageous
Aung San Suu Kyithe hopeful alternative to the current repressive regimelast year it had signed
treaties with rebellious hill tribes on the borders of India and China and had lifted travel restrictions. I
was able to journey by plane, ship, boat, bus, car, trishaw, and foot to see the places where Orwell, the
subject of my recently published biography, had lived while serving with the Burmese police from 1922
through 1927. The prison at Insein, near Rangoon, was the scene of A Hanging, his polemic on capital
punishment. Moulmein, a city in Lower Burma, was the setting of Shooting an Elephant, his essay on the
limitations of British colonial power. His life in Katha, a town far north of the capital, inspired his
powerful novel Burmese Days (1934), a satiric portrait of English officials and corrupt Burmese that had
offended everyone.
But Orwell's letters from Burma have not survived, and the meager records of his service had either
been transferred to London or destroyed during the Japanese occupation. When writing the Burmese
chapter in my biography, I'd had to use information from gazetteers, travel books, and memoirs. Today,
most British buildings are in a state of advanced decay, and the Burmese government has tried to
obliterate all traces of the colonial era, which lasted from the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to
independence in 1948. (The five-story National Museum leaves out more than a century of the country's
history.) But with the help of Burmese friends, I was able to find the places where he had worked, to
imagine how it was for a very young Englishman to represent British rule in an exotic, alien land.
Rangoon, like a rich widow fallen on hard times, was a broken-down and depressing citymore like
Calcutta than the thriving capitals of Southeast Asia. It had leprous-looking, fungus-encrusted buildings;
dark, uninviting shops; and restaurants that served such menacing dishes as stamping fish, fish bladder
soup, and pork stomach with garlic bean curd, as well as more exotic plates of snake, alligator and
monkey meat. Street vendors had pathetic offerings: a tiny mound of lemons, a few cheap sunglasses,
some tattered English magazines. Men dressed in lungis and rubber sandals hung off the edge of packed
buses. (Few people in Burma wear shoes, as I discovered when I broke my shoelaces and had trouble
buying new ones.) Laborers staggered by, under crushing piles of bricks. Lines of monksheads shaved,
feet bare, with rust-colored robes and umbrellaswalked in procession with black lacquer bowls to beg
their food and alms. Huge red government billboards carried Big Brother's slogans in English, urging the
populace to destroy those who opposed the ruling generals and who wanted to restore the democratically
elected government (Aung San Suu Kyi's party won the national elections in 1990): Crush all internal
and destructive elements as the common enemy, and Oppose those relying on external elements, acting
as stooges, holding negative views. The regime revealed its puritanical side with another sign that read,
rather oddly: Prohibition: Any indecorous social behavior is strictly prohibited.
I visited Rangoon's main attraction, the enormous Shwedagon pagoda, set in a vast green park, as the
sun blazed off the white stone floors, glittering altars and ornate statues. Unimpressed by the layers of
gold and encrusted jewels, Aldous Huxley wrote that the pagoda belongs to the merry-go-round style of
architecture and decoration. It seems a sacred Fun Fair, a Luna Park dedicated to the greater glory of
Gautama [Buddha]. Although there are very few new buildings in town, throughout the country there is an
endless proliferation of pagodasthe only growth industry in Burma.
But the people smile warmly, no one bothers or begs from the occasional tourist, and the streets are
safe, even at night and in the dingiest districts. In a large store I was ceremoniously escorted through
various departments to buy tissues and bottled water, although my purchases amounted to only 65 cents.
The Burmese believe that displays of anger and the loss of self-control are humiliating, and this desire to
suppress hostility and avoid conflict makes social relations here more pleasant than in the West. I saw
only one altercation, between a trishaw driver and an irate passenger who jabbed his fingers and made
violent threats, as the crowd looked on disapprovingly and the driver slowly turned and pedaled away.
Buddhism, which teaches that life is suffering, seems to make the people passive and fatalistic, yet it also
gives them a sweetness, gentleness and charm.
Orwell's favorite bookshop, Smart & Mookerdum's, was long gone. But a Burmese friend from
Rangoon University showed me the old English Gymkhana Club on Halpin Road, which Orwell
frequented when he came to Rangoon. It had a high, cross-timbered ceiling and a tin roof that rattled in the
rain, and was now the oldest building of the Children's Hospital. A young woman doctor, sensitive about
Burma's low rating from the World Health Organization and assuming that I was collecting evidence, got
angry when I took photos and started scolding my friend, who gently deflected her.
I also saw the Central Railway Station, where, according to Maung Htin Aung (the only Burmese to
write about Orwell), a Burmese student once tripped Orwell, who fell down a staircase. In my biography,
I wrote that this apparently eyewitness account seemed more like nationalist propaganda than an actual
event. I was pleased to have this belief confirmed by my learned Burmese friend, who said that Aung, an
old colleague and rector of the university, was an unreliable historian who refused to give sources for his
assertions.
On a trip south of the river, I got special permission to enter the grounds of the old Burmah Oil
Company, which had supplied most of the oil to India and was once guarded by Orwell's men. After a
monsoon squall, I hired a taxi ($4 for 75 minutes) and drove north, near the airport, to Insein prison,
where the execution described in A Hanging took place, also in the monsoon season. It was Burma, a
sodden morning of the rains, Orwell wrote. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the
high walls and into the jail yard. In that crowded and squalid part of town, quite different from the quiet
suburb it had been in the 1920s, a sign outside the prison gate warned that photos were forbidden. After
my Rangoon lecture on writing biography, I met many lively, intelligent writers who were eager for news
of the larger literary world. Several of them had done time in Insein prison for political offenses and told
me that hangings still took place there.

After four days in Rangoonfull of irritations and interests, pleasures and disappointmentsI flew
north to Mandalay to join the eleven-day Road to Mandalay cruise offered by the Orient-Express
company. For most of the year, it visits only Mandalay and Pagan, but in August and September, when the
Himalayan snows melt and the Irrawaddy rises, an extended trip all the way up to Bhamo, only thirty
miles from the Chinese border, becomes possible. The elegant ship, a converted Rhine passenger vessel,
offered firstrate food, accommodations and service. In an extremely remote locale, it maintains a high
standard of comfort, even luxury. The shore excursions are seamlessly organized, and since it is anchored
at night, there are no rough seas. It is pleasantly without a disco, television, phones and email, and takes
only sixty to ninety passengers.
I spent much of the journey sitting beside the swimming pool or under the canopy, watching the
riverine scenery from the upper deck or even from my own high bed and stateroom. The river route
enabled us to visit places hard to reach by road or by air. Wherever we arrived, the whole village would
come out to greet us. The fast-flowing river, the houses built on stilts to protect against flooding, and the
lush green mountains in the distance recalled the atmosphere of Joseph Conrad's early novels. Stepping
off a jungly jetty, I felt like his Lord Jim or Tom Lingard, whose sudden appearance roused great interest
when Westerners were still an unusual sight. It seemed odd, even vulgar at first, to stare at the villagers
and take their photograph. But the interest was mutual. The people waved and smiled, sold us lungis and
straw hats, and examined us as intensely as we did them.
The Irrawaddy was muddy yet clean, the vistas unspoiled, the green banks dotted with white and gold
pagodas. Logs floated down the river on barges, dolphins leapt out of the water, workers dredged sand
for cement, fishermen cast their nets, women washed clothes, children swam and carried home buckets of
water on their heads. In some places, the jungle rushed down to the river and tall trees towered over the
ship as it passed through the narrow defiles, close to the shore.
Of our destinations, I was most interested in Katha (pronounced ka-TAH), about two hundred miles
north of Mandalay and the setting of Burmese Daysin the novel, borrowing the name of a district of
Rangoon, Orwell calls the town Kyauktada. Katha was a long way from Rangoon, and in 1927 the lonely
young Orwell was as isolated as a Peace Corps volunteer is today, but had infinitely more responsibility.
I toured the town in a narrow-seated, rickety trishaw, through heavy rain and mud, accompanied by a local
schoolteacher on a motorcycle (surely a government agent assigned to keep an eye on me).
The main streets run north-south, parallel to the river, and at the far edge of town a lavish market
offers mounds of tropical fruit and many kinds of rice. But there is no maidan, or central common, which
unifies the characters and locales in the novel. Orwell's autobiographical hero has an affair with a
Burmese girl. I wondered if he'd left any descendants, and looked out for a tall, thin, seventy-five-year-
old Eurasian who might have fit the bill.
I saw five places that surface in Burmese Days. Katha's old English Club, the social center of
colonial life and the scene of a Burmese riot in the novel, was now a musty office with sales figures
chalked on an old blackboard. It was adjacent to a wretched tennis court, hidden away where the river
curves back around the town. A Western-style building, it had sliding windows with fixed metal grilles, a
corrugated-tin roof and four pillars at the entrance. The lower story had a concrete floor that was once
used for dances. At one end stood an ancient billiard table that had once distracted bored Englishmen.
The Anglican Church of the Province of Mandalay, where the protagonist John Flory's Burmese
mistress denounces him in front of his English colleagues, was built in 1912. It collapsed in 1994 and was
rebuilt on the same site with bricks, timber and a metal roof in time for services on Christmas Day in
1999. The Burmese priest opened the church and showed me around. His family lived in a house on the
grounds, where a young woman sat on a raised platform, suckling her baby in the warm rain. The English
cemeterynot next to the church, as described in the novelwas large, square, fenced and locked,
overgrown with three feet of foliage that completely covered the old gravestones of those who'd died of
bullets or fever. Though I found a hole in the fence, I was warned not to wander amid the poisonous
snakes and spiders. The railroad stationwhere, in the novel, Lieutenant Verrall departs on an early
train, jilting Elizabeth Lackersteen and bilking the Hindu merchantswas built in 1898. Surrounded by
shabby food stalls, the tin-roofed building with grilled ticket windows stood across from the
stationmaster's house. The open, doorless, second-class train cars, which average about fifteen miles an
hour, were filthy. Although the railroad was still in service, oxen grazed on the grass that grew between
the tracks.
Significantly, the prison at Katha was still an impressive structure, kept in good condition. Surrounded
by a barbed wire fence, it had 15-foot-high, fortresslike stone walls and wooden watchtowers at all four
corners. I entered the front gate but was not allowed to take photos or approach the main entrance. I later
heard that the trishaw driver got into trouble for taking me to the prison, though I was actually led there by
the schoolteacher/government agent, who carefully took down my name and address. At the end of the
Orwell tour, the teacher refused a donation for his school, putting his hand on his chest and rather
unconvincingly insisting: My heart is your heart. Later on, when immigration officials boarded our ship
and made a show of scrutinizing the passenger list, one of the ship's guides teased me, whispering,
They're looking for you!
Outside Katha, where Orwell's Flory toiled as a timber merchant, I saw working elephants dragging
chained teak logs out of the forest, bathing in the river with their mahouts, and even carrying some of my
fellow passengers. One elephant had had half his trunk bitten off; another had lost control of her bladder
and dripped like a leaking faucet. Some towns had satellite television, and some village teahouses
showed videos of violent American-made films. But the landscape and the people still looked much as
they had when Orwell saw them. The bullock cart was the main form of transport, the fields were still
plowed with water buffalo, the rice was planted and harvested by hand.
Unlike wet and crowded Rangoon, Mandalay, in central Burma, was dry and sunny, a spacious,
sprawling city of artisans and craftsmen: silk weavers, gold beaters, wood-carvers, stonecutters and
bronze casters. A rare British memorial tablet on Mandalay Hill, which has the usual pagoda and
spectacular view, marked the bitter, costly Gurkha assault on that Japanese stronghold in March 1945.
From aboard the plane I had taken to join the cruise, I had seen a fine view of Mandalay Hill and Fort,
with its high, crenellated walls surrounded by a huge moat. The Burmese Royal Palace (which
represented the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology) and the English police barracks inside the fort
were destroyed by British bombers in May 1945.
When I reached Mandalay Fort, I paid an entrance fee and then walked across a wooden bridge, past
guards, through a tall gate and down one of the wide avenues to inspect the place where Orwell trained
and recklessly rode his motorbike. Hawkers at the souvenir stalls, calling out Geo Orwe, sold pirated
copies of the Penguin Burmese Days, with the print sometimes slanting right off the edge of the page. In
the Maha Muni pagoda, an enormous Buddha was placed on a platform high up in a narrow niche. Only
men are allowed to approach. The high platform has no railing, so as I walked around it, I had to clutch
the shoulders of kneeling Buddhists who were gaining merit by pasting layers of gold leaf on the statue.
The gold, thickened over the centuries, has now distorted the original shape of the Buddha.
Pagan was once one of Southeast Asia's architectural glories. Its distant mountains and dry flat plain,
with palm, neem and tamarind trees, reminded me of Marrakech. Spread over twenty square miles, it has
more than two thousand temples and pagodas. After climbing to the top of a high pagoda, I watched flocks
of sheep and goats pass through the temple gates as a sudden, dramatic tropical sunset illuminated the
spectacular landscape. The Visit Myanmar 1996 campaign, which promised to attract half a million
tourists, spawned more than fifty guesthouses in Paganall of them quite empty. Souvenir shops were
attached to all of the major pagodas, and peddlers mobbed me wherever I went. Most of Pagan's pagodas
are in ruins or are crudely restored, and I was rather disappointed by my visit. The site was certainly
worth seeing, like Borobudur in Indonesia, but not nearly as thrilling as Cambodia's Angkor Wat.
I was much more impressed by Mount Popa, thirty miles and two hours east of Pagan, tucked into the
high hills like a Himalayan retreat. As I drove toward the town, the desertlike plain turned into a luxuriant
green landscape. Herds of spindly goats wandered along the road, and water buffalo immersed
themselves in mud. From a distance, the enticing pagoda, perched atop a 5,000-foot mountain, looked like
the Greek monastery on Mount Athos. As I climbed the 777 smooth steps (the last 500 in bare feet),
grasping the handrail and shaded by a snaking roof, monkeys scampered about me. There were fine views
along the way and a rewarding vista from the top of the mountain.
The cruise concluded with a flight back to Rangoon and an abrupt end to my pampered existence. I
wanted to go south to Moulmein, the third-largest city in Burma, but it was nearly impossible to reach by
plane, train or ship. The crowded twelve-hour express bus had (I was told) arctic airconditioning and
Burmese videos that blasted all night, so I hired my own car and driver for $50 a day. Alia half-Indian,
half-Chinese Muslimowned a ten-year-old Toyota, a used car discarded from Japan, with a steering
wheel on the wrong side for driving on the right side of the road. Ali drove very fast and constantly blew
his horn while passing buses, trucks, cars, pedicabs, bicycles, tongas, bullock carts, pedestrians, road
menders, goats, pigs, dogs and chickens, as well as sheets of rice drying on the road. Although he never
actually hit anything, there were hundreds of near misses. As he plowed through the endless potholes at
top speed, I found it impossible to relax or find a comfortable position in the cramped car, and felt as
though I were bouncing on a bucking horse.
Ali's English was rudimentary, and he called all foreign women sir. But his comical face was
immensely expressive, he was ebullient and eager to please, and he cared for me tenderly. After
establishing that I was older than hean important distinction in Burma, where age and status are
enshrined in forms of addresshe showed heightened respect for my age as well as my status as a client.
When asking directions to the next town, Ali would shout out its name and ask the startled bystander: Ya,
le-le? which meant Yes, or no? The roads were not only full of holes (even washed out altogether in
some places, where water from the flooded rice paddies spread over the rough surface) but also had
frequent roadblocks, manned sometimes by police or soldiers, sometimes by a nodding toll collector. Ali
often went around or under the barrier (if the guard wasn't vigilant), and occasionally halted to pay a
small fee. It was impossible to tell why he stopped at one gate or shot past another with a dismissive
wave of the hand.
The government, obsessed with security and afraid of terrorist attacks, had set up a dozen of these
roadblocks over the two-hundred-mile, ten-hour drive from Rangoon to Moulmein. America is demonized
in the official press, but the armed soldiers who checked my passport and took down my name at the two
new bridges across the Salween River were pleasant and polite.
After Pegu, the landscape changed dramatically from a flat plain with tall rows of fenced rubber trees
to oval-shaped mountainslike those near Guilin, portrayed on Chinese screenswhich surged above
the emerald rice paddies. The road was flooded near Pa-an, so I hired a boat to see the deep painted
caves and hilltop monastery. I glided there past high rocks and through a silent, spooky mangrove swamp.
One cave depicted a local legend, with statues of chained and bloody prisoners brought before a merciful
king; others had Buddhas placed in dark niches. One monk greeted me by sounding a gong, and another
read his prayers aloud while a group of boys chanted their lessons in school. As I passed through the
damp caves, water dripped from the ceiling, formed pools on the ground and created a strange, eerie
atmosphere.
Moulmein was once the most beautiful town in Burma, and the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 praised its
gorgeous setting: The river banks are crowded with the most varied of ever-green foliage. To the
north and west lies the meeting place of the rivers, the shipping in the stream, the wooded islands in the
channel, Moulmein with its glistening pagoda overlooking the water, and the dark hills of Bilugyun.
Kyaikthanlan, the old Moulmein Pagoda in Kipling's Mandalay, is still a meeting place for young
lovers. I saw what Kipling called a pretty Burma girl a-settin there. But, attached to a young man, she
did not seem to be pining for a British soldier. The U Zina pagoda, on the hill above the city, also offers
splendid views of the bustling town and the ships in the river. But the city, decayed since colonial times
and with no electricity at night, now has a squalid market and a riverfront filled with garbage.
I stayed at the best hotelvery rundown (but with its own generator!) and situated in a park across
from a little island where pilgrims meditate and Buddhist nuns tend the neat gardens. The hotel's hopeless
waiters never changed the dirty-to-begin-with tablecloth, and brought food that was on hand rather than
the dishes I'd ordered. My room featured squashed bugs on the walls, a large puddle in the bathroom, a
filthy bath mat, two nonfunctioning lights, and a planklike bed. It was decorated with a gaudy elephant
tapestry in high relief and green satin curtains that clashed with the bright red blankets. I was, for several
days, the only tourist in the hotelindeed, in the entire town of 250,000.
Bored with the hotel food, I had a decent meal at the Peking Restaurant. Decorated with cigarette and
beer posters, it had a cement floor, bathroom-tile walls, worn Formica tables and low stools. While a
young man massaged his friend by treading on his back with bare feet, I ate duck, vegetables, noodles,
bananas and beer for $2 (paid in U.S. currency). I went to the Mon State Museum and found the gate ajar
and the doors padlocked. But the museum was opened especially for me. The sleepy adolescent caretaker
was too short to reach the switches for the lights and fans, so I turned them on myself. The toilet (always
on your mind in Asia) was unspeakable. Though sadly neglected, the museum had an unusual emaciated
Buddha, a stringed musical instrument in the shape of an alligator, and some royal robes and thrones,
melancholy reminders of the Burmese princely families.
While in Moulmein, I made some new discoveries about Orwell's ancestors and the family business.
His French grandfather, Frank Limouzin, was a teak merchant in Moulmein, and his mother grew up there
in luxurious surroundings. The first sawmill was built in 1833, just south of the town in Mudon, and logs
were floated down from the forestry stations to the Salween River. Most of the timber was exported to
India and Europe; some was used by the local shipbuilding industry.
The Gymkhana Club and the English cemetery have both been destroyed, and no maps or tourist
information were available. But traces of Orwell remain. Shooting an Elephant opens: In Moulmein, in
Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of peoplethe only time in my life that I have been
important enough for this to happen to me. It then describes how he had to shoot an animal that had run
wild and killed a coolie. Moulmein was, for a time, one of the main penal settlements for Indian convicts.
The original jaila collection of barracks within four walls, guarded by peons by day and soldiers at
nightwas replaced in 1908 by the Central Jail (now a municipal building), where Orwell worked. In
his time, the police headquarters was an impressive colonial building with a covered veranda, high
wooden shutters and tiled floors. Built in 1826 on a hill in Than Lwin Park, it had a fine view of the river
and is still used for the same purpose. Nine friendly policemen watched me while I waited for permission
to enter and photograph the view from the front entrance.
Despite the pervasive fear of foreigners and the usual reluctance to take responsibility for them, the
police chief was surprisingly generous and allowed me to inspect the building. Inside the sanctum, the
office girls, taking their morning tiffin of rice and tea, stopped to stare at me and giggle. There were
mountains of yellowed paper tied with rough string, ancient typewriters, uneven floorboards, curtained-
off partitions and crumbling sleeping quarters in the overgrown garden. The second floor could no longer
be used because the roof was leaking and the twenty-foot-high ceiling was severely damaged.
Lyndhurst, a large two-story brown wooden villa in an unruly garden near the corner of Morten Lane
and Judson Road, in the colonial quarter of town, may have been Orwell's house, I was toldor was very
like the one he'd lived in. The present owner, the grandson of a Burmese district commissioner who'd
bought it in 1949, invited me inside and showed me some faded photographs of his grandfather at a garden
party in Buckingham Palace. Now fallen on hard times, he lived alone, served by a cook and a boy, in the
damp, decrepit, Poe-esque house.
 After Moulmein, Ali and I drove south to Amherst on a full-moon holiday. The market was closed, the
boys played soccer, and many people, dressed in colorful clothing, visited the pagodas. Near Mudon, I
saw the largest reclining Buddha in the world. Still unfinished and weirdly impressive, the concrete
monster lookedfrom belowlike a giant gray submarine. It too will eventually be plastered with layers
of gold leaf. When passing a monastery on the way back to the main road, I saw a man incongruously
hitting golf balls into an empty paddy.
At Thanbyuzayat, in a tidy park maintained by the British War Graves Commission, I saw the graves
of hundreds of English, Australian, Dutch, Indian and Gurkha prisoners of war who died while building
the BurmaSiam Railway for the Japanese. Some graves were of unknown soldiers, and one of the men had
posthumously won the Victoria Cross. Officers had a much better chance of survival, and most of the dead
were young enlisted men. This sad and moving military cemetery recalled Kipling's story The
Gardener, in which a grieving woman visits her lover's war grave amid a merciless sea of black
crosses.
Amherst, a few miles south of the war graves, was an old colonial beach resort with a Brighton-like
pagoda pier extending into the sea on stilts. At the pagoda, I was amazed to meet someone I knew. The
Moulmein police chief, now on a short pilgrimage and surrounded by barefoot policemen with guns slung
over their shoulders, greeted me warmly. The beach was flooded and muddy during the monsoon season,
so I dashed through the heavy shower to a modest Chinese restaurant, the best there was, where I dined on
soup and noodles for a dollar.
The road through Pa-an on the way back to Rangoon was now impassable, so we took the ferry to
Martaban, where the muddy river showed through the rust holes of the deck. I remembered Kipling's
lines: And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, / And the crimes of Clapham chaste
in Martaban. But in that swampy, sleepy village, I saw no signs of prodigious depravity or sexual
corruption, and Ali bounced off the ferry with his usual enthusiasm.
Everyone I had met in Rangoon told me that I had to visit the Golden Rock Pagoda at Kyaiktiyo, but
they were all terribly vague about how to get there. Ali, swerving to avoid a few more obstacles, turned
off the main road and drove to the base camp, which was as far as cars were allowed to go. Once there, I
joined forces with an Israeli couple and three Spanish women, who were not at all surprised to find a
Spanish-speaking American in the wilds of Burma. We negotiated a price of two dollars each for a
thrilling half-hour truck ride up steep mountain passes and over torrential streams to the end of the road. I
took a room (and was, once again, the only guest in the hotel) just above the truck stop. As in Moulmein,
they refused to take traveler's checks or credit cards, and I had to pay in U.S. dollars. The others set off
for the summit, where there was another place to stay.
I was mobbed by porters and bearers who offered to carry mea humiliating alternative to hiking
up to the top. They followed me as I climbed the steep hill in the heavy rain, which quickly soaked my
clothes and skin. Fog obscured the magnificent views on this one-hour via dolorosa. When I reached the
top, I had to give my passport number and pay six dollars to enter what seemed, after all the shops along
the way, to be the headquarters of Buddha, Inc. I proceeded with bare feet across the perilously wet,
slippery tiled floor and, perched on a tilting rock, finally took a photo of the famed pagoda. The Israeli
engineer I'd met, suddenly appearing out of the fog, explained that the rock was held like a ball-and-
socket and may also have had a lead weight to balance the strange tilt.
As he berated his wife for dragging him to this Buddha-haunted peak, I wondered why travel maniacs
suffered great expense and extreme discomfort to see such inevitably disappointing sites. Burma is
dilapidated, its people oppressed and rather unhappy, and once you leave the cruise ship, traveling there
is exhausting. But the greater the hardship, the more memorable the experience. Unique, almost untouched
by tourism, its rural regions still pristine, the country is for travelers who have done it all. It is now
possible to stay for a month and visit places north of Mandalay and south of Rangoon that have been
closed since 1948. There's still time to see the most remote, traditional and mysterious part of Asia before
revolution, prosperity or Chinese dominance destroys the old way of life.
THREE

THE ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

Burmese Days

My first essay on Orwell began with a contrast between Orwell and Henry Miller. I then defined
Orwell as a man of letters and man of war, and showed his kinship to the themes of guilt, sense
of responsibility and need for commitment of his French contemporaries in the 1930s, Malraux
and Sartre.

Passing through Paris on his way to fight in Spain in 1936, Orwell stopped to meet Henry Miller, whose
books he had reviewed and admired. Miller cared nothing for the Spanish War, and forcibly told Orwell,
who was going to combat Fascism and defend democracy from a sense of obligation, that he was an
idiot.1 This striking confrontation reveals the polarity of political attitudes among modern writers. If
Miller, as Orwell later wrote, is undoubtedly inside the whaleperforming the essential Jonah act of
allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, acceptingthen Orwell himself is clearly
outside the whale, responsible, active, rejecting the horrors of the modern world and committing
himself to change them.2 He is part of the collective tragedy and shares in the collective guilt, and he
would agree with Dostoyevsky that every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for
everything.3 Spain was the magnet that attracted such crusaders as Orwell, Hemingway and Malraux
intellectual men of letters who are also courageous men of war, the very incarnation of the heroes they
create in their books.
Orwell is a literary nonconformist whose works defy genres, a writer who is hard to place. His
satiric style has been likened to that of Swift, Butler and Shaw. He has affinities with the school of the
great plain writers Defoe, Crabbe and Gissingthe writers of working-class realism, of human beings in
conflict with the class structure. He has some similarities to the Auden-Spender school of the Thirties,
though he was unsympathetic to them.4
But more important than any of these influences and traditions, I think, is Orwell's close kinshipin
his intense feeling of guilt, responsibility and commitmentto the French novelists, particularly Malraux
and Sartre, who began to write during the interwar years, the age of guilt. They have been perceptively
analyzed by Victor Brombert, who states that those French writers who reached the age of reason around
1930, have suffered from a near-pathological guilt complex, and are haunted by what Paul Nizan has
called the social original sin. The further removed from the scene of human anguish, the greater the
self-reproach, the more persistent the feeling of responsibility. Their message is permanent accusation.
Silence in the face of social injustice or political tyranny is for them a shameful act, a manner of
collaborating with evil. To give society a bad conscience is, according to Sartre, the writer's first
duty.5
It is not difficult to relate Orwell's ideas and ideals to those of the French writers. The evolution of
his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), is an illustrative example, though many of his works attacking
Fascism, Communism or capitalism would serve equally well.6 Orwell spent five years as a policeman in
Burma, and he was responsible for the kicking, flogging, torturing and hanging of men. He saw the dirty
work of Empire at close quarters and the horribly ugly, degrading scenes which offend one's eyes all the
time in the starved countries of the East where an Indian coolie's leg is often thinner than an Englishman's
arm.7
By the end of the five years, writes Orwell, I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness
which I probably cannot make clear it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing
it as an unjustifiable tyranny. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.8
Orwell managed to relieve this intense guilt in two ways. He resigned his position and to expiate his
country's political sin submerged himself among the oppressed poor of Paris and London and took their
side against tyrants by becoming one of the common people. For obvious reasons of caste and race this
kind of masochistic submergence was impossible in Asia, but for Orwell the European working classes
were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in
Burma.9 Orwell also relieved his guilt through creative exorcism, for he writes that the landscapes of
Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of a nightmare,
afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of
them.10 This accounts for the novel's passionate and didactic quality.
The central political principle in Burmese Days derives from Montesquieu who wrote in The Spirit
of the Laws, If a democratic republic subdues a nation in order to govern them as subjects, it exposes its
own liberty.11 The truth of this principle is illustrated by the Burmese judge U Po Kyin, who is clearly
modeled on the physical characteristics of the Malay chief Doramin in Conrad's Lord Jim, for both
Orientals are lavishly dressed, enormously fat, need assistance to rise from their chairs and habitually
confer with their wives.12 U Po is the primum mobile of all events in the novel, an underling who has the
most actual power in the English outpost of progress and through devious machinations controls even his
rulers. He slanders the Deputy Commissioner Macgregor, ruins the Indian Dr. Veraswami, incites a
rebellion in which two men are eventually killed and six imprisoned, and drives the hero, Flory, to
suicide. A fair sample of a Burmese magistrate, U Po has advanced himself by thievery, bribery,
blackmail and betrayal, and his corrupt career is a serious criticism of both the British rule that permits
his success and his British superiors who so disastrously misjudge his character.
The object of U Po's intrigues and the Nirvana for which he pines is the English Club, the last fortress
of white insularity. Orwell's ironic juxtaposition of native and English social scenes (which he
observed in A Passage to India) reveals the sleazy Club just after U Po's fabulous wish. Besides Flory,
the British colony consists of the bigoted and malicious Ellis, the drunken and lecherous Lackersteen, his
scheming and snobbish wife, the bloodthirsty and stupid Westfield, the boring and pompous Macgregor,
the innocuous and inoffensive Maxwell and, later on, the arrogant and cruel Verrall. Orwell's work is
unlike Forster's novel; there are no redemptive characters in his essentially negative and pessimistic
novel, only the dull boozing witless porkers who observe the five beatitudes of the pukka sahib and
exploit the country. They strive to impose the Pox Britannica which, prophesies Flory, will eventually
wreck the whole Burmese national culture. We're not civilising them, we're only rubbing our dirt on to
them (37).13
These are the views that Flory presents in his everlasting argument with his friend Dr. Veraswami, a
loyal British subject who always defends imperialism and who also aspires to Club membership as
protective prestige against his enemies. Flory reveals his moral weakness by first refusing to support his
friend's nomination and then allowing himself to be coerced into signing a statement against native
members. Like Orwell, Flory hates to see the English humiliating the Asians, and is ashamed of the
imperialist exploitation and class distinctions. But he recognizes that even friendship can hardly exist
when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism (61).
This connection between political oppression and private guilt has been acutely described by
Nietzsche, who wrote that political superiority without any real human superiority is most harmful. One
must seek to make amends for political superiority. To be ashamed of one's power.14 Flory, of course, is
ashamed, but his failure to come to terms with the intolerable colonial situation is symbolized by his
hideous birthmark (as much a sign of guilt, a mark of Cain, as an indication of his isolation and
alienation), but also by his failure to mediate between the three worlds of Burma: the English, the
native and the natural world of the jungle.
The second third of the novel begins with the arrival of the shallow and selfish Elizabeth Lackersteen,
whom the desperate Flory sees as the only salvation from his Burmese misery. But they are unable to
communicate in a meaningful way, and Flory's efforts to introduce Elizabeth to the Burmese world of
dance plays and marketplaces, to make her appreciate and admire the country as he does, result only in
insulting his Oriental friends and revolting Elizabeth, who prefers English society. Nevertheless, their
parabolic courtship progresses in a series of physical adventures: they meet as Flory rescues Elizabeth
from a water buffalo, decide to marry first after shooting a leopard and again after Flory's heroic swim to
rescue the besieged Club members, when the rioting Burmese all want to get into the Club.
Their only communion occurs during the central hunting episode. Flory teaches Elizabeth to shoot and
she kills the beautiful jade pigeons that he had previously observed while peacefully performing a
Thoreau-like baptism in the lonely jungle. He had sought refuge and relief there from the anguish of
penitential solitude and guilt. When the limp, warm and iridescent fowl is placed in Elizabeth's hand, her
desire for Flory is awakened, and the connection between sexual passion and destructive violence
(foreshadowing Flory's suicide) is subtly revealed. Soon afterwards Flory shoots a male leopard and his
gift of the skin silently seals their troth. Later on, this ruined leopard skin, like Flory's disfigured skin, is
both a cause and a symbol of Elizabeth's disaffection.
Flory's inability to meet responsibility under the pressure of an overwhelming guilt is revealed in his
relationships with Dr. Veraswami, whom he proposes to the Club only when it is too late; with his
Burmese mistress May Hla, whom he abandons and then bribes after a mutually destructive relationship,
and who decays in a brothel after exposing him before Elizabeth; and finally with Elizabeth herself, whom
he can neither enlighten nor engage. His suicide, an appropriate gesture of physical courage and moral
weakness, is his terrible protest against these failures.
But Orwell himself continued to bear that guilt he acquired in Burma and to defy that whale which
swallowed up so many other writers. His whole life was a struggle against barbarism and for what he
called comparative decency: a sane, clean, friendly world, without fear and without injustice. He felt it
was his duty to prepare the future; he opened himself to the suffering of others and changed the world in a
small way. His one great motive for writing was a desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter
other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.15 Is this sort of intense
commitment, so desperately needed, still possible today, or have our Orwells been overwhelmed and
extinguished by the increasing horrors of modern life?
FOUR

ORWELL
The Honorary Proletarian

This breakthrough review-article on Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1969)
was my first long piece, at the beginning of my soi-disant career, in a prestigious scholarly
journal, Philological Quarterly. It enabled me to formulate my essential ideas about him and
make a case for the importance of his minor works, and it became the solid basis of my later
articles and books. I placed Orwell in the English moral tradition of Johnson, Blake and
Lawrence (and later wrote lives of both Johnson and Lawrence). My Orwellian prediction that a
definitive edition would appear in the future came true thirty years later when the 2,000 pages
of this four-volume edition were expanded to 8,500 pages and twenty volumes.
The letter to me from his Eton tutor A. S. F. Gow (a friend of A.E. Housman) about why Orwell
chose the Burmese police instead of going to university seemed definitive at the time. But I later
discovered from interviews with Sir Steven Runciman, Orwell's classmate at Eton, and with
Michael Meredith, the librarian at Eton, that Orwell could easily have won a scholarship at
Oxford or Cambridge.

When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which have year after year
been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or
morbid infirmity, I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry
by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed.
(Samuel Johnson, Diary, April 1775)

There has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with
the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was
working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to
get away from this neurotic feeling.
(George Orwell, Diary, early 1949)

These entries are remarkably similar in the fervor of their unjustified selftorment, and they suggest
Orwell's close resemblance to Johnson as well as his place as the last of the English moralistsJohnson,
Blake and Lawrencewhose passionate intensity is nearly prophetic. Both Johnson and Orwell had
unhappy childhoods, struggled long with severe illness and bitter poverty, spent many years as hack
journalists and did not achieve fame until their mid-forties. Both men were independent, combative, harsh
on themselves and others, and often wrong-headed in a fascinating way. Both had limited imaginations but
great critical faculties; and their satire was an expression of high principle, integrity and compassion.
Both were pessimistic, patriotic, pragmatic, courageous, commonsensical, intellectually curious,
scrupulously honest, fundamentally decent, oddly humorous and quintessentially English.
The new edition of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters enables us to sharpen our
appreciation of Orwell and to place his life and works in a more precise perspective.1 Reviewing
Orwell's posthumous essays in 1954, John Wain wrote, It is clear enough that this will be the last volume
of barrel-scrapings from the Orwell stock, so that anything not included here will have small chance of
emerging in the future.2 In fact, only one third of Orwell's short articles and reviews have even here been
included (about 230 out of 700) so that a definitive edition may still appear in the future. Orwell too
would have been surprised by the existence of this collection, in which the majority of items are very
short pieces, for he firmly stated, I would never reprint in book form anything of less than 2000 words;
and he would have been amazed by the price (and royalties) of these four large volumes, for the ten
dollars he received for each London Letter was probably his highest fee for a short article and he rarely
earned more than four or five pounds a week until the success of Animal Farm in 1946. Nevertheless, we
now have two thousand more pages of Orwell's writing, a quarter of it published for the first time, and it
is first appropriate to state what has been omitted and what included.
The editors give no indication of exactly how much unpublished material has been excluded; two
unpublished letters I remember are to Humphrey Slater in September 1946, mentioning a draft of Nineteen
Eighty-Four, and to Leonard Moore in July (?) 1947, giving a chronology of his life. The BBC material
and many trivial notes have been rightly omitted; and though Mrs. Orwell writes, somewhat unclearly,
there is nothing either concealed or spectacularly revealed in his letters, the unpublished letters and
papers in the Archive at London University are not available to scholars, while those in the New York
Public Library and the University of Texas can be read but not quoted. Only selections from the last
Notebook are published, so that Orwell's notes for a projected essay on Evelyn Waugh are printed while
those for an essay on Conrad and a long short story are not.
Though Mrs. Orwell writes, Anything he would have considered as an essay is certainly included,
the long political essays in The Betrayal of the Left and Victory or Vested Interests?, and the Introduction
to British Pamphleteers (which is better than Pamphlet Literature) have been omitted. The following
published though uncollected writings have considerable value and deserve to be printed in a fifth
volume: the sixteen film and drama reviews for Time and Tide (194041); the fourteen war reports from
France and Germany for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News (early 1945) which (pace Mrs.
Orwell) are much more like straight reporting than his wartime London Letters; the very important
book reviews on Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Butler, Edmund Wilson and F. R Leavis; the other interesting
reviews of Milton, Byron, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Chekhov, Rilke, Mann, Hardy, Hopkins, Joyce,
Silone and Richard Wright; and finally the shorter reviews on the subjects of his major essays in which he
first worked out his ideas on novelists who influenced him: Dickens, Gissing and Koestler, and on those
whom he criticized for their reactionary political views: Swift, Tolstoy, Kipling, Wells, Wodehouse and
Henry Miller.3
The most interesting unpublished material printed in these volumes includes 284 letters (relatively
few of them before Orwell became famous in his last years), the War Diaries (194042), the brief
Manuscript Notebook (1949) and the Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm where he
describes the original creative impulse of that book: I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a
huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such
animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals
in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx's theory from the
animals point of view. Of less interest are Clink, Hop Picking, The Road to Wigan Pier Diary
and Notes on the Spanish Militias, which are very similar to material already published in Orwell's
early books. The remaining 1500 pages of previously published material consists of the 32 major essays
(autobiographical, literary, sociological and political), 77 short articles and reviews, 73 (nearly all) of
the As I Please column and all the 15 London Letters.
The most striking thing about this occasional journalism, produced in Grub Street fashion at the rate of
three or four pieces a week, is how readable and interesting it still is, for Orwell is the great master of
colloquial ease. His style is extremely flexible and far-ranging, from very close observation:

A few rats running slowly through the snow, very tame, presumably weak with hunger;

and witty aphorisms:

Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers;

Nine times out of ten a revolutionary is merely a climber with a bomb in his pocket;

to a strange Swiftian presentation of the seemingly familiar:

All our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem
to us the most horrible;

and the startling, almost Donne-like openings of his major essays:

As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me;

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

The only writer who approaches Orwell in both highbrow political analysis and intelligent literary
criticism is Edmund Wilson, though D. H. Lawrence's Phoenix essays and Dwight Macdonald's political
polemics are also comparable to Orwell's. His best characteristics are a Conradian concern with human
solidarity; generosity of spirit that extends to enemy prisoners, French collaborators and Fascist war
criminals; intellectual honesty in admitting his own mistakes; balanced judgment;4 and courage to speak
out against any mean or cowardly attitude and to defend dangerous and unpopular views. As Orwell says,
To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot
be politically orthodox.
The dullest and most dated of the journalism are the London Letters and some of the more heavy-
handed and repetitive political articles that often contain plodding uncharacteristic sentences like this
one: Though a collectivised economy is bound to come, those countries will know how to evolve a form
of Socialism which is not totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance of
economic individualism. The literary articles are much livelier and more original than the political ones;
and the delightful As I Please column exhibits the uniquely random and miscellaneous quality of
Orwell's mind (with some curious gapshe has few philosophical or psychological interests), as he
ranges from the New Year's Honours List to the ugliest building in the world, and seems to resemble his
own description of Charles Reade: a man of what one might call penny-encyclopaedic learning. He
possessed vast stocks of disconnected information with a lively narrative gift.
The volumes also have very considerable biographical interest, especially since no life of Orwell
exists. I believe one is now being written, and it will certainly be welcome despite Mrs. Orwell's
assertion that there was so little that could be written about his lifeexcept for psychological
interpretationwhich he had not written himself. With these present volumes the picture is as
complete as it can be. This is hardly true, for there is a vast difference between a mere factual
chronology of a life and a full-scale interpretive biography of a man and his age, especially a man like
Orwell who was deeply involved in all the political controversies of his time and whose life of art and
action was equaled only by T. E. Lawrence, Malraux and Hemingway. Though the books and
autobiographical essays (Such, Such Were the Joys, Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, How the
Poor Die, Bookshop Memories, Marrakech, Confessions of a Book Reviewer and Why I Write)
tell us a good deal about certain periods in his life, there are many large lacunae.
We know virtually nothing about Orwell's birthplace and earliest years. Like Kipling, he was born in
India, spent his first years there, had an unhappy childhood,5 and went to school in England; and Orwell is
undoubtedly thinking of himself when he writes of Kipling, Much in his development is traceable to his
having been born in India and having left school early. The first chapters of Kipling's Something of
Myself describe an Indian childhood while Baa Baa Black Sheep portrays the horrors of early youth.
Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise gives a rather different and more pleasant picture of their prep
school, St. Cyprian's, than Orwell does, and he also describes their later life at Eton.
The Burmese period is the next obscure phase of Orwell's life, and exactly why he chose the Burmese
police instead of Cambridge or at least the political section of the Indian or West African Civil Service
is, as Mr. Angus says, not known. Mr. A. S. F. Gow, Orwell's classical tutor at Eton, whom Orwell
visited after Burma in 1927 and later corresponded with, has written to me (in a letter of January 1, 1969)
that Orwell's father said he could not go to a University unless he got a scholarship and there was not
the faintest hope of his getting one. He had shown so little taste or aptitude for academic subjects that I
doubted whether in any case a University would be worth while for him. (Orwell had won scholarships
to both St. Cyprian's and Eton but resolved to slack off and cram no longer after prep school. He writes
of Eton, I did no work there and learned very little, and I don't feel that Eton has been much of a
formative influence in my life.6 Mr. Gow also writes that Orwell's father then spoke of the Burmese
police; and the job was undoubtedly secured through personal connections which, writes Orwell, his
family had with the country over three generations. My grandmother lived forty years in Burma. His
statement that when he was there nationalist feelings in Burma were not very marked, and relations
between the English and the Burmese were not particularly bad is very different from the atmosphere
portrayed in Burmese Days. Leonard Woolf's Growing and Philip Woodruff's The Men Who Ruled India
describe the social and political background of Orwell's Burmese period.
Another obscure phase of his life is his decision in 1946 to live the extremely arduous and exhausting
existence on the remote island of Jura in the Hebrides. Mr. Angus explanation that he had gone to Jura to
find some peace away from journalism, the telephone, etc. is clearly unsatisfactory since an equally quiet
place could be found in a more salubrious climate, closer to medical assistance and away from the
country that Orwell professed to dislike (see Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 42). The terminal phase of
Orwell's very serious illness (he could speak, like Pope, of this long disease, my Life) dates from the
winter of 1946, part of which he spent on Jura.
One pattern that emerges from these volumes is the terrible state of Orwell's health. Like D. H.
Lawrence, he seems to have had defective lungs since boyhoodafter about the age of ten, I was seldom
in good health. I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung that was not discovered till
many years laterwhich tormented him for the rest of his life. The Burmese climate ruined his health, he
had pneumonia in February 1929 (see How the Poor Die), was shot through the throat in Spain in May
1937, had tuberculosis in March 1938, was unfit for service in the Second World War due to
bronchiectasis and was gravely ill during the last three years of his life.
Orwell's published letters, like Conrad's, are strangely impersonal, rather pedestrian and unvarying
with each correspondent, but they become extraordinarily moving during the last months of his life when
he faces the gravity of his disease with a Keatsian courage. He was deeply devoted to his adopted son,
Richard, and poignantly writes: I am so afraid of his growing away from me, or getting to think of me as
just a person who is always lying down & can't play. Of course children can't understand illness. He used
to come to me & say Where have you hurt yourself? In May 1949 he admits: I am in most ghastly
health. When the picture is taken I am afraid there is not much doubt it will show that both lungs have
deteriorated badly. I asked the doctor recently whether she thought I would survive, & she wouldn't go
further than saying she didn't know. Don't think I am making up my mind to peg out. On the contrary, I
have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive. But I want to get a clear idea of how long I am likely
to last, & not just be jollied along the way doctors usually do. In August he announces, rather
surprisingly: I intend getting married again (to Sonia) when I am once again in the land of the living, if I
ever am. I suppose everyone will be horrified. And in October he writes: I am still very weak & ill, but
I think better on the whole. I am getting married very unobtrusively this week. It will probably be a long
time before I can get out of bed. He died three months later, in January 1950.
Future biographers will certainly be interested in Orwell's unusual second marriage, just as Orwell,
in discussing Carlyle's marriage, was interested in the frame of mind in which people get married, and
the astonishing selfishness that exists in the sincerest love.
The other dominant pattern in Orwell's life (closely related to his illness) is the series of masochistic
impulses for a higher cause that testifies to his compulsive need for self-punishment: in school; in the
Burmese Police; among scullions and beggars; in squalid doss houses and inside mines; with the ragged,
weaponless army of the Republic in Spain; in propagandistic drudgery for the wartime BBC (a
whoreshop and lunatic asylum); in thankless and exhausting political polemics; and finally in that mad
and suicidal sojourn amidst the damp, bleak and isolated wastes of Jura. In Wigan Pier Orwell states, I
was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate and explains that this guilt derives
from his experience as a colonial oppressor.7 But it seems that the source of this guilt, which he could
never extinguish (see his Diary, quoted in the epigraph), was both earlier and deeper than Orwell
suggests (Such, Such Were the Joys describes his deep-rooted childhood guilt). Though no specific
evidence yet exists, it is possible to imagine an early Lord Jim syndrome, a kind of moral self-betrayal or
dishonorable fall from self-esteem that is a truer source of his masochistic guilt. But whatever the source,
Orwell's writing is manifest proof of his ability to transcend this personal guilt by channeling it into
effective social and political thought and action.
Orwell's books deal with two dominant themespoverty and politicsor as he put it, the twin
nightmares that beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare of State
interference. The autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), the novels A
Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and the reportage The Road to
Wigan Pier (1937) deal with the first theme; Burmese Days (1934), Homage to Catalonia (1938),
Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) with the second; while Coming Up For Air
(1939) is a transitional work that concerns an unsuccessful attempt to escape from both nightmares. The
rest of this essay concentrates on the first phase of Orwell's career; I do not discuss A Clergyman's
Daughter, his weakest book.
We all live in terror of poverty, writes Orwell, and its psychological and social effects are his great
theme. Though almost all his books treat this question in a significant way (the exploited natives in
Burmese Days, the plight of the common soldier in Homage to Catalonia and of the dehumanized proles
in Nineteen Eighty-Four), Orwell's three books of the depressed mid-thirties are completely devoted to
the exploration of this theme. Works like New Grub Street, The Spoils of Poynton, Nostromo, Howards
End and Major Barbara all deal, in their different ways, with the corruption of capitalistic society;
Orwell's books consider the working classes who are exploited by this corrupt society.
One of Orwell's main ideas can be found in Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara (1907): The greatest
of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.8 Shaw, a half-century before Orwell, was drawn into the
Socialist revival of the early eighties, among Englishmen intensely serious and burning with indignation at
the very real and very fundamental evils that affected all the world.9 Orwell's way of dealing with these
evils is to experience them personally and directly, to break out of the emotionally shallow and sheltered
state of the middle classes and make contact with physical reality, to look down at the roots on which his
existence is founded.10 As Orwell explains in the autobiographical section of Wigan Pier:

I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their
side against their tyrants. Therefore my mind turned immediately towards the extreme cases, the
social outcasts: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. I could go among these people, see what
their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them
and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, andthis is what I felt: I was aware even then
it was irrationalpart of my guilt would drop from me. And down there in the squalid and, as a
matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure, which
seems absurd when I look back, but which was sufficiently vivid at the time. (130131, 134)

Many of Orwell's most characteristic ideas are stated in this passage: the desire to have immediate and
actual experience, to see things from the inside rather than from a purely theoretical viewpoint; to fight,
like Dickens, on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere, and to agonize over their sufferings;
to extinguish, among out-castes, the sense of social class; to feel the pleasurable relief, the anxiety and
guilt-annihilating euphoria of going to the dogs and knowing you can stand it; to undergo the excitement of
a sortie to the lower depths.
Orwell felt, in Burke's words, I must see the things; I must see the men.11 Books like Johnson's Life
of Savage, Zola's Germinal, Hamsun's Hunger, Crane's Maggie, Gorki's The Lower Depths, Davies
Autobiography of a Super Tramp and Jack London's The Road, which had vividly portrayed the outcasts
at the extreme fringe of society, were pioneering works of intensely personal social protest. But the most
immediate influence on Down and Out was London's The People of the Abyss. In his Preface, London
likened himself to an explorer of the underworld and wrote, what I wish to do, is to go down into the
East End and see things for myself. I wish to know how these people are living there, and why they are
living there, and what they are living for. In short, I am going to live there myself.12
Orwell lived first in a working class quarter of Paris and worked as a dishwasher (a slave's slave)
in 192829, just after he returned from five years in Burma as a policeman. The similar injustices to the
workers in both countries are suggested in Down and Out though this idea is not fully developed until
Wigan Pier. When Orwell writes of the English tramp Paddy, for example, Seeing him walk, you felt
instinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one (109), it is clear that this instinctive
feeling grew directly out of his nasty experiences in Burma where he did the dirty work of Empire, was
responsible for the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos and saw louts
fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants.13 This made him burn with hatred of his countrymen and
of himself. Similarly, the equation of exploitation with luxury in his analysis of the upper class attitude
toward the poorsince evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to
you (87)again recalls the colonial parallel: As the world is now constituted, we are all standing on
the backs of half-starved coolies.14
In his summary chapter of the Paris section, Orwell compares the slavery and suffering of a plongeur
to that of an Indian rickshaw puller and a coal miner, which both looks back to Burma and anticipates
Wigan. The most striking aspect of the continuity of Orwell's books in this period is that his description of
the infernal plongeur's cellar is extraordinarily like the hellish mine in Wigan:

[I came] into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was
stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be
miles of dark labyrinthine passagesactually, I suppose, a few hundred yards in allthat
reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space
and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise. It was too low for me to stand upright,
and the temperature was perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Scullions, naked to the waist, were
stoking the fires. (Down and Out, 4143)

Most of the things one imagines in hell are thereheat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and
above all, unbearably cramped space. You can never forget the line of bowed, [naked],
kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their huge shovels under the coal with stupendous
force and speed. (Wigan Pier, 1921)

The theme of class exploitation is dramatized most vividly amidst the luxury and squalor of the grand
hotel where the splendid customers sit just a few feet away from the disgusting filth of the kitchen
workers. The only connection between these two worlds is the food prepared by one for the other, which
often contains the cook's spit and waiter's hair grease. From this fact Orwell posits a wonderfully ironic
economic law: the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it (59).
One of the larger ironies of the book is that Orwell fled this unjust social hierarchy only to find among
the down and out an even more elaborate and rigidly military caste system. The staff of the hotel
descended from the exalted heights of the patron and manager, through the matre dhtel, head cook, chef
du personnel, other cooks, and waiters, to laundresses, apprentice waiters and finally plongeurs (who
aspired to become lavatory attendants) and who had only chambermaids and caftiers below them. And a
similar social line existed among the London beggars, between those who merely cadge and those who
attempt to give some value for money (123).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Orwell's description of the psychology of poverty,
as he discovered it in the hotels, hospitals, pawnshops and parks of the mean and degenerate Paris of Zola
and of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens; and in his very narrow streeta ravine of tall, leprous
houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of
collapse (5), whose ancient and sinister quality suggests the medieval city of Villon and of Hugo's Notre
Dame de Paris.
Orwell seemed happier as a plongeur than as a tramp, perhaps because it was easier to be dclass
outside his own country, and because he was fresher and the life had an exotic tinge despite the patina of
antique filth. He speaks of the eccentric freedom from the normal and the decent, the mindless acceptance
when you reach destitution after anticipating it for so long, the animal contentment of the simple rhythm of
work and sleep. But in the long run, of course, the degrading human effects are disastrous. Hunger reduces
men to a spineless, brainless condition and malnutrition destroys their manhood, while extreme poverty
cuts men off from contact with women: The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as
that it rots him physically and spiritually (148).
Orwell's suggestions for the alleviation of poverty are both pragmatic and politic, and he hopes to
improve conditions by clarifying common misconceptions in the light of first-hand experience: You
thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is
merely squalid and boring (13). Orwell explodes a number of common prejudices by explaining them.
Educated people fear workers because they do not understand them and despise beggars because they fail
to earn a decent living. That money has become the grand test of virtue (126) is a major theme of Keep
the Aspidistra. Tramps tramp because they are compelled by law to do so; they are too docile to be
dangerous and too destitute to be drunk.
Apart from improving the harsh and unfair laws governing tramps, Orwell also suggests making the
casual wards more comfortable and finding suitable employment for the men, possibly through small
farms attached to the workhouses. But all these are minor palliatives; the solution implicit in this book,
though not stated until Wigan Pier, is Socialism; and it was Orwell's experience among the poor and
outcast in Paris and London that made him aware of the need for that radical solution.
Keep the Aspidistra, like Down and Out, has a balanced structure. Paris and London, Boris and
Paddy, the good and bad hotels, the castes of plongeurs and of beggars, and the summaries with practical
suggestions at the end of each half are contrasted in the earlier book. The same kind of technique is also
used in the novel, where it emphasizes the circular pattern of the book (the return to the advertising office)
as well as the two phases of Gordon's life: before and after his drunken spree. McKechnie's and Cheese-
man's bookshops, Mrs. Wisbeach's and Mrs. Meakin's rooms, the friendship of Flaxman and Ravelston,
the love of his sister Julia and his girl Rosemary,15 and the two sexual encounters with Rosemary are
contrasted, though ironically. For the worse job and the dingier room seem better to Gordon; though he
is closer to Ravelston and Rosemary, he finds it easier to accept help from Flaxman and Julia; and the
lyrical seduction scene is a failure while the squalid one is all too successful.
Several other structural motifs emphasize Gordon's resolution to return to the respectable middle-
class moneyed world, symbolized by the indestructible aspidistra and the New Albion advertising
company. At the end of the novel, Gordon and Rosemary have their wedding feast at the modest Soho
restaurant that Ravelston had previously suggested they go to instead of the disastrously expensive
Modigliani's (which parallels the fashionable country hotel); they live in a flat with a view of Paddington,
from where they had left on their country outing; Gordon sprouts grey hairs to match Rosemary's (a
symbol of his mature acceptance of life?) and she pulls hers out for the wedding ceremony; and as a
comfortably employed writer and prospective father, he relinquishes his apocalyptic wish and no longer
craves the destruction of London by bombs.
Despite Orwell's evident care with the form of the novel, the plot has some serious weaknesses. The
chance meeting with Rosemary in the open-air market seems too coincidental; and the mystery of how the
previously unacquainted Flaxman and Ravelston, Rosemary and Julia, ever got together to save Gordon
is never explained. Ravelston's inability to resist the abominable adventure with the whores seems
incredible; and worst of all, Rosemary becomes pregnant after her first sexual encounter, in the archaic
tradition of the Victorian novel.
Nor is Orwell in full control of his style in this novel, which is repetitive to the point of boredom and
exasperation (Money, money, always money!) and liberally sprinkled with poetic allusions (Gordon is,
or was, a poet!) which are rather forced and banal: Novels fresh from the pressstill unravished brides,
pining for the paperknife to deflower themand review copies, like youthful widows, blooming still
though virgin no longer, and here and there, in sets of half a dozen, those pathetic spinster-things,
remainders, still guarding hopefully their long preserv'd virginity (1112).16 But the worst example of
Orwell's poetic style is his metamorphosis of the countryside, where Gordon attempts to seduce
Rosemary, into a sexual landscape. While pheasants (which Gordon considers the embodiment of
ferocious animal lust [110]) loiter with long tails trailing, he says the trees are phallic, the knobs on the
bark are like the nipples of breasts, and the boughs like the wreathing trunks of elephants (135137).
And just before he screws himself up for the effort of seducing the virgin, the warm light poured over
them as though a membrane across the sky had broken (147, 149).
The third major flaw in the novel is the character of the hero, Gordon, whose self-pity, envy and need
to expose the wounds of poverty are very like Paddy's, the tramp in Down and Out: Self-pity was the
clue to his character. The thought of his bad luck never seemed to leave him for an instant. He would
break long silences to exclaim, apropos of nothing, It's hell when yer cloes begin to go up de spout, eh?
or Dat tay in de spike ain't tay, it's piss as though there was nothing else in the world to think about. And
he had a low, worm-like envy of anyone who was better off.17 But it is not only this spineless self-pity
that so alienates the reader from Gordon (when asked what he does on Sunday, he answers, Moon about
and look miserable [124]). He lacks character, will, integrity and honor. He is selfish and horribly
unfair to Rosemary about the use of contraceptives; parasitic with Julia and Ravelston; cowardly with
waiters and servants; improvident and lecherous, callous and cold-blooded, without self-respect or
principles. But Gordon is more ridiculous and weak than wicked, and Orwell suggests these traits stem
less from personality defects than from poverty.
Orwell was well aware of the weaknesses of this novel, but published it anyway because he needed
the money. As he wrote in 1946: There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not
allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that [Keep the Aspidistra] is one of them. There is an even
worse one called A Clergyman's Daughter. This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn't to have
published it, but I was desperate for money, ditto when I came to write Keep the A. At that time I simply
hadn't a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in 100 or so.
In spite of these weaknesses in plot, style and characterization, there is an undoubtedly poignant and
moving quality about the novel that results from Orwell's perceptive portrayal of the alienation and
loneliness of poverty, and from Rosemary's tender response to Gordon's mean misery.18 His final
affirmation of ordinary life is achieved through her selfless acts: the thrusting of cigarettes in his pocket
and her sacrificial sexual surrender. Her love vindicates his self-respect and disproves one of Gordon's
ides fixes, first stated by Orwell in Down and Out: there is no doubt that women never, or hardly ever,
condescend to men who are much poorer than themselves.19
The novel of poverty is as old as Defoe (Balzac is the French master of this genre), but the main
English tradition runs from Dickens through Gissing and Orwell (both of whom wrote insightfully on
Dickens) to John Wain20 (Orwell's best critic), the angry young men, and the plays of Pinter and Wesker.
Orwell's acknowledged master and (sometimes baneful) model for the novel of poverty is George
Gissing, who wrote that his aim was to depict a class of young men distinctive of our timewell
educated, fairly bred, but without money.21 Like Gordon, the writer-hero of Gissing's New Grub Street
knew what poverty means. The chilling of the brain and heart, the unnerving of the hands, the slow
gathering around one of fear and shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the
world's base indifference. Poverty! Poverty!22 For Orwell, Gissing's central theme can be stated in
three wordsnot enough money. Gissing is the chronicler of poverty the cruel, grinding,
respectable poverty of underfed clerks, downtrodden governesses and bankrupt tradesmen.23
Other literary influences are equally significant, though perhaps less obvious. The self-tortured and
compulsive craving for the lower depths, the self-repudiating and futile insulted and injured syndrome,
are most powerfully expressed in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Like the underground man,
Gordon wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the
strings of his self-respect, to submerge himselfto sink. It was all bound up in his mind with the
thought of being under ground (217). Gordon also suffers intense humiliation when he is not informed
that the time of a party has been changed.
Gordon's powerful sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time (21) and his acute
longing for a cleansing holocaust is very like Birkin's in Women in Love. And Gordon's favorite subject
the futility, the bloodiness, the deathliness of modern life. Dead people in a dead world (90)is
close to The Burial of the Dead section of The Waste Land. There is a similarity in the response of
English writers recovering from the First World War and those, like Orwell, apprehensive about the
impending Second War.
Orwell's central vision of total grimness and despair, born amidst the sense of approaching disaster in
the Thirties and intensified by the greater horrors of the Forties, is repeated throughout his works like a
fatal portent of dissolution and doom. In Keep the Aspidistra, it is Gordon's vision of London slaving
under capitalistic oppression: He had a vision of London, of the western world; he saw a thousand
million slaves toiling and grovelling about the throne of money. The earth is plowed, ships sail, miners
sweat in dripping tunnels underground, clerks hurry for the eight-fifteen with the fear of the boss eating at
their vitals. And even in bed with their wives they tremble and obey. Obey whom? The money-priesthood,
the pin-faced masters of the world. The Upper Crust (160161). In Wigan Pier, it is the vision of the
industrial slums of Lancashire, a compound of the moon and hell: On the outskirts of the mining towns
there are frightful landscapes where your horizon is ringed completely round by jagged grey mountains,
and underfoot is mud and ashes and overhead the steel cables where the tubs of dirt travel slowly across
miles of country. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except
smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes, and foul water.24 In Coming Up for Air, it is Bowling's vision of an
Ersatz universe, culminating in a disgusting explosion: Everything slick and streamlined, everything
made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night,
glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over,
mock-turtles gazing under neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth
into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of
filth bursting inside your mouth.25 In Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is Winston Smith's hopeless vision in the
Ministry of Truthvulgar, squalid, dreary, arid, painfully unnatural: In any time that he could actually
remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were
not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded,
houses falling to pieces, bread dark-colored, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient
nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin.26
Orwell's hopeful parallels to these dreadful visions are the joyous scenes in each of his fictions of
escape from the domination of urban technology to the freedom and simplicity of peaceful nature: Flory
meditating in the jungle pool in Burmese Days; Dorothy worshipping nature in A Clergyman's Daughter;
Gordon and Rosemary, Winston and Julia, making love in the countryside in Keep the Aspidistra Flying
and Nineteen Eighty-Four; Bowling fishing in Coming Up For Air; and the joyous freedom of the
animals when they first take over the farm.27
The kind of affirmation that is stated in these scenes is also expressed in the conclusion and theme of
Keep the Aspidistra, after Gordon realizes one cannot live in a corrupt society without being corrupt
oneself (225). Faced with a choice between the New Albion, the fungus of decaying capitalism, or an
abortion for Rosemary, he is secretly relieved to be able to reintegrate himself into a decent, fully human
life. He throws his destiny in with that of the common men who mysteriously transmute the greed and fear
of modern civilization into something far nobler. This much is convincing, indeed, inevitable.
But Gordon's movement from a dying to a flying aspidistra is less plausible and too insistently
symbolic; and the first stirring of the baby within Rosemary is a terribly sentimental clich that denies,
through its pleasant prognosis, the entire tenor of their unhappy sexual relationship: Rosemary's frigidity
and rare sexual desire, Gordon's alternation between gross lechery and impotence, and her ultimate
magnanimous yielding with neither pleasure nor satisfaction for man or woman. This situation cannot be
remedied by a raise of two pounds a week.
A number of important ideas in Keep the Aspidistra reappear in Orwell's reportage of the following
year. Gordon's belief that poverty kills thought, and that cleanness and decency cost money, is reaffirmed;
and the same sense of disintegration, decay and despair (which culminates powerfully in Nineteen
Eighty-Four) is manifest in Wigan Pier: We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which
hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and remain alive. We live,
admittedly, among the wreck of a civilization (149, 160). Gordon's desire to break out of his family's
middle-class insulation and submerge himself in the sprawling smoke-dim slums is exactly what Orwell
did in Wigan Pier.
Though Orwell had never seen these impoverished northern industrial slums before, he knew them
well from books. Engels The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844 (1845), especially
the chapter on The Mines, Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851) and Charles
Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (18891903) were his sociological models; Dickens
Hard Times (1854), Zola's Germinal (1885) and Lawrence's Midlands novels were his literary ones.
Orwell is obviously drawn to Dickens because of their similar social attitudes, and he repeatedly
describes Dickens in a way that forcefully applies to himself as well:

In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root.

