Amusing, but in its urge to crucify Orwell as a small-minded John Bull misses the crackling ambivalence that keeps him feeling so vastly more relevant and current than nearly any other writer of his time. You shoot at the king, you better not miss -- and this missed.
What I try to show at the link is the way that the rules in themselves are not very coherent and that once you see past the fairly lame politics the whole essay just isn't as mighty as it is thought to be
You know when a writer relies on insults to make a point, there isn’t one! Actually, Orwell is beloved by those who know how to interpret not only graphs, but also the context in which they are presented: case and point I make below. Oliver wrote this and included a link to a graph.
Oliver wrote: "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.”—
That "English standards carried on ascending uninterruptedly after Indian independence" falsifies nothing. That the British economy was more diversified at that point — that it was not totally dependent on India does not negate the very real and documented exploitation of India.
You have elided two different points. Orwell thought British living standards depended on Indian exploitation, which wasn’t true. That doesn’t mean the exploitation wasn’t real. Of course it was.
"Every Intellectual's Big Brother : George Orwell's Literary Siblings"
John Rodden
Orwell was anti-Catholic. This might also be informing your distaste for him? Given that the Catholics in the US are leading our current run at fascism, this comment from Christopher Hitchens in that book resonates with me at the moment.
—"The twenty-first century began, not with a confrontation with the totalitarian principle, but with the recrudescence of an older form of absolutism, namely the theocratic, millennial fanaticism that was met with in Afghanistan and has been able to metastasize itself. Theocratic absolutism— and millennial religion— metastasized very rapidly, even within the American border, with a secret army. Orwell teaches us quite a lot about this. The ultimate form, and the most refined form, of tyranny— because it requires us not just to obey, not simply to be a slave but to be a joyful one, to praise our chains, to enjoy our master, to kiss the whip— and it’s perhaps therefore the most threatening form— is exemplified by the intellectuals of Nineteen Eighty-Four who attempt to change the language and the existence of the secret book. Everything in his writing shows that Orwell prizes liberty and regards the concept of the infallible Vatican as the most menacing tyranny from which you can escape.”--
I believe it is you who has done the eliding. You point to England’s economy post Indian Independence as proof that Orwell was wrong about England benefiting greatly from the exploitation and abuse of India. That is your point. You are wrong to assert this. For someone who is quick to point out simple reductions — this is a big one. As if there is a one-to-one correlation between the gross exploitation of India that Orwell speaks of and your economy after 1947 is comical at best. That the ascendency of your living standards from 1947 onward was one of the largest postwar cash infusions ever by The United States of America (68.8 Billion from 1947-1954) has nothing to do with the fact that England did actually benefit greatly from their gross exploitation of India about which Orwell is correct. The point is that one does not refute the other. The reasons for your economy’s boom post 1947 is irrelevant to Orwell’s point. But here is a graph for you since I know you are fond of them.
It is precisely his prejudices and lack of artifice that make Orwell’s essays so great. Of course they have to be read with skepticism, but though he may have been wrong in his predictions and even his judgements, what his essays have retained is a certain kind of timeliness, which is harder to achieve this many years out than timelessness. An essay by Charles Lamb in Orwell’s day, for example, probably already bore the weight of age in a way that Orwell’s today don’t.
But I think it’s also fair to say that what Orwell did best was journalism of a particularly high caliber, which nails down the same quality that makes Ben Franklin’s gossip columns for the Pennsylvania Gazette so compulsively readable almost 300 years later. He wrote very well about minutiae in a way that makes his work a good exemplar of the period. Orwell gives you a taste of the 1930s from the vantage point of an educated contemporary magazine subscriber - ordinary readers just like us.
I respectfully disagree with this. Orwell is in my top five of all time, easily. I have read everything except the first two novels, which I really ought to do. I have a whole book about Orwell I want to write. No spoilers. I will reserve any detailed comment until such happy time as I can write and publish that notional book. I think if I could work on it full time for six months I could bash it out.
So many other commitments: (1) professional work, which is heating up, (2) my own novel, which is long but I think I can see the finish line from here, at least drafting it, hopefully by 1/1/26, (3) engagement with some of the current books and possibly posting about those. I have eight books I have at least sketched out that I want to write: (1-3) the current novel and its two sequels, (4-6) three different novels where hinge historical events went a different way as a backstory, which will be, I think spy thrillers using a MacGuffin to tour these alternate histories, (7) a short romantic comedy I started thirty years ago but now I think I can write female characters, and (8) the Orwell book. I am 62. If I can manage to liberate myself from full time professional work reasonably soon, I may be able to pull this off. I will finish the first of the trilogy, which is monstrously long, then the romantic comedy, likely a novella, to cleanse my palate.
