Analysis of an argument

Scholarly Orwell Article 2003

HONEST, DECENT, WRONG

Author(s): Louis Menand Source: The New Yorker. 78.44 (Jan. 27, 2003): p084. From Academic OneFile.

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Louis Menand discusses George Orwell and his legacy

"Animal Farm," George Orwell's satire, which became the Cold War "Candide," was finished in 1944, the high point of the Soviet-Western alliance against

fascism. It was a warning against dealing with Stalin and, in the circumstances, a

prescient book. Orwell had trouble finding a publisher, though, and by the time the book finally appeared, in August, 1945, the month of the Hiroshima and

Nagasaki bombs, the Cold War was already on the horizon. "Animal Farm" was an instant success in England and the United States. It was a Book-of-the-Month

Club selection; it was quickly translated into many languages and distributed, in some countries, by the United States government; and it made Orwell, who had

spent most of his life scraping by, famous and rich. "1984," published four years later, had even greater success. Orwell was fatally ill with pulmonary tuberculosis

when he wrote it, and he died in January, 1950. He was forty-six.

The revision began almost immediately. Frances Stonor Saunders, in her

fascinating study "The Cultural Cold War," reports that right after Orwell's death the C.I.A. (Howard Hunt was the agent on the case) secretly bought the film

rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow, Sonia, and had an animated-film version produced in England, which it distributed throughout the world. The book's final

scene, in which the pigs (the Bolsheviks, in Orwell's allegory) can no longer be distinguished from the animals' previous exploiters, the humans (the capitalists),

was omitted. A new ending was provided, in which the animals storm the farmhouse where the pigs have moved and liberate themselves all over again.

The great enemy of propaganda was subjected, after his death, to the deceptions and evasions of propaganda--and by the very people, American Cold Warriors,

who would canonize him as the great enemy of propaganda.

Howard Hunt at least kept the story pegged to the history of the Soviet Union,

which is what Orwell intended. Virtually every detail in "Animal Farm" allegorizes some incident in that history: the Kronstadt rebellion, the five-year plan, the

Moscow trials, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Tehran conference. But although Orwell didn't want Communism, he didn't want capitalism, either. This part of his

thought was carefully elided, and "Animal Farm" became a warning against

political change per se. It remains so today. The cover of the current Harcourt

paperback glosses the contents as follows:

As ferociously fresh as it was more than half a century ago, "Animal Farm" is a parable about would-be liberators everywhere. As we witness the rise and bloody

fall of the revolutionary animals through the lens of our own history, we see the seeds of totalitarianism in the most idealistic organizations; and in our most

charismatic leaders, the souls of our cruelest oppressors.

This is the opposite of what Orwell intended. But almost everything in the popular

understanding of Orwell is a distortion of what he really thought and the kind of writer he was.

Writers are not entirely responsible for their admirers. It is unlikely that Jane

Austen, if she were here today, would wish to become a member of the Jane Austen Society. In his lifetime, George Orwell was regarded, even by his friends,

as a contrary man. It was said that the closer you got to him the colder and more critical he became. As a writer, he was often hardest on his allies. He was a

middle-class intellectual who despised the middle class and was contemptuous of

intellectuals, a Socialist whose abuse of Socialists--"all that dreary tribe of high- minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come

flocking toward the smell of 'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat"--was as vicious as any Tory's. He preached solidarity, but he had the habits of a dropout,

and the works for which he is most celebrated, "Animal Farm," "1984," and the essay "Politics and the English Language," were attacks on people who purported

to share his political views. He was not looking to make friends. But after his death he suddenly acquired an army of fans--all middle-class intellectuals eager

to suggest that a writer who approved of little would have approved of them.

