Joseph Sobran
National Review, 30 June 1989
I HAVE ALWAYS enjoyed reading George Orwell, except for his fiction, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. That book is a great idea, weakly executed, and the popular misunderstanding of it-the assumption that it was a prediction-gave it its popularity. It has sold in the tens of millions, with sales peaking in early 1984 and, Big Brother having failed to materialize, trickling off afterward. (Though one contributor to Horoscope Magazine noted respectfully that Orwell's prophetic track record surpassed those of many professional astrologers.
John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "ST George" Orwell examines the highbrow department of the Orwell cult, which has had its own fatuities. Intellectuals of diverse persuasions have wrestled bitterly over which side Orwell would be on which smelly little orthodoxy he would subscribe to-if he were alive today. The parties to these disputes have shown all the acumen of those Victorian readers who used to write letters to Sherlock Holmes, soliciting his assistance.
Mr. Rodden takes it all much too seriously. To make matters worse, he writes sentences that don't suggest he's alive to Orwell's syntactical vigor "We will return to these conceptual points as we relate the anomalies of Orwell's present-day educational institutionalization and their implications for canon and reputation-formation to the development of his curricular reputation." I'm quoting out of context, but only because I would spare you reading the context too. Four hundred pages of this stuff is a lot of context.
Anyway, Mr. Rodden informs us that Orwell has been variously celebrated as rebel, common man, prophet, and saint. He provides quotations to back this up, and footnotes to back the quotations up. The book is divided into chapters, the chapters into sections, and one of the sections into subsections. Further details upon request.
It's ironic that a writer as lively as Orwell should be honored with so pedantic a piece of work as this. I have a theory that we owe the enormous volume of sludgy prose in our time to the growth of the public sector, especially the subsidized academy. Freed from commercial pressures, scholars nowadays don't have to worry about being readable.
Orwell did. Though a socialist, he wrote for the market, and he knew how to keep the customer satisfied.
Jimmy Cannon once wrote of Howard Cosell: "His real name is Howard Cohen and he wears a toupee and he says he tells it like it is." Orwell's real name was Eric Blair, but he made a reputation for telling it like it was. You can argue that the persona enabled him to be honest "the most honest writer of our time," V.S. Pritchett called "Orwell" in 1949, the year before Blair died. Or does it mean anything to call a fiction "honest"?
"Orwell" is a fiction. Blair created him as Conan Doyle created Holmes, as Raymond Chandler created Philip Marlowe, He's an attitude, not a real human being, and we enjoy seeing the attitude apply itself to real subjects. The attitude may or may not have been Blair's; it doesn't matter. "Orwell" is still interesting, like Holmes and Marlowe, who also confront mundane realities such as we might encounter, and make them romantic by the sheer power of attitude itself.
Committed to socialism, atheism, and other progressive pieties, Orwell creates complications for himself by (for instance) attacking his fellow socialists, by espousing patriotism, or by offhandedly remarking that he has never been able to dislike Hitler. He brings the attitude of the romantic loner into a new realm, politics, where the party line usually prevails. His commitments don't involve personal loyalties or preclude human spontaneities. His aesthetic and moral reactions are in tension with his principles. He has no investments he can't shed, no shame about his prejudices; let the chips fall where they may. His blunt sentences, graceful without obvious mannerism, deliver casual shocks to the reader's expectations.
"To accept an orthodoxy," he remarks, "is always to inherit unresolved contradictions." The passage that follows this observation proceeds to debunk Labour Party orthodoxy for espousing incompatible things: dismantling the British Empire while raising the British worker's living standard.
Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't prognosticate. It imagines a world in which people have been conditioned to accept naked contradictions-War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength-because language has been reduced to a tool of power, rendered useless as a medium of critical intelligence. Orwell doesn't present this as a future event on a timetable, but as the concentrated expression of something he sees around him, as described in his most famous essay, Politics and the English Language. He projects a world in which political power has diminished the sense of irony to the vanishing point: O'Brien triumphantly explains this to Winston Smith, and adds that within a century nobody will even be able to comprehend the explanation. A world without irony is the supreme creation of the master ironist, Orwell, whose deadpan horror Hitchcock might have admired. The book's weakness is that the characters are puppets to begin with, not human enough to be much dehumanized.