I think a lot of the problem with Orwell's reputation is the myth of moral authority that has been built around him. On which note, you might like this, which Orwell's friend Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in his diary after the funeral. “Read through various obituary articles on George by Koestler, Pritchett, Julian Symons, etc., and saw in them how the legend of a human being is created, because although they were ostensibly correct and I might have written the same sort of stuff myself, they were yet inherently false - e.g. everyone saying George was not given to self-pity, whereas it was of course his dominant emotion.”
Anthony Powell, who was a friend of Orwell ("the only conservative I like"), left the following appraisal:
> Apart from the projections of himself, the characters of his novels do not live as persons, though they are sometimes effective puppets in expressing his thesis of the moment. Orwell had a thoroughly professional approach to writing and a finished style
I think that's pretty much right. Interestingly I think Orwell's direct style is better than Powell's indirectness, but Powell is a better writer. His scenes and characters really come alive.
Naipaul, a better writer & stylist than both, was also a friend of Powell, and after reading Powell after his death, remarked, "It may be that the friendship lasted all that time because I had not examined his work." These Brits love to speak ill of the dead!
Although 1984 contains clumsy didacticism, it is a successful mood piece that captures the post-war malaise. I agree with you that Orwell shouldn't be so idolized, but who should, really? He's certainly worth reading.
I agree with you about Naipaul's genius but he was relentlessly cruel about other writers. The only person I recall him saying anything nice about was Thomas Mann
Hmmm. I hardly disagree with anything in this essay - except the entire thesis ... Let me explain what I mean.
I totally agree with your judgement about the weaknesses of 1984, the unsatisfactory way his personal angst over his class invades so much of his writing, etc. etc. But Orwell wrote, in my view, two great books - one fiction, one fact - and you brush over the first, and don't mention the second.
The great fiction is, of course, Animal Farm - which you grudgingly acknowledge is a wonderful book. You say that "you can remember very little of what he wrote. It doesn’t stick" - but so much of the specifics of the language of Animal Farm does stick, not just the one or two famous quotes. The only bad thing you have to say about the book comes from the catty rejection letter by T.S. Eliot - which really misses the point. Yes, more public-spirited pigs would have saved Animal Farm, but the essence of the book is that any social revolution which institutes a new hierarchy is going to be dominated by people whose commitment to the public good is ultimately overridden by pursuit of their own interests. You don't have to agree with that thesis, but it is compellingly depicted in the allegory whether or not one agrees with it.
And then there's the great factual book - Homage to Catalonia. There is, it's true, a small amount of his agonizing about the "true nature of socialism" in it, but that really occupies a tiny portion of the book, and is not its major theme. The book is so memorable for the gritty account of day-to-day life during the war, and the way in which the Republican cause was fatally ruined by the inability of those fighting for it to keep together, and the consequent tragedy of Spain collapsing into Fascism before Orwell's eyes.
So the nub of my problem is: you seem to be working from the premise that we can only call people great writers if their entire oeuvre (more or less) consists of masterpieces. And that seems to me simply wrong. Can't we crown a great writer on the basis of one or two great books? If Milton had not written Paradise Lost, he would be remembered as a decent minor poet and polemicist - but Paradise Lost outweighs everything else. One of my favourite 20th century novels is Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra - and I'm happy to call Fuentes a great writer on the back of it, even though nothing else Fuentes wrote is one quarter as good. Why shouldn't we say the same about Orwell?
The idea of CS Lewis, of all people, criticizing a work for having "too much in it of the author’s own psychology" is, I think, quite rich.
I don't have much opinion on Orwell's wider writings, but I think you have Animal Farm wrong. A "clever allegory" is the most common reading, but it's actually a political fable, which is an entirely different thing. I wrote about that here:
I would be interested in anyone who has read Zemyatin’s ‘We’ recently, which clearly influenced Orwell. ‘We’ does not present a decaying world, but a rather shinny, new world, but interestingly the emphasis on the sexual relations is in ‘We’ as well. It’s the ultimate private world, the last refuge against the prying eyes of the state and neighbours.
