The Road to 1984

...George Orwell's future is here...

...That was his independence of mind...

...He was conscious that whatever virtues there once had been in the lower classes were being washed away by the tides of mass culture...

...But there is another major facet of Orwell's character which has rarely been explored...

...The first, containing the tightest, most moving writing, is devoted to descriptions of working and living conditions among miners (both employed and unemployed) in the North of England in the depression years...

...It is no wonder that George Orwell, standing on the brink of the postwar world, our world of crowds, full of faceless inhabitants, wrote 1984...

...It can almost be said that they want, psychologically, a government of the sort described in 1984...

...Its significance is as a milestone in the intellectual development of George Orwell...

...By the time he wrote 1984 Orwell saw his warning had to be broadened, that he could no longer offer purely sectarian advice...

...And as he warned, it is a gray, machine civilization that we live in...

...This school leans heavily on the psychoanalytic crutch, and Anthony West's opinion that "only the existence of a hidden wound can account for such remorseless pessimism" is fairly typical of the attempts to discredit Orwell in the years since his death when, as Irving Howe has written, "there has arisen a desire among intellectuals to belittle Orwell's achievement...

...He notes, for example, "the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanization," and his discussion of what the machine world has done just to our taste buds alone is one of those little Orwellian gems scattered throughout this book...

...Orwell, writing as a polemicist, spends nearly an entire chapter chiding his fellow socialists for their adherence to the idea socialism "is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion...

...While it was on the press Orwell was already off to Spain to fight in the civil war...

...Thus, the importance of Yhe Road to Wigan Pier lies not in the superbly-done vignettes of working class life, nor in the "decency" with which Orwell portrayed his subjects, nor in a good many of the polemics which now merely invoke nostalgia^ Its importance does not, really, lie in the realm of either art or politics...

...The politics and the art of that civilization are the products of the masses, of the mass mind...

...The Road to Wigan Pier, which has just been published for the first time in this country, is a splendid example not only of the generosity of Orwell's anger, but of its strength...

...Generously angry...

...The point, of course, is that Orwell understood better than Beavan and his ilk ever could that there was something more important than merely answering the "needs" of a working class made decadent by a hundred years of industrialism, that there was something wrong about the narrowness of those needs, that a socialism which confined itself merely to answering those needs would increase, rather than diminish, the real, pressing problems of existence in our times...

...There is abundant evidence in the descriptive passages of Orwell's keen reportorial eye (and nose...

...The truth about Orwell and his work undoubtedly lies somewhere between the two schools...

...The machine itself may be the enemy," he adds later, for he is concerned that the socialist's embrace of the machine, and of the mass society and culture which is perforce created by it, will drive "sensitive" people, individuals aware of the shabby, flabby mass which machines and machine-people make of a civilization, away from socialism...

...In microcosm, George Orwell represented, with rare fidelity, the troubled, independent, liberal intellect of a generation and of a world...

...the second to a critique of the socialism which many liberals were proposing to alleviate those conditions...

...Here we do not find the precision of expression that was a hallmark of his work, and, indeed, one of his "crusades" (see his fine essay on "Politics and the English Language"), but we do find, more nakedly than in most of Orwell's other work, the anger which informed all of his writing...

...It is true that Orwell's background did prevent him from totally understanding the proletariat...

...The work is divided into two sections...

...No one heeded him when he advised the socialists, as the last, best hope of earth, to try to turn the tide, rather than ride with it...

...O'Casey wrote: "He saw life in a mirror . . . the misshapen figures and manners born in his own ailing mind...

...The beginning of Orwell's vision is seen in The Road to Wigan Pier...

...Moreover, there is another facet of his personality which served the same purpose...

...Orwell's decency and "virtue" are stamped on nearly every page he wrote, and the wounds of this autobiographical writer are not very deeply hidden...

...The masses today aren't simple, virtuous peasants...

...It is perhaps significant that Orwell never repudiated his socialism...

...All of this may now seem a little academic...

...The hope never quite flickered out, despite the darkness gathering around Orwell...

...There are a couple of chapters of autobiography, telling, with that oft remarked "fierce honesty," why Orwell, scion of the middle class, could never achieve that ideal oneness with the working class which most pink poets of his time pretended, but which, in reality, no writer of middle class background achieved...

