GEORGE ORWELL

Judged from a smugly philistine standpoint, Orwell could also be regarded as a 'bum person', at least during that short period in his life when he threw himself into the garbage world of Paris and London dropouts for the sake of a new experience, some fresh material for his writings, and to kill time before taking up a school-teaching post in England. Not that he was completely down and out during this relatively brief period of time. For he did have his job as plongeur to fall back-on for a meagre support, at least whilst in Paris, and he did have to bear in mind his future pedagogic appointment and literary ambitions. He simply wanted to discover what he could about proletarian low-life, to infiltrate the ranks, one might say, in the interests of what was then a trendy, quasi-socialist vocation for those intellectuals of left-wing persuasion who saw their salvation in an identification with the common man.

Not that Orwell was a drop-out aristocrat or anything of the sort. He was scarcely a drop-out bourgeois, although he had been educated at Eton and had intellectual connections of one kind or another. He also had experience of police service in Burma and was acquainted with journalism. But he hadn't been to university and probably felt more kinship with the common man in consequence. Down and Out in Paris and London wasn't his first novel, nor even his best, but it certainly became one of his most famous, and took its place as a kind of British literary equivalent to Tropic of Cancer, without being in any sense a copy of that great book or an attempt at emulation. It just so happened that more than a few people were behaving in what could be termed a Milleresque fashion in those days, when poverty, partly associated with the great depression and mass unemployment, was almost respectable. But the motives which drew Orwell and Miller to their respective lifestyles were by no means identical, and one would look in vain in Miller's writings for indications that he harboured any kinds of socio-political reasons for rubbing shoulders with the common herd. Indeed, the characters that crowd Tropic of Cancer are generally artistic, like Van Norden and Boris. Those that grace the pages of Orwell's novel, by contrast, are simply bums - without aesthetic pretension or literary ambition, and with scarcely any moral sense. Here if anywhere is a clue to the vast difference between the two men. Miller's was an artistic sensibility in search of aesthetic nourishment. Orwell was simply an intellectual philistine who, like most of his compatriots, with their Protestant traditions, cared nothing for aesthetics and only wanted to extend his sociological studies into the lower depths.

Yes, the fact of Orwell's philistinism comes across very clearly from a study of his works, only one novel of which, namely Keep the Aspidistra Flying, borders on an aesthetic attitude to life or, at any rate, embraces aesthetic considerations ... in the form of Gordon Comstock's ambitions and struggles as a minor poet and sometime-bookshop assistant. If this is not the best of Orwell's less than profound novels, it is at least one of the most entertaining of them, leaving the reader with a sense of sympathy for the vicissitudes of its fairly romantic protagonist, whose fate at the hands of a philistine world must be the common experience of thousands of young idealistic poets every generation. But Keep the Aspidistra Flying was as much a self-lesson for Orwell as a parable for others, since he never again cherished any such romantic illusions as his hero Comstock, preferring, instead, to meet the philistine world on its own pragmatic terms. The prospect of Orwell discoursing on art or music or higher religion or philosophy in his writings thereafter could only be remote, and only in certain of his essays does one come across anything approximating to aesthetic self-indulgence, and then merely in connection with poets and novelists like Swift, Houseman, and Miller. In this respect his temperament resembles James Joyce, who would have been no less incapable of seriously discoursing on the life of the spirit, as applying to higher aesthetics or religion, and whose basic creative urge was also philistine, since shackled to the everyday world of vulgar reality. Unlike Joyce, though, Orwell had strong political interests, and it was to politics that, directly or indirectly, he dedicated most of his creative energies, becoming associated, in the process, with writers like Koestler and Muggeridge, whose political disillusionment with Soviet Communism resembled his own.

Having gone out to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell found the brutalities and authoritarian rigidities of the communists engaged in the struggle with Franco unacceptable to his fundamentally liberal temperament, and he began to lose his faith in communism - rather as Malcolm Muggeridge had done during his visit to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, and as Koestler was in the process of doing, following similar disillusioning experiences both in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. An outcome of this change-of-heart on Orwell's part was the bitter satire on the Soviet system and leadership which bore the title Animal Farm and sought to demonstrate, in the form of a parable, that no matter how good the intentions, all revolutions are sooner or later corrupted by power-hungry men like Stalin, who adopt the ways of the previous governing class in opposition to the furtherance of any real social amelioration among the masses. Although the ousting of the humans in Animal Farm signifies a revolution, the re-establishment of a leadership under the pigs eventually leads to a situation wherein the ways of the humans are being 'aped', and a return to the status quo is effectively brought about with the reconciliation of pigs and men, both of which appear identical to the other animals, i.e. to the masses generally. Hence the betrayal of the revolution as paralleled, so Orwell believed, by the example of Soviet Russia.

Whether or not he was entirely right to believe this, his slender novel became a best-seller in Britain and is still widely read there today, not least of all in schools, where it has long been a pillar of support for the bourgeois establishment. If revolutions are betrayed in the manner described in Animal Farm, then why make them at all? For if, once made, they only lead to the emergence of people like Stalin ('Napoleon'), then surely one is better off with the status quo, even though it may fall short of perfection? These and other such questions, well known to Camus and other liberal humanist writers, are raised by Animal Farm, which, despite its literary merits, is probably one of the most cynical, reactionary, and fatuous novels ever to have appeared in print. We need not doubt that socialist progress requires a strong and at times ruthless leadership, or that socialist leaders will behave differently from the masses, despite the efforts Orwell makes to put doubt into our minds. His opposition to Soviet Communism, no less apparent in Nineteen Eighty-Four - at the time it was written a futuristic projection of a world divided between three dictatorial powers who form an uneasy symbiosis - could, in some sense, be described as prophetic, although, within the Western context, it simply marks him out as a bourgeois apologist of leftist inclination who prefers to remain on the wrong side of history - an upholder of bourgeois democracy in response to a liberal capitalist tradition, given the fact that Social Democracy, in any real socialist sense of that much-abused term, is virtually inconceivable without a Marxist precondition.

Can we blame him for this? No, because he was, after all, British and essentially petty-bourgeois, not proletarian, and he did have reasons to become disillusioned with the state of communism in certain parts of the world. All in all, his response was not untypical of the liberal intelligentsia of his generation, although the way he exploited it as a writer was certainly most unusual. As a writer, however, Orwell was fundamentally too narrow and cynical to accomplish anything truly great. His contribution to bourgeois/proletarian literature was temporal rather than eternal, apparent rather than essential, and his intellectual status somewhat modest in consequence. The twenty-first century will be more than satisfied, I feel confident, to consign all or most of his works to the rubbish heap of history, where some of them already belong.

LONDON 1982 (Revised 2011)

Preview BECOMING AND BEING eBook