"Orwell" himself is a magnetic character. Something about his detachment inspires the kind of hero-worship among intellectuals that the aforementioned detectives inspire in other breeds of readers. He's a tough guy, but at bottom a good guy-"a good man," Lionel Trilling reverently called him. Everyone tries to claim him, as if to invoke his authoritative approval, though it usually means belittling a lot of things he actually says. Orwell-the character, the attitude-never died, but he ceased production when Blair expired, so he can't talk back to his claimants. Mr. Rodden documents all the claims exhaustively, and at least has the good sense not to try to adjudicate them.
Orwell's reputation has had its ups, but no serious downs. The passe controversies he was engaged in become more unreal with time, so that his virtuous posture in itself increasingly seems to put him on the side of tbe angels, regardless of the specific merits of the cases.
If Blair had lived on (he'd be 86 now), new cases might have gotten Orwell into trouble. As things fell out, Orwell stands frozen on the side of the angels, permanently tantalizing speculation.
John Rodden
The New Republic, 12 March 1990
The writer who coined "Hate Week," "thought crime," ought Police," vaporize," "Newspeak," doublespeak," "Some are more equal than others," and "Big Brother is Watching You" has sold, between Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, more than 40 million books in sixty languages which is, according to John Rodden, more than any pair of- books by a seriotis or popular postwar author." In early 1984, Nineteen Eighty-four alone sold 50,000 copies a day. Nor do numbers even begin to suggest the scale of' George Orwell's influence, which is so huge as to have lost-almost-all specific meaning. Not long ago Apple Computers ran an ad invoking Orwell to imply that IBM is slightly sinister. And the Einstein Moomjy carpet company had the wit to announce:
WAR IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
And crisp new Sisal-like look in wool broadloom is $19.84 sq. yd.
The breadth of Orwell's attraction to intellectuals is positively weird. Rodden, who seems to have read every essay on Orwell ever written, sensibly concludes that among Orwell's leading champions, Irving Howe most closely resembles Orwell intellectually (perhaps along with George Woodcock, the Canadian biographer and essayist, who was Orwell's friend during a period when Orwell, back from Spain, hung around the London anarchists). More important, the controversial and slightly preposterous essay written a few years ago by Norman Podhoretz, "If Orwell Were Alive Today," which claimed him posthumously for neoconservatism, turns out to be a minor cliche of the modern era. Everyone, of every ideological stripe, believes that Orwell would have come around in the end.
Wyndham Lewis, who admired Hitler as late as 1938, wrote, incredibly: "Had Orwell been of German nationality who can doubt he would have been an S.S. man?" The very first full-length essay, ever devoted to Orwell was written in 1939 by a pro-Franco jesuit named father C.C. Martindale, under the title, "Why Not Our Ally?" Another Catholic writer, Christopher Hollis, wrote: "More and more I am convinced that it is as a theologian that Orwell will be considered important." Rodden has even dug up a Soviet author who regards Orwell as a friend of the Soviet camp and a foe of tyranny in ... China. Has any other modern writer been assimilated to so many views-which is to say, has any other modern writer conquered the culture so thoroughly? Ours, it turns out, is the age of Orwell.
Rodden explains Orwell's reputation, and by extension all literary reputations, anthropologically. He invokes Edmond de Goncourt, who said: "A book never is a masterpiece. It becomes one." The meaning and the value of a work may be intrinsic. But the work's reputation its fame, the esteem In which it is held these are created by publishers, editors, reviewers, and generally by the powerhouses of the culture industry. Rodden, being a man of the moment, expresses this observation by means of a theoretical apparatus, partly derived from German "reception-theory" and with a nod to current canon-criticism, that brandishes terms like "loci of the momentous" (or important reviews) and volcanic moments" (something bigger than reviews, like a TV movie). The theoretical apparatus sounds a little formidable, but like a dentist's roomful of equipment, it has the virtue of focusing on usefully tiny details.
The loci of the momentous in Orwell's case turn out to be favorable reviews and essays that appeared in the two years after his death in 1950. V S. Pritchett, in a dozen small notices and an obituary, coined the notion of Orwell as the conscience of his generation, as well as the image of Orwell as a saint. Cyril Connolly called him a revolutionary in love with 1910." Lionel Trilling, in the introduction in 1952 to the first American edition of Homage to Catalonia, called him (quoting Stephen Marcus) a virtuous man." And these early labels managed, as Rodden sees it, to engrave a series of "faces" that proved lasting: Orwell the Rebel, Orwell the Common Man, Orwell the Prophet, and Orwell the Saint (especially St. George the dragonslayer who saved England).
