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Or well
By J. D. SCOTT G FORGE ORWELL, who was born in 1903, was still, in 1945, a comparatively unimportant novelist and pamphleteer. When he died in 1950 he was already a legend and a portent, the great rainmaker who, in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, washed away the Stalinist 'thirties.' This at least has become the accepted view of Orwell, and it is the view put forward in Mr. Hopkinson's brief new study (George Orwell, by Tom Hopkinson, published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green & s.). Animal Farm, writes Mr. Hopkinson, " is by far Co.,Orwell's finest book." And again : " . . . his gifts were not those of a novelist, and if the novel had not happened to be the prevailing literary form during the twenty years when he was writing, he would probably never have been attracted to it. Orwell had little imagination, little under- standing of human relationships, little sympathy with individual human beings. His gifts were an inspired common sense and a power of steady thought. . . ." This view of Orwell is stated not only with the authority which Mr. Hopkinson commands, but with sympathy and admiration. Sympathy and admiration are the more striking because they come from a writer possess- ing in plenitude exactly the qualities which, he says, Orwell lacked. That Orwell was lacking in these qualities I agree with some reserve. But from the rest of Mr. Hopkinson's disquisition I dissent at almost every step.
For me Orwell is not a satirist and a political philosopher, but a creative artist—more specifically, and despite his faults, a novelist—and a revolutionary. To me his common sense seems crotchety rather than inspired and his thought flashing rather than steady. For me his finest book is not Animal Farm but Coming Up for Air. Let us look a little more closely at this controversial figure.
George Orwell was born into what he described as the " lovVer-upper-middle class," in India, but a fashionable prep. school and a scholarship to Eton led him to be educated as a poor boy amongst the rich. He disliked it, served in the police in Burma (1922-27) in order to avoid continuing his Eton life at Cathbridge; chucked up the Police; lived as a proletarian in France and England; turned to a shabby-genteel life as shopkeeper, journalist, teacher and book-shop assistant in England (1929-37); fought in Spain and was wounded (1937); was in England writing and doing war-work (1937-47); writing 9n the island of Jura (1947-49). He had long suffered from lung trouble, and by the end of 1949 he was seriously ill; yet his death, following a hemorrhage in January, 1950, was Sudden.
His books are closely related to the various phases of his life. Thus Burmese Days expresses his disgust with the brutality, meanness, hysteria and sheer silliness of the life he had taken part in—and it is fair to say that there are traces of all these qualities, as well as an extraordinary force and compassion Vn the book itself. For Orwell's greatest difficulty was to Achieve detachment, that detachment which arises, not from indifference, but from the ability of finding room in which to Swing the axe, that special ability which lies at the heart of Creative talent, and distinguishes it from pamphleteering. In the first book which Orwell published, Down and Out in Paris 1 and London—which is undisguised autobiography—there is no detachment at all. It is brilliant reporting, wonderfully done; but it is no more moving than it is sentimental; it does not compel the heart. This is true also of Orwell's other mainly autobiographical books, The Road to Wigan Pier and his Spanish War book Homage to Catalonia. Both arouse indig- nation; both make one want to argue and ask questions, but only in the very last paragraph of the latter, with his return to England, did Orwell open the door and enter the room where the artist is alone with the Tragic Sense : " Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood; the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs."
This foreshadowed Coming Up for Air, which however had had another foreshadowing in Orwell's novel of 1936, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is an awful, madly irritating, weirdly readable tale, written with a knock- down force, about an impossible young man called Gordon Comstock, who tries to live, as a poet, outside the money- racket. It is remarkable as a study in poverty; not the starva- tion poverty of Down and Out, but the shabby-genteel poverty in which it is agony to take your girl out for a meal because an extra sixpence on the bill may mean disaster. This was very much a book of England-in-the-Thirties, and this almost obsessive feeling of Orwell's for England, this desperate anxiety about what was happening to England, emerges with a far greater, smoother power from Coming Up for Air.
Coining Up for Air appeared in 1939, when Orwell had for some time been living quietly in Hertfordshire. Of all the books which he had so far written it was the one furthest removed from reporting, the most imaginative, the one in which the material was most truly worked upon by the mysterious and transforming digestive juices of the artist. It is the story of an attempted escape from 1939 to 1913, a work at once of passionate informed nostalgia and of revolutionary protest. George Bowling, the narrator, an insurance salesman in the inner-outer-suburbs, fat, vulgar, lecherous and common- place, takes advantage of some unexpected winnings to visit Lower Binfield, where he had been brought up. He remembers the fishing, and the atmosphere of 1913: " 1913! My God! 1913! The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir! It'll never come again. I don't mean that 1913 will never come again. I mean the feeling inside you, the feeling of not being in a hurry and not being frightened, the feeling you've either had and don't need to be told about, or haven't had and won't ever have the chance to learn." But Lower Binfield, of course, has been " built up," the big pool with the bream in it has become the Model Yacht Club; the small pool in which as a boy George had seen the great carp (" It was almost the length of my arm. It glided across the pool, deep under water, and then became a shadow and disappeared under the darker water on the other side. I felt as if a sword had gone through me.")—this pool has become a rubbish dump. So there is no fishing for George Bowling in 1939, but only the return to the inner-outer suburbs, the row with his wife, the " roar of the bombs." This, Orwell says, is what has happened to England; her beauty made a rubbish-dump, her people turned afraid and mean; and the saying of it is revolutionary. Coming Up for Air is written in George Bowling's style, with a terseness, and even with a jauntiness, which is extraordinarily effective, because it can be by turns both lyrical and serious; in none of his other books does Orwell's special effect, the effect of a mature and serious man addressing his equals, come through more strongly. By contrast with Coming Up for Air, Animal Farm, in spite of its charm and wit and its great power, seems to me sad, bitter, clever—and dead. If it is a satire, it is a satire not only upon revolution, but upon all human hopes, by one who had ceased to share them. Did Orwell, when he wrote it still possess that sympathy with humanity with which Mr. Hopkinson credits him ? Or had he not reached already the position of almost complete despair of which Nineteen Eighty Four was the product ? " Power," Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty Four," is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution ; one makes the revolution in order to safeguard a dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
It is surely obvious that Nineteen Eighty Four marks the last stage of a journey, the journey of the political satirist, whose " gifts were an inspired common sense and a power of steady thought," to the Point at which these gifts were seen not to be enough. In the very last stage of his life, Mr. Hopkinson tells us, " he intended to make a complete break from his former polemical, propagandist way of writing and to concentrate on the treatment of human relationships. He had actually roughed out a story in the new manner, which was not destined to be completed." Orwell had an extraordinary power of making fresh starts ; what masterpiece did we not lose when death prevented his returning to what he had, at last, recognised as his metier ?
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