Essays Page 2

  He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

  THE END

  Many heavy-weight critics have read this as terrible black pessimism: Everyman defeated by the totalitarian state, and not even killed but brainwashed into loving it. Orwell becomes an English Kafka or a sane Nietzsche with common sense. But I see better sense behind Anthony Burgess’s provocative exaggeration that it is ‘a comic novel’.5 It is often missed that the darkness contains much of what the Germans well call from long experience Galgenhumor, ‘gallows humour’, or what we now call a whole literary mode, ‘black humour’. Nineteen Eighty-Four is of a piece with the sardonic, mocking tone of several of Orwell’s major essays – such as that on pornography and violence, ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali’.

  Consider the language of this ‘last’ passage closely. It is either grotesquely and incompetently overwritten, or it is broad satire all the way. Why else the sudden lapse into parody of popular, romantic novels: ‘O cruel … O stubborn …’? Why else the ludicrous ‘ginscented tears’ trickling down not even the dignified face, but the comic ‘nose’, the ‘sides’ of it moreover? ‘Victory over himself’ has no totalitarian resonance but was a common catch-phrase of British soap-box, street-corner evangelists and temperance reformers (a point unhappily difficult for most translators to catch): it was that kind of ‘struggle’, not class or race Kampf. I read the passage as saying that the Party can break Winston Smith but that it cannot remake him in any heroic image, only as a miserable, beaten, frightened drunk, neither dedicated proletarian nor purified Aryan. And notice it is not ‘the last passage’, as is so often sepulchrally said. After ‘THE END’ comes the ‘Appendix’. I suspect that the capitalized ‘THE END’ is another little bit of Galgenhumor, for it appears in no other book by the same publisher in this period, but usually only appeared in popular novelettes and at the end of Hollywood B-movies – presumably in case the reader or viewer ran one into the next by mistake. The Appendix, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, is the real conclusion and states that because it is a ‘slow and difficult business’, the final translation into Newspeak of ‘Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens and some others’ (all Orwell’s favourites) has had to be postponed until ‘so late a date as 2050’. This year, next year, sometime, never.6

  If we read the book as dark pessimism (for which there is warrant, especially in the torture scenes and the image of the future as ‘a boot stamping on a human face – for ever’), then this Appendix either has to be ignored or made into a rather incompetent afterthought about the nature of language which somehow the author could not work into the text proper. But if we see the book as satire, specifically Swiftian satire, then the ‘Appendix’ becomes part of the text and tells us that the author believes language cannot be controlled by the State or the Academy (he was of the demotic or colloquial rather than the structuralist school of linguistics, whether he knew it or not). This is consistent with Orwell’s views on language and literature expressed in several essays, his ‘Propaganda and Demotic Speech’ (1944) and more fully and famously in ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), although admittedly the view is darker in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ (1946), when he seems to admit the possibility (but perhaps only as a rhetorical warning) of total thought control and the destruction of imaginative literature. But I am now in deep water, especially as a sometime political philosopher trying to talk to, among others (I hope), teachers, students and critics of English. I know that a text is a text and that an author’s intentions are not always met in the imaginative act of writing, and that all texts can be and are read differently in different contexts (especially political ones), and nowadays can be deconstructed according to fancy and at will. So I should not push my interpretations too far, or at all. The only point I need to make is that the plain style can be ambiguous, and is no guarantor of truth. The American critic Hugh Kenner, in a notable essay ‘The Politics of the Plain Style’, has shown that the choice of a plain style is as much a rhetorical device, whether for Lincoln or for Orwell, as the choice to write or speak in Ciceronian or Churchillian prose.7 The high style connotes authority and tradition and the plain style connotes common sense and the common man, but both are relative terms, and both are artificial. Kenner makes a simple but important philosophical point and offers a sobering literary example. The philosophical point is quite simply that we cannot tell the truth of any sentence from the syntax, grammar or semantics. ‘A camel sits on my shoulder telling me what to write’ is a better sentence than ‘Meaning is an epistemological arrest of experience or a contextually modulated interaction between authorial intentionality, contingently received text and subjectively deconstructed interpretation’, but it cannot be true, whereas the bad sentence may well be true (if it is not simply a tautology, possibly even a truism, but even then can be reasonably construed as logically true – true by definition). In the famous and purgative ‘Politics and the English Language’ Orwell implies, by quoting so much bad and biased political prose, that good plain prose is contraceptive against propaganda. But his essay could be read by propagandists as sensible advice to keep the propaganda plain and simple: ‘Love thy leader as thyself, ‘Relax with a ciggy’. Besides, Orwell’s plain style, while an admirable introduction to English prose, is not appropriate to all circumstances. Learning does need some special vocabularies, even if far less often than academics (talking mainly to each other) suppose. And have you ever tried (I use an Orwell-like ‘button-holing’ tactic) writing an obituary in an Orwell-like, conversational manner? I have. Not on.

