ORWELL: A GENERATION'S CONSCIENCE

...DOH'S AM) OCT I.V PARIS AM) LOM)0.\, the first of Orwell's books to be published—it originally appeared in 1933—is a straightforward account of some of his experiences during his years of "fairly severe poverty...

...A feeling of security, even when they weren't secure...

...Orwell, however, was the kind of brave man who can admit he is afraid without losing the capacity for action or dreaming of surrender...

...Subsequently, according to the sketch he contributed to Twentieth Century Aulltors, he spent a year and a half in Paris, writing novels and short stories that he couldn't sell...

...in politics his determination to avoid wishful thinking sometimes led him to err on the side of pessimism...

...His account of restaurant life as seen by a dishwasher is as amusing as it is enlightening, and his analysis of the accommodations that England provides for tramps could not be more dispassionate if he had never been bitten by a bed bug...

...When he went to Spain to fight for the Loyalists, he associated himself with the anarchist POUM...

...Flory's see-saw love affairs with a girl who wants nothing so much as to marry a true pukka sahib is a gruesome piece of irony...

...If, it seems to me, his talents were not of the first rank, they were plenty good enough to make him stand out in a period such as ours...

...With the prospect of a job, he returned to London on borrowed money, but the job was not immediately forthcoming, and he spent several weeks tramping the roads, sleeping in cheap lodginghouses, Salvation Army hotels, and so on...

...The first part of the book, describing the life from which George Bowling wants to escape, has the kind • of free-swinging vigor, combined with fine imaginativeness in the use of significant details, that makes much of Dickens and some of Wells such exciting reading, and Bowling's recollections of his boyhood have a quite wonderful vitality...

...But Stalinism was too easy game for Orwell, and in 1984 he turned his attention to the tyrannical potentialities of modern civilization...

...My money oozed away—to eight francs, to four francs, to one franc, to twentyfive centimes...

...That is why he was always a radical —and why he was never a Communist...

...He never doubted that poverty could be abolished, and should be, and he believed that it would be if the respectable middle class ceased to hide behind protective generalizations...

...His moral courage had a grandeur that helps to redeem the ugliness of our age...

...Unshaken by either failure or success, immune to self-pity, though hie was a lot that left room for complaint, standing quite alone, without sect or party or clique, he did his work...

...By George OrwellJ Harcourt, Brace & Co...

...On January 19...

...He knew too much at first hand about poverty, hard work, and exploitation to minimize the kind of progressthat has been brought about, in spite of two world wars, by increased production and the militancy of the working class...

...in literature his contempt for pretentiousness and muddy writing ocassionally produced a kind of Philistinism...

...Coming Up for Air is not merely the story of a man's quest, futile of course, for his lost youth...

...In 1936 he went to Spain and fought for four months on the Aragon front with the POUM militia, receiving a bad wound...

...And yet there is never a suggestion of neurotic anxiety in his contemplation of the future...

...If he had ever wondered whether his opposition to Communism might be unreasonable, what he saw in Spain settled the problem once and for all...

...It is an attempt to discover what is happening to the quality of modern life...

...Orwell was a man of blistering integrity, the kind of man whose existence purifies the intellectual atmosphere...

...The intrigue involves the entire British community in Kyauktada, and before it has worked itself out, the pukka sahibs have exhibited with melancholy thoroughness their several deformities of character...

...This was an ugly experience...

...It isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war...

...Eventually he got work in a restaurant as a dishwasher—a plongeur, a pearl diver —and had enough to eat at the cost of fifteen or sixteen hours of work a day...

...Orwell is merciless, even to poor John Flory, in his analysis of the racket and its effects on its two sets of victims...

...He was a man with a cause, but it was a large and generous cause, and he fought for it in a noble spirit...

...Orwell—his real name was Eric Blair —was born in India in 1903...

...What aroused his indignation more than anything else was the assumption that the poor arc a class by themselves, different from other people...

...1984" offers no sop to our comfortable illusions, but it speaks to us nonetheless with the accents of courage...

...THE PUBLICATION IN 1946 of a collection of essays, Dickens, Dali, and Others, established his reputation as a critic, and then almost immediately he won a different and far more general reputation with Animal Farm...

...BURMESE DATS, first published in 1034, is a brilliant picture of a system of exploitation that enslaves the oppressors...

...Each of the three—two novels and one book of reminiscences called a novel—is impressive in its own way, and taken together they help us to understand some of the things that went into the shaping of Orwell's character...

...v COMING UP FOR AIR...

...Communism promised to solve the paradox of * which 1 have spoken: it promised to realize fully the possibilities of industrialism and also to abolish insecurity, war, exploitation, and discrimination...

...They had something that we haven't got now...

...In Twentieth Century Authors Orwell said that while he was in Burma he came to regard imperialism as "very largely a racket...

...Orwell was kept from any sympathy with Communism not only by hii intransigent individualism but ulSo by his sharp-eyed realism...

...It isn't that life was softer than now...

...People were happier before 1914, George Bowling says, than they arc now...

...That it was a tempting vision, many besides Koestler, Mnlraux, and Silone can testify...

...But whatever his rank as a novelist, his quality as a man cannot be debated...

...I do think some critics have underestimated his Action, probably because of his unfashionable directness of manner...

...In that year he moved out of London, which he detested, and set up a small general store in the country...

...People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably and died more painfully...

...More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity...

...But Orwell, so far as I know, was never tempted...

...Here was a theme worthy of his talent!, and the result was a book that makes Animal Farm seem both clumsy and trivial...

