On Orwell's essays

Going deep inside the whale

In his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell’s essays, John Carey writes that “[m]ore than the novels, more even than The Road to Wigan Pier or Homage to Catalonia, the essays and journalism are the essential Orwell”. Having finally finished the 1,363-page collection, which I have been reading on and off for the past four years, I can attest to this. The Orwell that one encounters in its pages—not, I should say, the Eric Blair, a point we will return to later—is a more complex, fully rounded figure than the one who pops up elsewhere in the work. He is certainly a more warm-blooded one than his reputation as “the wintry conscience of a generation,” let alone as a secular saint, would suggest. (“Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints,” Orwell wrote in a 1949 essay on Gandhi, “and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.” Orwell wanted very much to be a human being.)

He’s surprisingly companionable, too. If nothing else, he is often much funnier than even his admirers would acknowledge. Having described the meagre range of toys available to children in the immediate post-war years, he decides, for example, that perhaps this doesn’t matter:

It is absurd, for instance, to give a doll to a baby, as people habitually do. To the baby a doll is merely a soft object, in no way superior to a knotted towel, and even at the toddling age it is generally happy with the fire tongs, or a stone inside a tin can, than with anything that comes out of a shop.

I’m not sure about you, but I laughed like a drain.

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Orwell’s eighty ‘As I Please’ columns, which he wrote for the news weekly Tribune between 1943 and 1947, are in some ways at the heart of this collection. It is in these pieces, as well as in the occasional ones he wrote for other papers on the common toad and how to make a cup of tea, that one encounters Orwell the homebody, the amateur naturalist, the would-be social scientist, the connoisseur of verse, the flâneur. (When you read his less-anthologised pieces on dirty postcards or American fashion magazines, it is worth remembering that he’d been dead seven years by the time Roland Barthes’ Mythologies appeared. Cultural Studies owes a debt to Orwell.) While politics are never far from the surface, and only rarely from the nib of his pen, we do ourselves a disservice by reducing his output to ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘Politics and the English Language’.

For a moment there, I was going to write that this is obviously an exaggeration. I could just as easily have named ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Why I Write’, or 'The Prevention of Literature' and ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’. There are at least a dozen essays, more or less political in nature, on which his critical reputation could rest. But is it really such an exaggeration? Generally speaking, especially these days, Orwell’s output has been reduced, not even to these, but rather to his last two novels. One might even argue that, in the minds of the majority of readers, it has been reduced to one, which is to say to Nineteen Eighty-four. This is disappointing but unsurprising. It is rare that a book should have such an impact on the language, or that contemporary events should so regularly render it relevant. But Nineteen Eighty-four is neither Orwell’s best book (that would be Homage to Catalonia) nor particularly representative of the politics to which he dedicated his writing life.

While we’re talking about Nineteen Eighty-four, I’ve always found it pretty Orwellian that Orwellian now means Orwellian. It should, if anything, mean clear, clean, and intellectually honest. That it doesn’t is fitting, given doublespeak and the rest of it, but it also brings us to one of the most important things about Orwell: the uses and abuses to which he has been put. More than most other writers, Orwell has long been prey to cooption, especially by the right and especially in relation to his last book. That Animal Farm is an attack on the Soviet Union is obvious. The notion that Nineteen Eighty-four is, too, or that it is only an attack on the Soviet Union, is a deliberate, willful misreading.

One of the through-lines of this collection—which, by virtue of its chronological arrangement, allows the reader to experience the evolution of Orwell’s ideas over time—is the writer’s critical fascination with James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, which argued that two or three technocratic super-states would eventually rule the world. (The chronological arrangement, especially of the ‘As I Please’ columns, also allows the reader to experience history more or less as it’s unfolding, both on the macro scale of wars and battles and on the micro one of rations and paper shortages.) Orwell has his issues with Burnham, whom he at at one point diagnoses with “a major mental disease” rooted “partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power,” but there was obviously something in the super-state idea that seemed to him broadly correct in its contours. It also seemed terrifying. In a 1947 essay on European unity, Orwell considered how global affairs might be conducted moving forward. One of the options he considered was that

the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them. This seems to me the worst possibility of all. It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast superstates, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen.

As in Nineteen Eighty-four, the outlines of which are clearly discernible in this passage, this outcome is predicated, not only on Soviet domination of Eurasia, but on the Western powers becoming totalitarian, too. Orwell saw this as a distinct possibility, and it isn’t as though the conservatives didn’t mind the idea, either. When Animal Farm was reissued during the McCarthy era, the introduction read:

If the book itself, Animal Farm, had left any doubt of the matter, Orwell dispelled it in his essay ‘Why I Write’: “Every line of serious work that I’ve written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against Totalitarianism…”

The actual line continues: “…and for Democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” The italics there are his.

John Rodden called this “the politics of ellipsis” and described Orwell as the “patron saint who could be quoted to your purpose just like the devil can quote scripture.” While it is a mug’s game to try and predict what Orwell might have thought about anything that happened in the years following his death, it doesn’t seem that he was so much of an anti-Communist that he wouldn’t have seen in this, and in the Red Scare of the 1950s more generally, precisely the same impulse to power that he saw in the Stalinism of the 1930s and 1940s. You can be certain that any conservative pushing Nineteen Eighty-four on you today considers it first and foremost an instruction manual, and that any claiming Orwell as his own has either read very little of the published work or else is acting in bad faith.