From the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of laissez faire capitalism.

His whole message is if men would behave decently the world would be decent.28

The strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.

Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it.

[He is a] man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not
frightened who is generously angry.

Orwell's grim vision of Wigan, quoted earlier, is very close to Dickens famous description of the
unnatural ugliness and mechanical uniformity of Coketown, and to Lawrence's portrayal of the insentient
corruption of Wiggiston, the mining village that is contrasted to Ursula's hopeful vision of the rainbow.
The very extinction of organic life, of vital sources being choked off, terrifies all three novelists, and the
heart of this problem exists in the crucial social issue of whether the poor should marry and have
children. In Hard Times, the hateful Bounderby tells the worker Stephen Blackpool, You had better
have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married;29 and the ironic conversation of Bitzer and
Mrs. Sparsit expresses the selfish and moribund attitude of the middle classes: I am quite sure we are
constantly hearing, maam, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families, said
Bitzer. Why look at me, maam! I don't want a wife and family. Why should they? Because they are
improvident, said Mrs. Sparsit.30
It is precisely this view, so hostile to life, which Orwell attacks in both Keep the Aspidistra and
Wigan Pier. In the former, Gordon (who violently, and unfairly, objects to Rosemary's wish for
contraceptives) says, Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in a family
way! At least he's got blood and not money in his veins (49); and Orwell writes in the latter, alluding to
Walter Greenwood's popular play of 1933, getting married on the dole annoys old ladies in Brighton, but
it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to
be a human being (78). In The Rainbow, the colliery manager Tom Brangwen, who exploits the miners,
marries the lesbian schoolmistress Winifred Inger, a strange union of perversion, sterility and corruption.
And in Women in Love, the ugliness, poverty and suffering that Gerald Crich inflicts on the miners is
symptomatic of his radical failure as a human being. In Dickens, Lawrence and Orwell the emotional
sterility of the mine owners, who impose a deathly ugliness on both landscape and people, is contrasted to
the inextinguishable warmth and vitality of the oppressed working classes.
In the 1930's, coal was by far the largest single industry, the only one employing more than a million
workers. It had always been the symbol of class struggle.31 Orwell's immersion in the reality of this
struggle was his very deliberate attempt to overcome what he considered the tragic failure of theoretical
Socialism, to make contact with the normal working classes.32 Orwell believes it is both his duty and
responsibility to have first-hand experience in the slums and mines, and he cannot see the value of the
more objective intellectual inquiry of Beatrice Webb, whom he calls a high-minded Socialist slum
visitor (157). As he wrote to Richard Rees from Wigan, Have you ever been down a mine? I don't think
I shall ever feel quite the same about coal again. Neither will his readers, for Orwell's acute
observations on coal mining leave a vivid impression: you have a tolerable sized mountain on top of
you; hundreds of yards of solid rock, bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things, green
grass and cows grazing on itall this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as
thick as the calf of your leg (22). His account of the miners crawling to work underground for two or
three hours each day (without pay) is a powerful and disturbing revelation.
Orwell's approach is documentary, empirical and pragmatic, filled with statistics, essential
information and useful suggestions, and his view is, as far as possible, an insider's view.33 In praising
people's patience with him, Orwell humorously describes his methods and their response: If any
unauthorized person walked into my house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I
was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell.
This only happened to me once, and in that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a Means
Test nark; but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I wanted (65). Orwell
constantly refers to his own practical knowledge (you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound
packet) with phrases like I have had just enough experience and From my own observation
and Once when I was . The result of this approach is twofold: as in Down and Out, he questions
common assumptions, discredits the illusion and shows the reality; and he also describes the most serious
injustices he has lived through himself. He has a deep loathing of the ugliness, emptiness and cruelty of
what he sees, but is not merely content to describe ithe wants to transform it radically.34
The main effect of shattering illusions and enforcing reality is to convince the reader that he is
profoundly ill-informed and must change his wrong-headed attitude about the working classes. Contrary to
popular belief, Orwell finds that miners wash when they can; eat astonishingly little; are poorly paid;
have impoverished landlords who cannot afford repairs; do mind dirtiness; favor slum clearance; dislike
crowded areas; want to work and do not like unemployment; are sensitive and serious; do not smell; and
lead an extremely hard life. In short, they are much like other people (the interests of the exploited are
the same [203]), only worse off because of the inequity and iniquity of the capitalist system. By making
readers understand the workers, Orwell alleviates their fears and engages their sympathy; by making them
care about their countrymen, he pricks their social conscience and awakens their sense of justice.
The great strength of Wigan Pier (and Down and Out) is that the economic injustices are always
described in human terms. Orwell's vision of Wigan is like Blake's of London:

I wander thro each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

For both writers a slum implies warped lives and ailing children. Orwell's moving theme is a fervent plea
for human dignity and compassion, and against the frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly
thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized struggles against economic laws, which
he does not understand, the disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame (131). He attacks
Corporation housing because it is soulless and inhumane, and erodes both family and communal life; he
criticizes the Means Test because it cruelly breaks up families; and he exposes the deadening effect of
unemployment. His images of human degradation are the most powerful: the desolate drudgery of the
exhausted young woman kneeling beside the blocked waste-pipe; the blank and aged grandmother with the
yellow cretinous countenance; the worn skull-like face of the slum mother; and the dumpy shawled women
crawling in the cindery mud in search of coal chips. (Orwell's contrasting image of human affirmation is
the pavement-artist Bozo in Down and Out who gazes at the stars and is a free man in his own mind: rich
or poor, you can still keep on with your books and your ideas.)35 Orwell's emphasis throughout the book
is on the ordinary decent person, and the sense of human waste, shame and debasement that he conveys
is overwhelming. As Orwell wrote during the War, I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating
anybody else. I wanted to think that the class distinctions and imperialist exploitation of which I am
ashamed would not return.
Though Orwell writes I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them (102
103) and dissociates himself from a belief in the superiority of the proletariat, he too idealizes the
manners, temperament, stoicism, family life36 and democracy of the working class.37 This is partly
because he is intensely dissatisfied with his own middle-class origins and wants to transcend them. But
more importantly, he feels, like Sartre and other French writers of the Thirties, that the working class
incarnates some deeply meaningful myth of suffering, and that in its emancipation lies the general
salvation of mankind.38 Victor Brombert's perceptive analysis of the basic attitude of French
intellectuals toward Marxist beliefs applies with equal force to Orwell: 1. a characteristic, nearly
pathological humility in the face of the Proletariat. 2. the belief that the bourgeois intellectual can save
his soul only by sharing the suffering of the working class and by imitating its Passion. 3. the
conviction that any present sacrifices, even self-destruction, will be eschatologically justified; that the
intellectual's duty is to prepare the future. 4. the concomitant quest for holiness by means of
martyrdom.39 (The fourth point is implicit in the imitation of the Passion and the sacrificial self-
destruction.)
Orwell is quite explicit about his humility: if there is one type of man to whom I feel myself inferior,
it is a coal miner (102); and he exhibits an almost Lawrencean admiration for their earthiness and
physical power: underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their
shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel (31). He is equally clear on the notion of
penitential sacrifice among the symbolic victims: I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down
among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants. Once I had been among
them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and part of my guilt would drop from me
(130131).
The third point is twofold: the duty to prepare for the future and the idea of self-punishment. The
whole force of Orwell's argument for the ideal of Socialism, justice and liberty (189) testifies to his
compulsive desire to prepare for the future, to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other
people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. And Orwell's entire life, a series of
personal sacrifices for a higher cause, in Burma, France, Spain and England, testifies to his need for self-
punishment. The words that provide the theoretical basis of these sacrifices were inscribed by Orwell in
his diary during the grim days of June 1940, and they express, perhaps more than anything else he wrote,
his personal courage and high moral principle: Both E and G insistent that I should go to Canada if the
worst comes to the worst, in order to stay alive and keep up propaganda. I will go if I have some function,
e.g. if the government were transferred to Canada and I had some kind of a job, but not as a refugee, not as
an expatriate journalist squealing from a safe distance. There are too many of these exiled anti-Fascists
already. Better to die if necessary, and maybe even as propaganda one's death might achieve more than
going abroad and living more or less unwanted on other people's charity.40
FIVE

ORWELL AND
THE EXPERIENCE OF FRANCE

Orwell's austere existence in Paris provided a striking contrast to the glittering bohemian life of
American expatriates in the 1920s. This essay described how the quintessentially English Orwell
had extensive personal and professional connections with France, which inspired his first book.
Paris made him even more English and gave him a new angle of vision.
The now extinct World and I, a high-paying hodge-podge of a magazine, let me write about
many different subjects: graduate school in Berkeley in the 1960s, my work in an English
auction house, the Greek idea of madness and art, my biography of Katherine Mansfield,
Wyndham Lewis, the pony express, my mother's physical and mental collapse, the attempt to
murder my father, the futility of the war in Iraq (September 1998) and the impossibility of
military victory in Afghanistan (January 2002). While the fact-checkers were sleeping at the
switch, the editor published a misleading photo to accompany Berkeley in the 60s, which was
clearly taken in the 50s. In this essay on Orwell he included a photo of Henry Millera thin
grey man dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, wearing a goatee and looking like one of the
Smith Bros. cough drop men. When I pointed out that this was not the notorious pornographer
(whom he'd never heard of), the editor insisted that it was a man called Henry Miller and that
no one would ever notice the difference.

George Orwell, author of the satiric fable Animal Farm and the prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
created an image of himself as a quintessentially English writer in his choice of pseudonym, in the
subject-matter of his novels and essays, and in his political analysis of the English social scene. But his
mother was wholly French in background, though from an expatriate family. His first published book,
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), told the story of his extended stay in Paris in the late 1920s,
his menial jobs and descent into poverty. One of his best essays, How the Poor Die (1946) is a vivid
account of how he came close to death in a Paris hospital. Marrakech (1939) gives a piercing snapshot
of life in Morocco, then a French colony. Though his education and upbringing made him English, at a
critical juncture in his life he chose to live in Paris. Why did Orwell go to live in France, what did he
expect to find there, and how did this experience change his life and influence his work?
A schoolboy during the Great War, Orwell was taught French at Eton by the highly eccentric and
rather miserable Aldous Huxley, who later wrote the influential utopian novel Brave New World. Half-
blind, inexperienced and insecure, Huxley was treated by the boys with appalling incivility. But Orwell,
unlike his classmates, saw beyond Huxley's physical disability and pathetic attempts to keep order, and
disliked their cruel jeers. He appreciated the quality of Huxley's mind, and admired his use of unusual
words and phrases. Always defending the underdog, a school fellow recalled, he rather stood up for
Huxley because he found him interesting. Huxley must have taught him well, for Orwell mastered spoken
and written French, and later taught French and English at the coeducational Frays School, west of
London. He later corresponded in French with the translator of Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the
Spanish Civil War.
On leaving Eton at eighteen Orwell had gone to Burma to serve in the British colonial police force,
where he remained for five increasingly unhappy years. Both his parents had a colonial background, and
the French side of his family had a long association with Burma. His maternal greatgrandfather, G. E.
Limouzin, was born in France and became a prosperous shipbuilder and teak merchant in Moulmein. His
grandfather, Frank Limouzinspiky-haired and beetle-browed, with sharp nose, thin lips and severe
expressionlooked exactly like a rapacious miser in one of Honor de Balzac's novels. Punning on the
Limouzins exotic name, as a boy Orwell called them Lemonskins or Automobiles.
In July 1927, sailing home after five years in Burma, Orwell disembarked in Marseilles, planning to
travel across France by train. There he witnessed a massive political protest in what was for him a
defining moment. A vast crowd had turned out to support Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants in
Massachusetts, who had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in a highly controversial case.
All these people, Orwell wrote, tens of thousands of themwere genuinely indignant over a piece
of injustice, and thought it quite natural to lose a day's wages in order to say so. He contrasted the
passion of the French crowds to comments of the English bank clerks in Marseilles, who didn't care if the
men were guilty or innocent, and crassly exclaimed: Oh well, you've got to hang these blasted
anarchists. He admired the instinctive sense of justice in the French people.
After returning from Burma Orwell became estranged from his parents, who were furious when he
gave up his secure government job. They felt they had done their best for him, and had no sympathy with
his ambitions to be a writer or with his political views. In the spring of 1928 the twentyfiveyearold
Orwell put some distance between himself and his disappointed family, went to Paris to test his resolve
and his abilities, and lived there for nearly two years. In 1929 he saw Philippe Ptain, the defender of
Verdun, at the state funeral of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the supreme commander of the victorious French
armies in World War I. He contrasted his own experiences in Paris with that of thousands of American
expatriates who flocked there in the 1920s, when everything was cheap for those with dollars to spend.
As he wrote in his essay on the controversial American novelist Henry Miller: During the boom years,
when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by such a
swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchs and plain idlers as the world has
probably never seen.
Orwell's Paris was altogether different from that of the expatriate authors Ernest Hemingway and
James Joyce, and he had no contact with French or English-speaking intellectuals. He lived in the squalid
rue Pot de Fer (Iron Pot Street) in the Latin Quarter. Hemingway had lived in the district with his first
wife in the early 1920s, but by the time Orwell arrived he'd moved on to a richer wife and a better
address. Orwell did not frequent the fashionable restaurants and cafs, though he thought he once saw
Joyce in one of his favorite hangouts, the caf Deux Magots (Two Apes). Other expatriate writers wanted
to enjoy the good life for very little money. Orwell wanted to endure a harsh life with no money at all.
Orwell's grim experiences in Paris gave him the right to condemn the English Catholic writer G. K.
Chesterton, who ignorantly idealized Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not spent much
time in France, and his picture of itas a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise
over glasses of red winehad about as much relation to reality as [the popular musical] Chu Chin Chow
has to every-day life in Baghdad. Reviewing Cyril Connolly's hedonistic novel The Rock-Pool, which
takes place among expatriates in the south of France, Orwellin a finely tuned sentencedefined the
moral chasm between himself and his comfortably decadent old school friend: even to want to write
about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of
spiritual inadequacy. Orwell was interested in French politics and literature but he did not go to France
for pleasure. When contemporaries like Connolly were studying at Oxford and spending the long summers
enjoying art, architecture and music in Paris, the food, the scenery and the shimmering beaches of
Provence, Orwell was doing a tough and lonely job in Burma.
For most of his time in Paris Orwell survived on his savings, supplemented by teaching English.
When you are in a foreign country, he observed, unless you are there because you are obliged to work
there, you do not live fully and you do not usually mix with ordinary people. You tend to spend your life in
cafs or brothels or picture galleries rather than in ordinary homes, and if you're also short of money your
experiences will be more sordid than they would be in your own country. He lived a more or less
solitary existence, finding his own kind of dissipation in low life. Instinctively masochistic, he sought out
the most uncomfortable place he could find and reveled in his ability to live on only a few francs a day.
We know almost nothing about the first twenty-two months of Orwell's life in Paris, nothing about the
ordinary people he met and homes he visited while teaching English. He made no lasting friends and had
no serious relationships with women. He wrote two novels, but threw them away. He didn't think his
commonplace existence was worth mentioning in Down and Out. His money dwindled, he became ill and
he was robbed. First he pawned most of his belongings, then he got work as a dishwasher. He couldn't
admit failure and ask his parents for money.
Orwell used to visit his mother's bohemian sister, Nellie Limouzin, a militant Socialist and
suffragette. Though he rarely sought her help, his aunt could always be counted on for a small handout.
She'd acted in vaudeville and was married to a Frenchman, Eugne Adam, who'd been involved in the
Russian revolution in Petrograd in October 1917. The marriage was not happy, according to one of
their friends. She had no character. She was soft, without backbone, without willpower. Adam, a
fanatic who refused to speak any language but Esperanto, later abandoned Nellie, wound up in Mexico
and killed himself in 1947. If Orwell had gone to Paris with the idea of exploring the French half of his
heritage, he must have been disappointed, for he had little contact with French people of his own social
class. He inhabited the underworld of downtrodden foreign workers, and Paris reinforced his
Englishness.
His memoir of those years, Down and Out in Paris and London (the metaphor in the title comes from
being knocked unconscious in a boxing match), emphasized the sour reek of the refuse-carts, the
extreme decay of the place and the bizarre consolation of desperate poverty: I believe everyone who has
been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last
genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogsand well, here are the dogs, and
you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety. Though his extreme poverty was
the result of bad luck, it was inevitable. The miracle had not happened, the novels were no good, and
Orwell still had no idea what he was going to do with his life. And yet, in a typical Orwellian paradox,
the experience of being doubly an outsider, in nationality and in poverty, inspired the particular angle of
vision, political and social, that set its stamp on his writing. There would be false starts, and he would
have difficulty publishing Down and Out, but it was his first authentic prose.
Despite Orwell's pre-tubercular condition, a friend recalled, he exposed himself in cold weather
in totally inadequate clothing. It wasn't just poverty. It was suicidal perversity. This stubborn self-
testing endangered his always precarious health, and in Paris he suffered a serious bout of influenza. In
March 1929 he spent two weeks in the public wards of the Hpital Cochin, which he later described in
his moving essay How the Poor Die, an experience which taught him what it was like to belong to the
world's underclass.
 After filling out a lot of forms in the hospital and learning he had a temperature of 103, he was forced
to take a cold bath and, wearing only a thin night-gown, had to walk two hundred yards across the open
grounds to reach the charity ward. He then suffered agonies as the inhuman staff first cupped him with hot
glasses and then applied an excruciating mustard poultice to his chest. While there he felt reduced to
nothing more than a thing, a mute specimen for medical students who didn't seem to realize that he and the
other patients were actually human beings. In his essay the hospital resembles an old-fashioned,
dungeon-like prison in which the poor died slow, smelly and painful natural deaths.
After he left the hospital, his marginal existence suddenly became desperate when his room was
robbed and his money stolen. In Down and Out the thief is an Italian compositor and fellow-lodger who
duplicates the keys and robs a dozen rooms. But Orwell was actually deceived by a French girl whose
short haircut and slim figure reminded him of the boys at Eton. He picked her up and brought her to his
room, and she stole everything he possessed. Reduced to destitution, Orwell tried unsuccessfully to catch
fish in the Seine (Hemingway claimed to have caught pigeons for dinner), and with no rent money was
forced to sleep outdoors: I passed the night on a bench on the boulevard. It was very uncomfortablethe
arm of the seat cuts into your backand much colder than I had expected.
Finally, through Borisa Russian migr and former soldier whom he'd met in the hospitalhe
worked thirteen hours a day for ten weeks, first as a plongeur, or dishwasher, in the luxurious Hotel Lotti,
then in a Russian restaurant. According to the Duchess of Westminster, the Duke, then a guest at the Lotti,
once craved a peach in the middle of the night. There was no peach in the hotel and the lowly Orwell was
hastily sent out to find one. All the fruit shops were shut, and he desperately but vainly pounded on
several doors. Finally, afraid to return empty handed, he smashed a shop window with a rock, grabbed a
peach and dashed back to the hotel with the precious fruit.
These menial experiences occupy most of the Paris section of Down and Out. The lowest of the low
in the hotel hierarchy, he was forced to shave off his cherished mustache, which was considered
insubordinate by the management. Abused by the waiters, he had to use his fists to get common civility.
Some of the more ambitious waiters took English classes in the afternoon, yet he never tried to escape
dishwashing by teaching them. He had no presentable clothes and was too exhausted to try to earn more
money.
Orwell stuck it out in Paris as long as he could, but returned to England toward the end of 1929 with
the promise of a job. Once more fate seemed to propel him into a hand-to-mouth existence. The job did
not materialize, and for the next two years he continued his masochistic, almost pathological commitment
to exploring the life of the poor and dispossessed, and wandered around the country as a tramp. Now back
home, he kept comparing the two countries and testing his own Englishness. In August 1931, while
tramping in London's Trafalgar Square, he recorded the English workingclass notion (a strong contrast to
Chesterton's idealized view) that the French were dirty: I spent most of the day reading [Balzac's
novel] Eugnie Grandet, which was the only book I had brought with me. The sight of a French book
produced the usual remarksAh, French? That'll be something pretty warm, eh? Evidently most English
people have no idea that there are French books which are not pornographic. Censorship of theater, art
and publications was strict in England, and in the popular mind France was synonymous with racy
cabarets, sexy books, obscene postcards and permissive morality.
In January 1933six long years after Orwell had left the Burmese Police and decided to become a
writerhis first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was finally published. Influenced by the
stark realism and social protest in the novels of Balzac and Emile Zola, Orwell, both observer and
participant, described his journey to the lower depths, heightening reality to achieve dramatic effects. The
book's episodic structure and mixed genre helps to explain why he had great difficulty placing it.
Combining sociology, anthropology and politics, autobiography, reportage and travelogue, it vividly
describes harsh poverty, degrading work and desperate unemployment, but also tells the story of Orwell's
personal adventures. The first part covers the last few weeks of his two years in Paris, his search for
work and his job as a dishwasher.
The epigraph from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales announces the dominant theme: O
scathful harm, condicion of poverte! The narrative is often interrupted by digressionsanecdotes,
stories-within-the-story, character studies and observationsand by the tales that Orwell heard in the
local bistros that were based on the oral traditions of illiterate workers. Two of his most eccentric types
are Communists: Furex, a hardworking stonemason who becomes a French patriot as soon as he's drunk;
and Jules, a Hungarian waiter, whose politics demand he does as little work as possible. By contrast, the
waiters in the grand hotel, snobs to a man, delight in servility. Orwell also uses French literary models.
He quotes a Franois Villon poem on hunger and invokes the name of Zola when describing the hellish
kitchen. He uses Charles Baudelaire to symbolize the Romantic idea of the damned poet and compares
himself to Baudelaire's impoverished skeleton labourer as he lies starving in bed. A temporary dweller
in poverty, he tells his middle-class readers about this unexplored country that lies in plain sight.
The book opens abruptly and dramatically on what he calls the rue Coq dOr (Golden Cock Street),
where the leprous houses, like old drunkards, lurch towards one another in queer attitudes, as though
they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. With sharp social analysis and in vigorous prose, Orwell
gives an economic profile of the quarter, and shows how he fits into it. All the houses were hotels and
packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians, and as one of these poor foreigners
he's at the bottom of the heap. Yet he also reveals the gradations of poverty and how each level feeds on
the one below: amid the noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and
laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes.
Orwell is fascinated with the particularities of poverty, the special smells and sounds in a room
where the walls are as thin as matchwood and layers of wallpaper house innumerable bugs. He's equally
obsessed with how to survive on a few francs a day. When he discovers that one of his coins is Belgian,
he has to slink out of a shop without a purchase, and must conceal bread in his pockets as he slips past the
patron of the hotel. Orwell, the upright ex-policemana rather nave, trusting and inexpert comic
characterneeds his mentor Boris, the Russian waiter, to guide him through this underworld. Boris inks
the white skin that shows through the holes in his socks, and urges him to lie to the boss.
Some scenes have a Charlie Chaplin-like humor and slapstick quality. Boris contrives to keep the
patron talking about sport while Orwell, shielded by Boris wide shoulders, escapes to a pawnshop with
a suitcase full of clothes. The cramped kitchen in the Russian restaurant has piles of greasy plates and
slippery vegetable peelings underfoot, and the big-buttocked cook bursts into tears when the going gets
rough. All this would be funny, except that Boris and Orwell are starving, and the cook works sixteen
hours a day to support an invalid husband. Like Chaplin, Orwell pushes comedy to the edge of misery and
suffering.
The chapter on the luxurious Hotel Lotti, the most effective in the book, combines analysis of the
social hierarchy with Dickensian descriptions of the laborers. The hotel, like an ocean liner, has strict
class distinctions. The guests live in splendor while the workers toil in the infernal regions: there were
the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the
kitchen furnaces) just like the whir of engines. The hellish heat is matched by the raging abuse that pours
in torrents from the cooks and waiters, who have to serve hundreds of people simultaneously.
Though he suffered at the time, Orwell the writer retrospectively delights in pulling the curtain aside
to contrast the elegant faade with the disgusting mess that lies behind the scenes: It was amusing to look
round the filthy little scullery and think that only a double door was between us and the dining-room.
There sat the customers in all their splendour. An Italian waiter hurled insults at an apprentice in the
revolting kitchen before he entered the dining room and sailed across it dish in hand, graceful as a swan.
Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a customer. The rigid class system in society is replicated
in the hierarchy of employees, which naturally inspires resentment and provokes revenge. The cook
routinely spits in the soup, the waiters dip their greasy fingers in the gravy. Roughly speaking, Orwell
writes in a characteristically shocking epigram, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle
one is obliged to eat with it.
Though he works like a slave from seven in the morning until nine at night, he findsstrangely enough
that the job suits him. It needs no skill, is extremely exhausting, has no interest and no future, but it
produces a heavy contentment. Having done the work himself, instead of simply observing it, Orwell
gains deeper insight into the mentality of workers and the rhythm of their lives. He admires the spirit of
the people who put up with endless drudgery and take pride in their ability to deal with anything. What
keeps a hotel going, he argues, is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly
and silly though it is. At the end of the week, the intensity of their work makes the pleasures of the bistro
all the sweeter.
Orwell makes the transition to the second part of the book, on tramping and begging in England, by
contrasting his impressions of Paris and London: [London] was so much cleaner and quieter and
drearier. One missed the scream of the trams, and the noisy festering life of the back streets, and the armed
men clattering through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces comelier and milder
and more alike, without the fierce individuality and malice of the French. It was the land of the tea urn
and the Labour Exchange [government employment office], as Paris is the land of the bistro and the
sweatshop.
The tone of Down and Out suggests that Orwell was more content as a plongeur than as an English
tramp. It was easier to be dclass outside his own country, and in Paris he could enjoy the freedom to be
eccentric and the stupefying animal contentment of work and sleep. In Paris he had a hotel room (squalid),
a job (horrible), a circle of acquaintances (drunkards) and a close friend (who couldn't help him). In
London, though he could always retreat if necessary to his bolt-hole with family or friends, he was forced
by strict regulations to be constantly on the move: tramping, begging and stealing. In England he observed
men degraded by unemployment and homelessness, reduced to a spineless condition by hunger and
malnutrition. Tramps, condemned to move from one shelter to another and cut off from women by extreme
poverty, live in enforced idleness that destroys their souls. Only while hop-picking in Kent can they
earn some money and enjoy a freer life in the English countryside.
Down and Out was well received. Though Orwell had started tramping in the late 1920s, his book
gained significance during the Depression, when unemployment, poverty and the struggle to survive were
crucial issues for millions of people. His contrast between the luxury of the grand hotel and the
exploitation of the workers, his firsthand analysis of the psychology of poverty met the demand for social
realism in the 1930s. Reviewers praised his honesty, his sensitive social conscience, his practical
suggestions for the alleviation of poverty, and his portrayal of the differences in national temperament in
the sections on Paris and London.
In his introduction to the French edition, La Vache enrage (manger la vache enrage means to have
a rough time), Orwell took pains to mollify his French audience and wrote: Since all the personal
scenes and events have something repulsive about them, it is quite possible that I have unconsciously
portrayed Paris and London as abominable cities. But, he disingenuously added, he would be hurt if
Parisian readers believed I feel the least hostility toward a city that is very dear to me. In an
enthusiastic letter of August 1936, Henry Miller, another connoisseur of Parisian lowlife, told Orwell:
It's almost fantastic; it's so incredibly true! How you ever held out for so long is beyond me. Did you
get to China? It's a pity you couldn't have had another section [complete with opium dens] on down and
out in Shanghai. That would be the coup de grace! In 1962 Miller added: I was crazy about his book
Down and Out in Paris and London; I think it's a classic. For me it's still his best book. Miller would
have been pleased to know that for many years Down and Out was the most popular work in the library of
Dartmoor prison.
In France Orwell formed some personal habits that lasted a lifetime. He adopted a proletarian
appearance, wore a blue flannel workman's shirt and started to roll his own cigarettes from strong black
tobacco. He also returned to London with a narrow, rectangular clipped mustache that left an odd bare
strip under his nose. It must have taken some trouble to maintain, but distinguished him from the clean-
shaven English and made him look more military and authoritative. The English novelist Anthony Powell
was fascinated by this idiosyncratic mustache, which always remained a bit of a mystery. It was
perhaps Orwell's only remaining concession to a dandyism that undoubtedly lurked beneath the surface of
his self-imposed austerity. Perhaps it had something to do with the French blood inherited through his
mother.
In January 1937, on the way to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell stopped to see
Henry Miller in Paris. Miller thought Orwell, willing to sacrifice his life in a foreign war, a foolish
idealist. But he wished him well and gave him a leather jacket that was useful on the wintry Aragon front.
Six months later, after barely escaping the Communist death squads in Barcelona, Orwell crossed the
border into France and spent three restful days (on one of the two rare holidays in his adult life) on the
Mediterranean coast at Banyuls.
In 1938, to avoid another flare-up of his chronic tuberculosis, Orwell and his wife Eileen spent the
winter in the supposedly perfect climate of French Morocco. Unfortunately, the hot, dry desert blew a lot
of sand and dust in the air and irritated his lungs. He was no stronger and in no better health when he
returned to England the following spring. Marrakech, a crossroads for caravan routes across North
Africa, was supposed to be the most attractive place in Morocco. The Koutoubia Mosque and its 200-
foot-high minaret dominated the town, the museums, the royal palaces, the gardens and the maze of souks.
The towering Atlas Mountains, snowcapped in winter, provided a stunning background for the palm trees,
pink buildings and high mud ramparts. The living center of town, the vast Djmaa el Fna square, was filled
with food sellers, storytellers, letter writers, witch doctors, dentists, mystics, acrobats, drummers and
dancers. Their rented villa, three miles north of town, was on the edge of a huge date-palm plantation. It
was entirely isolated except for a few Arabs who live in the outbuildings to tend the orange grove that
surrounds it. There is a large sitting room, two bedrooms, a bathroom & a kitchen. There was no
provision for cooking, but they had some little pots with charcoal in them & a Primus stove.
Orwell was not interested in the picturesque or touristic aspects of Morocco, but in the social and
economic conditions, the agricultural methods and urban poverty. He was disgusted by the endemic
blindness and beggars. He had never visited French Indo-China while working in Burma. But his months
in Marrakech enabled him to evaluate British and French colonialism; and he felt that Burma, compared to
Morocco, was like paradise. The Moroccan villagers lived in miserable little straw huts, surrounded by
mud walls. The old Arab quarter of town had labyrinthine bazaars filled with camels and donkeys, very
exotic, but degraded by dirt and squalor. The decadent colonial milieu and the threat of a major European
war made him gloomier than ever. He got to know some Foreign Legionaires, stationed nearby, who
surprised him by showing no interest in the impending European crisis. Yet he was surprised to find, in
contrast to Burma, that there was very little discontent and, at any rate on the surface, no organised
movement against the French rule.
In December 1938 Orwell told Cyril Connolly why he disliked Morocco: [It] seems to me a beastly
dull country, no forests and literally no wild animals, and the people anywhere near a big town utterly
debauched by the tourist racket and their poverty combined, which turn them into a race of beggars and
curio-sellers. His essay Marrakech contains a series of vivid impressions: brutalized donkeys, fly-
blown funerals, starving Arabs, squalid Jews, hopeless farmers, aged porters and wretched soldiers.
These brief scenes illuminate the desperate economic conditions of the French colony and reinforce his
attack on colonialism, which reduces its subjects to moral, social and political insignificance: when you
see how people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe you are walking
among human beings. People with brown skins are next door to invisible to the European colonizers,
who see them not as individuals but as part of the mass.

II

At the beginning of his career, Orwell tried unsuccessfully to get a commission to translate Zola's novels.
Burmese Days and Animal Farm were translated into French in his lifetime, but (at least in the beginning)
never sold well. The translation of Homage to Catalonia did not appear until after his death, in 1955.
When Animal Farm, his first great success, was published in England, Orwell asked his editor to send
copies to the leading French writers: Andr Gide (who'd criticized the Soviet Union in Return from the
USSR), Franois Mauriac (who'd made Orwell think about the limitations of Catholic novelists), Julien
Green (an American-born, Parisian-raised novelist who wrote in French), Andr Malraux (a brilliant
writer who'd fought for the loyalists in Spain), and the ExistentialistsJean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir and Albert Camus (the novelist and courageous editor of the wartime resistance newspaper
Combat).
Orwell, extremely well read in French literature, reviewed books by and about twenty French authors,
and made many shrewd observations. Reviewing a book on the self-destructive nineteenth-century poet
Charles Baudelaire, Orwell emphasized the paradoxical, even satanic quality of his religious beliefs:
Spiritually the Christian cosmos suited him, though as a rule he preferred to turn it upside down. [It
was] natural enough at a time when religious belief was decaying, and it did not incapacitate Baudelaire
as a poet; on the contrary, it was the making of him. He also emphasized decay when criticizing the
frustrating obscurity of the poet Stphane Mallarm: there is something wrong somewhere when poets of
obvious talent write poems that are virtually unintelligible. Artistic obscurity, so common this last
seventy years, is only one of the morbid growths of our decaying civilization.
Orwell often placed French writers in their economic and political context. Julian Green's
autobiography recorded the twilight of the aesthetic age, the last gasp of the cultivated second-generation
rentier. Though passionate about his Left-wing political beliefs, he nevertheless was able to admire, on
aesthetic grounds, Fascist writers like Louis-Ferdinand Cline, whose politics he abhorred. The purpose
of Cline's horrific Voyage to the End of the Night, he wrote, was to protest against the horror and
meaninglessness of modern lifeactually, indeed, of life. It is [like the novels of Henry Miller] a cry of
unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool.
Orwell's own style was lucid and direct, and he valued vigor and clarity in English prose. The main
stylistic fault of contemporary French writers, he felt, was a tendency towards rhetoricthat is, a
tendency to say everything at enormous length and at once forcibly and vaguely. Sartre, who gave the
impression of being one of those [cerebral] writers who set on paper the process instead of the results of
thought, embodied this rhetorical tendency and was, Orwell always maintained, a bag of wind.
 In 1945 Orwell became a war correspondent for the London Observer and the Manchester Evening
News. Between February and May he sent eighteen dispatches about the effect of war on the civilian
population in liberated Paris as well as in occupied Germany and Austria. Orwell did not witness the
great events of the war: the frontline battles, the liberation of the extermination camps and (later on) the
war-crimes trials. He did see the desperate plight of French civilians and the massive destruction of
Germany, but his curiously flat, lifeless and impersonal cables disappointed the Observer's editor, David
Astor. Orwell may have been too horrified to comprehend and capture conditions during the last months
of the war in France, and needed more time to absorb the impact of what he'd seen.
Orwell spent most of his time at the Htel Scribe in Paris, was struck by the tribe of American
reporters with their glittering uniforms and stupendous salaries, and met a number of eminent writers.
Harold Acton, the Old Etonian and art historian, was impressed by his mournful dignity. He mentioned
his lung trouble as if it were something to be ashamed of. Orwell also had a strong effect on another Old
Etonian, the Oxford philosophy don A. J. Ayer, who was in Paris in the spring of 1945. His moral
integrity made him hard upon himself and sometimes harsh in his judgement of other people, Ayer wrote,
but he was no enemy to pleasure. He appreciated good food and drink, enjoyed gossip, and when not
oppressed by ill-health was very good company.
Orwell met Ernest Hemingway at the Ritz when he came to borrow a pistol because They were
after him. He was very gaunt and looked in bad shape and [Hemingway] asked him if he would not stay
and eat. But he had to go. The pistol was all he needed. We asked about a few mutual friends and he
left. Orwell, about to publish Animal Farm, his satire on the Soviet Union, had good reason to fear the
Russians who'd hunted him in Spain and still considered him a dangerous enemy. When the Germans were
defeated and the Communists emerged from the underground, a lot of people were shot. Hemingway's Colt
.32 helped protect him from assassins.
Orwell also had some contact with French writers who shared his political views and had worked in
the Resistance during the war. He arranged to have lunch with Albert Camus at the Deux Magots, but he
was even more ill than Orwell and couldn't come. Both Orwell and Camus suffered from tuberculosis,
struggled continuously against pain and knew their days were numbered. Orwell did meet Andr Malraux,
an advisor to General Charles de Gaulle, and found him very friendly. Orwell wanted Malraux to write an
introduction to the French edition of Homage to Catalonia, and Malraux planned to write one but never
did. Ayer, in a suggestive comparison, described their political affinity: Both were individualists, and
each of them combined Left-wing sympathies with the conservative values of patriotism, self-reliance and
discipline in action. I suppose that Orwell was the more puritanical, though in personal relations neither
priggish nor arrogant, perhaps also the more romantic and the more keenly aware that power corrupts.
Malraux seems to have been more of an adventurer. It is to their credit that [Karl] Marx would have seen
them both as sentimental socialists.
Anti-Communist as well as anti-Fascist, Orwell was violently opposed to the puppet Vichy
government that was set up by the Germans during their occupation of France in World War II. He
admired the democratic principles of liberty, equality and fraternity that were embodied in the French
Revolution of 1789; and felt that the Vichy government, led by Marshal Philippe Ptain (whom he'd seen
at Foch's funeral), was consciously bent on destroying these cherished beliefs. Using the horrific
symbol of cruelty in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he thought that in postwar France all kinds of petty rats
police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiersare hunted
down while almost without exception the big rats escape. Disgusted by the crude attacks on the Left in
the postwar French press, he noted that enemies of the Jewish-Socialist prewar Prime Minister once
published a cartoon showing Lon Blum in bed with his own sister. He respected the integrity of the neo-
Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, one of the tiny handful of prominent Catholics who [unlike
Cline and other literary collaborators] kept their heads and refused to make propaganda for Fascism.
Orwell condemned France for putting hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, who had fled from General
Francisco Franco's regime after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War, behind barbed wire in southwest
France. And he was sickened when France, which in the French Revolution had abolished all social
restrictions against Jews, cooperated with the Nazi occupiers and helped deport their own Jewish citizens
to extermination camps in Eastern Europe. In 1945, alluding to the false charges against Captain Alfred
Dreyfus that had aroused furious anti-Semitic feelings at the turn of the century, Orwell warned his own
countrymen that with the revival of nationalism in the usually more tolerant England, the kind of anti-
Semitism which flourished among the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and [Hilaire]
Belloc tried to import into this country, might get a foothold.
Orwell felt the myth of a kindly Joseph Stalin and a beneficent Soviet Union (which had been exposed
by the former Communist Andr Gide) was weaker in France, despite the powerful French Communist
Party, than in England. But he feared a drift to the extreme Left and the possibility of a Communist
government in postwar France. Yet after the British general election in November 1945, in which the
Labour Party defeated Churchill's Conservatives, Paris seemed less revolutionary, more pre-1939 in
outlook, even than London.
In December 1945 Orwell shrewdly predicted that postwar France would have Slow economic
recovery, intellectual stagnation. Growth in the power of the Catholics as against the other factions.
Increasing estrangement between Socialists and Communists. All-round growth of xenophobia. The one
great political issue will be the question of the Western Bloc, but the forces will be so perfectly balanced
that no decision will be reached. The Western Bloc became NATO, the North Atlantic military alliance
against the Soviet bloc, which France joined in 1949. The previous year Orwell told his friend David
Astor: I think you were right after all about de Gaulle being a serious figure. I suppose at need we shall
have to back the swine up rather than have a Communist France.
Orwell had always admired France and its literature, and drew upon his fluent French and intimate
knowledge of French culture in his life as a political journalist. In the 1930s and 1940s he became far
more critical. Though opposed to colonialism, he thought French rule in Morocco worse than English rule
in Burma. He condemned the self-defeating neutrality of both France and England in the Spanish Civil
War and their appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. Orwell loathed both the wartime pro-Nazi Vichy
regime and the postwar Communists. Like most Britons, he felt that England had saved France from defeat
in two world wars and resented the postwar grandiosity of General de Gaulle. Though he did not enjoy
the same literary life as Hemingway and the other American expatriates in the 1920s, his years in Paris
were just as crucial and, eventually, as liberating. In Down and Out in Paris and London he compared
French and English life and character, and played off one against the other. Above all his book describes
the development of a young man and artist, committed to an intellectual life that would be always
connected to political realities. Life in Paris reinforced his English identity, yet gave him an artistic start
he had not found in Burma or England. His experience in France, grafted on to his eccentric English
character, provided a unique perspective and inspired his vision of European politics.
SIX

AN AFFIRMING FLAME
Homage to Catalonia

I sent my first essays on Orwell to the English novelist John Wain, who had written most
perceptively about him, and was immensely gratified by Wain's letters of encouragement and
(when we met in Oxford) by his friendship. I later met Georges Kopp's son and found out much
more about Orwell's military hero. This essay placed Homage, a focal point in his literary
career, in its political and literary context. It showed that its genre is war memoir; that its great
theme is comradeship; and that it expressed Orwell's deep-rooted need to be, as John Donne
wrote, involved in mankind. It's highly ironic that his best book sold only six hundred copies
in his lifetime and if the bullet that pierced his throat had had a slightly different trajectory, he
would never have written Homage or his political satires of the 1940s. It's worth noting, as
Orwell would say, that the only people who still believe in Marxism are North Koreans, Cubans
and fraudulent but prosperous English professors.

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming flame.
W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

In his valuable essay, Orwell in Perspective, John Wain states that much of the criticism on Orwell is
useless or misdirected because it started out from the wrong end. It is impossible to criticize an author's
work adequately until you have understood what kind of books he was writing.1 Homage to Catalonia
(1938), which contains autobiography, military history, political analysis and propaganda, is
problematical in this respect and seems a mixture of kinds. The structure of the book is determined by
Orwell's motivations and psychological needs as well as by the pattern of historical events. This essay
attempts to place it in perspective in two ways: according to its genre and its relation to Orwell's other
books. I believe its genre is war memoir and its model those classic accounts of the Great War, narrated
from the victim's viewpoint, which Orwell discusses in Inside the Whale. Critics have frequently noted
that Orwell's war experience in Spain provided the original impetus for his late political satires. If
Homage portrays the revolution, Animal Farm describes the revolution betrayed and Nineteen Eighty-
Four the triumph of reaction. What has not been observed, however, is that Homage is closely related
to his early life and personal narratives and that its central theme of comradeship and human solidarity
(the main support of the victim in war) is an expression of his intense need to be accepted by and
involved in mankinda need that was generated by his experiences in St. Cyprian's and Eton, in the
colonial service, with Parisian plongeurs, London paupers and Wigan miners. Homage portrays not only
an eyewitness account of what really happened in Spain, but also the story of a man's growth in personal
and political awareness. The central tension between politics and war, reflection and action,
disenchantment and idealism, creates the dominant form of Homage and reflects the poignant opposition
of victimization and comradeship.
In Why I Write, Orwell states that Homage to Catalonia is, of course, a frankly political book, but
in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the
whole truth without violating my literary instincts.2 Though critics find the political chapters merely
ephemeral and obstructive, Orwell's evaluation is reliable and his creative instinct sound. The form of the
book, which he said was the best I have written, is finely wrought.
The structure of Homage is based on two contrasts. First, the descriptions of combat on the Aragon
front are contrasted to Orwell's three visits to Barcelona in December, April and June. Second, at each
visit the revolution has rapidly deteriorated, so that the radically reversed political conditions provide an
increasingly dramatic and painfully ironic reflection on his previous stay. Orwell's two apparently
distinct purposes converge and unify as the four dominant events of the book reveal that the military action
at the front is negated by the political events in Barcelona. The parapet attack (chapter 7) and Orwell's
wound (chapter 12) climax his two visits to the front; the fighting around the Caf Moka (chapter 10) and
his attempt to rescue Kopp (chapter 14) climax his two returns to Barcelona.
The book opens in December 1936 as Orwell enlists in the militia and experiences for the first time
the special atmosphere of revolutionary spirit in Barcelona.3 After the briefest and most ineffectual
training, he is sent to the front in early January and remains there until the parapet attack. He returns to
Barcelona on April 26 to find the Civil War has become triangular, with the Communists and Socialists
fighting each other as well as the Fascists, and spends most of his leave involved in street fighting for the
Socialists. He returns to the front on May 10, disillusioned though awakened, and is shot through the
throat ten days later. He spends the next month first in various hospitals and then seeking his discharge
papers, and returns to Barcelona for the last time on June 20 to discover his militia-party outlawed and
his life in danger. Though pursued by the police, he attempts to rescue Kopp and barely escapes to France
on June 23.
The political chapters, like chapter 8 and the end of chapter 14, are reflective and establish an
effective contrast to the action. These chapters serve as interludes which place Orwell's experiences in
perspective: chapter 5 separates the five chapters on the Aragon front (chapters 24, 67) and explains
the stalemate that has been described in the earlier chapters (the Loyalist armies are divided and cannot
mount and sustain an offensive); chapter 11 explains the reasons for the street fighting narrated in the
previous chapter. Though the subject of Homage is war, Orwell insists it could be quite impossible to
write about the Spanish War from a purely military angle. It was above all things a political war.4 The
vital connection between personal narration and political reporting of the war is skillfully emphasized by
the description of his retreat from the parapet and retreat from the Hotel Continental, where the police are
searching for him. Both events are narrated in brief staccato dialogue: the repetition of a curt but urgent
command and a puzzled response by OrwellGet out of it! / Why? (97) and Get out of here at
once! / What? (204)are followed by his halting movement in the ordered direction.
Like the structure, the atmosphere of Homage is compounded of contrasts and antitheses. In its
political and military aspects it resembles Nostromo, in which history is nothing more than stories of
political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars,
barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions. Oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods, treachery,
and savage brutality [ruled].5 As Bernanos writes of his painful Civil War experiences: The tragedy of
Spain is a foretaste of the tragedy of the universe. It is the shattering proof of the unhappy condition of
men of good will in modern society, which little by little eliminates them, as a by-product that can be
turned to no good account.6
These men of good will are always the victims of war, and it is from this traditional viewpoint that
Orwell narrates his war memoir. He specifically compares the Spanish to the Great Warit was a bad
copy of 191418, a positional war of trenches, artillery, raids, snipers, mud, barbed wire, lice and
stagnation, and defines his tradition by comparing books on both wars. In Inside the Whale (1940),
Orwell criticizes the Spanish war books for their shocking dullness and badness, and states that almost
all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you
what to think. Homage to Catalonia, on the other hand, is distinguished from these books by its
truthfulness and objectivity and by its frank portrayal of Orwell's helplessness and confusion. Though
more polemical and positive than books about the Great War, Homage belongs in that tradition because of
its sensitive portrayal of a sympathetic victim. For those books were also

written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the
whole thing was about. Books like All Quiet on the Western Front, Le Feu, A Farewell to Arms,
Death of a Hero, Good-Bye to All That, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and A Subaltern on the
Somme7 were written not by propagandists but by victims. They are saying, in effect, What the hell
is this about? God knows. All we can do is to endure. They are the records of something
completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a void. That was not actually the truth about the
war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction. The soldier advancing into a machine-gun
barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew only that here was an appalling experience
in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to make a good book out of his helplessness and
his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole thing in perspective.