Orwell's army is one of the most ideologically mixed up ever to assemble. John

Rodden, whose "George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation" was published in 1989 and recently reprinted, with a new introduction (Transaction; $30), has

catalogued it exhaustively. It has included, over the years, ex-Communists, Socialists, left-wing anarchists, right-wing libertarians, liberals, conservatives,

doves, hawks, the Partisan Review editorial board, and the John Birch Society: every group in a different uniform, but with the same button pinned to the lapel--

Orwell Was Right. Irving Howe claimed Orwell, and so did Norman Podhoretz. Almost the only thing Orwell's posthumous admirers have in common, besides

the button, is anti-Communism. But they all somehow found support for their particular bouquet of moral and political values in Orwell's writings, which have

been universally praised as "honest," "decent," and "clear." In what sense, though, can writings that have been taken to mean so many incompatible things

be called "clear"? And what, exactly, was Orwell right about?

Indifferent to his own person as Orwell genuinely was, his writing is essentially

personal. He put himself at the center of all his nonfiction books and many of his

essays, and he often used personal anecdotes in his political journalism to make,

or reinforce, his points. He never figured himself as the hero of these stories, in part because his tendency to self-abnegation was fairly remorseless. But self-

abnegation was perhaps the most seductive aspect of the persona he devised. Orwell had the rare talent for making readers feel that they were dealing not with

a reporter or a columnist or a literary man--not with a writer--but with an ordinary person. His method for making people believe what he wrote was to

make them believe, first of all, in him.

He was a writer, of course--he was a graphomaniac, in fact: writing was what he lived for--and there was not much that was ordinary about him. He was born, a

hundred years ago, in Bengal, where his father was a sub-agent in the Opium

Department of the Indian Civil Service, and he came to England when he was one, and was brought up there by his mother. (The family name was Blair, and

Orwell's given name was Eric.) Orwell's father visited the family for three months in 1907, engaging in domestic life with sufficient industry to leave his wife

pregnant, and did not come back until 1912. By then, Orwell was boarding as a scholarship student at St. Cyprian's, the school he wrote about, many years later,

in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys." He studied hard and won a scholarship to Eton, and it was there that he began his career in self-denial. He deliberately

slacked off, finishing a hundred and thirty-eighth in a class of a hundred and sixty-seven, and then, instead of taking the exams for university, joined the

Imperial Police and went to Burma, the scene of the essays "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant." In 1927, after five years in Burma, while on leave in

England and with no employment prospects, he resigned.

He spent the next four years as a tramp and an itinerant worker, experiences

that became the basis for "Down and Out in Paris and London," the first work to appear under the pen name George Orwell, in 1933. He taught school briefly,

worked in a bookstore (the subject of the essay "Bookshop Memories"), and spent two months travelling around the industrial districts in the North of England

gathering material for "The Road to Wigan Pier," which came out in 1937. Orwell spent the first half of 1937 fighting with the Loyalists in Spain, where he was shot

in the throat by a fascist sniper, and where he witnessed the brutal Communist suppression of the revolutionary parties in the Republican alliance. His account of

these events, "Homage to Catalonia," which appeared in 1938, was, indeed, brave and iconoclastic (though not the only work of its kind), and it established

Orwell in the position that he would maintain for the rest of his life, as the

leading anti-Stalinist writer of the British left.

During the war, Orwell took a job with the Indian section of the BBC's Eastern Service, where he produced and, with T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Louis

MacNeice, and other distinguished writers, delivered radio talks, mostly on literary subjects, intended to rally the support of Indians for the British war

effort. For the first time since 1927, he received the salary he had once enjoyed as a policeman in Burma, but he regarded the work as propaganda--he felt, he

said, like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot"--and, in 1943,

he quit. He worked for a while as literary editor and as a columnist at the Tribune, a Socialist paper edited by Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the left wing of

the Labour Party in Britain and a man Orwell admired. In 1946, after the success of "Animal Farm," and knowing that he was desperately ill with lung disease, he

removed himself to one of the dankest places in the British Isles: the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. When he was not too sick to type, he sat in a

room all day smoking black shag tobacco, and writing "1984." His biographers have noted that the life of Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth in that novel is

based in part on Orwell's own career (as he experienced it) at the BBC. Room 101, the torture chamber in the climactic scene, was the name of the room

where the Eastern Service held compulsory committee meetings. Orwell (is it necessary to say?) hated committees.