...He recognized fascism and Communism as manifestations of the same terrifying menace, a menace inherent in the nature of industrial society...

...COMING VI' FOR AIR...

...I have never thought that Animal Farm was a great satire: neither the basic idea nor the way in which it is elaborated exhibits the highest imaginative powers...

...The novel is also the tragicomic story of John Flory, who has intelligence enough to understand and hate the system of exploitation, even if he has not the courage to speak out against it...

...But his faults could easily be tolerated for the sake of his vigor and his scrupulousness...

...1 7 - Reviewed by GRANVILLE HICKS IN HIS APPRECIATION of George Orwell that recently appeared in the New York Times Book Review, V. S. Pritchett referred to him as "the conscience of his generation...

...The actual outlook, so far as I can calculate the probabilities, is very dark, and any serious thought should start out from that fact...

...We went several clays on dry bread, and then I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever...

...It begins with his being rather hard up, then downright poor, then broke...

...Although some of his early fiction .was.published in this country, most of us came to know Orwell first as a journalist and critic, through his London letters in Partisan Review and his articles and reviews there and elsewhere...

...It is in part a story of intrigue, with a greedy Burmese magistrate plotting against .a decent Burmese doctor...

...Pritchett, in the article I have mentioned, compares him with KoOstler, Malraux, and Silone—all cx-Communists...

...secret cells Where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching' you while you- sleep...

...Actually it was harsher...

...Paddy, the Irish tramp...

...More successfully than any other writer one can think of in this intensely political age, he served both literature and (in the larger sense of the word) politics...

...Orwell's skill in creating the moral atmosphere of an outpost of empire has caused him to be compared with Kipling and E. M. Forster...

...One felt his astringent honesty and: independence in every word he wrote, whether he was discussing the demands for a Second Front, the policies of the British Labor Party, or the misuse of the English language...

...That was the past...

...278 pp...

...And the processions and the posters with enormous facet, and the crowds of a million people cheering for the Leader till they deafeh themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they wont to puke...

...Having to affirm their racial superiority in order to justify their existence, they had developed a code of behavior that was as stultifying as it was hypocritical...

...He endured several years of what he called "fairly severe poverty," and it was not until 1940 that his writing provided him with even a model ate income...

...IN 1847 Orwell ended an article on, "The Future of Socialism" that appeared in Partisan Review with these Words: "But all this is speculation...

...Orwell's gift for detail, of which I shall have something to say later on, gives the book its horrible verisimiltude, but the basic power is that of fear speaking, to fear...

...19M" Is an almost unbearably intense expression of our great anxiety—the fear that the free mind can be conquered...

...It was, on \he other hand, a timely book, and must have exerted a powerful influence on its half-million readers...

...In Burmese Days John Flory reflects: "The Indian Empire is a despotism — benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism witli theft as its object...

...and twenty-five centimes is useless, for it will buy nothing except a newspaper...

...What...

...Polly...

...Yet if Orwell found much to interest him among the poor, and refused to waste a minute in pitying himself, he never -forgot, nor will he let the reader forget, that poverty is evil...

...After his return to England, he devoted himself to gardening and writing...

...On the other hand, no amount of material progress could justify in his mind the diminution of liberty and integrity...

...In writing about this intensive introduction to the life of the poor, Orwell maintained a calm objectivity, studying his own sensations and observing with lively interest the behavior of his companions in poverty...

...And yet what was it that people had In those days...

...It was simply that they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of...

...I would not argue that Orwell was a great novelist...

...So, in 1938, George Orwell looked back to 1914 and ahead to—1984...

...Bozo, the sidewalk artist...

...published in England in 1939, is like nothing else of Orwell's that I have read, The story of a middle-aged insurance agent who decides to break away from his nagging wife and take a vacation among the scenes of his happy childhood, it reminds me of the early H. G. Wells—the Wells of Kipps and Bealby and Mr...

...3.00...

...Ho went to Eton, thanks to a scholarship, but never felt that the school contributed much.to his education or the shaping of his character From 1922 to 1927 he served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that undermined his health and filled him with a disgust for imperialism...

...The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world...

...Now" is 1938...

...There are some vivid character studies, too: Boris, the Russian waiter...

...With the Empire's mistreatment of the natives Flory was not greatly concerned, for lie knew that they had been worse treated by their native rulers, but he was obsessed with what happened to the British in India...

...Orwell always did, start out with a good look at the worst...

...Orwell refused to disparage the improvement, just as he refused to overlook or condone the deterioration...

...Granville Hicks' most recent book Is "Smell,Town...

...In his attitude towards imperialism, however, Orwell is as sharply set part from the liberal Forster as he is from the conservative Kipling...

...On literary grounds the comparison is just...

...two days before his death, Orwell's ^American publisher issued three books of his, two that had long been out of print in America and one that had never before been published here...

...he is fearful, yes, but his fears, as I have said, are those of a man whose courage is so fixed that he dares estimate candidly the odds against him...

...Roucolle, the miser...

...Orwell's fervently personal love of liberty and his utter impatience with cant tore away the shreds of decency with which Stalinism during the war, had managed to clothe itself...

...What of the future, as it looked to George Bowling (and to George Orwell) in, 193H...

...The theme of Coming Up for Air, in other words, is the great paradox of modern history—that life has become so much better in Some ways and so much worse in others...

...One felt also, to be sure, the shortcomings appropriate to his virtues...

...The colored shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons...