Orwell Among the Liars

...The invention of Newspeak is simply the last link in a chain Orwell had already described in the essay "Politics and the English Language": the scientific creation of a language through which reality simply cannot be perceived...

...Sociologically he was a man apart—Anglo-Indian among the Britishborn, poor boy among the rich, autodidact among the university-trained . 2 Returning from Spain and moving out of the leftist literary circles in which he had begun to play a part, he reverted to his natural role...

...What is truly wicked in Orwell's little world made cunningly of animals is the falsification of the past...

...There is nowadays a tendency on the right, at least on the literate right, to exploit Orwell's later books for their antiStalinism...

...It was the lies, and not the lice,that brought him to the verge of despair...

...The history of the revolution is continually revised and, given the inability of the animals to remember, recreated...

...He has, with some justification, been talked of in terms that would probably have annoyed him greatly...

...Orwell was obviously upset by the squalid lives of men neither tramps nor cripples, men who were brave, skillful, hard-working (when they had work), and miserable...

...Animal Farm, which can seem a comic work because of the witty comparisons between barnyard squabbles and the history of the Soviet Union, is in reality a bleakly ironic book in the misanthropic spirit of Jonathan Swift, whom Orwell greatly admired...

...Although Orwell had already used his diary for essays and was to use it again for his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter, he did not, before the Spanish war, see the political relevance of his painfully acquired experiences within the culture of poverty...

...He admitted to compensatory distortion in Homage to Catalonia...

...History has stopped," says Winston Smith, "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right...

...As he put it to Cyril Connolly, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours...

...Homage to Catalonia, once published, was not exactly admired on the Communist and pro-Communist left...

...The piece, suggestively entitled "Spilling the Spanish Beans," came out in the New English Weekly...

...Although he mentioned Marx on occasion, his awareness of modern social theory was minimal...

...Describing in 1946 his own evolution as writer and as political man, George Orwell commented that he had been confused and uncertain until about 1935, but "the Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood...

...His position was, in short, a relatively naive one...

...But it seems generally established that, in order to increase their influence within the Republic, the Stalinists 1 The reminiscence appears in an essay reprinted for the first time in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed...

...Orwell had been quite able, in 1933, to describe the dismal hardships he endured and to transform them into picaresque episodes...

...The train ride to Spain seemed itself almost a ritual, a preparation for a new kind of experience if not for a rebirth: "In the morning, as we crawled across southern France, every peasant working in the fields ALLEN GUTTMANN turned round, stood solemnly upright and gave the anti-Fascist salute...

...but a ORWELL AMONG THE LIARS lengthy study of Orwell's collected letters and essays makes this argument untenable...

...The Road to Wigan Pier is a more thoughtful and less superficial book than Down and Out in Paris and London...

...There was then, however, apparently no desire to smash down the wall...

...And yet, in our own time of troubles, his awkward, quizzical, indignant decency may well be as useful as the models of modern social thought...

...He was, in other words, prepared for Barcelona...

...The reasons are not entirely clear...

...A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread—not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group...

...It is character istic that the theorist whom he most fre quently discussed, James Burnham, is of no intellectual importance...

...There is, moreover, a sense in which Orwell himself lives on as a literary figure, like Dr...

...For Orwell, however, the language of social science seemed rather an obstacle to truth—which it sometimes is...

...The career of the man has become exemplary, as if his life were an allegory...

...A similar situation holds today, apropos the Vietnam war...

...These actions, military as well as political, were then systematically misrepresented as defensive measures taken as a result of a consciously pro-Fascist, attempted coup on the part of the POUM...

...T T HERE WAS ALSO the lonely anxiety of the outsider...

...Although he was never a member of England's literary Establishment, he had numerous friends who were fairly well-known as writers...

...Although the English sections of Down and Out are less larky than the French, there is little sense of systematic injustice and certainly no demand for revolution...

...But I had to put it as sympathetically as possible, because it has had no hearing in the capitalist press and nothing but libels in the left-wing press...

...He tried to render a more or less disinterested judgment...

...Addressing others but speaking also to himself, he wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn that, "above all, it is your civilization, it is you...

...Orwell's objections to pacifism are harder to accept...

...It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope it has been interesting in the same way as a travel diary is interesting...

...Like the prisoners of the concentration camp, analyzed in Bruno Bettelheim's "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations," Winston Smith identifies with that which destroys him...

...Orwell's lack of concern with scientific methods, or even with the results of disciplined study, ruined many of his essays...

