The religious fellow traveler

...He had written of some with qual- ified admiration...

...Although Orwell himself noted that Catholicism and conservatism should not be automatically equated --pointing to Greene's leftist politics as an example -- he usually did equate them in the British 1940s through politically conservative publications like The Tablet, the London Catholic weekly...

...One must find one's oven interpretations, somewhere sub- merged in the leisurely pace of those scenes, so jaggedly assembled and left unabashedly without explanation...

...Orwell spoke fondly of England's Jews as if they were some lost William Morris-like ideal of English socialism, for they "have failed to keep up with the modem tendency toward big amalgamations, and have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily car- ried out on a small scale and by old- fashioned methods...

...y ET DESPITE Orwell's criticism of religion in general and Catholicism in particular, Catholic critics had paradoxically turned him by the mid-fifties into a Crusader-by-impressment, a footdragging religious fellow traveler...

...Man, he thought, needed . . . ownership of property in a simple straightforward way, to know, to see and to handle what was his own...

...But Orwell thought conservative politicians had betrayed conservatism's ideals, said HoUis: "'Orwell despaired of the conservatives because the conservatives despaired of conservatism...

...NICHOLAS MACDONALD (Nicholas Macdonald, a guest critic reviewing films for Com-monweal, is an independent moviemaker...

...Why were they willing to overlook, even welcome, his harsh criticism of the church...

...Books: EARTH, AIR, LIFE, WATER-- CITIES Cities, for Oliver, were not a part of nature...

...Auden, once a victim of Orwell's attacks on "the pansy left," "the name of George Orwell is one of the first that would come to mind...

...He particularly despised Catholicism in the 1930s because he saw it as an intellectual fad, concluding one 1948 column in which he compared Communist intellectuals with 1930s Catholic intellectuals: "If you do not like Communism, you are a Red-baiter...

...For in Orwell's realization that modem man's decaying belief in immortality was (in his words) "the major problem of our time," he recognized, said one reviewer, that "the fundamental problem of the world is spiritual...

...They admired his uncompromising independence of mind, accepting his criticism as the fire of a man passionately committed to the truth...

...These three criteria --fashion, power and organiza- tion, and political tendency --governed virtually all of Orwell's reflections on Catholicism...

...For, like the greatest jazz,ln the White ORWELL & CATHOLICISM City has that magical combination of opposites: relaxed and lo~-key and yet, at the same time, rigorously structured...

...Anne Spirn's solution calls for acknowledging the elemental forces which underlie urban settlements and which have since ancient times been rec- ognized as fundamental --processes of earth, air, and water, to which she has added a fourth, "life," in place of the Traditional element, fire...

...Owning no more than a few department store chains and a couple of newspapers, Jews were not, Orwell said, "numerous or powerful enough" to pose a problem...

...About liberation theology...

...Indeed, despite Orwell's frequent and scathing assaults on "the stinking RC," Orwell's enthusiastic history of re- ception in Catholic periodicals rivals that of many leading Catholic writers...

...Orwell rightly saw that power worship itself had become an intellectual fad, typified by intellectuals' admiration for Stalin and Hitler...

...Orwell criticized the Tribune's postwar "overemphasis" in support of it, and once declared to Tribune editor and Labor party leader Aneurin Bevan that British Zionists were only "a bunch of Wardour Street Jews who have a controlling influence over the British press...

...Orwell's hard-headed, this-worldly orientation and stress on individual human dignity is probably closer to rationalism, humanism, or personalism than to any established religion, and some followers of these philosophies have also inducted Orwell as an honorary member...

...Despite their criticisms of religion, these books' frontal assaults on Stalinism (and the British Labor party) popularized Orwell as the anti-Communist Jeremiah, the doomsday prophet...

...I i I Douay Bible, Orwell wrote in August, 1931, to a friend: "Long may they fight, I say...

...He considered Cathol- icism's overall political tendency plainly fascist, distinguishing it from Anglicanism, which did not "impose any political 'line' "on its followers...

...And doubtless he would be surprised (and most disquieted) to find his one-time "enemy" claiming that the road to Wigan Pier was also the path to Rome...