No worries. I hope you get a chance to read it. I think Orwell frankly, er, borrowed a lot from Zemyatin, but he’s simply nowhere near as well known as he should be. But, I read it a while ago: maybe it actually depicts viking orgies in a rocket ship.
"His purpose was seldom so much political as humanitarian (or moral) and where he tried to make it so, as in Road To Wigan Pier, the result is an unsuccessful medley of firsthand description, time-staled statistics and naive political exhortation. For all his polemical brilliance Orwell was not a profound thinker. There is something "occasional" about most of his writing, it is riddled with contradictions, he was too concerned with sociological currents - he never concerned himself that everything is filtered through the prism of self and stopped short of total revolt against all abstractions with which society traps, labels and affixes status to the individual, preferring instead to concern himself with "socio-economic vectors", "class-oppression" and all the other abstractions of the "socially-conscious", thus, he is of little interest for those of us who come after him, but then, one gets the feeling in spite of his constant references to politics that he was fundamentally unpolitical, that if he hadn't lived when it was fashionable to be "socially-conscious", the superb, poetical element present in all his work would have made him one of our models." - Alexander Trocchi
This is the best essay I've read on Orwell since that Trocchi piece in an old Evergreen Review. I don't want to cast any definitive judgments as I haven't read all of his work but for the most part I concur with you here, Henry. And yes, 1984 is a bad novel that has become a meme fest.
Another emblem of "higher-middlebrow English-pessimism," Malcom Muggeridge describes acquaintances of Orwell describing him as "a gloomy sort of chap," and "a gate swinging on a rusty hinge." Regardless of how much one likes Orwell's books, there is certainly something to this critique.
I agree with almost all of this excellent critique, but it is not true that 'he was one of a small number of left-wing people who avoided being duped by Stalinism.' A very large number of left wing people were hostile to or at least highly sceptical of the Soviet Union, even though so much attention is given to a handful of fellow-travellers. The myth of Orwell as the uniquely courageous opponent of Stalin is only true of his time in Spain. I particularly agree with your point that he lacked empirical understanding. Wigan Pier is full of empathy and generalised opinion, particularly about his fellow-socialists, but lacks any hard analysis of how this country he describes came to be like that. The point of being a socialist is not just to have feelings but to have an analysis. Others did the job better - J B Priestley for one, whom Orwell would no doubt dismiss as a popular hack - English Journey is a popular book, not a political tract, but its analysis of 1930s Britain and its historical roots is more penetrating than anything Orwell wrote. It was Priestley not Orwell who became an influential wartime commentator; Priestley never had any doubts where he stood on Stalin or Hitler, or the prospect of postwar social-democratic Britain, while Orwell's attitude to the outbreak of war hardly stands up to examination.
Orwell shaped my worldview, particularly 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' and 'Down and Out,' but also 'A Clergyman's Daughter' and 'Coming Up for Air.' Yet I can't help agreeing with much of this critique. Also, I recently read Anna Funder's 'Wifedom,' which I'd feared would be predictable feminist boilerplate, but turned out to demonstrate - I'd say unarguably - what a bad husband he was to Eileen. The couple did indeed live that agricultural life, in both Oxfordshire and Jura, unsupported by any modern aids, in truly appalling conditions and worsening health.
My first exposure to Orwell was in high school, where 1984 left me, as you could imagine after 9/11, in a catatonic state of paranoia. Over time, though, I have come to appreciate his pre-war works the most, especially the novels, as this is where he is strongest. He is a good observer of his time, writing, despite his later insistence that the writer should efface himself from the prose, as someone with all the predicaments and peccadillos of that era. He's somewhat like Hemingway in that regard, in that the writer himself is the Rosetta Stone to appreciating the work, which isn't always the case.
Is the main point of this to diminish Orwell as a writer, a serious thinker, or to talk down to readers who very much like his work, and find its content meaningful and relevant still - even if it is "a fact" we are unable to recall "very little of what he wrote." (How do you know as a fact what we are able to recall or not?)
Btw, on my understanding of 1984, the Thought Police were anti-sex only because sex was recognized by The State as a (distracting) universal experience of human joy. Expressions of joy were only tolerated in Oceania so far as they demonstrated acquiescence to The State. Strip humanity of every last vestige of personal autonomy and freedom, and you control them completely. I'm surprised Lewis missed that.