...His attempts to define nationalism are, for example, hopelessly amateurish: "Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacificism...

...The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered your soul...

...In Spain, he realized fully and finally that hunger is a moral and political problem as well as a physical one...

...There is a world of difference between the two observations...

...He admired their physical strength, their ability to endure almost unendurable conditions...

...N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968...

...In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell goes one step further...

...Winston Smith lives in our imaginations, as the characters of Orwell's other novels do not...

...Essays like "Notes on Nationalism" are a negative contribution to human understanding...

...If wartime mobilization did not destroy English liberties, there was at least hope that socialism might bring about equality without loss of freedom...

...Not only does the revolution of the animals fail, it clearly ORWELL AMONG THE LIARS never had a chance...

...A A CCORDINGLY, Nineteen Eighty-Four seems the culmination, the final statement of the fear first realized in Barcelona in 1937...

...That this "perfection" is probably not attainable (in the world outside the novel) is not the point—Newspeak is closely enough related to contemporary tendencies toward political obfuscation...

...The Communization of Eastern Europe was another...

...He assumed that we are all quite aware of the distinction between truth and falsehood and that the intention to deceive can be more quickly detected if we all return to a simpler, more straightforward kind of English...

...Chairman Mao might well dream of Newspeak...

...In moods of disillusionment, nineteenth-century Romanticism might still cry out with Matthew Arnold's melancholy speaker, "Oh love, let us be true to one another," but the Ministry of Love is now the place of darkness and torture...

...My references to essays and letters are taken from this excellent edition...

...Although he had recently suggested that an underground opposition to the British government ought to be organized in the event of war, he now realized "the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty...

...line] than I...

...When Orwell reviewed Franz Borkenau's excellent book, The Spanish Cockpit, thrown him as a sop, Martin refused to run the review he had commissioned...

...Nonetheless, when he contended that a refusal to fight against Hitler made Hitler's task easier, he was not unreasonable...

...The pragmatics of pacifism have always been problematical...

...Heroism may be necessary, may even be the rule, but "the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally...

...Orwell himself is undeniably the central actor of Homage to Catalonia, and of most of the essays by which he will be remembered...

...In the bitterness are traces of disillusioned love...

...Considering his autobiographical writings, especially the moving narrative of his wretched schooldays, Such, Such Were the Joys, I am tempted to saythat he was temperamentally an outsider...

...Cups of tea and genial jokes about common foibles: these are among the values summed up by the single word that Orwell set against the lexicon of totalitarianism— decency...

...It is therefore appropriate that Winston Smith functions within the "Ministry of Truth," that he be among the liars...

...He was exemplary, but he was no secular saint, and to measure him by impossible standards is to find him lacking...

...The perversion of equality ("some animals are more equal than others") is, within the confines of the fable, based upon the natural inequality of the animals and is, one speculates, related to the inherent inequality of human talents...

...The political factors do not, however, account for the passion of Orwell's invectives against the "pansy Left...

...The inequality does seem necessary, but the falsehoods do not...

...Frightened by the intolerant fanaticism of at least some of the intellectuals, Orwell looked hopefully to the simple, inexplicable decency of ordinary Englishmen...

...His concern for the truth about society never led him to any serious interest in the social sciences...

...1 The solidarity of the peasants was a preview of Barcelona, where the revolution seemed to have taken place...

...The final dramatization of this opinion occurs in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party systematically institutionalizes sensual (and especially sexual) repression, where Winston Smith's adultery is a political act, brash defiance of a pleasureless status quo...

...Years before the current social-psychological discussions of "brainwashing," the techniques were already familiar, partly through the work of Orwell's friend Arthur Koestler...

...He had heard that Orwell's opinions were unsound...

...Taking up the problem at length in "Reflections on Gandhi," Orwell characterized his doctrines as otherworldly and inhumane...

...Orwell had always known that socialism in itself was no panacea, but it provided (and provides) at least the possibility of improvement, which alternative doctrines did not (and do not...

...The conclusion undercuts whatever indignation the reader might have felt: "My story ends here...

...Intellectuals justified the betrayal of intelligence...

...Detailing his experiences as a dishwasher, he remarked upon the wall separating dining room from kitchen: "There sat the customers in all their splendor—spotless table-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim...

...Throughout Orwell's work, one encounters a determined anti-asceticism...

...His knowledge of the work of Franz Borkenau is typical...

...Thanks partly to Orwell, the Stalinist propaganda is generally discredited, but Orwell's initial efforts to publish his version of what he saw in Spain intensified his conviction that the very idea of objective truth was endangered...