  Writing in the first person should be seen as a literary device before ever we look to it as a possible guarantee of authentic autobiography. Kenner cites the classic case of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The original title page had on it ‘Written by Himself, and not until several months later did the astonished reading public realize that the prince of Grub Street hacks, Daniel Defoe, had pulled a fast one on them again. An even more interesting case was Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, written in the first person with his own name to it, full of facts, personal narratives and even mortality statistics drawn from Parish records and other sources. There is only one problem: Defoe’s date of birth is not certain, but the real Defoe rather than the fictive ‘I’ of the eye-witness observer can only have been four or five years old at the time of the plague; yet the facts and figures, much used and checked by social and medical historians, appear to be true and accurate. He must have interviewed older survivors, searched the records diligently and then written the account as a fictive Defoe.

  I was told by an old man while working on my biography of Orwell that it was not Eric Blair who was caned in front of the whole school for bed-wetting, as Orwell wrote in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, but someone else. Who knows? But if it was someone else, and if Orwell did not attend a hanging or shoot an elephant, does it matter? Do we then call him a liar and think him exposed, or admire him all the more as a skilful writer of short stories or ‘colour sketches’? The distinction between an essay and a short story is not absolute. ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ could equally well be printed in an anthology of short stories, and the first two also in an anthology of polemical writing. Both the short story and the essay based on direct experience – or claiming to be based on experience – were a typical form of British writing in the 1930s. Orwell was only one of many who used this convention or literary strategy. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936) was republished in 1940 in a Penguin New Writing collection edited by John Lehmann, in which ten out of the fourteen contributions were written in t
he first person and raise the same problem as Orwell’s – short story or essay? Neither term is used by Lehmann in his Foreword, just ‘writing’; true, he calls them all ‘imaginative literature’, but then also ‘a return to the realistic tradition of Defoe and Fielding’, with ‘an interest in speed and vigour of narrative’.

  No one supposes that in Plain Tales From the Hills Kipling was under the table when the Colonel proposed to Mrs Hackerby, nor that H. G. Wells saw the Martians land or had dinner with the time traveller back from the horrific future. These were plainly fictions. But Orwell’s development of the literary persona of a plain, blunt, honest man was so successful that he brought problems of criticism upon himself. He had done some, perhaps most, of the things of which he wrote about in the first person. But if you build a reputation on first-hand narrative and honesty, the common reader may come to admire what he or she reads more for the truth than for the art of it, to admire the honesty of the man more than the writing; so may then feel, if any part of the narrative or story is shown to be untrue (it is unlikely that Orwell attended a hanging in Burma or was in hospital in Paris for as long as he implies), that both the essay, short story, colour sketch or article (whichever it is) and the man are demeaned or diminished. And literary critics could come to underestimate both his imaginative, creative powers and his critical ability.8

  In a highly original essay, ‘Politics vs Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, Orwell faced (as most scholars and critics had not) the moral enormity of Jonathan Swift, the depth of his hatred of and disgust at humanity, but could, nonetheless, acknowledge and characterize his genius.

  Swift did not possess ordinary wisdom, but he did possess a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and distorting it. The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art.

  Orwell’s seminal essay ‘Charles Dickens’ was written without any use of formal literary theory or academic discourse (he would have said ‘jargon’) and at a time when Dickens had been demoted by nearly all serious critics, except the irascible Leavises, to the patronizing pint-size of an over-productive Victorian popular novelist. It began Dickens’s rehabilitation as one of the great English novelists. Orwell’s feeling for Dickens is so intense that the physical and psychological portrait in the concluding paragraph is often taken as an unconscious self-portrait. Stocks in Kipling were also, more understandably, quoted low when Orwell wrote his essay ‘Rudyard Kipling’, but it began a sorting of the wheat from the chaff in Kipling’s remarkably mixed achievement. In this essay Orwell coins the phrase ‘good bad poetry’, which gives us a way of appreciating popular writing as good or bad of its kind. This enabled Orwell to produce his wholly original essays ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ and ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, which provided a way into the sociology of literature so much more tolerant and open-ended than the Marxist interpretation. Orwell never denied the second-rate nature of much of this matter, but equally he could condemn the political morality of Yeats, Pound and even Eliot, while acknowledging their genius. And in ‘In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse’ he sees that Wodehouse, so good of his kind, was a naïve idiot, not a Nazi sympathizer. But the defender of Dickens and Kipling against the scorn of intellectuals and modernists could himself, in ‘Inside the Whale’, present a brilliant appreciation of the surrealism of Henry Miller while being bitterly critical (in a somewhat over-diffuse essay of galloping digressions) of the social irresponsibility of Miller and others. He targets the very god of the common man in literature more precisely in ‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’. Orwell accuses Wells of a scientific rationalism that could not take Hitler seriously, belittling both his threat and appeal.

