GIVING AIR TO THE TRUTH

RICHARD MAGAT

The enduring legacy of George Orwell

Although George Orwell died in 1950, one need not go back very far to sense his influence. The Bush administration, for example, was accused by a critic of using Orwellian language to disguise its true purposes: “A policy that opens national forests to destructive logging of old-growth trees is labeled Healthy Forest Initiative.”

But no political party has a monopoly on what Orwell called the perversion of the English language. “Political language,” he wrote, “and this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

The term “Orwellian” has become embedded in the English language largely because of “Newspeak” and “Doublethink,” features of Orwell’s celebrated novel 1984. In that masterpiece, published in 1949, he depicted the gloom and horrors of a totalitarian state. Crimes on a colossal scale are camouflaged by perverted language. 1984 also portrayed models of agencies all too real in 20th century history—the Gestapo, the KGB, and the Stasi.

Many are familiar with Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm, two books that have inspired television, motion picture, and stage productions, to say nothing of shelves upon shelves of literary and political critiques. Both have been translated into dozens of languages. But these books are just the most celebrated part of an enormous legacy this man left us. Peter Davison, editor of a 20-volume compilation of George Orwell’s writing, notes that the two novels were not the core of his achievement. “They were the outer layer...the bark. The journalism is the tree.”

As a journalist, Orwell struggled to give air to the truth in the face of frequent opposition by fellow intellectuals. Orwell was the conscience of his generation, his ideals forged by deeply rooted courage and broadly checkered events in a short but memorable life. He wrote regular newspaper columns, authored six novels and three non- fiction books, and penned hundreds of essays, pamphlets, and reviews. His prodigious output is all the more remarkable because he lived to be only 47.

Who was this man who became the conscience of a generation? On the surface, he was merely an impoverished freelance journalist and an amateur novelist.He had no university education, no capital, no backing from a political party or a major newspaper. As Christopher Hitchens, author of Why Orwell Matters, observes,“Much of his energy was dissipated in the simple struggle to get published or in the banal effort to meet [daily] schedules of bills and deadlines.”

AN ANGLO-INDIAN HERITAGE

Orwell was born in India, where his father was a British civil servant who worked in the Opium Department, which guided England’s practice of supplying China with the drug in return for the tea trade. The family lived in modest, though genteel, circumstances. His mother, for example, bargained with the headmaster of his first school to cut the fees in half. In English society of the day being a member of a professional class, including the civil service, counted more than money.

Moving back to England as an infant, Orwell was a shy child in an unfamiliar world. Orwell felt as a child that he would grow up to be a writer, and by nine he was writing sketches, skits, stories, and verse. His first published writing, during World War I, was a patriotic poem carried in a local newspaper.

The school Orwell attended, St. Cyprian’s, prepared boys for admission to the vaunted English public schools. The preparation was grueling, and the environment oppressive, including beatings for having wet his bed. The five years at school, one biographer noted, was “a lukewarm bath of snobbery.” Orwell himself wrote later that “to send a child to school among children richer than itself was the greatest cruelty one could inflict on it.”

But Orwell succeeded academically and was admitted to Eton as a scholarship student in 1917. Despite a culture of harassment by upperclassmen, Eton was an improvement over the prep school. It allowed the older boys an uncommon degree of freedom. Although Orwell did poorly in his studies, he read voraciously, especially such favorites as Jack London,George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. But his poor academic record, along with the family’s strained finances, prevented him from going to university.

With no interest in the professions or business, he chose a respectable career appropriate to family tradition, one that would not require a good deal of costly training or other expense, and would provide a modest income and an early pension. At 19, he joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to Burma, where he served for five years. Burmese nationalism was growing, and he called the colonial environment “a stifling, stultifying world in which to live.” From this experience emerged the book Burmese Days (1934) and the brilliant essays “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging.” He became convinced that the British Empire was a capitalist mechanism to exploit the subjugated poor.

His family was deeply disappointed when he resigned his commission, rejecting a tradition of selfless service that men like his father had upheld proudly. Orwell was prepared to be a failure. He wrote, “Even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundred [pounds] a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.” His early schooling had given him a corrupt view of merit. Throughout his life Orwell railed against the class system, sardonically describing himself as lower-uppermiddle class.He changed his birth name Eric Blair to the commonplace George Orwell, as a way of opting out of his birth-assigned class. He was haunted by a powerful and ineradicable sense of guilt—built on his colonial heritage, bourgeois background, inbred snobbery, and elite education.

Orwell made numerous journeys into lower-class life, both as journalistic ventures and as a form of self-punishment. He immersed himself in a life of poverty in London and Paris and as a tramp in Northern England. Often living in squalor and uncomfortable conditions, he refused to wear a hat or coat in winter in spite of his bad lungs.