...Winston Smith rebels against continual supervision, against officially imposed asceticism, and against sadism (`°If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever") ; but he rebels most desperately against the Party's dictatorial ability to control the present by an annihilation of the past...

...This, at least, was Orwell's position in the early 1940s...

...The relative hopefulness of the war years vanished in 1945-49, the last years of Orwell's life...

...It is only in the weekly column 2 In Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days, we can see that his disgust for the lies of Po Kyin is more central than his condemnation of imperialism...

...The pen name, "George Orwell," suggests that Eric Blair, born in India in 1903 and uncertain about what to do with himself, stepped aside for a more important person...

...There were, of course, good political reasons for Orwell's disgust with British Communists...

...It was a vision Orwell never forgot, to which he returned again and again in essays and letters...

...In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impos sible, because there will be no words in which to express it...

...No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid...

...But the fact is that Orwell's life, from 1937 to his death, was largely devoted to a vendetta against left-wing intellectuals, against what seemed to him a witless conformity no better than a lie...

...His love can then be transferred to the torturer: "He had won the victory over himself...

...Actually," he wrote to Frank Jellinek, "I've given a more sympathetic account of the P.O.U.M...

...ALLEN GUTTMANN he wrote for the London Tribune that we can see how deeply and persistently he valued simple pleasures—flowers, cups of tea, cosy pubs, warm days, quiet moments...

...The reasons are, again, uncertain, but continual illness was undoubtedly a factor...

...Similarly astute was his analysis of the "transferred nationalism" of certain ideologues who displayed a positively chauvinistic approval of whatever the U.S.S.R...

...His conviction that he had at last begun to breathe "the air of equality" did not mean that he romanticized life in the trenches...

...In the face of joyless conformity and principled self-denial, he defended our deviations into the little pleasures that make life bearable...

...In Spain, he understood, as if in a moment of religious conversion,that something might be done...

...It is easier to learn statistics and to program computers than it is to keep your head when those you love are losing theirs...

...His marveling descriptions stick in the mind: it was a world where everyone wore overalls and shared a common fate, where "waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face andtreated you as an equal," where shoeshine boys refused tips and prostitutes organized a union...

...The rewritten sections of Soviet publications are childish compared to the Ministry of Truth's ability to rewrite every copy of every extant document, and thus to prove the infallibility of Big Brother's predictions...

...Working for the BBC in the 1940s, he was occasionally deceitful, as when he alleged that the Japanese planned an attack on the Soviet Union, which he seriously doubted...

...It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise...

...His publisher, Victor Gollancz, who also ran the Left Book Club, rejected Homage to Catalonia before Orwell began to write it...

...He was angry at their exploitation by absentee owners...

...He reviewed their books, they reviewed his...

...However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time...

...and here, just a few feet away, we in our disgusting filth...

...There was even a time of optimism...

...Still another factor is relevant...

...It is all set down in Homage to Catalonia, the best of his books...

...The impoverished men and women of the rue du Coq d'Or are portrayed as a curious collection of rogues and scamps, each with a story and a part to play, like characters from Dickens...

...Crisis brought men together...

...Gandhi, especially, bothered him...

...The insights are almost accidental...

...In the early months of 1936, at the instigation of his publisher, Orwell went to the north of England and investigated the lives of British miners, then hard-hit by the Depression...

...It ought to be admitted that Orwell lacked the ability he admired in Dickens, the ability to create characters who move from the contexts oftheir creation into the ever-present world of myth...

...Thenovel is even more centrally about the fate ofJohn Flory, the outsider...

...To his own surprise, he discovered in 1939 that he was—like the ordinary Englishman and unlike many intellectuals—a patriot...

...This is, of course, the theme of the famous essay, "The Art of Donald McGill," in which Orwell praises postcard art of the fat-lady, newlywed, pants-down genre...

...As a proponent of Newspeak boasts, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought...

...In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell wrote, "A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within sound of the guns...

...In other words, he saw in Nineteen Eighty-Four the modern capacity for the scientific falsification of reality, but he never understood that rational inquiry provides at least the possibility of precise knowledge about social behavior...

...Since visions are never wholly realizable, since utopia retreats mirage-like into the distance, since we can reduce but not eliminate the sum of misery, it is better to pursue our ideals moderately—lest we create their opposite...

...The story of these initial efforts can be followed in his letters...

