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Subject: 	[Marxism] How Orwellian was Orwell?
Date: 	Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:52:53 -0400
From: 	Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
Reply-To: 	Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
To: 	aorta <aorta at home.nl>



 From The Times Literary Supplement
August 5, 2009
How Orwellian was Orwell?
How the political and historical context of Orwell's work is often
missed or ignored
Richard Vinen

Paul Anderson, editor
ORWELL IN "TRIBUNE"
"As I Please" and other writings, 1943–7
401pp. Methuen. Paperback, £14.99.
978 0 413 7765 5

Philip Bounds
ORWELL AND MARXISM
The political and cultural thinking of George Orwell
253pp. I. B. Tauris. £52.50 (US $89.50).
978 1 84511 807 5


More than any other British author of the twentieth century, George
Orwell has escaped from his own time. Every schoolchild who gets as far
as GCSE English will have read at least one Orwell novel, and the one
that they are most likely to have read (Nineteen Eighty-Four) is,
ostensibly at least, not set in Orwell’s own lifetime. Orwell was
fascinated by children’s literature and some of his books have a special
appeal to children (particularly, I suspect, boys in their early teens).
This means that most people read Orwell before they have any sense of
the period in which he wrote; indeed, before they have much sense of why
it might matter to understand the period in which a writer worked.

Even the most sophisticated readers take Orwell out of context. In 1940,
Q. D. Leavis argued that Orwell’s early novels (the ones with clear
temporal settings) were "wasted effort". Ever since then, critics have
judged him largely on his long essays, and these reinforce the
impression of a man outside his own time – big enough to interpose
himself between Tolstoy and Shakespeare at a time when his
contemporaries were locked in petty Bloomsbury disputes. His admirers
think of him as an emblem of universal integrity. Central European
dissidents in the 1980s appealed to his memory, and committees of the
great and good award an Orwell Prize to writers who have made their
reputations writing about, say, Sweden since the 1970s. I doubt if a day
passes when some politician or journalist does not denounce something or
other as "Orwellian", a word that Orwell would have hated.

Orwell did not enjoy such special status in the eyes of his
contemporaries. Much of his writing was made up of book reviews churned
out to pay the bills. The flavour of this life is captured in a short
letter that he wrote to T. S. Eliot asking whether Faber might be
interesting in commissioning him to translate Jacques Roberti’s À la
Belle de Nuit, a task that apparently required a command of low-life
Paris argot. Some of his work seemed to fit into easily identifiable
patterns. Cyril Connolly had admired Orwell since meeting him at prep
school, but, in Enemies of Promise (1938), he stitched together
quotations from Orwell, Hemingway and Christopher Isherwood into a
single passage to show how indistinguishable "colloquial" writers could be.

Both these books are designed, in part, to put Orwell back into the
context of his own times. The articles he wrote for Tribune between 1943
and 1947 are gathered into a single volume with an excellent
introduction by Paul Anderson. They have all been published in previous
collections and some of them, such as "The Decline of the English
Murder", are already well known, but publication of the Tribune articles
is useful because Orwell wrote for the paper at a time when he was
writing Animal Farm and thinking about Nineteen Eighty-Four. His article
on Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a book which is sometimes seen as a model for
Nineteen Eighty-Four, appeared in January 1946, though any reader of the
Tribune articles will conclude that Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution
was a more important influence on Orwell’s thinking. For most of this
time, large parts of the British Left, including some of the other
writers for Tribune, were pro-Soviet. More importantly, support for the
Soviet alliance was part of the official policy of both Britain and the
United States. In short, Orwell’s most famous books need to be
understood against the backdrop of Yalta rather than that of, say, the
Berlin airlift. The Tribune articles show how intermittent
anti-Americanism, suspicion of the British ruling classes and distaste
for the realpolitik of the great powers were blended with a personal
dislike of Stalinism. Orwell repeatedly drew attention to facts about
the Soviet Union that were inconvenient to the Western Allies; he wrote,
for example, about the mass rape of women in Vienna by Russian soldiers.
An article of September 1944 about the Warsaw Uprising is particularly
striking; in it he asked why the British intelligentsia were so
"dishonestly uncritical" of Soviet policy, but he also suggested that
Western governments were moving towards a peace settlement that would
hand much of Europe to Stalin.

If the Tribune articles tell us mainly about Orwell after 1943, Philip
Bounds sets him against the fast-changing political backdrop to his
whole writing career. In the mid 1930s, the Communist International
turned away from "class against class" tactics to encourage Popular
Front alliances of anti-Fascist forces. This position changed with the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, then changed again with the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. These gyrations
produced odd consequences in Britain, a country in which there was not a
large Communist party (though there were some significant figures who,
as Orwell put it, believed in the Russian "mythos" ) and in which the
most important leaders of the Labour Party were not tempted by an
anti-Fascist alliance with the Communists. The Popular Front was
supported by an odd coalition that ranged from Stafford Cripps to the
Duchess of Atholl.

Orwell opposed the Popular Front, or, at least, he was rude about its
English supporters. During the Spanish Civil War he fought with the
non-Stalinist POUM rather than the International Brigade (joined by most
Communists). He reversed his position overnight in 1939: he claimed to
have dreamt of war and then come downstairs to see the newspaper reports
of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. He supported the war against Hitler and
became an eloquent defender of patriotism though he also thought, at
least in 1940 and 1941, that the British war effort might be combined
with a revolutionary transformation of British society. His position was
sometimes close to that of Trotskyists and he quoted the Trotskyite
slogan "the war and the revolution are inseparable" with approval in
1941. Orwell’s interest in Trotsky, however, seems to have been rooted
in a sympathy for outsiders and in the sense that, to quote his friend
Malcolm Muggeridge, "Trotsky blows the gaff" on the Soviet Union. Orwell
did not believe that Russia would necessarily have been less repressive
if ruled by Trotsky rather than Stalin. He was not much interested in
Marxist theory and his remark, apropos of T. S. Eliot, that
Anglo-Catholicism was the "ecclesiastical equivalent of Trotskyism", was
probably designed to annoy Trotskyites as much as Anglo-Catholics.