And enough with the "A real literary genius..." canards already. An artist does not have to be widely regarded as a "genius," (even assuming there were a widely-agreed on, objective measure of genius) to be regarded as very good, does he? And heaven forbid a writer should permit his own worldview to inhabit his fiction!
"But the idea that he was uniquely honest or observant is exaggerated."
No it's not. I don't about "uniquely," but Orwell was nothing if not honest and truthful with his sentences, most of the time. Which is about as much as we can expect of any writer. And where exceptions are revealed...well, cherry pickers gotta cherry pick I guess.
Amusing, but in its urge to crucify Orwell as a small-minded John Bull misses the crackling ambivalence that keeps him feeling so vastly more relevant and current than nearly any other writer of his time. You shoot at the king, you better not miss -- and this missed.
Hear hear!
Politics and the English Language is one of my favorite essays. I haven't read his other works in a long time.
I think it’s awful! https://open.substack.com/pub/commonreader/p/my-debate-with-robert-cottrell?r=1g4uc&utm_medium=ios
I’ll have to read the essay again. Awful is harsh (to use a short word!)
What I try to show at the link is the way that the rules in themselves are not very coherent and that once you see past the fairly lame politics the whole essay just isn't as mighty as it is thought to be
"Orwell is beloved by people who don’t want to look at graphs."
I cannot think of a higher compliment to his readership.
You know when a writer relies on insults to make a point, there isn’t one! Actually, Orwell is beloved by those who know how to interpret not only graphs, but also the context in which they are presented: case and point I make below. Oliver wrote this and included a link to a graph.
Oliver wrote: "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.”—
That "English standards carried on ascending uninterruptedly after Indian independence" falsifies nothing. That the British economy was more diversified at that point — that it was not totally dependent on India does not negate the very real and documented exploitation of India.
You have elided two different points. Orwell thought British living standards depended on Indian exploitation, which wasn’t true. That doesn’t mean the exploitation wasn’t real. Of course it was.
Here is a book you might find interesting.
"Every Intellectual's Big Brother : George Orwell's Literary Siblings"
John Rodden
Orwell was anti-Catholic. This might also be informing your distaste for him? Given that the Catholics in the US are leading our current run at fascism, this comment from Christopher Hitchens in that book resonates with me at the moment.
—"The twenty-first century began, not with a confrontation with the totalitarian principle, but with the recrudescence of an older form of absolutism, namely the theocratic, millennial fanaticism that was met with in Afghanistan and has been able to metastasize itself. Theocratic absolutism— and millennial religion— metastasized very rapidly, even within the American border, with a secret army. Orwell teaches us quite a lot about this. The ultimate form, and the most refined form, of tyranny— because it requires us not just to obey, not simply to be a slave but to be a joyful one, to praise our chains, to enjoy our master, to kiss the whip— and it’s perhaps therefore the most threatening form— is exemplified by the intellectuals of Nineteen Eighty-Four who attempt to change the language and the existence of the secret book. Everything in his writing shows that Orwell prizes liberty and regards the concept of the infallible Vatican as the most menacing tyranny from which you can escape.”--
I believe it is you who has done the eliding. You point to England’s economy post Indian Independence as proof that Orwell was wrong about England benefiting greatly from the exploitation and abuse of India. That is your point. You are wrong to assert this. For someone who is quick to point out simple reductions — this is a big one. As if there is a one-to-one correlation between the gross exploitation of India that Orwell speaks of and your economy after 1947 is comical at best. That the ascendency of your living standards from 1947 onward was one of the largest postwar cash infusions ever by The United States of America (68.8 Billion from 1947-1954) has nothing to do with the fact that England did actually benefit greatly from their gross exploitation of India about which Orwell is correct. The point is that one does not refute the other. The reasons for your economy’s boom post 1947 is irrelevant to Orwell’s point. But here is a graph for you since I know you are fond of them.
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2025-01/US_foreign_assistance.png?itok=6KaGbv30
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/special-relationship-brief-history-us-aid-uk
You are being ironic, aren't you!?!
It is precisely his prejudices and lack of artifice that make Orwell’s essays so great. Of course they have to be read with skepticism, but though he may have been wrong in his predictions and even his judgements, what his essays have retained is a certain kind of timeliness, which is harder to achieve this many years out than timelessness. An essay by Charles Lamb in Orwell’s day, for example, probably already bore the weight of age in a way that Orwell’s today don’t.
