by Geoffrey Heptonstall
Contemporary Review, April 1994
IN Cyril Connolly, George Orwell had a lifelong friend -- from early days at school until forty years on when Orwell died in 1950 in the week that the last edition of Connolly's magazine Horizon came out.
Even when they had drifted apart for a time they were closer than they knew. Orwell in Paris is a famous experience because of the few weeks he spent washing dishes, raw material for the myth he created of his life. It was an experience banal in itself -- the tyro writer in bohemian Paris, or Berlin, or Zurich. Though they didn't know it at the time, Connolly was there, a few streets away. There are times when the coincidences which don't quite happen are more telling than those which do.
Of those Paris years (about 1930) both were later to write up a memory of a public event which each was privileged to witness. For Connolly it was the first screening of Bunuel's L'Age d'Or. For Orwell it was the funeral of Marechal Foch, where he saw Petain whom he ironically remembered as looking distinguished, even heroic.
Bohemian Paris gave Connolly the impulse which directed his life, not only in his own writing and travels, but in what has been called ~the world of Horizon'. It was Connolly who prompted Aragon, Camus and Sartre to the English-speaking world. And it was Connolly who was the motor of Fitzrovia, a conscious attempt to create a bohemia which was possible in the especially rootless conditions of wartime.
Orwell's relation to Fitzrovia was as distanced as his relation to the political left in the Thirties. We are familiar with the problem of the revolutionary socialist, active in Spain, who regarded Marxism as armchair thinking turned sour. We are less familiar, and perhaps less comfortable, with Orwell's attitude to bohemia.
The political Orwell has become prophetic and visionary in a way, so to speak, which he did not foresee. His political writing is essentially a series of humane intuitions from personal observation. He wasn't a sophisticated thinker and was largely unaware of political or social ideas outside of the pamphlets -- barely that with intellectual landscapes beyond a narrow range. Orwell was an imaginative writer, sensitive to the human dimension in political vision. Orwell's gift was his ability to imagine how it must feel to live in worlds so perfect they are uninhabitable.
His own socialism was idealistic within a human frame. This would seem contradictory, and so it would have been had he not been guided by a self-irony which placed limitations on his hopes. He wanted a new order, but would settle for a new deal. He wanted socialism, but would settle for the welfare state.
Without this self-irony his ideals would have been corrupted. Tyrants begin as dreamers. The great tyrannies of Orwell's time began in the bohemian cafes among talkers who didn't expect in any serious way to achieve. His political insight in that respect was profound, though not singular in the way it is claimed sometimes. Camus, Koestler, Malraux, Silone and Weil all had perceptions resembling the Orwell position of personal integrity within a public commitment. The arguments for a transformed community were taken, broadly speaking, as understood. The task was to plea for the individual within the community. The significance of Orwell as a political writer was his exceptional position in an Anglo-American culture which had no direct experience of tyranny.
His socialism was forged in the Spanish Republic where there really does seem to have been a spontaneous communication across the traditional social divides. His testament is weak in so far as he derides the raping of nuns, and ignores the desecration of churches. These are established facts which he could never accept. We cannot take even so honest and frank an account of life as Orwell's at face-value.
Yet his descriptions of tyranny are accepted. It is by them that he is known to a wider public. Coming up for Air is a novel of feeling, and its concerns still have a resonance. But without those famous post-war dystopias it is doubtful whether much of Orwell would be in print now -- certainly not the scraps of journalism, the pedestrian correspondence and run-of-the-mill book reviews. Among the Orwells that might have been we have the example of his friend Jack Common, entirely forgotten except as a footnote to Orwell (a footnote worth investigating).
If Animal Farm owes rather too much to Anatole France and Nineteen Eighty-Four to Zamatyn and to Aldous Huxley (who greatly influenced the young Orwell at Eton), the satirical imagination in Orwell is of less consequence. What distinguishes the dystopias -- the opposite of Utopia -- is their sensitivity to pain and humiliation conceived in human terms. Orwell opened the prison-house door and stepped inside. He wasn't doing so as the self-congratulatory liberal but as the 'Last Man in Europe', a title abandoned in favour of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The isolated man was, of course, Orwell himself. Such a figure is to be found in most of his fiction. He is not the friendless man, not even the loveless one. But he is the man distanced from the world by his refusal to accept convenient calumnies and betrayals. He is a man who can encounter others, although society as an abstract force is always suspect.
Yet Orwell was a socialist, and he accepted political compromise -- which is to say, he accepted necessary lies. Stated so baldly the position is untenable. What makes it credible is that it wasn't a position, an argument, so much as a life of working through the contradictions. His mind, though not free from human prejudice, moved through experience towards reasoned pleas.
Such a life is sure to know the milieu of bohemia. Orwell's denial of bohemia was a discipline, a marshalling of his resources. He had every right to deny poseurs, charlatans and bon viveurs who never produced the work they talked about. Everyone who has known a bohemia has met such people. Their danger is their charm, for they are flies round the honey.