His first wife, Eileen, with whom he adopted a son, died in 1945. He proposed to several women thereafter, sometimes suggesting, as an inducement, that he

would probably die soon and leave his widow with a valuable estate; but he struck out. Then, in 1949, when he really was on his deathbed, he married Sonia

Brownell, a woman whose sex appeal was widely appreciated. Brownell had slept with Orwell once, in 1945, apparently from the mixed motives of pity and the

desire to sleep with famous writers, one of her hobbies. The marriage was performed in a hospital room; Orwell died three months later. He ended up

selling more books than any other serious writer of the twentieth century-- "Animal Farm" and "1984" were together translated into more than sixty

languages; in 1973, English-language editions of "1984" were still selling at a rate of 1,340 copies a day--and he left all his royalties to Sonia. She squandered

them and died more or less in poverty, in 1980. Today, Orwell's gravesite, in a

churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, is tended by volunteers.

Orwell has been posthumously psychoanalyzed, but there is no great mystery behind the choices he made in his life. He explained his motive plainly and

repeatedly in his writing: he wanted to de-class himself. From his days at St. Cyprian's, and possibly even earlier, he saw the class system as a system of

oppression--and nothing but a system of oppression. The guilt (his term) that he felt about his position as a member of the white imperialist bourgeoisie preceded

his interest in politics as such. He spent much of his time criticizing professional Socialists, particularly the leaders of the British Labour Party, because, apart

from the commitment to equality, there was not much about Socialism that was

important to him. His economics were rudimentary, and he had little patience for the temporizing that ordinary politics requires. In 1945, after Germany

surrendered, Churchill and the Conservatives were voted out and a Labour government came in (with Bevan as Minister of Health). In less than a year,

Orwell was complaining that no steps had been taken to abolish the House of Lords.

He didn't merely go on adventures in class-crossing. He turned his life into an

experiment in classlessness, and the intensity of his commitment to that experiment was the main reason that his friends and colleagues found him a

perverse and sometimes exasperating man. His insistence on living in uncomfortable conditions, his refusal (despite his bad lungs) to wear a hat or

coat in winter, his habit of pouring his tea into the saucer and slurping it noisily (in the working-class manner) struck his friends not as colorful eccentricities but

as reproaches directed at their own bourgeois addiction to comfort and decorum. Which they were. Orwell was a brilliant and cultured man, with an Eton accent

and an anomalous, vaguely French mustache, who wore the same beat-up tweed jacket nearly every day, made (very badly) his own furniture, and lived, most of

the time, one step up from squalor. He read Joyce and kept a goat in the back yard. He was completely authentic and completely inauthentic at the same time--

a man who believed that to write honestly he needed to publish under a false name.

Orwell's writing is effortlessly compelling. He was in the tradition of writers who-- as Leslie Stephen said of Defoe--understand that there is a literary fascination in

a clear recitation of the facts. There is much more to Orwell than this, though. As Christopher Hitchens points out in "Why Orwell Matters" (Basic; $24), a book

more critical of Orwell than the title might suggest, "Homage to Catalonia" survives as a model of political journalism, and "Animal Farm" and "1984" belong

permanently to the literature of resistance. Whatever uses they were made to serve in the West, they gave courage to people in the East. The territory that

Orwell covered in "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier"--the lower-class extremes--was by no means new to nonfiction prose.

Engels wrote about it feelingly in "The Condition of the Working Class in England

in 1844"; Jacob Riis studied it in "How the Other Half Lives." But Orwell discovered a tone--"generous anger" is the phrase he once used to describe

Dickens, and it has been applied to him, but "cool indignation" seems a little more accurate--that has retained its freshness after seventy years.

Orwell's essays have recently been collected, with exceptional thoroughness, by

John Carey (Everyman; $35). The essay on Dickens, published in 1940, is weaker criticism than Edmund Wilson's "Dickens: The Two Scrooges," which came out

the same year. But Orwell's essay on Henry Miller, "Inside the Whale," which also appeared in 1940, was original and unexpected. His personal essays, especially

"Shooting an Elephant" and "Such, Such Were the Joys," are models of the form.