In squalid misery and unspeakable horror, Orwell's experiences on the Aragon front surpassed
anything he had previously endured in Burma8 or Wigan or while down and out. He insists that in war
the physical details always outweigh everything else (139), and he is constantly submerged in an
atmosphere of filth and chaos, excrement and decay, boredom and discomfortin mud, lice,
hunger, cold. The nightmare feeling is constantly stressed and rats appear frequently. During the
parapet attack he feels a deep horror at everything: the chaos, the darkness, the frightful din, the
slithering to and fro in the mud (95). When he is wounded, he finds the medical treatment almost as crude
as in the days of Hogarth and Smollett. When he returns to Barcelona he finds the suspicion and hostility
sickening and disillusioning.9
For Orwell, helpless and confused, war is a trial by ordeal that ends with his wound and his flight.
The most interesting things about his narrative are his startling honesty and the accuracy of his
psychological responses, portrayed in an exciting and vivid, yet detached style. Orwell admits that he is
often frightened: when going to the front, the first time under fire and especially after his wound when he
loses his nerve completely. He confesses that he is ineffectual in combat, deceived in a crisis, absurd as a
smuggler, self-indulgent on leave. Yet this seems to generalize his experiences (we would be the same)
and to engage our sympathies as he becomes a kind of military Everyman who embodies the fate of most
soldiers in most wars (103). Though a soldier, he is always a sensitive humanist, who observes, It was
the first time in my life that I had fired a gun at a human being (21). When he is under fire he reacts with
instinctive and futile gestures: he ducks, he claps his hand over his cheek, as though one's hand could
stop a bullet!but I had a horror of being hit in the face (91). Instead, he is shot through the neck and,
like Joyce Cary who was wounded in the German Cameroons in 1915, manages to reflect in the midst of
the horrible experience. Cary recalls, I got a bullet that scraped my mastoid, and of course it felt as if my
brains were blown to pieces, and it knocked me right out. And I just sat down to think: Well, this is it,
and it is easy.10 Similarly, Orwell observes,

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion. There seemed to be a
loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shockno pain, only a
violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling
of being stricken and shrivelled up to nothing. I knew immediately that I was hit, but because of
the seeming bang and flash I thought it was a rifle nearby that had gone off accidentally and shot me.
All this happened in a space of time much less than a second. The next moment my knees crumpled
up and I was falling, my head hitting the ground with a violent bang which, to my relief, did not
hurt. I had a numb, dazed feeling, a consciousness of being very badly hurt, but no pain in the
ordinary sense. (185)11

Orwell's wound is carefully foreshadowed by those of his wounded comrades, a series of ghastly
creatures who pass through the book like scenes from Goya's Disasters of War and evoke Orwell's
sympathy: I saw one poor devil, his breeches dark with blood, flung out of his stretcher and gasping in
agony (83). There was the roar of the explosion and then, instantly, a diabolical outcry of screams and
groans. Poor wretch, poor wretch! I felt a vague sorrow as I heard him screaming (9697). There
was one man wounded in the face and throat who had his head inside a sort of spherical helmet of butter-
muslin. He looked so lonely, wandering to and fro (192).
When the injured men are sent back to the hospitals, the ambulances filed down the abominable road
to Sietamo, killing the badly wounded with their joltings (7576); and when Orwell is shot he endures
the horrors of the same ride: no one who was liable to bleed internally could have survived those miles
of jolting (188). The tender pity in these passages is similar to the feeling in How the Poor Die; in
Donne's words, Orwell felt any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind.
Strangely enough, war, for Orwell, is not all futility and suffering. He reverts at times to the self-
conscious, adventurous and Boy Scout attitude of the Eton officers, where sniping and whizzing bullets
are rather fun, patrols and trenches are not bad fun in a way, and building barricades is a strange and
wonderful sight. Here the boyish navet in combat, a kind of playful whistling in the dark, is the military
correlative of Orwell's political innocence. But as the political realities darken his vision, the fighting
does not seem quite so much fun as before. In a crucial way, Homage is a Bildungsroman der
Realpolitik, for Orwell moves a great distance from [The fall of Malaga] set up in my mind the first
vague doubt about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple
(45) to The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it
continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with
military efficiency (180).
Like all victims, Orwell is immersed in immediate events and confused about the political situation,
and his perspective is not clarified until his political awareness gradually develops. There is no such
thing as a genuinely non-political literature, writes Orwell in 1946, and least of all in an age like our
own, when fears, hatreds and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone's
consciousness. And he adds in the same year, a writer's subject matter will be determined by the age he
lives in. One of the primary obligations of the political writer is to be honest, to establish the truth; and
Orwell writes of Homage, I happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to
know, that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should never have
written the book.12
Orwell came to know this truth by a series of accidents. He describes his connection with POUM, the
Unified Marxist Workers Party, the most extreme of the revolutionary parties, in the recently published
Notes on the Spanish Militias: Just before leaving England I rang up the ILP [Independent Labour
Party], with which I had some slight connections, mainly personal, and asked them to give me some kind
of recommendation. They sent me a letter to John. McNair at Barcelona. [I] produce[d] my letter to
McNair (whom I did not know) and through this I joined the POUM militia. At that time I was only
rather dimly aware of the differences between the political parties. Had I a complete understanding of
the situation I should have probably joined the CNT militia.13 Hugh Thomas writes of POUM that many
joined this party believing that it represented a mean between, the indiscipline of the Anarchists and the
strictness of the PSUC [Socialists]. Foreigners in Barcelona joined the POUM in the romantic supposition
that it indeed embodied a magnificent Utopian aspiration.14
Though Orwell idealistically affirms, There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten
than not to fight at all (153), 15 he also states: As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one
was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories (47).
As Orwell gradually realizes, the real struggle is between revolution and counterrevolution, between the
Comintern and the Spanish Left-wing parties. The Russian government tried to prevent revolution in
Spain,16 just as it had done in China ten years earlier.17
The retrogression of Barcelona from a revolutionary to a bourgeois to a totalitarian city is paralleled
by the decline of the POUM party. First, writes Orwell, it was an accepted party and supplied a minister
to the Catalan Government; later it was expelled from the Government; then it was denounced as
Trotskyist; then it was suppressed, every member that the police could lay their hands on being flung in
jail. Trotsky in Russia, Snowball in Animal Farm, suffered a similar fate.
There is considerable confusion in Homage (Orwell tells what happens, but not why), because he,
like everyone else, did not understand why the Communists destroyed their Socialist allies.18 And his
bewilderment continued beyond 1943 when he says, As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war
are completely inscrutable. This confusion results because the Russian policy was both contradictory
and ineffectual. As Isaac Deutscher writes: Stalin's desire [was] to preserve for the Spanish Popular
Front its republican respectability and to avoid antagonizing the British and French Governments. He
saved nobody's respectability and he antagonized everybody. Conservative opinion in the west, not
interested in the internecine struggle of the Spanish left and confused by the intricacies of Stalin's policy,
blamed Stalin as the chief fomenter of revolution.19
According to Orwell, The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted
to be anti-Fascist without being antitotalitarian. Except for Orwell, Trotsky, Borkenau, and a few others,
no one seemed to realize that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon
the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right (56). Since the Loyalist revolutionaries had no footing in the
foreign press, Orwell had to tell the truth. But he was a voice crying in the wilderness: his book sold only
six hundred copies in its first twelve years and was not even published in America until after his death.
For Orwell, this Loyalist internecine strife was more horrible than actual warfare against the Fascists.
During the street fighting, I was in no danger, I suffered from nothing worse than hunger and boredom, yet
it was one of the most unbearable periods in my whole life. I think few experiences could be more
sickening, more disillusioning or, finally, more nerve-racking (130). Yet Orwell's thrill of hope was
never extinguished and he remained an affirming flame: When you have had a glimpse of such a
disaster as thisand however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster,
quite apart from the slaughter and the physical sufferingthe result is not necessarily disillusionment and
cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency
of human beings (230).
His conception of human decency is manifested in comradeship and solidarity, and is symbolized by
the moving handshakes of the Italian militiaman and Spanish police officer at the beginning and end of the
book. This idea of comradeship is at the very core of Homage and is elaborated in numerous ways
humanistic, psychological, idealistic and heroic. Orwell shares the concept of the virile fraternity with
the great masculine writers like Melville, Conrad, and Malraux, who writes of Vincent Berger in The
Walnut Trees of Altenburg: What he liked about war was the masculine comradeship, the irrevocable
commitments that courage imposes.20 This sense of a brotherhood that shares the intimacy of death is
general rather than local and extends to all combatants. When enemy deserters slip across the Loyalist
lines and Orwell sees his first real Fascists, it struck me that they were indistinguishable from
ourselves, except that they wore khaki overalls (17). And when he lies next to a wounded Assault Guard
in Monzon Hospital, he says, In Barcelona we should have been shooting one another, and we laughed
over this (202). Similarly, during the soldiers talk across the rooftop barricades near the Caf Moka
(which recalls the famous scene in The Red Badge of Courage where foes converse along a narrow river
bank), the peaceful Orwell yells:

Hi! Don't you shoot at us!

What?
Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!
No, No! I wasn't firing at you. We don't want to shoot you.
We are only workers, the same as you are. (133)

This powerful bond makes Orwell a reluctant warrior. Once, in the trenches, Orwell suddenly came
very close to an enemy and could see him clearly. He was bareheaded and seemed to have nothing on
except a blanket which he was clutching round his shoulders. If I had fired I could have blown him to
pieces [but] I never even thought of firing. Instead, Orwell chases and prods him with a bayonet but
never quite catches hima comic memory for me to look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less
comic to him (92). The point here is that Orwell does not really want to kill the man, and this is
reinforced by the well-known incident described in Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War (1943).
Again, a vulnerable enemy suddenly appears: He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with
both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. I had come here to shoot at Fascists; but a man
holding up his trousers isn't a Fascist, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't
feel like shooting at him.21
This sense of comradeship and solidarity that Orwell experienced in Spain answered his deep-rooted
psychological need. In school, Burma, Paris-London and Wigan, Orwell had been a lonely outsider, and
this feeling of intense isolation is reflected in his fictional heroesFlory, Dorothy and Comstock. He and
his wife went to Spain right after their marriage, and it was the first time in his life that he was not
isolated and alien. United in a common cause with the Spanish Loyalists, he became passionately attached
to them.
In the autobiographical ninth chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier, a book Orwell completed just
before leaving for Spain, he relates how the overpowering guilt that resulted from his years as a colonial
oppressor in Burma forced him to seek expiation among the down-and-outs of Paris and London: I could
go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world.
Once I had been among them and accepted by them part of my guilt would drop from me.22 Though
Orwell knows he can belong to this world only temporarily, he is desperate to be accepted, for only
then can he begin to shed his guilt. Despite his extensive experience with low life and poverty in Burma,
I was still half-afraid of the working-class. I wanted to get in touch with them, I even wanted to become
one of them, but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous. The people would spot that I was not one
of themselves.23
When he finally overcomes his fears and enters a common lodging-house, it seemed to me like going
down into some dreadful subterranean placea sewer full of rats, for instance. (The real rats in
Homage, where he is accepted, are less frightening though they become the symbol of ultimate horror to
the isolated Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)24 Orwell is initiated by a drunken stevedore who cries,
ave a cup of tea, chum! and he writes that It was a kind of baptism everybody was polite and
gentle and took me utterly for granted. [I was] on terms of utter equality with workingclass people.25 If
tramp life is Orwell's baptism, life in the Spanish militia is his confirmationin true equality and
comradeship with the working class for the first time in his life. In Aragon they were all living at the
same level and mingling on terms of equality. One had been in contact with something strange and
valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the
word comrade stood for comradeship. One had breathed the air of equality. This period is now
of great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life (104105).
The stevedore's crucial acceptance of Orwell is repeated in another moving, almost ceremonial
incident, concerning the dark, ragged boy in his section who was accused of stealing, stripped naked and
exonerated. Orwell believed him guilty and was ashamed of his humiliation. Shortly afterwards, when
Corporal Orwell got into a dispute with his men about the need for discipline, this boy sprang into the
ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, He's
the best corporal we've got. Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal
circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy
and myself.
Besides Orwell's constant affirmation of the value of the individual in the midst of degradation, there
are other striking parallels between the down-andout period and Spain. Homage, as Orwell says, is a
focal point in his career: it both epitomizes his earlier experiences among the poor and oppressed and
anticipates his late political satires. When he first became attracted to the poor he had no interest in
Socialism or any other economic theory;26 and when he first came to Catalonia, he ignored the political
side of the war (46). He states in Wigan Pier that he wanted to get right down among the oppressed, to
be one of them and on their side against the tyrants;27 and, he repeats in Homage, when I see an actual
flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself
which side I am on (124). Because the Trotskyist POUM party was the defeated faction of the defeated
side, it was deeply attractive to Orwell and answered his compulsive need to seek failure (related to his
guilt) and to become a victim. He loved the hopeless individuality of the undisciplined and ill-armed
militia, partly because it made military life more difficult and dangerous.
Orwell's response to the tramps and the militia is a similar mixture of boredom and adventure: And
down there in the squalid, and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling
of release, of adventure;28 it was simply the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare
[but] it was rather fun wandering about the dark valleys with stray bullets flying high overhead (2325).
His encounter with the Italian militiaman, who symbolizes the best qualities of the European working
class, allowed him to transcend class differences and form solidarity and comradeship in the same way he
had with the Wigan miners: I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner,
and both of us were aware of it.29 It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in
bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hope he liked me as well as I
liked him (4).
Orwell confesses he hardly knows why he took such an immediate liking to the militiaman, and his
powerful attraction to the commonplace youth remains vague. More symbolic than real, he exists as a
prototype of the soldier-hero and embodiment of the special atmosphere of the time (the palms are
only able / To meet within the sound of guns). Orwell idealizes this man in the same way he did the
Burmese, tramps and miners; and Boxer, in Animal Farm, is an equine version of the illiterate Italian.
The special atmosphere that Orwell describes is one where the primary emotions are released, a
time of generous feelings and humane gestures. It is also a time that reveals the very roots of human
solidarity, for war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. This
comradeship, so vital and so necessary to Orwell, begins even before he reaches Spain, for the night he
leaves Paris the slow train was packed with Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, all bound on the same
mission. The male pyramid that the sleeping volunteers form on the floor of the train foreshadows
Orwell's vivid memory of young Ramon snoring with his nose flattened between my shoulder-blades
(105). When they wake in the morning, the French peasants in the fields stood solemnly upright and gave
the anti-Fascist salute. The political implication of these symbolic incidents is clear: though the
international working class achieves solidarity in time of war, it is destined to defeat. This, for Orwell, is
perhaps the great tragedy of the interwar period, from the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht to the paralysis of the Labour Party when confronted with Spain and with Munich.30
But the militiaman is also a sacrificial victim, martyred by lies and treacherous guns and forgotten
before your bones were dry. In this respect his fate is like the meaningless death in a Spanish jail of
Bob Smillie, the son of the labor leader who had been on the French train with Orwell and fought with
courage and willingness, and of the cruel and absurd imprisonment of Orwell's hero in the book, his
comandante, Georges Kopp.
This brave Belgian, who is first seen riding a black horse at the head of a column, represents the ideal
military leader and reappears at the moments of intense crisis and actionat the parapet assault, the Caf
Moka attack and the POUM purge in Barcelona. He calls the stagnant trench warfare a comic opera with
an occasional death (32); and during the chaotic street fighting, he walks unarmed, up to men who were
frightened out of their wits and had loaded guns in their hands in order to prevent bloodshed (129). After
Kopp's arrest, Orwell gives a proud resum of his life and character: He was a man who had sacrificed
everythingfamily, nationality, livelihoodsimply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism. He had
piled up years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever return to his own country. He had been in the
line since October 1936, had worked his way up from militiaman to major, had been in action I do not
know how many times, and had been wounded once (209).
Orwell's courageous attempt to rescue Kopp is a failure, and he flees Spain believing his friend will
be shot. Though all books on Orwell repeat this assumption, the recent publication of his letters reveals
that in December 1938 Kopp escaped to England after 18 months in a GPU jail, in which he lost seven
stone in weight (98 pounds).31 Thereafter Kopp continued his amazing career. Orwell's editors write:
He joined the French Foreign Legion in September 1939 and was captured by the Germans in June
1940. He escaped from a French military hospital and worked for British Naval Intelligence until
betrayed to the Gestapo. Kopp was rescued by the British in 1943 and died from war wounds in 1951.
Orwell's own anti-heroic character is the opposite of Kopp's, who represents an ideal standard
against which Orwell measures his own inadequate self. Two of Orwell's contrasting but related roles are
presented in the book: comrade and victim. His belief in comradeship allows him to be exploited, and
this victimization reaffirms, ironically, his idealistic belief in the virile fraternity.
Spain itself, as a conception and a reality, inspired idealism.32 Orwell had a deep desire to belong to
the oppressed and to experience degradation. He liked this, not in the Baudelairean sense of self-
mortification, but so he could experience the effort and spiritual triumph of preserving decency.
According to Stephen Spender, who observed the war as a non-combatant, within a few weeks Spain
had become the symbol of hope for all anti-Fascists. It offered the twentieth century an 1848: that is to
say, time and place where a cause representing a greater degree of freedom and justice than a reactionary
opposing one, gained victories. It became possible to see the Fascistanti-Fascist struggle as a real
conflict of ideas, not just as the seizure of power by dictators from weak opponents. From being a pathetic
catastrophe, Spain lifted the fate of the anti-Fascists to heights of tragedy.33
Orwell confirms these exalted feelings when he writes soon after his return from England, No one
who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that
strange and moving experience. Four years later he states that the Spanish civil war made a deep and
painful impression on the English intelligentsia, deeper, I should say, than has yet been made by the war
now raging.34 In his review of Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit, he echoes Kipling's Tommy and
refers to the International Brigade as a thin line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing
between barbarism and at least comparative decency.
Orwell was always volunteering for the most difficult and dangerous missions; and when he found
things too quiet in Aragon, he tried to join the International Brigade and get sent into combat at the Madrid
front. He came to Spain as a journalist but joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and
in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do (4). He volunteers for the parapet attack
and to recover the wounded afterward and to smuggle rifles back to the POUM building. He offers
himself in Sietamo when it appears that fighting will start again, although he has a hole in his neck and a
medical discharge and is too weak to jump down from the lorry. Far more than most men, Orwell lived
his words: To understand a political movement one has got to be involved in it. The greatness of
Homage to Catalonia is that Orwell's honesty, idealism and courage are embodied in his own mind and
spirit and action.
SEVEN

REPEATING THE OLD LIES

I've interviewed people who were angry, hostile and insulting; who'd fallen into a toilet and had
to be extracted; who made me as drunk as they were; who were confined to insane asylums and
on their deathbeds. I discovered illegitimate children, introduced unknown siblings to each other
and even held Wyndham Lewis mighty brain in my hand. The interviews described in this essay
presented a new problem: ideological blindness. And I had the usual practical difficulty, in a
limited amount of time and with a deaf informant, of trying to eat and drink, ask questions and
take notes, look at letters and copy down as much as I could.

As a biographer, I'm often more puzzled than enlightened by personal interviews. Establishing the facts is
tricky enough, and the truth can be elusive. The people I talk to may be old, have frail health or failing
memories. They sometimes remember what's been written or said instead of what actually happened, or
say what they think I want to hear. They may even lie to make themselves look better. Recently, I came
across a new difficulty in literary biography: ideological blindness.
I went to England in November 1998 to do research for a life of George Orwell. I had the names of
two men, Frank Frankford and Sam Lesser, who'd fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Frankford, who'd been in the Anarchist POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) militia with Orwell, and
was now aged eighty-five, had agreed to see me; but I didn't know anything about Lesser, or if he was still
alive. After talking to them I realized that the two men, fighting on different fronts, Barcelona and Madrid,
had in fact been intimately connected. Lesser had changed the life of Frankford, and Frankford had been
searching for him for the last sixty years.
I knew that Frankford had played a notorious role in Orwell's life. In 1937 Frankford was arrested in
Barcelona for trying to sell paintings stolen from museums or looted from churches. After his release from
jail with the help of an English intermediary, the British Daily Worker of September 14, 1937, published
a story about him. In the article Frankford accused POUM, and especially its commander, Georges Kopp,
of secretly helping the Fascists on the Aragon front in northeast Spain and of deliberately rebelling against
their Communist allies in Barcelona.
To validate the story the Daily Worker claimed that it had first appeared in the Spanish press, and then
quoted Frankford's detailed accusations: Every night at 11 p.m. the sentries heard the rattle of a cart, and
we could tell from its light that it was crossing the space between the positions on our left and the Fascist
lines. We were ordered never to shoot at this light. Near Huesca one night we saw Commandant
Kopp returning from the Fascist lines. Two days later, to lend authenticity to the story, the Daily Worker
printed Frankford's corrections. He now said he wasn't so sure: he was not certain that the carts actually
crossed the line, nor had he himself actually seen Kopp returning from the Fascist lines.
Frankford's false statement that POUM had collaborated with the Fascist forces in Aragon was
repeated in a vicious book by Georges Soria, Trotskyism in the Service of Franco: Facts and
Documents on the Activities of the P.O.U.M., which was brought out in London in 1938 by the
Communist publishers Lawrence and Wishart. This book was used to justify the Communist extermination
of their former POUM allies in Barcelona. Frankford's condemnation did great harm to former comrades,
like Kopp, who were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and like Orwell, who were hunted down and
threatened with execution. In Homage to Catalonia (1938) Orwell described these events from personal
experience, and made Kopp the hero of his book.
Frankford's accusations were forcefully refuted by Orwell's article in the British New Leader of
September 24, 1937, which was signed by fourteen members of the British contingent. He concluded: it
is quite obvious that all these wild statements were put into Frankford's mouth by the Barcelona
journalists, and that he chose to save his skin by assenting to them, because at that time it was extremely
dangerous to be known to have any connection with the P.O.U.M. The Left-wing politician Fenner
Brockway later verified this statement. In his autobiography, Inside the Left (1942), Brockway wrote that
when the boy (Frankford was actually twenty-four) returned to London he came to the office of the
Independent Labour Party, which was affiliated with POUM, and spoke to John McNair, who had escaped
from Barcelona with Orwell: He broke down crying and begged forgiveness. He had been imprisoned in
Barcelona, and had been presented with the document to sign as a condition of freedom.
But forty-two years later, in December 1979, Frankford repeated his accusations to Orwell's
biographer. Bernard Crick wrote:

Frankford denies that he ever broke down or asked forgiveness; says that he never signed anything,
but simply gave an interview to Sam Lessor [sic] of The Daily Worker which he embellished, and
he sticks to his story that there was fraternisation and crossing of the lines on occasion (which
seems plausible), but he is not sure whether he ever thought that guns rather than fruit and
vegetables ever figured in such movements, though there are things still to be explained. (When I
asked him if he was not angry at The Daily Worker for putting words into his mouth, Mr. Frankford
replied: Quite legitimate in politics, I am a realist.)

Four years later, when closely questioned in an Arena television program of December 1983,
Frankford squirmed uneasily and forced out a fake smile. He now denied that he'd ever made the
accusations and insisted: I don't remember that. I don't think I ever said that that wasn't true and I
wouldn't have said that. When asked about the propriety of publishing such stories, he replied with
surprising cynicism: Certain tactics are legitimate when you are fighting a battle like this. Not at all
horrified that such statements could be attributed to him, he said, it rather amuses me.
On a long shot, before seeing Frankford, I called Lesser's old phone number. Now eighty-three, he
answered in a gruff, aggressive voice. When I mentioned my book on Orwell, he became extremely
hostile and asked: What the hell are you ringing me for? I said I understood that he'd been in the Spanish
War. He exclaimed that he was a Communist who'd fought and was wounded with the International
Brigade, and was violently antagonistic to both Orwell and POUM.
As I questioned him about his background, he first vented his anger, then calmed down and became
more friendly. He'd spent his whole professional life as a journalist on the Daily Worker. Since his
brother was also on the paper, he'd reversed the letters of his last name and used the byline Sam
Russell. When I said his brother must have been the greater Lesser and he the lesser Lesser, he laughed
and we broke the ice.
Still repeating the old lieswhich he may have believed after a lifetime of professional lying
Lesser claimed that POUM had started the revolution in Barcelona behind the front and stabbed the
Communists in the back.

He also maintained that members of POUM had driven around Barcelona in the ambulances so
desperately needed at the front. POUM, he said, had plenty of medical supplies when the International
Brigades had nothing at all. When he was wounded he had to be evacuated by ox-cart. I listened patiently
to these angry assertions, hearing the bitterness of past years, and didn't try to refute them.
Despite all his contradictory interviews, ranging over sixty years, Frankford was still eager to talk
again when I turned up in 1998. I realized I was dealing with a deaf and probably muddled old man. I had
made the appointment over the phone with his wife, but he then called back to get my address so he could
send me directions to his house in Wells, Somerset. The directions never reached me (the house was hard
to find) because he really couldn't hear me on the phone. I arrived late and hungry at noon. Mrs. Frankford
gave me a sandwich, and poured me a glass of Spanish wine. So I struggled to eat, drink, ask questions,
take notes, look at the documents he offered me and copy whatever I couldall at the same time.
Though apparently robust, the stocky, white-haired Frankford had trouble hearing my questions and his
memories were clearly embellished. After discussing his background and explaining why he went to
Spain, he claimed (like most other British volunteers on the Aragon front) that he was the one standing
next to Orwell when he was shot through the throat and caught him when he fell. Frankford maintained that
just before he was shot Orwell was telling us of his experiences working in a Paris brothelunlikely,
since he had worked in a restaurant.
Frankford readily admitted that he disliked Orwell because of his attack on the English working
class in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which he had read in Spain. Orwell had been a policeman in
Burma and assumed leadership of the British contingent. Frankford resented this, as well as Orwell's
belief that everything he did was right. He was also annoyed that Stafford Cottman (another British
member of POUM), rather than himself, had been invited to Spain for the Arena television program. He
didn't seem to realize that his role in events in Barcelona precluded such an invitation.
Frankford then described his arrest, along with his mate Tankie, who'd served in the Tank Corps in
World War I. The Spanish police saw Frankford reading an English book, suspected him of being a spy
and stopped him for questioning. They found the looted items, arrested him and put him in prison. An
Englishman, Sam Lesser, got him out of jail and advised him to leave Spain as soon as possible. But he
didn't know if Lesser had published the Daily Worker story and didn't know where Lesser wasthough
he'd been trying to find him for a long time. When I said I had just spoken to Lesser and had his address
and phone number, Frankford was astonished.
We then got down to the sticky question. Though Frankford was still a Communist, he now conceded
that POUM was all right and had been badly treated during the political maneuvering and struggle for
power. Apparently contrite and eager to clear his name, though stumbling for words, he showed me a
xeroxed page from Brockway's book and admitted that he had indeed broken down and begged
forgiveness in London. The Daily Worker twisted and changed the meaning of what I said, he
exclaimed. Pathetically, and rather touchingly, he pleaded: Don't blame me for anything. I never meant
those things to be put down that way! I asked, for the record, if the accusations he'd made in 1937 were
true or false. Just say yes or no, I said. Vague, evasive, yet eager to please, he thought for a long
time. Finally, he said he wasn't sure.
I went back to London and called Lesser again. Friendlier this time, but more wary, he said that after
being invalided out of the International Brigade he became Communist Party representative, head of
English-language broadcasting (i.e., propaganda) and Daily Worker correspondent in Barcelona. When I
mentioned Frankford's name, Lesser said he might have known him in Hackney (a working-class district
in London's East End) before they went to Spain. But he could not recall getting Frankford out of prison
and said he would surely have remembered that good deed if he had done so. When I mentioned the Daily
Worker story, he asked: Was it signed? When I said it wasn't, he claimed he had no recollection of
writing it. Then he added: Maybe it was true.
What, then, is the truth? Frankford said Lesser got him out of prison and he was certainly in a position
to do so. Frankford's arrest gave the Communists an opportunity to smear the POUM and helped justify
their extermination. Lesser, Barcelona correspondent of the Daily Worker, must have written that lying
story. He was, it seems, both Frankford's benefactor and betrayer.
Frankford's accusations, refuted by Orwell, were certainly false. Brockway's account of Frankford's
remorse (witnessed by McNair) is convincing. Why then did Frankford stick to his story and repeat his
lies to Crick, yet retract essential parts of his statementas he did long ago in Spainand claim to be a
cynical realist when he was really a disillusioned fantasist? Was it stubbornness, pride, bravado or
bitterness?
His uneasy recantation on television, reinforced by his guilt-ridden pleas when I interviewed him,
seemed inspired by bad conscience. Was he a victim,manipulated and humiliated by the Communists he
still believed in, or a Communist agent, planted in POUM to discredit the militia? My interviews with
Frankford and Lesser reveal that the political battle-lines of the 1930s have endured into the 1990s. Hard-
liners still believe it's ethical to lie in the service of Communismeven when the system has withered
and supporters like Frankford have begun to crack. They continue to repeat what Orwell in 1940 called
the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.
THE ART
EIGHT

ORWELL'S APOCALYPSE
Coming Up for Air

This essay, the first devoted entirely to Coming Up for Air, appeared in the special Orwell issue
of Modern Fiction Studies when I was guest editor. I argued that this synthetic and seminal novel
recapitulates the themes of the 1930s and foreshadows the political satires of the 1940s. It also
portrays an apocalyptic vision that destroys the possibility of recapturing one's childhood. I
concluded with an extended comparison of Joyce's Leopold Bloom and Orwell's George
Bowling.

They were born after 1914 and are therefore incapable of happiness.
Bertrand Russell

Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell's central transitional work, is both a synthetic and seminal book,
gathering the themes that had been explored in the poverty books of the thirties and anticipating the
cultural essays and political satires of the next decade. The location and central symbol of the novel
appear as early as Down and Out when Orwell describes tramping in Lower Binfield and fishing in the
Seine; but the novel has much closer affinities to Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for Gordon Comstock's
belief that our civilization is dying and the whole world will soon be blown up is very like Bowling's.
Similarly, Comstock's fulmination against marriage and his dreadful vision of a million fearful slaves
groveling before the throne of money are repeated in the later novel. Comstock's fellow lodger and
sometime friend, the traveling salesman Flaxman, has the same good humor, stout physique and mild
vanity of Bowling; and he, too, uses some extra money to escape from his wife.
The dull, shabby, dead-alive Comstock family, who depressingly dwell in an atmosphere of semi-
genteel failure, resemble the decayed middle-class family of Hilda Bowling, whose vitality has been
sapped by poverty. Like the Oxford don Porteous, whose name suggests old wine and Latin, they live
inside the whale, entirely in the dead world of the past. When everything else has changed for the
worse, only Hilda's fossilized Anglo-Indian family and the eternally classical Porteous have stayed the
same, and their political vacuum has been filled by the hateful Left Book Club lecturer. All the decent
people are paralysed. Dead men and live gorillas:1 The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are
full of passionate intensity.
The Road to Wigan Pier satirizes many of the same targets as this novel: drab and soulless estate
housing; mild and mindless Socialists; the crankish fruit-juice drinker, nudist and sandal-wearer of Pixy
Glen; and the difficulty of finding unpolluted streams with live fish in them. And one of the most striking
images of working-class life in Wigan Pier is repeated in Coming Up. The decrepit woman who had the
usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and
drudgery2 becomes Bowling's boyhood nursemaid: A wrinkled-up hag of a woman, with her hair
coming down and a smokey face, looking at least fifty years old. It was Katie, who must have been
twenty-seven (41). As in Wigan Pier, the deterioration and decay of the natural landscape is paralleled
by a similar decline that Bowling observes in people. In the early twenties, Hilda Bowling was a pretty,
delicate girl and within only about three years she's settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-
aged frump (136). When he returns to Binfield in the thirties, Elsie, his first love, with her milkywhite
skin and red mouth and kind of dull-gold hair, had turned into this great round-shouldered hag, shambling
along on twisted heels (204).
Finally, Orwell's idealization of domestic life in Wigan Pier is repeated in the novel when Bowling's
parents read the Sunday newspaper: A Sunday afternoonsummer, of course, always summera smell
of roast pork and greens still floating in the air, and Mother on one side of the fireplace, starting off to
read the latest murder but gradually falling asleep with her mouth open, and Father on the other, in
slippers and spectacles, working his way slowly through yards of smudgy print and myself under the
table with the B.O.P. [Boys Own Paper], making believe that the tablecloth is a tent (46). This
Dickensian description of sentimental and soporific, cozy and mindless domestic dullness would be used
satirically by most modern writers, but Orwell portrays the scene from the point of view of a secure and
protected child.
Bowling's prophetic fears about the destruction of his childhood England by bombs follow inevitably
from Orwell's ambivalent thoughts in the final paragraph of Homage to Catalonia as he returns to
England: Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings
smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the
slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage
gardens all sleeping the deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake
till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs. Orwell says that the phrase that Hilter coined for the
Germans, a sleep-walking people, would have been better applied to the English, and the somnolence
of this pleasant pastoral nostalgia is clearly related to the drowsy numbness of mother and father at the
fireplace.3
Coming Up for Air is about an apocalyptic vision that destroys a nostalgic dream of childhood.
Bowling is in a prophetic mood in which he foresees the end of the world and can feel things cracking and
collapsing under his feet. The war that will decide the destiny of Europe is due in 1941, and it seems to
Bowling (as it did to Orwell at the end of Homage) that he could see the whole of England, and all the
people in it, and all the things that will happen to all of them (224). Bowling, caught in a brief intense
moment between the destructive future and the nostalgic past, seeks, like Winston Smith, to escape the
painful modern realities by recapturing his idealized childhood memories. Orwell's metaphor of escape in
both works (people trapped in a sinking ship is the symbol of man's fate in Nineteen Eighty-Four) is
coming up for air, like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses
out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and octopuses
(168). But escape is impossible for Bowling, who has the archetypal experience of returning home to
discover that the lost Eden of childhood is irrecoverable: What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes
of your boyhood? They don't exist. Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin we're in reaches
up to the stratosphere (216).
The childhood passages of Coming Up have the same affectionate and nostalgic tone as Orwell's As
I Please column and his major essays on English popular culture, like Boys Weeklies. These essays,
which develop and illuminate the themes of the novel, were written against the background of the Second
World War. In one of these cultural essays, The Art of Donald McGill (1941), Orwell lists the
conventions of the comic postcard jokesall women plot marriage, which only benefits women; all
husbands are henpecked; middle-aged men are drunkards; nudism is comical; Air Raid precautions are
ludicrous; illegitimate babies and old maids are always funnyand nearly every one of them appears in
Coming Up. Actually, Bowling's colloquial humor is far superior to these conventional jokes. He
baptizes his new false teeth in a pub, compares Hilda's constriction to that of an average zenana, says
that one old lady thought the Left Book Club had to do with books left in railway carriages, and observes
that he got fat so suddenly that it was as if a cannon ball had hit me and got stuck inside. Orwell's
description of Bowling guarding the tins of bully-beef in Cornwall, and especially his satire on Hilda's
(and his own) Anglo-Indian family and on Porteous, both mummified relics of the past, is well done.
Coming Up, like Gem, Magnet and the Raffles stories (all three are mentioned in the novel), comic
postcards, Helen's Babies, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, and Good Bad Books, recreates a decent,
stable, familiar but nonexistent world.
In each of his essays on popular culture, Orwell favorably compares the static old-fashioned view
expressed in these works with that of their harsher and crueler successors: the schoolboy atmosphere of
the Raffles stories and Boys Weeklies with the torture and corruption of No Orchids for Miss Blandish
and the Yank mags, the classic perfect poison murder with the modern bloody Cleft Chin Murder.
(The closing paragraphs of Orwell's Raffles and Decline are nearly identical.) All these popular
works are Orwell's boyhood favorites, have a strictly prewar outlook, and never mention contemporary
politics. Popular books like Helen's Babies and Little Women have something that is perhaps best
described as integrity, or good morale. Their world, like that of Lower Binfield at the turn of the century,
was more class-ridden and more impoverished than the modern world, but did not have an oppressive
sense of helplessness. As Orwell says in an unpublished BBC talk, What you are not likely to find in the
mind of anyone in the year 1900, is a doubt about the continuity of civilisation. If the world as people saw
it then was rather harsh, simple and slow-moving, it was also secure. Things would continue in a more or
less recognisable pattern; life might not get appreciably more pleasant, but at any rate barbarism wouldn't
return.4
This opposition between past and present is symbolized by the house in Binfield that is cleaved by the
accidental bomb: What was extraordinary was that in the upstairs rooms nothing had been touched but
the lower rooms had caught the force of the explosion. There was a frightful smashedup mess (221).
Both the prewar past and the warlike present have rather obvious contrasting characteristics. In old
Lower Binfield there was no rush and no fear, in West Bletchley everyone is scared stiff; in the past the
airplane was a flimsy, rickety-looking thing, in the present threatening bombers constantly fly overhead;
in the prewar world fish swim in the pond, in the modern world, writes John Wain, fish is the stuff they
put into sausages instead of meat:5 Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that they were making
sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into
the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. But when you come down to brass tacks
and get your [false] teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a
rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth (27).
The explosive and perverse phallic image emphasizes the corruption and sterility of Lower Binfield.
Orwell frequently protests against the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the
progressive mechanization of life; and in one of his rare poems, On a Ruined Farm Near the His
Master's Voice Gramophone Factory, he grieves that The acid smoke has soured the fields, / And
browned the few and windworn flowers. These lines echo the tradition that goes back to Blake and that
has been voiced most powerfully in the modern age by Lawrence (in Lady Chatterley's Lover) and by
Forster, whose views in Abinger Pageant (1934) are similar to Orwell's: Houses and bungalows,
hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, bypasses, petrol pumps and pylonsare these going to be
England? Are these man's final triumph? Or is there another England, green and eternal, which will outlast
them?6
Orwell's symbol of England's green and pleasant land is fishing, the opposite of war, and so much
of the novel is concerned with fishing that Orwell might have subtitled his book, which takes place near
Walton, The Compleat Angler. Yet it remains an effective symbol: The very idea of sitting all day under
a willow tree beside a quiet pooland being able to find a quiet pool to sit besidebelongs to the time
before the war. There's a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. They're solid
kinds of names (74). The ideal fishing pool is the secret one behind Binfield House where enormous
carp, perhaps a hundred years old, sun themselves near the tranquil surface of the water. When Bowling
finally returns there, he finds the Thames crowded and polluted and the sacred pool a drained cavern half
full of tin cans.
Isaac Rosenfeld's shrewed observation that Orwell was a radical in politics and a conservative in
feeling,7 both a socialist and a man in love with the past, explains why Orwell is so deeply ambivalent
about the prewar period. He criticizes the English for obstinately clinging to everything that is out of date
and a nuisance, but creates an ideal pub, The Moon under Water, in which everything has the solid
comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century. He praises the postcards of Donald McGill, for there is
no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class, but he calls Boys
Weeklies sodden in the worst illusions of 1910 because they inculcate pernicious social and political
attitudes: the boys get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their
future employers think suitable for them. In England Your England, he states that both the common
people and the intellectuals must and do oppose the existing social order, yet he also attacks the prewar
world of Boys Weeklies that is very similar in mood to his description of Lower Binfield: The year is
1910. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round
the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Everything is safe, solid
and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.
Since Orwell believes one of the dominant facts in English life during the past three-quarters of a
century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class and since all the peace and serenity of prewar
England depends on the leisure of the few and the labor of the many, he admires the working, lower-
middle and middle-class aspects of the prewar world but attacks the upper-middle and upper-class
characteristics. In Such, Such Were the Joys, Orwell both criticizes and cherishes the decent but rather
decadent age of The Merry Widow, Saki's novels and Peter Pan and describes the atmosphere, as it
were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The
extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozing, bulging wealth of
the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things. After
1918 it was never quite the same again. In Coming Up, Pixy Glen, like Wendy's Tea Shoppe, represents
a spurious attempt by the lower-middle classes to climb upwards by returning to the artificiality of
Barrie's prewar world.
I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in
childhood, writes Orwell; and when in the summer of 1940 he escaped into the country with his dog,
Marx, and had two glorious days at Wallington, in Hertfordshire, the whole thing took me straight back to
my childhood, perhaps the last bit of that kind of life that I shall ever have. Though Orwell yearns to
return to his boyhood years, it is rather difficult to reconcile his childhood nostalgia with the grim tortures
of Such, Such Were the Joys. It would seem that this ideal childhood existed only in Orwell's
imagination and that his works represent a fairly consistent attempt to recreate and perpetuate this myth.
Orwell has a keen desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and the present and
is particularly attracted to writers who, like T. S. Eliot, carry on the human heritage by keeping in touch
with prewar emotions. The most perfect embodiment of the prewar myth of eternal ease and blue summer
skies is Brooke's The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (1912). In The Captain's Doll, Lawrence also
writes with retrospective nostalgia about these peaceful years which seemed lovely, almost like before
the war: almost the same feeling of eternal holiday, as if the world was made for man's everlasting
holiday.8 Reviewing Edmund Blunden's Cricket Country, Orwell states the essential thing in this book,
as in nearly everything that Mr. Blunden writes, is his nostalgia for the golden age before 1914, when the
world was peaceful as it has never since been; and he says almost the same thing about H. G. Wells,
whose greatest gift was his power to convey the atmosphere of the golden years between 1890 and
1914.9 Wells The History of Mr. Polly (1910) has a strong effect on Bowling and, as Orwell says of
Coming Up in a letter to Julian Symons, Of course the book was bound to suggest Wells watered down. I
have a great admiration for Wells as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me.
This golden tranquility was shattered forever by the kind of modern war that Bowling experienced in
Flanders and Orwell fought in Spain. The unrefrigerated backyard of the Binfield butcher smelt like a
battlefield; the ravaged landscape of tincans, turds, mud, weeds, clumps of rusty barbed wire (81) is
exactly like the catalogue of the Aragon front; both Orwell and Bowling try to escape war by fishing; and
the description of Bowling's explosive wound derives from that day at Huesca when Orwell was shot
through the throat. Bowling believes that if war did not kill you it was bound to make you think about the
kind of world that would emerge from the ruins, and some aspects of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four
already exist in Coming Up: the blunt razor-blades, the nasty gusts of wind, the vision of the seedy
smashed streets. Bowling finds a severed leg at a bomb site just as Winston Smith finds a severed hand;
and, like Winston, the cringing victims in the housing estate lick the hand that wallops them. The red-
armed and fertile-bellied prole washerwoman is foreshadowed by Bowling's peaceful glimpse of the
roofs where the women hang out the washing, and the Two Minutes of Hate is anticipated by the
enraged anti-Fascist (a nice touch) lecturer at the Left Book Club. Bowling fears the postwar totalitarian
State even more than the cataclysmic war, and the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four is foreshadowed in
Coming Up: It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're
terrified of, the things you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries.

The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the
enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows (223224).
Orwell's apocalyptic belief is similar to Henry Miller's, who told Orwell that Our civilization was
destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as
human. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm. Miller made a powerful
impression on Orwell, and his astonishing indifference and passivity about the impending doom was both
fascinating and deeply attractive. Miller, perhaps more than any other modern writer, totally rejects
Orwell's concept of decency, his vague but important term for the synthesis of the traditional English
virtues that he describes in England Your England: gentleness, fairness, integrity, unselfishness,
comradeship, patriotism, respect for legality, belief in justice, liberty and truth. In the world of modern
power politics, especially as Orwell describes it, these qualities barely survive: they exist in Wiltshire
perhaps, but not in Whitehall. One of his major weaknesses is that he puts too much faith in this ineffectual
and disappearing decency, for decent men seldom achieve political power, and if they do, they rarely
remain decent. Yet Orwell feels the need to believe in somethingThe real problem is how to restore
the religious attitude while accepting death as finaland there is nothing else left to believe in but
decency.
Miller's extreme immorality and sensuality and his imaginative intensity are precisely the qualities
that Orwell lacks, and his social radicalism is characteristically American just as Orwell's conservatism
is typically English. Orwell's profound and ambiguous attraction (revealed in his long essay and three
enthusiastic book reviews on Miller) to someone who could remain so oblivious and insulated,
illuminates Orwell's strange ambivalence about preserving the past and about his intense commitment to
the concept of decency.
Like Miller, James Joyce also rejects decency and remains supremely indifferent to modern politics.
As Orwell says, Joyce wrote Ulysses in Switzerland, with an Austrian passport and a British pension,
during the 191418 war, to which he paid as nearly as possible no attention. Orwell is extremely
enthusiastic about Ulysses, studies it carefully and writes about it frequently. In a letter of 1933 he says,
Joyce interests me so much that I can't stop talking about him once I start; and the following year he
makes a witty comparison between himself and the author of Ulysses in a Joycean sexual-musical image:
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. Orwell's novel has several Joycean
echoes. The firm of Wilson & Bloom builds houses on Bowling's street; Orwell's epigraph, He's dead,
but he won't lie down, recalls the song Finnegan's Wake; and Bowling reads Molly's favorite author,
Paul de Kock.
Orwell's many statements about Ulysses illuminate the central theme of his own novelthe lost world
of childhood and the fearful despair of ordinary people in the modern worldas well as the personality
and character of Bowling, who is modeled on Leopold Bloom:

Here is a whole world of stuff which you have lived with since childhood, stuff which you
supposed to be of its nature incommunicable and somebody has managed to communicate it. The
effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When
you read certain passages in Ulysses you feel that Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he
knows all about you though he has never heard your name, that there exists some world outside time
and space in which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble Joyce in other ways,
there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller.

[Ulysses] sums up better than any book I know the fearful despair that is almost normal in modern
times.

Books about ordinary people behaving in an ordinary manner are extremely rare, because they can
only be written by someone who is capable of standing both inside and outside the ordinary man, as
Joyce for instance stands inside and outside Bloom.

[Bloom has] a streak of intellectual curiosity. [He] is a rather exceptionally sensitive specimen
of the man in the street, and I think the especial interest of this is that the cultivated man and the man
in the street so rarely meet in modern literature.

While writing Coming Up, Orwell describes Bowling as being, like Bloom, rather thoughtful and
fairly well-educated, even slightly bookish. Though Bloom and Bowling (their names are similar though
Bowling suggests the bourgeois bowler hat) are not comparable in depth of characterization (the bass and
the eunuch), and Bowling is more brash and hardened, they both are intelligent, curious, perceptive,
sympathetic, good natured, humorous and vulgar, and both are nostalgic about a happier past. Both
characters are ordinary middling chaps, and both are salesmen, though Bowling is more successful and
feels superior to the two newspaper canvassers (Bloom's job) whom he meets on the train to London.
Both know many obscure scientific facts; Bowling's mind, like Bloom's, goes in jerks; and the thought
of the Albanian King Zog starts memories of King Og of Bashan and transports Bowling back to his
incommunicable childhood through a Joycean stream of consciousness that attempts to capture the
past: The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your
thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago. Then some chance sight or sound or smell,
especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past
(30).
In 1948 Orwell responded to Julian Symons criticism of Coming Up and said: Of course you are
perfectly right about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator. I am not a real novelist
anyway, and that particular vice is inherent in writing a novel in the first person, which one should never
do. This frank admission of his lack of imaginative power (and his need to write for money) explains
why Orwell's books have so much in common and why his novels are so often nourished by his essays. It
also explains his eager receptivity to the influence of Joyce and of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he also
alludes in this novel.
A man named Mellors gives Bowling the racing tip that provides his escape money; and like
Lawrence's Mellors, Bowling rises to the officer class during the war and becomes, temporarily, a
gentleman. Lawrence's story The Thorn in the Flesh is referred to in the novel, and Bowling enjoys
reading Sons and Lovers. More significantly, the mood of Coming Up, and, indeed, of many of Orwell's
works of the Thirties, is close to the opening sentences of Lady Chatterley's LoverOurs is essentially
a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruinsand
to the dark prophecies of Lawrence's letters: I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of
civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old
things passing away and no new things coming the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and
all memory dies out.10
A disintegrating civilization on the verge of an annihilating war has been the subject of the greatest
novels of our timeWomen in Love, Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountainand Coming
Up belongs thematically with these books. Written a generation later, the novel conveys many of the
modes of thought and feeling characteristic of Orwell's agethe uncertainty, fear and despair that is
expressed in Spengler's Decline of the West and Yeats The Second Coming, in Miller's Tropic of
Cancer and Auden's September 1, 1939. As Leonard Woolf writes in his autobiography: In 1914 in the
background of one's life and one's mind there were light and hope; by 1918 one had unconsciously
accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness and had admitted in the privacy of one's mind or soul an
iron fatalistic acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism.11
While working on Coming Up, Orwell wrote to Cyril Connolly in Gadarene imagery: Everything
one writes now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice and,
though we shan't actually prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some sort of
fight. Despite the grim prognostications, Bowling opposes the threatening cataclysm. His imaginative
preservation of the past is the positive core in the novel that survives the present horrors and ultimately
conveys the most powerful effect in the book. As Bowling says, I'm fat but I'm thin inside. Has it ever
struck you that there's a thin man [the past] inside every fat man [the present]? (23). This preservation of
the past in the free minds of helpless yet resisting men was one of Orwell's central concerns in both
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
NINE

ORWELL AS FILM CRITIC

This was the first (and perhaps the only) essay to be published on Orwell in Sight and Sound. It
explored a little known aspect of his career, and showed that his film criticism was strongly
influenced by the overwhelming Nazi victories in Europe in 194041. Orwell disliked escapist
entertainment, criticized the low intellectual level of American movies and had no interest in
film as art. He concentrated, instead, on the political and propagandistic content, and
particularly liked Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

Between October 1940 and August 1941 George Orwell wrote twenty-six film review columnswhich
were omitted from the four volumes of his Collected Essays, Journalism and Lettersfor Time and
Tide. This politically independent weekly magazine was edited by the lively Lady Rhondda, the plump
and curly-haired daughter of a Welsh coal magnate. Most of the films Orwell reviewed were
undistinguished escapist entertainment, which he mostly disapproved of and disliked. But they also
included minor works by major directors: Rene Clair's The Flame of New Orleans and Fritz Lang's
Western Union; and a few which he took more seriously: the Mormon epic Brigham Young, the anti-Nazi
melodrama Escape and, most notably, Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
By 1940 Orwell had had an adventurous but not particularly successful life. He was born in India, had
won a scholarship to Eton, served for five years in the Burma police, been down and out with the tramps
of Paris and London, lived with the miners of Wigan, contracted tuberculosis, fought and been shot in the
Spanish Civil War. He spent most of the 1930s writing prophetic books about the dangers of Communism
and Fascism, and warning about the impending war. He had written three books of reportage and four
novels, whose honesty and integrity earned him a respectful reputation but no money. The outbreak of war
led to a period of waste and frustration. He was desperately poor, medically unfit for the army and unable
to find work that would help the war effort. He published Inside the Whale, a collection of essays, in
March 1940; and wrote the propagandist Lion and the Unicorn between August and October. When he
completed this tract, he began reviewing films and writing the London Letter for the Partisan Review;
but he abandoned his stopgap career as a film critic when he joined the Indian section of the BBC in
August 1941.
Orwell's criticism was permeated by a battered idealism and powerfully influenced by the massive
defeats of the Allied armies during 193941. The invasion of Poland; the occupation of Norway,
Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France; the evacuation of Dunkirk and the air raids on England; the
conquest of Yugoslavia and Greece; the destruction of shipping by U-boats and the siege of Leningrad,
placed all of Europe under the domination of Hitler and threatened the very existence of Britain. America
had not entered the war; and the victories at Stalingrad and El Alamein were not yet in sight. Orwell's
fears and hopes about the war affect all his reviews. He specifically mentions the Athenia, which was
torpedoed, with fourteen hundred people aboard, two days after the war began; Russian tank battles; and
Wavell's first bright triumphs in Libya and Abyssinia in February 1941. What rot it all is! he comments
on One Night in Lisbon. How dare anyone present the war in these colours when thousands of tanks are
battling on the plains of Poland and tired workers are slinking into the tobacconist's shop to plead humbly
for a small Woodbine. And yet as current films go this is a good film.
Orwell, who rarely mentions the directors and is not interested in film as a distinct form of art, does
not write brilliantly illuminating criticism, like his contemporaries James Agee and Graham Greene. He
is primarily concerned with the political, social and moral content of films; their propaganda value; the
way they reflect the progress of the war; and the difference between English and American cinema. His
reviews are generally short and formulary: an opening comment, discussion of the plot, snap judgment on
the film and remarks on the cast, with particular praise for veteran English character actors like Edmund
Gwenn, C. Aubrey Smith and Eric Blore. But his wit at the expense of the more tedious films shows the
engaging side of his character that was also revealed in his As I Please columns for Tribune. The top
hat in Quiet Wedding, symbol throughout half the world of British plutocracy, is now only worn by
schoolboys, undertakers and bank messengers. The school in Little Men is the 1870 equivalent of
Dartington Hall. I Married Adventure, an African jungle film by Osa Johnson, is excellent for those
who are distressed by the present depleted state of the Zoo. The horrible quality of the color in Noel
Coward's Bitter Sweet makes the actors faces marzipan pink, garish magenta and poisonous green.
(Orwell rather exaggerates, a year after Gone With the Wind, the general defects of color film.)
Orwell's intensely hostile response to the manifest defects of American escapist films, which make a
blank cartridge fired in a studio more exciting than the bomb that drops next door, is reinforced by his
anger at the isolationist position of the United States during the first two years of the war. He assumes that
English and European films are more serious if less technically expert than American ones, and condemns
the sheer idiocy of the absurd plot of a romantic tearjerker like Waterloo Bridge. But he is interested in
the audience's response to the lively dialogue and their acceptance of the appalling banality. (He quotes a
nice exchange from two women sitting behind him: Of course, she can't marry him after that.Why
can't she?Well, I mean to say, she couldn't.Why not? I would. I just wouldn't say anything about
it.No, she'll kill herself. You'll see.)
He notes that the interest in adventure films would increase enormously if in five per cent of the
cases the heroine did not escape! He objects to the oppressive conventional morality and wryly
comments that only in films do beautiful women ever starve. And in a critique of The Lady in Question, a
remake of La Gribouille [The Simpleton] directed by Charles Vidor, he condemns the intellectual
contempt which American film producers seem to feel for their audience. It is always assumed that
anything demanding thought, or even suggesting thought, must be avoided like the plague. An American
film actor shown reading a book always handles it in the manner of an illiterate person. In a thriller like
Tim Whelan's A Date with Destiny (an old-fashioned murder story dolled up with a few psychological
trappings for the benefit of an audience who are assumed to have heard far-off rumours of Freud), the
producers cannot resist denouncing the whole science of psychiatry as something sinister, wicked and
probably an imposture. The moral, beloved of English-speaking audiences, is that the intellectual is
always wrong. What disgusts him and offends his Socialist beliefs in George Cukor's film of The Gay
Mrs. Trexel, as in so many American films, is the utter lack of any decent, intelligent vision of life. It
does not seem to strike them that the whole manner of life which depends on Paris dresses, servants,
riding horses, etc., etc., is futile in itself.
Another distasteful aspect of American culture, which Orwell also discusses in his comparison of
English and American detective novels, Raffles and Miss Blandish, is the gratuitous violence. For
Orwell, the Raoul Walsh gangster film High Sierra represents the ne plus ultra of sadism, bully worship
and gunplay, repugnantly combined with sentimentality and perverse morality: Humphrey Bogart is the
Big Shot who smashes people in the face with the butt of his pistol and watches fellow gangsters burn to
death with the casual comment, They were only small-town guys, but is kind to dogs and is supposed to
be deeply touching when he is smitten with a pure affection for a crippled girl, who knows nothing of
his past. In the end he is killed, but we are evidently expected to sympathise with him and even to admire
him.
By contrast, he praises Henry Hathaway's unusual and more ambitious film Brigham Young, because
the heroism of the Mormon pioneers is well brought out and Brigham Young's own spiritual struggles are
taken seriously. Orwell, who notes that the Mormons claimed divine inspiration, preached polygamy and
were persecuted in the nineteenth century, states The film is an interesting example of the way in which
important events lose their moral colour as they drop backwards into history. It is more or less pro-
Mormon, the polygamy [Young had nineteen wives and fifty-six children] being played down as much as
possible and the methods by which the Mormons secured their extra wives ignored.
Orwell finds that the cinematic representations of English social life and history are also highly
idealized. He notes that the portrayal of county society in Anthony Asquith's Quiet Wedding, a
charming little film, which kept the jaded press audience laughing rapturously, ignores the fact that the
English gentry have lost contact with agriculture and live mainly on dividends. Yet he admires the deep
charm of country life, its casualness and lack of ceremony with the feudally familiar servants; and says the
film is chiefly interesting as a record of vanished time: for it ignores the war and seems to belong to
some period before Hitler definitely filled the horizon. The nostalgic longing for a world of peace, and
the desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and of the present, were the dominant
themes of Orwell's most recent novel, Coming Up For Air (1939).
This England, a historical pageant, also sustains the myth that England is an agricultural country and
that its inhabitantswho could not tell a turnip from a broccoli if they saw them growing in a field
derive their patriotism from a passionate love of the English soil. Yet he affirms that such films are
probably good for morale in wartime and patriotically states (as he does in his essay on Kipling) that
many of the events which the jingo history-books make the most noise about are things to be proud of.
Orwell believes that propaganda films are a major weapon in war and that it is vital to learn how to rouse
resentment against the enemy. He criticizes two British propaganda films for their amateurishness, their
use of the dreadful BBC voice which antagonises the whole English-speaking world and their failure to
realize that most people are more disturbed by the destruction of a house than of a church. (Surely we
can find something more effective to say than that the Germans have a spite against Gothic architecture?)
Orwell is fascinated by the effect of war on the cinema. He notes a welcome change from the tinge of
isolationist feeling in Escape to Glory to the sudden outbreak of Anglophilia in Nice Girl? He remarks
that Tony, the Californian grape-grower in They Knew What They Wanted, is one of those big-hearted,
child-like Italians who were favourites on the American screen before Mussolini lined up with Hitler.
He is pleased to see, in Mitchell Leisen's Arise, My Love, that the refusal to deal with reality and the rigid
pattern of the American happy ending were finally breaking down under the intense pressure of
contemporary events. Foreign politics, wars and assassinations are no longer treatedas they had been in
England during the 1930sas a fantastic joke, or as material for a news scoop. At the end of this film
Ray Milland and Claudette Colbert survive a shipwreck and decide to stay in Europe and work for the
defeat of Fascism. So, somewhat less rosily and more credibly than is usual in a film intended as a
popular success, the story ends.
So Ends Our Night, an adaptation of Erich Remarque's novel about the sacrificial death of a German
refugee, directed by John Cromwell, also reveals a welcome development of political consciousness:
Two years ago this anti-Nazi film would have been impossibly highbrow and dangerously left. It
can now be safely assumed that S.A., S.S., Ogpu, Gestapo, etc., will convey approximately the
right meanings and that the average filmgoer is somewhat ahead of the magistrate who remarked recently
to a German refugee, You must have done something wrong or they wouldn't have put you in the
concentration camp.
Orwell's critique of another anti-Nazi film, Escape, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, foreshadows with
extraordinary clarity the even more dehumanized and dangerous world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. He
believes the film fails because of its unwillingness to be too political, and has rather unrealistic
expectations of what a film might hope to portray: It makes play, fairly effectively, with the horror of the
Gestapo, but as to why the Gestapo exists, how Hitler reached his present position, what he is trying to
achieve, it utters not a word. Though the end of the film degenerates into absurdity, the first part, which
includes Bonita Granville as one of those spying and eavesdropping children whom all the totalitarian
States specialise in producing, captures the nightmare atmosphere of a totalitarian country, the utter
helplessness of the ordinary person, the complete disappearance of the concepts of justice and objective
truth. The nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Fourwhich he saw in films like Escaperealistically
portrayed the political terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, transposed into the austere
landscape of wartime London.
Orwell's most substantial and significant review, which synthesizes the dominant themes of his film
criticism, concerns The Great Dictator. Orwell, who is predominantly interested in the effective
presentation of serious ideas, praises the glorious scenes of fights against Storm Troopers which are not
less, perhaps actually more moving because the tragedy of wrecked Jewish households is mixed up with
[slapstick] humour. He describes how the little Jewish barber is mistaken for Hynkel, the Dictator of
Tomania, and says the great moment of the film occurs when the barber is surrounded by Nazi dignitaries,
waiting to hear his triumphal speech: Instead of making the speech that is expected of him, Charlie makes
a powerful fighting speech in favour of democracy, tolerance, and common decency. It is really a
tremendous speech, a sort of version of Lincoln's Gettysburg address done into Hollywood English, one
of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time. He adds, less enthusiastically, that it
has almost no connection with the rest of the film, which fades out after the speech without revealing if the
oration takes effect or if the Nazis shoot the impostor.
Though Orwell believes the film is technically weak, has no more unity than a pantomime and gives
the impression of being tied together with bits of string, he finds it deeply moving because he identifies
with Chaplin's peculiar gift: His power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man,
for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West.
We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in retreat, super-men in control of three-
quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists.
The common man is wiser than the intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men. Chaplin's appeal
lies in his power to reassert the fact, overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by Socialism, that vox
populi is vox Dei and giants are vermin. Orwell adds that pro-Fascist writers like Wyndham Lewis
(who also wrote for Time and Tide) have always pursued Chaplin with a venomous hatred. Lewis
actually attacked Chaplin in Time and Western Man (1927) not for political reasons, but for popularizing
infantile attitudes.
Orwell concludes by affirming the propagandist value of Chaplin's films, which had been banned in
Germany since Hitler (his near-twin) came to power: If our Government had a little more imagination
they would subsidise The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into
Germanya thing that ought not to be beyond human ingenuity. The allure of power politics will be a
fraction weaker for every human being who sees this film.
Orwell's criticism is limited by the mainly uninspiring quality of the films he reviewed during 1940
41 and by his lack of interest in the theory and technique of the cinema. But his commonsensical reviews
are enlivened by his exposure of Hollywood's superficiality (Nearly all American films are
intellectually pretentious. The synopses handed out to representatives of the press analyse their
absurd subject-matter as though it were the work of Ibsen), and strengthened by his social commitment
and moral intensity. They reflect his values, especially the concern with his distillation of English virtues
the concept of decency. They clearly anticipate his acute insights about the terrifying atmosphere of
totalitarianism in his two masterpieces: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
TEN

THE RELUCTANT PROPAGANDIST

These two book reviews described Orwell's work at the BBC during World War II and his
movement from idealism to disillusionment. The first volume contains sixteen political and
literary programs, and one hundred pages of his letters. There are also scrappy radio talks by
Forster, Eliot and William Empson. Though Orwell was forced to lie and felt that this
propaganda had damaged his integrity, his efforts were useless and his talks did not reach their
audience. The second volume contains forty-nine news talks to India. Orwell was shocked by the
massacre of Jews in Poland and by the Japanese atrocities in the Far East, and he makes a
number of shrewd prophecies.
Though I'm not a conservative, I wrote fifty-five reviews for the National Review in the 1980s.
It was edited by William Buckley, who always sent me encouraging notes (good going) and
copies of his books. I stopped writing for Buckley when he spiked my criticism of his hero Evelyn
Waugh and published an unfair attack on my review of Nabokov without giving me a chance to
reply.