...Although Orwell once pointed out to Tribune readers that Marx's famous phrase "religion is the opium of the people" really meant that religion was something created by people to meet a real need rather than "a dope handed out from above," he often talked in his journalism and through figures like Moses the Raven as if he meant precise- ly the latter...

...Another is the contamination of air, water, soil, and plants by hazardous chemicals and others of unknown toxicity...

...Nothing could have been further from Orwell's professed intent...

...These kinds of reclamation efforts were facilitated by misunderstandings about Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four...

...He saw Catholicism as intellectually fashionable, hierarchically structured and politically influential, and conservative or even fas- cist in political tendency...

...The Roman Catholic ideal," Orwell claimed, is always "in favor of private ownership and against socialist ownership and 'progress' generally...

...Catholic writ- ers noted explicit affinities in religious thought between Orwell's outlook and their Christian outlook...

...He maintained that London intel- lectuals' attraction to Catholicism was also a form of power worship...

...Orwell accurately observed more than once that most of Britain's two million 1940s Catholics were poor Irish laborers, and he certainly knew that far less than one percent of Catholics in Britain were intellectual converts...

...To a degree, Orwelrs different de- scriptions of Catholics and Jews were merely a polemical strategy aimed at un- dercutting Catholic popular influence...

...Political Tendency...

...RWELL identified the "Catholic" outlook by a tiny number of vocal intel- lectual adherents rather than by its popu- lar membership --a practice he sharply criticized in Wigan Pier when "book- trained socialists" treated Marxist intel- lectuals as if they actually spoke for workers...

...When Waugh's remark got back to him, Orwell groused with a smile, "Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be while holding un- tenable opinions...

...Typically, Orwell found that "the enemy" was up to no good, and he pulled no punches in his war of words against Catholics, especially Catholic intellec- tual apologists...

...Spiritual roots, patriotic spirit, and ap- preciation for ordinary life went to-gether, Orwell thought...

...When he spoke of Catholicism, Orwell invariably referred to intellectuals --and intellec- tual converts at that...

...He maintained that the rigid doctrines which "orthodox" Catholics upheld handicap- ped them severely as writers --'just as Communist ideology disabled left writ- ers...

...In the spring of 1931 he explained to Old Etonian and Catholic acquaintance Christopher Hol- lis why he regularly read the Catholic press: "I like to see what the enemy is up to...

...The odd thing is not that the questions are in a sense absurd, for Or- well is dead thirty-four years and it is impossible to extrapolate from a man's writings what he would say about-evenlts after his death --but that most Orwell critics admit straight off that the ques- tions are absurd --and yet still feet drawn to ask them...

...Fashion...

...One often suspects that Orwell the fashion hater is chiefly intent on decrying a fashion...

...One might say the same about Orwell's warm reception in religious circles, despite his career of bit- ing attacks against believers, especially Catholics...

...and Mrs...

...They also found in his work parallels with their own views, and sometimes sought to use him as a weapon in their own internal politicking against (or sometimes inside) the left...

...What would he say about the church in light of present-day ecumenical efforts...

...Observers voiced similar questions about Orwell's possible positions through the fifties and sixties, on the Suez crisis and the Viet- nam War, for example...

...Unlike T.S...

...Pithers, who says to his wife at the end of each suffering day, "Never you mind, my dear, we ain't far off from heaven now...

...Despite unmistak- able affinities between his apparent reli- gious thinking and these philosophies' outlooks, and also his having close friends (like humanist Brenda Salkeld) who identified themselves by such names, Orwell never bothered formally to align himself with these groups or to call himself by these or any other secta- rian labels...

...All this was in sharp contrast to Jewish anti-fascism, as Orwell saw it...

...One could well understand it if Orwell were merely being reclaimed posthumously as a radical Dissenter in the Protestant tradi- tion...

...Sewage, water supply, and storm drainage sys- tems demand refurbishing or reconstruc- tion within the next decade...

...But nowhere in his work does Orwell make any specific references to these philosophies...

...There are two journalistic activities that will always bring you a comeback," Orwell told 1944 Tribune readers...

...They "denigrat [ed] England and [the] Protestant countries generally," along with "every English #.lJ-r institution --tea, cricket, Wordsworth, Charlie Chaplin, kindness to animals, Nelson, Cromwell, and what not...