Next the "faces" were refilled and put to factional use by an odd set of' intellectual circles: the London Tribrune group (Amercan Bevin, Michael Foot, and others); the London Freedom group (Woodcock and other anarchists); the groups around the British Catholic journals (the right-wing Tablet and the New, Left Slant); plus the Partisan Review group in the United States, followed by what Rodden describes as PR's left and right offshoots at Dissent and Commentary. Obviously not everyone has viewed with equal enthusiasm an author who was called, by the authoritarian wing of British Marxism, the "Maggot of the Month." Anglo-American feminists have seen him, due to some disapproval of birth control and other opinions, as misogynistic. Yet the champions overwhelmed the detractors, and the more appealing of Orwell's "faces" loomed with sufficient clarity to be picked up by big-time cultural institutions such as Time-life, the paperback houses, the school publishers, and the TV networks, who broadcast the "faces" to the world.
Some among these powerful cultural institutions applied Orwell principally to the political purpose of waging both the cold war, which he supported, and the war of conservatism against democratic socialism, which was a war that he opposed. Other institutions took him up without any politics at all. The organized junior and senior high school English teachers of America, appreciating his prose, canonized him as the Model Stylist, which guaranteed him an enormous circulation. (University English teachers, on the other hand, have never much liked him, possibly because, as Rodden slyly suggests, professors distrust intelligibility.) Saga magazine, appreciating the crags of Orwell's cheeks and nose, ran his portrait on the cover as a sort of Mr. Macho. And between them these several layers of the general culture, the high and the low, Partisan Review and the TV networks, the idealistic and the cynical, honest champions and rightwing exploiters, Einstein Moomjy and the junior high school teachers, the anarchists, the Jesuits, finally created Orwell," the name that everyone knows even if, for most people, the name means something like Frankenstein" or the bogeyman, and rarely conjures the image of a mere writer.
Rodden's account of this extraordinary development, his summaries of intellectual positions, the quotations from commercials and movies, the taxonomic zeal with which he has catalogued the three attitudes of Raymond Williams toward Orwell (favorable, mixed, and hostile, spread over a lifetime)-all this makes for a rich intellectual history, at once broad and arcane, which might suggest that loci of the momentous and volcanic moments and the splendid other terms in Rodden's theoretical apparatus offer a good model for the writing of cultural history.
But is it true that a book (or a body of work) never is a masterpiece, that it only becomes one? The maxim can be tested elsewhere. IS iL true, to take an American example, that a book like Uncle Toni's Cabin rose to prominence chiefly because of institutional factors operating through loci of the momentous, and not through its own force? The parallels between Harriet Beecher Stowe's career and Orwell's are not to be missed. They were noticed as early as 1946, Rodden tells us, by an official at the Book-of-the-month Club.) Stowe's literature of social protest played a role in the Civil War just as Orwell's work did in the cold war, then so expanded its influence that more than 400 "Tom" companies toured all parts of the United States (except the South) by the 1880s, performing stage versions of the novel.
And just as with Orwell, the message of Uncle Tom's Cabin sank so deep into the popular imagination that the author's meaning gradually turned into an Orwellian blackwhite," and the abolitionist novel became, on many a rustic American stage, a racist minstrel show, and the character of Uncle Tom, a selfless defender of his fellow slaves in the novel, entered the language connoting virtually the opposite. An energetic scholar could write an interesting book by training Rodden's apparatus on the Stowe phenomenon and ferreting out long forgotten Congregationalist magazines or Broadway plays, where popular conceptions and misconceptions about Stowe must have had their start.
And yet, if you actually read Uncle Tom's Cabin, which not many people do nowadays, another possibility comes to mind. Stowe herself, not just her champions and popularizers, seems to have accomplished something. She seems to have drawn, from a personal commitment to a humanized Calvinism, a moral sense that was full of lofty grandeur and at the same time full of lowly common decency; and she succeeded in aiming this high-and-low Calvinist morality at an oppressive system that had always seemed, for the majority of white Americans, too complicated to understand; and with a grand cannonade of loathing and indignation, she made that complicated system instantly appear as what it was: simple, and evil.
