Analysis of an argument
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Not Just Another Apocalyptician Author(s): Samuel Hynes
Source: The New York Times Book Review. (Nov. 3, 1991): Arts and Entertainment: From Academic OneFile.
Document Type: Article Full Text:
GEORGE ORWELL The Authorized Biography. By Michael Shelden. Illustrated. 497 pp. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $25.
One evidence of George Orwell's place in our lives now, more than 40 years
after his death, is an entry in the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary: "Orwellian . . . Characteristic or suggestive of the writings of
'George Orwell,' esp. in his satirical novel 1984 ." The examples that follow are from Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer, and from a variety of
publications, including The New York Times. Some of them refer to Orwell's vision of a future totalitarian state; others use the term to name a corruption
of language, in which meaning is inverted or annihilated.
It was Orwell's great achievement that he made the connection between
those two meanings a clear and urgent issue for his time. His writing years were the 1930's and 40's -- the decades of the great dictators -- and he
wrote in opposition to them and what they stood for: " against totalitarianism," he said, "and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."
But he might just as well have said that he wrote against debased language and for plain, honest statements. His two best-known books, "Animal Farm"
and "Nineteen Eighty-Four," are as much about what absolute power does to language as they are about what it does to lives. He saw those evils as
inextricably intertwined: bad politics debases language, debased language empowers bad politics. If we aim to oppose the evils of states, we must start
by speaking plain truths.
Not all of Orwell's plain truths were socialist truths; he was humane before
he was political, and he had developed a sense of injustice long before he began to express it in political terms. You might say that he was born into
injustice. His father, Arthur Blair, was a minor British official in Bengal whose job was to keep the opium trade running profitably, and Eric Blair (who was
to become Orwell) was born there in 1903. Young Eric's early years, as Michael Shelden recounts them in "Orwell: The Authorized Biography," were
a string of tyrannies endured -- at home, back in England, in prep school, at Eton and in his first job, as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.
Having seen power in action, he hated it, and he shifted his loyalties from
his own class, the wielders of power, to the world's oppressed and
powerless.
In practice that meant quitting the Indian Police and returning to Europe to live among the poor -- with paupers in Paris, with tramps in London, with
the unemployed in the town of Wigan, near Manchester, then with common soldiers of the Loyalist army in Spain. And then to write about their lives, in
"Down and Out in Paris and London," "The Road to Wigan Pier" and "Homage to Catalonia." These books are not autobiographies exactly; Orwell adjusted
events to suit his polemical and literary ends. A better term would be "fables of injustice." Perhaps it was because he wasn't quite writing autobiographies
that he chose not to sign his books with his real name, but adopted instead
a pseudonym composed of an ordinary English first name and the name of an English river. Still, the sufferings he wrote about were sufferings he had
felt; in that sense his accounts were true. Other books of those early years were novels: "Burmese Days," "A Clergyman's Daughter," "Keep the
Aspidistra Flying." These too were written close to Orwell's experience of poverty and injustice -- too close, perhaps, for them to succeed altogether
as novels.
Orwell returned from Burma hating the British Empire; he returned from Spain hating Communism. That was the point, he said, at which he became
a political writer and a socialist. A very Orwellian kind of socialist, though.
His experiences among the poor had convinced him of a few simple truths: that injustice was the great social crime; that the right moral position was
always on the side of the weak; that failure was honorable and success corrupting; that decency was a primary moral value; that common sense
was more trust worthy than systems; that decency and common sense were most likely to be found in ordinary people. You couldn't call that set of
propositions an ideology, but then Orwell wouldn't want you to: he hated ideology. But that too is a possible political position.
Orwell's anti-ideological socialism was eccentric in another way: it went
against the internationalist tradition of the movement by being explicitly and
unashamedly English. "The Lion and the Unicorn," his wartime book about England, is subtitled "Socialism and the English Genius," and that subtitle
would do for virtually all of his political writings. "Every political theory has a certain regional tinge to it," he wrote, and his was as English as bitter beer
and toad-in-the-hole. He had much to say about the English that was unflattering: they were unesthetic, unphilosophical and anti-intellectual, a
nation of tea-drinking, dog-loving, class-conscious, xenophobic hypocrites. But they were also decent, sensible, peaceable people who believed in
justice, liberty, objective truth and the right to privacy. If you wanted an
English socialism, you'd have to start from those qualities, the faults as well
as the virtues.
What Orwell created in his books was not a systematic socialism; you couldn't govern England, or even a village, on the basis of what he wrote.
But system wasn't what he was after. He offered instead a double vision: of what society does to the poor and helpless, and of a good life that ordinary
people might live, if they were allowed to -- a life as simple and unpolitical as a working-class kitchen on a Sunday afternoon. He wanted to believe that
in the future such a life would be possible for everyone; but he was realistic enough to see the human forces of cruelty and greed that work against that
dream, and the future he foresaw, toward the end of his life, was bleak --
bleakest in that terrible image in "Nineteen Eighty-Four": a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
In the years since Orwell's death in 1950, the date he made into a symbol,
1984, has passed into history, and so has the Soviet state that best exemplified what he had made that date mean. Big Brother has been pulled
from his pedestal, K.G.B. is no longer an acronym for terror, and Orwell's books can be bought and read in Moscow. One mustn't be too millennial
about the change; the future will no doubt contain new police states and new gulags, but it seems unlikely that they will be world-class. The global
totalitarianism that Orwell feared and warned against is not going to happen,
at least not for a while.
What, then, will be the future importance of Orwell and his work? Has history made him merely historical, one more apocalyptician whose
predictions were wrong? I think not. He will survive as a voice, telling us that small-scale, decent social democracy is possible, that the world does not
belong to the managers but to ordinary people. His is not the only voice saying that now. Orwell would have felt a kinship with Eastern Europeans
like Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia; he'd have admired Mr. Havel's anti- ideological views, his pragmatism and the "regional tinge" of his politics. I'd
be surprised if Mr. Havel didn't also admire Orwell.
Orwell cared about politics, but he also cared about good writing. He was a
master of the plain style; nobody in our time has written it better. But his writing also has another quality that is crucial to the life of language now: its
fierce intemperateness. He believed that humankind benefited from the unrestrained use of strong, vivid language, and he would have regarded the
lexical pussyfooting of current American academic discourse as political cowardice. His resources of invective and abuse were extraordinary, and he
found targets on the left as well as on the right. His contempt for English socialist intellectuals must have offended entire drawing rooms full in
Hampstead and Oxford: "vegetarians with wilting beards, Bolshevik
commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control
fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers," he called them. Bearded and sandal-wearing readers may find this offensive; but no one can deny that it
expresses the feelings of an individual man. Somebody is there, speaking his own language, plainly and pungently. Orwell knew that he would offend
people; he also knew that offensiveness is a necessary consequence of opinions strongly held and openly expressed, and that free societies should
treasure and protect it. An idea that offends no one is not worth entertaining.
Orwell is a rare case of a modern writer of unquestioned importance and influence who never wrote a great work of art, had no effect on the forms of
literature and has no place in the history of literary modernism. His example is greater than his formal accomplishments; he affected the world by
thinking and feeling about great issues, and by speaking with an angry insistence, in his own voice.
The danger in such a case is that the man will be canonized for his virtue
rather than admired for his achievements. When V. S. Pritchett called Orwell "a kind of saint," he did him a disservice, one that Orwell would have
resented. "Sainthood is a thing that human beings must avoid," he wrote in
an essay on Gandhi, and he proposed his own counterfaith: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes
willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and
that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."
That is what one gets from Orwell -- the essence of being human.
While Orwell's widow, his second wife, Sonia, was alive, no biographer could count on help from the executors -- quite the opposite, in fact. Peter
Stansky and William Abrahams wrote two intelligent volumes of an intended
life of Orwell, but broke off at 1938, defeated by Mrs. Orwell's obstructionism. Bernard Crick persevered and reached the end of the life,
but only after many tribulations. Neither biography mentions Sonia Orwell among the acknowledgments.
Michael Shelden has been more fortunate; his book is an "authorized
biography," and he has had the cooperation of the Orwell estate. He has been industrious in his research, and has found material that the other
biographers missed. His Orwell is neither a saint nor an ideologue; he is imperfect in his work and contradictory in his thought -- a man, not a model.
Mr. Shelden, a professor of English at Indiana State University, is an
unobtrusive presence, willing to let the life take its shape from events, preferring Orwell's ideas to his own. He sets out his principles of biography
writing in his introduction: the story of a life "deserves to be told with as much accuracy and fairness as possible"; it "must have a strong narrative,
and it must provide some sense of the human character behind the public face." Those are unexceptionable rules, and Mr. Shelden has followed them
faithfully. His accurate, fair book will send readers back to its subject -- to opinionated, unfair, vivid Orwell. That surely is the function of a literary
biography.
CAPTION(S):
Drawing of George Orwell (David Johnson)
By Samuel Hynes;
Source Citation Hynes, Samuel. "Not Just Another Apocalyptician." The New York Times
Book Review 3 Nov. 1991. Academic OneFile. Web. 9 Oct. 2011.
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his essay about "education as an instrument of torture