Still, his qualities as a writer are obscured by the need of his admirers to claim for his work impossible virtues.

Honesty was important to Orwell. He was certainly quick enough to accuse people

he disagreed with of dishonesty. But there is sometimes a confusion, when people talk about Orwell's writing, between honesty and objectivity. "He said

what he believed" and "He told it like it was" refer to different virtues. One of the effects of the tone Orwell achieved--the tone of a reasonable, modest, supremely

undogmatic man, hoping for the best but resigned to the worst--was the

impression of transparency, something that Orwell himself, in an essay called "Why I Write," identified as the ideal of good prose. It was therefore a shock

when Bernard Crick, in the first major biography of Orwell, authorized by Sonia Orwell and published the year of her death, confessed that he had found it

difficult to corroborate some of the incidents in Orwell's autobiographical writings. Jeffrey Meyers, whose biography "Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation"

came out in 2000, concluded that Orwell sometimes "heightened reality to achieve dramatic effects."

Crick has doubts that the event Orwell recounted in remarkably fine detail in "A

Hanging"--he describes the condemned man stepping aside to avoid a puddle of

water on his way to the scaffold--ever happened, and Meyers notes that, during his years as a tramp, Orwell would take time off to rest and write in the homes of

family and friends, something he does not mention in "Down and Out in Paris and London," where the narrator is sometimes on the verge of death by starvation.

Both Crick and Meyers suspect that "Shooting an Elephant" has fabricated elements. And everything that Orwell wrote was inflected by his predilection for

the worm's-eye view. When biographers asked Orwell's contemporaries what it was really like at St. Cyprian's, or in Burma, or working at the bookshop, the

usual answer was "It was bad, but it wasn't that bad."

The point is not that Orwell made things up. The point is that he used writing in a

literary, not a documentary, way: he wrote in order to make you see what he wanted you to see, to persuade. During the war, Orwell began contributing a

"London Letter" to Partisan Review. In one letter, he wrote that park railings in London were being torn down for scrap metal, but that only working-class

neighborhoods were being plundered; parks and squares in upper-class neighborhoods, he reported, were untouched. The story, Crick says, was widely

circulated. When a friend pointed out that it was untrue, Orwell is supposed to have replied that it didn't matter, "it was essentially true."

You need to grasp Orwell's premises, in other words, before you can start talking

about the "truth" of what he writes. He is not saying, This is the way it

objectively was from any possible point of view. He is saying, This is the way it looked to someone with my beliefs. Otherwise, his work can be puzzling. "Down

and Out in Paris and London" is a powerful book, but you are always wondering what this obviously decent, well-read, talented person is doing washing dishes in

the kitchen of a Paris hotel. In "The Road to Wigan Pier," Orwell gave the reader some help with this problem by explaining, at length, where he came from, what

his views were, and why he went to live with the miners. Orwell was not a reporter or a sociologist. He was an advocate. He had very definite political

opinions, and promoting them was his reason for writing. "No book is genuinely free of political bias," he asserted in "Why I Write." "Every line of serious work

that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."

Here we arrive at the challenge presented by the "Orwell Was Right" button.

Hitchens says that there were three great issues in the twentieth century, and that Orwell was right on all three: imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. What does

this mean, though? Orwell was against imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism. Excellent. Many people were against them in Orwell's time, and a great many

more people have been against them since. The important question, after condemning those things, was what to do about them, and how to understand

the implications for the future. On this level, Orwell was almost always wrong.

Orwell thought that any Englishman who boasted of liberty and prosperity while India was still a colony was a hypocrite. "In order that England may live in

comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of

starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream," he wrote in "The Road to

Wigan Pier." Still, he did not believe that India was capable of complete independence, and was still saying so as late as 1943. At first, he had the idea

that the British Empire should be turned into "a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics," but eventually he

arrived at another solution. In 1943, entering a controversy in the pages of the Tribune over the future of Burma, which had been invaded by Japan, he laid out

his position. The notion of an independent Burma, he explained, was as ludicrous as the notion of an independent Lithuania or Luxembourg. To grant those

countries independence would be to create a bunch of "comic opera states," he wrote. "The plain fact is that small nationalities cannot be independent, because

they cannot defend themselves." The answer was to place "the whole main-land of south-east Asia, together with Formosa, under the guidance of China, while

leaving the islands under an Anglo-American-Dutch condominium." Orwell was

against colonial exploitation, in other words, but not in favor of national self- determination. If this is anti-imperialism, make the most of it.