...The author stresses the primary impor- tance of applying knowledge about how...

...In this vale of tears we are all fellow travelers...

...Orwell and Catholics' common meeting ground in criticism of left-wing Russophiles indicates, too, that Catholic critics identified with and found appealing Orwell's conservative streak in his leftist stance...

...Agreement between themselves and Orwell on the need to restore what Orwell called "the religious attitude," by whatever means, struck many Catholic critics as more important than their differences...

...Power and Organization...

...Tributes to Orwell like these from believers --and posthumous conversions of him --became frequent during the 1950s...

...And indeed, what about 1984...

...The paradoxi- cally warm response of Catholics to Or- well illumines the larger pattern of Or- well's reception on the right in the 1950s, and illustrates how observers project selected aspects of a thinker's worBonto the author's whole corpus...

...Many observers have fairly noted that Orwell had "a blind-spot" when it came to religion, dismissing it as an other-worldly evasion of the here-and-now's problems...

...Both as a force in people's lives and simply as a system of belief, "religion" seemed to him on the historical wane, a topic hardly worth one's attention, except as it impinged on the pressing problems of poverty, im- perialism, and totalitarianism...

...Yet Orwell's passing comment that Graham Greene" might become our first Catholic fellow traveler" was neverthe- less in effect applied, with a sharp shift in emphasis on the phrase's last two words, to Orwell himself by postwar critics...

...Wrote one 1955 America reviewer: "One thing [Orwell] never forgot: 'When men stop worshiping God, they promptly start worshiping man, with disastrous results...

...Furthermore, even if technology brought all of the solu- tions, a perfectly designed urban envi- ronment carries the threat of a "boring sameness," which could strip a city of danger and also of character...

...Eliot, they had not embraced Anglicanism, but rather "the Church with the worldwide organization, the one with a rigid discipline, the one with power and prestige behind it...

...Much of OrweU's work shared that anti-Catholic spirit...

...They mean the word in no or- thodox sense, but it is easy to understand and to sympathize...

...He considered Zionism no better than Jewish Stalinism...

...The religious fellow traveler JOHN RODDEN S PEAKING of the high literary reputa- tion in England of Communist fel- tlow traveler Sean O'Casey, George Orwell remarked in 1945...

...And Orwell's surpris- ingly cordial reception among Catholics in the 1950s does mirror in microcosm the wider pattern of his enthusiastic postwar reception among conservatives generally...

...Such interpretations demanded downplaying or overlooking important evidence about Orwell's self-declared agnosticism and democratic socialism...

...It's intriguing also that, a movie of whiteness and light, it is, as well, somber, even foreboding...

...Anyone who can understand this is surely not far from the seat of understanding and grace...

...To be a skeptic was to be "grown up...

...The reviewer concluded: "This is a ruthlessly honest book...

...so long as that spirit is in the land we are safe from the RCs...

...Graphic illus- trations also abound...

...He knew Greene and Waugh personally, and respected much of their work...

...Similarly, when Catholicism was almost as fashionable among the English intel- ligentsia as Communism is now, anyone who said that the Catholic church was a sinister organization was promptly ac-cused of swallowing the worst follies of No-Popery organizations, of looking under his bed lest Jesuits should be con- cealed there, of believing stories about babies' skeletons dug up from the floors of nunneries, and all the rest of it...

...After spotting a Bible Society sign noting that the local Protes- tant shop did not carry the Catholics' JOHN RODDEN i$ joir~ng the faculty of the department of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Virginia, and com- pleting a book dealing with George OrweU...

...He "never sacrificed integrity for [left] 'orthodoxy,' " one Catholic reviewer put it approvingly -precisely what he refused to do with Christians, too...

...If I were asked to name people whom I consider true Christians," wrote W.H...

...Although Orwell never devoted any sustained attention to Christianity or to Catholicism in particular, it is startling to see, piecing together scattered refer- ences in his journalistic writings, to what degree the lines of his thought pertaining to Catholics, Jews and Communists ran on parallel tracks...

...The author is a landscape architect and environmental planner who teaches in the Department of Landscape Architec- ture at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University...

...One central and urgent problem she poses is that of the decaying urban infra- structure in the United States...

