Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Virtually nothing of this dramatic succession of events is conveyed in Orwell’s desiccated note: half of the diary entry is devoted to naturalist’s observations on the islet puffin burrows and young cormorants learning to fly. To get the full picture, as I just said, one must read the nephew’s narrative. There, one is struck first by Orwell’s total absence of practical competence and of simple common sense[1] — and secondly by his calm courage and absolute self-control, which prevented the little party from panicking. And yet, at the time, he entertained no illusions regarding their chances of survival: as he simply told his nephew afterwards: “I thought we were goners.” And the nephew commented: “He almost seemed to enjoy it.”

Conclusion: if one had to go out to sea in a small boat, one would not choose Orwell for skipper. But when meeting with shipwreck, disaster or other catastrophe, one could not dream of better company.

* * *

Orwell left explicit instructions that no biography be written of him, and even actively discouraged one early attempt. He felt that “every life viewed from the inside would be a series of defeats too humiliating and disgraceful to contemplate.” And yet the posthumous treatment he received from his biographers and editors is truly admirable — I think in particular of the works of Bernard Crick and of Peter Davison, which are models of critical intelligence and scholarship.

John Henry Newman said: “It has ever been a hobby of mine (unless it be a truism, not a hobby) that a man’s life is in his letters.” This selection of Orwell’s correspondence splendidly verifies Newman’s observation — which otherwise may not be true for many letter-writers and especially not for “men of letters,” who tend to adjust their tune to the ears of those whom they address. But Orwell is always himself and speaks with only one voice: reserved even with old friends; generous with complete strangers; and treating all with equal sincerity.

The letters illustrate all his main concerns, interests and passions; they also illuminate some striking aspects of his personality.

POLITICS

Orwell’s old schoolmate and friend Cyril Connolly famously stated: “Orwell was a political animal. He reduced everything to politics… He could not blow his nose without moralising on the conditions in the handkerchief industry.” This observation has a point, yet it could also be very misleading. Eileen, his wife — probably the only person who ever understood him in depth, since she managed to love him and live with him (while being herself the very opposite of a doormat) — had a much clearer view of the matter. She said that happiness for Orwell would have been to live in the country (he hated modern urban life and detested London), cultivating his vegetable garden and writing novels. Orwell himself repeatedly said very much the same thing — and proved it during the last years of his life, when he settled in his beloved (and very inaccessible) island of Jura. He had already expressed it in an earlier poem (1935) — Orwell’s poems may not be great poetry, but they always reveal his innermost feelings:

A happy vicar I might have been

Two hundred years ago

To preach upon eternal doom

And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time

I missed that pleasant haven…

He once defined himself half in jest — but only half — as a “Tory Anarchist.” Indeed, after his youthful experience in the colonial police in Burma, he knew only that he hated imperialism and all forms of political oppression; all authority appeared suspect to him, even “mere success seemed to me a form of bullying.” Then, after his enquiry into workers’ conditions in northern industrial England during the Depression, he developed a broad non-partisan commitment to “socialism”: “Socialism means justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped of it.” The decisive point in his political evolution took place in Spain, where he volunteered to fight fascism: first he was nearly killed by a fascist bullet, then he narrowly escaped being murdered by Stalinist secret police: “What I saw in Spain and what I have seen of the inner-workings of left-wing political parties have given me a horror of politics … I am definitely ‘left,’ but I believe that a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free from Party labels” (my emphasis).

From then on he considered that the first duty of a socialist is to fight totalitarianism, which means in practice, “to denounce the Soviet myth, for there is not much difference between Fascism and Stalinism.” Inasmuch as they deal with politics, the Letters focus on the anti-totalitarian fight. In this, the three salient features of Orwell’s attitude are his intuitive grasp of concrete realities, his non-doctrinaire approach to politics (accompanied with a deep distrust of left-wing intellectuals) and his sense of the absolute primacy of the human dimension. He once identified the source of his strength: “Where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than the so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in.” This uncanny ability received its most eloquent confirmation when Soviet dissidents who wished to translate Animal Farm into Russian (for clandestine distributors behind the Curtain) wrote to him to ask for his authorisation: they wrote to him in Russian , assuming that a writer who had such a subtle and thorough understanding of the Soviet reality — in contrast with the dismal ignorance of most Western intellectuals — had naturally to be a fluent Russian speaker!

Non-doctrinaire approach: In a letter to an old schoolmate (1 January 1938), Eileen wrote that they called their little dog “Marx” “to remind us that we had never read Marx, and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him.”

Orwell’s revulsion towards all “the smelly little orthodoxies that compete for our souls” explains also his distrust of and contempt for intellectuals. This attitude dates back a long way, as he recalls in a letter of October 1938: “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen. I was always struck by this when I was in Burma and used to read anti-imperialist stuff.” If the colonial experience had taught Orwell to hate imperialism, it also made him respect (like the protagonist in a Kipling story) “men who do things.” “Intellectuals depress me horribly” is another theme often encountered in the Letters . “Intellectuals are more totalitarian”; “the danger is that some native forms of totalitarianism will be developed here, and people like Laski, Pratt, Zilliacus, The News Chronicle and the rest of them seem to me to be simply preparing the way for this.” If the situation was depressing in London, in Paris (which he visited in 1945) it was dismal: “Sartre is a big bag of wind”; “French publishers are now commanded by Aragon [famous writer and leading member of the Communist Party] and others not to publish undesirable books.” His own Animal Farm was being translated into nine languages, but “the most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was ‘impossible for political reasons.’” “In France I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the Press, etc. The Occupation seemed to me to have had a terribly crushing effect upon people or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war.” (Though he adds: “The queer thing is that, with all this moral decay, there has over the past decade or so, been much more literary talent in France than in England, or than anywhere else I should say.”) He unfortunately missed meeting Camus at the time, which he regretted. These two men would have found a common language. In a letter of May 1948, he launched a well-aimed attack against Emmanuel Mounier and his flock of Christian fellow-travellers: “It’s funny that when I met Mounier for about ten minutes in 1945, I thought to myself, that man’s a fellow-traveller. I can smell them.” (And — if I may intrude here with a personal experience — how I know them myself! My benighted co-religionists, cretinous clerics and other Maoist morons who, twenty years later, were to preach the gospel of the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”…)