Orwell took a particular dislike to Gandhi. He referred to him, in private

correspondence, as a "bit of a charlatan"; in 1943, he wrote that "there is indeed a sort of apocalyptic truth in the statement of the German radio that the

teachings of Hitler and Gandhi are the same." One of his last essays was on Gandhi, written two years after India, and one year after Burma, became

independent, and a year after Gandhi's assassination. It is a grudging piece of writing. The method of Satyagraha, Orwell said, might have been effective

against the British, but he was doubtful about its future as a tactic for political

struggle. (A few years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., would find a use for it.) He confessed to "a sort of aesthetic distaste" for Gandhi himself--Gandhi was, after

all, just the sort of sandal-wearing, vegetarian mystic Orwell had always abhorred--and he attributed the success of the Indian independence movement

as much to the election of a Labour government in Britain as to Gandhi's efforts. "I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that

as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure" was the most that he could bring himself to say.

Hitler, on the other hand, Orwell did find personally appealing. "I have never

been able to dislike Hitler," he admitted, in 1940. Hitler, it seems, "grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life," which Orwell called the attitude of

"nearly all Western thought since the last war, certainly all 'progressive' thought." This response--the idea that fascism, whatever might be wrong with it, is at least

about the necessity of struggle and self-sacrifice--is not that far from the response of the relatively few people in England (there were more in France) who

actively endorsed fascism.

Orwell was opposed to Nazi Germany. But he thought that Britain, as an imperial power, had no moral right to go to war against Hitler, and he was sure that a war

would make Britain fascist. This is a theme in his novel "Coming Up for Air,"

which was published in 1939, and that winter he was urging friends to begin planning "illegal anti-war activities." He thought that it would be a good idea to

set up an underground antiwar organization, in anticipation of what he called the "pre-war fascising processes," and predicted that he would end up in a British

concentration camp because of his views. He kept up his antiwar agitation until August, 1939. Then, with the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, he flipped

completely. In "The Lion and the Unicorn," in 1941, he accused British antiwar intellectuals of "sabotage." They had become "Europeanized"; they sneered at

patriotism. (This from a man who, two years earlier, had been proposing an illegal campaign against government policy.) They had weakened the morale of

the English people, "so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war. . . . Ten years of systematic Blimp-

baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces." The prediction of

a fascist Britain had evidently been forgotten.

What were Orwell's political opinions? Orwell was a revolutionary Socialist. That

is, he hoped that there would be a Socialist revolution in England, and, as he said more than once, if violence was necessary, violence there should be. "I dare say

the London gutters will have to run with blood," he wrote in "My Country Right or Left," in 1940. And a year later, in "The Lion and the Unicorn," "It is only by

revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. . . . Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and

place." Orwell had concluded long before that capitalism had failed unambiguously, and he never changed his opinion. He thought that Hitler's

military success on the Continent proved once and for all the superiority of a

planned economy. "It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of

production and consumption," he wrote. "The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them."

A Socialist England, as Orwell described it, would be a classless society with

virtually no private property. The State would own everything, and would require "that nobody shall live without working." Orwell thought that perhaps fifteen

acres of land, "at the very most," might be permitted, presumably to allow

subsistence farming, but that there would be no ownership of land in town areas. Incomes would be equalized, so that the highest income would never be greater

than ten times the lowest. Above that, the tax rate should be a hundred per cent. The House of Lords would be abolished, though Orwell thought that the monarchy

might be preserved. (Everybody would drink at the same pub, presumably, but one of the blokes would get to wear a crown.) As for its foreign policy: a Socialist

state "will not have the smallest scruple about attacking hostile neutrals or stirring up native rebellions in enemy colonies."