The heart pounds when you read Stowe; the brain throws off electric bolts of sudden understanding. Her book, in its peculiar way, didn't become a masterpiece, it was one. The commentators in Christian magazines, the minstrel shows, the volcanic moment of President Lincoln's handshake: these several loci of the day, crucial though they doubtless were in dispersing and diluting her message, merely managed, after all, to respond to the grand moral and intellectual force that Stowe had already put into motion. To talk about her success without discussing the question of slavery is to talk nonsense.
Mightn't it make sense to see Orwell's success in a similar light? He, too, managed to draw, from a personal commitment to a humanized socialism, a moral sense that was full of lofty grandeur while at the same time full of lowly common decency; and he succeeded in aiming this high-and-low socialist morality at an oppressive system that had always seemed, for honest liberals, too complicated to understand; and with a grand cannonade of loathing and indignation, he made that complicated system instantly appear as what it was. And unquestionably, when you read Orwell, the heart does pound (if not quite so melodramatically as with Stowe), the brain throws off electric bolts of sudden understanding.
Surely that has something to do with the Orwell phenomenon. The man's plainness of prose, his virtuousness, his saintliness," his view of popular culture, his exemplary courage, and a other attributes that critics have chosen to celebrate-these have something to do with his success, undoubtedly. But surely the main reason that even today Orwell is marching Sherman-like from bookstore to bookstore through the newly liberated provinces of the East is because he, more perhaps than any other writer, with his vast moral and intellectual force, makes us understand what those provinces have had to endure.
It is often said that postmodern academic fashion-the emphasizing of factors like class, race, and gender over considerations of artistic or intellectual worth-intrudes coarse political ideology into delicate artistic zones where ideology shouldn't go. But Rodden's book shows that the opposite is more nearly true: postmodern analysis empties art and intellect of content, including political content. For in demonstrating how institutional factors transformed Orwell into a popular byword, Rodden has managed to write a 400-page book that never seriously considers the principal content of Orwell's writing. Absent from Rodden's diligent book is the reason why we respond to Orwell so forcefully, which is his political insight. y proceeding in that manner, by looking mostly at the institutional power of book reviewers and publishing houses and other agencies, Rodden can ultimately explain very little about his main topic, which is the way that literary reputations arise. For if the Orwell phenomenon was generated by institutional factors more than by Orwell himself and what he wrote, we're bound to wonder what generated the institutional factors. What, for instance, made Trilling's high opinion of Orwell so important? Rodden suggests that Trilling saw in Orwell a way of promoting qualiLies that the critic liked to claim for himself, which is a comment that no doubt can help us understand how Trilling managed to write so affectingly about Orwell. But if identification with Orwell was Trilling's main motive, if his portrait was mostly a flattering mirror, if Trilling was in some respect merely advancing himself and didn't also succeed in saying something that was inherently and recognizably true, not just for himself but for others, if he didn't shed light on the age, why has anyone bothered to take Trilling's judgment seriously?
Perhaps Trilling's influence derived merely from his own institutional prominence, from the play of his byline at Partisan Review. Then why did anyone bother with Partisan Review? Because still other commentators said that Partisan Review was all the rage? The entire theoretical model of how ideas arise and spread eventually collapses, because the system drains the importance from ideas and leaves us with mere power relations.
Rodden is a good-souled historian and a learned one, a man of solid judgment from detail to detail, who doesn't wish to be a fanatic of his own method. He promises not to fall into the trap of saying that everything is an institutional structure-but that is what he ends up saying. His system rules his research. It's a pity. And watching such a talented writer totter with his ton of engrossing information into his own trap, I became convinced that one day soon the empire of contemporary cultural theory will crack open, and the contented university masses will turn out to be discontented after all, and though the leaders will promise reforms, their assurances will come too late, and angry crowds will throng the quadrangles chanting for oldfashioned humanist criticism, and the postmodern age will be over, and even John Rodden may feel liberated. For what good is an analytic method that prompts a highly intelligent scholar to write hundreds of fascinating pages on Orwell without casting a single beam of light on the grand idea that he gave us, perhaps deeper and shrewder than any other writer's, about the greatest them of modern history, which is the question of totalitarianism?