Bounds covers all of Orwell’s writing – the early autobiographical
novels and exercises in fictionalized autobiography as well as the
better-known works – and tries to trace the themes that run through them
all. In particular, he argues that, for all of his anti-Soviet talk,
Orwell was influenced by Communist or fellow-travelling writers. This
influence was masked by his general cussedness and by a capacity for
annexing the ideas of authors he had once denounced; for example, he
wrote a savage review of The Novel Today (1936) by the Communist Philip
Henderson. However, Orwell’s remarks about modernism in his essay
"Inside the Whale" (1940) seem to owe something to Henderson’s assault
on literature that avoids "the urgent problems of the moment". Orwell
even transports the same rather laboured joke from Punch – about the
young man who tells his aunt "My dear, one doesn’t write about anything;
one just writes" – from his 1936 review to his 1940 essay. The changes
in Communist strategy made Orwell’s relations with its cultural
commentators all the more complicated. Sometimes he seemed to draw on
ideas expressed by Communist writers during the "class against class"
period to attack the Popular Front, and then to draw on the Popular
Front’s discovery of national culture to attack Communists after the
Molotov–Ribbentrop pact.

Bounds’s book is wide-ranging, stimulating and well written. I was not,
however, entirely convinced by its arguments. This is partly because it
is hard to prove influence. Bounds himself frequently admits that we
cannot be sure that Orwell read a particular author whose ideas seem, in
some respects, to run parallel to his own. Some Marxist authors whom
Orwell had read seem not to have influenced him very much. He reviewed
Christopher Hill’s The English Revolution 1640, though he himself did
not go in for the celebration of seventeenth-century radicalism that was
so common among English left-wingers – rather unconvincingly, Bounds
attributes this to the belief that Orwell’s readers were likely to be
"culturally ambitious members of the lower middle class".

Emphasizing Orwell’s roots on the Left means playing down his links to
writers on the Right. Anthony Powell, a friend of Orwell, does not
feature in this book at all. Bounds suggests that Orwell’s interest in
conservative writers – notably Rudyard Kipling – sprang partly from a
desire to answer a certain kind of Communist attack on them. Orwell
wanted to show the peculiarity of English conservatism and to
distinguish it from Fascism. He certainly underlined the difference
between Kipling and Wodehouse and Fascists. However, there were times
when he argued that Fascism itself might assume a particularly English
form. In any case, he admired many right-wing writers – including, for
example, Louis-Ferdinand Céline – for reasons that cut across his politics.

Bounds’s careful researches into relatively minor English Marxists can
sometimes obscure the importance of the two most important left-wingers
with whom Orwell was associated: John Strachey and Victor Gollancz.
Neither of these men was a member of the Communist party, though both
were close to it at times. Strachey’s The Coming Crisis (1932) presented
a Marxist analysis, but Strachey, like Orwell, also admired the work of
some authors on the Right: he described The Waste Land as "the most
important poem produced in English in our day". Gollancz was a publisher
and founder, along with Strachey and Stafford Cripps, of the Left Book
Club, and it is tempting to present him as a kind of antiOrwell:
devious, shrewd about money, politically conformist and an intellectual
who was not intelligent. Orwell himself thought privately that Gollancz
was "very enterprising about left stuff and . . . not too bright".
However, relations between the two men were sometimes closer than Orwell
cared to admit. Gollancz published Orwell’s first book, Down and Out in
Paris and London (1933), and, according to one account, it was he who
chose "Orwell" as Eric Blair’s pen name (the alternatives were "Kenneth
Miles" and "H. Lewis Allways"). It is true that Gollancz, or the Left
Book Club, turned down Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm, for fear of
offending Communists, but the Left Book Club did publish The Road to
Wigan Pier, though with an introduction by Gollancz himself in which he
said that he had noted at least a hundred points with which he
disagreed. It is also important to remember that there was a period,
from September 1939 until the summer of 1941, when Orwell, Gollancz and
Strachey were united by common distaste for what they called the
Communist Party’s "betrayal of the left".

Should we see Orwell as primarily a political writer? He certainly came
to see himself as one. In 1946, he wrote: "Every line of serious work
that I have written since 1936 has been written . . . against
totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism . . . it is where I lacked
a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books". However, not all his
early work was "lifeless", and his later books are not entirely animated
by politics. Throughout his career, Orwell saw that literature might be
an end in itself. As a twenty-year-old policeman in Burma, during his
brief attempt to flee from his destiny as a writer, he had read War and
Peace and been seduced by its characters: "people about whom one would
gladly go on reading for ever". He had begun the 1940s hoping to produce
a three-volume family saga. Would he have returned to this apparently
unpolitical work if he had believed that he would have time to finish it?

The fact that Orwell was very ill for much of the period when he wrote
his most famous works, and that he died in January 1950 a few months
after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, raises all sorts of
questions. His most savage critics see his last works as reflecting the
despair of a dying man – but, for my money, Burmese Days (1934) is the
most despairing of his works. And how would he have reacted to the Cold
War, and to seeing his own books used as weapons in that war? Perhaps
most importantly, how would an author who had defined himself in terms
of failure and obscurity have reacted to wealth and fame?


Richard Vinen’s book Thatcher’s Britain: The politics and social
upheaval of the Thatcher era, was published earlier this year.

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