In the 1970s, when I studied the Orwell papers at the British Broadcasting Company archives in Reading,
England, I was given a radically incomplete file. In the early 1980s the amateur scholar William J. West,
searching for material on C. K. Ogden's Basic English, accidentally found that radio talks by Orwella
producer in the Indian section from August 1941 until November 1943had been mysteriously misfiled
under the name of the Indian lady who introduced the program. This eventually led to West's astonishing
discovery of many of Orwell's weekly war commentaries (to be published in a later volume), of sixteen
political and literary talks and adaptations, and one hundred pages of correspondence. In 1984 West
published Orwell's literary talks, with the letters to his contributors, as Orwell: The Lost Writings.
Unfortunately, this impersonal, routine and repetitive correspondence could have been written by any
bureaucrat.
Though Orwell was born in India and had been a policeman in Burma, he seemed too independent and
outspoken for this essential but soul-destroying war work. His novel Burmese Days had been banned in
India, and in Looking Back on the Spanish War (June 1943) he wrote: Official war-propaganda, with
its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the
enemy. This volume, like his later novels, charts his progress from idealism to disillusionment.
Orwell complains about the desperate search for appropriate subjects, laments the poor quality of the
transmissions (it was a complete muckup and consisted largely of scratching noises), maintains the
broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens to them, notes in his diary that he is forced to lie
for propaganda purposes but denies this in his letter of resignation. He is frustrated by the impossibility of
getting anything done and feels like an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boota brutal
image that recurs in his essays and in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He must leave in order to be near-human
again and able to write something serious. Still, the BBC was not all bad. It continued to pay Hitler
royalties, during the war, for excerpts from Mein Kampf.
West's sound introduction to this small-print edition (though marred by a dozen minor errors) shows
that Orwell's biographer was ignorant of the BBC background and (despite Orwell's complaints) that
these years were not wasted. West usefully confirms that Basic English influenced the creation of
Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four; that wartime censorship inspired the portrayal of Winston Smith's
work; that Senate House, the headquarters of the Ministry of Information (which controlled censorship),
was the physical model for the Ministry of Truth; and that its chief, Brendan Bracken, known as BB,
was the forerunner of Big Brother. But West's claim that Orwell's adaptation of Ignazio Silone's story
The Fox (September 1943) directly inspired him to write Animal Farm is not convincing. The
inspiration, as Orwell states (and West quotes), came before the war; and Silone's work, in any case, is
entirely different from Orwell's.
The material in this volume is of uneven interest. The content of the broadcasts, like Comrade
Napoleon's speeches to the farm animals, is extremely over-simplified. Despite the contributions of T. S.
Eliot, William Empson, and E. M. Forster (whose Passage to India was broadcast to India as German
propaganda), they did not deal with political and literary matters in the highest intellectual context.
Rather, as Forster more realistically observed, they are chatty and scrappy.
The talk on British Rations and the Submarine War was spoken by an Indian as if he, rather than
Orwell, had written it. Some of the nondiscussions are absurd (orwell: The second poem is more like a
ballad. empson: Actually it's a savage attack on militaristic sentiment. orwell: Possibly, but as I was
saying) or unintentionally funny: It's a pity Wilfred Owen isn't here to read it. He was killed. But we've
got Edmund Blunden here today.
What is needed, to place these talks in their proper context, is a discussion of the war in Europe and
in South Asia, and a relation of the broadcasts to Orwell's other works. When Orwell was a propagandist,
the Nazis were masters of Europe from Norway to the Black Sea. There was a strong possibility that the
Japanese might invade India after the fall of Burma in January 1942, or even that the Axis might win the
war if Hitler broke through Russia to the Persian Gulf and India joined Japan.
Orwell's talks on Edmund Blunden, Jack London and Jonathan Swift were early versions of his
review of Blunden's Cricket Country (1944), his introduction to London's Love of Life (1945) and his
essay on Gulliver's Travels (1946), which meant more to him than any other book ever written. The
third Voice talk on poetry reveals that David Copperfield influenced Such, Such Were the Joys, his
essay about education as an instrument of torture. The first sentence of Orwell's part of a story by five
different writers recalls the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four; the reluctance to kill an enemy recalls
Orwell's own unwillingness, in Spain, to shoot a Fascist who was holding up his trousers and was
visibly a fellow-creature; and his observation that Blunden's poems express a love of the surface of
the earth exactly anticipates his famous statement in Why I Write: So long as I remain alive and well I
shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth.

II

The War Commentaries, a sequel to the earlier volume, was published in 1985. It contains Orwell's forty-
nine weekly news talks to India, which summarize the progress of the war from December 1941, just after
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, to March 1943, when the tide had turned after the great victories at
Alamein and Stalingrad. West provides an informative introduction and footnotes, though he does not
compare the war commentaries to Orwell's London Letters to the Partisan Review. They were directed
to American readers, ran from January 1941 to the summer of 1946, and used some of the same material.
Orwell's factual accounts reveal his familiarity with the terrain of Burma, where he had been a police
officer for five years; his ability to perceive the major turning points of the war: the Battle of Britain in
the late summer of 1940, the petering out of the German offensive in Russia in the winter of 1941 and the
entrance of Japan into the war; his skillful prophecies about military and political events (though he
doubted that Singapore could be taken); and his shocked reaction in December 1942 to the systematic
massacre of Jews in German-occupied Poland.
The censored parts of his talks, including an interesting paragraph on the creation of the Loyalist army
in the Spanish Civil War, are printed in this volume. And a few rare passages are lively. After stating that
there would soon be an official pronouncement defining the position of Admiral Darlan in French North
Africa, Orwell ironically adds: Well, it so happens that his position has been defined in another way. He
is dead. He was assassinated two days ago. It must be said, however, that these news commentaries are
terribly dull.
Orwell's talks were a direct response to the lies broadcast to India on Axis radio stations, particularly
by the forceful Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose. Orwell hoped to win the sympathy of his Indian
listeners by arguingfrom examples of conquest and oppression in Korea, China, Malaya and Burma
(which brought the enemy to the border of Bengal)that there would be no freedom for India under
Japanese rule, and that their victory would postpone Indian independence far longer than the most
reactionary British government would either wish or be able to do. He stresses the Japanese atrocities
they have held the peoples down with the club and the machine gun, they have robbed them of their
crops and of their raw materials, they have crushed their national movementsand emphasizes their
intention to pull the world down in ruins before they perish. Though there is no indication of the
specific effect of Orwell's propaganda, he did help keep India loyal to the Allies.
Orwell states that Axis propaganda has no other purpose than to deceive, [though] it is often possible
to infer the real intentions which it conceals. In January 1942 the Germans admitted that the Russian
town of Mojaisk had fallen, but declared that it was a town of no importance, though they had said just
the contrary when they occupied it themselves. But the BBC propaganda and censorship also tested
Orwell's integrity. He found it particularly difficult to describe the American defeat at Corregidor as a
long delaying action in the Philippines which has held up the Japanese attack on Australia, to justify the
arrests of Gandhi and Nehru, to praise the wise and large-minded speeches of Stalin, who claimed he
had no wish to subjugate anybody (Stalinists had tried to kill Orwell in Spain). Orwell's broadcasts do
not show, as West argues, how strongly he believed in what he was doing. On the contrary, they
demonstrate why he became disgusted and finally quit his work at the BBC.
Orwell's job was quite similar to Winston Smith's work at the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-
Four, and (as West points out) his experiences and observations at the wartime BBC had a significant
influence on that novel. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are also banners and slogans on May Day, mass
meetings in Trafalgar (Victory) Square, severe rationing and equalitarian austerity, vast populations
stupefied by propaganda and constantly prepared for bad news, a world dominated by superpowers who
are always at war with each other but always changing alliances. The biggest example of such a change,
Orwell writes, was when the Germans invaded Russia [in 1941]. Up to this moment, they exploited their
pretended friendship [pact] with Russia for all it was worth, and described themselves as the allies of a
socialist country fighting against plutocracy. They had no sooner invaded Russia than they began to
describe themselves as the defenders of European civilization against Bolshevism.
ELEVEN

THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

A New Source for Animal Farm

The first editor to read my most recent essay complained that Orwell never mentioned Kenneth
Grahame as a source for Animal Farm. If he had, the source would have been obvious. It was
much more difficult to discover a sourcein a most charming and delightful bookthat no one
(including myself) had ever noticed. Orwell borrowed many elements from Grahame's beast
fable. But, unlike Grahame, he gives his animals disagreeable human qualities. Though both
fables are counter-revolutionary, Grahame is a contented Conservative, Orwell a disillusioned
Socialist.

The lucid, witty and ironic beast fables, The Wind in the Willows (1908) and Animal Farm (1945), are
two of the most popular books of the twentieth century, but no one (including myself, in four works on
George Orwell) has seen how extensively Kenneth Grahame's work influenced Orwell's. Both books are
too subtly allusive and politically sophisticated for children to understand fully. Grahame's riverine Toad,
Rat, Mole and Badger are matched by Orwell's barnyard pigs, horses, donkeys and goats. Both sets of
characters are attacked by their own kind: Grahame's by weasels and stoats, Orwell's by the ferocious
police dogs of the pigs. The animals in both books are threatened by human beings: Grahame's repressive
policemen and harsh magistrates, violent barge-woman, brutes who keep pets and trap otters; Orwell's
Farmer Jones, Farmer Pilkington, the invader Frederick and the driver of the knacker's van that carts away
the exhausted horse Boxer. The Wind in the Willows is a children's book with another level of meaning
that adults can savor. Animal Farm is not for children, but uses Grahame's simplicity of characters and
plot to create a compelling political allegory.
No editor, at first, wanted to publish Wind in the Willows or Animal Farm. Everybody's magazine,
Grahame's usual bolt hole, refused to serialize it and John Lane of Bodley Head, who'd published his
previous books, rejected it. Only the personal intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded
Scribner's to bring it out in America. When Methuen finally accepted it in Britain, a misguided friend of
Grahame's, who either misread the fable or wanted everyone else to do so, advised him to deny its
essential content and meaning. Don't you think that Methuen himself, he wrote, in his preliminary
announcement of the book, should mention that it is not a political skit, or an Allegory or a Social
Satire? Contemporary reviewers, blinded by its originality, missed the point entirely. The Times wrote
with a straight face, as if it were a science textbook, As a contribution to natural history, the work is
negligible. T. P.'s Weekly, ignoring the comedy and fantasy, agreed that the numerous incidents will win
no credence from the very best authorities on biology.
Animal Farm was rejected by five leading British publishers. T. S. Eliot, at Faber, who saw nothing
wrong with the pigs taking charge since they were the most intelligent animals and best qualified to run
the farm, was unwilling to publish what he thought was a Trotskyist criticism of a wartime Russian ally. It
was also refused by about twenty American publishers, including one, oblivious to the political allegory
of the Russian Revolution, who explained that it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.
Orwell was preparing to publish it himself when Fredric Warburg finally accepted it. When the anti-
Stalinist fable appeared, all the Communist and fellow-traveling reviewers attacked it. Both books, with
their pristine style and charming tenderness, have sold millions and millions of copies.
The characters in The Wind in the Willows (whose title echoes Yeats The Wind Among the Reeds,
1898) combine both animal and human traits. They refer to each other as animals (not men). They
resemble animals in their physical appearance, though Toad's webbed toes are called paws; in their acute
sense of smell; and in their subterranean housing, perfectly suited to their characters and needs (they're all
terribly thorough about their crevice and burrow). But their most important qualities are human and they
lead their own individual lives. They stand upright on two legs; speak to each other, using schoolboy
slang and abusive epithets; wear clothes (with their tails sticking out behind); eat bountiful, skin-
stretching, even gourmet continental meals, while sitting at tables with knives and forks; have furniture
and a panoply of possessions; keep servants; control huge horses; own farm animals and caged birds;
study maps and read books; sing songs and write poetry; love being comfy and cozy, tidy and snug; enjoy,
after fatiguing activity, a well earned repose, with slippered feet raised in front of a blazing fire. They
have human tastes, habits, reason and morals, and (except for Toad) believe they must behave properly
and respect the law.
Though the leading characters are free-ranging bachelors, all the children in the story are dutiful, well
behaved and subservient to the prevailing class system. The lost, lower-class hedgehogs, who turn up at
Badger's well furnished sett, respectfully swing their caps and obsequiously touch their forelocks. The
little field-mice obediently form a semi-circle and squeak out Christmas carols in the cold night air. The
young Portlya rotund, elderly name for a sleek young otterdisappears on a mild escapade, but is soon
found and willingly returns home.
The blunt, unsocial Badger, the reflective yearning-to-wander Rat and the mild, inquiring Mole are all
contrasted to the flamboyant and reckless Toad. Like real amphibians, Toad loves to puff up and inflate
himself. It's significantsince Grahame's son Alastair, the first to hear the story, was born blind in one
eye and with a squint in the otherthat Grahame ignores Mole's natural blindness and life spent in
darkness, and emphasizes instead his normal desire to see the world.
Rat, Mole and Badger, with no visible means of support and no need to work, have sufficient funds to
pay for their simple way of life. Toad has inherited a considerable fortune and lives in rather grand, even
ostentatious style. Good-natured and hospitable, popular and debonair, he's also intolerably boastful and
conceited in a very un-English and simply-not-done way. He can't be left to himself and requires
persistent and sometimes forcible restraint. When opposed, his favorite word is Shan't.
Toad, quickly tiring of old fads, becomes possessed by new and increasingly rapid crazes: from a
boat rowed by a man to a caravan drawn by a horse to a car driven by a motor. His mobile obsessions
recall the turn-of-the-century passion for bicycles of Grahame's contemporaries, Shaw, Kipling and
Wells; and the craze for motor-cars of Conrad, Wharton and Henry James. Conrad's obsession, which
ranged from a 4.5-horsepower Dion to a Daimler that had once belonged to the Duke of Connaught,
amountedlike Toad'sto auto-eroticism.
The novel is structured by a series of contrasts: between Wild Wood and river, land and water, cars
and boats, stability and movement, stasis and change, restraint and freedom, reality and fantasy; between
honest and devious, proper and reckless, law-abiding and felonious, solitary and social, cold and warm,
messy and tidy, getting lost and coming home. The happy return home had a strong appeal to lonely
school-boarders. The book is also unified by recurrent patterns as Toad suddenly shifts from pride to
humility, escape to capture, reformation to relapse. Mole and Toad both hide inside the hollow of a tree;
Toad steals two cars and also appropriates a horse; Toad and Rat are both violently constrained; Toad
escapes from his house and from prison; Toad and Mole disguise themselves in washerwoman's clothing;
Toad twice arranges the chairs in his room, and sings two self-enhancing songs; the weasels and Toad's
friends feast during elaborate banquets in the Hall; Toad loses Toad Hall and finally regains it.
Modern writers found rivers threatening. Eliot wrote of the Mississippi: I think that the river / Is a
strong brown god. Conrad described the Congo River snaking into the heart of darkness and said that
even the Thames has been one of the dark places on the earth. Grahame's rivera stream, reallyhas
no fearful predators. Apart from a few unexpected sinkings and dunkings, it is benign and secure. Echoing
the famous Victorian lines on the Balliol don Benjamin JowettI am the Master of this college: / What I
don't know isn't knowledgeRat says of the river: What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it
doesn't know is not worth knowing.
The real menaces are the polluting, noisy and destructive machines: steam launches in the river,
threshing machines in the fields and motor-cars in the road. The premonitory Poop-poop! of the cars,
which wailed like an uneasy animal in pain, suggests the sound of the engine, the beep of the horn and,
in baby-talk, the word for excrement. The sudden onrush of the car frightens the placid horse, plunges the
passengers into a ditch and completely destroys the colorful caravan.
Instead of warning Toad, the accident inspires him to purchase his own automobile. After he's had a
number of smash-ups and regrettable encounters with the constabulary, Badgersounding like Sherlock
Holmes summoning Watson, or Professor Van Helsing calling his cohorts to track down Dracula
confidently tells Rat and Mole, You two animals will accompany me instantly to Toad Hall, and the
work of rescue shall be accomplished. They duly capture Toad, forbid him to drive and confine him to
quarters.
In the most fascinating scene in the book, Toad indulges himself in a compensatory experience:

When his violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange bedroom chairs in rude resemblance
of a motor car and would crouch on the foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead
making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when, turning a complete
somersault, he would lie prostrate amidst the ruins of the chairs, apparently satisfied for the
moment.

Lois Kuznets, expressing the critical consensus in her Twayne-series book on Grahame, confidently
asserts that the animal characters are burdened by neither sexual longings nor professional ambitions.
But Toad's violent paroxysms (an odd word in a children's story) take place in his solitary
bedroom as he crouches on a chair, as if mounting a woman during the sexual act, and makes ghastly
noises till he reaches a climax, lies prostrate and is finally satisfied. This unmistakable portrayal of
masturbation and orgasm foreshadows D. H. Lawrence's The Rocking-Horse Winner (1926), in which
the little boy's sexual release while furiously riding his toy horse enables him to predict the winner of real
horse races and provide money for his extravagant family.
Forbidden to drive, Toad escapes through the window of his room and steals a convenient car. He
inevitably cracks it up, is tried in court and harshly sentenced to twenty years in prison. In a scene that
imitates Lucy Lockit helping Captain Macheath to escape from prison in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera
(1728), the jailer's good-hearted daughter (the only kind human being in the book) helps Toad escape by
arranging a change of clothes with the official washerwoman. The transvestite Toad passes, most
improbably, for an old woman. He makes his way to the nearest railway station, but when he tries to buy a
ticket, he's horrified to discover that he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell, and with
them his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-caseall that makes life worth living.
Without these un-natural, materialistic props, Toad sets out on foot and finds himself in the worst sort of
hole: in an unknown wood, with no money and no chance of supper, and still far from friends and home.
Rat, by contrast, has embarked on a very different sort of adventure. Inspired by the travel-liars tales
of the peregrinating Water Ratwho echoes the theme of Robert Louis Stevenson's Ordered South
(1881) and of John Keats Ode to a Nightingale: O for a beaker full of the warm South (1819)Rat
filled his glass with the red and glowing vintage of the South. Changing his mind about his habitat, Rat
now wants to leave his beloved river and, like Toad, must be restrained by Mole until he comes to his
senses.
At the start of the book Rat warned Mole that they could not trust the weasels who live in the
dangerous Wild Wood. While Toad is confined in prison and then flees his pursuers, the weasels and
stoats, armed to the fangs, stealthily occupy Toad Hall. They lie in bed half the day, breakfast late, get
drunk, are shockingly untidy and leave the place a mess. While in possession of Toad Hall, they create a
new class system. As one of the stoats complains to the disguised Mole, who's made a foray into enemy
territory: That's just like the weasels; they're to stop comfortably in the banqueting-hall, and have
feasting and toasts and songs and all sorts of fun, while we must stay on guard in the cold and the dark.
Feasting at a big banquet on the Chief Weasel's birthday, unarmed and unsuspecting, they leave themselves
vulnerable to attack.
Taking advantage of the lapse in vigilance, Badger and the animals arm themselves for battle: First,
there was a belt to go round each animal, and then a sword to be stuck into each belt, and then a cutlass on
the other side to balance it. Then a pair of pistols, a policeman's truncheon, several sets of handcuffs,
some bandages and sticking-plaster, and a flask and a sandwich-case. The excessive weaponry and
incongruous supplies (which might impair their ability to fight) are amusing. The cavalier's sword is
balanced by the pirate's cutlass and then superfluously compounded, since they have only two paws, by
the more modern pistols. Since Toad, for once, is on the right side of law and order, they add a
policeman's baton and handirons. Finally, they carry medical supplies in case of wounds, grub in case of
hunger.
The final provocation is the Chief Weasel's song, delivered in a high, squeaky voice. He mocks the
bachelor-owner of the premises by echoing the anonymous nursery rhyme, A frog he would a-wooing
go, with Toad he went a-pleasuring. Badger chooses this opportune moment to attack the drunken
gluttons and retake the Hall. Grahame clearly states his political message (contra his friend's advice) on
the penultimate page: After this climax, the four animals continued to lead their lives, so rudely broken in
upon by civil war, in great joy and contentment, undisturbed by further risings or invasions. The novel
ends as the mother weasels warn their children that if they don't behave the terrible grey Badger would
up and get them. The hero of the battle of Toad Hall, like the weasels who once threatened the peaceful
animals on the river, becomes demonized by his former enemies.

II

Orwell was five years old when The Wind in the Willows was published. That delightful work made
perfect childhood reading, and he shared Grahame's love of the peaceful Thames Valley. The hero of his
novel Coming Up For Air (1939), like Grahame's characters, longs to escape from the harsh realities of
contemporary life and tries to recover the lost Eden of his Edwardian childhood. Both authors believed,
with Bertrand Russell, that anyone born after 1914 has never known real happiness. Choosing carefully
and covertly, Orwell borrowed and absorbed many elements of Grahame's beast fable. Toad, after
escaping from his house, has breakfast at the Red Lion inn. Orwell tips his hand and slyly hints at his
source when Farmer Jones drinks at the Red Lion inn.
Grahame's Rat and Orwell's pig Minimus write poetry. Like Rat, Orwell's pig Snowball was best at
expository writing and, precariously balancing himself on a ladder, writes the soon to be traduced Seven
Commandments on a wall. Toad, like Orwell's animals, loves to burst into song, and his Last Little
Song meagerly compensates for the narcissistic speech he's forbidden to give at his banquet. Toad's song
praises himself; Minimus song praises the dictatorial pig, Napoleon. Grahame's characters use schoolboy
slang; Orwell's pigs simplify and parody Marxist ideology.
In Grahame, machines wreak havoc on the river, the fields and the roads. In Orwell, the disappointing
electrical windmill is built and, like Toad's cars, destroyed: first by a raging gale and then by the invasion
of Frederick. Grahame's animals arm themselves before recapturing Toad Hall. Orwell's pig Napoleon
urges the animals to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them.
Grahame's stoats become the new lower classes, while the leading weasels, who sleep late and don't
work, enjoy all the pleasures of the elite. Orwell's pigs overthrow one class system and replace it with
their own. Taking advantage of their privileged position, they get up an hour later than all the other
animals and drink the farmer's whisky. The pigs add to ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL the illogical yet
self-serving emendation BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS, the unspoken
assumption of The Wind in the Willows.
After the Hall is retaken, some of the captured enemy weasels deliver invitations to Toad's banquet
and become his emissaries to the outside world. In Orwell, Mr. Whymper (echoing, perhaps, Eliot's This
is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper), a solicitor and former human enemy, had
agreed to act as intermediary between Animal Farm and the outside world.
Grahame's animals have many agreeable human qualities. Orwell reverses this. His boar Old Major
warns the animals that all man's habits are evil and that they must not adopt the vices of their natural
enemy. He forbids them to walk on two legs, live in a house, sleep in a bed, wear clothes or drink
alcohol. At the end, of course, the treacherous pigs consort with people, do all these forbidden things and
resemble their original oppressors. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, Orwell concludes,
but already it was impossible to say which was which.
There are two military attacks in both books. In Grahame, the weasels and stoats, seeking more
desirable accommodation and intent on overthrowing the landed gentry, take over Toad Hall. In the
second battle, the Hall is finally recaptured by Badger and his followers. When the weasels are driven
out and Toad regains possession, the revolution is happily repressed and the status quo restored. In
Orwell, the pigs lead the animals in a revolt against the oppressor, take over Jones Manor Farm and
enjoy a period of idyllic happiness. They first defeat the farmers attempt to regain the farm, and then
repel Frederick when he attacks and tries to seize it. In the end, the pigs replace Jones with their own
repressive regime, enslave their fellow creatures and betray the principles of the revolution.
In The Wind in the Willows Toad acts like a child and must be punished by humans, who represent
harsh law and order. In Animal Farm the animals are weak and exploited, and the pigs unite with the
humans, who represent the forces of corrupt capitalism. Orwell hates the class system that Grahame
endorses, but is disillusioned by the betrayal of twentieth-century revolutions. Yet he adopts Grahame's
idea of rural peace and safety, and the joy of animals in their natural state. In Grahame, the animals remain
animals and Eden is regained. In Orwell, the pigs are transformed into evil human beings and Eden is lost.
Though both fables are counter-revolutionary, Grahame is a contented Conservative and Orwell a
disillusioned Socialist.
TWELVE

ORWELL's BESTIARY
The Political Allegory of Animal Farm

I read extensively in the history of the Russian Revolution before writing this essay. In contrast
to many critics who claimed the meaning of this satirical fable was so obvious that there was
nothing more to say about it, I likened Animal Farm to the attacks on Stalin by Trotsky, Gide and
Koestler, and showed that every detail in the book has a precise political significance.

Orwell's hostility to the Russian Communists was a direct result of his experiences in Spain in 1937 when
the Loyalists, like the revolutionaries in China in 1927, were betrayed by the Russians, and the Trotskyists
whom Orwell had joined were mercilessly persecuted by their former comrades.1 Orwell writes in his
Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (1947): These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same
time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. Nothing has contributed so
much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and
that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so, for the past ten years I have been
convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist
movement. Orwell often discussed and repeated the theme of this book. In Inside the Whale (1940), he
states, The Communist movement in western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow of
capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy; and he
writes in his essay on James Burnham (1946), history consists of a series of swindles, in which the
masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job,
enslaved over again by new masters.
Orwell's attempt to communicate the terrible discoveries he made in Spain was a failure in practical
terms, for Homage to Catalonia sold badly and was largely ignored. Yet he felt it was vital to stimulate
others into political awareness. As he writes in the Preface to Animal Farm: Up to 1939, and even later,
the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the Nazi regime in Germany,
and now, with the Soviet regime, they are still to a large extent under the same sort of illusion. It was of
the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet rgime, for what it really
was.
An experimentation with literary techniques that could most forcefully convey his social and political
ideas is characteristic of all Orwell's nonfiction: the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and
London; the sociological reportage, The Road to Wigan Pier; and the personal, political and military
history Homage to Catalonia. Orwell had considerable success as a polemicist and pamphleteer, but this
genre was too blunt and too direct, and his views were extremely unpopular at the time he expressed
them. Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, after Stalingrad and before
Normandy, when the Allies first became victorious and there was a strong feeling of solidarity with the
Russian allies, who even in retreat had deflected Hitler from England. Distinguished writers like Wells,
Shaw, Barbusse and Rolland had praised Russia highly. Orwell's book belongs with Trotsky's The
Revolution Betrayed (1937),2 Gide's Return from the USSR (1937) and Koestler's Darkness at Noon
(1941), three prescient attacks on the Stalinist regime; and it anticipates postwar denunciations like
Crossman's compilation, The God That Failed (1949), and Djilas The New Class (1957).3 Animal Farm
was rejected in 1944 by Gollancz, Cape and Faber & Faber because it criticized a military ally, and
Orwell planned to publish it himself as a two-shilling pamphlet until Secker & Warburg accepted what
became Orwell's first financial success.
Orwell believed the business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own
small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be
evolved to meet it. His choice of a satiric beast fable for Animal Farm (1945) was exactly what he
needed. The fantastic genre enabled him to avoid the difficulty of assimilating his personal experience
into a traditional novel, a form in which he was never entirely at ease. Orwell's portrayal of character
was always rather weak, and the flat symbolic characters of the fable did not have to be portrayed in
depth. The familiar and affectionate tone of the fable and its careful attention to detail allowed the
unpopular theme to be pleasantly convincing, and the Soviet myth was exposed in a subtle fashion that
could still be readily understood. It was written in simple language that could be easily translated, and
was short so that it could be sold cheaply and read quickly. The gay genre was a final attempt to deflect
his profound pessimism, which dominated his final realistic vision of decency trampled on and destroyed
in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell fused his artistic and political purpose so well that the animals are completely convincing on
the literal level. His precise portrayal of the beasts is based on his practical experience as a farmer in
Wallington, Hertford (where he had a goat named Muriel) between 1936 and 1940. Though critics
emphasize his statement, Most of the good memories of my childhood are in some way connected
with animals, the most important animals in the story, the pigs (and their dogs) are frightening and
ferocious. Orwell utilizes the repulsive associations of Circean and Gadarene swine that have prevailed
since ancient times,4 and was undoubtedly influenced by the talking horses in Book IV of Gulliver's
Travels. Yahoos slave for Houyhnhnms as animals do for pigs, and horses milk their Cows, and reap
their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands5 just as the pigs sent for buckets and milked the
cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well-adapted to this task.6 He also has strong personal
feelings about pigs. In Coming Up for Air (1939), Bowling is frightened by a herd of pigs [that] was
galloping, a sort of huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn't pig
faces at all, it was only schoolchildren in their gas-masks. But I tell you that for a moment they looked
exactly like a herd of pigs.7 Orwell wrote from Jura in 1948, I have tried the experiment of keeping a
pig. They really are disgusting brutes. The pig has grown to a stupendous size and goes to the butcher
next week. We are all longing to get rid of him, as he is so destructive and greedy, even gets into the
kitchen sometimes.
Like the American publisher who rejected Animal Farm because it was impossible to sell animal
stories in the USA, critics have been deceived and disarmed by the apparent simplicity of this fairy
story. Atkins writes in 1954, In his revaluation of Animal Farm in World Review (June 1950) Tom
Hopkinson says that this novel is one of the two modern works of fiction before which the critic must
abdicate. There is so much truth in this that I find it very difficult to say anything useful about the book
and yet a study of Orwell cannot ignore it altogether.8 Two years later Hollis concurs that the story of
Animal Farm is so familiar that it hardly needs detailed recapitulation. The interpretation of the fable is
plain enough. As I say, there is no difficulty in interpreting the symbolism of the story.9 In 1962 Rees
agrees, Animal Farm is so well known that it cannot be necessary to do more than mention some of its
major felicities;10 and Thomas repeats three years later, The story is too-well known for anything but a
brief summary to be given here.11 The next year Woodcock reaffirms that Orwell produced a book so
clear in intent and writing that the critic is usually rather nonplussed as to what he should say about it; all
is so magnificently there.12 Though critics have often interpreted the book in terms of Soviet history, they
have never sufficiently recognized that it is extremely subtle and sophisticated, and brilliantly presents a
complex satiric allegory of Communist Russia in which virtually every detail has political significance.
Orwell describes the creative impulse of the book in his Preface: I saw a little boy, perhaps ten
years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck
me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that
men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse
Marx's theory from the animals point of view.
Major's speech is an accurate exposition of orthodox Marxism and is very similar to the last
paragraph of the Communist Manifesto (1848).13 The Communists

openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the Communistic revolution. The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL
COUNTRIES, UNITE!

All the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings. Only get rid of Man, and
the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free.
What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human
race! This is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! (8)
In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx stated, From each according to his abilities, to each
according to his needs; when Animal Farm is established, everyone worked according to his capacity
(25). Squealer's ingenious gloss of Four legs good, two legs bad is a witty and ironic example of
specious Marxist polemics: A bird's wing, comrades is an organ of propulsion and not of
manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg (29).
Comrade Napoleon, the poem of Minimus (who is based on the poet Mayakovsky),14 is a close
imitation of adulatory Soviet verse like the Hymn to J. V. Stalin:

The world has no person

Dearer, closer.
With him, happiness is happier,
And the sun brighter.15
Friend of the fatherless!
Fountain of happiness!
Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is on
Fire when I gaze at thy
Calm and commanding eye,
Like the sun in the sky,
Comrade Napoleon! (78)
Parts of the revolutionary song, Beasts of England, is a close paraphrase of certain lines of
LInternationale (1871):

Cest lruption de la fin

Soon or late the day is coming

Paix entre nous, guerre aux tyrans!

Tyrant Man shall be oerthrown

La terre nappartient quaux hommes

And the fruitful fields of England
Shall be trod by beasts alone

Foule esclave, debout! Debout!

Rings shall vanish from our noses
Le soleil brillera toujours!
Bright will shine the fields of England.

LInternationale expresses the brief but idealistic exhilaration that Orwell experienced in
Barcelona. As he wrote to Cyril Connolly from Spain in 1937, I have seen wonderful things & at last
really believe in Socialism, which I never did before. His moving description of life in the Spanish
militia is similar in feeling to the joyous freedom of the animals after the Rebellion:

One had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where
hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word comrade stood for
comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. In
that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no
privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of
Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me.16
Yes, it was theirseverything that they could see was theirs! In the ecstasy of that thought they
gambolled round and round, they hurled themselves into the air in great leaps of excitement.
Then they made a tour of inspection of the whole farm and surveyed [it] with speechless
admiration. It was as though they had never seen these things before, and even now they could
hardly believe that it was all their own (1819).
Immediately after the pigs celebrate their victory and bury some hams hanging in the kitchen (a
wonderful detail), the revolutionary principles of Major are codified by Snowball into The Seven
Commandments (which are reminiscent of the Five Chief Beatitudes of the Pukka Sahib in Burmese
Days). The corruption inherent in the Rebellion is manifested as each of the Commandments is
successively betrayed, until none of the original revolutionary idealism remains. The structure of the book
is circular, and by the time the name is changed back to Manor Farm, there has been a painful return to the
status quo (or worse) with whiskey and whips in the trotters of the pigs.
In the Preface to Animal Farm, Orwell writes: although various episodes are taken from the actual
history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is
changed. Thus, the human beings are capitalists, the animals are Communists, the wild creatures who
could not be tamed and continued to behave very much as before (27) are the muzhiks or peasants, the
pigs are the Bolsheviks, the Rebellion is the October Revolution, the wave of rebelliousness that ran
through the countryside afterwards is the abortive revolution in Hungary and Germany in 1919 and 1923,
the hoof and horn is the hammer and sickle, the Spontaneous Demonstration is the May Day celebration,
the Order of the Green Banner is the Order of Lenin, the special pig committee presided over by
Napoleon is the Politbureau, and the revolt of the hensthe first rebellion since the expulsion of Jones
(the Czar)is the sailors rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in 1921.
The carefully chosen animals names are both realistic and highly suggestive of their owners
personality and role in the novel. The imperious Major (Marx-Lenin) is military, dominant and senior (in
public school slang); the rather stupid and self-sacrificing Boxer (the proletariat), who is contrasted to the
cynical Benjamin and the indifferent and unenthusiastic cat, is named after the Chinese revolutionaries
who drove out foreign exploiters and were themselves crushed; Mollie (the White Russians) suggests
folly, and her retrogressive defection for vanity and luxury is a paradigm of the entire revolution; Moses
(the Russian Orthodox and later the Catholic Church) brings divine law to man; Squealer (a living
Pravda) is onomatopoetic for a voluble pig; and Whymper, the pigs agent, suggests a toady. Pilkington
(Churchill-England), the capitalist exploiter, connotes bilk and milk (slang): he is an old-fashioned
gentleman who enjoys country sports on Foxwood, which has associations of both craftiness and the Tory
landed gentry. Frederick (Hitler) refers to Frederick the Great, the founder of the Prussian military state
and Hitler's hero. Frederick is a tough, shrewd man who drives hard bargains, steals other people's land
for his own farm, Pinchfield, and practices terrible cruelties upon his subjects. These cruelties are related
to the most moving scene in the novelwhen Boxer is taken to the slaughterhouse. The knacker's van
recalls the terrible gas vans used by the Einsatzgruppen for mobile extermination. Though Clover
screams out, They are taking you to your death! the sound of Boxer's drumming hoofs inside the van
grew fainter and died away (102).
The most important animals are Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), whose personalities are
antithetical and who are never in agreement. Both characters are drawn fully and accurately, though with
simple strokes, and reflect almost all the dominant characteristics of their historical models. Like Trotsky,
Orwell compares Stalin to Napoleon, for both turned revolutions into dictatorships (Bonapartism was the
successor to Thermidor), and both transformed a national popular revolution from below into a foreign
conqueror's revolution from above and forcibly imposed their revolutionary ideology on other
countries. Napoleon the pig is fierce-looking, not much of a talker [his speeches are short and to the
point], but with a reputation for getting his own way (13). He dominates the party machinery, controls
the education of the young and is superb at plotting and canvassing support for himself in between
meetings.17 Napoleon never presents any plans and always criticizes Snowball's, though he eventually
adopts these plans and even claims he invented them. He first distorts and then changes history, blames
Snowball for all his own failures, accuses him of plotting with foreign enemies, drives him into exile and
finally pronounces his death sentence. He also publishes fantastic production figures, takes credit for
every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune (78), wins elections unanimously, names
cities after himself and replaces the cult of Major (the animals were required to file past the skull in a
reverent manner) with a more elaborate one of his own (49). As Orwell wrote in 1941, One could not
have a better example of the moral and emotional shallowness of our time, than the fact that we are now
all more or less pro-Stalin. This disgusting murderer is temporarily on our side, and so the purges etc are
suddenly forgotten.
The name Snowball recalls Trotsky's white hair and beard and the fact that he melted before Stalin's
opposition. Snowball is a brilliant speaker, sometimes unintelligible to the masses but always eloquent
and impressive, more vivacious and inventive than Napoleon, and a much greater writer. He is also
intellectual and energetic. For as Deutscher writes of Trotsky in 1921, besides running the army and
serving on the Politbureau, He was busy with a host of other assignments each of which would have
made a full-time job for any man of less vitality and ability. He led, for instance, the Society of the
Godless. He was at this time Russia's chief intellectual inspirer and leading literary critic. He
frequently addressed audiences.18 Orwell's description of Snowball's activities, though comic, is close
to reality: Snowball also busied himself with organising the other animals into what he called Animal
Committees. He formed the Egg Production Committee for the hens, the Clean Tails League for the
Cows, the Wild Comrades Re-education Committee and various others, besides instituting classes in
reading and writing (27). Snowball studies military history, organizes, commands and leads the Army to
victory in the Battle of the Cowshed (the Civil War) when foreign powers help Mr. Jones and invade the
farm (Russia). After the War he was full of plans for innovations and improvements (41).
Two of the most important battles between Trotsky and Stalin are allegorized in the novel. Trotsky
advocated manufacturing over agricultural priorities and fought for accelerated industrialization, and his
ideas for the expansion of the Socialist sector of the economy were eventually adopted by Stalin in the
first five-year plan of 1928 (which called for collectivization and industrialization): Snowball conjured
up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their ease in
the fields so much labour would be saved that the animals would only need to work three days a
week (4243).19 Stalin wanted comprehensive and drastic collectivization of private farms: Napoleon
argued that the great need of the moment was to increase food production, and that if they wasted time on
the windmill they would all starve to death (43).
The central ideological issue between Stalin and Trotsky concerned the theory of Socialism in One
Country against the idea of Permanent Revolution. Deutscher writes that two rival and quasi-
Messianic beliefs seemed pitted against one another: Trotskyism with its faith in the revolutionary
vocation of the proletariat of the West; and Stalinism with its glorification of Russia's socialist destiny.20
Orwell presents this controversy in simpler but entirely accurate words: According to Napoleon, what
the animals must do was to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them. According to
Snowball, they must send out more and more pigeons and stir up rebellion among the animals on the other
farms. The one argued that if they could not defend themselves they were bound to be conquered, the other
argued that if rebellions happened everywhere they would have no need to defend themselves (44).
When Snowball comes to the crucial points in his speeches, It was noticed that [the sheep] were
especially liable to break into Four legs good, two legs bad (41), just as in the party Congress in 1927,
at Stalin's instigation, pleas for the opposition were drowned in the continual, hysterically intolerant
uproar from the floor.21 The Trotsky-Stalin conflict reached a crucial point in mid-1927 after Britain
broke diplomatic relations with Russia and ruined Stalin's hopes for an agreement between Soviet and
British trade unions; the Russian ambassador to Poland was assassinated; and Chiang Kai-shek massacred
the Chinese Communists who had joined him at Stalin's orders. Trotsky and the Opposition issued a
declaration attacking Stalin for these failures, but before they could bring this before the party Congress
and remove Stalin from power, he expelled Trotsky and Grigori Zinoviev from the Party.22 Orwell writes
of this vital moment in Soviet history, which signaled the final defeat of Trotsky, by the time he
[Snowball] had finished speaking, there was no doubt as to the way the vote would go. But just at this
moment, Napoleon's dogs (the GPU or Secret Police) attack Snowball and force him to flee the farm and
go into exile (45).
Orwell is not primarily interested in the practical or ideological merits of these controversies, for he
believed (wrongly, I think) that both men had betrayed the revolution. He told a friend that Trotsky-
Snowball was potentially as big a villain as Stalin-Napoleon, although he was Napoleon's victim. The
first note of corruption was struck when the pigs secretly had the cows milk added to their own mash and
Snowball consented to this first act of inequity.23 He wrote in 1939, the year before Trotsky's murder, It
is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the
Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no
certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more
interesting mind.
The three main Russian political events that are most extensively allegorized in Animal Farm are the
disastrous results of Stalin's forced collectivization (192933), the Great Purge Trials (193638) and his
diplomacy with Germany that terminated with Hitler's invasion in 1941. Orwell writes that after
Snowball's expulsion, the animals were somewhat surprised to hear Napoleon announce that the windmill
was to be built after all (49). The first demolition of the windmill, which Napoleon blames on Snowball,
is the failure of the first five-year plan. The destructive methods of the hens during the Kronstadt
Rebellionthey made a determined effort to thwart Napoleon's wishes. Their method was to fly up to
the rafters and there lay their eggs, which smashed to pieces on the floor (65)are precisely those used
by the muzhiks in 1929 to protest against the forced collectivization of their farms: In desperation they
slaughtered their cattle, smashed implements, and burned crops. This was the muzhiks great Luddite-like
rebellion.24 The result of this enormous ruin was, as Orwell writes in a 1938 review of Eugene Lyons
book on Russia, years of appalling hardship, culminating in the Ukraine famine of 1933, in which a
number estimated at not less than three million people starved to death. Deutscher mentions the recurrent
cannibalism during times of starvation.25 Orwell refers to this famine when he writes that For days at a
time the animals had nothing to eat. Starvation seemed to stare them in the face. It was being put
about that all the animals were dying of famine and disease and had resorted to cannibalism and
infanticide (63).
The most dramatic and emotional event of the thirties was the Great Purge Trials, the minute details of
which were published in the official translation in 1938. Stalin's motive, according to the editors of the
trial's transcript, was a craving to achieve an unrestricted personal dictatorship with a totality of power
that he did not yet possess in 1934.26 They also state, What unfolds before us in the trial, then, is a
gigantic texture of fantasy into which bits and pieces of falsified real history have been woven along with
outright fiction.27 A perfect example of this is when the animals remembered that at the critical moment
of the battle Snowball had turned to flee but forgot that it was a deliberate ruse to set up the victorious
ambush (69). In the trial of Trotsky's friend, Karl Radek, in February 1937, the Prosecution claimed
Trotsky was organizing and directing industrial sabotage in the Soviet Union, catastrophes in coal mines,
factories, and on the railways, mass poisonings of Soviet workers, and repeated attempts on the lives of
Stalin and other members of the Politbureau.28 After the destruction of the windmill, Napoleon roars: In
sheer malignity, thinking to set back our plans and avenge himself for his ignominious expulsion, this
traitor has crept here under cover of night and destroyed our work of nearly a year. A rumour went
around that Snowball had after all contrived to introduce poison into Napoleon's food (60, 90). In the
last and most important trial of Bukharin in March 1938, Gorky's secretary, Kryuchkov, confessed, I
arranged long walks for Alexei Maximovich, I was always arranging bonfires. The smoke of the bonfire
naturally affected Gorky's weak lungs.29 During the purge in Animal Farm, two other sheep confessed to
having murdered an old ram, an especially devoted follower of Napoleon, by chasing him round and
round a bonfire when he was suffering from a cough (71).30
 In his review of Lyons book, Orwell is horrified by the fact that the GPU are everywhere, everyone
lives in constant terror of denunciation. There are periodical waves of terror [and] monstrous state
trials at which people who have been in prison for months or years are suddenly dragged forth to make
incredible confessions. In Animal Farm, hens stated that Snowball had appeared to them in a dream and
incited them to disobey Napoleon's orders. Then a sheep confessed to having urinated in the drinking
pool [Napoleon had urinated on Snowball's plan during their dispute]urged to do this, so she said, by
Snowball (71). Tucker and Cohen state that nine million people were arrested during the purges and that
the number of people executed has been reliably estimated at three million.31 In Animal Farm, all the
guilty animals are slain on the spot and the most terrifying moment of the satire comes after the
confessions and executions, when there was a pile of corpses lying before Napoleon's feet and the air
was heavy with the smell of blood (7172).
After solidifying his domestic power through massive liquidation, Stalin turned his attention to the
increasing menace in Europe, and attempted to play off the democracies against Hitler. Deutscher
describes how he still kept his front doors open for the British and the French and confined the contact
with the Germans to the back stairs. It is still impossible to say confidently to which part of the game
Stalin then attached the greatest importance: to the plot acted on the stage or to the subtle counter-plot
which he was spinning in the twilight of the coulisse.32
Similarly, the animals were struck dumb with surprise when Napoleon announced that he had sold
the pile of timber to Frederick. Throughout the whole period of his seeming friendship with Pilkington,
Napoleon had really been in secret agreement with Frederick (8283). But Napoleon is sadly deceived:
Frederick's bank notes (the Hitler-Stalin nonagression pact of 1939) are forgeries, and he attacks Animal
Farm without warning and destroys the windmill. Orwell's letter to his publisher in 1945 gives a
fascinating insight into the precision of his allegorical technique: In chapter VIII (I think it is Chapter
VIII), when the windmill is blown up, I wrote all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on
their faces. I would like to alter it to all the animals except Napoleon. If the book has been printed it's
not worth bothering about, but I just thought the alteration would be fair to Joseph Stalin, as he did stay in
Moscow during the German advance. Hitler's defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad (January 1943) was the
turning point of the Russian campaign: when the enemy saw that they were in danger of being
surrounded, Frederick shouted to his men to get out while the going was good, and the next moment the
cowardly enemy was running for dear life (87).
Orwell also portrays one of Stalin's diplomatic blunders. The reappearance of the raven Moses after
an absence of several years (97) and his eternal talk about the Sugarcandy Mountain represents Stalin's
queer attempt, in the spring of 1944, at reconciliation with the Pope. In order to gain Catholic support
for his Polish policy, he received a lowly and unaccredited American priest, Father Orlemanski, and
was twice closeted with him for long hours during a most crucial period of the war. Nothing came of
this, of course, and the result of this stunt, writes Deutscher, was that Stalin was made the laughing-stock
of the world.33
The satire concludes, as Orwell says in the Preface, with the Teheran Conference, which was taking
place while I was writing. Deutscher, who knew him, relates that Orwell was unshakably convinced
that Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world, and to divide it for good,
among themselves, and to subjugate it in common. 'they are all power-hungry, he used to repeat.34
The disagreement between the allies and the beginning of the cold war is symbolized when Napoleon and
Pilkington, both suspicious, played an ace of spades simultaneously (118). The point of the conclusion
is not merely that the pigs are like men, but that men are like pigs.35
 The political allegory of Animal Farm, whether specific or general, detailed or allusive, is pervasive,
thorough and accurate, and the brilliance of the book becomes much clearer when the satiric allegory is
compared to the political actuality. Critics who write it makes a delightful children's story36 and who
emphasize that the gaiety in his nature had completely taken charge37 do Orwell a serious disservice by
ignoring the depth and complexity of his satire. Orwell wrote to Middleton Murry the year he finished the
book, I consider that willingness to criticise Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty, and by
his own or any standard it is an honest and even a courageous book.
In its own subtle and compressed manner Animal Farm is as serious as Nostromo, whose theme it
shares. In Conrad's novel Dr. Monygham states of the capitalistic revolutionaries: They have their law,
and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the
continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. The time approaches when all that . .
[it] stands for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years
back.38 And Emilia Gould murmurs with deep grief: There was something inherent in the necessities of
successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.39
THIRTEEN

THE EVOLUTION OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

In this essay I argued forcefully against the prevailing critical opinion that Nineteen Eighty-Four
is a nightmare vision of a totalitarian future. I believe, instead, that it is a realistic portrayal
of the present and the past. Czeslaw Milosz has testified to Orwell's acute perception of
contemporary totalitarianism.
I published this piece in English Miscellany, edited in Rome by Mario Praz. One day in Rome,
when all the museums were closed, I visited Praz's flat, crammed with art, in the Fondazione
Primoli. Short and heavy, with slightly Mongol eyes and dilated nostrils, he impressed me as an
immensely learned man (only Donald Greene, of the people I've met, equaled his erudition), not
without vanity, who had read everything and knew everythingand had very nearly written
about everything.

