A critic – let us call him Comrade X, writing a book entitled something along the lines of ‘Twentieth Century English Novelists: A Marxist Guide’ – might put it like this:
As a novelist, Orwell scarcely begins to exist. His early books – from Burmese Days, say, to Coming up for Air – are derivative (Maugham, Gissing, Wells) and something worse than this: projections of his own self-pity, in which the writer’s life is used, quite unmediated, for the purposes of art. The results are not only clumsily executed but lack all artistic conviction. A Clergyman’s Daughter, for example, is simply three or four stretches of personal experience – the small-town Suffolk life, the tramping adventures, the private school teaching – thrown disconnectedly together in an unconvincing story about a woman who loses her religious faith. As for the later work, Animal Farm is an ingenious fable, but Swift had been there before. And half a century after its publication, Nineteen Eighty-Four is merely an exercise in emotional vulgarity, all flaring surfaces and bogus special effects, its bleakness coexisting with an altogether ghastly brand of guilt-ridden upper-bourgeois sentimentalising of the working class. ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles,’ Winston decides. As any student of social determinism can tell you, the only reliable agent of societal change is the radical middle classes.
As an essayist and polemicist, Orwell achieves his effects through a series of confidence tricks. One need only examine his diaries alongside the ‘official’ versions of the events they describe to appreciate the liberties he was prepared to take with observable fact. Exaggeration, selectiveness, outright misrepresentation: Orwell is guilty of them all. The opening chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier is a pattern example of how his careful use of pejorative language is capable of hoodwinking the reader. ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ is worse than this: thirty years of brooding and reality-erasure put to work to demonise – what? A snobbish pre-school master’s wife who made the mistake of offending a hyper-sensitive twelve-year-old boy! There were better targets than Mr and Mrs Wilkes, better targets than the Brookers in their dismal lodging house where the tablecloth was never changed, but no, they had offended Orwell’s gargantuan sense of personal myth – a kind of eternal nemo me impune lacessit – and all slights were to be repaid with compound interest.
As a political thinker, Orwell is hopelessly naïve. His hastily assembled view of the left-wing movements of the 1930s again mixes that absurd sentimentality about every aspect of working-class life with huge amounts of personal prejudice. In Spain he persisted in regarding the Trotskyist splinter group whose colours he fought under as a key player in proceedings, whereas its role was merely incidental. Back in England he completely misread the national mood both in the run-up to the war (when he was seriously advocating some kind of underground resistance movement) and in the post-Dunkirk era when he imagined the country to be gripped by proto-revolutionary fervour. His views on the ethical questions that war produced – notably the idea of non-resistance – are extremely reductive. How could someone who had pacifist friends, and was made wretched by the thought that he might have killed a Fascist soldier with a hand grenade, seriously equate nonviolence with ‘objective pro-Fascism’? Or affect such hard-headed nonchalance about the saturation bombing of German cities? Above all, perhaps, Orwell remains permanently detached from the practical realities of politics, always believing that emotional conviction alone will magically get things done. His post-1945 manifesto for what the Attlee administration should be seen to be doing if it meant business is rather like one of Tony Benn’s 1980s wish-lists: slogans parroted by people who have no idea of the effort involved in putting a catchphrase into practice.
As a human being Orwell was, well, a preliminary list might read: secretive, incompetent, womanising, offhand, anti-Semitic and homophobic. The late-period photographs of Orwell bending fondly over his lathe are misleading: the real-life Orwell was highly impractical – a botcher of shelves, a misreader of tide-tables, a vague, hopeless presence, fluttering diffidently about on the edge of things. Orwell’s dealings with the opposite sex, on the other hand, form a high old catalogue of duplicitousness, evasiveness, treachery and the eternal self-pity. Even coming across a childhood sweetheart nearly thirty years later he couldn’t resist suggesting that she had ‘abandoned’ him to Burma, whereas in reality Orwell had abandoned himself. Naturally, none of these failings invalidates anything that Orwell wrote – as he himself remarked, the second-best bed in Shakespeare’s will left to the author’s wife, does not invalidate Hamlet – and yet there is a way in which the stage-management Orwell lavishes on his life is subtly transferred to his art. Remembering the occasion on which he found him in his son’s bedroom ostentatiously standing to one side while the child played with a nine-inch Bowie knife, Anthony Powell decided the scene was ‘much too big to be ignored’. Orwell had set up the scene in order to be detected, and to appear to advantage in it. This kind of manipulation is a feature of his work. Reading ‘A Hanging’ the reader recalls only the appalled observer, not the servant of British Imperialism who, in his attendance at the Burmese jail, was merely doing his job, and continued to do it for a good four and a half years. The factor that made Orwell such a good critic of authoritarian regimes was his own pronounced authoritarian streak. It took one to know one.
And then there is the question of Orwell’s reputation, burnished up and inflated out of all proportion by people he would probably have regarded with infinite disdain. What would we think of Nineteen Eighty-Four if a gaggle of transatlantic spook-hunters and CIA opinion-formers – that epic ‘free world’ conspiracy that takes in everyone from Senator McCarthy to the brave boys at Encounter – hadn’t decided that it was the political text of the Cold War decades? Orwell dominates the NATO landscape because a gang of right-wing politicians and their media accomplices decided that he should do. This conspiracy, queerly, was responsible for a wide-ranging literary fraud. Once established, his significance naturally had to be pushed back in time, with the result that Orwell’s four third-rate novels now crowd out the real heroes of the 1930s. This, though hardly anyone now remembers, was the age of Walter Greenwood, Jack Hilton, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the first stirrings of a genuine working-class literary movement. But the figure who survived, who walked through into the textbooks and the reading lists, was the tall ex-public school boy who, try as he might, could never shake off his origins or his prejudices, who even below stairs in a Paris hotel could imagine that one of the waiters resembled an Eton boy, and whose misleading perceptions of an entire political and literary era are now our own.