  The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy Ghost, are nearer an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All that this idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life.

  But before one can say ‘biting the hand that fed him’ one comes, in the penultimate paragraph, to the most beautiful and empathetic encomium on the early Wells, full of affectionate humour, modulating – as essays can – from the ironic, almost sarcastic, rage of his opening.

  Many of Orwell’s sophisticated friends of the days of his late fame came to treat him, however, as if he was a naïve and amateur writer, a Douanier Rousseau of letters, to be valued for his simple honesty and authenticity rather than for his art. Even his second wife, Sonia, a highly intelligent and literary person who guarded his reputation well, said to me that he was like the painter Stanley Spencer, which urged me to remark that the naïve visionary had been a prize-winning student at the Slade. And once she shouted at me over lunch, irritated by such remorseless pedantry, ‘But of course he shot a fucking elephant, he said so didn’t he?’ The other Orwell biographer, Michael Sheldon, agrees with her. He has no doubt that ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is a memoir, just as ‘Everything about the sketch “A Hanging” suggests that it is based on a real experience. It is a riveting piece of work whose emotional power comes from a slow but steady accumulation of details.’ But there are many ‘riveting’ stories that we know to be made up the: pretence to be real is part of what makes them ‘riveting’. Hugh Kenner is right: the truth of a proposition cannot be inferred from the syntax.

  Orwell himself seemed to believe that it is more difficult to lie in monosyllables than in polysyllables, but like many people, he confused meaning with truth. So we must beware not merely of ‘flowery tongued Odysseus’ but of the plain-spoken man. I have met politicians who pretend to be tongue-tied and ordinary, and who take pains to ‘speak bad’. Lincoln once remarked that ‘“Honest Abe” is very useful to Abraham Lincoln’, and yet Lincoln was, like Orwell, an unusually honest man. Like Kenner, I do not wish to debunk Orwell; on the contrary I would like to shift the attention from his character to his writing and to present him as a great essayist, rather than the author of two considerable satires and a handful of minor novels that might no longer be read but for the fame of these two books and the joy of his essays. We can argue until the cows come home whether ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’ are to be classified as essays or short stories, but what we cannot do is to use them uncritically as autobiography just because they sound authentic. For part of the skill of the essayist, as of the story writer who uses the fictive first person, is not just to create that famous ‘momentary suspension of disbelief’ but also a lasting uncertainty about whether we are reading fact or fiction. The good essay is speculative and open-ended: the reader is engaged in a lively conversation, and even when argued with, is not addressed didactically or polemically brow-beaten. The common man, while he hates being talked down to quite as much as feeling that all is semiotically above his head, is not always aware of or happy with these conventions: he can sometimes find frivolity in the essayist and yearn for serious instruction from someone trustworthy and less tricksy. I have encountered many non-university readers of Orwell (it is hard to think of any other serious author who is still so widely read by the common reader in English-speaking countries) who are just as discomforted as Sonia was to have the literal truth of anything he said doubted. I can almost hear his sardonic, rusty laughter.

  Orwell could use broad humour for serious effect, rather than explicit moral argument, in a way both appealing and accessible to the common reader – unless such a reader feels himself lambasted:

  One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England …

  In the next equally digressive chapter of The Road to Wigan Pier he mocks those who think they can ab
olish class distinctions as easily as attending ‘“summer schools” where the proletarian and the repentant bourgeois are supposed to fall upon one another’s necks and be brothers for ever’. Oh yes, there can be mixing on equal terms ‘rather like the animals in one of those “Happy Family” cages [at a fair] where a dog, a cat, two ferrets, a rabbit, and three canaries preserve an armed truce while the showman’s eye is on them’. But Orwell was a socialist, remember (of a peculiarly English kind), and he did believe strongly that one should try to break down class barriers.

  It is this kind of Sattweis, sad and wise, humour that the readers of his wartime Tribune weekly column enjoyed, or at any rate grew to expect, as he leavened the polemics, varying the tone and pace with the skill of a good essayist. This image of Orwell is very different from the ‘Orwellian’ image of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The lighter tone of Animal Farm is more typical of his best writing and more ‘Orwell-like’: the lover of nature and of small, odd things; the humanist, not the misogynist – and the humanist who makes jokes at his own pessimism. Orwell told his Tribune readers that he was going to make the worst possible prophecy for the year 1946: it would be as bad as 1945. His essays often propound tongue-in-cheek paradoxes to provoke thought. But whereas G. K. Chesterton did this famously in a flamboyant, high literary style, Orwell’s voice is conversational – for example, he remarks in ‘The Sporting Spirit’ à propos the visit of the Moscow Dynamo football team to Arsenal in 1945, ‘that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before’.