The most common clich of Orwell criticism is that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a nightmare vision of
future totalitarianism.1 I believe, on the contrary, that it is a very concrete and naturalistic portrayal of the
present and the past, and that its great originality results more from a realistic synthesis and rearrangement
of familiar materials than from any prophetic or imaginary speculations. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only
a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty years, but also a culmination of all the
characteristic beliefs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works from the Depression to the cold war. The
origins of the novel can be found in Orwell's earliest books, and its major themes, precise symbols and
specific passages can be traced very exactly throughout his writings. For example, Orwell
characteristically expresses the poverty and isolation that oppresses the characters in his novels in terms
of personal humiliation, so that Winston's frustrating sexual experience with his wife Katharine (who is
frigid like Elizabeth in Burmese Days and Dorothy in A Clergyman's Daughter) is exactly like that of
Gordon with Rosemary in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
Orwell felt that he had to evolve a new literary technique in order to frighten people into a recognition
of the dangers that threatened their very existence. His statements about Nineteen Eighty-Four reveal that
the novel, though set in a future time, is realistic rather than fantastic, and deliberately intensifies the
actuality of the present. Orwell wrote that Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about the futurethat is, it is
in a sense a fantasy, but in the form of a naturalistic novel [it is] intended as a show-up of the
perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in
Communism and fascism. Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere,
and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.2 Irving Howe (and the
nightmare critics who follow him) asserts, it is extremely important to note that the world of Nineteen
Eighty-Four is not totalitarianism as we know it, but totalitarianism after its world triumph.3 It would be
more accurate to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays the very real though unfamiliar political
terrorism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia transposed upon the landscape of London in 194144.4
The naturalistic setting of wartime London is combined with brutal characteristics of eighteenth-
century England to emphasize the moral and material regression under Ingsoc. The people palliate their
dreary existence with large doses of acidic gin, prisoners march through the streets in leg-irons and public
hangings provide popular amusement.5 The major Augustan influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four is
Gulliver's Travels, especially Book Three, which, Orwell says, is an attack on totalitarianism and an
extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted Police-State, with its endless heresy-hunts and treason
trials. Julia's mechanical job on the novel-writing machines is clearly derived from the Engine in the
Academy of Lagado so contrived, that the Words shifted into new Places, as the square bits of Wood
moved upside down.6 The absurd scientific experiments described in Goldstein's book are very like
those Swift used to mock the Royal Society; the Floating Fortress is reminiscent of Swift's Floating
Island that also reduces rebellious subjects to obedience. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak was
designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by
cutting the choice of words down to a minimum (304); the Houyhnhnms have no word in their language
to express lying, falsehood or anything evil. And State control of love, sex and marriage is similar in
Houyhnhnmland and Oceania. Love is deliberately excluded from marriage, which is an objective and
dispassionate conjunction for the sole purpose of propagation. It is arranged by the State or parents on a
pragmatic basis, and adultery and fornication are forbidden or unknown.
Though Trafalgar is renamed Victory Square and Big Brother takes Nelson's place atop his column,
the physical setting of Airstrip One is essentially that of Orwell's London Letters to the Partisan
Review (194146), just as the Ministry of Truth is based on his experience at the bureaucratic BBC.
There is a continuous war with air raids and underground shelters, rubble in the streets, a sense of
disintegration and decay. There is rationing, a black market, Ersatz sugar and coffee, and a constant
shortage of small but essential articles like razor blades and boot polish.
The weapons and inventions of Oceania, which shows no material progress, are entirely familiar and
conventional: truncheons, machineguns, grenades, bombs, rockets; and microphones, dictaphones (speak-
write), twoway television (telescreen). When Orwell tries to be more sophisticated and imaginative
about such things, he is unconvincing or even ludicrous, as when Police Patrols snoop into windows with
helicopters and concealed microphones in the vast countryside not only pick up but also recognize voices.
Orwell's statement, The symbol of military despotism is the tank, the most terrifying weapon the human
mind has ever contrived, suggests his imaginative limitations about weaponry.7
Orwell fascinates [East Europeans] through his insight into details they know well, writes Czeslaw
Milosz, they are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into
its life.8 Orwell's acute conception of totalitarianism is most strongly influenced by Trotsky-Bronstein's
The Revolution Betrayed (1937), a passionate condemnation of the Stalin regime and the model for
Goldstein's book. During the Moscow Purge Trials, Trotsky quoted Rakovsky (former Commissar and
Ambassador who became an early victim of the purges) as saying: By means of demoralizing methods,
which convert thinking Communists into machines, destroying will, character and human dignity, the ruling
circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which
replaces the class and the party.
Trotsky's account of the secret police was noted by Orwell in his portrayal of child informers and the
sudden vaporization of those who, like Winston, are suspected of Thoughtcrime:9 The G. P. U.
introduces the sickening corruption of treachery and tale-bearing into the so-called socialist schools.
All who are outstanding and unsubmissive in the ranks of the young are systematically destroyed,
suppressed or physically exterminated.10
The illegal photograph of Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford that Winston finds is related to Trotsky and
firmly rooted in historical fact. Winston remembers that all three men had confessed that on a certain date
they had betrayed important military secrets to the enemy, and the photograph proved the confessions
were lies. Isaac Deutscher writes of the purge trials: In those few cases where the defendants did refer
to specific circumstances that could be verified, the falsehood of their confessions was immediately
plain. A hotel in Copenhagen where three defendants, Holtzman, David and Berman-Yurin, had allegedly
had an appointment with Trotsky, had ceased to exist many years before.11
In Nineteen Eighty-Four the enormous face on the posters, with a heavy black moustache and
ruggedly handsome features and the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU (3) is based mainly
on Stalin, but it also suggests the famous recruiting poster of 1914 with the picture of Field-Marshal
Kitchener and the caption Your Country Needs YOU. As in contemporary Russia, the people are called
Comrade, the three-year plans are exceeded as the staggering figures of production output are announced,
and women wear overalls and produce children for the State who are trained as informers and cause the
extermination of their parents.
The atmosphere of overpowering fear is reinforced by the well-known characteristics of the Nazi
regime: the underground resistance cells, hysterical Nuremberg-like demonstrations, sadistic attacks on
Goldstein and other Jews, and Facecrime, or having pronounced Semitic features.
History is completely rewritten, often in imitation of Stalin's military and pedantic style and his trick
of answering his own rhetorical questions (Orwell also parodies Trotsky's style in Goldstein's book). It is
not clear, however, who the Party is trying to convince by its enormous historical revisions. Since it
controls all books and media, it would seem more effective to destroy the old books and write new ones.
Winston's contention that the publication of the suppressed photo would be enough to blow the Party to
atoms seems highly unlikely.
The powerful sense of impending and then actual disaster that dominated Orwell's life and mind in the
thirties and forties is, quite naturally, expressed in the books he wrote during the last twenty years of his
life. As early as Down and Out (1933), Orwell foresees some dismal Marxian Utopia as the [only]
alternative to present conditions,12 and three years later Gordon Comstock imagines a Socialist future as
some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World; only not so amusing.13 The following year, in Wigan
Pier, he states that for the vision of the totalitarian state there is being substituted the vision of the
totalitarian world, and that we are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody
is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and remain alive.14 In Coming Up for Air (1939),
George Bowling accurately prophesies not only the imminent war but also the world of Nineteen Eighty-
Four that Orwell writes about ten years later: The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber
truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you
while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million
people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him.
It's all going to happen.15
In essays like Inside the Whale (1940), Literature and Totalitarianism (1941) and Raffles and
Miss Blandish (1944), Orwell again discusses the state's absolute power over the individual. There is a
clear connection between such essays as Politics and the English Language (1946), The Prevention of
Literature (1946) and Writers and Leviathan (1948) and the Appendix on the principles of Newspeak.
And there is a direct line of political thought from Homage to Catalonia (1938) through Animal Farm
(1945) to Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), all three of which could be called The Revolution Betrayed.
Orwell's last novel had been germinating in his mind for a very long time.
The evolution of Nineteen Eighty-Four becomes even clearer when the history of two major motifs is
traced. The most famous and frequently quoted motif is OBrien's picture of the future: imagine a boot
stamping on a human faceforever (271). Orwell had read a variation of this phrase in Book Four of
Gulliver's Travels when Gulliver imagines the Houyhnhnms battering the Warriors Faces into Mummy,
by terrible Yerks from their hinder Hoofs.16 This motif also appears in another source of Nineteen
Eighty-Four, Jack London's The Iron Heel, when the hero, Ernest Everhard, predicts the Iron Heel will
walk upon our faces.17 In Coming Up for Air, Bowling varies this motif slightly in his vision of himself
smashing people's faces in with a spanner;18 and in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), Orwell makes the
specific connection between totalitarianism and this inhuman cruelty when he writes that the Nazi goose-
step is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the
vision of a boot crashing down on a face. In a weary letter of 1943, he calls himself an orange that's
been trodden on by a very dirty boot. The next year, Orwell says that Giants stamping on pygmies is the
characteristic pattern of our age;19 and in Raffles and Miss Blandish, he quotes, with revulsion, James
Hadley Chase's description of stamping on somebody's face, and then having crushed the man's mouth in,
grinding his heel round and round in it. This motif of merciless sadism is one that Orwell could never
exorcise from his mind, for it symbolized the connection between brutality, power worship, nationalism
and totalitarianism.
Another horrible and unforgettable motif is rats. Their ugly ferocity causes nightmares, panic and
convulsions of nausea in Winston, and they are later used by OBrien to torture and destroy him. In Book
Two of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver is assaulted by two rats who came up almost to my Face;
whereupon I rose in a Fright These horrible Animals had the Boldness to attack me on both Sides.20
Another possible influence is Camus The Plague (1947), an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France,
whose theme of political oppression is analogous to Nineteen Eighty-Four and whose central metaphor
is a disease caused by rats. The rat image appears in almost every one of Orwell's works. In Down and
Out (1933) a Parisian brothel smells of rats; in Burmese Days (1934) the treacherous U Po Kyin fears he
will be reincarnated as a rat; and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) Comstock's landlady speaks of
young women as if they were plague-rats. In Wigan Pier, the rat image takes on the disturbing
psychological connotations of Nineteen Eighty-Four: going into the dark doorway of that common
lodging house seemed to me like going down into some dreadful subterranean placea sewer full of rats,
for instance.21 In Homage to Catalonia, rats run over Orwell in the darkness; and in Coming Up For Air
he repeats an image from Homage when Bowling shelters himself from a bomb and is flattened out on
the pavement like a rat when it squeezes under a door.22 In Animal Farm, while Major was speaking
four large rats had crept out of their holes, and when these rats become troublesome, they are said to be
in league with Snowball.23 In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the battered slum doorways were somehow
curiously suggestive of rat holes (82), and they continue to appear as a disturbing leitmotif throughout the
novel. Rats invade the secret room where Winston and Julia meet, and are associated in Winston's mind
with something dreadful and unendurable on the other side of a wall of darkness. This wall of darkness
is also related to the secure place where there is no darkness and where Winston hopes to meet
OBrien. Ultimately, this place becomes the constantly lighted Ministry of Love where OBrien uses the
rats to break Winston's will and force him to betray Julia.
The most convincing evidence for the evolution from Orwell's earlier works of the characteristic
beliefs and ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the specific passages that are repeated almost exactly in the
last book. There are two principal reasons for this: first, as John Wain notes, Orwell was a man of
comparatively few ideas, which he took every opportunity of putting across;24 and second, Orwell was
so seriously ill that he feared he might die before finishing the novel. He therefore wrote it as quickly and
easily as possible, drawing freely on his previous works when they could serve his purpose. The novel
succeeded despite these severe limitations.
The tenements and slums of the proles and the warmth and vitality that flourishes amidst this economic
deprivation derives from Orwell's experiences in Paris and Wigan as well as from his portrayal of
wartime London. The working-class district of Paris where Orwell lived in 192829a ravine of tall,
leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the
act of collapse25is reproduced almost exactly in the opening pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four; and the
nineteenth-century slums of the industrial Midlands are still standing in Oceania: the houses are poky and
ugly, and insanitary and comfortless, and they are distributed in incredibly filthy slums.26 The simple
comforts of working-class lifeYour pipe drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you,
the fire is well alight, the air warm and stagnantare also praised in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when
Winston enjoys the privacy of the secret room above the antique shop that he associates with
prerevolutionary times. These somnolent and ignorant proles represent the same revolutionary hope as
the exploited beasts of Animal Farm: But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of
their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves
like a horse (69).
The absolute control of individual thought and action by the State is another theme that dominates
Orwell's works. An idea that he frequently repeats and adopts for Nineteen Eighty-Four is that in the
end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it (80). This
idea appears as early as 1939 in his review of Bertrand Russell's book on power: It is quite possible
that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so. Mr.
Russell points out that the huge system of organised lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their
followers out of contact with reality. In Orwell's novel, the regime is so repressive that it is able to
destroy totally the personality of those who resist and to make the Winston Smiths believe what they know
to be false.
Winston reaffirms Orwell's belief that history has stopped and is being rewritten. This idea first
appeared in 1943: History stopped in 1936. If the leader says of such and such an event, It never
happenedwell, it never happened. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs. For Winston,
the psychological effect of political oppression is the loss of childhood memories, the abolition of history
in microcosm. Orwell asks in 1939, But is lifelife for the ordinary personany better in Russia than it
was before?, and he repeats this question in his last two books when the older animals rack their dim
memories and try to decide whether things had been worse under Mr. Jones, and when Winston asks the
proles about life in the days before the Revolution.
The central concept in the ideology of the Party, that freedom and happiness cannot coexist, comes
from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov by way of Zamyatin's We, and is stated both by Orwell in
his review of We, and by OBrien, a modern Grand Inquisitor:

He claims it as a great merit for himself and his Church that at last they have vanquished freedom
and have done so to make men happy.27

The guiding principle of the State [in We] is that happiness and freedom are incompatible. The
Single State has restored happiness by removing this freedom.

the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind,
happiness was better (265).
The terrible irony, of course, is that the people of Nineteen Eighty-Four have neither freedom nor
happiness. The omnipotence of the Church and State is defended by the Grand Inquisitor (and repeated by
OBrien) who maintains that men are terribly weak and unable to choose between good and evil: man is
weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! By showing him so much respect, Thou didst,
as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask too much from him. There will be thousands of
millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of
the knowledge of good and evil.28
A description of the evolution of Nineteen Eighty-Four reveals the remarkable consistency of
Orwell's style and long-considered ideas, and the working of his creative imagination, which drew upon
his painful experiences of poverty and totalitarianism, his reading of Swift, Trotsky and Dostoyevsky, and
the recurring motifs of his earlier works. The least effective parts of the novel are the purely expository
passages where he establishes the future state of the world in Nineteen Eighty-Four: the historical events
that followed the Atomic War (as revealed in Goldstein's book), Winston's historical work at the
Ministry of Truth and the Appendix on Newspeak.
The most powerful and effective part of Nineteen Eighty-Four is Orwell's recreation of the ghastly
atmosphere of fear and torture in the extermination camps, which he may have seen and certainly heard
about when reporting from Germany in 1945. Bruno Bettelheim, who was a prisoner in Dachau and
Buchenwald, writes that one major goal of the Gestapo was to break the prisoners as individuals, and to
change them into a docile mass from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise. [The
concentration camp] was a final apotheosis of the mass state, composed of few depersonalized managers
and millions of dehumanized slaves, all under thrall to one charismatic leader, the only person, the only
one truly alive.29 Like these prisoners, Winston must face the problem of individual existence in the
literal, not the philosophical, sense. He does not attempt to define existence, but to discover how to exist.
The paradox of totalitarianism is that it intensifies individual loneliness and at the same time binds all the
isolated figures into one overpowering system.
The dominant emphasis throughout Orwell's work is on loneliness and exclusion, on the fearful
individual in an oppressed world, on the people, in Trotsky's phrase, swept into the dust bin of history.
Winston Smith, the final embodiment of defeated man, has predecessors in all of Orwell's books: in his
impoverished and exploited persona in Paris, London, Wigan and Spain; in Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon
Comstock, George Bowling and Boxer. Each character attempts, in Chekhov's description of himself as a
young man, to squeeze the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and wake one beautiful morning to feel that
he has no longer a slave's blood in his veins but a real man's.30 And each character struggles against the
bondage of their threatening world toward individual freedom and responsibility.
Like the novels of Malraux, Sartre and Camus, Nineteen Eighty-Four expresses our archetypal fears
of isolation and disintegration, bestiality, cruelty and dehumanization. Orwell's response to the horrors of
contemporary history emphasizes his close relationship to these authors and firmly places him in the
tradition described by Victor Brombert: Europe's dark hours are thus responsible for the emergence of a
generation that feels situe and responsible in the face of historya generation whipped on by the urge
to transmute its anguish into action. Sartre has shown how the awareness of death, the threatened
subjection to torture and the systematic will to degrade brought writers to the extreme frontiers of the
human condition and inspired them with a concern for moral issues.31
Orwell's repetition of obsessive ideas is an apocalyptic lamentation for the fate of man in the age of
anxiety. His expression of the political experience of an entire generation gives Nineteen Eighty-Four a
veritably mythic power and makes it one of the most influential books of the modern period, even for
those who have never read it. As Harold Rosenberg states, The tone of the postwar imagination was set
by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: since the appearance of that work, [the theme of] the dehumanized
collective haunts our thoughts.32 Orwell's particular and distinct contribution to modern English
literature is a passionate commitment, a radical sincerity and an ethic of responsibility that ultimately
transcends his defeated heroes.
FOURTEEN

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
A Novel of the 1930s

This essay was first read at a conference on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Library of
Congress in Washington in 1984. It was then published in a book that also included heavy hitters
like Alfred Kazin and Denis Donoghue. I wrote that Orwell's statements about the future were
not prophecies, but descriptions of the past. Though he failed to predict many events, he was
impressively accurate about the emergence of three hostile superstates engaged in permanent
but inconclusive warfare. The novel is at once a warning about the future, a satire on the
present, and an ironic parody of the literary and political themes of the 1930s.

The Anschluss, Guernicaall the names
At which those poets thrilled or were afraid
For me meant schools and schoolmasters and games;
And in the process someone is betrayed.
Donald Davie, Remembering the Thirties

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a projection of the future that is based on a concrete and naturalistic portrayal of
the present and the past. Its originality is rooted in a realistic synthesis and arrangement of familiar
materials rather than in prophetic and imaginary speculations. The numerical title is thought to be a
reversal of the last two digits of the year in which the book was completed (1948), but it was probably
influenced by Yeats poem 1919 and certainly inspired Alberto Moravia's 1934, Anthony Burgess's
1985 and Arthur Clarke's 2001. If the novel had been completed a year later and the title transposed to
1994, we would have had to wait another ten years for the momentous revaluation of Orwell's work. It is
notoriously difficult to predict the future accurately in a world that is rapidly transformed by technology.
Who could have imagined 1949 in 1914? How precisely can we imagine 2019 in 1984?
Most of Orwell's statements about the future were not prophecies but descriptions of events that had
already taken place. He looked backward in time as much as he looked forward. The portrayal of Airstrip
One reflects the defeated and hopeless air of postwar London. Britain had won the war but suffered a loss
of colonies and an economic decline that made the country seem worse off than its defeated enemies. The
ruined, squalid and depressing postwar city was vividly portrayed by Wyndham Lewis in Rotting Hill
(1951). When Lewis returned to London in 1945, after six years of exile in North America, he found
himself in the capital of a dying empirenot crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a
peculiar muffled way.1 In 1948, the year Orwell completed his novel, Russiarecently an admired ally
had taken over all of Eastern Europe and was actively threatening the West. In that year Gandhi was
assassinated, Jan Masaryk was killed (or killed himself), Yugoslavia was expelled from the Comintern,
the Berlin airlift began, Count Bernadotte was murdered in Palestine and civil war raged in China. It
was the coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, writes Irving Howe, that persuaded many people that there
could be no lasting truce with the Communist world.2
Orwell failed to predict urban guerrillas, ecological problems, oil shortages, genetic engineering,
organ transplants, computers, sophisticated spy equipment, spaceships, satellites, nuclear submarines,
intercontinental missiles and the hydrogen bomb, as well as the dissolution of empire and the postcolonial
era that followed the Second World War. England and America today bear no significant resemblance to
Oceania. Yet his very act of prophecy tended to induce its own fulfillment, for readers have adopted his
terms and sought his portents. In the year 2000, as surely as we are now watching for Orwellian omens,
masses of new believers will be standing on mountain tops waiting for the apocalypse at the end of the
second millennium.
But Orwell did predict, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, three hostile superstates (America, Russia and
China; or NATO, the Warsaw Pact and the nonaligned countries) engaged in permanent but limited and
indecisive warfare. He said that they would use conventional weapons, that the war would be confined to
peripheral territories (Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia) and that there would be
no invasion of the homeland of the principal powers.3 The Vietnam War was a classic example of
America and Russia supporting foreign armies in an alien battleground. The ruthless suppression of
personal freedom, the rigid indoctrination and the widespread elimination of hostile elements during the
cultural revolution in China, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the Khomeini autocracy in Iran have
made Nineteen Eighty-Four a reality in our own time. But the horror of the Gulag Archipelago, which in
1948 had existed for nearly two decades, is far worse than anything portrayed by Orwell. Russia, like
Eurasia in 1948, still is a totalitarian power opposed to the West.

II

Nineteen Eighty-Four is composed of five poorly integrated elements. Orwell would have artistically
refined and perfected them if he had not been desperate to finish the book before his death. He was
terminally ill when he wrote the novel, had great difficulty completing it and tried to make his task easier
by repeating what he had written in his previous books. Orwell usually wrote clear drafts of his work, but
more than half of the typescript of Nineteen Eighty-Four was crossed out and completely rewritten.4
The five elements are (1) a conventional Orwellian novel of poverty, frustrated love and flight to the
countryside for solitude and sex; (2) a satire on conditions in postwar England; (3) an anti-Utopian
projection of an imaginary political future; (4) an almost detachable didactic argument in Goldstein's
testament and the appendix on Newspeak; and (5) (the least successful and most horrible part) a portrayal
of the torture and pain that are used to suppress political freedomclearly based on his knowledge of
Nazi extermination camps and his personal experience in sanatoria during 194748. The novel is
artistically flawed because each element has a different novelistic and political purpose. How, then, do
we account for the great strength of the novel, for the source of its overwhelming impact?
I have argued elsewhere that Nineteen Eighty-Four was influenced by Swift, Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin
and Trotsky; was a culmination of all the characteristic beliefs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works
from the Depression to the Cold War; was a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty
years; and expressed the political experience of an entire generation. I would now like to show that if we
read Nineteen Eighty-Four in its cultural contextthe literature of the 1930swe can see how Orwell's
various elements are connected by a unified theme. His novel is a collective text that abstracts and
synthesizes all the regular and recurring elements of Thirties literature. It explains the world of 1948
and by extension of 1984by describing the conditions and ideologies that led to the Second World War.5
In Nineteen Eighty-Four the 1930s were the prerevolutionary past, the final phase of capitalism that led
to atomic warfare, revolution, purges and the absolutism of Big Brother. Nineteen Eighty-Four is about
the past as well as about the future and the present.
The past is one of the dominant themes of the novel. The Party confidently believes: Who controls
the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. The Party can not only change the
past but can also destroy it and authoritatively state: it never happened.6 By creating a new as well as
destroying the old past, the Party can also arrange to predict events that have already taken place. Winston
spends a great deal of time conversing with the proles, trying to recall and reestablish the personal and
historical past that has been officially abolished, for he believes that the past may still exist in human
memory. When Winston plots with OBrien, they drink To the past. OBrien gravely agrees that the past
is more important than the future because under a system of organized lying only a remembrance of the
past can prevent the disappearance of objective truth.
Orwell's ideas about the capacity of language to express complex thoughts and feelings, to describe
the dimensions of experience with accuracy and honesty, are central to Nineteen Eighty-Four. These
ideas originate in Winston's desire to rediscover his own pastin his dreams and his diaryand are
contrasted to Ampleforth's enthusiastic creation of Newspeak. In pursuing these thoughts about language,
Orwell joined the literary debate about modern prose.
The Newspeak tendency to reduce the language, to limit the meaning and to reject abstract words was
originally a positive aspect of modern prose that developed just after the Great War. Hemingway, who
began his career as a journalist, was fascinated by the language of telegraphic cables that resembles the
messages sent to Winston's desk at the Ministry of Truth: speech malreported africa rectify. Hemingway
told his colleague Lincoln Steffens: Stef, look at this cable: no fat, no adjectives, no adverbsnothing
but blood and bones and muscle. It's great. It's a new language.7 Influenced by Ezra Pound, Hemingway
came to believe: Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.8
Like Robert Graves, John Dos Passos, Erich Remarque and other writers who had served in the Great
War, Hemingway learned to distrust patriotic rhetoric. In A Farewell to Arms he wrote: I was always
embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. Abstract words
such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers
of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.9 The abstractions were lies. Only
the concrete places where men had fought and died had any dignity and meaning. The bitter
disillusionment of the Great War is connected to the betrayal of principles in Nineteen Eighty-Four by
Winston's prophecy of doom: We are the dead, which is repeated by Julia and reaffirmed by the
telescreen when they are arrested. For Winston's grim phrase is an ironic echo of an accusatory line,
spoken by a corpse, from John Macrae's popular poem of the First World War, In Flanders Fields:
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.10
 In the Thirties, this need to reject meaningless abstractions was combined with the desire to find a
basic vocabulary and create a proletarian literature. Though Hemingway's short words, limited
vocabulary and declarative sentences, his bare, clear and forceful style, had a salutary effect on modern
prose, he was criticized by Wyndham Lewis in The Dumb Ox for choking off the possibilities of
thought: Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton a super-
innocent, queerly-sensitive, village-idiot of a few words and fewer ideas.11 Nineteen Eighty-Four
demonstrates how the modern tendency to reduce language to its essential meaning can, when carried to
the extremes of Newspeak, make the expression of unorthodox opinions almost impossible.
Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language demonstrates the connection between inaccurate
expression and dishonest thought. It debunks political pomposity, criticizes fuzzy thinking and shows the
corruption that comes from the use of clichs, hackneyed diction and dead language. Nineteen Eighty-
Four, however, criticizes the opposite tendency to oversimplify language so that it limits the range of
human expression. While expounding the principles of Newspeak and creating the brilliant neologisms
that have taken a permanent place in our speech (Big Brother, Thought Police, Doublethink, Facecrime,
Vaporized, Unperson), Orwell also predicted the radical deterioration of language and the perversion of
meaning. In our time, the influence of technology, bureaucracy, television and journalism has debased the
language. Dangerous euphemisms have diminished the reality of all unpleasant concepts: prison, torture,
war, disease, old age and death. Vague but condemnatory wordsCommunist, Fascist, racist, sexist
have been indiscriminately attached to anything that anyone dislikes. Orwell would have deplored the
primacy of visual over verbal media in our culturetelevision and video over books and magazines
and the corruption of language by computer jargon. All these tendencies have produced words that seem
to be written on a typewriter by a typewriter.

III

Many of the characteristic literary themes of the Thirties appear in Nineteen Eighty-Four: schools,
cinema, advertising and propaganda, public issues, self-deception, Marx and Freud, violence and war.
And aspects of Orwell's reportagehis anatomy of Burma, France and England in the 1930s in A
Hanging, How the Poor Die, and The Road to Wigan Pierare incorporated in Nineteen Eighty-Four
to provide the documentary basis of the future world.
The writers of the 1930s had intense feelings about the conventions and codes of schools and
schoolboys, which were often based on their personal experiences as both teachers and pupils. The
headmaster became the embodiment of social and political power, and the austerity and sadism of the
school were contrasted to the civility and kindness of the home. Auden expressed this theme when he
wrote: The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a Fascist state.12
Anthony West, who described his own horrible schooldays in the autobiographical novel Heritage, was
the first to notice that most of these [terrors], in Nineteen Eighty-Four, are of an infantile character, and
they clearly derive from the experience described in Such, Such Were the Joys. What he did in
Nineteen Eighty-Four was to send everybody in England to an enormous Crossgates to be as miserable
as he had been.13
Nineteen Eighty-Four explores the complex mixture of nostalgia, fear and self-hatred that Orwell felt
when writing about his school days. By drawing on these intense early experiences, he convincingly
portrays the psychological effects of totalitarian oppression: isolation, enforced group activities, physical
discomfort, desire to suck up to those in power, lack of identity and feelings of guilt. The physical
exercises, sexual propaganda, songs, processions, banners and drills all derive from school. Parsons,
who resembles a large boy, is an athletic Hearty. Winston dislikes Julia at first because of the
atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which
she managed to carry about with her. Even Winston's compulsive repetition of DOWN WITH BIG
BROTHER in his diary recalls the lines written out as punishment at school.
Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the 1930s ritual of cinema-going and the cult of film stars, the interest
in advertising and the use of propaganda. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock hates the
movies and seldom goes there. But a recurring image in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the bombing of Jewish
refugees in the Mediterranean which Winston sees at the cinema on April 3, 1984. Several hundred
victims are killed when a rocket bomb falls on a crowded film theater in Stepney, East London. The
obligatory Two Minutes Hate, with Goldstein as the star performer, is projected on a gigantic telescreen
before a hysterical anti-Semitic audience.
Winston dimly recalls an advertisement for wine in which a vast bottle composed of electric lights
seemed to move up and down and pour its contents into a glass. Virtually all the Outer Party members
are swallowers of slogans: War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength. (Should not it
logically be Ignorance is Wisdom?) As in a modern political campaign, the head of Big Brother (whose
image is an amalgam of Stalin and Kitchener) appears on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on
banners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarette packeteverywhere.
The writers of the Thirties dealt with public themes. It was a decade of economic depression
throughout the world; massive unemployment and poverty; the misery of democracies and the rise of
Fascism; wars in Manchuria, Ethiopia and Spain; the Nazi seizure of territory in Austria, Czechoslovakia
and Poland. Russia experienced the forced collectivization of the Kulaks (192933), the Ukraine famine
(1933), the exile and the murder of Trotsky (1940) and the Great Purge Trials (193638). Writers fared
badly under totalitarianism; Mayakovsky, Babel and Mandelshtam were killed during Stalin's regime. The
decade of hatred between the Nazis and the Communists culminated in profound disillusionment with the
Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact (August 1939), which was repudiated by Germany's invasion of Russia
(June 1941). This abrupt alteration of political alliances was portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four when it
became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the
enemy. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
As in 1930s literature, intellectuals in Nineteen Eighty-Four lie to support their cause and protect
their own position, and agree to accept and practice immoral acts. Orwell once condemned Auden for his
phrase the necessary murder. In Nineteen Eighty-Four OBrien asks Winston: If, for example, it
would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's faceare you prepared to do
that? and he unhesitatingly answers: Yes. In both the 1930s and in Nineteen Eighty-Four the ruling
class betrays the principles of the revolution; and the deceivers are themselves deceived.
The committed writers of the 1930s developed a new moral awareness and literary strategy to deal
with the dreadful conditions of the time. They became socially and politically conscious and abandoned
private art for public communication. They adopted a new tone and rhetoric in which to express their new
convictions and often embraced Left-wing or Communist ideology. The two main intellectual influences
of the Thirties, Marx and Freud, are faithfully reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Marxist dialectic,
expressed in Trotsky's style, appears in the forbidden tract, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivism. Winston embraces the Marxist belief: If there was hope, it must lie in the proles. His
hope is not based on their real or theoretical virtue, but on the fact that they comprise eighty-five percent
of the population and are the only force that seems strong enough to overthrow the Party. But the proles
lack a Marxist political awareness and a desire to revolt against oppression.
Orwell suggests a Freudian interpretation of Winston's dreams to depict his inner life. They concern
Winston's guilt about the sacrificial death of his mother, which foreshadows his betrayal of Julia. Winston
realizes that the political hysteria stirred up by the Two Minutes Hate is an emotional outlet for sex gone
sour. And the last line of the children's poem, which he has been vainly trying to remember, is supplied
by the voice on the telescreen when he and Julia are arrested in their secret bedroom. The line suggests
the threat of castration after sexual pleasure: Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a
chopper to chop off your head!
In the Thirties violence was used to achieve political ends. The strong dictator replaced God as the
omnipotent figure and ruled with absolute and intimidating power. There were constant threats of bombing
civilians and of global war. Gordon Comstock eagerly awaits this destruction in Keep the Aspidistra
Flying; George Bowling dreads it in Coming Up for Air. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the rocket bombs are
fired on the people by their own government in order to arouse continuous hatred of the enemy. The
confrontation of Communism and Fascism in Spain was, for most intellectuals, their first real experience
in politics and warfare. Auden and Spender attended propaganda conferences in Spain; Hemingway and
Koestler went as journalists; Francis Cornford and Julian Bell were killed. But of all the major writers
involved in the war, only Orwell fought as a common soldier, was seriously wounded and survived to
record his experiences. He came from the generation which had failed The Test by being too young to
participate in the Great War, but he brilliantly passed The Test in Spain. Orwell (and his wife) knew from
personal experience what it felt like to be hunted by the secret police. His honesty and integrity shine
through Nineteen Eighty-Four as they did in the literary personae of the more openly autobiographical
works of the Thirties. All his books project what Malcolm Muggeridge has called his proletarian fancy
dress, punctilious rolling of his cigarettes, his rusty laugh and woebegone expression and kindly
disposition.14

IV

Orwell not only evokes the past era of the Thirties to explain the evolution of 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-
Four, but also ironically reverses the dominant political themes of the period: homosexuality, frontiers,
spies, technology, Mass Observation, change of consciousness, collective action, justification of
Communism and intellectual polarities. Winston affirms Orwell's own commendable heresies of the
1930s: his refusal to adopt the orthodoxy of the Left about the socialist intelligentsia in England
(criticized in The Road to Wigan Pier) and about the Communist Party in Spain (condemned in Homage
to Catalonia). Nineteen Eighty-Four contains two opposing strains: Orwell's truthful revelations about
the horrors of both Fascism and Communism, and his despair about the destruction of the hopes and ideals
of the Thirties.
The homosexual themefounded on adolescent love affairs in school, portrayed as a protest against
the oppressive educational system and idealized in poems like Auden's Lay your sleeping head
becomes perversely twisted in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston's intense attachment to OBrien takes on
homosexual overtones and verges on sexcrime. (When tortured, Winston freely but falsely admits he is a
sexual pervert.) When he first comes to his hero's flat, A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed
out from Winston towards OBrien. When OBrien tortures him to the point of lunacy and death, It made
no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates. And just before he
faces his final degradation in Room 101, The peculiar reverence for OBrien, which nothing seemed
able to destroy, flooded Winston's heart again. Like the young favorite of the Head Boy at school,
Winston vacillates between craven submission and a lust for vicarious power.
OBrien's Irish name may have been inspired by the surname of Orwell's first wife, Eileen
O'shaughnessy, by her brother Dr. Eric Lawrence O'shaughnessy (who had the same Christian name as
Orwell) and by Eric's wife, Dr. Gwen O'shaughnessy. The name may have expressed Orwell's fears about
the power, domination and sexual demands of women, which the passive Winston is scarcely able to deal
with. Eileen, as closely attached to her brother as to her husband, was deeply grieved by Eric's death at
Dunkirk in 1941. Both Eric and Gwen O'shaughnessy treated Orwell for tuberculosis in the 1930s. Orwell
may have transferred his antagonism from the doctorswho seemed to be torturing him while trying to
cure him during the unsuccessful treatment with streptomycin in 1948to the authoritarian figure of
OBrien. While curing Winston of Thoughtcrime, OBrien destroys his body exactly as the doctors had
done.
The map, the frontier and the geographical context were recurrent metaphors in the poetry of Auden
and his followers. The marked increase of this imagery coincided with the obsolescence of the frontier,
which was easily overrun by tanks, planes and modern armies. (Goldstein declares: The main frontiers
must never be crossed by anything except bombs.) Orwell sets his novel in a global context by
describing two vast land masses that are alternately opposed to and aligned with Oceania. A Flying
Fortress lies between Iceland and the Faroes in the north; victories are announced on the Malabar front in
the south; and the permanent land wars take place in the rough quadrilateral covered by Tangier,
Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong. Julia gives Winston precise directions to their secret meeting place
as though she had a map inside her head. Orwell is also concerned, more profoundly than the Thirties
writers, with the inner psychic frontier at which man can be broken and made to betray.
In the literature of the 1930s spies secretly cross the frontier and operate independently against the
alien population. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Goldstein is said to control spies and saboteurs; but the real
Spies (the name of a youth group) work in the home against their own parents. Parsons, the most
enthusiastic Party hack, is proud of the fact that his daughter has betrayed him for uttering Down with Big
Brother in his sleep (another example of the Freudian unconscious at work). All the principal characters
in the novel are either arrested (Winston, Julia, Parsons, Syme, Ampleforth) or work for the Thought
Police (OBrien, Charrington, Parsons daughter).
The Thirties writers, following the Italian futurists, were fascinated by modernism, airplanes and
technological advance. Auden liked industrial landscapes and advocated New styles of architecture, a
change of heart. Orwell, who loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future,15 opposed
modern change and longed for the familiar cosiness of the decent past. In Nineteen Eighty-Four a
dehumanized London is called Airstrip One and hovering helicopters snoop into people's windows.
Technology either breaks down and causes chaos or operates efficiently and leads to repression.
The characteristic mode of social inquiry in the 1930s was Tom Harrisson's Mass Observation, which
tried to understand social behavior by accumulating disparate [factual] observations about what given
groups of people were doing.16 This is also ironically reversed in Nineteen Eighty-Four where Mass
Observation is a mode of surveillance carried on by the Thought Police to identify and vaporize potential
opponents of the regime.
The writers of the 1930s advocated a change of heart and new awareness that would lead to
revolutionary commitment. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is also an alteration of consciousness and a
commitment to the revolutionbut of an entirely different kind. In the last part of the novel, OBrien
tortures Winstonusing a process that resembles electroconvulsive therapyin order to humiliate him
and destroy his powers of reasoning. He makes Winston believe that 2 + 2 = 5, forces him to betray Julia,
crushes him until he loves Big Brother.
The idea of collective action was a major preoccupation of the Thirties. Writers were concerned with
relating the public and private dimensions of their lives, with creating a Popular Front, with establishing a
secure defense against Fascism by immersing themselves in the collective security of the Soviet Union. In
the 1930s there was an attempt to deny utterly the validity of individual knowledge and observation.17
Unlike most writers of the 1930s, Orwell (who had served as part of a unit in the Burma Police) rejected
the idea of collective action and almost always stood alone. The only group he ever joinedthe
Anarchists in Spainwere an underdog minority, destined for destruction. Like all left writers of the
Thirties, Orwell hoped for a new social order; but he did not believe that Communism would help
mankind progress toward that goal. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the Party embodies the collective mind and
all members are forced to participate in communal activities. Winston, locked in loneliness, becomes a
lunatic, a minority of one, the only man still capable of independent thought. He is The Last Man in
Europe (the original title of the book) precisely because he adheres to the importance of the individual
mind. Orwell shows that totalitarianism paradoxically intensifies solitude by forcing all the isolated
beings into one overpowering system.
Thirties writers idealized and justified the Soviet Unioneven after the transcripts of the Purge Trials
had been published and the pact with Hitler signed. They argued that any criticism of Russia was
objectively pro-Fascist. This belief was carried to a typically ludicrous extreme in a line of Day Lewis
The Road These Times Must Take: Yes, why do we all, seeing a communist, feel small? Winston
feels small when he sees OBrien, not only because he admires and loves him, but because he craves
OBrien's power (The object of power is power) and is reduced by his torture to a rotten, suppurating
cadaver who resembles a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease. In Nineteen Eighty-
Four Winston's physical disease symbolizes his intellectual illness: his heretical hatred of the
prevailing ideology.
Finally, the political conditions of the 1930s led to an intellectual polarity between catastrophe and
rebirth, a contrast between economic and industrial collapse and revolutionary hope for the future, a
belief in the destruction of the old social order for the sake of a new Communist world. Nineteen Eighty-
Four combines and transforms these polarities. The revolution is followed by betrayal and repression,
catastrophe leads only to catastrophe, the new order is far worse than the old. In Orwell's novel, the
endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing
of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties are attributed to Eurasia (or Eastasia),
but they actually take place in Oceania.
After the Second World War, the destruction of much of England, the reaffirmation of the class system
and his own long illness, Orwell realized that the totalitarian states he had written about in his essay on
James Burnham had come into permanent existence. The ideas of the 1930s had led to the chaos of
postwar Europe and his hopes had been destroyed. Orwell's disillusionment and disease help to account
for the political ideas and the artistic flaws of the novel. Nineteen Eighty-Four is at once a warning about
the future, a satire on the present and an ironic parody of the literary and political themes of the Thirties.
The past, as a theoretical concept and a historical reality, is crucial to the meaning of the novel. The best
books, [Winston] perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
FIFTEEN

MISERIES AND SPLENDORS OF SCHOLARSHIP

Bernard Crick and Peter Davison were both at the Library of Congress conference, and their
personalities accurately reflected their work. My third essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four contrasted
Crick's poorly annotated and factually inaccurate edition of the novel with Davison's masterful
facsimile edition (both 1984). Crick was completely out of his depth as a literary critic and there
was nothing original in his overlong introduction, written in his typically turgid style. Davison's
work revealed Orwell's working methods and enabled readers to see the genesis of the novel.

Wyndham Lewis's prescient political study, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), which would have been a
brilliant title for Orwell's novel, begins with similar premises but arrives at quite different conclusions.
Written a few years after the Russian Revolution and the Fascist coup in Italy, Lewis's book, like
Orwell's, combines satire, political theory and prophecy. Lewis (who lived in Canada during World War
II, taught at Assumption College and wrote his greatest novel, Self Condemned, about Toronto) sees the
postwar world divided between the democratic and dictatorial forms of government: The principal
conflict to-day, then, is between the democratic and liberal principle on the one side and on the other
the principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and first great theorist. Because the
masses are manipulated by the mediaThe contemporary Public [is] corrupted and degraded into semi-
imbecility by the operation of this terrible canon of press and publicity techniqueLewis rejects force
as a passing and precarious thing and cynically insists that thought control, getting inside a person's mind
and changing his very personality, is the effective way of reducing him and making him yours.
In contrast to Orwell, Lewis, the intellectual elitist, asks: Instead of the vast organization to exploit
the weaknesses of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the
Few? Lewis maintains that the strong ruler is justified in outraging the most elementary principles of
freedom because the masses (Orwell's proles) are happier when they are dependent rather than
independent. Since Lewis concludes, like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Orwell's OBrien, that men
are essentially weak and crave authority, not freedom, he inevitably recommends a totalitarian form of
government: We should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised. All
the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufactured, will henceforth
be spared. The disciplined fascist party in Italy can be taken as representing the new and healthy type
of freedom. For anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism
would probably be the best.
The heart of Bernard Crick's introduction, the Seven Satiric Thrusts of Nineteen Eighty-Four,
includes three of the themes mentioned by Lewis: the division of the world, the mass media as agents of
prolerization, and power hunger and totalitarianism; and adds four others: betrayal by the intellectuals, the
degradation of language, the destruction of truth and the theses of James Burnham's The Managerial
Revolution (1941). The first, third, fourth and sixth of these points were mentioned in Orwell's letter to H.
J. Willmett of May 18, 1944 (printed as Appendix B) and repeated in Orwell's unused introduction to
Animal Farm, Freedom of the Press, first published in 1972. So there is nothing at all original in
Crick's argument, which fails to distinguish between the true objects of Orwell's satire (points 26) and
the ideas he borrows from Burnham (points 1 and 7). Crick's statement that the novel is best read as
Swiftian satire repeats an idea stated by V. S. Pritchett, Herbert Read and Czeslaw Milosz when the
book first appeared; his assertion that it is deeply rooted in contemporary conditions echoes the
argument in my Reader's Guide to George Orwell (1975).
It is an excellent idea to bring out a scholarly edition of a modern novel (as Cambridge University
Press is doing with the work of D. H. Lawrence) when it is relatively easy to recreate the context and
elucidate the contemporary references. Crick is good on relating Orwell's essays and reviews of the
1940s to the ideas of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and revealing the conscious parody of catechism and
communion when Winston visits OBrien's flat. But his edition, directed at students and teachers (if any
can afford the steep price of this volume) is more likely to confuse than to edify.
Crick, a political scientist, is completely out of his depth as a literary critic. He states, for example,
that Lear's eyes were ground out by the boot of his daughter's husband. But it is Gloucesternot Lear
who is blinded by Cornwall. There is no clear logic or structure in his 136-page introduction. He
discusses Orwell's intentions, which should have come first, after the contemporary reception, which
should have come last. The contemporary reception covers exactly the same ground as my George
Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975); Crick mentions eleven of the fifteen writers that I discuss on pages
2427 of my book, but he does not cite this work except to quote one essay that I translated from German.
Long-winded and unbearably repetitious, Crick tediously reiterates dozens of points. His turgid and
sometimes senseless stylein contrast to Orwell's clarity, precision, vigor and witmakes the reader
feel as if he were crawling through a swamp. Crick is fond of clichs like red herring and there is
many a slip between the cup and the lip; and he writes that Orwell was making notes, on what proved to
be his death bed (a fact which was, indeed, a possibility to him at the time, but far from a certainty).
Crick's annotations (which repeat what has already been repeated in the introduction) tend to be
obvious, unconvincing, incomplete or incorrect. His observations that thirteen is an unlucky number and
that the hero bears the first name of Churchill and the most common surname in English scarcely need to
be stated. His remark, some critics regard this [sense of smell] as morbid on Orwell's part. They must
lead sheltered lives, is completely gratuitous. He relates the mustached face and caption Big Brother Is
Watching You to Stalin, but not to the famous recruiting poster of 1914 with the picture of Field Marshall
Lord Kitchener and the caption Your Country Needs YOU. He connects the Floating Fortress to the
Flying Fortresses of the U.S. Air Force, but not to the Floating Island in Gulliver's Travels that also
reduces rebellious subjects to obedience. And he claims that OBrien, described as a large, burly man
with a thick neck and humorous face, seems distinctly more like Hitler than Stalinthough he bears
absolutely no physical resemblance to the Fhrer.
Crick does not mention, for example, that the opening stanzas of Gordon Comstock's poem in Keep the
Aspidistra Flying convey the same sense of bleak discomfort as the first page of the novel (the new film
of Nineteen Eighty-Four reminds us that conditions in postwar London resembled those of the
Depression); that Leopold Bloom refers to God as Big Brother in Ulysses (508); that Winston's
prophecy of doom, We are the dead, repeated by both Julia and the telescreen when they are arrested, is
an ironic echo of an accusatory line, spoken by a corpse, in John Macrae's popular Canadian poem of the
Great War, In Flanders Fields; and that Two and two are five was used by Mikhail Bakunin in
Reaction in Germany, published in the Deutsche Jahrbcher in October 1842.
Crick, who frequently cites his biography of Orwell in the introduction, presents his dubious dating of
Such, Such Were the Joys as if it were an established fact, and has many serious mistakes and
misreadings. Orwell did not take the example of pacification (for retaliatory bombing of villages)
from the British on the North-West frontier of India, but from the savage wars in southeast Asia in the
late 1940s. The Nancy poets in The Road to Wigan Pier, a specific reference to the Auden circle, are
certainly homosexual. Crick's belief that Big Brother Is Watching You is a comfort as well as a threat
cosily ignores the fearful menace of that slogan. His statement that hope lies in the proles ignores the
important qualification if there was hope, it must lie in the proles, for there is no hope in the ignorant
masses who have no political awareness or desire to revolt against oppression.
Crick first says that Winston Smith is a more educated [George] Bowlingthough the two
characters are entirely differentand later contradicts himself by stating that Bowling is a decent but
politically useless man while Smith is actually very brave and holds out for truth under torture
astonishingly long. Finally, Crick repeats that OBrien turns out to be insane, he thinks he can levitate
and reach the stars. But OBrien, who is quite sane, represents Orwell's belief that a totalitarian system
can impose ideology on scientific truth. OBrien, who maintains that reality is inside the skull, can
force Winston to believe that OBrien could levitate or, if he wished, even reach the stars.
The weakest aspect of Crick's edition, however, is the astonishing number of mistakes in names,
places, books and quotations. There are typographical errors on pages 3, 6, 10n, and 98, and crooked
lines on page 21. The names William Jovanovich, Anthony West, H. G. Wells, Veronica Wedgwood,
Alfred Kazin, Diana Trilling, Alexander von Humboldt, F. A. Hayek and Ellen Leyburn are misspelled.
My first name is given three variants and five references to my work are omitted from the index. Francis
A. Hendon appears variously as Hendron and Henson. Crick also misspells Teheran (in a direct quotation
from Orwell) and Balnibarbi (from Gulliver's Travels). The titles of The Beggar's Opera, A Clockwork
Orange, and A. J. P. Taylor's English History, 19141945 as well as the place of publication of
Raymond Williams George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays are all incorrect. The date of Wells
The Sleeper Awakes is listed in one place as 1898 and in another as 1900, though When the Sleeper
Wakes was actually published in 1899. Crick also misquotes the text of the novel: The clever thing was
to break the rules and stay alive all the timeinstead of all the same. He concludes his introduction by
characteristically garbling Tristram Shandy: He can make two and to five, replied the Papish doctors.
Crick, who needs an army of copy-editors, commits more than twenty blunders when left to his own
devices by the publisher. In this scholarly edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Clarendon Press has
abandoned its high standards and produced perhaps the worst book in its long history.

After Crick's slipshod effort, it is a pleasure to study Davison's masterful scholarly work. The six-pound,
10-by-14-inch bookcarefully, faithfully, lovingly producedis excellent value at 25. The typed and
handwritten manuscript, reproduced to show the blue ink, is transcribed in both roman and italic type on a
scale that allows a line-for-line reference to the facsimile. The transcription and the textual notes are
scrupulously accurate, though Denis Donoghue (in the London Review of Books, December 20, 1984, p.7)
has noted five minor errors and two typos. The one flaw I have found is that Davison first quotes Orwell's
letter of October 22, 1948, to Fredric WarburgI first thought of it in 1943and then concludes,
without justification, that the novel was conceived at some time between mid-1940 and the end of 1943.
The manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four was sold at auction by Christie's to Scribner's rare books
department for $140 in June 1952. Scribner's sold it to a collector in Kansas City for $275 in September
of that year, and bought it back from him for $2,000 in May 1969. The following month, they sold it for
$5,000 to Daniel Siegel, the present owner and joint publisher of the facsimile.
The extant manuscript, which represents 44 percent of the text of the novel, was composed in four
stages. Most of the facsimile comes from the last, handwritten stage, possibly because Orwell found it
too painful to sit at a table and type in 1948. Orwell was terminally ill when he wrote the novel and had
great difficulty completing it. He usually wrote clear drafts of his work, but more than half the typescript
of Nineteen Eighty-Four was crossed out and completely rewritten. The successive drafts, as Davison
points out, reveal a consistency of conception and a sense of driving urgency to finish what he knew
would be his final work. Like the facsimile of Sons and Lovers, edited by Mark Schorer, this manuscript
reveals the author's actual working methods and provides the basis for a study of the genesis of the
novel.
The manuscript shows that the title of the novel was changed from 1980 to 1982 to 1984; and that
three significant passages were omitted from the published version. In the first section of the novel, after
the description of the horrific war film, Orwell wrote: Typical prole reactionnot to care about the thing
itself, only about its being shown in front of children. Cf. last year when they were showing Romeo and
Juliet and suddenly it was flashed on the screen that a good nigger lynching was happening somewhere in
America and would be televised. One of the niggers was a pregnant woman and when they hoisted her up
she gave birth to the baby. The crowd played football with it. Again an old prole woman started making a
fuss because she said that till then her little granddaughter aged nine hadn't known where babies came
from. Orwell probably realized that this passage was overwritten, far-fetched and slightly comical, that
it emphasized the gratuitous cruelty rather than the perverse morality of the proles. (The first use of
proletarian in English was in Samuel Butler's Hudibras, 1663.) The stereotyped lynching recalls the
black humor of the news report in the Cyclops section of Ulysses: Black Beast Burned in Omaha, Ga.
(328), just as the physiological effect of hanging recalls the execution of Joe Brady: when they cut him
down after the drop [his tool] was standing up in their faces like a poker (304).
In the second deleted passage Winston is intimidated by the luxury of OBrien's Inner Party flat. The
third passage, which describes Winston and Julia's embrace after visiting OBrien, prefigures their tragic
end and could well have been retained: She kissed his cheek almost violently a number of times, then
slipped away into the shadow of the wall and promptly disappeared. He had a curious feeling that
the embrace she had given him was intended as some kind of good-bye.
Conrad, a perceptive political novelist whom Orwell planned to write an essay about at the end of his
life, foreshadowed the themes of both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in a moving passage in
Under Western Eyes: The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures, the unselfish
and the intelligent, may begin a movementbut it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a
revolution. They are its victims.
SIXTEEN

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE ORWELL

Peter Davison followed his facsimile of Nineteen Eighty-Four with a titanic accomplishment: the
magisterial 8,500-page, 20-volume editionwith definitive texts and useful notesof the
Complete Works (1998). I was probably the only one, of the very few reviewers, who read every
word. The completeness of the edition allows us to see Orwell in a new way and trace his artistic
evolution from 1929 to 1949an astonishing achievement in only twenty years. Gillian
Fenwick's clear, thorough and accurate bibliography (1998) provides an excellent complement
to Davison's edition. Both works make a tremendous advance in Orwell scholarship.

Peter Davison's magisterial edition of Orwell's Complete Works includes everything listed in Fenwick's
Bibliography and a great deal of fascinating complementary material. It has a handsome format and
binding, attractive paper and type, and the rough lettering on the dust wrappers and endpapers looks like
crudely stenciled words on a prison wall. The first nine volumes were published in 198687; the last
elevenwith Orwell's essays, reviews and lettersappeared in 1998 and provide an intellectual context
for the major works. The substantial indexes in the final volume total 220 pages. The text is usually
definitive; the notes concise and helpful; and the authoritative editing will provide a distinguished
standard for the Works of all other modern writers.
Orwell's letters from hospitals in 194849 to his sister, looking after his house and child on the island
of Jura, and to his future wife, involved in London literary life, have not survived. A few other letters
have been omitted: an extraordinary love letter to Celia Paget, 1946, which she refused to make public;
another letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, December 4, 1948, published in Ian Hunter's biography of the
Blessed Mugg; and five letters, 194549, to David, John Stuart Groves and John Courtenay Trewin at
the University of Texas.
This scholarly work, like the Bibliography, has some flaws. Davison does not give the death dates of
many people cited in the notesfrom Godfrey Harvey (born 1889) and Rashid Ali (born 1892) to
Lawrence Durrell (died 1990), Dorothy Lamour (died 1996), James Laughlin and A. L. Rowse (both died
1997) and Halldr Laxness (died 1998). He should have noted the publishers of the books that Orwell
reviewed and indicated which pieces were previously included in the four-volume, 2,000-page edition of
Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1968). Many important figures in Orwell's life
Bob Edwards, Geoffrey Gorer, Sally McEwan, Leonard Moore, Gwen O'shaughnessy, Richard Rees and
Reginald Reynoldsneed more substantial biographical notes.
Davison credits the work of many scholars, but does not mention, in connection with the material he
reprints, that I was the first to publish, in articles and books: the India Office records of Orwell's career
in Burma (1972); Georges Kopp's report, in the British Library, of Orwell's bullet wound in Spain; the
English translation of Orwell's introduction to the French edition of Down and Out in Paris and London;
and Humbert Possenti's letter protesting Orwell's libel of French kitchens (all 1975). I also wrote the only
essay on Orwell as Film Critic (1979).
The elaborate textual apparatus for the first nine volumes are a delight. As Cecil Lang wrote in his
edition of Matthew Arnold's Letters, no detail is too niggling, no nuance too nice, no mite of pointing or
mote of orthography too puny for the dainty appetence of what Carlyle called the Able Editor. But the
minute textual alterations do not fundamentally change our understanding of Orwell's works. And in a few
places the text is badly garbled. In The Clergyman's Daughter (3. 228), for example, Davison prints:
Nonconformist ind. th the best will instead of Nonconformist mind. With the best will. He moves
chapter 5 of Homage to Catalonia to the end of the book, but fails to see that without it the political
discussion that follows in chapter 8 now makes no sense. It would have been more useful to have
explanatory notes on the foreign words, quotations, allusions and obscure references in the first nine
volumes as well as introductions that give the essential background and provide critical evaluations of his
work.
The completeness of the edition enables us to see Orwell in a new way. His writing at Eton,
compared to more sophisticated contemporaries like Harold Acton and Brian Howard, was conventional
and rather dull. But we can now trace his artistic evolution from early sketches on tramps and beggars
(first published in French in 1929) to The Spike (1931), his first distinctively Orwellian work, to the
final version in Down and Out (1933); from a letter about sleeping outdoors in Trafalgar Square (August
1931) to a fuller account of this experience in his diary (October 1931) to the fictionalized version in A
Clergyman's Daughter (1935).
Orwell described the atmosphere of the BBC, where he worked during 194143, as something half
way between a girls school and a lunatic asylum and concluded that all we are doing at present is
useless, or slightly worse than useless. The three volumes on these three wasted years are filled with
boring bureaucratic detail. Most of the hundreds of books Orwell reviewed were mediocre, so his brief
notices (as opposed to the major essays on writers he lovedor hated) were competent but uninspiring.
There are many descriptions of Orwell's typing till 3 a.m., but none of him quietly reading, and it's clear
that he didn't have time to read many of the books he wrote about.

II

For the last forty years Ian Willison and Ian Angus work on their nevercompleted bibliography of
George Orwell has discouraged everyone else from doing the job. Finally, Gillian Fenwick, using the
material in the Orwell Archive at London University, has finished this difficult task and compiled an
impressive list. During twenty years as a professional, Orwell wrotedespite frequent, serious and
agonizing bouts of illness12 books, 50 contributions to books, 842 articles, 18 collections of essays
(16 of them posthumous), 269 wartime radio broadcasts, 456 published letters, 25 poems and 1,262
unpublished works (mostly letters, but also notes for unfinished essays on Joseph Conrad and Evelyn
Waugh, and a story about Burma.) He also organized 519 radio talks by T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Herbert
Read and other distinguished authors.
Keith Arbour's review of Fenwick's bibliography (PBSA, 93:2, June 1999) emphasized its limitations.
I believe her work is clear, thorough and accurate, but it inevitably contains a number of errors and
omissions. There are several typos: no one (vi: 5 up), Taddert (xv: 12 up), Hairmyres (xviii: 3), Kopp
(66: 22), Homenaje (75: 20), Schorer (133: 18 up), Symons (161 n14 and n17), GUERRILLA (267: 22
up), Orwell, Partido and Unificacin (406: 16) and Zoltan (409: 4 up). Fenwick does not mention the
reprint of Orwell's poem As One Non-Combatant to Another in Philip Larkin's Oxford Book of
Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), nor list in the section on Archival Materials Orwell's letters to
Herbert Read at the University of Victoria in Canada.
Fenwick admits that her coverage of foreign editions is undoubtedly spotty, and that section could
certainly be improved. There is no title for the German translation of Burmese Days (p. 30); and she does
not list the Hungarian (Kaldor Gyorgy) or Spanish (Ediciones Destino) publishers of that novel, nor the
Estonian, Gujurati, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Telugu editions of Animal Farm. In The Politics of
Literary Reputation (1989), John Rodden writes that Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have been
translated into more than 60 languages and have together sold almost 40 million copies. Fenwick lists
only 44 translations of these two books and her sales figures do not come close to Rodden's.
More significantly, Fenwick omits the American Popular Library paperback edition of Burmese Days
(February 1958) and American Avon paperback edition of A Clergyman's Daughter (no date), as well as
the stage adaptation of 1984 (sic) by Robert Owens, Wilton E. Hall, Jr. and William A. Miles, Jr.
(Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1963).
Fenwick's introduction, filled with inaccurate assertions, is the weakest part of the book. Contra
Fenwick, Orwell did not have to go to Burma, the definitive biographies had not been written before her
book was published and there certainly is a huge body of critical work on him. He did not miss the
boat where the great age of literary criticism is concerned, for his writing was brilliantly analyzed by
Bertrand Russell, V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, John Wain, Conor
Cruise OBrien, Richard Hoggart and George Steiner, as well as by the best American critics of his day:
Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe.
Fenwick's discussion of the composition and publication history of each book, though based only on
published letters, is valuable. We learn that Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), out of print by
1938, was the most popular book in the library of Dartmoor prison. Two years later, Penguin printed a
first edition of 55,000 copies. Burmese Days, written by George Orwell, was copyright under his real
name, Eric Blair. The first printing of the English edition of Animal Farm was only 4,500. But, used for
the teaching of English throughout the world, it was translated into exotic languages like Maltese, Persian
and Vietnamese. The American Signet edition sold over 5 million copies by 1973 and continues to sell
more than 350,000 a year. Orwell risked losing 40,000 when he refused to cut the Appendix on The
Principles of Newspeak from the Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, though the
Club eventually backed down and he got his money. Fenwick's Appendix on Payments and Royalties
reveals that in 192527 Orwell earned 696 a year, plus bonuses, in the Burmese Police. As a writer, he
did not exceed this income until 1941 when his BBC salary and literary fees (an average of 3 each for
18 articles) came to 706.
Orwell constantly, perhaps defensively, ran down his own books. Burmese Days, he said, made me
spew when I saw it in print, A Clergyman's Daughter was very disconnected as a whole, and rather
unreal and he felt he made rather a muck of The Road to Wigan Pier. Nevertheless, his reputation has
risen steadily since his death in 1950. Most of his books are still in print, and he is the most widely read
and influential serious writer of the twentieth century.
SEVENTEEN

ORWELL
A Voice That Naked Goes

In 1973 I sent an essay on Roger Casement to Alan Rossnaval officer, racing and cricket
enthusiast, poet and autobiographer, and excellent (if rather too casual) editor of the London
Magazine. He rejected it, I rang him to ask why and he frankly said he didn't know anything
about the investigator of atrocities in the Congo and Putumayo, and ill-fated Irish revolutionary.
When he kindly agreed to send it to an expert and eventually published the piece, I established a
permanent relationship with the magazine (surviving through three other editors) and since then
have published twenty-seven essays (including this one) with them.
This piece emphasized Orwell's violent streak, risky self-sabotage and dangerous invitation to
his wife Eileen to visit him on the Aragon front and in Barcelona in 1939. It also showed how
OBrien in Nineteen Eighty-Four was physically modeled on Georges Kopp, and noted the
astonishingly accurate prophecies in Orwell's last novel.