...Orwell always judged Catho- lics and Jews from the outside, by quan- titative measures, never asking (as he did so effectively in exploring the outlooks of tramps and miners) how members themselves saw their faith, what alleged "needs" specific faiths satisfied for members, nor how different faiths con- tribute to British society...

...a dog does not praise its fleas, but this is somewhat contradicted by the special status enjoyed in this country by Irish Nationalist writers...

...Pithers in A Clergyman"s Daughter whom he ridiculed for their superstitious faith...

...Even Arnold Lunn, whom Orwell had savaged in numerous columns, wrote a sympathetic memoir of him...

...And yet, when Orwell di- rectly confronted the work of a believer like Chesterton, Greene or Waugh, he could drop his knee-jerk reponse and admit the quality of the thinker's mind and his work's value...

...Or- well concluded on a note of selfcongratulation: "But a few people stuck to their opinion, and I think it is safe to say that the Catholic church is less fash- ionable now than it was then...

...By contrast, in condemning Ezra Pound's wartime radio broadcasts for Mussolini, Orwell declared: "Anti- Semitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person...

...Numerous poets have limned this vital- ity, from Wordsworth's portrayal of regal London at the start of the industrial era ("This City now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning") to Hart Crane's exulting in the urban trans- formations of twentieth-century America ("Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt, / Leaps from Far Rockaway to Gol- den Gate") and Carl Sandburg's sonor- ous Chicago litany ("Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of THE GRANITE GARDEN URBAN NATURE ANB HUMAN DESIGN Anne Whiston Splrn Basic Books, $25.95, 400 pp...

...Orwell often voiced the reductive and simpleminded opinion that'socialists and progressive-minded people believe in (and therefore engage life more fully and directly) "this world," while people of religious faith believe in the escapist "other world...

...Sometimes he confused Judaism and anti-Semitism, lumping questions of re- ligious belief, ethnicity, and politics together...

...Because Orwell saw the novel as a genre portraying the individual's strug- gle against society and conformity, Or- well argued that the paucity of good Catholic novels historically was proof that "orthodox believers" were "intel- lectually crippled" and "mentally un- free": "The fact is that some themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them...

...Whether writing for neoliberal or conservative organs, some postwar Catholic critics did convert Orwell, im- plicitly or explicitly, from a church hater into a man of grace --just as some 1950s conservatives like Hollis and Russell Kirk transformed this left-wing Laoor party supporter into a would-be conservative or a disillusioned socialist, respectively...

...It comes as a jolt, then, to con- front the decline and vulnerability of modern urban settlements...

...In Orwell's post-En-lightenment view, intellectual disbur- denment of religion was in effect a stage in the progress of the species toward maturity...

...In a deathbed journal entry Orwell remarked of Evelyn Waugh: "One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up...

...Wyndham Lewis and J.B...

...With the arrival of 1984, neoconserva- tives like Norman Podhoretz and socialists like Irving Howe raised the question as to "where Orwell would stand today" on current political ques- tions ranging from the nuclear freeze to the comparative merits of Soviet and American foreign policies...

...This disregard has doubtless made it more possible even for groups to' which Orwell was openly antagonistic, like Catholics, to interpret his occasional religious pronouncements as reconcil-able with their own central preoccupa- tions...

...He noted with contempt that several English Catholic intellectuals had successively supported Mussolini, Franco, and appeasement...

...It's worth the effort...

...So occupied was Orwell with questions pertaining to Catholics and Jews in light of English political conditions that he saw the two groups in diametrically op- posed terms, never giving attention to anything like a Judeo-Christian tradition...

...Orwell's resonant language here, linking faddish anti-Semitism and Catholicism with what he viewed as the schoolboy mentalities of most 1930s Oxbridge-educated London intellectuals, is representative of his ten- dency to organize religious topics in compartmentalized extra-religious categories...

...The Granite Garden is a guidebook to the interdepend- ence of this environmental quartet, with explanations both of how natural pro- cesses have been violated and how they could be harnessed, with great positive good for cities...

...Christopher Hollis, by this time a Conservative M.P., argued the following year: "His main complaint against the Conservative party is that it failed to conserve...

...The collaboration of the Spanish church with Franco in the Spanish Civil War hardened Orwell's anti-Catholicism, though his hostile at- titude is evident in his book reviews of the early 1930s...