These forays were embodied in books powerful in sociological terms and, in the view of some critics, underrated—Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Keep the Aphidistra Flying (1936), and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

In London, living in a sparse, cold room, he made secret excursions to the East End wearing dilapidated clothes, spending his time in the company of tramps and beggars. He worried that his upper-class accent might mark him as a police spy. But he passed, following in the tradition of Jack London, who also assumed a disguise to explore slums earlier in the century. Orwell was not simply gathering literary material, but also was trying to understand how the poor lived and to experience something of their suffering. But he could retreat and find rest and comfort in friends’ homes, so he was never truly down and out. As a result of trying to turn his life into an experiment in classlessnesss, friends and colleagues found him perverse and sometimes exasperating.

EXPLORING THE DEPTHS

Orwell went to Paris in 1928 to write and “to rub shoulders with mankind at its lowest and dirtiest; to commit an act of public defiance against the money values of the present day world.” He could live seedily in a cheap hotel, but escape to the home of an aunt living in Paris who helped him now and then.

Paris was teeming with artistic and literary figures, including Ernest Hemingway and other expatriates. But Orwell saw little of the fashionable cafes and did not attend literary gatherings.He was a nobody who was too modest to introduce himself to the big names of the day. He took jobs as a restaurant dishwasher and as a kitchen porter in one of the fine hotels. Orwell spares none of the ugly details of the wretched conditions and 17-hour days. He describes the hot, filthy hotel service quarters, and in one Russian restaurant he discovers two large rats eating a ham on the kitchen table.

He also had a severe attack of bronchitis and was treated in a public charity ward. Orwell stayed in Paris for 18 months. He completed two novels but could not get them published, though he did get his first article as a professional writer published in a French newspaper. All in all, he had happy memories of Paris and the intense private experiences that plunged him into the concerns that shaped his career as a writer.

Back in England, he spent two months traveling around industrial districts in the north, tape measure and questionnaire in hand, gathering material for The Road to Wigan Pier. The book was written on commission from a left-wing publisher, Victor Gollanz, for inclusion in the Left Book Club, a sure key to success since it distributed 40,000 copies.

AWAKENING TO STALINISM

In 1937, he went to Spain to cover the insurgency by General Francisco Franco against the popularly elected leftist Republican government.Moscow had supplied the government with arms, but also sent in communist agents in an effort to Stalinize the Republic. A civil war raged within the larger civil war. Orwell enlisted in an independent socialist militia unit that the communists were trying to liquidate. He became convinced that he was a spectator of a full-blown Stalinist coup. The head of the Socialist Party was tortured and murdered. Orwell’s closest comrade was arrested and died in prison.

Orwell was not the only one to have figured out that the Soviet Union’s vaunted socialist utopia was a put-up job, but nobody ever expressed his revulsion better or more lastingly. The lesson was deeply engraved in him during the Spanish Civil War. On the Aragon Front, he fought courageously, sometimes even recklessly. After being shot in the throat by a sniper, Orwell recuperated in Barcelona, where he witnessed four days of fighting among various communist and non-communist left factions. He and his wife escaped to France in disguise, in the nick of time. They might have been murdered by the communists, who had begun a purge against the militia to which he was attached.

The Spanish police had confiscated Orwell’s diaries, so he composed his book about Spain, Homage to Catalonia, mainly from what he saw with his own eyes or learned from other eyewitnesses he trusted. When the book was published in 1938, it was attacked roundly by many left-wing critics.

Orwell’s hopes for English socialism were embodied in the 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn, both a fond tribute to the good sense of the English people and a stirring indictment of their traditional rulers. He took comfort in the knowledge that goose-stepping storm troopers would not find favor among the common people. He was himself incurably English. He once worked in a store called Booklovers Corner, and later ran a grocery in a tiny village where he also raised chickens, ducks, and goats.

The Hitler-Stalin Pact threw the Left into turmoil, but once Hitler repudiated it, left-wing intellectuals once again praised the virtues of the Soviet Union. Not Orwell. He continued to regard the Soviet Union as a tyranny. To the surprise of left-wing critics, Orwell sought to enlist for war service.He loved his country and was willing to fight for it when it was in danger. Judged unfit for military service because of his health, Orwell spent three years in the Home Guard. Though he never had to fire a shot in anger, he wrote extensively about arming the Guard and rose to rank of sergeant.

In 1941, Orwell was hired by the BBC to write propaganda broadcasts to strengthen ties between Britain and India. The British also feared that anti-colonial Indians would veer toward Japan. Orwell’s efforts were largely wasted, because few Indians had short-wave radios and many of the topics did not interest them.