...Homage to Catalonia has been read (and written about) as if the book contributed to the All Quiet on the Western Front tradition of disillusionment, but the central fact is that Orwell continued to think that the struggle against Generalissimo Franco was justified despite mud, cold, hunger, lice, and the pervasive stench of excrement...

...Faced with the torturethat was for him the ultimate—snarling rats about to tear his unprotected face to bits and shreds—Winston Smith screams for "them" to "do it" to Julia, to his partner in heretical sensualism...

...by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols...

...In short, Nineteen Eighty-Four began in 1937...

...The about-face of 1939, occasioned by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the similarly puppet-like jump-to-orders executed in 1941 were nearly as absurd as the moment in Nineteen Eighty-Four when the Party's spokesman switches in midsentence from a denunciation of Eurasia to a condemnation of Eastasia...

...His frequent abuses of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis and the "Roman Catholic clique" (Belloc, Chesterton, and their epigoni) are seldom as ardent or as personal as his polemics against leftist intellectuals...

...Another facet of Orwell's rejection of asceticism was his shameless delight in the mild pornography of popular art...

...The review of The Spanish Cockpit was the impetus for the review of other books...

...In other words, socialism seemed to Orwell necessary but not sufficient...

...As an unwilling participant in a civil war within a civil war, Orwell discoveredthat "the left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right" (with the honorable exception of the Manchester Guardian) . The particulars of that civil war within the Republic, the "May Days" of 1937, are still uncertain...

...He wrote back to England, "I have seen wonderful things [and] at last really believe in socialism, which I never did before...

...There is a contrary tendency on the left to argue that Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four condemn totalitarianism, Fascist as well as Communist...

...The phenomena Orwell lists are actually varieties of emotional allegiance, under which head nationalism itself can be included...

...The trouble with material goods is not that they are bad in themselves but that they are hoarded by the wealthy—by the Colonel Blimps of Orwell's England, by Napoleon and his fellow pigs (in Animal Farm), by the members of the Inner Party (in Nine teen Eighty-Four...

...They ran together in packs...

...One might well wonder, did Orwell become an outsider because he refused to lie or did he see certain truths because he was by nature an outsider...

...Had Snowball (Trotsky) defeated Napoleon (Stalin), the quadruped population of Animal Farm was still obviously unfit for intelligent self-rule...

...Orwell was enraged...

...He loved Big Brother...

...Johnson or, to instance a rather different ALLEN GUTTMANN kind of personality, Lawrence of Arabia...

...felt, because I always told them they were wrong and refused to join the party...

...Orwell was not one to sneer at the civilisation de consommation...

...Writing, for instance, of Thackeray's novels, he discussed the "atmosphere of surfeit" and revealed his own respect for "oysters, brown stout, brandy and water, turtle soup, roast sirloin, haunch of venison, Madeira and cigar smoke...

...The "perfection" of the language is the disappearance of the distinction between the lie and the truthful statement...

...If Winston Smith lives and accompanies us in our distress, it is because he is George Orwell in extremis, the imagined enactment of the essential truth of Orwell's life...

...Before going to Barcelona and impulsively joining the militia of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista), Orwell had experienced poverty and had used it as the main theme of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, but he had made his adventures into literature rather light-heartedly...

...Spanish and foreign—acted against the allegedly Trotskyite POUM and, to a lesser degree, against the Spanish anarchists of the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo...

...He had, moreover, a narrow conception of truth and falsehood...

...Among them are probably the sense of betrayed possibility, in the U.S.S.R., and the worried fear that British socialism might also lead to tyranny...

...did, even as they automatically deprecated the policies of their own government...

...The mean denials of the miserly, the repressive legislation of the moralistic and, especially, the politically motivated abnegations of the idealistic— these actions seemed foolish, needless hardship in a world where unavoidable pain was already the common lot...

...Whatever decency is, it is not fanatic...

...As Orwell observed, the poor seldom praise poverty...

...If we intend to pay him homage, we must follow his example and face plain facts...

...Instinctively and intellectually, Orwell was undoubtedly a committed socialist and an anti-Fascist, but his horrified rejection of Stalinism was, in his last years, more intense than his hatred of Hitler...

...Of course, socialists ought to be skeptical about their own commitments...

...During the Spanish Civil War, academic periodicals offered their readers—among whom Orwell was not to be counted—a far more adequate interpretation of the conflict than was to be found in newspapers or in the great majority of polemical journals...

...England fought Hitler and remained free...

...Sections of the book were subsequently turned down by The New Statesman because Kingsley Martin, then editor, found Orwell's anti-Stalinism politically objectionable...