The 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell (1998), brilliantly edited by Peter Davison, reveals as
much about Orwell's life as about his books. In 1945 he noted the contrast in many writers between the
character which they display in private life and the character which seems to emanate from their
published works. But Orwell's life, like Chekhov's, matches the idealism of his writing, and reflects the
literary and political history of the first half of the twentieth century. He had exemplary courage,
compassion and honesty, and the more we examine his character, the more we like him. Even his
crankiness and eccentricity seem endearing.
Orwell could never remain in one place for long and was always an outsider: a chubby bed-wetter at
St. Cyprian's prep school, a cynical rebel at Eton, a gentleman-outcast in Paris and London, a member of
the defeated faction of the defeated side in the Spanish Civil War, a truthteller amidst the propagandists of
the BBC, a critic of the Left on the Socialist Tribune. His appearance was also idiosyncratic. He was,
like his contemporary and friend Graham Greene, unusually tall and thin. Greene dressed conservatively
and looked like a man of the upper middle class while Orwell had a workman's cropped haircut, a
Frenchman's thin mustache, a proletarian's clothesand an invalid's furrowed face.
Like Simone Weil, Orwell identified with and actually lived the life of the poor and oppressed. Both
were committed, self-sacrificial writers who joined the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went
down and out, and investigated the lives of the industrial poor. Weil became a manual laborer on farms
and in a car factory, and joined the Resistance movement in France and England. Orwell gave up part of
his wartime rations so otherspeople he didn't knowwould have more to eat. Weil, finally, refused
to eat in order to show her solidarity with the victims of World War II. Both authors died of tuberculosis
in an English hospital.
Orwell's life, in essence, was a series of irrational, sometimes life-threatening decisions. He joined
the Burmese police instead of going to university; washed dishes in Paris and tramped in England; tried to
grow vegetables and run a small shop in Hertfordshire; fought with the POUM Anarchists in Spain, just
after his marriage, and put his wife in great danger by encouraging her to come to Barcelona. He moved to
London during the Blitz, when everyone else was trying to leave; and he made a suicidal sojourn to Jura
when he was dying of tuberculosis. All these potentially disastrous moves, this risky self-sabotage,
provided valuable experience that he transformed into art.
Orwell had extensive military training, was fascinated by explosives and had a violent streak in his
character. As he wrote at the beginning of the war: At seven years old I was a member of the Navy
League and wore a sailor suit with H.M.S. Invincible on my cap. Even before my public-school O.T.C.
[Officers Training Corps] I had been in a private school cadet corps. On and off, I have been toting a rifle
ever since I was tenin the Burmese police, drilling recruits and fighting on the Aragon front, and
training volunteers in the London Home Guard.
One of the greatest joys of my own childhood, he wrote at the end of the war, were those little
brass cannons on wooden gun-carriages [that] went off with a noise like the Day of Judgement.
Normal healthy children enjoy explosions. And so, apparently, do normal healthy adults. His publisher
Fredric Warburg, who served under Sergeant Orwell in the Home Guard, described how Orwell loaded a
spigot mortar, an anti-tank weapon, with the wrong kind of fifty-pound bomb and then gave the order to
fire. The man holding the mortar lost all his front teeth and another, standing nearby, was knocked
unconscious for twenty-four hours.
In his essay Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944) Orwell contrasted the gentlemanly, intellectual
English detective with his violent and brutal American counterpart (though the author, James Hadley
Chase, was actually English) and criticized Chase's portrayal of one of the American gang, whose sole
pleasure in life consists in driving knives into other people's bellies. But the sometimes saintly Orwell
had the same violent urge. In Such, Such Were the Joys (c. 1947), his horrific account of St. Cyprian's,
he describes his swift revenge on an older boy who'd cruelly twisted his arm: [I] walked up to Burton
with the most harmless air I could assume, and then, getting the weight of my body behind it, smashed my
fist into his face. Quarreling with an elderly but contentious Paris taxi-driver, en route to Spain in 1936,
he exclaimed: You think you're too old for me to smash your face in. Don't be too sure! When his
flatmate Rayner Heppenstall came home drunk late one night and threatened him, Orwell punched him in
the face and knocked him down the stairs.
Later on, Orwell was haunted by memories of the Burmese servants and coolies he had hit with his
fist in moments of rage. In Shooting an Elephant (1936) he recalled that during the endless provocations
and torments in Burma, I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a
Buddhist priest's guts. In the dark months of 1940 he recorded in his diary: one must above all die
fighting and have the satisfaction of killing someone else first. The torture scenes in Nineteen Eighty-
Four were based not only on the ghastly medical treatments during the last years of his life, but also on
his own deep-rooted streak of sadism.

II

When Orwell came home after five years in Burma, he horrified his family by throwing up his secure,
well-paying job and deciding to become a writer. But he needed something to write about. So instead of
working for a newspaper or publisher (as Greene did at the beginning of his career), he became a kitchen
slave and wandering bum. He knew how to get on with outcasts and quite enjoyed their company. He
neither patronized nor scorned them, but showed real sympathy and interesta considerable imaginative
leap for an Old Etonian and imperial policeman. His desire for first-hand experience with the down and
outs was meant to compensate, he said, for the tragic failure of theoretical Socialism to make any contact
with the normal working class.
His revulsion from and guilt about his bourgeois background as well as his natural inclination toward
austerity made it essential for him to live in extreme discomfort. Just after he married Eileen
O'shaughnessy in June 1936, she abandoned her graduate studies and they moved into a little-ease cottage.
It's bloody awful, he told the working-class writer Jack Common. Still, it's more or less livable.
When there is sudden rain in winter the kitchen tends to flood. The living room fire, you may remember,
smokes. There is water laid on, but no hot. The crude toilet, of course, was outdoors. The six flights of
stone steps leading to his wartime flat in Islington (which also had the requisite leaking roof) left Orwell,
who also had to carry up a baby and pram, gasping for breath. His remote, wet and windy cottage in Jura
a cross between Wuthering Heights and Cold Comfort Farmwas down a deeply rutted road, without
electricity or telephone, and six hours from the nearest doctor. A hemorrhage on Jura would have finished
him off.
In 1934 gloomy George (as Herbert Read called him) compared himself to an Old Testament
prophet of doom: This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and
start calling down curses from Heaven like Jeremiah or Ezra. The event that profoundly sickened him,
changed his life and transformed the nature of his writing was the Spanish Civil War. Orwell told
Heppenstall (who'd provoked and then forgiven Orwell's violence) that we started off by being heroic
defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.
Davison includes the list of interrogator's notes about Orwell and Eileen (they were never formally
charged), which were given to the Communist Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia, three
weeks after they'd barely managed to escape from Spain. Based on papers stolen from Orwell's hotel
room while Eileen was being questioned by the police, these notes show that Orwell was well known as
a writer and prominent member of POUM, and would certainly have been executed if they'd caught him.
His heroic commander, Georges Kopp, was arrested and tortured in Spanish prisons, and Orwell
bravely visited him and tried to get him out while he himself was being hunted. It's worth noting, as
Orwell would say, that the powerful, bull-like Kopp appears as OBrien in Nineteen Eighty-Four: In
spite of the bulkiness of his body there was a remarkable grace in his movements. A wave of
admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards OBrien. When you looked at
OBrien's powerful shoulders and his blunt-featured face, so ugly and yet so civilised, it was impossible
to believe that he could be defeated.
Good war books, Orwell said, are nearly always written from the angle of a victim, and Homage
to Cataloniahis greatest bookwas written with white-hot anger. He was disgusted by the way the
Left-wing press in England had covered up or lied about the savage suppression of POUM by the
Communists and was determined to reveal the truth about what had really happened in Spain. As he told
his close friend Arthur Koestler, who had gone through a similar experience in Mlaga (and been interned
in both French and English prisons during the war): The sin of nearly all leftwingers from 1933 onwards
is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.
Orwell perfected a plain style that was part of his rhetorical arsenal, and persuaded his audience that
he was both honest and sympathetic. As Wynd-ham Lewis wrote in One-Way Song: These times require
a voice that naked goes,/Without more fuss than Dryden's or Defoe's. The striking openings of his major
essays, for example, are uncannily effective and immediately hook the reader:
 In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people.
As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

The first two sentences portray Orwell as victim; the last two are paradoxical statements about human
nature.
Gloomy George could also be surprisingly witty in the supercilious Etonian mode. In a review of The
Hamlet in 1940, he describes Faulkner's characters as if they belonged to a primitive tribe in a remote
corner of the earth: people with supremely hideous namesnames like Flem Snopes and Eck Snopes
sit about on the steps of village stores, chewing tobacco, swindling one another in small business deals,
and from time to time committing a rape or a murder.
Orwella conscientious, imaginative but severe schoolmaster for two years in the early 1930s
later mocked (millenarians take note) the mechanical way in which he was taught history at school: in
1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long
lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and
everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main.
When describing the sexual habits of amphibians in one of his most charming essays, Some Thoughts
on the Common Toad (1946), he combines close observation and unusual facts with tenderness for a
repulsive creature, and ends with a comical twist: All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he
wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it
with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad.
Though Nineteen Eighty-Four is more a realistic projection of the present than a nightmare vision of
the future, Orwell was acutely prophetic (in that novel and elsewhere) about the breakdown of the nuclear
family, the fate of the homeless, environmental pollution, deforestation, the dangers of addictive drugs,
fanaticism and violence in international sporting events, the decay of meaningful language, the treatment of
political dissidents in mental hospitals, the sudden disappearance of people who oppose repressive
regimes, the proliferation of atomic weapons and the endless small wars, backed by the superpowers,
who threaten but never actually fight each other.
Just as Orwell was almost captured and killed before he could write Homage to Catalonia and tell
the truth about what happened in Spain, so he nearly died, during a boating accident in the dangerous
Scottish whirlpool at Corryvrecken, before he could finish Nineteen Eighty-Four and radically change
our way of thinking about modern politics. The grim letters about his rapidly declining health reveal the
terrible struggle to finish his last novel (published seven months before he died). In the tuberculosis
sanatoria he suffered weight loss, high fever, acute pain and a severe reaction to the streptomycin that
mightin more moderate doseshave saved his life. Confined to bed, without a typewriter or even a
decent pen, and with his right arm in a plaster cast, he heroically raced against death.
Orwell's statement about Kipling applies with equal force to himself: he was the only English writer
of [his] time who has added phrases to the language. In Nineteen Eighty-Four alone Orwell invented
these vivid phrases: Big Brother Is Watching You, Two Minutes Hate, Thought Police, Thoughtcrime,
Facecrime, Doublethink, Memory Hole, Vaporized and Unperson. He was, paradoxically, a Tory
Anarchist, a Socialist in love with the past. The destruction of the past is a dominant theme in his last four
books: the Communist lies about what really happened in Barcelona in Homage to Catalonia, Bowling's
childhood village destroyed by developers and polluters in Coming Up for Air, the pigs constant
alteration of the Seven Commandments in Animal Farm and Winston's rewriting history in the Ministry of
Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Though Orwell died fifty years ago, we now need him more than ever. Had he lived, he would surely
have commented on the squalid strife in western democracies. In April 1942, disgusted with wartime
propaganda on both sides, Orwell wrote a scathing passage in his diary that seems to describe
contemporary American politics: You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that,
and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth. I
feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the
earth. Is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but
they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.

III

Evelyn Waughthe subject of Orwell's last, unfinished essaywas the same age as Orwell and came
from a similar background. But Waugh delighted in snobbish society and indulged in all the luxuries that
Orwell despised: a grand country house, a London club, hedonistic cruises, elegant clothes, fine wines
and expensive cigars. Though Orwell wanted very few material things, he didn't get any of themeven
when he became comparatively wealthy at the end of his life. He wanted a handsome pram, decorated
with a gold line, for his adopted son (impossible to obtain during the war), a good pair of American shoes
(which were sent but didn't fit), a van for the rough roads of Jura (which arrived in wretched condition
and couldn't even be driven off the ferry), streptomycin to cure his tuberculosis (which caused a severe
reaction and saved another patient) and a second wife (who married him on his deathbed).
Though Orwell seems more puritanical than Byronic, this edition is full of extraordinary revelations
about his love affairs. As a young man in Burma he slept with prostitutes and almost certainly had a
mistress who inspired the vengeful Ma Hla May in Burmese Days. In Southwold in the early 1930s he
had an affair (as I've recently discovered) with his married patron, Mabel Fierz. While seeing Mabel he
was also courting Eleanor Jaques (engaged to his friend), who slept with him, and Brenda Salkeld (a
clergyman's daughter), who did not. He then moved on to another love triangle: Kay Ekevall, with whom
he had an affair, and Sally Jerome (who worked in an advertising agency, like Rosemary in Keep the
Aspidistra Flying), who did not sleep with him. He dropped both women (Sally's still angry about his
duplicity) when he met and immediately fell in love with the bright and attractive Eileen.
He admitted that he was unfaithful to herwith bewitching Berber girls in Morocco and with Sally
McEwan (his secretary at the Tribune)and also tried to seduce a girl he escorted home from William
Empson's party and Eileen's Russian friend, Lydia Jackson. Orwell's school friend Cyril Connolly
though fat, porcine and physically repulsiveseduced many women with his Irish wit, cleverness and
charm. Orwell, though better looking and more manly, was shy, awkward and rather gauche. But in his
own quiet way he had more women than Conrad and Lawrence, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
The quintessential erotic moment in Orwell's life took place in the summer of 1932 when Eleanor
Jaques surrendered to him and revealed her nakedness in an idyllic setting: I cannot remember when I
have ever enjoyed any expeditions so much as I did those with you, he wrote to her in September.
Especially that day in the wood along past Blythburgh Lodgeyou remember, where the deep beds of
moss were. I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark green moss.
This scenean unresisting, often virginal woman lying naked in the grassrecurs in three of his
novels:
Naked, she lay back, her hands behind her head, her eyes shut, smiling slightly. I'll be as
gentle as I can with you. It doesn't matter. (Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936)
 [I] stood over her for a moment. She was lying on the grass with her arm over her face. She
was mine and I could have her, this minute if I wanted to. (Coming Up for Air, 1939)
He had pulled her down onto the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he
liked with her. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)

The most moving piece in the entire edition was written by Eileen in March 1945, just before she
went into hospital for surgery. Her long last letter was more concerned with making things easier for
Orwell (then a war correspondent in Germany) than for herself, and explains why the sweet-natured,
stoical wife was willing to put up with such discomfort, even hardship, during their marriage: Obviously
I can't just go on having a [uterine] tumour or rather several rapidly growing tumours. I really don't
think I'm worth the money [for this expensive operation]. On the other hand of course this thing will take a
longish time to kill me if left alone and it will be costing some money the whole time. Eileen's death at
the age of thirty-nine, under anesthesia, was particularly tragic, for she'd survived a difficult time during
the war and had just adopted an infant. She never lived to see the great success of Animal Farm, which
she'd helped to plan, or to enjoy the hard-won wealth and fame of Orwell's last years.
After Eileen's sudden death, Orwell, lonely, sick and left with a baby he refused to give up, was
desperate for a wife. So he impulsively proposed to several young women he scarcely knew. His letter of
April 1946 to Anne Popham (who was thirteen years younger than Orwell and later married Quentin
Bell), after her astonished rejection of his unexpected proposal, was unusually personal and revealing:

I wonder if I committed a sort of crime in approaching you. In a way it's scandalous that a person
like me should make advances to a person like you, and yet I thought from your appearance that you
were not only lonely and unhappy, but also a person who lived chiefly through the intellect and
might become interested in a man who was much older and not much good physically. What I am
really asking you is whether you would like to be the widow of a literary man. If things remain
more or less as they are there is a certain amount of fun in this, as you would probably get royalties
coming in and you might find it interesting to edit unpublished stuff.
Several times in the past I have been supposed to be about to die, but I always lived on just to
spite them. I am also sterile I thinkat any rate I have never had a child, though I have never
undergone the examination because it is so disgusting. On the other hand if you wanted children of
your own by someone else it wouldn't bother me, because I have very little physical jealousy. If
you think of yourself as essentially a widow, then you might do worsei.e. supposing I am not
actually disgusting to you.

Orwell emphasized his age and poor health (bronchiectasis and a tubercular lesion in one lung) and
practically promised to die as soon as possible. He offered widowhood rather than marriage and the
chance to edit his works (Anne later edited Virginia Woolf's Diaries). He also confessed, to put the
topping on the cake, that he was sterile (though he didn't know for sure) and had been unfaithful to Eileen.
He ends with a Clifford Chatterley-like offer to let his would-be fiance breed with another man.
This bizarre, abject declaration is reminiscent of Kafka's letters to Felice Bauerhe too was
tubercular and close to deathin which he assumed a pathetic posture, confessed the worst about himself
and tested her ability to endure him: I should want to drag you down to the dreadful decrepitude that I
represent. In spite of everything [do] you want to take up the cross? I am prostrate before you and
implore you to push me aside: anything else means ruin for us both.
Orwell portrayed his second, deathbed wife, Sonia Brownell, as Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Winston's confession at their first meeting suggests that Orwell had proposed to her in the same
Kafkaesque manner: I'm thirty-nine years old. I've got varicose veins. I've got five false teeth. You
are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. What could you see to attract you in a man like me?
Orwell's description of Julia's deceptively hearty demeanorthe atmosphere of hockey-fields and
cold baths and community hikes and the general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with
heris a joking allusion to Sonia's lifelong rebellion against her convent school in Roehampton.
Winston's first reaction to JuliaHe hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he
wanted to go to bed with her and would never do soexpresses Orwell's frustration with Sonia, who
slept with him only once and found the experience unsatisfactory. The marriage of the gaunt El Greco saint
and the blooming Renoir beauty was not consummated.
Sonia, the Euston Road Venus, had a series of illustrious loversincluding the painters Victor
Pasmore, William Coldstream and Lucian Freudbut she didn't like sex. This explains the contrast in
Nineteen Eighty-Four between Julia's leading role in the Junior Anti-Sex League (which represents
Sonia's sexual attitude in real life) and her reckless nymphomania (which alludes to Sonia's numerous
lovers and portrays Orwell's fantasies about her): With what seemed a single movement she tore off her
clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Have you done this before? Of course. Hundreds of times
well, scores of times, anyway.
Orwell's comment that Julia obviously had a practical cunning which Winston lacked suggests that
he was sceptical about Sonia's motives for marrying him. But at the sight of the words I love you, when
she passes him a secret note, the desire to stay alive had welled up in him. Sonia, whatever her
extremely ambiguous motives, certainly gave him hope when he was moribund. Their plans to fly to a
Swiss sanatorium ended with his fatal hemorrhage, but he kept a never-to-be-used fishing rod at the end of
his hospital bed. As Winston prophetically observes: It was impossible that this affair should end
successfully; such things did not happen in real life.
EIGHTEEN

ORWELL AND THE ART OF WRITING

Since everyone these days wants to be a writer, I thought a collection of Orwell's essays on
writing, with my introduction, would be a useful and successful book. There is no better model
for a nonfiction writer than Orwell, who expressed what he thought as honestly as he could and
in the clearest possible way. Though I was publishing two art biographies with Harcourt at the
time, they foolishly rejected my idea and I brought out my essay in the Kenyon Review. I showed
how Orwell influenced the concepts and methods of American participatory journalism;
compared his views on style to those of Hobbes and Swift; and argued that his clear style was
closely related to his moral integrity.

While our country is bitterly divided by radically opposing views on domestic and foreign policy and we
are engaged in an increasingly costly and risky far-off war, we had to vote in a presidential election in
which neither candidate inspired hope or confidence. In London during the Second World War, when the
propaganda war at home raged in concert with the war against Hitler, Orwell felt as many of us feel now.
In his War Diary of April 27, 1942, he recorded: We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or
read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced
judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Is there no one who has both firm
opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the
hands of paranoiacs. Repeatedly struck by the viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy,
Orwell used his journalism to attack politicians lies and blatant fear-mongering tactics, the supine press
and passive public.
Orwell perfected his rhetorical arsenal and lucid but flexible prose style during the political battles of
the 1930s and 1940s, when the threat to Western civilization came from totalitarian and Fascist regimes in
Europe. Today we wage a war on terror, for which the Patriot Act has been passed (both classic
Orwellian locutions) against a shadowy and multinational army of radical Islamists. In Orwell's time
people suffered large-scale bombing and destruction, and after 1945 learned to live with the Cold War
and the threat of nuclear war. In our time we feel nostalgic for the good old days, when the major powers,
at least, had enriched plutonium under lock and key. Terrorist attacks signify an additional loss of security
that affects every aspect of our lives, and we are now led ever deeper into confrontation and danger.
Though he died in 1950, Orwell's ideas about the language and style of politics, expressed in witty
how-to-do-it essays as well as in his weekly political commentary and literary journalism, are not merely
relevant to this moment, but more desperately needed than ever. As Wyndham Lewis wrote in One-Way
Song (1933): These times require a tongue that naked goes, / Without more fuss than Dryden's or
Defoe's. A happy vicar I might have been, wrote Orwell in a reflective poem about that pre-1914
world he had briefly glimpsed in his childhood. His ambition was to create long social novels, and he
also tried almost every other kind of writing. But history and politics claimed him, and his genius was to
write more acutely about politics than anyone had done before.
Orwell, whose books have sold a phenomenal forty million copies in more than sixty languages, was
the most influential prose stylist of the twentieth century. Homage to Catalonia (1938), which showed
that good reporting not only describes the urgent political and military issues but also captures the spirit
of the place, influenced both the concepts and methods of participatory journalism from Mary McCarthy,
Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to Joan Didion, George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe. Kingsley Amis
observed that no modern writer has his air of passionately believing what he has to say and of being
passionately determined to say it as forcefully and simply as possible. Norman Mailer, agreeing with
Amis, maintained: I don't think there's a man writing English today who can't learn how to write a little
better by reading his essays. Even his maxims and instructions on how to write well are superb. Like
Hobbes and Swift, Orwell saw political writing not only as a powerful tool for conveying ideas, but also
as a demanding and enthralling art with a moral imperative to search for truth.
Orwell was obsessed by writing, felt compelled to write and composed with great fluency in an age
that greatly admired authors like Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce and Franz Kafka, who'd tortured
themselves with creative agony. Flaubert, the antithesis of Orwell in his complete lack of political
commitment, thought the artist should have no religion nor fatherland nor even social conviction. No
cause is worth dying for, any government can be lived with, nothing but art may be believed in, and
literature is the only confession. The smoldering indignation of Orwell was also the opposite of the cool
objectivity of Joyce, who said he wrote Dubliners in a style of scrupulous meanness. And his personal
reticence is quite different from Kafka's self-exposure and belief that a book must be the axe for the
frozen sea inside us.
Who, then, was Orwell's model? In an autobiographical note of April 1940, he said the modern
writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of
telling a story straightforwardly and without frills. Both writers advocated direct language and
unambiguous expression, distrusting attempts to dress up facts and ideas to make them more palatable.
They believed that the writer ought to communicate in the clearest possible way and employed a plain
style that appealed to their readers common sense. Maugham wrote that good prose should be like the
clothes of a well-dressed man, appropriate but unobtrusive; Orwell echoed him in his famous simile:
Good prose is like a window pane. Despite their preference for simplicity, both were also deeply
moved when young by the rich sounds and exotic associations of John Milton's high style. Maugham noted
the exultation, the sense of freedom which came to me when first I read in my youth the first few books of
Paradise Lost. Orwell also recalled that when I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of
mere words . The lines from Paradise Lost sent shivers down my backbone.
Like Maugham, Orwell trusted his audience to share his values and understanding of the world, but
had a far more didactic bent, a crusading spirit that sought to cut through cant and intensify political
consciousness. He developed a clear, racy, supple style, fluent and readable, forceful and direct, with a
colloquial ease of expression. The critic Edmund Wilson, defining his essential qualities, praised his
readiness to think for himself, courage to speak his mind, tendency to deal with concrete realities rather
than theoretical positions, and prose style that is both downright and disciplined. The English historian
Veronica Wedgwood elegantly described Orwell's combination of passion and restraint: the strength of
his feelings and his determination that they should not intrude make his style spare and economical, while
his acute observation and sensibility make its very bleakness the more powerful. Orwell's style is spare
but never drab. His vigorous prose, engaging honesty and sly wit immediately engage his readers. And his
literary personalityhis integrity, idealism and commitmentshines through his writing like pebbles in a
clear stream.
Fascinated by every aspect of an author's life, in the course of his all-too-brief career Orwell
discussed the teaching of creative writing, revising one's work, being edited, editing others, author's notes
and the limitations of reviewers. In his As I Please newspaper column in the London Tribune, he
satirized ads for writing courses (which were just beginning in England and have since become
entrenched college courses, even majors, in America). He effectively punctured their pretensions with a
commonsensical question: If these [anonymous] people really knew how to make money out of writing,
why aren't they just doing it instead of peddling their secret at 5/- a time? If Bernard Shaw or J. B.
Priestley offered to teach you how to make money out of writing, you might feel that there was something
in it. But who would buy a bottle of hair restorer from a bald man?
In these days when everybody wants to be a writer (but nobody wants to read, preferring to get
information and interpretation from television news and radio talk shows), it is worth emphasizing that
writing even competently demands diligent effort that few students are prepared to give. In June 1940,
chronically poor and still under pressure to earn money after more than a decade as a writer, Orwell
reflected that his apparent ease of composition had been achieved by years of practice and repetition:
Nowadays, when I write a review, I sit down at the typewriter and type it straight out. Till recently,
indeed till six months ago, I never did this and would have said that I could not do it. Virtually all that I
wrote was written at least twice, and my books as a whole three timesindividual passages as many as
five or ten times.
Reviews and articles kept Orwell's body and soul together as he labored to complete his novels, and
he wrote interestingly on the practical problems of writing for newspapers. As a highly contentious and
polemical writer, hostile to any form of censorship, he loathed cuts that weakened his argument and
changed his meaning, yet had to accept the reality of being edited. The question of editing might be
more difficult, he told his agent. In my experience one can never be sure that one's stuff will get to press
unaltered in any daily or weekly periodical. The Observer, for instance, habitually cuts my articles
without consulting me if there is a last-minute shortage of space. In writing for papers like the Evening
Standard, I have had things not merely cut but actually altered, and of course even a cut always modifies
the sense of an article to some extent. What really matters here is whether or not one is dealing with a
civilized and intelligent paper.
When Orwell took over as literary editor of the Socialist Tribune in November 1943, he found his
desk drawers stuffed with letters and manuscripts which ought to have been dealt with weeks earlier,
and hurriedly shut it up again. As an editor himself, he had a fatal tendency to accept manuscripts which
he knew very well could never be printed, but didn't have the heart to send back. When he considered
manuscripts submitted to the newspaper, he must have remembered Gordon Comstock's bitter rage (in
Orwell's novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936) when his verse was politely rejected: Why be so
bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, We don't want your bloody poems. We only take
poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with. In June 1947 Orwell, an ex-policeman, recalled his
generous weakness as editor and concluded the discussion with a characteristically witty simile: It is
questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an
editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.
Reserved about his private life and wary of improper publicity, Orwell was reluctant to provide
biographical details for his dust jackets and, with a prematurely lined face and idiosyncratic mustache,
didn't think his photograph would be a good advertisement for his books. He justly complained about the
low standards of book critics and told a fellow novelist, Anthony Powell: the reviewers are awful, so
much so that in a general way I prefer the ones who lose their temper & call one names to the silly asses
who mean so well & never bother to discover what you are writing about. Though Animal Farm was
enthusiastically received in 1945, Orwell felt reviewers had missed an essential aspect, compared them
to the villains of his book and called them grudging swine not one of them said it's a beautiful book.
Orwell's primary ambition was to be a writer of fiction, and he carefully studied writers he admired
like Edgar Poe, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyceto learn how they'd achieved their artistic effects.
His account of Poe's realistic fantasy suggests how he created his own convincing futuristic world in
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from
being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is it, then, that [his] stories which might very nearly have
been written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain
framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to
write successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it.
Writing in July 1933 to one of his girlfriends about Lawrence (who'd died, neglected and reviled, in
1930), Orwell tried to account for his powerful, heroically primitive vision: there is a quality about L
that I can't define, but everywhere in his work one comes on passages of an extraordinary freshness,
vividness, so that tho I would never, even given the power, have done it quite like that myself, I feel he
has seized on an aspect of things that no one else would have noticed. He reminds me of someone from
the Bronze Age.
Orwell was passionate about Joyce's Ulysses, which he'd bought when working in Paris and smuggled
into England. In a letter to another girlfriend a year later, he confessed that Joyce interests me so much
that I can't stop talking about him once I start. He was writing his weakest novel, A Clergyman's
Daughter (1935), very much under the influence of Joyce. But he went on to make fun of his work in
comparison to the Master's: My novel, instead of going forwards, goes backwards with the most
alarming speed. There are whole wads of it that are so awful that I really don't know what to do with
them. When I read [Ulysses] 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. He knew that he could not be a Joyce or
a D. H. Lawrence, but realized that he had to keep trying to find his own narrative style.
Lawrence was a great travel writer andlike Joyce in Ulysseshad broken through traditional
restraints with his vivid sexual descriptions in Lady Chatterley's Lover. (Both novels, suppressed on
grounds of obscenity, were only published in England after contentious trials.) But Orwell disliked both
travel books and detailed descriptions of sexual acts. Henry Miller's narcissistic account of his life in
Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi, for example, has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the
fake intensities, the tendency to discover the soul of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring
descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers. And Orwell felt that in a novel by his friend Humphrey
Slater, the sex stuff was out of place and in poor taste, disapproved of this modern habit of describing
love-making in detail, and thought it would one day seem as meaningless as the sentimental gush of
Victorian novels. He was surely right about this modern obsession. Depictions of sex in contemporary
novels and films have become ever more graphic, ugly and depressing.
Orwell's illuminating comments on his own work show how desperately he wanted to be a writer and
how long he had to struggle to become one. He destroyed his early stories and first novel; and after
returning from police duties in Burma, worked as a dishwasher, hop-picker, tutor, teacher and tramp
before publishing his first book, the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), at the
age of twenty-nine. In his introduction to the French translation the following year, he defended the
truthfulness and explained the artistic rearrangement of the incidents in that book: As for the truth of my
story, I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by
selecting. I did not feel I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything
I have described did take place at one time or another.
Orwell found it difficult to invent fictional incidents and wanted to use the events of his early life in
Coming Up for Air (1939), but also saw the technical weakness in telling the story from the hero's point
of view. You are perfectly right, he told a friend, about my own character constantly intruding on that
of the narrator. I am not a real novelist anyway, and that particular vice is inherent in writing a novel in
the first person, which one [i.e., Orwell] should never do. One difficulty I have never solved is that one
has masses of experience which one passionately wants to write about, e.g. the part about fishing in that
book, and no way of using them up except by disguising them as a novel. Orwell felt that he should use
every scrap of his experience in his work. If it couldn't be placed in an essay or review, it ought to be
used up in his fiction.
Most writers, after struggling for seventeen years to achieve literary success, would have remained in
London to be lionized and enjoy their celebrity. But Orwell, immune to the effects of wealth and fame,
couldn't endure the success of Animal Farm in 1945. It didn't match his guilt-ridden idea of himself.
Success also led to the conflict between accepting endless lucrative offers to write for periodicals and
dedicating himself to his more serious books. Nineteen Eighty-Four was beginning to take shape in his
mind, and he wanted to rest for two months and allow the idea to germinate. I am anxious to get out of
London, he wrote a friend, because I am constantly smothered under journalismat present I am doing
4 articles every weekand I want to write another book which is impossible unless I can get 6 months
quiet. Quite unexpectedly, the man who'd always hated Scotland took off for the remote island of Jura in
the Inner Hebrides.
When he finished Nineteen Eighty-Four, under harsh living conditions and with a terminal illness,
Orwell, with his usual honesty, saw the flaws in his work and conceded the vulgarity of the [torture in]
Room IOI business. I was aware of this while writing it, but I didn't know another way of getting
somewhere near the effect I wanted. I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied.
I first thought of it in 1943. I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not
written it under the influence of TB.
Orwell's description of his ghastly treatment in the tuberculosis sanatorium is very close to his
portrayal of Winston Smith after his torture in the novel and reveals Orwell's horrific condition when
completing the book: the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs
was as narrow as that of a skeleton. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders
were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double
under the weight of the skull. He was aware of his ugliness. When Orwell was in the sanatorium, the
doctors had to take extreme measures to prevent him from writing. The medical staff, insisting on
complete physical and mental rest, confiscated his typewriter. When he kept on writing with a ballpoint
pen, they put his right arm in plaster.
Orwell, usually able to write four serious articles a week (or about 200 articles a year!), was a
desperately driven and manically compulsive writer. In one of his most revealing passages (in a notebook
of 1949), he confessed, despite his extraordinary output, that he always felt guilty about his work and
fearful that his creative energy would dry up:

[Since I started publishing in 1928] there has literally not been one day in which I did not feel that I
was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even
at periods when I was working Io hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I
have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling, that I was wasting time. I can never get
 any sense of achievement out of the work that is actually in progress, because it always goes slower
than I intend, & in any case I feel that a book or even an article does not exist until it is finished. But
as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is
not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there never will be a next onethat my impulse is
exhausted for good & all.

Though guilt made Orwell miserable, it also energized him and drove him to produce his impressive body
of work.
Orwell completed the final draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in November 1948, but found it too
indecipherable to send to a typist. His friends desperately tried to find a London secretary to go to Jura.
Despite intensive efforts, no one was willing to help the distinguished author type his extraordinary
manuscripteven at two or three times the going rate of pay. He had to sit up in bed typing the final copy
of the 150,000-word novel, finally collapsed and went into hospital. Mortally ill when Nineteen Eighty-
Four was published in June 1949, he died seven months later, before he could enjoy his newfound wealth.
The creation of the novel virtually killed Orwell, and its vision of the future (by a man who himself had
no future) is correspondingly grim. It's not surprising that in Why I Write he exclaimed that writing a
book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

II

Orwell had limited success in creating a credible first-person narrator in his fiction, but the lively
persona he created in his nonfiction made essays his most successful genre. His essays on writing fall into
three main categories: the writer's life, popular literature and the search for truth. These essaysand
three passages from his novelscover many aspects of writing and reading, or how to deconstruct the
meaning and purpose of pieces of writing: the deceptions of advertising, techniques of book reviewing,
writers income and authors motives; the brutality of crime novels, definition of humor, mediocre but
enduringly popular books and children's literature; the creation of new words, effects of propaganda,
genesis of satire, suppression of literature, purity of language, relation between content and pleasure,
political pamphlets, keeping a diary and rewriting history.
With a keen nose for the bogus, Orwell saw early on the falsity and fraudulence of the newly spawned
advertising agencies that serve the corporate economy and would eventually contaminate the media.
Orwell, who'd been to school with the advertising innovator David Ogilvy, had amused himself in
childhood by answering a fake ad for a weight-reducing course and, by pretending to be an obese lady,
had deliberately prolonged the cheeky correspondence. Do come before ordering your summer frocks,
the weight-reducer insisted, as after taking my course your figure will have altered out of recognition.
This went on for some time, he recalled, during which the fee gradually sank from two guineas to half a
crown, and then I brought the matter to an end by writing to say that I had been cured of my obesity by a
rival agency.
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying Orwell's embittered hero and would-be poet Gordon Comstock is
forced by poverty to take a humiliating job as a hack writer in a cynical, hard-boiled, Americanized
advertising agency. He calls it the dirtiest swindle of capitalism, and (in a homely farm metaphor) the
rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. When the boss discovers that Comstock has published poetry, he
promotes him to copy-editor and launches him on a successful career. Fearful that he'll be trapped by
blind worship of the money-god, Gordon manages to escape. But when his girlfriend Rosemary
becomes pregnant during their plein air frolics, he feels obliged to marry her and is trapped once again in
his old job.
Orwell's family in Southwold and Leeds, and visitors to his London flat and house on the Scottish
island of Jura, emphasized how hard he worked and how he constantly pounded away at the typewriter.
The endless clacking sound became part of his legend. But no one ever mentioned him sitting quietly (if
not comfortably, for he thrived on hardship) in a chair and actually reading the books he was reviewing.
The chief bore (he felt) was having to read at least fifty pages of each book to avoid making a howler, but
he eventually learned to skip expertly through these useless volumes.
He begins the autobiographical Confessions of a Book Reviewer like a short storywith himself as
the satiric victim. Looking (like Orwell) much older than his age and plagued by unpaid bills, predatory
creditors and tax demands, the literary hack tries in vain to write his way out of poverty as a book
reviewer. Since most books are worthless yet somehow have to be praised, Orwell calls book reviewing
a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. To alleviate this tedium, he advocates
fewer but longer reviews; and claims that the book reviewer is, at least, better off than the film critic
(who has to praise a greater proportion of trash). Since there's an endless supply of amateurs eager to
break into print, there will always be desperate men willing to have a shot at the disparate books that, the
editor falsely claims, ought to go well together.
Most of Orwell's fictional heroes are impoverished and (like Charles Dickens and George Gissing)
he puts a great deal of emphasis on money, or the lack of it. In August 1941, when he took a job at the
BBC and earned a salary of 640 a year, for the first time since 1925 he made more money than he had as
a policeman in Burma. A writer like Gordon Comstock usually has to have another job. In The Cost of
Letters Orwell, always the Socialist, states that a writer should ideally have 1,000 a year, which would
enable him to live in reasonable comfort without joining the privileged class. He concedes that it's almost
impossible to earn this income solely by writing books; and that a second occupation, useful for putting
the author in touch with the real world, should be non-literary. He'd been strongly discouraged by his
conventional family, who were horrified by his resignation from his secure job in the Burmese police, and
recalls that I had to struggle desperately at the beginning, and if I had listened to what people said to me I
would never have been a writer.
Orwell's instinctive approach to literary topics was moral. He analyzed crime novels in Raffles and
Miss Blandish to reveal the social and political dimensions of popular art. In a classic contrast he argues
that there was an immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two works of fiction (the
Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, beginning in 1899, and No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James
Hadley Chase, in 1939) and discusses the change in the popular attitude that this probably implies. The
first had an almost schoolboy atmosphere; the second, full of cruelty and corruption, was a header into
the cesspool. There are, however, perverse elements in Orwell's condemnation. He loathed Chase's
fictional character, whose sole pleasure in life consists in driving knives into other people's bellies but,
as he himself sadistically wrote in Shooting an Elephant, as a young policeman in Burma he thought the
greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. He blames the
horrors of James Hadley Chase on the American obsession with violencethough the author was in fact
English. Connecting his thesis to wartime politics, Orwell argues that Chase's obsession with the struggle
for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak reveals the interconnection between sadism,
masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism.
Just as Raffles and Miss Blandish explains the moral and stylistic decline of crime novels, Funny,
But Not Vulgar defines comedy and describes the decline of English humorous writing from the
nineteenth to the twentieth century. Humor, Orwell observes with many lively examples, must show a
willingness to attack the beliefs and the virtues on which society necessarily rests and dare to upset the
established order. All comedy attacks social evils, and in order to be funny you have to be serious and
include an element of vulgarity.
Good Bad Books reveals Orwell's nostalgia for the idyllic prewar era of his youth as well as his
keen interest in popular escape literature. Like his previous essays, it also attempts to explain the
decline of the contemporary novel. Good bad books (a term he borrowed from G. K. Chesterton) show
that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take
seriously, and that art is not the same thing as cerebration. Despite Orwell's valiant attempt to revive
interest in out-ofdate popular fiction, only Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker's Dracula,
Rider Haggard's She and perhaps Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabinall of which have been
made into filmsare still in print and read today.
Riding Down from Bangor, closely related to Good Bad Books, describes Orwell's strong
attraction to works like Helen's Babies and Little Women that formed his childhood vision of America.
The characters in these books, though slightly ridiculous, have integrity, or good morale, founded partly
on an unthinking piety a native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling, which was the product, presumably,
of the unheard-of freedom and security of nineteenth-century America. He's nostalgic about the lost
world of these books that have no hint of the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man:
unemployment and State interference. When Orwell, a new boy at his preparatory school, had to stand on
a table in the dormitory and sing a song, he sang Riding Down from Bangor, the American folksong he
quotes in the essay.
In 1942 Orwell wrote that Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to
the language. But in Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell also invented many vivid phrases: Big Brother Is
Watching You, Two Minutes Hate, Thought Police, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime. Doublethink,
Memory Hole, Vaporized and Unperson. These words, which uncannily expressed the ideas and
emotions of people living under totalitarian oppression, read like advertising catchwords. They became
political shorthand during the Cold War, and remain so today.
In New Words Orwell ventures into the realm of dreams and psychology, argues for the expansion
of language and boldly but impractically suggests that it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary,
perhaps amounting to several thousands of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now
practically unamenable to language. Just as the French Academy was created in the seventeenth century
to preserve the purity of language, so, Orwell argues, several thousands of people with the necessary
time, talents and money could, by dedicating themselves to this noble task, create new words for the
now unnamed things [intuitions, fantasies, dreams] that exist in the mind. Through this unrealistic project
Orwell hoped to increase understanding through language and reduce the star-like isolation in which
human beings live.
The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda considers the influence of history on literature and explains
why English writers have shifted from an interest in form over content in the 1920s to the reverse in the
1930s. Minimizing the military, political and social effects of the Great War, which shattered a century of
relative peace in Europe and killed ten million men, Orwell argues that it was the Depression and the
Second World War that forced writers into a world in which not only one's life but one's whole scheme
of values is constantly menaced. Detachment is no longer possible and literature had to become
political because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty. Propaganda has crept into art and
aesthetic judgments are now influenced by the author's prejudices and beliefs.
Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm describes the genesis of his most humorous
and wickedly satiric book. As in Why I Write, he describes his backgroundincluding his five years
with the police in Burma, association with the criminal class in Paris and warfare in Spainto explain
his political beliefs. His experience in Spain taught him about the great dangers to clear style and free
thought: how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic
countries and the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement. His duty,
he felt, was to expose the illusions created by such propaganda, make people see the Soviet rgime for
what it really was and destroy the Soviet myth in order to revive the real Socialist movement. Inspired
by seeing a little boy whip a huge farm horse, Orwell imagined a revolution of oppressed beasts and
analyzed Marx's theory from the animals point of view.
Orwell's lucid, witty and ironic style is perfectly suited to his political allegory of the Russian
Revolution. In Animal Farm the actual writing of political slogans takes place after the revolution. The
pigs, Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), become literate, reduce the principles of Animalism to
seven commandments, and use writing to manipulate the animals and consolidate their political power. As
the revolution is gradually betrayed and the pigs replace the oppressive farmer they have overthrown,
each of these sacred rules is broken. Finally, the horse Clover realizes that the last and most important
commandmentAll animals are equalhas also been changed to ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT
SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS. The most famous phrase in his fable,
rewritten by the shrewd, self-serving pigs, combines Thomas Jefferson's fundamental concept in the
Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, with Eve's command to the serpent in Milton's
Paradise Lost: render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior. The
defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish War taught him that history is written by the winners. His own
minimal achievement, while working as a talks producer at the wartime BBC, was to keep our
propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.
Several of Orwell's essays explore the conditions that allow or prevent the freedom of expression
(and freedom from self-censorship) that's essential for good writing to exist. The polemical Prevention
of Literature considers the more insidious factors, apart from totalitarianism, that mitigate against the
creation of great, or even honest literature. It also anticipates Orwell's portrayal of Winston Smith's job in
Nineteen Eighty-Four: rewriting and perverting history in order to adhere to the ever-changing party line.
In England, he argues, the immediate enemies of truthfulness and hence freedom of thought, are the press
lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty
among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all. All literature is political in an age
like his own, when fears, hatreds and loyalties affect everyone's beliefs. In one of his most striking
sentences, he insists that a writer must have freedom of thought and oppose the prevailing doctrines in
order to create serious work: to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one
thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox. Literature is doomed if liberty of thought
perishes. The assumption that the act of writing is in itself a political act runs through all Orwell's work.
In a 1946 review of a book by the novelist Georges Bernanos, Orwell, always ready to expose poor
style, noted: a tendency towards rhetoricthat is, a tendency to say everything at enormous length and at
once forcibly and vaguelyseems to be a common failing with present-day French writers. His classic
essay Politics and the English Language opposes this trend and forcefully advocates clear language.
Orwell's ideas were foreshadowed by Leviathan (1651), the major work of the English political
philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, who had also attacked the abuse of words, argued that a sane,
stable society must have a clear, stable language and believed that pure style was not only good in itself
but also a civil duty. Writing during the English civil war, in an elegant and balanced style, Hobbes
insisted that clear words benefited society while confused and confusing style could lead to seditious
disruption:
 The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definition first snuffed, and purged
from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the
end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui
[delusions]; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their
ends, contention and sedition, or contempt.

Hobbes also observed that the misuse of words and creation of meaningless speechalso the subject
of Orwell's essaywere intended to deceive rather than enlighten readers:

There is yet another fault in the discourses of some men; which may also be numbered amongst the
sorts of madness; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before by the name of
absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at
all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and
repeat by rote; by others from intention to deceive by obscurity.

E. M. Forster, himself a notable stylist and, in A Passage to India, a major influence on Burmese
Days (1934), wrote that in Politics and the English Language Orwell was passionate over the purity of
prose, and tears to bits some passages of contemporary writing. It is a dangerous game but it ought
to be played, for if prose decays, thought decays and all the finer roads of communication are broken.
Liberty, he argues, is connected with prose.
Orwell begins his practical advice to writers by giving five examples of bad contemporary prose,
characterized by stale imagery and lack of precise meaning. He then lists (with convincing examples) four
common faults, a catalogue of swindles and perversions that conceal and prevent rather than express
clear thought: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs (including the use of passive rather than active voice
and awkward noun constructions rather than gerunds), pretentious diction and meaningless words. He
insists that a careful, thoughtful writer will always ask six essential questions about everything he writes:

What am I trying to say?

What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is unavoidably ugly?

It's worth noting, as Orwell would say, that he enlivens his essay on the evils of bad writing with a
number of striking satirical similes. He compares dead language to tea-leaves blocking a sink, to soft
snow blurring sharp outlines, to cuttlefish spurting out ink and to cavalry horses mechanically answering
the call of a bugle.
Orwell's six stylistic rules (he seems fond of the number six) are worth repeating and should be
carved in stone above every writer's desk:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
 v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an
everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

As we all know from the speeches we hear every day, it is possible to obey all these rules and write
persuasively, with all the appearance of clarity and strength, yet still be an outrageous liar. In his rules for
writing Orwell assumes that the author wants to tell the truth. He believed that the consistent and
courageous attempt to find the simplest and most direct way of communicating an idea would keep a
person honest. In an observation that equally describes government propaganda today, he concludes that in
his time political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Perhaps the most
appealing quality of this essay is Orwell's daring to suggest that politics doesn't have to be dirty, and that
the language we use can be a powerful force for order and understanding, for choosing the right thing to
do.
In his Imaginary Interview with Jonathan Swift, published in the Listener in November 1942,
Orwell said that Gulliver's Travels has meant more to me than any other book ever written. I can't
remember when I first read it, I must have been eight years old at the most, and it's lived with me ever
since so that I suppose a year has never passed without my re-reading at least part of it. Swift, a major
influence on Orwell's ideas about writing, also wrote three important essays about the need to preserve
clear style and eliminate corrupt language. In On Corruptions of Style (1710)essential reading for
anyone who wants to write good proseSwift, like Hobbes, followed the tradition of English plain style.
He attacked senseless, convoluted wit and condemned words and phrases that are offensive to good
sense.
Swift's Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue (1712) unrealistically hoped to arrest the
decline of language and preserve (his editor wrote) a sanctioned standard language, in order to give
permanent life to all written records. Anticipating Orwell's plan in New Words to create an informal
academy to study language, Swift proposed a strict English Academy (modeled on the well-established
Academy in France) dedicated to eliminating useless words. They will observe many gross
Improprieties, which however authorized by Practice, and grown familiar, ought to be discarded. They
will find many Words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of Our language; many more to be corrected.
In his Letter to a Young Gentleman, lately entered into Holy Orders (1721), Swift, an old gentleman,
long in holy orders, expressed his clearest ideas about style, which he classically defined as Proper
Words in Proper Places. (In New Words Orwell, echoing Swift, defines good style as taking the right
words and putting them in place.) Swift emphasized clarity, particularly disliked the use of obscure
terms and urged the young clergyman to address his congregation in a manner to be understood by the
meanest among them.
Orwell's Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels considers the inter-
connection between Swift's political loyalties and his ultimate despair and the relationship between
agreement with a writer's opinions, and enjoyment of his work. He discusses the changes in Gulliver's
character in the four parts of this rancorous, reactionary and pessimistic book, as well as Swift's hatred of
the human body, his paradoxical denunciation of oppression but dislike of democracy, his reverence for
the past, lack of belief in religion or progress and his scorn for humanity. For Orwell the most significant
aspect of Gulliver's Travels and Swift's greatest contribution to political thought is his attack on
totalitarianism: he has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted police State, with its
endless heresy-hunts and treason trials.
Swift had a profound impact on Orwell's political fiction. Taking a hint from Swift's rational horses,
he idealized the horses in Animal Farm, and transformed Swift's Floating Island of Laputa into the
Floating Fortress in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He mentions that books were written by machinery in
Gulliver's Travels and in The Prevention of Literature says it would not be beyond human ingenuity to
write books by machinery. Orwell, like Swift, was a Tory anarchist, a revolutionary in love with the
past, but he was not a complete pessimist. In Why I Write Orwell states: as long as I remain alive and
well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take
pleasure in solid objects. In Politics vs. Literature, by contrast, he emphasizes Swift's inability to
believe that lifeordinary life on the solid earthcould be made worth living.
Orwell owned hundreds of political pamphlets, and in his essay on pamphlet literature, published in
1943, he exclaimed: the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time
when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on
a scale never before known. For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form. His
introduction to a co-edited anthology British Pamphleteers (1948) advocates (like Good Bad Books)
another minor but valuable kind of writing. Closely connectedin comparative method and argumentto
Politics and the English Language, it forcefully laments the current decay of English and the
corresponding decline of the pamphlet. After defining the topical and polemical pamphlet, rarely
concerned with evidence or truth and essentially a protest expressed through exuberant argument and
scurrilous attacks, he sums up the horrors of capitalism in a single, rhetorically effective sentence.
Wherever one looks, he exclaims, one sees fiercer struggles than the Crusades, worse tyrannies than
the Inquisition, and bigger lies than the Popish Plot. His age (like ours) cries out for political pamphlets
but the form, to Orwell's deep regret, has virtually died out.
Orwell's political point of view informed all his criticism and fiction. Why I Write, his
retrospective artistic credo, begins with a brief account of his early life, including a description of his
first novel, Burmese Days, in order to explain his four great motives for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic
enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. In a letter of 1938 he added, in amusingly cynical
American diction, pulling in the dough. He might also have mentioned, as he did in a review of John
Galsworthy, some minor trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, that gave him the urge to write. He
called the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought on the Loyalist side and was shot through the throat, the
great turning point in his life. After that, he said, every line of his serious workand in his view no work
could be serious without a political purposewas written against totalitarianism and for democratic
Socialism. His conscious aim was to transform political writing into an art.
Most of Orwell's essays on writingparticularly New Words, The Frontiers of Art and
Propaganda and Politics and the English Languageprefigure the ideas that he dramatized in Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Fond of making political prophecies and honestly willing to admit his mistakes, Orwell
urged readers to keep a diaryas Winston Smith does in the novelnot only to recover and preserve the
past, but also to maintain an accurate perspective on the truth: To see what is in front of one's nose needs
a constant struggle. One thing that helps towards it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of
record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is
exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.
Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Winston Smith is absorbed into the hateful
system he'd once opposed, and expresses his anxiety in two kinds of composition. He professionally
destroys the work of others while secretly writing his own work. In his job Winston alters the records of
the past to fit Party policy. In private, he writes on the creamy paper of an old diary with an old-fashioned
pen and ink. The first kind of writing (like Orwell's at the BBC) is mechanical and exhausting, the second
(like Orwell's own creative writing) is psychologically liberating, but also sets off disturbing memories
and dreams. The first is systematic lying in Newspeak, the second a passionate search for truth in
Oldspeak. Orwell contrasts the mindless, bureaucratic attitude Winston needs to do this work with his
panic at the blank sheet of paper, his poor handwriting, his mental and emotional confusion when he starts
writing for himself. Winston's work forces him to practice Doublethink, the ability to hold
simultaneously two contradictory opinions which cancel each other out. Winston has to believe that he's
rectifying errors, yet also knows that he's falsifying information. Each kind of writing forces him to find a
plausible formula to disguise the truth. Winston is manipulated by the system and, in his role of Outer
Party intellectual, is also part of the system that manipulates others.
The word Orwellian constantly appeared in 2003, Orwell's centenary year, and has become
essential to our political discourse. But the term is ambiguous. In the negative sense, it stands for the kind
of oppressive totalitarian regime that he created in Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially political
manipulation of the media to deceive the public. In the positive sense, it suggests the personal honesty,
bravery and idealism in both his life and his writing. For Orwell, writing has two essential aspects. The
first concerns an individual writer (like Winston Smith) who sits down alone to communicate his most
secret thoughts, even to an unknown future reader. He must have courage and dedication, and an optimistic
belief in his own ideas. The second concerns the writer's desire and power to ameliorate society. For
Orwell clear language and independent thought were an aesthetic as well as a moral responsibility.
Ironically, Orwell's subtle and morally acute lessons on how to read and write have been
misunderstood and misapplied after his death. Neoconservatives have singled out his warnings about the
totalitarian aspects of the Socialist state and claimed him as one of their own. A recent account of the
Cold War described Nineteen Eighty-Four as the canonical text of conservative anti-Communism, as
the key imaginative manifesto of the Cold War and gave Orwell credit for having invented a
complete poetics of political invective. Willfully obscuring the complexity of its vision, this reduces the
novel to a clever piece of propaganda. More grotesquely, the John Birch Society used to sell his novel in
its Washington office and even used 1984 as the last digits of its telephone number.
Since Orwell himself was so scrupulous about his own limitations as a political observer and
criticized the Left as sharply as the Right, it is easy to cite his ideas out of context and simply ignore his
professed belief in democratic Socialism. Like devout Mormons baptizing their helpless ancestors, the
neo-cons, by trying to co-opt him, have missed the whole point of his life and work. In an anxious,
atheistic age like our own, he resisted the temptation to submit to religious or political dogma, and
believed that ordinary people had to participate in the conduct of political life. Despite his vast influence,
Orwell was never part of a movement, and remained a solitary, individualistic writer with a stubborn
message: think for yourself and write the truth.
In a famous statement the eighteenth-century French naturalist Count Buffon said: the style is the man
himself. Like his hero Jonathan Swift and other writers of the Enlightenment, Orwell derived his clear
style from moral integrity. There was in Orwell an unusual consistency between the gritty, combative
persona that emanates from his lucid writing and his courageous, civilized and intellectually truthful
character. His description of Charles Dickens, another of his literary heroes, applies equally to himself:
In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root.
The strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. As a
matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere. Dickens, Orwell observes,
has the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not
frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry a free intelligence, a type hated with equal
hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls. Irving Howe summed
up Orwell as craggy, fiercely polemical, sometimes mistaken, but an utterly free man. In his readiness to
stand alone and take on all comers, he was a model for every writer of our age. Orwell belongs with
Johnson, Blake and Lawrence in the great English tradition of prophetic moralists.
NINETEEN

ORWELL's SATIRIC HUMOR

My three general essays (of which this is the third) were written after my analyses of Orwell's
major works. Though it's difficult to explain jokes, this piece showed that Gloomy George
could be quite funny and lightened his dark warnings with sardonic wit. He used many different
kinds of humorfrom puns and obscenities to sexual innuendoes and suggestions of perversity
to express his political beliefs.