Orwell was not a cultural radical. Democracy and moral decency (once the blood

was cleaned off the pavement, anyway) were central to his vision of Socialism.

His admirers remembered the democracy and the decency, and managed to forget most of the rest. When "Homage to Catalonia" was finally published in the

United States, in 1952, Lionel Trilling wrote an introduction, which Jeffrey Meyers has called "probably the most influential essay on Orwell." It is a work of short

fiction. "Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order," Trilling wrote; he exemplified the meaning of

the phrase "my station and its duties," and respected "the old bourgeois virtues." He even "came to love things, material possessions." A fully housebroken anti-

Communist. It is amusing to imagine Orwell slurping his tea at the Columbia Faculty House.

Understanding Orwell's politics helps to explain that largely inaccurate prediction about postwar life "1984." There was, Hitchens points out, an enormous blind

spot in Orwell's view of the world: the United States. Orwell never visited the United States and, as Hitchens says, showed little curiosity about what went on

there. To the extent that he gave it any attention, he tended to regard the United States as vulgar, materialistic, and a threat to the English language. ("Many

Americans pronounce . . . water as though it had no t in it, or even as though it had no consonant in it at all, except the w," he claimed. "On the whole we are

justified in regarding the American language with suspicion.") He thought that, all things considered, Britain was better off as a client-state of Washington than as a

client-state of Moscow, but he did not look on an increased American role in the world with hope. Since Orwell was certain that capitalism was doomed, the only

future he could imagine for the United States was as some sort of totalitarian regime.

He laid out his view in 1947, in the pages of Partisan Review. There were, he explained, three possible futures in a nuclear world: a preemptive nuclear strike

by the United States against the Soviet Union; a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, wiping out most of the race and returning life to the

Bronze Age; and a stalemate created by the fear of actually using atomic bombs and other weapons of mass destruction--what would be known as the policy of

mutually assured destruction. This third possibility, Orwell argued, was the worst of all:

It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast superstates,

unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine

caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen. Within each state the

necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states.

Civilizations of this type might remain static for thousands of years.

Orwell's third possibility was, of course, the path that history took. Mutually assured destruction was the guiding policy of the arms race and the Cold War.

Orwell himself coined the term "Cold War," and after his death he became a hero

to Cold Warriors, liberal and conservative alike. But he hated the idea of a Cold War--he preferred being bombed back to the Bronze Age--because it seems

never to have entered his mind that the United States would be a force for liberty and democracy. "1984" is, precisely, Orwell's vision of what the Cold War might

be like: a mindless and interminable struggle among totalitarian monsters. Was he right?

Some people in 1949 received "1984" as an attack on the Labour Party (in the

book, the regime of Big Brother is said to have derived from the principles of "Ingsoc"; that is, English Socialism), and Orwell was compelled to issue, through

his publisher, a statement clarifying his intentions. He was a supporter of the

Labour Party, he said. "I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive," he continued, "but I believe (allowing of course for the

fact that the book is satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals

everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences."

The attitude behind this last sentence seems to me the regrettable part of

Orwell's legacy. If ideas were to stand or fall on the basis of their logically possible consequences, we would have no ideas, because the ultimate

conceivable consequence of every idea is an absurdity--is, in some way, "against

life." We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices, intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity

susceptible to improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation; a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the

circumstances. One of the most tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition--to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or

to a war of all against all. Orwell did not invent this kind of argument, but he provided, in "1984," a vocabulary for its deployment.

"Big Brother" and "doublethink" and "thought police" are frequently cited as

contributions to the language. They are, but they belong to the same category as

"liar" and "pervert" and "madman." They are conversation-stoppers. When a

court allows videotape from a hidden camera to be used in a trial, people shout

"Big Brother." When a politician refers to his proposal to permit logging on national land as "environmentally friendly," he is charged with "doublethink."

