George Orwell's Complex Simplicity

...I cannot imagine that there will ever be a better book written about George Orwell...

...The one major fault in Woodcock's book seems to me a very Orwellian one: The Crystal Spirit is criss-crossed with "which I shall discuss Iaters," "as I have saids," and "which I shall return tos...

...It is interesting to note, as Woodcock does, how Orwell's protagonists are characterized by a marked passivity even in rebellion, and one is reminded again of how he thought of himself as "forced" to become a pamphleteer...

...Orwell's primary statement about himself as a writer is contained in his 1947 essay, Why I Write: "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties...

...But Woodcock does give full scope to Blair's social and political thought as expressed in his writings and in conversation?which is quite different from biography...

...Orwell's earliest reviews "might have fitted very well into one of the decadent magazines of the 1890s...

...It also does not mean that Orwell's "for and against" formulation is an adequate definition of his writing????awhich is the burden of The Crystal Spirit...

...Nor was he a prophet of doom...

...He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds...

...It is astounding how often Orwell was "right," and when he was "wrong" it was almost always in a very purposeful, clearheaded manner...

...His Nineteen Eighty-Four, for example, was aimed as much at the silly Utopian aspirations of 1948 as at the dark future...

...As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer...

...and free himself for the act of criticism...

...Thus Orwell's obsession with class evidently began to grow in the unlikely soil of English literary neo-romanticism, and it emerged fully during his service as a police officer in Burma...

...After The Crystal Spirit, however, it is clear that we must turn to Orwell again, and few who have read Woodcock's book will be able to read Orwell quite as they did before...

...In his discourse on begging in Down and Out in Paris and London he wrote: "A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand...

...Orwell requested that no biography of him be written, and Woodcock has both honored and evaded this request by beginning his study with a very brief sketch of his meetings with Eric Blair (Orwell's real name) in order to "exorcise" the man ("How often his works were good talk turned into better prose...

...The Orwell style, as is amply demonstrated by his early writing, was not natural to him...

...In this, depending upon how one chooses to look at it, lies their great power or their self-defeating limitation...

...When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrong-ness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide...

...Woodcock is both frank and correct in his statement that early Orwell works such as Keep the Aspidistra Flying are written in a "verbose, repetitious style...

...The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at...

...It is fair to say that Orwell turned a national characteristic, extreme class consciousness, upside down and struggled against it in a way that was, really, very English...

...He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honor...

...but at any rate the grievance is there...

...And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's esthetic and intellectual integrity...

...Woodcock, who was Orwell's friend from 1942 until his death in 1950, has conclusively demonstrated that both of these assumptions are unfounded...

...In The Crystal Spirit, though, we see this repeating pattern against the background of Orwell's penetrating political essays, and the wisdom?for Orwell was a wise rather than a "brilliant" writer????of his judgment of complex political moments lends authority to the more abstract social paradigm that he continually tested both in life and in art...

...indeed, it topples at the touch of a pen...

...The critic of Orwell then faces a peculiarly difficult task, for it is assumed by Orwell's detractors that he does not deserve critical explication and by his advocates that he does not need it...

...His premise about the artist and politics will not stand as a generalized corollary...

...More, one puts down Woodcock's study feeling that his is the proper portrait of Orwell????awith no covered-over imperfections and without the distracting glitter of lacquered interpretations????awhich will endure and fix Orwell's modest yet secure place in the history of English literature...

...It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects...

...It would be foolish in the extreme to hoist this austerity (Woodcock does not) as the ultimate virtue in literature, nor is there much point in dismissing the very terms of Orwell's art: Yes, of course, a pony is not an Arabian stallion and Jules Feiffer is not Andrew Wyeth, but that tells us almost nothing about either the pony or Jules Feiffer...

...It is a measure of Orwell's complex simplicity that one can only say his opinion would certainly have been uncommon and would probably have been justified by history...

...He was his own man, a Socialist viewed nervously by his fellow Socialists, an English patriot capable nonetheless of understanding the pathetic "appeal" of Hitler: "I have never been able to dislike Hitler...

