by Nick Bardsley
1997
In July of next year a 20 volume edition of the complete
works of George Orwell will be published by Secker and
Warburg, publisher of most of his later works. I won’t shock
you with the price of the full set, suffice to say it is a viable
proposition only for well-funded university libraries and rich
Orwell fans.
Putting the price to one side, such a collection is a nice sign
that Orwell is still regarded as an author worthy of study.
Another pleasing result for Orwell in recent times was the
Waterstones Top 100 Books survey in which
Animal Farm and 1984 came second and third.
At the time of the Waterstones survey, I expressed my view
that Orwell is the greatest English writer of the 20th century
to a friend of mine. He disagreed, saying that he thought
Orwell overrated. When I asked him why, he said that Orwell
had never made him laugh.
I was astonished.
One of the reasons I value Orwell’s writing
so much is that he so often makes me chuckle and many
times has had me doubled up with laughter. Admittedly, this is
more often the case with his essays and journalism than with
his novels but that merely speaks to his versatility as a writer.
For an example of Orwell at his most amusing take this justly
famous passage from
The Road to Wigan Pier: ‘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. One day this summer I was
riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two
dreadful-looking old men got onto it.... They were dressed in
pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their
huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study
every dimple. Their appearance caused a mild stir of horror on
top of the bus. The man next to me...glanced at me, at them,
and back again at me and murmured “Socialists”’.
I make no apology for declaring that anyone who cannot see
the comedy there has no sense of humour. But the passage
also makes one wonder if its lessons have been learnt.
Another piece of writing that makes one think the
Left have hardly changed in fifty years is the essay Politics and the English Language from Inside the Whale. This essay consists
of an analysis of bad writing prevalent in Orwell’s time.
Inevitably an excerpt from a Communist pamphlet is among
the examples and it is fascinating to see that it is eerily similar
to the kind of thing you might find in the Socialist Worker or a
theoretical journal published by the Spartacist League, or some
such waste of paper.
Orwell also reminds us that much claimed as ‘new’ today is,
in fact, tediously unoriginal. The essay ‘Benefit of the Clergy’,
found in
Decline of the English Murder, refers to Salvador
Dali’s use of mutilated donkey corpses and dares to say that
while Dali’s work is technically excellent it is ‘diseased and
disgusting’.
Today, if someone were to say this of Damien Hirst the
avant-garde would dismiss it as philistine and reactionary. But
I should point out that Orwell’s daring in this article was his
actually admitting that Dali was a good artist if a ‘disgusting
human-being’.
Orwell would no doubt be amused by the Labour Party’s
(mis)appropriation of the word ‘new’. We can imagine him
wearily nodding as if in expectation at the actions of Blair’s
spin-doctors.
Whenever people think of Orwell today they usually think also
of security cameras and ‘Big Brother’. Orwell represents
much more than that. He saw that language and writing can be
perverted to deceive people rather than inform them. If we
remember that single lesson then his legacy will remain
secure.