When a critic finds sexism in a poem, she is accused of being a member of the "thought police." The terms can be used to discredit virtually any position, which

is one of the reasons that Orwell became everyone's favorite political thinker. People learned to make any deviation from their own platform seem the first step

on the slippery slope to "1984."

There are Big Brothers and thought police in the world, just as there are liars and madmen. "1984" may have been intended to expose the true character of Soviet

Communism, but, because it describes a world in which there are no moral

distinctions among the three fictional regimes that dominate the globe, it ended up encouraging people to see totalitarian "tendencies" everywhere. There was

visible totalitarianism, in Russia and in Eastern Europe; but there was also the invisible totalitarianism of the so-called "free world." When people talk about Big

Brother, they generally mean a system of covert surveillance and manipulation, oppression in democratic disguise (unlike the system in Orwell's book, which is so

overt that it is advertised). "1984" taught people to imagine government as a conspiracy against liberty. This is why the John Birch Society used 1984 as the

last four digits in the phone number of its Washington office.

Orwell himself was a sniffer of tendencies. He, too, could blur moral distinctions

among the things he disliked, between the BBC and the Ministry of Love, for instance; he apparently thought of the Ministry of Love as the logical

consequence of the mass media's "tendency" to thought control. His most celebrated conflation of dislikes is the essay, for many years a staple of the

freshman-composition syllabus, "Politics and the English Language."

Orwell wrote many strong essays, but "Politics and the English Language," published in 1946, is not one of them. Half of the essay is an attack on bad

prose. Orwell is against abstractions, mixed metaphors, Latinate roots, polysyllabic words, cliches, and most of the other stylistic vices identified in

Fowler's "Modern English Usage" (in its fourth printing in 1946). The other half is

an attack on political dishonesty. Certain political terms, Orwell argues, are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his

own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is

the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.

Fowler would have found nothing to complain about, though, in the sentences

Orwell objects to. They are as clear as can be. Somehow, Orwell has run together his distaste for flowery, stale prose with his distaste for fascism, Stalinism, and

Roman Catholicism. He makes it seem that the problem with fascism (and the

rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style. They're bad, we are encouraged to feel,

because their language is bad, because they're ugly.

This is not an isolated instance of this way of thinking in Orwell. From his earliest work, he was obsessed with body odor, and olfactory metaphors are probably the

most consistent figure in his prose, right to the end of his life, when he congratulated Gandhi for leaving a clean smell when he died. But Orwell didn't

think of the relation between smell and virtue as only metaphorical. He took quite seriously the question of whether it was ever possible to feel true solidarity with a

man who smelled. Many pages in "The Road to Wigan Pier" are devoted to the problem. In his fiction, a bad character is, often, an ugly, sweaty, smelly

character.

Smell has no relation to virtue, however. Ugliness has no relation to insincerity or

evil, and short words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness. Political speech, like etiquette, has its codes and its euphemisms, and

Orwell is right to insist that it is important to be able to decipher them. He says that if what he calls political speech--by which he appears to mean political

cliches--were translated into plain, everyday speech, confusion and insincerity would begin to evaporate. It is a worthy, if unrealistic, hope. But he does not

stop there. All politics, he writes, "is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." And by the end of the essay he has damned the whole discourse:

"Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from

Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." All political parties? Orwell had sniffed out a tendency.

Orwell's prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining,

mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought. Orwell was not clairvoyant; he was not infallible; he was not

even consistent. He changed his mind about things, as most writers do. He dramatized out of a desire to make the world more the way he wished it to be, as

most writers do. He also said what he thought without hedging or trimming, as few writers do all the time. It is strange how selectively he was heard. It is no

tribute to him to turn his books into anthems to a status quo he hated. Orwell is

admired for being a paragon when he was, self-consciously, a naysayer and a misfit. If he is going to be welcomed into the pantheon of right-thinking liberals,

he should at least be allowed to bring along his goat.

LOUIS MENAND

Source Citation: Menand, Louis. "HONEST, DECENT, WRONG." The New Yorker

27 Jan. 2003: 084. Academic OneFile. Web. 9 Oct. 2011.

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