Orwell called the doom-laden Thirties a riot of appalling folly that suddenly becomes a nightmare, a
scenic railway ending in a torture-chamber, and wrote that since about 1930 everyone describable as an
intellectual has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Everywhere, he
exclaimed in 1940, there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm. For him, to think was to be
miserable.
Gloomy George (as friends called him) was tubercular, guilt-ridden, masochistic and self-destructive.
He relished physical discomfort and was extremely pessimistic. John Carey writes that Orwell was
personally prickly, diffident, ill at ease with ordinary people. His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin
called him a skeleton at the feast and recalled that in pubs Orwell used to sit in a corner by himself,
looking like death. Noel Annan said that he remained a biting, bleak, self-critical, self-denying man.
Though never a bundle of laughs, Orwell had a lively sense of humor. He revealed another, more
human, side of his austere character when he lightened his dark warnings with an idiosyncratic, sardonic
English wit. Using different voices, from charming to cruel, and always finely tuned to the chronic
problems of his age, he consoled his readers for his grim message that conditions would not change and
might even get worse. His humor expressed his intelligence and showed that he was still alive and
protesting, no matter how grim the state of the world.
Orwell in person could be unintentionally comical. The poet Ruth Pitter recalled the young writer
earnestly but awkwardly trying to get started, desperately in search of material and ludicrous in his
attempts to use it: We lent him an old oil-stove and he wrote a story about two young girls who lent an
old man an oil-stove. One story that never saw the light of day began Inside the park, the crocuses
were out. Oh dear, I'm afraid we did laugh. He later satirized his own behavior in the absurdities of his
fictional characters.
In his forties Orwell affected working-class habits and a cockney accent, much to the amusement of
his colleagues, to show his kinship with the working class. In the BBC canteen during World War II he
would pour his tea into a saucer and drink it with loud slurping sounds. During the war he shared the
austerity and deprivation of ordinary people by eating the worst food he could possibly find. The more
wretched the dish, the more cheerful he became. He'd gobble up over-boiled cod with bitter turnip tops
and annoy his dining companions by gleefully remarking, I'd never have thought they'd have gone so well
together! He once even ate boiled eels that his wife had left for the cat and found them quite tasty.
Arguing with an Indian colleague in the BBC Eastern Service in a self-consciously cockney voice, Orwell
could be heard through the thin partitions insisting, The FACK that you're black and that I'm white has
nudding whadever to do wiv it. His fake accent made the gauche yet well-intentioned remark hilarious.
Orwell was not afraid to offend people when forcefully expressing his ideas. In his essay Funny, But
Not Vulgar, he insisted that humor was essentially serious: A thing is funny whenin some way that is
not actually offensive or frighteningit upsets the established order. All great humorous writers show
a willingness to attack the beliefs and the virtues on which society necessarily rests. In fact, the more
shockingly offensive he became, the funnier he was.

II

In his essays, journalism and letters Orwell used all the weapons in his humorous arsenal, from the subtle
to the crude, to enhance his polemical arguments and persuade readers that he was speaking the truth.
Recalling his schooldays, he challenged the assumptions about British superiority by mocking the
mindless way that history, rigidly divided into periods, had been taught: in 1499 you were still in the
Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the
clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and
doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main. Using familiar clichs about each
historical period, he satirized the supposedly instant transition from one age to another, when every class
wore exactly the same costume and scarcely had time to change from clanking armor to velvety doublets.
(Nineteen Eighty-Four, by the way, opens as the clocks were striking thirteen.)
He loved to drive home his point with the schoolboy slang he'd perfected at prep school and Eton and
with the colloquial language he'd learned as a policeman and a tramp. When contrasting British and
American crime novels in Raffles and Miss Blandish, he turned from a genteel to a brutal book and
expressed his moral and physical disgust for the latter by using a shocking metaphor and comparing it to a
dive into the slime: So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool. He liked to yoke
disparate images together for comic effect. He first called the atmosphere of the BBC something halfway
between a girls school and a lunatic asylum, then sharpened this image by defining it as a mixture of
whoreshop and lunatic asylum. Though the comparison seems far fetched, he believed he was
prostituting his talents by working under an absurdly bureaucratic regime and broadcasting wartime
propaganda to India, which had very few radios.
Orwell, who thought of himself as unattractive, mocked buildings, statues and even people he disliked
by calling them ugly. In one of his As I Please columns, he wrote that if you climb the hill in Greenwich
Park, which had several handsome works by Sir Christopher Wren, you can have the mild thrill of
standing directly on longitude 0, and you can also examine the ugliest building in the world, Greenwich
Observatory that shapeless sprawling muddle at the top of the hill. The climber would be rewarded
not with a handsome prospect, but (as Orwell challenges the reader to think of an uglier building) with a
hideous astronomical observatory that ruins the mild thrill.
Referring to the monument of the famous hymn writer, Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta, Orwell
told a friend, if you are ever near St. Paul's [cathedral] & feel in a gloomy mood, go in & have a look at
the statue of the first Protestant bishop of India, which will give you a good laugh. Orwell was amused
not only by the statue, but also by the very idea of a Christian bishop preaching (as Orwell did at the
BBC) to the Hindu masses.
Orwell also used humor (as well as quirky behavior) to cut the upper classes down to size by
connecting them, with deliberate absurdity, with physical ugliness. Looking through the photographs in
the New Year's Honours List, he wrote, I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and
vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the
right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst
like a tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer. Contrasting the tentative it seems with the definitive the
rule and inventing a fanciful aristocratic name, he placed those honored by the King between two
distinctly lower-class types: a fat bartender and a dyspeptic tax-hound. He then zeroed in on a particularly
distinguished personage, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian newspaper tycoon and wartime minister of
supply, who actually had a simian countenance. Suggesting that the minister was being manipulated by the
government, he wrote that Beaverbrook looked more like a monkey on a stick than you would think
possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.
Recalling his grim experience as a dishwasher in an expensive Parisian restaurant, Orwell took
gleeful pleasure in describing disgusting acts that were motivated by class hatred. In Down and Out in
Paris and London (1933) he revealed that a French cook will spit in the soup and that a waiter proudly
told him that he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer's soup before taking it in, just to
be revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie. The waiter not only upset the expectations of haute
cuisine, but also took grim pleasure in watching the customer consume the polluted soup. Orwell
concluded with a startling though irrefutable premise: Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the
more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.
In addition to schoolboy slang, the adolescent mockery of physical ugliness and delight in disgusting
details, Orwell also took pleasure in practical jokes. He had amused himself in childhood by answering a
fake advertisement for a weight-reducing course and, pretending to be an obese matron, had deliberately
prolonged the cruel correspondence. Do come before ordering your summer frocks, the weight-reducer
insisted, as after taking my course your figure will have altered out of recognition. This went on for
some time, he recalled, during which time the fee gradually sank from two guineas to half a crown, and
then I brought the matter to an end by writing to say that I had been cured of my obesity by a rival agency.
In this diverting playlet, the adult advertiser assumes that the cheeky schoolboy is actually the sort of
woman who orders frocks from her dressmaker each season instead of buying them off the rack in a shop.
Her fee is as sharply reduced as his figure is supposed to be. Never revealing that his fraud matched her
own, Orwell neither enrolled in the promising course nor rejected it. Instead, he twisted the knife by
claiming to default to another agency. The advertiser, promising a radical transformation, thinks she's
deceiving Orwell but is herself deceived.
Orwell's humor could be self-deprecating in a characteristically English way. In his autobiographical
first novel, Burmese Days (1934), he portrays the comical aspect of a humiliating incident. Flory,
courting Elizabeth and taking her through the jungle, shoots a leopard, seems heroic and achieves a long-
sought moment of intimacy with her. He promises to cure and give her this symbolic trophy, but is
horrified to discover that the skin had been utterly ruined. It was as stiff as cardboard, with the leather
cracked and the fur discoloured and even rubbed off in patches. It also stank abominably. Instead of being
cured, it had been converted into a piece of rubbish.
Flory, of course, should have thrown it away and pretended he'd lost it. But, desperate to see
Elizabeth, he feels compelled, in an extremely awkward scene, to present it to her: It looked so shabby
and miserable that he wished he had never brought it. She stepped back with a wince of disgust, having
caught the foul odour of the skin. It shamed him terribly. It was almost as though it had been himself and
not the skin that stank. Elizabeth, edging away from him, is predictably horrified by the disgusting hide
and by the offensive smell that seems to drift from the skin to Flory himself. This incident terminates all
hope of marrying a girl who is, though he doesn't realize it, quite shallow and worthless.
Courting a girl in England when starting out as a writer and using a comically far-fetched image,
Orwell compared his own work to Joyce's great novel. When I read Ulysses, he said, 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 a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak
just the same as ever. Taking a course in voice production is as useless as the weight-reducing course
and only gives the impression of being what Joyce (alluding to a brand of ale) called a bass barreltone.
(In any case, a truly ambitious eunuch would try to become a countertenor.) Orwell freely admits that his
literary faults are all too clear and that, compared to Joyce, he's a castrato.
Orwell often used satiric wit to expose the faults of the literary world. Reviewing Cyril Connolly's
novel The Rock Pool (1936), he defined, in a neatly phrased alliterative sentence, the moral chasm
between himself and his old friend: even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy
what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy. Exploiting the sexual
suggestion of spending sperm, Orwell exposed Connolly's arty frauds as both parasites and buggers.
Orwell could be both a blunt Englishman and a supercilious Etonian. In a review of The Hamlet in
1940, he put down William Faulkner by satirizing the perverse, Southern Gothic characters: people with
supremely hideous namesnames like Flem Snopes and Eck Snopessit about on the steps of village
stores, chewing tobacco, swindling one another in small business deals, and from time to time committing
a rape or a murder. The wit derives from the casual way in which these revolting characters
progressively degenerate from disgusting habits to minor frauds to violent crimes.
Orwell began to write after returning from Burma in 1928, but did not achieve success until he
published Animal Farm in 1945. In the course of his long struggle a lot of his work was rejected and his
animal fable turned down by T. S. Eliot himself. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) Orwell, who did
not go on to university after Eton and remained a perennial outsider, pierced the polite faade and
exposed the snobbery and clubbyness of literary life. Once again, he contrasted opposite extremes of
discourseexcessive delicacy and brutal franknessto drive home his point. His hero Gordon
Comstock, bitterly enraged after his rather feeble poem has been rejected by an editor, asks: Why be so
bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, We don't want your bloody poems. We only take
poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with.
When Orwell became literary editor of the Socialist newspaper Tribune in 1943, he didn't have the
heart to send out rejections and meekly accepted manuscripts he knew he could never print. In another
deliberately absurd comparison, the ex-colonial policeman used a prison metaphor to show that a
reversal of roles would be fatally anarchic if a mere writer were suddenly promoted to a position of
power: It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to
become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.
One of Orwell's most famous political anecdotes anticipated a major theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
the slavish submission to authoritarian rule. In August 1939, after Hitler signed the nonaggression pact
with Stalin, which allowed him to invade Poland and start World War II, he was, according to the
Communist Party line, suddenly transformed from an enemy into a friend. In June 1941, after betraying the
mutually treacherous pact by invading Russia, he once again became an enemy. Stressing the mindless
loyalty of Party members, Orwell recorded in July 1941 that when the news of Hitler's invasion of
Russia reached a New York caf where some Communists were talking, one of them who had gone out to
the lavatory returned to find that the party line had changed in his absence. Orwell emphasized the
extreme suddenness of the Communist's mind-change by connecting his high-minded political beliefs with
an ill-timed trip to the toilet.

III

During the last half of Orwell's career, as his books became darker and more pessimistic, he introduced
humor to relieve the gloom and make his ideas more palatable. He began The Road to Wigan Pier (1937),
his account of coal miners lives in the industrial Midlands, with a description of the revolting tripe shop
and the equally horrible lodging house above it. In the shop that sold sheep's stomachs, the food of the
poor, there was a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known
as black tripe, and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled. Using a Latinate word, he
contrasted the cloudy stuff with the translucent trotters, which seem even worse when boiled and ready to
eat.
Incongruously joining excretion with ingestion, Orwell wrote of the lodging-house: On the day when
there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to
depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless
decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just
like blackbeetles. It's comical that he endured these horrors for some time before he decided to depart
and that even then it was only beginning to depress him. The power of this passagewith the hapless
Orwell quite willing to live in such a dumpintensifies during his progressive descent from squalor to
stagnant decay to subterranean existence to subhuman creeping to repulsive blackbeetles.
In the autobiographical second half of this book, which explains why he became a Socialist, Orwell
took a few cracks at the lunatic fringe of that political movement. The food-crank, he wrote of wheat-
germ and tofu eaters, is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of
adding five years on to the life of his carcase. Instead of making himself useful to society, the crank
solipsistically concentrates on his own carcass, whichmetaphoricallyis already dead.
Orwell could not resist lashing out, in a hilariously exaggerated broadside, against his particular
btes noires, the creepy eunuchs in pansy-left circles who followed the crankish homosexual crusader
Edward Carpenter. In his most notoriously offensive passage, which aroused howls of protest, he poured
vitriol on every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack,
pacifist and feminist in England. He also condemned all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and
sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of progress like
bluebottles to a dead cat. Finally, he rubbed salt in the wounds by wishing that all the sandals and the
pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler, and creeping
Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City [a dreary planned community] to do his yoga exercises quietly!
Orwell's clever catalogue connected all sorts of weirdos to quackery in dress (or undress), food, sex,
religion and ideology. He personally favored drab wooly steerage garb and was especially irritated by
the brightly colored, open-necked shirts that oddballs wore at Socialist summer schools. He was so
incensed by bearded fruit-juicers and sandal-wearers that he condemned them several times, and stressed
their life-denying joylessness by comparing them to bluebottles (a variant of the disgusting blackbeetles)
swarming over the carcass of a cat.
George Bowling, the engaging hero of Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell's last prewar novel, is a
hedonistic, disillusioned insurance salesman, partly modeled on Joyce's Leopold Bloom. He, too, takes a
shot at well-intentioned but hopelessly ill-informed women by contrasting in fact with I believe and
making a far-fetched but effective pun on Left. Bowling says, They've never had any direct connexion
with the Left Book Club, founded by the publisher Victor Gollancz to propagate Socialist ideas, or any
notion what it's all aboutin fact I believe at the beginning Mrs. Wheeler thought it had something to do
with books which had been left in railway carriages.
Bowling, who has intellectual curiosity and a lively sense of humor, satirizes both his own family and
that of his wife. He remarks that when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise
polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs mounting guard over
them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she'd heard of it. I can almost hear her
voiceWell, now! Shutting their wives up like that! The idea! Not that she'd have known what a eunuch
was. But in reality she lived her life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the
average zenana. Contrasting the exotic East with humdrum England, Bowling exploits the sexual
absurdity of eunuchs mounting and hints at the strange sexual practices of Arabian harems. He imagines
his mother's indignant reaction to all this, yet concludes that she does, in her own limited way, fit into the
average zenana, where women are secluded in a remote part of the house.
His wife's self-enclosed Anglo-Indian family also belongs to this Eastern world.

As soon as you set foot inside the front door [Bowling observes] you're in India in the eighties. You
know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-skulls on the
wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of chaps in sun-helmets,
the Hindustani words that you're expected to know the meaning of, the everlasting anecdotes about
tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in 87. It's a sort of little world of their own that
they've created, like a kind of cyst.

The random yet amusing catalogue of Indian clichs creates an absolutely convincing picture of these
exiles. Their world (introduced by the familiar you know), filled with exotic objects carefully collected
and brought back Home, was based on his own Anglo-Indian family. (Orwell was born in India, where
his father worked as a civil servant.) The hermetic existence reminded these people of their lost life, their
large houses and polo ponies, cringing servants and social status. The boring stories of tiger-shoots and
tiger-skulls were endlessly repeated. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell had compared the dreary tribe of
Socialists to bluebottles flocking to a dead cat. He now shows the pathology of this atmosphere by
comparing it to a kind of cysta bubbly sac of semi-fluid matter.
Bowling, nostalgically in search of his lost childhood, gets a taste of contemporary life when he bites
into a sausage:

The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary false teeth weren't much of a fit. I
had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then
suddenlypop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was
oozing all over my tongue. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and
discovered what it was really made of. [When you] get your teeth into something solid, a sausage
for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your
mouth.

By suggesting oral sex and ejaculation when the solid and then suddenly soft thing bursts in Bowling's
mouth, Orwell conveyed his intense disillusionment with the modern world and his fears about the bombs
that were about to rain down on Europe.
Orwell, who'd supported himself as a small-time farmer for several years in the 1930s, knew a lot
about barnyard creatures and made good use of this knowledge when writing Animal Farm. Warning a
friend who was looking after the farm while Orwell was living abroad, he gave instructions about mating
his pet goat Muriel, who appears under her own name in the novel: Whatever happens don't let her go to
that broken-down old wreck of Mr. Nicholls's, who is simply worn out by about twenty years of fucking
his own sisters, daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters. Orwell felt that the old billy goat,
breeding rapidly through several generations, was more clapped out by incest than by sex and that his
favorite Muriel deserved a better sexual partner.
Orwell could be tender as well as crude about animals. In one of his most charming passages, in
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, he humanized the toad, combined close observation with
fondness for the repulsive creature and ended with a comical twist. The toad goes through a phase of
intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round
something, and that if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength
and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Toads, Orwell suggested, are like human
beings: foolish, indiscriminate, easily deceived and clinging to false hope when driven by sexual passion.
Animal Farm, despite its serious political theme of the revolution betrayed, has many amusing
moments. When the ruling pigs take over Farmer Jones house, Some hams hanging in the kitchen were
taken out for burial. On this mock-solemn occasion, made worse by the hanging of the hams, the
remains of the slaughtered relatives, cured and transformed into human food, are discreetly removed from
sight and given a decent interment.
The pigs demonstrate their superiority to the other farm animals by performing human tasks. After the
revolution, Orwell wrote, the pigs sent for buckets and milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters
being well adapted to this task. Orwell suggests, as fairly qualifies successfully, that the cows were
not milked well and that their trotters were not adapted to this task. He took this ironic idea from
Gulliver's Travels, one of his favorite books, when Gulliver, watching the Houyhnhnm horses use their
hoofs, remarks: I have seen a white Mare of our Family thread a Needle with that Joynt. They milk
their Cows, reap their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands, in the same Manner.
In contrast to the fierce pigs and hardworking horses, the white mare Mollierepresenting the
aristocrats and monarchists who opposed the Russian Revolutionwants to dress up and have a good
time. With subtle wit, Orwell reveals Mollie's vanity, indolence and childish frivolity when Clover, a
stout motherly mare, went to Mollie's stall and turned over the straw with her hoof. Hidden under the
straw was a little pile of lump sugar and several bunches of ribbon of different colours.
Even Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), written when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, has a few comic
moments. When Winston first sees Julia, a narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League,
was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness
of her hips. Winston, missing the implications of the tight sash, is put off by her puritanical demeanor. In
fact, as she later admits, Julia is defiantly promiscuous and sexually voracious; and their first physical
encounter is filled with romantic clichs and fantasies about submissive women and potent men: she had
turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she
was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was
utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her.
Winston also has an ironic encounter with his neighbor Parsons, who blindly follows the Party line
and is proud of his children's fanatical vigilance:

By the way, old boy, he said, I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult
yesterday. I gave him a good dressing down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he
does it again.
 I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution, said Winston.
Ah, wellwhat I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they
are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course.

The disappointment about missing the public execution, suitable entertainment for children in the world of
1984, and keenness about spying eventually turn the daughter against her father. But, ever loyal to the
state, he praises her treachery: Who denounced you? said Winston. It was my little daughter, said
Parsons, with a sort of doleful pride. She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped
off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for
it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.
Orwell's satiric humor, sharpened by his style, included puns and obscenities, schoolboy slang and
practical jokes, self-deprecation and mock solemnity, ironic contrasts and startling juxtapositions, wild
exaggerations and coruscating catalogues, disgusting details and morbid comparisons, sexual innuendos
and suggestions of perversity. His sly sense of humor, a vivid contrast to his dour public persona,
revealed that George was much less gloomy than he seemed to be.
ORWELL AFTER ORWELL
TWENTY

REVIEWING THE ORWELLIANS

I. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams,

THE UNKNOWN ORWELL (1972)

This review began with an account of my unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Orwell Archive in
London University. Though Stansky and Abrahams made use of the Archive, what they called the
unknown Orwell" was in fact quite well known. They failed to show how an unremarkable youth
became the man who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A Personal Prologue:
In the spring of 1968 I won a grant from my university to do research at the Orwell Archive in
University College, London. I wrote in advance to the director of the Library asking if I could read
Orwell's unpublished letters and manuscripts, and I duly received his permission. But when I arrived that
summer and certified in writing that I was not working on a biography of Orwell, I was icily informed by
Ian Angus, deputy librarian, that the unpublished material was closed and that I could read only what was
already in print (which I had already done). As I appealed to the English sense of fairness, and then
expostulated angrily, tapping the letter with the backs of my fingers for emphasis, I was told first that only
Sonia Orwell, who had married the tubercular Orwell in University College Hospital two months before
he died, could grant me access to the papers, and second that she would never do so.
Gradually I learned the reasons for this distressing volte-face. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus were just
completing the four volumes of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters that were about to
appear with a splash in the fall and were not at all enthusiastic about what James called a publishing
scoundrel prospecting in their gold mine. Even more to the point, Orwell had asked in his will that no
biography be written. Between the time of my letter and my arrival, two Americans (one of them from
Boston, where I had just come from), who knew that Malcolm Muggeridge had once been authorized by
Sonia Orwell to write Orwell's biography but had abandoned it because he could not be entirely candid
about his friend's life, protested their biographical innocence (so I was told), combed through the Archive
and, like Lovelace in Richardson's Clarissa, only revealed their intentions when it was too late to stop
them. I could only admire the resourcefulness of Stansky and Abrahams and realized that a biography of
Orwell, like that of Kafka and T. S. Eliot, was both inevitable and desirable.
The four Orwell volumes appeared in the fall and, after the critics initial enthusiasm had subsided, I
wrote a long review-essay in Philological Quarterly, based on my familiarity with Orwell's eight
hundred uncollected articles, on how much had in fact been left out of these deceptively incomplete
volumes, which claimed to be a full revelation of Orwell's life and a substitute biography. I continued to
publish articles on Orwell, and eventually met William Abrahams, who was enthusiastic about my work
and made several suggestions that never materialized. In the summer of 1970 I did some burrowing in the
India Office Library in London and discovered some new information about Orwell's constabulary career
in Burma. The substance of my article on this subject, accepted in the fall of 1970 but not yet published,
has been (quite independently) fleshed out and turned into the best chapter of The Unknown Orwell.

This book and an unpleasant letter in TLS by Sonia Orwell appeared simultaneously last fall. In the letter
Sonia Orwell states, ex cathedra, that the book contains mistakes and misconceptions and that it was
written without my cooperation and without my permission to quote from the work in copyrighta
considerable disadvantage for Stansky and Abrahams. She also states, with perhaps unconscious irony,
that Bernard Crick, a political scientist, has been engaged to write the authorized biography. (This is quite
in keeping with current publishing practice: a translator and indexer is editor of the entire twenty-volume
Abinger Forster, and a history graduate edited T. E. Lawrence's poetical anthology, Minorities.) This
announcement is not only a free advertisement for Crick's work, but also a staking out of territory that will
inhibit publishers from bringing out books that might compete with it.
When my review copy of The Unknown Orwell arrived, I was surprised to learn that the authors were
deeply grateful to me as well as to Valerie Eliot, Lord Harlech and the Keeper of the Wall at Eton (who
sounds like Snout, the witty partition in A Midsummer Night's Dream); grateful to discover that I had
been immortalized in a footnote; and somewhat disconcerted to find that some of my ideasthe influence
of Jack London's The People of the Abyss on Down and Outso long embedded in academic journals,
had been properly put before the public by Stansky and Abrahams. The unknown Orwell is a familiar
figure, and this biography of his first thirty years, culminating in the publication of Down and Out in Paris
and London, fills in the details of a picture that remains substantially the same. The authors have
interviewed a great many people but have learned relatively little. They never describe what Orwell's
father, a gruff-voiced elderly gentleman forever saying Don't, actually did in the Indian Opium
Department; they do not state what Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, the terrifying Flip of Such, Such Were the
Joys, thought about the adult Orwell and his corrosive essay on her school; and their chapter on Eton,
where at least one had a cubicle of one's own, is more about the ceremonies and customs of the college
(though they do not mention homosexuality) than about Orwell himself. With the exception of Cyril
Connolly, who published his memoirs in 1938 and is a major source for this book, Orwell had no close
friends in his early life. There was nothing unusual about the young Orwell, no promise of genius, very
little to suggest that he would become, after D. H. Lawrence, the most influential English writer of the
century.
The theme of The Unknown Orwell, a study of Eric Blair becoming the writer George Orwell in
1933, was suggested to the authors by Sir Richard Rees in 1967, but even then it was vieux jeu, for T. R.
Fyvel wrote an essay on George Orwell and Eric Blair in 1959, and Keith Aldritt published The
Making of George Orwell in 1969. Moreover, the central idea that Blair was the man to whom things
happened; Orwell the man who wrote about them, is too facile, too pat. The crucial event in Orwell's
life and the turning point of his political and literary career, what Erik Erikson calls the moment, was
surely the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell found commitment, compassion and courage. The authors
claim that Orwell went tramping to make use of his down and out experience as a writer, but his five
years of Burmese experience certainly provided more vital and significant literary material than his rather
superficial subterranean sojourns.
The essential thinness of this book (the first of two volumes) is disguised by trivial anecdotes and
verbal padding which, like the heavy porridge that broke the boys appetites at St. Cyprian's, fill one up
without satisfying one's hunger. We are told what fizzy drinks young Eric bought from the little old lady
who kept the village shop, and the grateful vignette of Orwell's sister knitting his school scarf. But
Orwell's birthplace in Bengal is described in a series of Eastern clichsits spicy smells and pungent
flavors, its flamboyant sights and exotic soundspopularized by Kim. Because of the restriction on
quotation, Orwell's few taut paragraphs on the bedwetting episode in Such, Such Were the Joys are
expanded into five slack pages; and the authors fail to notice that several significant details in this essay
come directly from the school scenes in David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby. (They also ignore, in
their account of Orwell's reading, the important influence of Ulysses on the character of George Bowling
in Coming Up for Air. The night-town chapter in A Clergyman's Daughter has become a dubious
critical clich, for it is not really Joycean at all.)
The authors devote three pages to Orwell's unremarkable juvenilia at Eton and five pages to his
patriotic schoolboy poem on Kitchener (1916); and though they refer to the Field-Marshal's famous
recruiting poster with the slogan, Your Country Needs YOU, they do not mention that this was a direct
inspiration for the poster with Big Brother Is Watching You in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Their rather
sentimental account of Orwell's development could apply to almost any adolescent: He was ten years
old, taller, wiser, and tougher than the sad-eyed bewildered small boy with whose homesickness Mum
had tried to cope. Their description of Orwell's happy childhoodEric conformed to the codes of the
school, worked hard, did well in his studiesis based largely on Connolly's rather than Orwell's own
account of his feelings; and their pallid commentDisgust on one side; joy on the other. The tension
between them was essential to him as an artistis a thoroughly inadequate treatment of a vital issue in
Orwell's life: how he transformed his childhood guilt and suffering into an ethic of responsibility.
The most interesting part of The Unknown Orwell is the chapter on Burma, and though the authors
have not found any letters from Burma and did not visit that country, they have discovered some new facts
about Orwell's examinations, training and duties in that important and still obscure period of his life. Like
the young Joyce Cary in Northern Nigeria, Orwell, as Assistant to the District Superintendent in
Myaungmya, was expected to run the office; supervise the stores of clothing, equipment and ammunition;
take charge of the training school for locally recruited constables, as well as the headquarters police
station with its strength of thirty to fifty men on active patrol duty and a contingent of escorts for hearings
and trials in court. He would also check the night patrols in Myaungmya, and when his Superintendent
was away, touring the sub-divisional headquarters within the District, he would assume general charge.
The authors report the statement of Mabel Fierz, Orwell's friend in the early 1930s, that he told her
he had never been present at a hanging, but they do not discuss the literary implications of this most
sensational confidence in their long description of A Hanging (1931). Whether Orwell was imitating
life or his own art, he repeated specific details from this essay in Symes enthusiastic report of a hanging
in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The authors quote the observation of a colleague in Burma: As for female company I don't think I
ever saw him with one, as well as the suggestive remark of Brenda Salkeld, a young woman whom
Orwell met in 1928 after his return from Burma, He didn't really like women. These comments
correspond with Orwell's surprisingly celibate early life in the public school and police (he boasted of a
brief liaison with a French tart, though his book on Parisian low-life has very few references to sex), and
also to the unhappy sexual experiences of John Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon Comstock and Winston
Smith in Orwell's novels. But these statements do not explain Orwell's two marriages (his first wife died
unexpectedly after an operation in 1945) to two attractive women nor his love of family life.
Early in the book the authors state that at the end of his life Orwell overcame his long-standing dislike
of Scotland and went to live on the island of Jura; and at the end of the book they relate Ruth Pitter's story
of how the tubercular Orwell deliberately exposed himself to fierce winter weather: It was suicidal
perversity. These two events are closely related, for Orwell had a strong masochistic streak, a
permanent residue of the childhood guilt he describes in Such, Such Were the Joys. His suicidal
perversity compelled him to live in a country he disliked and on a rugged and rainy island that
undermined his precarious health and led him to an early death at forty-six. The Unknown Orwell ought to
but does notexplain how the Orwell of St. Cyprian's evolved into the Orwell on Jura; how an
unremarkable youth, who began by writing banal poems in rhymed quatrains, became the writer who
transformed the political experience of an entire generation into the veritably mythic power of Nineteen
Eighty-Four.

II. Bernard Crick, GEORGE ORWELL: A LIFE (1980)

Bernard Crick's biography is even worse than Stansky and Abrahams book. His style is flat and
filled with clichs. He plunders previous scholarship without acknowledgment. He does not
believe that biography can reveal the inner man and deliberately offers a strictly external view
of Orwell's elusive and contradictory character: an odd mixture of personal gentleness and
literary ferocity. And Crick is quite mistaken about Orwell's suicidal sojourn on Jura. When he
came to that remote, wind-ravaged Scottish island in 1946, wartime shortages were severe,
essential supplies strictly rationed and often impossible to obtain.

Orwell's uncompromising intellectual honesty made him one of the most controversial figures of the
twentieth century. In his credo Why I Write (1947), he recalled the effect of his combat experience in
the Spanish Civil War on his style and thought: What I have most wanted to do is to make political
writing into an art. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly
or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. Because of his attacks on the Right
and the Left, Orwell was praised and condemned by both sides. Lionel Trilling called Homage to
Catalonia, which describes the Communist attacks on their Socialist allies in Spain, one of the most
important documents of our time. But Mary McCarthy, in a rancorous essay, claimed Orwell would have
supported America in the Vietnam war.
Animal Farm, a political allegory on the betrayal of revolutionary principles in Stalinist Russia, was
rejected by T. S. Eliot and many American publishers. But Orwell's clarity, precision, vigor and wit made
it a popular success: it was translated into thirty-nine languages and had sold eleven million copies by
1972. Nineteen Eighty-Four, which created the concepts of Big Brother, Doublethink and Newspeak,
alerted the postwar world to the dangers of a totalitarian future. Like Don Quixote and Pilgrim's
Progress, it became familiar to people who had never read the book. Like Silone, Koestler, Malraux and
Sartre, Orwell was a political novelist who felt responsible in the face of history for moral awareness
and social justice. He belongs with Johnson, Blake and Lawrence in the English tradition of prophetic
moralists.
Bernard Crick, a professor of politics at London University, introduces his book by defining Orwell's
achievement: the finest political writer in English since Swift and announcing his own curiously
crippling method: the best that a biographer can do is to understand the relationship between the writer
and the man. He does not believe a biographer can enter into his subject's mind, rejects the fine writing,
balanced appraisal and psychological insight that is the hallmark of English biography, and dismisses the
great line that runs from Johnson's Lives of the Poets to George Painter's Marcel Proust.
He writes in a consistently flat and graceless style (and even takes up the cudgelsa clich
specifically condemned in Politics and the English Language); emphasizes how his books and essays
came to be written and published, rather than Orwell's development as an artist; and provides a strictly
external view of the manwith neither vivid details nor rich revelation of characterthat tends to ignore
his psychological motivation, guilt, masochism and self-hatred. But Orwell (echoing Heine) stressed the
inner life and self-reflectively wrote in his essay on Salvador Dal: Autobiography is only to be trusted
when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying;
since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
Crick was the first scholar with permission to use and quote from the unpublished papers at the
Orwell Archive in London. He provides a more thoroughly documented factual biography than Peter
Stansky and William Abrahams two-volume life, which appeared in 1972 and 1979. But because Crick
is more interested in Orwell's political ideas and their context than in the man who thought them out, we
come no nearer to understanding the contradictions in Orwell's elusive character: Etonian prole,
anticolonial policeman, Tory anarchist, Leftist critic of the Left, puritanical seducer, kindly autocrat.
Though Orwell was radical in politics, he was conservative in feeling. Malcolm Muggeridge, who once
planned to write his life, said he loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future.
Crick's comparison with Hobbes political thought is misleading, for Orwell had comparatively few
ideas and tended to express the same thoughts in all his works. He is more important for his brilliant style
and noble character than for his rather superficial and frequently inconsistent political beliefs. His
personal qualitiescourage, compassion, honesty, integrityled, immediately after his death, to the
legend of the tall, lined and shaggy man who shot the elephant in Burma and was wounded in Spain,
witnessed a hanging and saw the poor die, lived with tramps and went down the mine, and was canonized
as a secular saint. Crick fails to mention that this legend was based on Orwell's own carefully constructed
self-image.
Crick rejects Stansky and Abrahams dubious theory that in 1933 Eric Blair (his real name) was
suddenly transformed into the pseudonymous George Orwell (the transformation in this biography is
Orwell into Crick). But Orwell was such an impersonal and aloof figure that his obscure friends of the
twenties and thirties have almost nothing significant to relate about his Burmese or Parisian days. There
was nothing unusual about the young Orwell, no promise of genius, very little to suggest that he would
become, after D. H. Lawrence, the most influential English writer of the century. Crick does not explain
how the youth who began by writing banal poems finished by transforming the political experience of an
entire generation into the mythic power of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Crick's attitude toward Orwell scholars is churlish. He sneers at their errors, though they can scarcely
be blamed for being misled by the published chronology of Ian Angus, the curator of the Archive, who
was instructed to prevent scholars from checking the facts. And he plunders the discoveries of his
predecessors, who first established the bibliography of criticism, the history of Orwell's reputation, the
reason he went from Eton to Burma (he supposedly could neither win a university scholarship nor afford
the expense), and his selection and training as an imperial policeman. His account of Orwell's
constabulary duties (84), for example, is lifted straight from Stansky and Abrahams (179)without
acknowledgment.
Crick arguesagainst the generally accepted belief first proposed by the New Yorker critic Anthony
Westthat the autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys, was probably written in 1938 rather
than in 1947 (when Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four), and that the origins of his most important
novel lie in the political events of the thirties and forties rather than in his terrifying experiences in the
authoritarian school. Crick quotes Orwell's statement: I originally undertook [the essay] as a sort of
pendant to Cyril Connolly's autobiography, Enemies of Promise (1938), he having asked me to write a
reminiscence. But this does not necessarily mean that Orwell wrote the essay just after Connolly's
memoirs appeared. Crick also insists that Orwell's censored letters home during his first term at prep
school give no evidence of disturbance. But Kipling, who also endured agonies at school, wrote in
Something of Myself: Badly treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they
betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it. Contrary to Crick's theory, Orwell states
that these traumatic memories took place thirty years ago and more, which makes the date of
composition precisely 1947. Connolly regards Such, Such as the key to Orwell's formation.
Once Orwell decided to become a writerhe was a late and slow starterhe pursued his goal with
fanatical determination. His friend Ruth Pitter observed: He had the gift, he had the courage, he had the
persistence to go on in spite of failure, sickness, poverty, and opposition, until he became an
acknowledged master of English prose. His imaginative powers were limited, and he often sought
experience for literary purposes (I would like to spend Christmas in gaol). Nearly every phase of his
life was reflected in his books: school days in Such, Such Were the Joys, the East in Shooting an
Elephant and Burmese Days, dishwashing and tramping in Down and Out in Paris and London, illness
in How the Poor Die, teaching in A Clergyman's Daughter, working in a bookshop in Keep the
Aspidistra Flying, investigating the condition of slums and mines in The Road to Wigan Pier, fighting for
Republican Spain in Homage to Catalonia, convalescing in Marrakech, childhood fishing in Coming
Up For Air, farming at Wallington in Animal Farm, working for the wartime BBC in Nineteen Eighty-
Four.
Orwell, who had a chronic cough as a child, was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1929, left teaching
after a second attack in 1933, and had his first tubercular hemorrhage in 1938. He was always careless
about his health. He worked compulsively, ate poorly, lived austerely, wore no overcoat during wintry
rides on a motorbike and distrusted doctors. An anonymous gift from the novelist L. H. Myers allowed
him to spend the winter of 1938 recovering in the mild climate of Morocco.
Orwell had predicted the war throughout the thirties. When it came, Connolly thought he was
enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless,
the signs of rising revolutionary temper. His proletarian affectations in the BBC staff canteenslurping
tea from a saucer and rolling shaggy cigarettesem-barrassed colleagues and shocked the doormen.
Friends were struck by his peculiar combination of gaiety and grimness, of personal gentleness and
literary ferocity.
Though Orwell believed he was sterile, Crick suggests that the fault was more likely his wife's. They
apparently had sexual problems. The heroines of Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, and Nineteen
Eighty-Four are all frigid; she may well have been frightened of his contagious disease; he had several
casual affairs during the last years of the war. They finally adopted a month-old baby in June 1944. In
March 1945 his wife (aged 39) died of cardiac failure during an operation for cancer of the uterus.
Orwell, who had another hemorrhage while reporting the war in Germany that month (Crick says nothing
about his direct experience with concentration camps), was shattered and guilt-ridden by her death. But he
was determined to keep the baby, precipitously proposed to four women who gently turned him down and
then capably cared for his son.
After the success of Animal Farm, Orwell wanted to get away from the distractions of London in
order to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four. A friend told him about the remote island of Jura, off the west
coast of Scotland, and he moved to Barnhill in May 1946. Crick opposes friends and critics like T. R.
Fyvel and Anthony West who believe the move to Jura was a fatal mistake. He calls it a long
premeditated and quite sensible decision, and then inadvertently provides evidence that contradicts his
own argument. Barnhill, at the end of a seven-mile rutted track that was extraordinarily uncomfortable
and exhausting, was far from a telephone, a doctor, a hospital. The paraffin stove in his writing room
gave off smelly and heavy fumes. The farm life was physically arduous, the climate was wet, the
dampness obviously harmful.
 Orwell had two hemorrhages in 194546; he was in poor health when he went to Jura and gravely ill
when he left to enter a hospital in 1947. He had an adverse reaction to the newly discovered
streptomycin, which could cure the disease and was specially imported from America. He desperately
needed a warm, dry climate and would almost certainly have lived longer if he had gone to Switzerland,
Morocco or the Mediterranean. He was the last of the modern writersChekhov, Mansfield, Kafka,
Lawrenceto succumb to tuberculosis.
Orwell married the beautiful Sonia Brownell, who had been Connolly's secretary at Horizon, in
University College Hospital in October 1949 and died there three months later at the age of 46. The
tragedy of Orwell's life, wrote Connolly, is that when at last he achieved fame and success he was a
dying man. He had fame and was too ill to leave the room, money and nothing to spend it on, love in
which he could not participate; he tasted the bitterness of dying. But, as Orwell said of Gandhi, How
clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

III. MICHAEL SHELDEN, THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY (1991)

No Orwell biographer had ever gone to Burma, though Michael Shelden made the forty-eight-
hour journey from London to Orwell's house on Jura. Shelden's life is decent, dutiful and dull;
his style is graceless and he fails to bring Orwell and his circle of friends to life. But his account
of Orwell's two marriages is interesting, and he's surely right in stating that Sonia Brownell
married Orwell on his deathbed for mercenary motives.

There is a real need for a new life of George Orwell (190350). Stansky and Abrahams biography is
thesis-ridden and superficial; Crick's is turgid and imperceptive. Michael Shelden's decent, dutiful and
thoroughly researched life has made good use of the Orwell Archive at London University. But his
numerous interviews do not seem very probing, and neither he nor the previous biographers have
searched for traces of Orwell in Burma or given firsthand descriptions of the places where he served as a
policeman in the 1920s. Shelden's assertion that the chief Burmese official of the district could not have
been excluded from the English club is highly unlikely. Julius Nyerere, as prime minister of Tanzania, was
excluded from the white club in Dar-es-Salaam even after his country had become independent.
Shelden's work also has serious flaws. He has a graceless style (There is a description of a horse
named Boxer being beaten by an army officer with a whip, and the horse is given the name Boxer) and
lacks the vivid details that bring his now-familiar subject to life. His criticism of Orwell's work is
descriptive rather than analytical, and frequently descends to awkward paraphrase. The rare insights are
always derived from previous critics.
Shelden clumsily and obviously maintains that Orwell has no box into which he is determined to stuff
Dickens, no ideological sledgehammer with which he wants to pound him. Homage to Catalonia,
Orwell's account of the Spanish War, is an intensely personal book that refuses to accept easy
answers. Completely missing the wit of a provocative simile, Shelden solemnly characterizes as
intemperate Orwell's deliberately outrageous but acute attack on socialist cranks: all that dreary tribe
of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards
the smell of [Marxist] progress like bluebottles to a dead cat. Worst of all, Shelden is disappointingly
dull.
He tends to elaborate the obviousOrwell's father was disappointed when his son left the Burmese
police, and Orwell was very pleased when his first book was acceptedbut tends to miss the more
subtle points. The Lucknow Pioneer, which offered Orwell an editorial job in 1938, was Kipling's old
newspaper. Andrew Morland, who treated Orwell during his last illness, had been D. H. Lawrence's
doctor. And when Orwell told Middleton Murry about his tuberculosis, he knew that Murry's first two
wives had died of that disease. Shelden gives very little sense of what Orwell's friends were like, what
drew him to these men and what kind of relations he had with such diverse figures as the conventional
Murry and the bohemian Henry Miller, the editor Max Plowman and the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer,
the professorial William Empson and the Hungarian refugee Arthur Koestler.
Shelden's new discoveries, based on previously unknown documents, tend to confirm what is
already known: that Down and Out in Paris and London was based on fact and that Orwell was in
serious danger of being arrested by his political enemies in. Spain. Though Orwell's prep school may not
have seemed too bad to many other boys, it was hellish for him. His crush on another boy at Eton was
commonplace. The information about Burma has been known since 1972, and the police report from the
archives of Madrid was published in the Observer in 1989. Many of the names on Orwell's private list of
crypto-Communists were extremely doubtful.

The most interesting part of Shelden's book is his account of Orwell's two marriages and his suggestion
that Orwell's first wife, Eileen, may have had an affair in Spain with Georges Kopp, the heroic
commander who was idealized in Homage to Catalonia. After Eileen's doctor-brother was killed at
Dunkirk, she went into a deep depression and had serious marriage problems. As Orwell wrote after her
unexpected death during an operation: I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and also treated her very
badly, and I think she treated me badly too at times, but it was a real marriage in the sense that we had
been through awful struggles together.
Shelden is justly severe on Orwell's second wife, Sonia. She was, like Orwell, born in India; and as a
teenager she was responsible for the death of a friend by drowning. She gave in to Orwell's clumsy
efforts at lovemaking at least once before his final illness; and her other notable lovers included the
English painters William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, and the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. She
married the wealthy, famous and gravely ill Orwell for mercenary motives, bought herself an expensive
engagement ring and was in a Soho nightclub with one of her former lovers when Orwell died.
Orwell's life seems to be divided into separate phases: being miserable at prep school, slacking off at
Eton, shooting an elephant in Burma, tramping and dishwashing when down and out (which resembled T.
E. Lawrence's self-conscious degradation in the ranks of the RAF), getting shot through the throat in Spain
(and having the hospital assistants steal his valuables), broadcasting futile war propaganda to India for
the BBC, achieving astonishing success with Animal Farm (which was rejected by T. S. Eliot, who
completely missed the political point of the book), retreating to the unhealthy Scottish island of Jura and
dying of tuberculosis when he reacted adversely to the newly discovered streptomycin.
The consistent element in this extraordinarily diverse life was Orwell's elusive, guilt-ridden,
masochistic character. A former friend vividly described him as a tall, big-headed man, with pale blue,
defensively humorous eyes, a little moustache and a painfully snickering laugh. A fellow fighter in Spain
called him a good shot, a cool customer, completely without fear. He was capable of intellectual
brutality and was intensely fair-minded, cynical yet idealistic. Self-deprecating about the romantic
fatalism of his conventional early novels, he brilliantly fulfilled himself in his late political satires. This
nobly impressive man, whom Victor Pritchett called the wintry conscience of his generation, was, in
Shelden's words, willing to sacrifice everythinghis health, his security, his career, his happiness, his
lifefor his dreams.

IV. D. J. TAYLOR, ORWELL: THE LIFE (2003);

 GORDON BOWKER GEORGE ORWELL (2003)

D. J. Taylor's and Gordon Bowker's lives appeared in Orwell's centenary year, three years after
my own biography was published. Unlike Crick's self-defeating book, these two lives attempted
to explore the inner man. Orwell, who helped construct his own personal legend, has been
dishonestly appropriated by extremists like Mary McCarthy on the Left and Norman Podhoretz
on the Right. His great themes are longing and loss. Bowker's biography, though more careless
than Taylor's, is more dramatic and penetrating, and he's discovered more new material. Burma
gave Orwell a knowledge of two Asian languages (Burmese and Hindi), Oriental people and
colonial society, and provided valuable legal and quasi-military experience.

Samuel Johnson defined biography as an attempt to understand the lives of others, as an act of the
imagination. Ideally, the modern biographeran investigative reporter of the spiritshould have
Johnson's sympathy and intuition, critical judgment and healthy scepticism. These new lives by D. J.
Taylor and Gordon Bowkerthe fifth and sixth biographies of Orwellattempt to explore the inner man.
D. J. Taylor mentions the vats of ink expended on Orwell's ghastly prep school and the shelf-full of
memoirs by his contemporaries at Eton. He concedes that Orwell's life is a well-trodden path, and the
scenery can be distressingly familiar. He asks, but doesn't answer, the crucial question: what more [is]
there to be said? Taylor uses Peter Davison's twenty-volume edition of Orwell's Complete Works and
the unpublished memoirs of Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit and David Holbrookjust as I did in my recent life
of Orwell. And some of his sentences are surprisingly dj lu: He impulsively proposed marriage to
several attractive younger women whom he scarcely knew (Meyers) and he made proposals of
marriage to a series of younger women some of whom he barely knew (Taylor); the outboard motor
was wrenched off the mounting and fell into the sea (Meyers) and the engine sheared away from its
mounting and disappeared into the sea (Taylor).
There are a number of minor flaws in Taylor's book. His doubts about Orwell's elusive life and
character, though commendably honest, are tactically unwise and undermine his credibility as a
biographer. He insists that there are few verifiable facts and no hard evidence, Orwell is impossible
to pin down and it's anyone's guess, his motives are unfathomable and circumstances are not
wholly decipherable, whatever happened is lost in time and beyond recreation, there is no way of
knowing and we shall probably never know. Repeating the epigraphs to the chapters in the text blunts
their effect, and there are several other pointless repetitions. Lady Grigg is identified twice in three
pages, and Orwell's well-known disdain for his early novel Keep the Aspidstra Flying is mentioned three
times.
Taylor did not go to Burma, where Orwell spent five years as a policeman in the 1920ssurely
(contra Taylor) a more glamorous, exotic and responsible job than teaching or working in the Cityand
gets lost on the geography. Maymyo is inland (not on a peninsula); Twante is ten minutes across the river
from Rangoon (not a thirty-six-hour steamer trip); Katha is northeast (not west) of Mandalay; and the
Governor in Orwell's time was Sir Harcourt Butler (not Harcourt Brace, his American publisher). Other
errors have also crept into the text. The correct title of Orwell's four-volume works is The Collected
Essays, Journalism and Letters; the condemned man in A Hanging went to the gallows (not the block);
Dwight Macdonald's surname is spelled two different ways, both incorrect; William Phillips and Philip
Rahv (not Macdonald and Clement Greenberg) were the editors of the Partisan Review; the van Georges
Kopp sold Orwell was not just in poor condition, but had to be pushed off the Jura ferry and was
permanently abandoned on the dock; Orwell's adopted son Richard got sick after smoking a pipe (not a
cigarette); and, in a famous scene, Orwell saw a woman trying to unblock a drain pipe from a train (not
while walking up a back-alley) in Wigan.
There are also some unresolved contradictions. Was Orwell unable to get the northern miners to treat
him as an equal or were they willing to take [him] for granted? Did Henry Miller give him, when he
was on the way to the Spanish Civil War, a corduroy jacket or a more useful pigskin jacket? Did he leave
Spain with only a tiny oil-lamp as a souvenir or did he also have a goatskin water-bottle? Did he
probably or certainly make his first trip to Jura in the autumn of 1944? Was the climate of Jura
temperate or was the remote Scottish island lashed by ferocious storms, with endless icy rain blowing
east from the Atlantic?
Finally, Taylor does not always extract the maximum meaning from the events he describes. He asks,
if Orwell wasn't proud of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, why try to get it published
in the first place? Clearly Orwell was aware of its faults but believed in its merits. He wanted to justify
his years as a dishwasher and tramp, get into print and make some money. Taylor doesn't fully explain the
bond forged between Orwell and his devoted wife Eileen, both of whom risked their lives in Spain, as
well as Orwell's guilt about exposing her to this risk both in Barcelona and when she visited him during
an artillery bombardment on the Aragon front.
Despite these criticisms, Taylor's is a highly competent book, which reinforces rather than changes the
traditional view, and has several merits. His style is clear and lively, and he sympathizes with his subject.
His interchapters on Orwell's face, voice, obsession with rats, attitude toward Jews, paranoia and
possessions are useful and interesting. He's been industrious and turned up some new bits of information:
Orwell being chased on South-wold common by a romantic rival on a motorcycle; Orwell working as a
male charwoman, cleaning the house for half a crown a day. He suggests that Rayner Heppenstall's
description of Orwell's sadistic exaltation during their fight in the 1930s was retrospectively influenced
by the sadistic torture scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Taylor (like Bowker) is sound on Orwell's now
notorious but quite innocuous List of well known Communist sympathizers and (in contrast to Hilary
Spurling's absurd self-serving whitewash) on the self-serving character of Sonia Brownell, who married
him on his deathbed.
Bowker's biographywhich attempts to explore the roots of Orwell's emotional life and illuminate
his shadowy selfis better than Taylor's: more lively, dramatic and penetrating. He reveals the French
influence on Orwell, the dominant patterns in the life and work, the paradoxical elements of one of the
great misfits of his generation, the romantic and tragic aspects of his character. Bowker has also
discovered much more new material: Eurasian relatives in Burma; letters to the unattainable girlfriend
Brenda Salkeld (source not cited) suggesting a mnage trois (Orwell said that Eileen unselfishly
wished he could sleep with Brenda about twice a year); a letter from another girlfriend, Celia Kirwan,
to her twin sister about Orwell's marriage proposal; an interview with Orwell's sometime roommate
Michael Sayers; the diary of his publisher Roger Senhouse, at Eton; material in the Archive de Paris, the
Marx Memorial Library in London and the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam; and the Spanish
political poster that probably inspired OBrien's picture of the future in Nineteen Eighty-Four: a boot
stamping on a human faceforever.
But Bowker is more careless than Taylor. In addition to misspelling twenty proper names, he
misstates the first names of John Aubrey and Heinrich Mann, confuses a duck with a goose and Herbert
Read with Harold Acton, garbles a sentence on page 332 (lines 67) and misplaces a parenthesis (with
Tether misspelled) on page 340 (lines 1011). Many of his factual statements are inaccurate. Orwell's
father did not remain in the same grade of the Indian Opium Department for twenty-two years, and his
service in the Great War was reflected in the fictional George Bowling's; Orwell didn't blow up toads,
but punished boys who did; Rangoon is not in the mouth of the Irrawaddy Delta; Maugham's On a Chinese
Screen is a travel book (not stories); Orwell's Clink (1932) was published; his memoir Down and Out
in Paris and London is more autobiographical than his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Mlaga was
not captured without a shot being fired: the city fell after a naval bombardment and a three-pronged
land attack; Malraux was not a journalistic spectator during the Spanish Civil War, but flew many
dangerous missions with the Escadre Espaa; Orwell was not paranoid about being murdered by the
Communists: they tried to kill him in Spain and his name was on a Moscow hit list; Victor Pritchett was
not always appreciative of Orwell, but wrote a harsh and unjust review of Homage to Catalonia; T. S.
Eliot did not resist Orwell's invitations, but stayed overnight in his flat during the Blitz; Orwell,
pushing a wheelbarrow, couldn't possibly have made an eight-mile round trip during his lunch-hour; he
had a motorboat (not a sailboat) on Jura; and Kafka did not destroy his papers, but gave them to Max
Brod.
Bowker could also have extracted more meaning from several passages. He misses Orwell's
quotation of Scott's Marmion in what tangled webs we weave and allusion to Maugham's story The
Hairless Mexican in his unpublished story The Hairless Ape. It's not astonishing that during his
wife's mourning for her dead brother Orwell lusted after Brenda Salkeld: when Eileen rejected him and
withdrew into prolonged depression, he naturally sought the consolation of other women. Bowker fails to
comment on Orwell's weirdly self-denigrating proposal to Anne Popham (which recalls Kafka's tortured
letters to Felice Bauer); and he fails to note that Sonia's futile wish to save the moribund Orwell by taking
him to Switzerland was an attempt to compensate for the lifelong guilt she felt about her inability to save a
friend who'd drowned in that country.
Bowker exaggerates Orwell's superstitious schoolboy dabbling in black magic and the negative
influence of his early education at a Catholic school, for there's no evidence that he disliked the nuns or
was unhappy there. He mistakenly asserts that Orwellwho did his job well and could have returned
after home leavehad failed in the Burmese Police. In the 1920s Harold Acton had got ahead in the
literary race and published several volumes of poetry, but Orwell's precious years in Burma were worth
infinitely more than those now forgotten poems. Besides a knowledge of Asian languages, Oriental people
and colonial society, he gained valuable legal and quasi-military experience. While still in his teens he
had tremendous responsibility. Burma was a crucial experience that provided material for his best early
novel, Burmese Days, and two of his greatest essays: A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant. As a
young recruit on the voyage out he was horrified to see a white policeman kicking a coolie, but soon
compromised his values and began to beat his servants. When he left Burma he abandoned his casual
brutality and taught himself compassion for the oppressed. He also gave up the purple passages in his
exotic, jungly novel and cultivated a prose as transparent as a window pane.
Orwell helped construct his personal myth, has been claimed by extremists on both the Left and the
Right, and is still a mentor, guide, motivating spirit and conscience. His achievements, Taylor notes,
were considerable: an Eton scholarship, first book published before he was thirty, friendships with the
great minds of his age, authorship of at least two novels that literally changed the way people thought.
But, like Somerset Maugham, the writer [he said] who has influenced me most, Orwell had a negative
world view. Both men were miserable at school, refused to go to a university and had their early novels
rejected. They were committed to clear prose, and had socialist sympathies and a desire to improve the
lives of the working class. They were disenchanted with the Orient, nostalgic for Edwardian England and
disgusted by modern pollution. Most importantly, both felt profound guilt and self-hatred.
Orwell's great themes are longing and loss: for his Thames Valley childhood, his intellectual freedom
at Eton, the haunting landscapes of Burma, the idealism and comradeship of Spain, the neglected wife
who died in her thirties, the child he was unable to raise, his brief years of good health and chance to
serve in the war. Like the tubercular Stevenson and Lawrence, Orwell knew he was destined for an early
death. Just before the tragic end he remarked: I've made all this money and now I'm going to die. Both
these biographies increase one's admiration for Orwell who, one friend observed, in earlier days would
have been either canonizedor burnt at the stake!
TWENTY-ONE

TRUE TO LIFE
Writing Orwell's Biography

I first read this essay at the Partisan Review conference on biography and memoirs (where I was
a last-minute replacement for the ailing Saul Bellow) and then published it in the very last issue
of that distinguished journal. My research and interviews, and the use of unpublished material
in the Orwell Archive, shed new light on Orwell's strained relations with his weak and passive
father, his role in the social and political upheavals in Burma in the 1920s, his career as a
teacher in two shoddy schools, his long, loyal connection with his literary agent Leonard Moore,
and his arduous life on the island of Jura. Orwell's Soviet police report shows that he was nearly
captured and killed in Spain. My biography also describes his close friendships with two
shadowy figures, Georges Kopp and Reginald Reynolds, and his literary relations with Ernest
Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Wyndham Lewis. Unlike Orwell's other biographers, I also
asked many authors what Orwell meant to them and included an important Epilogue on Orwell's
influence and legacy. In all my writing on Orwell I have followed the nineteenth-century French
critic, Sainte-Beuve, who believed that a personal acquaintanceship with a writer, and a
knowledge of his biography, were the surest bases for sound literary judgment.

