On the Occasion of George Orwell's Birthday, Now Is the Time to Bury His Corpse a Bit Deeper

Henry Oliver on the Perils of Socialism Without Marmalade

Dear Republic,

Henry Oliver is sort of our Cary Grant — a dapper Englishman who is nearly as well-read in Samuel Johnson as he is in T. S. Eliot and who manages to be elegant even when plunging the hatchet into George Orwell. Orwell’s defenders will have their say a bit later. Stay tuned.

-ROL

ON THE OCCASION OF GEORGE ORWELL’S BIRTHDAY, NOW IS THE TIME TO BURY HIS CORPSE A BIT DEEPER

The case against Orwell is simple: he has been over-rated for political reasons. His work is not terrible, but it is by no means the calibre that the admirers believe. Orwell is a grumpy entertainer who some people mistake for an important thinker. All good fun, as long as you don’t take it too seriously.

How many times can one read 1984? Twice? Once in admiration, once with the sense of astonishment that this book has been so well regarded for so long. All those long pseudo-theoretical rantings about doublespeak and so on are dull. These ideas have passed into popular idiom. But often quite undeservedly. They are memes. Almost none of the things that are called Orwellian really are. The word is used more and more with each passing year. Like most political jargon, what useful meaning it once had has been inflated away. If so much really was so Orwellian then liberal democracy would already be at an end.

Rather than a work of prophecy, 1984 is perhaps best read as a slightly despairing satire of post-war London. It can be very entertaining. The first time one reads it, the book is gripping. But no-one makes their claim for Orwell’s genius based on his capacity for entertainment. That is, indeed, quite the opposite of what he is supposed to be. Orwell is a great intellectual, a great political thinker, a hero of liberalism.

It is true that he opposed authoritarianism at a difficult time, that he defended liberal values, and that he was one of a small number of left-wing people who avoided being duped by Stalinism. But Orwell is not really valued for these things: instead he is the patron saint of a very partial mood—he is the idol of the higher-middlebrow English-pessimism.

1984 is a gruesome vision of what it is like to live under authoritarian socialism; in that, it is well done. The ending is shocking. But as C.S. Lewis pointed out, there is a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the totalitarian authority is anti-sex, but we are never told why this would be so. It is not relevant to the point of the novel, but it takes up a lot of space. Why? Probably, Lewis said, because that was the preoccupation of Orwell’s generation when they were young.

There is too much in it of the author’s own psychology: too much indulgence of what he feels as a man, not pruned or mastered by what he intends to make as an artist.

This egoism mars the book, as it does a great deal of Orwell’s writing. Animal Farm is much better: a clever allegory that allows people to see an important truth without their judgement getting clouded by partisan concerns. It is a strong and simple piece of work that deserves its praise. As Lewis said, “The author shows us hateful things; he doesn’t stammer or speak thick under the surge of his own hatred.”

Orwell’s reputation rests as much on his essays as anything else. His assessment of Dickens is marvellous, as are the essays on Kipling, Tolstoy, and Swift. No one forgets reading ‘Shooting an Elephant.’ But this is a small basis for a large reputation. He added nothing to style or thought. There is less of true excellence in all his non-fiction than in a single volume of essays by contemporaries like Virginia Woolf or C.S. Lewis. The rest is reportage. Often very good reportage, but not for the literary ages. Who would pick up Orwell alongside the great names of the past? Are we really trying to claim him a place with Hazlitt and De Quincey, Johnson and Addison?

In fiction he is soundly surpassed by dozens of names. He has none of Spark’s strangeness, West’s intensity. There is less real life in his works than in von Arnim, Mansfield, Bowen, Kingsley Amis. Although a few of his quotes are passed around the internet like Chesterton’s, the fact is that you can remember very little of what he wrote. It doesn’t stick. His sentences were much better than a lot of other newspaper writing, but that is the level of his achievement.

The admirers want to make much bigger claims for him than this. Sometimes they invoke the early non-fiction. These are the sort of work that would easily be forgotten without the heft of his name to save them. They are worth reading. Some of the details are splendid. But the idea that he was uniquely honest or observant is exaggerated. In his review of Orwell’s essays, the diplomat Christopher Sykes summed Orwell up perfectly.

He was a person who saw through prejudice, but was never rid of his own. He hated the use of un-thought-out political catch phrases, and yet he could use words such as ‘Left’ and ‘reactionary’ as though they contained precise meaning. He ridiculed the pretensions and affectations of people who regarded themselves as advanced thinkers, ‘the-Pansy-Left’ as he sometimes called them, but he never lost an absurd conviction that everyone on the opposite political side was basically mad or wicked. I believe he would rather have been killed than have committed any action in the least treacherous to the rights and liberties of artists, but his understanding of pictures and poetry was negligible.

What makes Orwell so loved is that he made simple pessimism sound intelligent. This is no small skill. The true misanthrope of genius—Evelyn Waugh or V.S. Naipaul—is a rare bird. But are we really to claim Orwell as the peer of the authors of Scoop and A Bend in the River? It is nice to think of him with his tea and marmalade, typing lividly in his scruffy jumper, a cigarette hanging with posh-foppishness from his not-quite-curled lip. It is nice to think of the days when one could live off the proceeds of essays about toads. It is nice to think that serious political writing could be so simple and accessible and literary.