...It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows...

...But that does not mean it was not true for Orwell, who certainly maintained his intellectual integrity within the framework of his own carefully wrought esthetic...

...Even Animal Farm, Woodcock shows, may be seen as the effort of an entire society to cross the bridge from Blair to Orwell...

...For me, Orwell's prose stands naturally beside the line drawings and portraits of such artists of the '20s as Grosz and Annenkov, and the inherent "pictorial" quality of his writing was surely an essential contributing factor in the highly successful animated film that was made of Animal Farm...

...rather, it was demanded and cultivated by the goals he set himself...

...That is Orwell as he wished to be and on the whole has been seen...

...While Orwell himself certainly "chose" to make his descents into the lower depths and, for that matter, his returns to proper society, he was merely exercising a prerogative possessed solely by his class...

...Widely viewed as an extremely pessimistic writer, Orwell's real attitude was perhaps more closely expressed by his statement: "Our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in...

...To be sure, Orwell cared about words and structural integrity, but not as much as he cared about the ideas behind those words and personal integrity...

...I think Orwell is read by almost everyone but rarely re-read...

...Orwell always sought to be simple, but he never took the easy path to that simplicity...

...Orwell's early attitude toward art gave very little space to politics, and Woodcock very deftly finds the roots of Orwell's major theme????athat of crossing the class barrier and descending into the slums????ain the literary atmosphere of fin-de-siecle London...

...Yet, as with Orwell's own writing, one is ready to forgive these protruding elbows for the sake of the overall excellence of the work...

...Orwell succeeded only when he left large white spaces and made his picture with a simple stroke or two...

...Stated this way, Woodcock's thesis may seem to reduce Orwell's political views to the realm of personal or national, neurosis...

...Woodcock is repeatedly able to surprise us with the complexity present in even the simplest and most "straightforward" of Orwell's works...

...Reviewed hy ANDREW FIELD Author of the forthcoming "Nabokov: His Life in Art" George Orwell's novels are, first of all, amazingly simple in both style and form...

...The change from Blair to Orwell (the name was first used in 1933) was to reverberate in different guises throughout everything he wrote...

...Of his early works in the Adelphi, all signed Eric Blair, only one, a short story called "A Hanging," was reprinted by Orwell, and it has the unmistakable "Orwell" imprint: "It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man...

...This ability was in him from the beginning????one remembers the aunt in his second novel Burmese Days "looping about in one of the long chairs like a hysterical snake" ????and it reached its purest expression in Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four...

...He erred most of all in the amount of personal responsibility and power that he allowed the individual in the historical process, although this, too, had its aspect of willfulness and wishfulness...

...Even in the best that he wrote, however, one finds "monumental imperfections," a judgment that Woodcock ascribes to "literary mandarins...

...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...

...One is startled but convinced by Woodcock's juxtaposition of Orwell's novels with Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, a book, we are told, that had a great effect on the young Eric Blair while he was still at Eton...

...What might he have thought about Vietnam...

...That strikes me as rather odd, since he himself scrupulously faces all of his friend's faults as a writer...

...Having done this with skill and thoroughness...

...he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade in which it is impossible to get rich...

...Viewing this strange passivity in the context of political commitment, one may say that Orwell was seeking to redress the advantage afforded him by his class...

...But does a beggar really "choose" his trade...

...He left Burma and his job rather abruptly in 1927...

...George Woodcock says much the same thing in a different way when he refers to Orwell's striking images strung together by "almost transparent" words...

...Everyone writes of them in one guise or another...

...Woodcock places Orwell's transparent narratives upon one another, and the pattern, though it undulates, is one: upper and lower, European and Asian, fantasy and reality, state and individual, present and future, Blair and Orwell...

...To a greater extent than he is likely to have realized, Orwell was a social rather than a political writer, and this approach????aeeeking out the less obvious sociological factors in ostensibly ideological problems????appears to be the source of Orwell's sound political judgment...

...Orwell's "effects" were almost always grossly overdone: Surely no other English writer has the sun "come slanting through the clouds" with such banal regularity...