He quit the BBC in 1943, but the experience contributed to his literary work. One of his radio adaptations, dealing with a political fable by Italian writer Ignazio Silone, was a prototype for Animal Farm. The seeds of “Newspeak” in 1984 lay in a BBC talk he commissioned on Basic English—a vocabulary of 800 words that Churchill’s cabinet wanted to use as a propaganda tool.

Before the war ended, Orwell completed Animal Farm, the book that would bring him worldwide fame. The book is a satire warning of the consequences that must follow if Soviet-style leaders capture socialism. The animals who are successful in a barnyard revolt against the capitalist farmer allow themselves to become easy prey for Napoleon, who relentlessly accumulates power by preying on the weaknesses of his comrades. In a letter to Dwight McDonald, editor of Politics magazine, Orwell said, “the turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves. If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, it would have been all right.”

Given the widespread admiration of the Soviet Union for its heroic struggle against Hitler, the manuscript of Animal Farm was treated like a hot potato by British intellectuals and publishers. His regular publisher split hairs to reject it. Another was advised by its editor, T.S. Eliot, to turn it down, as he had Down and Out in Paris and London. But the manuscript quickly was accepted by the small Warburg firm in 1945 and became a success.

1984, published four years later, depicts the world divided by a few totalitarian superpowers, and the fate of two lovers in one of them, Oceania. It is a nightmare world in which the Leader controls not only the future, but also the past. If the Leader says of a certain event, “It never happened...well, it never happened.” Besides the language perversion of “Doublethink” and “Newspeak,” the novel introduced the terms “Big Brother” and “Hate Week.” The book was written at a time when totalitarianism seemed an overpowering force, perhaps on the verge of conquering Europe. Millions of people took Nazi and communist ideologies and slogans with the utmost seriousness. The book was successful in England and in the United States, where it became a Book-of-the- Month selection.

A WRITER’S VIEWS ON WRITING

Orwell was not reticent about his craft. In his essay “Why I Write,” he recalled, “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words... and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”

His journalism avoided the consciously poetic, but never lapsed from the truly dramatic. Politics were always at the core of his writing. “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale,” he wrote, “and thereafter I knew where I stood... Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism...”

Orwell was a superb literary critic, and particularly celebrated writers like Swift and Dickens. Among the magisterial essays he wrote during his final years were “Conrad’s Place and Rank in English Letters,” “Politics and the English Language,” and “Books vs. Cigarettes.”

The success of Animal Farm enabled him to buy a small farmhouse on the remote Scottish island of Jura. With no telephone or regular mail service, he could take a break from the demands cascading down on him in London’s literary circles.

Often portrayed as a saint, he was far from it.He subjected his ailing wife Eileen to his pinched life of excruciating self-denial. Before her death in 1945, he had an active extramarital life with a number of married women and made clumsy unsuccessful passes at others. His attraction to a woman in the British Foreign Office may also account for one of the most controversial episodes in his life. In 1949, he gave her a list of prominent journalists and intellectuals whom he said should not be used in government work because they were “crypto communists,” or otherwise untrustworthy. Next to each name he added such comments as “decayed liberal,” “politically ignorant,” “strong sympathizer,” and “tendency toward homosexuality.” Orwell’s motive was to set the Foreign Office straight, since it had been erring on Stalin’s side for more than a decade. He would not have advocated a blacklist, however. He had, for example, organized a statement that objected to the purge of supposed political extremists from the Civil Service, demanding that they be enabled to face their accusers and have other civil liberty protections.

In 1950, in a sanatorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Orwell was visited by Sonia Brownell, a beautiful, highly regarded editor with whom he had once had an affair.Attracted by Orwell’s success, but also genuinely sorry for him, she accepted his proposal of marriage. For his part, he thought the marriage might provide the extra inspiration he needed to continue fighting for his life. He also knew she was well qualified to deal with publishers and agents and to manage his estate. He died four months after the bedside marriage ceremony.

In the 20 years since the publication of 1984, Orwell’s dim view of the totalitarian state has been partially realized through the fall of the Soviet Union. But other tyrannies continue. He would also have been depressed by Vietnam and Iraq and the rise of the American imperium. And, though he would deride Tony Blair’s version of socialism, he might take quiet pride at England’s giving thumbs down to the euro.

Additional Resources:

Davison, Peter, editor. The Complete Works of George Orwell (in 20 volumes). London, UK: Secker & Warburg, 1998.
Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2002.
Sheldon, Michael. Orwell. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1991.

Richard Magat (CC ’00), a former communications director of the Ford Foundation and president of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, is senior fellow at the Community Resource Exchange in New York. He has written extensively on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, including Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement.

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