...But the second section of The Road to Wigan Pier puts Orwell in quite a different light...

...In the twelve years between Wig-an Pier and 1984 the pessimism that is merely hinted at in the first book was to grow until it fed an all-encompassing vision of horror, a vision so repugnant that, as I noted earlier, the liberals have need to belittle it...

...Bertrand Russell noted it and in a brief essay used Orwell's own description of Dickens as a description of Orwell: "It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights it in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a Nineteenth Century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls...

...It is the thing that makes so much more appealing a figure than the new angry young men...

...And if you ask why we need bother with the development of George Orwell's intellect, remember that he was more than merely "the conscience of his generation...

...It has become one of the critical cliches about Orwell to say that he had some psychological need to sink down to the muckiest level of the lowest orders, that he seemed to need the self-abnegation involved in this act, that despite his efforts he never really achieved what he set out to do, truly understand the lower economic orders...

...He had the sense to see that the masses O'Casey worships are not quite the same as the masses of the Nineteenth Century with whom O'Casey, and others like him, have them confused...

...Neither is the pessimism...

...Today, an English socialist like John Beavan can write that Orwell's "quest for the worker was a failure" because he could not appreciate "the virtues of the Labor Party and the Trade Union Movement which fulfill so successfully the English wage-earner's needs...

...There is compassion in all this, as well as anger, and if this first section of Wigan Pier were all that survived of Orwell's work, later generations might be justified in putting him down as merely the most talented proletarian journalist in an age in which they proliferated—a little more gifted in description than most, a little more acute as a sociologist of poverty...

...The world of the future, says Orwell, is likely to be a world made safe for "the little fat men...

...Sean O'Casey's mean-spirited attack on Orwell— brought on by an unfavorable Orwel-lian review of one of the autobiographies—represents the conflicting view...

...Its organization is slapdash as is much—but by no means all—of its writing...

...If, as literature, the book's first section is the better of the two, it is nevertheless somehow not so interesting today as the second...

...The peasants have been turned into something vicious and weak by the machine age...

...He could no more totally accept the manners, the mode of living of a class, whatever his admiration for it, than he could completely accept all the dogmas of a political party—no matter how much, in general, he admired most of its principles...

...There is also a tremendously moving—and un-patronizing—description of how a coal miner worked (and for all I know, still works) when he went down a mine...

...It is strange that more critics, especially in this time of "angry young men," have not picked it up...

...He got closer to the working classes and came to understand the meaning of their experience better than any writer of the Twentieth Century...

...This independence is evident in the sections of Wigan Pier where Orwell acts as a devil's advocate against the socialism of which he was normally an adherent...

...Because Orwell, in his anger and despair, simply did what the sentimental worshippers of the masses—like Sean O'Casey—have never been able to do, set down the logical end of our society's drift...

...Wigan Pier is not vintage Orwell...

...And there are descriptions of the ugly sights of poverty which are strong enough to make one almost physically sick...

...The smell of a working class boarding house is captured here as, I suppose, it has never been captured before...

...Lionel Trilling's feeling that he was "a virtuous man" and V. S. Pritchett's that he "was the conscience of his generation" represent the rather simple-minded admirers...

...Orwell advises his fellow socialists to end their affair with the machine...

...Instead of predicting that the socialist future will be even more heavily industrialized than the awful present, he advises them to concentrate on socialism as a means of enhancing liberty and justice in a world lacking in both...

...Either socialism has arrived (some places) or it never will arrive (in the United States...

...It represents one of his first steps down the road which led to 1984...

...It shows evidence of the fact that Orwell did it rather hastily, on assignment...

...They are a people ruled by cliches, dependent on myth for psychic survival in the Atomic Age...

...It is Orwell's analysis of "progress" in relation to socialism which is the best thing in the book, and which gives us the key to its real importance for us today, which is as a milestone on Orwell's road to the final apocalyptic vision of 1984...

...There's the phrase for Orwell...

...Just twenty years later we can see how right he was, how much more right he is shortly going to be...

...This failure is in evidence here, but what is more important, the successes of understanding that he did achieve are also evident—and these successes are usually missed by Orwell's critics...