The impulse to write literary biography begins in fascination with an artist's character, mind and art.
George Orwell had interested me since 1968, when I went to read his unpublished letters and manuscripts
at University College in London. Unwittingly, I came up against a classic stumbling block: the obstructive
literary widow. The curator had given me written permission, but Sonia Orwell had abruptly closed the
Archive to scholars. Orwell had left instructions that no biography was to be written, and she was furious
that Peter Stansky and William Abrahams had deceptively used the Archive for that purpose. To get even
with them, Sonia impulsively asked Bernard Crick, a professor of politics, to write an official biography.
When Crick's book, a dry compendium of facts that ignored Orwell's inner or emotional life, appeared in
1980, she naturally disliked it. The four-volume edition of Orwell's essays, diaries and letters which she
and Ian Angus had brought out in 1968, together with Crick's biography, remained for some years the
definitive word on Orwell. In 1991 Michael Shelden published a third biography, authorized this time by
the Orwell estate.
Orwell's life and works, then, had been thoroughly researched, but my fascination with the complex
personality behind the lucid prose had lasted. For thirty years I'd been teaching and thinking about Orwell,
and I disagreed with all three biographies in matters of fact, emphasis and meaning. So I took up the
challenge to find new material and to write a better book than the previous ones. A biographer begins by
asking questions. That's the essence of research. You ask questions of the novels, essays and letters; you
look questioningly at a landscape and at a house where he lived, as well as at the friends and family
who've survived him. What was he like? How did he look? What did he say? How did he laugh? What
did he eat? Why did he go to Burma and not Cambridge? Why did he leave Burma? What sort of Socialist
was he? Was he as gloomy and pessimistic as his last novel? How often we read a voluminous book
which leaves us with no clear impression of its subject. We may get to know in excruciating detail
everything he did on a certain day, in a certain city, but nothing of how he felt or what he thought as a
human being.
The existence of new material spurred me on. In 1998 Peter Davison published a monumental,
brilliantly annotated, 20-volume, 8,500-page edition of Orwell's Complete Works, which contained a
great deal of new information, including several moving letters from his first wife, Eileen O'shaughnessy,
written just before her unexpected death. Peter Davison himself proved a marvelous resource. A
passionate researcher and generous colleague, he couldn't quite let go of Orwell and helped me answer
many questions. He even trekked out to the British Newspaper Library to search for unsigned articles by
Orwell in the Rangoon Gazette. The intervening years had brought new books, articles, memoirs,
interviews, oral history, radio and television material. The Orwell Archive had grown, and family
members and friends were still alive. Though dead for fifty years, Orwell's language and ideas still
permeate the culture. Vivid phrases like Big Brother Is Watching You, Thought Police, Vaporized
and Unperson uncannily expressed the thoughts and feelings of people forced to live in totalitarian
societies.
Other new documents had surfaced as a result of political changes. The Soviet Secret Police report on
Orwell, dated July 7, 1937, is now in the Central Party Archives in Moscow. This NKVD report shows
that he was well known to the Communists and had played an active role in the Barcelona battles between
the factions on the Left. By labeling him a Trotskyist, the Communists signed his death warrant. Orwell
was wounded and on the run. If they'd caught him before he escaped into France, they would certainly
have executed him to prevent him from telling the truth about the Communists destruction of their former
allies in Spaina major cause of their defeat in the Civil War.
Orwell's was the dominant voice of his age, and his moral and literary influence has long outlasted the
political context of the 1930s and 1940s. John le Carr, in response to my query about what Orwell meant
to him, summed up the way his life and works have fused into a noble ideal: Orwell meant and means a
great deal to me. Burmese Days still stands as a splendid cameo of colonial corruption. Orwell's
commitment to the hard life is a lesson to all of us. I taught at Eton. It always amused me that Blair-
Orwell, who had been to Eton, took great pains to disown the place, while Evelyn Waugh, who hadn't
been to Eton, took similar pains to pretend he had. Orwell's hatred of greed, cant, and the me society is
as much needed today as it was in his own timeprobably more so. He remains an ideal for meof
clarity, anger and perfectly aimed irony. I realized that this image of Orwell the man and writer had
attracted me to him in the first place: the wintry conscience Orwell, the volunteer in the Spanish war,
the austere figure with a quirky sense of humor. But what intrigued me most was the inner man. I wanted to
ask different sorts of questions, to get closer to this enigmatic personality, to hear the private voice as
well as the public one.
One crux of Orwell biography is the account he gives of his prep school days at St. Cyprian's in a
justly famous essay, Such, Such Were the Joys. Is it an embroidered Dickensian tale or deadly accurate
satire? Previous researchers had interviewed the headmistress, who claimed it was wildly exaggerated. I
consulted the memoirs of other distinguished Old Boysthe photographer Cecil Beaton, the nature writer
Gavin Maxwell, the advertising man David Ogilvy and the golfing expert Henry Longhurstas points of
comparison. They all corroborated Orwell's account. At breakfast the young Orwell was repelled by the
encrusted strips of cold porridge under the rims of the pewter bowls. For poor Henry Longhurst it was
much worse: after getting sick into his bowl he was forced to stand up in front of the school and gobble
down the nauseous mixture.
I wanted to define Orwell by putting him into his social context. Who were his friends and what did
they say about him? In the Orwell Archive I now made frequent discoveries: details seemed to jump out at
me and fit into the pattern of the book I was conceiving. The best things were unpublished memoirs about
Orwell and Eileen, letters to him and television documentaries that had many interviews with people who
knew him. One poignant tape of long-dead friends, Cyril Connolly and Malcolm Muggeridge, showed
them lying on the summer grass of the Sussex Downs and reminiscing about gloomy George.
Some of this material, of course, has been read over and over again by other people. But if you look at
documents in a new way, you can find new connections. I found a fascinating letter, which no one else had
noticed, from his older married patron, Mabel Fierz, who'd encouraged Orwell at the start of his career
and helped him get published. In the summer of 1932 Mabel, planning an outdoor excursion, gushingly
wrote: Take your costume in case we find a suitable place. I hate the usual swimming bath. Will also
take tea. It will be nice. Not as you say a decent walk. I prefer the opposite! Was this a love letter? To
me it suggested a clandestine affair.
I remembered that twenty years earlier, when writing my life of Katherine Mansfield, I'd visited her
old school, Queen's College in London, and met the headmistress, Stefanie Fierz. When I asked her:
Doesn't your family have something to do with Orwell? she replied: You are a clever young man. She
invited me home to taste the same greengage jam her mother-in-law, Mabel, had made for Orwell. In 1998
I got back in touch with Stefanie and her husband Adrian Fierz and went to see them again. Orwell, in his
midtwenties, had been a friend and mentor to the schoolboy Adrian. I hesitated to ask about his mother's
possible affair with Orwell, but I need not have worried. Adrian said that he'd guessed the truth about
their relationship early on, and when he'd questioned his mother late in her life (she lived to be a hundred
years old) about her affair with Orwell, she confessed: Yes, you could say so. He was my lover.
Evidence of sexual relationships is rarely as clear as thisthe biographer seldom finds a letter that
says: You were wonderful in bed last night! So he has to weigh the evidence carefully and make his
judgment. In this case, I had gotten to know a lot more about Mabel. She was a bohemian, literary type
who not only encouraged Orwell to write and placed his first book with an agent, but also adored and
worshipped him. Back from Burma, lonely and hard up, Orwell was glad to sleep with his patron. He
also slept with several other women in London and Southwold.
I found several printed sources unknown to previous biographers. One example is A Russian's
England by Elisaveta Fen, whose real name was Lydia Jackson. A Russian migr, she was a close friend
of Orwell's wife Eileen, and knew Orwell for several years in the late 1930s. At Eileen's urging she
visited him when he was recuperating from a flare-up of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Gloucestershire.
Her memoir reveals that Orwell was a lonely, sexually needy man. She felt so sorry for him she allowed
him to kiss her. Her kindness encouraged his hopes of becoming her lover and he sent her love letters
when he spent a winter in Morocco. When he returned in 1939 he planned to seduce her. Lydia, who
loved Eileen and valued her friendship, was mortified by his conduct, but understood his desperate desire
to assert his masculinity as his body betrayed him.
Eileen shared Orwell's need to suffer, but his masochism sometimes became too mucheven for her.
One unnerving letter she wrote to him, influenced by fear of her impending operation, conveys her horror
of urban life during World War II and foreshadows the grimmer passages of Nineteen Eighty-Four: I
don't think you understand what a nightmare the London life is to me. I can't stand having people all
over the place, every meal makes me feel sick because every food has been handled by twenty dirty
hands. I can't breathe the air, I can't think any more clearly than one would expect to in the moment of
being smothered. After her death Orwell felt guilt-ridden for having neglected her. Eileen's letter is
desperately sad, but my sympathy for her led me to understand rather than to criticize Orwell. With
tuberculosis hanging over his head, he had a bleak future. People in London during the blitz were under
great stress and tended to be promiscuous. Sex was an escape from a hard life of long hours and
insufficient food, like the boiled cod and bitter turnip tops in the BBC canteen. To me, his human
weaknesses made his courage and achievement more remarkable.
Many of my interviews, the most pleasurable part of the research, have taken place in bizarre
circumstances: in freezing English houses where my breath was visible in the sitting room, in convents,
insane asylums and on deathbeds. I've introduced people to brothers and sisters they'd never known about.
I found and held in my hands the brain of Wyndham Lewis. Nothing's more riveting than talking to
sympathetic and intelligent people about a subject in which you're passionately interested. This brings you
as close as you'll ever get to the character you're trying to recreate. Two of the most interesting meetings
were with women who'd known Orwell, under unusual circumstances, in the mid-1940s.
After Eileen's sudden death during an operation at the age of 39, Orwell, lonely, sick and left with an
adopted baby he refused to give up, was desperate for a wife. He impulsively proposed to several young
womenincluding the exceptionally beautiful and charming Celia Paget, whose twin sister Mamaine was
married to Orwell's close friend Arthur Koestler. Though Celia was many years younger, Koestler
implored her to marry Orwell. She liked him and enjoyed his sardonic humor, but to her he seemed old
and ill. She emphasized that Orwell expressed great concern for my happiness. He always seemed to
feel that he wasn't a good bet for me, both because he was quite a lot older and because of his poor
health. When she sat on Orwell's lap in a crowded taxi, he confessed he was so excited by embracing
her that the passion went through him like an electric shock.
Orwell also proposed to Anne Popham, a young art student he scarcely knew. She told me about this
bizarre episode. Orwell invited her to tea, and dismissed his son Richard and the nanny with Go along,
now. He then told Anne: Come and sit here. It will be more comfortable on the bed in the corner.
Coming directly to the point, he kissed and embraced her, and asked: Do you think you could care for
me? Since there was absolutely no courtship, wooing or getting to know him, Anne was deeply
embarrassed and shocked by his proposal, which seemed both precipitate and calculating. Feeling
intensely uncomfortable, yet aware of his loneliness, she wriggled out of his arms and rejected his offer
as gently as possible. Neither of these young, pretty women saw themselves as widowed stepmothers.
Orwell's relations with Sonia Brownell, who became his second wife, developed in this context of
desperation and fear of death. David Astor, editor of the Observer and a loyal friend who'd helped
Orwell in innumerable ways, told me about his deathbed marriage to Soniaa blooming Renoir beauty
with a gaunt El Greco saint. I asked a number of Sonia's friends to describe her role in Orwell's life. The
moribund Orwell was deeply in love with the gorgeous Sonia. But why did she agree to marry him in
1949 after rejecting him in 1945? Was she a devoted Florence Nightingale or a mercenary Kate Croy?
Sonia herself was perplexed about her motives and said: The reasons why George married me are
perfectly clear. What aren't clear are the reasons why I married George. Part of the complex answer must
be that in 1949 he was a rich and world famous author who made no sexual demands and would soon be
dead.
Up to now I've always visited every place where my subjects had lived and traveled, believing that
places had a magic influence on people's lives. Since I'd spent several years in London in the 1970s, I felt
I knew Orwell's London quite well. At the end of my research trip in November 1998, with a day to
spare, I decided to go to Eton, which I'd not seen for many years. Orwell's Eton years had been well
documented, and I just wanted to pick up some local color. But my visit turned out to be a perfect example
of how, when you work on a biography, places, people and documents all come together in unpredictable
ways.
It was a beautiful fall day, and I was lucky to find the librarian, Michael Meredith, who gave me a
whirlwind tour of the College. He showed me the young Orwell's copy of G. K. Chesterton's book of
comic verse, Greybeards at Play (1900), with his pen-and-ink bookplate, Eric BlairHis Book, and
his drawing of a rocky, Middle Eastern landscape, with palm trees, domed mosque and fortified castle.
The beauty of the College, its atmosphere of learning and privilege, were overwhelming. As we talked
about Orwell we got on to the subject of his fateful choice, at the age of eighteen, of going to Burma
instead of to Oxford or Cambridge.
The week before I had been to Scotland to see the ninety-five-year-old Sir Steven Runcimanthe
great scholar of Byzantium and the Crusades, who'd been to Eton with Orwell. (On the telephone he'd
said: I'd be delighted to talk to you, Professor Mayers, about Eric Blair. But I must warn you that I've not
seen him for 77 years!) Attended by two devoted retainers, Runciman lived alone in a huge castle on the
Scottish border (I'm a younger son and had to buy this place myself, he told me). He still had vivid
memories of their days at Eton and of their old tutor, Andrew Gow, a friend of A. E. Housman and, later
on, Runciman's irritating colleague at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1969 Gow had written me that
Orwell could not go to University unless he got a scholarship that there was not the faintest hope of
his getting one and that it would be a waste of time to try. Not true, said Runciman, who told me that
Gow particularly resented someone like Orwell, who was capable of doing well in classics but was
bored by the subject. I now realized that Orwell could have gone to university if he had wanted to. He
was very good at exams, and as Michael Meredith assured me, could have walked into Oxbridge from
Eton, which had generous scholarships for boys who could not pay their own way. He simply chose not to
go, and in his teens took on the grave responsibilities of a colonial policeman.
But Burma, where Orwell spent his crucial early adult years, was out of reach. Since travel was
restricted to the area between Rangoon and Mandalay, I would not be able to visit Moulmein (southeast of
Rangoon), where Orwell shot the elephant, or Katha (north of Mandalay), his last post and the setting of
Burmese Days. Apart from his own writing very little is known about Orwell's years there, and colonial
police records have been either transferred to London or destroyed in the war. I studied maps and
gazetteers of India and Burma to recreate the atmosphere of his obscure birthplaceMotihari, Indianot
in the province of Bengal, but in Bihar, and placed Orwell's role as policeman in the context of colonial
history. Once again, memoirs of other administrators and visitors, including Somerset Maugham, helped to
flesh out the picture of conditions there. (In August 2000, just before my book was published, I did get to
Burma. I lectured on an Orient Express cruise up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay to Bhamo, near the
Chinese border, and with a month's visa was able to visit nearly all the places where Orwell had
worked.)
One obscure source, May Hearsey's privately published memoir of Burma, Land of Chindits and
Rubies (1982), gave an interesting view of Orwell as policeman. She provides a telling snapshot of his
kindness to a young Irish officer who had just been posted to Moulmein. When the new man confessed that
he didn't know Burmese well enough to take on his new job, Orwell was sympathetic and advised him to
transfer to the River Police, where the language was not essential. Decent and kind himself, he was very
different from the type of martinet officer he satirized in Burmese Days.
The journey to Orwell's house on Jurain the Inner Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, where
he lived in the late 1940s and wrote Nineteen Eighty-Fouris almost as difficult as getting to Burma.
The train from London to Glasgow, bus to the coast, boat to the island of Kintyre, bus across Kintyre, boat
to Jura and taxi from Craighouse to Ardlussa still takes forty-eight hours. The last seven milesalong a
grueling, badly rutted cart-track, full of enormous potholeshas to be negotiated on foot. His old house,
Barnhilla cross between Wuthering Heights and Cold Comfort Farmis closed up and there's nothing
else to see when you finally get there. Since I went to Britain in November and December, when Jura is
sometimes cut off from the mainland for weeks by stormy seas, I abandoned the idea and based my
descriptions of Jura on travel books, Orwell's diary and accounts of friends who visited him.
Susan Watson, who as a young woman worked as a nanny for Orwell's adopted son in London and
Jura, recounted her bitter quarrels in Jura with Orwell's sister, Avril, about who would control his
household. I went to visit David Holbrook, now a Cambridge don but in the late 1940s a young writer
and, for a time, Susan's boyfriend. Holbrook made the trek to visit Susan on Jura, where Orwell and
Avril, suspecting he was a Communist spy, treated him as an unwelcome guest. Holbrook gave me his
unpublished novel, with an account of his visit he assured me was based on reality. I had always felt that
Orwell's decision to live on the damp and dreary Jura virtually killed him. Talking to Susan Watson,
David Holbrook, David Astor, who had first told him about the island, to Orwell's family, who'd spent
summers there, and to two of his doctors, confirmed this belief.
The important questions were: why did he go there? what was it like? why was he so reluctant to
leave, despite the acute discomfort, the cold and the impossibility of getting secretarial help when he was
working on Nineteen Eighty-Four? Jura is still unspoiled, very much as it was when Orwell lived there.
He idealized the place, and gave it up reluctantly. He was not a very social person, and sought austerity
and isolation. He was fleeing London, the grime and destruction of the blitz, and the struggle of life in the
postwar years. The setting of Jura must have heightened the dark images of London that filled his mind
when he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Details of behavior, dress and speech help build the central character and the atmosphere surrounding
him. His former pupil, Geoffrey Stevens, told me how Orwell, a conscientious teacher, would prod the
boys stomachs while urging them to respond to his queries. His nieces and nephewJane, Lucy and
Henry Dakinvisited Orwell on Jura. Lucy remembered her uncle's dour response when she first arrived
at the house, exhausted after the rail journey, the ferry and the miles of rutted dirt track. Ah, there you are,
Lu, he said, as if she had just come back from a shop round the corner. Lucy and Henry were with him
when he misread the tidal tables, steered his twelve-foot dinghy into one of the most perilous whirlpools
in Europe and came very close to drowning them all. After their boating accident he infuriated them by
refusing their rescuer's offer to drop them off at Barnhill, and casually remarked, That's all right. We'll
walk back. They had lost their shoes in the whirlpool and had to go barefoot over three miles of rough
country.
Orwell made idiosyncratic remarks that people remembered all their lives. Connolly remembered him
saying at prep school: whoever wins this war, we shall emerge a second-rate nation. William Empson
heard Orwell, when he worked in the wartime BBC, arguing with an Indian colleague. In a self-
consciously cockney accent he exclaimed through the thin partition of his office: The FACK that you're
black and that I'm white, has nudding whatever to do wiv it. (Oddly enough, the Indian did not reply:
But I'm not black.) When Susan Watson prepared a particularly appetizing dish, Orwell, like the
schoolboy he once was, would turn to baby Richard and remark: Gosh, boys, this looks good! David
Astor captured the atmosphere of their weekly London lunches during the war. He recalled Cyril Connolly
(alluding to a British general and their mutual friend Tosco Fyvel and imitating Arthur Koestler's strong
Hungarian accent) asking: The great kvestion iss: Who vill vin ze desert var? Wavell, Fyvel or
Orvell?
Orwelllike Samuel Johnson and Anton Chekhovwas a great-hearted and admirable man. But he
also had his human failings. He yearned to be rich, handsome and a devil with the ladies. Women were
always important to him, and his weird proposals to Celia Paget and Anne Popham revealed the
hopelessly romantic side of his character. His desperate longing for lovea theme in all his novelslies
at the core of his life and work, and was responsible for his deathbed marriage to Sonia, the model for
Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Orwell who emerges from my book is darker than the legendary
figure. He had a noble character, but was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt,
masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.
EPILOGUE

After writing twenty-two lives, I've formulated twelve principles of biography.

This is how I think lives should be written and what they ought to achieve.

1. Read everything in print and follow up every lead.

2. Be persistent and see everyone who will talk to you.
3. Weigh all the evidence like a lawyer. A biographer is an artist on oath.
4. Get the subject born in the first five pages. Nothing is duller than genealogy.
5. Describe the subject's personal habits and tastes.
6. Portray the minor characters as fully as possible.
7. Illuminate the recurrent patterns of the life. Look at the big picture, not the small details.
8. Keep up the dramatic narrative, employing the same techniques as the novelist, and
concentrate on your readers interests rather than your own obsessions.
9. Don't focus on the events of the life, but on what they mean.
10. Be selective rather than exhaustive, analytical rather than descriptive. Aim for four hundred
pages and remember that a shorter book, though much harder to write, is easier to read than a
long one.
11. Complete the book in a few years, at most, or you will begin to hate the subject for eating up
your life.
12. Always remember the responsibility of the biographer to do justice to his subject.
NOTES

1. ORWELL's PAINFUL CHILDHOOD

1. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1939; London, 1962), p. 106.
2. G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London, 1968), p. 31.
3. William Thackeray, The Newcombes, in Works, ed. George Saintsbury (London, 1908), 14:66.
4. Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, in Works (New York, n.d.), pp. 960, 975. Orwell considered Baa Baa Black Sheep one of
the ten best short stories in English. Unlike Thackeray and Kipling, Orwell's description of childhood, though entirely subjective, has no self-pity
or false pathos.
5. Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939; London, 1962), p. 134.
6. Orwell's father, who was fifty when Orwell was four, was separated from his family in 1907 and spent the next four years in India. See
Gordon Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York, 1955), p. 62: In later life Thackeray's recollections of his first years in his
native country were scanty. He could just remember his father, writes Lady Ritchie, a very tall, thin man, rising out of a bath.
7. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968),
4:330369.
8. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p.104. See also Coming Up for Air, p. 46; Boys Weeklies (1940), 1:473; Decline of the English
Murder (1946), 4:98; and Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 1949), p.96.
9. The echo of Milton's Satan (by fraud or guile / What force effected not, Paradise Lost, 1.646647), emphasizes the hellish aspect of
the school.
10. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936; London, 1962), p. 42.
11. Ibid., p. 46. This is surely not the greatest cruelty one can inflict, but it was the one Orwell suffered.
12. Quoted in G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (New York, 1965), p. 37.
13. See Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (New York, 1937), p. 17: afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told
anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly
treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.
14. Charles Dickens, Preface to Nicholas Nickleby (1839; London, 1964), p. xvi.
15. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p. 87.
16. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York, 1956), p. 50.
17. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 127.

3. THE ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY: BURMESE DAYS

1. Orwell, Inside the Whale, in A Collection of Essays (New York, 1954), p. 247.
2. Orwell, Inside the Whale, p. 249. In the same essay Orwell writes: To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept
concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned foods, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts,
gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders (223).
3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1943), p. 356.
4. See Stephen Spender, World Within World (Berkeley, 1960), p. 202: We were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save
the world from Fascism. We were the Divided Generation of Hamlets who found the world out of joint and failed to set it right.
5. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, pp. 143, 147, 220.
6. Orwell wrote about imperialism in his essays Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, Rudyard Kipling, Reflections on Gandhi and in
the last half of The Road to Wigan Pier.
7. Orwell, Review of The Sword and Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand, Horizon 6 (July 1942), 71.
8. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 126, 129.
9. Ibid., p. 130.
10. Quoted in Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works (London, 1956), p. 29. In Why I Write, A
Collection of Essays, p. 315, Orwell suggests the limitations of this novel: I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy
endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their
sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of
book.
11. Compare this with Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, A Collection of Essays, p. 159: I perceived in this moment that when the white
man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys; and with Orwell's Travel Round and Down, Time and Tide, October 17, 1936, p.
1453: When a subject population rises in revolt you have got to suppress it, and you can do so only by methods which make nonsense of any
claim for the superiority of western civilisation. In order to rule over barbarians, you have got to become a barbarian yourself.
12. Compare Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; New York, 1931), p. 259:
Doramin was one of the most remarkable men of his race I had ever seen. His bulk for a Malay was immense, but he did not look
merely fat; he looked imposing, monumental. This motionless body [was] clad in rich stuffs, coloured silks, rich embroideries the flat,
big, round face [was] wrinkled, furrowed. When he walked, two short, sturdy young fellows sustained his elbows; they would ease
him down and stand behind his chair till he wanted to rise and then would catch him under his armpits and help him up. It was
generally believed he consulted his wife as to public affairs;

with Burmese Days, pp. 5, 13:

unblinking, rather like a great porcelain idol, U Po Kyin gazed out into the fierce sunlight. He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years
he had not risen from his chair without help. His face was vast, yellow and quite unwrinkled he wore one of those vivid Arakanese
longyis with green and magenta checks. [His wife] had been the confidante of U Po Kyin's intrigues for twenty years and more.

13. See Orwell, England, Your England, A Collection of Essays, pp. 277278: By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in
the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilised men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left
forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Notes (1874), The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), p. 48.
15. Orwell, Why I Write, A Collection of Essays, p. 316.

4. ORWELL: THE HONORARY PROLETARIAN

1. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968).
2. John Wain, The Last of George Orwell, Twentieth Century 155 (January 1954), 72.
3. The editing and the index have been highly praised and deserve commendation. But I would like to note the following errors, which can
be corrected in future printings. The editors claim the War-time Diaries have never been published; in fact, about half the 194041 Diary
was published in World Review 16 (June 1950), 2144; the book jacket says Orwell wrote ten books (excluding essays) during his lifetime
while the Introduction says he wrote nine (which is correct); said in 3:31 and there in 4:146n1 are both misspelled; in 3:358 Jos lacks an
accent; in 4:4849 the quotation from Herbert Read is garbled. The references to Samuel Johnson in 3:6 and to D. H. Lawrence in 3:166 are
missing from the index; and the index references to Talking to India in 3:428 are incorrect.
The annotations are inconsistent. R. H. Tawney and William Empson get explanatory footnotes but Frank Buchman and Lord Rothermere
do not. The lines in Orwell's footnote on 2:4 from Marvell's The Garden are not identified, nor is the mysterious reference to 18b in 3:80.
The note on Rayner Heppenstall in 2:18, their friendship continued until Orwell's death, is misleading in view of the denigrating and
destructive portrait of Orwell in Heppenstall's Four Absentees (1960). And the backward boy (1:546) whom Orwell took care of in 1930 is
called a congenital imbecile in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; New York, 1961), p. 84. He is probably the subject of Orwell's
lost short story, The Idiot.
4. But not always balanced. In a letter of July 1940, he writes, rather perversely: I actually rather hope that the [German] invasion will
happen. The locale morale is extremely good, and if we are invaded we shall at any rate get rid once and for all of the gang that got us into this
mess (2:34).
5. My early childhood had not been altogether happy. I knew very well that I merely disliked my own father, whom I had barely seen
before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying Don't (4:334, 360).
6. See Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936; London, 1962), p. 13, where Gordon attacks the Snooty, refined books on safe painters
and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews.
7. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London, 1962), p. 129.
8. Samuel Johnson expressed the same idea: Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently
a great evil (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and Lawrence Powell, [Oxford, 1934], 1.511).
9. G. B. Shaw, Preface to Immaturity, Selected Prose (New York, 1952), p. 54.
10. Orwell, Culture and Democracy, Victory or Vested Interests? ed. G. D. H. Cole (London, 1942), p. 83.
11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
12. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (New York, 1903), p. 1.
 13. Orwell, Burmese Days (1934; New York, 1951), p. 61.
14. Orwell, Culture and Democracy, p. 81.
15. Ravelston is based on Orwell's friend Sir Richard Rees, the editor of Adelphi, where Orwell published his first reviews and the
mediocre poem that Gordon composes in the novel. Rosemary is based on Eileen O'shaughnessy, whom Orwell married in 1936 and who died
unexpectedly during an operation in 1945.
16. Besides quotations from Keats and Marvell, there are ineffectual allusions to the Bible, Virgil, Chaucer, Villon, Wyatt, Peele,
Shakespeare, Milton, Mandeville, Blake, Baudelaire, Francis Thompson and D. H. Lawrence. In Lawrence's artistically superior Women in
Love (1920), the numerous references to nineteenth-century English writers contrast the tradition and solidity of that period to the chaos and
disintegration of the modern age.
17. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, pp. 110111.
18. Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed is a theme of Orwell's novel as well as of Johnson's London (1738). Toil, envy, want, the
patron, and the gaol are all portrayed in the book.
19. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 148.
20. The influence of Keep the Aspidistra Flying on Wain's Hurry on Down (1953; London, 1960) is particularly strong, as the following
Orwellian quotations from Wain indicate:

his aim was to be outside the class structure altogether. (52)

He began to think increasingly about money. The poison was doing its work. (77)

He had turned his back resolutely on the world represented by Robert Tharkles; he had declared that he wanted none of it, that he would
manage without its aid or approval. (81)

Can't get a short drink under two bob. Money. The network everywhere: no, a web, sticky and cunningly arranged. (84)

He comes to the illusory citadel called Renunciation of Ambition. (234)

21. Quoted in Jacob Korg, The Spiritual Theme in George Gissing's Born in Exile, From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert
Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis, 1958), p. 246.
22. George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; Boston, 1962), p. 56.
23. Orwell, Not Enough Money, Tribune (London), April 2, 1943, p. 15. See also Orwell's important posthumous essay, George Gissing,
4:428436.
24. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 9495.
25. Orwell, Coming Up For Air (1939; London, 1962), p. 27.
26. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 1949), p. 60.
27. This scene is very close to the sense of freedom that Orwell experienced under the short-lived Anarchist government in Barcelona. See
Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938; Boston, 1959), pp. 104105.
28. Orwell puts too much faith in common decency. Decent men seldom achieve political power; and if they do, they rarely remain
decent.
29. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; London, 1961), p. 65.
30. Ibid., p. 105.
31. A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 19141945 (New York, 1965), p. 238.
32. Orwell, Our Own Have Nots, Time and Tide, November 27, 1937, p. 1588.
33. Compared to Orwell's book, J. B. Priestley's English Journey (1934) gives a superficial outsider's view and conveys the impression of
a rather cozy and pleasant jaunt.
34. Orwell's desire to change things is related to another criticism of most Left-wing writing. In England, Your England he states: The
immediately striking thing about these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive
suggestion (2:74).
35. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 120.
36. Orwell's somewhat sentimental description of working-class domestic life reflects his own lack of family warmth.
37. He can also be very muddle-headed about them. In The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 103104, he writes: Of course I know now there is
not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school.
38. Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero (Chicago, 1964), p. 153.
39. Ibid., p.154.
40. E is his wife Eileen; G his sister-in-law, Gwen O'shaughnessy.

6. AN AFFIRMING FLAME: HOMAGE TO CATALONIA
1. John Wain, Orwell in Perspective, New World Writing 12 (1957), 85.
2. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1:6.
3. The first part of Malraux's Man's Hope (1938) describes the initial events of the war and the victory of the workers in Madrid and
Barcelona.
4. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 46. Orwell may have been thinking of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917) and Eliot's
Homage to John Dryden (1924) when he chose his title.
5. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904; New York, 1960), pp. 83, 99.
6. Georges Bernanos, A Diary of My Times, trans. Pamela Morris (New York, 1938), p. 185.
7. By Remarque, Barbusse, Hemingway, Aldington, Graves, Sassoon and Max Plowman.
8. Many images of Burma reappear as similes in Homage to Catalonia. The Spanish hills are wrinkled like the skins of elephants (25), a
patrol is like stalking a wild animal (89), returning to Barcelona is like going from Mandalay to a hill station (108) and the noise of bullets is
like a tropical rainstorm (131).
9. Yet Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive From the Camp of Victory (Carbondale, Illinois, 1962), p. 60, writes, it is predominantly a
gay book.
10. Quoted in Nathan Cohen, A Conversation with Joyce Cary, Tamarack Review 3 (1957), 15.
11. Orwell's metaphorical and emotional description is quite different from Georges Kopp's more precise and factual account in a letter from
Barcelona on May 31, 1937: Eric was wounded on the 20th of May at 5 a.m. The bullet entered the neck just under the larynx, slightly on the
left side of its vertical axis and went out at the dorsal right side of the neck's base. It was a normal 7mm bore, copper-plated, Spanish Mauser
bullet, shot from a distance of some 175 yards. At this range, it has a velocity of some 600 feet per second and a cauterising temperature.
Under the impact, Eric fell on his back. The hemorrhaging was insignificant (British Museum Additional MS 49304).
12. See Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York, 1963), p, 424n: Orwell's account of the Barcelona riots should be read with
reservations. It is more accurate about war itself than about the Spanish War.
13. The Independent Labour Party was more radical than the Labour Party and, according to A. J. P. Taylor, was a refuge for middle-class
idealists (English History, p. 238). John McNair was the ILP representative in Barcelona. The CNT were Syndicalist unions controlled by
the Anarchists (53).
14. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, p. 191. See Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (London, 1937), p. 73, on Barcelona in August 1936:
All languages are spoken and there is an indescribable atmosphere of political enthusiasm, of enjoying the adventure of war, of relief that
sordid years of emigration are passed, of absolute confidence in speedy success. Orwell calls this work by a long way the ablest book that
has yet appeared on the Spanish war (Homage to Catalonia, p. 57n).
15. For a similar thought, see Orwell's War Diary of June 16, 1940, when Britain was threatened by invasion: If the USA is going to
submit to conquest as well, there is nothing for it but to die fighting (2:349).
16. See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (New York, 1965), p. 290: The Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with
its treacherous policy of people's fronts, in insuring the victory of reaction in Spain and Francethe Communist International is doing all it
can in that direction.
17. There are fascinating similarities between Homage to Catalonia and Malraux's description in Man's Fate (1933) of the betrayal of the
Shanghai workers by the Communist International in Hankow.
18. Orwell, equally confused about England's motives, writes in 1938: The real meaning of British foreign policy in the last two years will
not become clear until the war in Spain is over (1:347).
19. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1960), p. 425.
20. Andr Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, trans. A. W. Fielding (London 1952), p. 119.
21. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (1929; London, 1961), p. 112, describes a similar episode of military humanism: While sniping
from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loop-hole, I saw a German, perhaps seven hundred yards away, through my
telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line. I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the
sergeant with me. Here, take this. You're a better shot than I am. He got him; but I had not stayed to watch.
22. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 131.
23. Ibid., p. 132.
24. Compare Homage to Catalonia, p. 83:
The place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than
another it is a rat running over me in the darkness, However, I had the satisfaction of catching one of them a good punch that sent him
flying;

with Graves, Good-bye to All That, pp. 116117:

Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly [one man] found two rats
on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.

25. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 132133.

26. Ibid., p. 130.
27. Ibid.
 28. Ibid., p. 134.
29. Ibid., p. 137.
30. See Bernanos, A Diary of My Times, p. 118: The Spanish tragedy is a charnel-house. All the mistakes by which Europe is bringing
about her death, mistakes which she tries to spew forth in frightful convulsions, mingle there in putrefaction.
31. For a vivid account of Fascist jails, see Arthur Koestler's Spanish Testament (1938).
32. Orwell's descriptions of dawn with the first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness (40); of the cherries whitening on
the trees in no man's land; and of the silver poplar leaves that fringed our trenches and brushed against my face (187) are deeply moving
affirmations of life. These glimpses suggest the real Spain that Orwell could never see until he was discharged: the sierras, goatherds,
vineyards and palaces that had held his imagination since childhood.
33. Spender, World Within World, p. 170.
34. Orwell, Review of The Forge by Arturo Barea, Horizon 4 (September 1941), 214. See also K. W. Watkins, Britain Divided: The
Effect of the Spanish Civil War on British Public Opinion (New York, 1963).

8. ORWELL's APOCALYPSE: COMING UP FOR AIR

1. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 160.
2. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 16.
3. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 2:58.
4. See Orwell's BBC talk (no. 31), Calling All Students (June 13, 1943).
5. John Wain, Here Lies Lower Binfield, Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1963), p. 208.
6. E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest, Abinger Harvest (New York, 1955), p. 343.
7. Isaac Rosenfeld, Decency and Death, Partisan Review 17 (May 1950), 516.
8. D. H. Lawrence, The Captain's Doll, Four Short Novels (New York, 1965), p. 245.
9. Orwell, The Male Byronic, Tribune, June 21, 1940, p. 20. Orwell's novel has thematic affinities with H. G. Wells Mr. Britling Sees It
Through (1916), which portrays the destruction of these golden years by the Great War.
10. Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Harry Moore (New York, 1962), 1:378.
11. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way (London, 1967), p. 9.

12. ORWELL's BESTIARY: THE POLITICAL ALLEGORY OF ANIMAL FARM

1. See 1:279, for Orwell's letter of July 31, 1937: We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the
border with the police panting on our heels.
2. See Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 5152: With the utmost stretch of fancy it would be difficult to imagine a contrast more
striking than that which exists between the schema of the workers state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and the actual state now
headed by Stalin.
3. John Atkins, George Orwell: A Literary Study (London, 1954), p. 233, writes of two books critical of the Soviet Union: Orwell had read
both of these books and he reviewed one. They are The Life and Death of Stalin by Louis Fischer and The Real Soviet Russia by David J.
Dallin. If Orwell read Dallin's book (1944), it was too late to influence Animal Farm; if he reviewed the book, it is not listed in any of the
bibliographies. He could not have read Fischer's book, which was first published in 1952.
4. Alexander Pope's couplet in The Essay on Man (1734) is typical:
How instinct varies in the groveling swine
Compared, half-reasoning elephant with thine!
See also Boswell, Life of Johnson, 4.373: Miss Seward told Johnson

of a wonderful learned pig, which I had seen at Nottingham; and which did all that we have observed exhibited by dogs and horses.
The subject amused him. Then (said he) the pigs are a race unjustly calumniated. Pig has, it seems, not been wanting to man, but
man to pig. We do not allow time for his education.
5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (New York, 1958), p. 224.
6. Orwell, Animal Farm (New York, 1946), p. 22.
7. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, pp. 219220.
8. Atkins, George Orwell, p. 221.
 9. Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell (Chicago, 1956), pp. 140, 145, 150.
10. Rees, George Orwell, p. 85.
11. Edward Thomas, Orwell (London, 1965), p. 71.
12. George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (Boston, 1966), p. 192.
13. One line of the speech is borrowed from Thomas Hobbes. See Leviathan (1651; New York, 1962), p. 100: The life of man [is] solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and Major's our lives are miserable, laborious, and short (6).
14. See C. M. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (New York, 1967), p. 127, on Mayakovsky: He became more and more a public figure, a
tribune of the Revolution, who through his rhetorical verse did much to convince the proletariat that it lived in a wonderful world and must
make every effort to preserve and improve it. Orwell had read Bowra's essay on Mayakovsky (see 3:105).
15. By an anonymous Russian poetaster, quoted in Fischer's The Life and Death of Stalin (New York, 1952), p. 32, and cited by Atkins,
George Orwell, p. 228.
16. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 104105.
17. See Robert Tucker and Stephen Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York, 1965), p. xviii, quoting Stalin: To choose one's victim,
to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed there is nothing sweeter in the world.
18. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 19211929 (New York, 1959), p. 28.
19. In The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 190, 165, Orwell attacks the machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia, and states: the
unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary
development, but as an end to itself, almost as a kind of religion.
20. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 288.
21. Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 309311.
22. Ibid., p. 311.
23. Quoted in Woodcock, Crystal Spirit, p. 196.
24. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 325.
25. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 5.
26. Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, p. xxix.
27. Ibid., p. xxiii.
28. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 19291940 (New York, 1963), p. 360.
29. Quoted in Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, p. 508.
30. B.T. Oxley, George Orwell (London, 1967), p. 81, mentions this striking similarity as well as the parallel to the Kronstadt revolt.
31. Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, pp. xxvii and note.
32. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 434.
33. Ibid., pp. 519520. Atkins, George Orwell, p. 230, mentions this similarity.
34. Isaac Deutscher, 1984The Mysticism of Cruelty, Russia in Transition (New York, 1960), p. 263n.
35. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow, 1959), p. 73: the worker in his human functions no
longer feels himself to be anything but animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.
36. Tom Hopkinson, George Orwell (London, 1953), p. 29.
37. Laurence Brander, George Orwell (London, 1954), p. 171.
38. See Animal Farm, p. 72: In the old days there had often been scenes of bloodshed equally terrible, but it seemed to all of them that it
was far worse now that it was happening among themselves.
39. Conrad, Nostromo, pp. 406, 414. Orwell was working on a study of Conrad's political novels when he died.
For a similar idea, see Homage to Catalonia, p. 180: every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it
continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

13. THE EVOLUTION OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

1. See Irving Howe, Orwell: History as Nightmare, Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957), pp. 235251; Langdon Elsbree, The
Structured Nightmare of 1984, Twentieth Century Literature 5 (1959), 135151; Toshiko Shibata, The Road to Nightmare: An Essay on
George Orwell, Studies in English Language and Literature (Kyushu University, Fukuoka) 11 (1962), 4153. Others who make the
nightmare vision comparison are: Wyndham Lewis, Orwell, or Two and Two Make Four, The Writer and the Absolute (London, 1952), p.
154; Deutscher, 1984the Mysticism of Cruelty, p. 252; Philip Rieff, George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination, Kenyon Review
16 (1954), 54; Max Lerner, Introduction to Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York, 1957), p. vii; Samuel Yorks, George Orwell: Seer Over
His Shoulder, Bucknell Review 9 (1960), 33; Frederick Karl, George Orwell: The White Man's Burden, A Reader's Guide to the
Contemporary English Novel (New York, 1962), p. 164; Thomas, Orwell, p. 78; and Woodcock, Crystal Spirit, pp. 67, 218.
2. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4:329330 502.
3. Howe, History as Nightmare, p. 250.
4. A historical event, the 1943 Teheran Conference, gave Orwell the idea of three totalitarian super-states. He writes that what Nineteen
Eighty-Four really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into Zones of influence (4:460). See Deutscher,
Stalin, p. 514: in the months that followed the Teheran Conference, the plans for the division of Europe into Zones were becoming more and
more explicit. Politicians and journalists in the allied countries had discussed a condominium of the three great allied powers, each of whom
was to wield paramount influence within its own orbit.
5. Orwell is indebted to his earlier description of a hanging in Burma for the details used in his last work: I have known cases where the
doctor was obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable. Wriggling about, eh? That's
bad (1:47).
It was a good hanging, said Syme reminiscently. I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking
(Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 50).
6. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, p. 146.
7. Orwell, Review of Home Guard For Victory! by Hugh Slater, Horizon 3 (March 1941), 219.
8. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York, 1953), p. 42.
9. Orwell's concept of Thoughtcrime is as old as Matthew 5.28: Whoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery
with her already in his heart.
10. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 100, 162.
11. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 373.
12. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 87.
13. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p. 95.
14. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 189, 149.
15. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 149.
16. Orwell quoted this sentence in hisessay on Gulliver's Travels (4:208).
17. London, The Iron Heel, p. 150.
18. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 148.
19. Orwell, General de Gaulle, Manchester Evening News, May 5, 1944, p. 2.
20. Swift, Gulliver's Travels, p. 68.
21. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 132.
22. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 218.
23. Orwell, Animal Farm, pp. 9, 66.
24. Wain, The Last of George Orwell, p. 72.
25. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 5.
26. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 45.
27. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 308309.
28. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, pp. 314, 318. See Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 265.
29. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960), pp. 109, 242.
30. The Letters of Anton Chekhov, trans. and ed. Constance Garnett (London, 1920), p. 120.
31. Brombert, The Intellectual Hero, p. 137.
32. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York, 1965), p. 270.

14. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: A NOVEL OF THE 1930S

1. Quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London, 1980), p. 286.
2. Irving Howe, Celebrations and Attacks (London, 1979), pp. 208209.
3. From 1948 to 1984 wars have been fought in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon,
Cyprus, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, the Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Chad, Chile, Nicaragua, El
Salvador and the Falkland Islands.
4. I have examined a microfilm copy of the typescript of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Orwell Archive at University College, London
University.
5. The standard works on this period are Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation (London, 1976) and Bernard Bergonzi, Reading the
Thirties (London, 1978).
6. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, p. 35.
7. Letter from George Seldes to Jeffrey Meyers, April 2, 1983.
8. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York, 1932), p. 191.
9. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929; New York, 1969), pp. 184185.
10. John Macrae, In Flanders Fields, The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (Toronto, 1960), p. 110.
11. Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway: The Dumb Ox, Men Without Art (London, 1934), p. 29.
12. W. H. Auden, Gresham's School, Holt, The Old School, ed. Graham Greene (London, 1934), p. 14.
13. Anthony West, George Orwell, Principles and Persuasions (London 1958), pp. 156, 158.
14. Malcolm Muggeridge, Langham Diary, Listener, October 6, 1983, p. 18.
15. Malcolm Muggeridge, A Knight of the Woeful Countenance, The World of George Orwell, ed. Miriam Gross (London, 1971), p. 172.
16. Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties, p. 52.
17. Julian Symons, The Thirties: A Dream Revolved (London, 1960), p. 142.
SOURCES AND JEFFREY MEYERS: OTHER WORKS ON
ORWELL

Sources
Orwell's Painful Childhood, Ariel, 3 (January 1972), 5461.
Orwell's Burma, Cond Nast Traveler, November 2001, pp. 177188.
The Ethics of Responsibility: Orwell's Burmese Days, University Review, 35 (December 1968), 83
87.
George Orwell, the Honorary Proletarian, Philological Quarterly, 48 (October 1969), 526549.
Orwell and the Experience of France, The World and I, 18 (November 2003), 274291.
An Affirming Flame: Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Arizona Quarterly, 27 (Spring 1971), 522.
Repeating the Old Lies, New Criterion, 17 (April 1999), 7780.
Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up For Air, Modern Fiction Studies, 21 (Spring 1975), 6980.
Orwell as Film Critic, Sight and Sound, 48 (Autumn 1979), 255256.
A Reluctant Propagandist, National Review, 37 (November 29, 1985), 5657.
Righteous Lies, National Review, 39 (March 13, 1987), 52.
The Wind in the Willows: A New Source for Animal Farm, Salmagundi, 162163, (SpringSummer
2009), 200208.
Orwell's Bestiary: The Political Allegory of Animal Farm, Studies in the 20th Century, 8 (Fall 1971),
6584.
The Evolution of Nineteen EightyFour, English Miscellany, 23 (1972), 247261.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel of the 1930s. George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ed. John
Broderick. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1985.Pp. 7989.
Miseries and Splendors of Scholarship, University of Toronto Quarterly, 55 (Fall 1985), 117121.
The Complete Works of George Orwell, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 95 (March
2001), 121124.
George Orwell: A Voice That Naked Goes, London Magazine, 40 (Feb-ruaryMarch 2001), 3040.
George Orwell and the Art of Writing, Kenyon Review, 27 (Fall 2005), 92114.
Orwell's Satiric Humor, Common Review, 5 (Summer 2006), 3441.
The Well Known Orwell, Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Summer 1973), 250254.
Wintry Conscience, Virginia Quarterly Review, 58 (Spring 1982), 353359.
Hunting the Essential Orwell, Boston Globe, October 27, 1991, p. A16.
A Life of Loss and Longing, Times Higher Education Supplement, June 20, 2003, p. 25.
Writing Orwell's Biography: The Mystery of the Real, Partisan Review, 68 (Winter 2001), 1120, 51
52, 44.
Jeffrey Meyers: Other Works on Orwell

Books
A Reader's Guide to George Orwell. London: Thames & Hudson, 1975.
George Orwell: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
(With Valerie Meyers) George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Garland,
1977.
Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation. New York: Norton, 2000.

Other Articles
Review of Raymond Williams George Orwell and Miriam Gross, ed. The World of George Orwell,
Commonweal, 96 (June 2, 1972), 313314.
Orwell in Burma, American Notes and Queries, 11 (December 1972), 5254.
George Orwell, Bulletin of Bibliography, 31 (JulySeptember 1974), 117121.
Review of Alex Zwerdling's Orwell and the Left, London Magazine, 15 (AprilMay 1975), 104107.
George Orwell: Selected Checklist, Modern Fiction Studies, 21 (Spring 1975) 133136.
Review of William Steinhoff's George Orwell and the Origins of 1984, English Language Notes, 13
(March 1976), 227230.
Orwell's Debt to Maugham, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 33 (January 2003), 812.
Orwell on Writing, New Criterion, 22 (October 2003), 2733.
Review of Christopher Hitchens Why Orwell Matters, Studies in the Novel, 86 (Summer 2004), 277
278.
Orwell's Burmese Days: A Hindi and Burmese Glossary, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 35 (May
2005), 23.
 INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search
function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index
are listed below.

Abrahams, William
Acton, Harold
Amis, Kingsley
Angus, Ian
Astor, David
Auden, W. H., September 1, 1939, Spain,
Aung Maung Htin
Aung San Suu Kyi
Ayer, A. J.

Bernanos, Georges
Blair, Richard
Blake, William
Blunden, Edmund, Cricket Country
Borkenau, Franz, The Spanish Cockpit
Bowker, Gordon
Brockway, Fenner, Inside the Left
Brombert, Victor
Brooke, Rupert, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,
Burckhardt, Jakob
Burnham, James, The Managerial Revolution

Camus, Albert, The Plague

Cary, Joyce
Cline, Louis-Ferdinand, Voyage to the End of Night
Chaplin, Charles, The Great Dictator
Chesterton, G. K.
Connolly, Cyril, Enemies of Promise, The Rock-Pool
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes
Crick, Bernard

Daily Worker
Dakin, Lucy
Davison, Peter
Deutscher, Isaac
Dickens, Charles, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Nicholas Nickleby
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground
Durrell, Lawrence

Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land

Empson, William

Faulkner, William, The Hamlet

Fen, Elisaveta, A Russian's England
Fenwick, Gillian, Bibliography of George Orwell
Fierz, Adrian
Fierz, Mabel
Fierz, Stefanie
Flaubert, Gustave
Forster, E. M., Abinger Pageant, A Passage to India
Frankford, Frank
Freud, Sigmund
Funder, Anna, Stasiland

Gide, Andr, Return from the USSR

Gissing, George, New Grub Street
Gow, Andrew
Grahame, Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows
Graves, Robert, Good-bye to All That
Green, Julien
Greene, Graham

Harrisson, Tom
Hearsey, May, Land of Chindits and Rubies
Hemingway, Ernest, A Farewell to Arms
Heppenstall, Rayner
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan
Holbrook, David
Howe, Irving
Huxley, Aldous

Independent Labour Party

Johnson, Samuel
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses

Kafka, Franz
Katyn Massacre
Kipling, Rudyard, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, The Gardener, Mandalay, Something of Myself, Tommy,
Koestler, Arthur, Darkness at Noon
Kopp, Georges

Lawrence, D. H., The Captain's Doll, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Rainbow, The Rocking-Horse
Winner, Women in Love
le Carr, John
Lesser, Sam
Lewis, Wyndham: The Art of Being Ruled, One-Way Song, Rotting Hill, Time and Western Man
Limouzin, Nellie
London, Jack: The Iron Heel, Love of Life, The People of the Abyss

Macrae, John, In Flanders Fields,

Mailer, Norman
Malraux, Andr, Man's Hope, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg
Marx, Karl, Communist Manifesto
Maugham, W. Somerset
McCarthy, Mary
McNair, John
Meredith, Michael
Meyers, Jeffrey
Miller, Henry, The Colossus of Maroussi
Milosz, Czeslaw
Milton, John, Paradise Lost
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws
Muggeridge, Malcolm

Orwell, Eileen O'shaughnessy

ORWELL, GEORGE (Eric Blair, 19031950)
LIFE
appearance
biographies of: Gordon Bowker, Bernard Crick, 219; Jeffrey Meyers, Michael Shelden, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, D. J.
Taylor
birth
boating accident
Burma
childhood
earnings
education, Eton
family background
friendships
illness, pneumonia, tuberculosis
Jura
list of Communist sympathizers
marriages: Eileen O'shaughnessy, Sonia Brownell
relationship with parents
relationships with women
travel: France, Morocco, Spain
wound
CHARACTER
attitude toward animals
austerity
concern about money
conscientiousness
courage
defense of underdog
disregard of health
guilt
honesty
idealism
kindness
masochism
self-destructiveness
sense of humor
social conscience
violent temper
work ethic
working-class persona
IDEAS
politics, anti-colonialism, anti-Communism, anti-totalitarianism, Socialism
writing
TECHNIQUES
beast-fable
humor
motifs
realism
satire
style, clear, colloquial, plain
WORK
autobiographical
BBC Talks
book reviewing
cultural criticism
cultural influence
film criticism
 journalism
letters
literary influences: Camus, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, Forster, Gissing, Grahame, Joyce, Kipling, Koestler, Lawrence,
London, Maugham, Milton, Swift, Wells, Zola
literary persona,
moralist
propaganda
themes: class exploitation, comradeship, England, loss, the past, poverty, revolution betrayed, telling the truth
WORKS
Collections
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
The Complete Works
Nonfiction
Down and Out in Paris and London
Homage to Catalonia, criticism of, sales
Inside the Whale
The Lion and the Unicorn
The Lost Writings
The Road to Wigan Pier, expiation, poverty; satire, Socialism
The War Commentaries
Novels
Animal Farm, Preface, sources
Burmese Days, colonial critique
A Clergyman's Daughter
Coming Up for Air, George Bowling
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock
Nineteen Eighty-Four, anti-totalitarian theme, Appendix on Newspeak, and the BBC, composition of, edited by Crick, facsimile
edition, new words, OBrien, the past, predictions in, and Sonia, and Teheran Conference, as Thirties novel, Winston Smith
Essays and Diaries
The Art of Donald McGill,
As I Please,
Boys Weeklies,
Charles Dickens,
Clink,
Confessions of a Book-Reviewer,
The Cost of Letters,
Decline of the English Murder,
Diary,
England, Your England,
Freedom of the Press,
The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,
Funny, But Not Vulgar,
Good Bad Books,
A Hanging,
Hop-Picking,
How the Poor Die,
Imaginary Interview,
Inside the Whale,
Introduction to British Pamphleteers
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,
Literature and Totalitarianism,
London Letters,
Marrakech,
New Words,
Notes on the Spanish Militias,
Politics and the English Language,
Politics vs. Literature,
The Prevention of Literature,
Raffles and Miss Blandish,
Riding Down from Bangor, The Road to Wigan Pier Diary,
 Rudyard Kipling,
Shooting an Elephant,
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,
The Spike,
Such, Such Were the Joys,
Travel Round and Down,
War Diary,
Why I Write,
Writers and Leviathan,
Poems
A happy vicar I might have been,
On a Ruined Farm Near the His Master's Voice Gramophone Factory,
Orwell, Sonia Brownell, marriage

Paget, Celia
Partisan Review
Pitter, Ruth
Poe, Edgar Allan
Popham, Anne
POUM
Powell, Anthony

Rees, Richard
Rodden, John, The Politics of Literary Reputation
Rosenberg, Harold
Runciman, Sir Steven

Salkeld, Brenda
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Shaw, George Bernard
Shelden, Michael
Silone, Ignazio, The Fox,
Soria, Georges, Trotskyism in the Service of Franco
Spender, Stephen
Stalin, Joseph
Stansky, Peter
Stevens, Geoffrey
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels
Symons, Julian

Taylor, D. J.
Thackeray, William, The Newcombes
Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish Civil War
Time and Tide
Tribune
Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed

Wain, John, Hurry on Down

Warburg, Fredric
Watson, Susan
Waugh, Evelyn
Weil, Simone
Wells, H. G., The History of Mr. Polly
West, Anthony
West, William J.
Woodruff, Philip, The Men Who Ruled India
Woolf, Leonard, Growing
Zamyatin, Yevgeniy, We
Zola, mile

Compiled by Valerie Meyers

JEFFREY MEYERS has written extensively on literature, film and art. He is the author of forty-eight books, including
The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe and biographies of Katherine Mansfield, Joseph
Conrad, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Meyers is one of twelve Americans who are Fellows of the Royal
Society of Literature. In 2005 he received an Award in Literature to honor exceptional achievement from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Berkeley, California.
The University of Illinois Press
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