The English tradition is rich in great political honesty: Swift’s pamphlets, Mill’s late political works, the writings of Bentham. What distinguishes these people from Orwell is their vision of society. Like the true English gentleman amateur, Orwell was content to make a great game of it all. He knocked the establishment into a cocked hat with the easy gaiety of Bertie Wooster throwing cards at the Drones Club (careful to come across as very serious while he did so). And what did he recommend in its place? What is the lesson of Animal Farm exactly? T.S. Eliot rejected that book, telling Orwell:

… your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.

To admire Orwell one must overlook the fact that he was frequently wrong. He was more interested in politics and ideology than real-world economics. It is intoxicating to read Orwell claiming that the English standard of living was reliant on the suffering of millions of colonised people. Of course, the idea that “in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation” was falsified when English living standards carried on ascending uninterruptedly after Indian independence, as Alex Tabarok has shown.

Orwell was quite right to be against colonisation. But that’s as far as it goes. Moral rightness doesn’t equal empirical understanding. On the points of detail, he simply wasn’t well-informed enough.

The essence of Orwell is, as he once said, the problem of being stuck in one’s class. English people find it very hard to get beyond their class. Down and Out in London and Paris and Wigan Pier are all about Orwell’s own difficulty with getting beyond his class. He wanted to believe in left-wing ideas without being wrenched too far from his natural state. Socialism without marmalade was a socialism too far. And he knew that asking people to change their class habits is dangerous to the revolution. So he trod the line. Technology is inherently disruptive to this idea, so he disliked technology. It’s all downstream of his morning tea.

This leads to Orwell’s fundamental conservatism. In “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote, “Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English” which echoes Wigan Pier’s, “A chemist perfects a new method of synthesizing rubber, or a mechanic devises a new pattern of gudgeon-pin. Why? Not for any clearly understood purpose, but simply from the impulse to invent and improve, which has now become instinctive.”

Where is the great liberal now? God forbid that we should improve or change! God forbid we ought to use foreign words! (which Orwell does all the time). I will not deal here with the huge wrongness of Orwell’s writing rules as I have dealt with it extensively elsewhere. All I will point out is that the idea that using words like “primary,” “promote,” “effective,” “extramarital,” and “expedite” was what corrupted our political culture and democracy is beyond absurd. Taking this stuff seriously simply isn’t serious.

What Orwell refused to see, because it would have complicated his difficult balancing act of talking left while living right, is that improving the living standards of most people relies on “the impulse to invent.” He had much less need of that, having gone to Eton, and was blind to the way such inventions could act as little miracles in ordinary homes. It was impossible for Orwell to appreciate the benefit of inventing medicines or using technology to mine coal or making textile cheaper and more durable or providing women with labour-saving devices or generating the wealth to educate children rather than have them go to work. And all because of his own hang-ups about being posh.

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don’t ‘want’ to cut down my drinking, to pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization in which ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men.

This self-mocking tone is very modern and Orwell was clearly driven by the same unease at his own privilege that still motivates people like Polly Toynbee. The irony, of course, is that like any good member of the establishment, Orwell is arguing to change things in a way that will preserve things so much more than would be the case if we let progress carry on. Progress doesn’t make the world safe for the little fat man. Progress was the alternative to authoritarian socialism that he refused to think about. The sort of progress he opposed for political reasons is why life expectancy has risen and poverty has fallen globally. It is why we are more equal than ever before.

Orwell is beloved by people who don’t want to look at graphs and accept the simple fact that life has become immeasurably better over the last three hundred years. The progress ideal that he so casually opposed has been reducing child mortality, making life safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable, bringing more people fresh food and clean water year round. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was 37. Now it is 63. In 1950 the global child mortality rate was 27%. Now it is 4%. In 1950, 53% of the world lived in extreme poverty. By 2018 that was down to 10%.

All of this was well underway when Orwell was writing. He could have read Adam Smith. He could have seen the way that inventions were bringing these changes to the world. He could have understood the scientific miracle that is soap, or the agricultural revolution that finally, finally, broke the Malthusian trap, or the astonishing benefits of technology like the printing press or the manufacture of tea and tea-pots. But no. Calling himself a semi-degenerate was more important than actually improving the lives of the poor.

Were he alive today, he would surely oppose the use of Ozempic and similar drugs on the grounds that it corroded moral fibre, caring little for the small miracle that we have found a cure for obesity which has tormented so many lives. (Before you fly to the comments, new research suggests that people stay thin even after they stop taking the drug.) He would have written popular screeds against the pharmaceutical companies without ever having to have relied on their chemotherapy drugs, as I have, to save his life. He would have been a reliable London Review of Books contributor with nothing good to say about the fact that the tech companies made the pandemic a vastly easier experience for many people than it otherwise would have been. No wonder he is still so popular among a certain crowd. There is always a readership for the misanthropist who has no interest in the actually complicated state of the world.

A real literary genius would either have written superior books or been able to see things more pluralistically. Usually, those two things go together, as with Mill, Naipaul, and all the other writers with whom Orwell ought not to keep company. They could see what he could not: the world is a Faustian pact, not a battle of wits about political allegiances.

How silly to idolise a man who refused to understand all of this because he was self-conscious about having gone to Eton. Orwell is essential reading, but he is not the writer his admirers believe him to be. It’s time we saw him for what he is: a splendid example of the way English people throw themselves into intellectual agonies because of their class background.

Henry Oliver writes

The Common Reader

. His work has appeared in Liberties, the Financial Times, The New Statesman, and many others. His book Second Act came out last year.