Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

One last note on the subject of Orwell’s politics: in the end, he seems to have essentially reverted to his original position of “Tory Anarchist.” In a letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (4 December 1948—it resurfaced very late and, unfortunately, is not included in Davison’s edition of the Complete Works , nor in Life in Letters ; it was reproduced in the Times Literary Supplement when the Complete Works first appeared), there is a statement that seems to me of fundamental importance: “ The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians. ”

THE HUMAN FACTOR

Even in the heat of battle, and precisely because he distrusted ideology — ideology kills — Orwell always remained acutely aware of the primacy that must be given to human individuals over all “the smelly little orthodoxies.” His exchange of letters (and subsequent friendship) with Stephen Spender provides a splendid example of this. Orwell had lampooned Spender (“parlour Bolshevik,” “pansy poet”); then they met. The encounter was in fact pleasant, which puzzled Spender, who wrote to Orwell on this very subject. Orwell replied:

You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, and on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you…[Formerly] I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a) your verse did not mean very much to me; b) I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist, or Communist sympathiser, and I have been very hostile to the Communist Party since about 1935; and c) because not having met you I could regard you as a type and also as an abstraction. Even if, when I met you, I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude because when you meet someone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone, I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like Labour MPs who get patted on the back by Dukes and are lost forever more.[2]

Which immediately calls to mind a remarkable passage in Homage to Catalonia . Orwell described how, fighting on the frontline during the Spanish Civil War, he once saw a man jumping out of the enemy trench, half-dressed and holding his trousers with both hands as he ran: “I did not shoot, partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists,’ but a man that was holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he’s visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”

LITERATURE

In an otherwise stimulating essay, Irving Howe wrote: “The last thing Orwell cared about when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four , the last thing he should have cared about, was literature.” This view is totally mistaken. What made the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four such a gruelling struggle (of which the Letters provide abundant evidence) was precisely the problem of turning a political vision into “a work of art.” (Remember “Why I Write”: “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”) If, in the end, Nineteen Eighty-Four could not fully satisfy Orwell’s exacting literary standards, it is only because he had to work in impossible conditions: he was pressed by time and reduced by a deadly illness to a state of invalidity. That in such a state he could finally complete such an ambitious work was in itself an amazing achievement.

From the very start, literature was always Orwell’s first concern. This is constantly reflected in his correspondence. “Since early childhood I always knew I wanted to write”—this statement is repeated in various forms, all through the years, till the end. But it took him a long time (and incredibly hard work) to discover what to write and how to write it. (His very first literary attempt was a long poem, eventually discarded.) Writing novels became his dominant passion — and an accursed ordeal: “Writing a novel is agony.” He finally concluded (accurately), “I am not a real novelist.” And yet, shortly before he died he was still excitedly announcing to his friend and publisher Warburg, “I have a stunning idea for a short novel.”

As the Letters reveal, he reached a very clear-sighted assessment of his own work. Among his four “conventional” novels, he retained a certain fondness for Burmese Days , which he found faithful to his memories of the place. He felt “ashamed” of Keep the Aspidistra Flying and, even worse, of A Clergyman’s Daughter and would not allow them to be reprinted: “They were written for money; at that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half-starved.” He was rightly pleased with Coming Up for Air— written in one go, with relative ease, it is indeed a most remarkable book, quite prescient in the light of today’s environmental concerns. Among the books worth reprinting he listed (in 1946— Nineteen Eighty-Four was not yet written) first of all, and in order of importance: Homage to Catalonia; Animal Farm; Critical Essays; Down and Out in Paris and London; Burmese Days; Coming Up for Air .

THE COMMON MAN

The extraordinary lengths to which Orwell would go in his vain attempts to turn himself into an ordinary man are well illustrated by the Wallington grocery episode, on which the Letters provide colourful information. In April 1936, Orwell started to rent and run a small village grocery in an old, dark and pokey cottage, insalubrious and devoid of all basic amenities (no inside toilet, no cooking facilities, no electricity, only oil lamps for lighting). On rainy days the kitchen floor was underwater and blocked drains turned the whole place into a smelly cesspool. Davison comments: “One may say without being facetious it suited Orwell to the ground.” And it especially suited Eileen, his wonderfully Orwellian wife. She moved in the day of their marriage and the way she managed this improbable home testifies both to her heroism and to her eccentric sense of humour. The income from the shop hardly ever covered the rent of the cottage. The main customers were a small bunch of local children who used to buy a few pennies worth of lollies after school. By the end of the year, the grocery went out of business, but at that time it had already fulfilled its true purpose: Orwell was in Barcelona, volunteering to fight against fascism, and when he enlisted in the Anarchist militia, he could proudly sign: Eric Blair, grocer . [3]

FAIRNESS

Orwell’s sense of fairness was so scrupulous that it extended even to Stalin. As Animal Farm was going into print, at the last minute Orwell sent a final correction — which was effected just in time. (As all readers will remember, “Napoleon” is the name of the leading pig, which, in Orwell’s fable, represents Stalin):

In 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.” I just thought the alteration would be fair to Stalin as he did stay in Moscow during the German advance.

POVERTY AND ILL-HEALTH

Orwell was utterly stoic and never complained about his material and physical circumstances, however distressing they were most of the time. But from the factual information provided by the Letters , one realises that his extreme poverty ceased only three years before his death (first royalties windfall from Animal Farm ), whereas his health became a severe and constant problem (undiagnosed tuberculosis) virtually from his return from Burma (age twenty-five). In later years it required frequent, prolonged and often painful treatment in various hospitals. For the last twelve years of his short existence (he died, aged forty-six, in 1950) he was in fact an invalid — but he insisted most of the time on carrying on with normal activity.