Orwell's qualified denial made him enemies among the flies. There remain those prepared to denigrate him as a quack socialist and grub street hack writer. Yet these are few indeed. Those who make a claim on Orwell are many and varied. He was an inferior poet, yet the Movement poets found inspiration in his concern for clarity of language, As a critical essayist he was greatly admired -- astonishingly -- by the Leavis circle who normally had no time for the ~belle-lettrists'. Many novelists since his day have surpassed his own creative achievement, yet he is well-regarded by most of them. A Marxist thinker, Raymond Williams, appreciated his socialism. The Conservative Paul Johnson likened Orwell to a secular saint. He was contemptuous of Catholicism, yet a Catholic may find in his work the themes of sin and redemption which are close to a religious position.
Accepting him has become too easy. Orwell's absorption into the mainstream is suspicious for someone who asked uncomfortable questions. We are charmed by the frankness (which he learned from reading Shaw), and we admire the genuine altruism. What we have lost is the voice. This is true in the literal sense, for every recorded item there was from his extensive broadcasting was destroyed. The erasure is a fact, a sad one of neglect or even of vandalism. It is also a metaphor: the Orwell we hear is too often an echo of our prejudice.
When we speak of regretting, as we should, the early death, we like to imply what might have been. When we do this we say more about ourselves than him. Predicting his reaction to world events is impossible, for his experience was halted at a particular moment. He died reconciled to the Church of England. It is conceivable that he might have undergone a greater conversion with Huxley, say, in California. Or he might have served (Lord Orwell of Catalonia) in a Labour government. The editorial chairs of some great papers might have beckoned. And there was television. The example of Muggeridge, whom Orwell admired, is there with his other contemporaries.
He is compared with Camus, whom he also admired. Yet we could ask why he never measured up to Camus in achievement? The political polemics are stimulating, but they lack the authority of L'Homme Revolte. The major fiction of the spiritual isolate was L'Etranger. Camus' own attitude to colonialism was as ambivalent as Orwell's. Camus' essays of Algeria consider the metaphysic of the European in Africa. 'Shooting an Elephant' is a vivid description with a political coda, but it contains itself within a contingent world. Compared with Camus, Orwell's work is a series of lost opportunities.
I am being unfair, although the point is worth making. Consider the work Connolly himself produced. His critical work has a broader cultural reference, is written more demandingly in style. Orwell's clear prose -- as Connolly indicated -- tends towards anonymity. It lacks epigrammatic wit. It contains no rhetoric. It is the plain man speaking, whereas Connolly is the weaver of elaborate patterns of thought, observation and feeling. Connolly writes. Orwell communicates, a valuable activity without being an essentially artistic achievement. At his worst, a writer is a drunken man at a funeral. Orwell can be the sober man at a carnival.
He suppressed the Villon within him in recognition of his own rage, his own allegiance to life outside conventional society. Between Eric Blair and George Orwell there was P. S. Burton, the genteel habitud of the spikes, the hop-picker and tramp. It made good copy, though the experiences were undertaken for their own sake. He tried, without success, to get himself arrested. (In the East he had served as a policeman.) Like Roquentin in Sartre's La Nausee, he saw a value in degradation. He accepted the contingent world as fundamental to human experience.
This can work as literature only through metaphor. The Paris section Of Down and Out in Paris and London is a vivid pastiche of French writing on la vie de boheme. Orwell, who was part-French, transforms a brief flirtation into a romance. When he writes of London he offers a poor justification for his vagrancy and proceeds to write without inspiration. On home ground he is deprived of imagination and betrays himself as a voyeur.
The betrayal of his integrity became a commitment to those who were themselves betrayed. In the industrial poverty of Wigan, in Barcelona, and finally in the Blitz, the voyeur is transformed and redeemed as the witness, the one who can testify on behalf of the silent. With Connolly he bravely fire-watched while London burned. They took no shelter, watching St. Paul's withstand the bombardment.
Orwell's stated aim of turning journalism into art nearly turned his art into journalism. Much of the record also succeeded in making a myth out of life. The experiences shared by an entire generation often seem peculiar to one man. The temptation to make of this a performance might have been irresistible had he lived. That is purely conjectural. What we do have is a commentary, marginal but effective, on the mid-century. Class, empire, war and ideology are the great themes on which he wrote valuable notes. Some of that experience is well known through his eyes. There is much of those that later generations have encountered initially by reading George Orwell. He is the English interpreter of the Spanish War, of Stalinism, of dystopia, and of socialism. We all think we know him, but we flatter ourselves unless we have the discipline, the integrity and the courage which he found through trials of great endurance. They were self-inflicted and in part unnecessary. Their meanings must be approached as metaphors. Orwell was a creation, a work of art lived as life. He was unusual in that respect: he was greater than anything he wrote. He becomes the material of myth.