...It should be required reading for conscious Catholics...

...Orwell relished comebacks...

...Morton, Orwell said, combined foreign leader-worship with hatred of England...

...He could hardly feel, he could hardly admit when it was pointed out to him, that cities are a second body for the human mind, a second organism, more ra- tional, permanent, and decorative than the animal organism of flesh and bone: a work of natural yet moral art, where the soul sets up her trophies of action and instru- ments of pleasure...

...Unsurprisingly, Prot- estants uninterested in "Chestertonian geography" and "the path to Rome" have also hailed Orwell as a pilgrim Christian without faith...

...Only an obsessive anti-Catholicism, however, could have led Orwell to overestimate so grossly the church's power in his observation that, if New York University political theorist James Burnham's vision of an "American Empire" prevailed as a countervailing force against potential USSR global hegemony, "the strongest influence in it would probably be that of the Roman Catholic church...

...He judged it sig- nificant that many prominent intellectual converts (including Chesterton, Christ- opher Hollis, Evelyn Wangh, Monsignor Ronald Knox, and Arnold Lunn) were attracted to Catholicism...

...Briefly, the author's approach is to estab- lish a problem, construct a framework for its analysis, and work to its resolution, drawing numerous examples fi'om vari- ous cities and time periods...

...He mocked the Catholic and Anglican priesthood and notions of heaven in Down and Out in Paris and London and A Clergyman's Daughter, frequently denounced "Romanism" as the ecclesiastical equiv- alent of Stalinism in his journalism and in The Road to Wigan Pier, and castigated the Spanish church in Homage to Catalonia...

...In this Orwell clearly differed from Marxists, technocrats and other leftists whom the church typically opposed...

...This much can be said today about George Orwell and Catho- licism: surely he would find it more difficult than in the 1930s and 40s to locate the church on the right side of the political spectrum...

...It is interesting to note that a 1969 Commonweal reviewer of CEJL, while conceding that guesses about Orwell's political positions in the sixties were" interesting if futile specula- tions," also could not resist asking what Orwell's attitude would be toward the church "in the post-Vatican II and posto Humanae Vitae period...

...But hatred of Russia was not, On, ell believed, the prime reason for Catholic pro-fascist sympathies...

...When he thought of believers he dealt in stereotypes like Mr...

...But he also possessed an overwhelming empathy for victims and underdogs which disposed him to defend the weak and ostracized against the strong, almost irrespective of politics...

...He believed that Judaism's emphasis on indi-, vidualism, the absence of a Jewish bureaucracy, and the political effects of Britain's mild anti-Semitism had combined constructively to exclude Jews from the official circles which bred rightist mentalities, and to render Judaism itself compatible with progressive political aims...

...The onslaught against reli- gious belief and Catholicism in particular continued with the satiric figures of Moses the Raven and Sugarcandy Moun- tain in Animal Farm, and O'Brien's power-crazed rhetoric associating politi- cal with religious orthodoxy in Nineteen Eighty-Four...

...The deep feeling of Chesterton for the common man and English popular culture explain Orwell's otherwise peculiar fondness for him...

...Orwell is a man we Catholics ought to get on reading terms with," a reviewer for the Jesuit magazine America declared, "for he is very definitely on our side...

...And although Christian socialism and Catholic socialist parties were widely supported on the continent, Orwell also insisted in "Toward European Unity" that the church's existence "made true socialism impossible, because its influence is and always must be against freedom of thought and speech, against human equality, and against any form of society tending to promote earthly happiness...

...Religion," which Orwell often discussed in the singular as a nionolithic and anachronistic institution, was not a subject to which he directed sustained attention...

...Rosemary Booth Wheat . . . / City of the Big Shoul- ders...

...But Orwell did not only attack Catholicism on this score...

...And Tanner spins this magic quietly and without fanfare...

...He saw himself as an agnostic and freethinker, and he was confirmed in the Anglican church and requested an Angli- can burial service...

...But what did Catholics see in Orwell which appealed so strongly...

...This contrasted sharply with his view of Britain's 400,000 Jews...

...The widespread circulation of this image made it easy for 1950s and '60s Catholic intellectuals, and conservatives generally, to blink at or gloss over differences with Orwell --especially since most of his anti-Catholic Tribune criticism was not widely known until publication of the 1968 Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters ( CEJL...

...Born" Catholics, Orwell argued, were more patriotic and less crankish...

...Resolving these problems is only partly a technological issue, for such solutions bring their own problems in turn --for example, the con- flict between transportation needs (the automobile) and pollution...

...Religion" to Orwell amounted to "pie in the sky...

...Even acquaintances of Orwell, like Christopher Hollis, argued (in a full-length critical study of Orwell's work) that Orwell "half-understood" the need for God, and that his thought "pointed in the direction" of religious belief...

...Much of this book appears to have grown out of first-hand experience solving urban problems...

...Catholic critics also found that they shared with Orwell some long-standing antagonists, such as "the birth control people...

...There is no reason why, at least in Chestertonian geography," a critic for the Dublin Review put it shortly after Orwell's death, "one should not travel the path to Rome by the road to Wigan Pier...

...Although Nineteen Eighty-Four's Emmanuel Goldstein is the image of the Jew as intellectual which many readers identify with Orwell's work, when Orwell thought of the Jews in Britain, he often thought not so much of intellectuals as of a common people, many of them desperately clinging to standards of craftsmanship and to a dis- senting tradition --two signal char- acteristics of nineteenth-century English Noncomformity...

...Placing V.S...

...Catholic critics in the 1950s admired Orwell because they discerned a special integrity in his writings and style of life...

...About the pro-life movement...

...One is to attack the Catholics, and the other is to defend the Jews...

...Pritchett's famous obituary characterization of Orwell as "a kind of saint" and "the conscience of his genera- tion" within a Catholic framework, they came to see Orwell as Chesterton's "good agnostic...

...People are already beginning to speak of him as a saint," observed a Jesuit in 1957 in an Irish re- view...

...Orwell's remarks on Cath- olicism --often couched in sharp com- parisons and contrasts with Com-munism, Anglicanism, Judaism and anti-Semitism --sho.w the curiously an- tinomian character of his religious thought, and how politically schematized and blinkered it could be...

...Headlined "The Testimony of an Honest Man," a 1953 Commonweal re-view of Orwell's Such, Such Were the Joys, a collection of essays, drew atten- tion to Orwell's attacks upon the Spanish church, on Chesterton's anti-Semitism, and on Catholic propaganda and fascist tendencies...

...George Santayana, quoted in Paterson, Book Three, William Carlos Williams T HE CITY has been variously char- acterized, but in its contemporary guise at least it has often been perceived as majestic, virile, all but invulnerable...

...Orwell had no doubt in late 1941 that "the bulk of the hierarchy and the intel- ligentsia would side with Germany" against "godless Russia" if given the chance...

...Orwell also seemed to Catholic intellectuals a man who, when all was said and done, was in their camp...

...Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Eve- lyn Waugh, Charles P~guy, l~on Bloy, Jacques Maritain and Graham Greene...

...Catholic (and non-Catholic) intellec- tuals have compared Orwell and his work favorably with the outlook and writings of G.K...

...This at- titude sometimes led him to absurd asser- tions like one in The Lion and the Uni- corn (repeated in a later work despite an editorial reader's protests) that "the common people are without definite reli- gious belief, and have been so for cen- turies" --overlooking the importance in Britain of nineteenth-century Methodism and pious people like Mr...

...The acclaim began even before the 1946 publication of Animal Farm, with the appearance a few months earlier of Dickens, Dali and Others, Orwell's first American essay collection...

...In an editorial that same year, Commonweal called Orwell "an honest man --an appallingly honest and consequently quite lonely man," recommending that President Eisenhower find and listen to "a single unsyndicated voice" like Orwell's...

...Waugh reportedly visited Orwell in the hospital during Or- well's last months, and returned once with the verdict that Orwell was "very near to God...

...It is this as- pect of the urban scene --the city as fragile human construct --that Anne Whiston Spirn depicts in her book, The Granite Garden, aptly subtitled, "Urban Nature and Human Design...

...Catholic critics took Orwell's criticism willingly because he chastised the left-wing intelligentsia no less harshly...

...Indeed Catholic writers like D.B...

...OrweU invited many of these compari- sons...