But I think it’s also fair to say that what Orwell did best was journalism of a particularly high caliber, which nails down the same quality that makes Ben Franklin’s gossip columns for the Pennsylvania Gazette so compulsively readable almost 300 years later. He wrote very well about minutiae in a way that makes his work a good exemplar of the period. Orwell gives you a taste of the 1930s from the vantage point of an educated contemporary magazine subscriber - ordinary readers just like us.
I respectfully disagree with this. Orwell is in my top five of all time, easily. I have read everything except the first two novels, which I really ought to do. I have a whole book about Orwell I want to write. No spoilers. I will reserve any detailed comment until such happy time as I can write and publish that notional book. I think if I could work on it full time for six months I could bash it out.
You should blog the case for Orwell! Would be interested to read it.
So many other commitments: (1) professional work, which is heating up, (2) my own novel, which is long but I think I can see the finish line from here, at least drafting it, hopefully by 1/1/26, (3) engagement with some of the current books and possibly posting about those. I have eight books I have at least sketched out that I want to write: (1-3) the current novel and its two sequels, (4-6) three different novels where hinge historical events went a different way as a backstory, which will be, I think spy thrillers using a MacGuffin to tour these alternate histories, (7) a short romantic comedy I started thirty years ago but now I think I can write female characters, and (8) the Orwell book. I am 62. If I can manage to liberate myself from full time professional work reasonably soon, I may be able to pull this off. I will finish the first of the trilogy, which is monstrously long, then the romantic comedy, likely a novella, to cleanse my palate.
I think a lot of the problem with Orwell's reputation is the myth of moral authority that has been built around him. On which note, you might like this, which Orwell's friend Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in his diary after the funeral. “Read through various obituary articles on George by Koestler, Pritchett, Julian Symons, etc., and saw in them how the legend of a human being is created, because although they were ostensibly correct and I might have written the same sort of stuff myself, they were yet inherently false - e.g. everyone saying George was not given to self-pity, whereas it was of course his dominant emotion.”
The myth of moral authority is exactly right and most evident in the least tempered comments!
You came for the king! I’m pretty confident Orwell would have found that thought hilarious on so many levels. Which is part of his charm tbh.
Anthony Powell, who was a friend of Orwell ("the only conservative I like"), left the following appraisal:
> Apart from the projections of himself, the characters of his novels do not live as persons, though they are sometimes effective puppets in expressing his thesis of the moment. Orwell had a thoroughly professional approach to writing and a finished style
I think that's pretty much right. Interestingly I think Orwell's direct style is better than Powell's indirectness, but Powell is a better writer. His scenes and characters really come alive.
Naipaul, a better writer & stylist than both, was also a friend of Powell, and after reading Powell after his death, remarked, "It may be that the friendship lasted all that time because I had not examined his work." These Brits love to speak ill of the dead!
Although 1984 contains clumsy didacticism, it is a successful mood piece that captures the post-war malaise. I agree with you that Orwell shouldn't be so idolized, but who should, really? He's certainly worth reading.
I agree with you about Naipaul's genius but he was relentlessly cruel about other writers. The only person I recall him saying anything nice about was Thomas Mann
I've only read Death in Venice and I hated it. As Nabokov said, "To consider it a masterpiece is an absurd delusion."
Naipaul had the goal of beating the English at their own game, which probably contributed to his nastiness.
Always read like insecurity to me. But his prose style was unimpeachable
That’s a good Powell quote. Is that from the Journals?
I got it from The Atlantic. He says a lot more about Orwell too, it's a good read: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1967/10/george-orwell/660337/
Thanks!
Thanks
Hmmm. I hardly disagree with anything in this essay - except the entire thesis ... Let me explain what I mean.
I totally agree with your judgement about the weaknesses of 1984, the unsatisfactory way his personal angst over his class invades so much of his writing, etc. etc. But Orwell wrote, in my view, two great books - one fiction, one fact - and you brush over the first, and don't mention the second.
The great fiction is, of course, Animal Farm - which you grudgingly acknowledge is a wonderful book. You say that "you can remember very little of what he wrote. It doesn’t stick" - but so much of the specifics of the language of Animal Farm does stick, not just the one or two famous quotes. The only bad thing you have to say about the book comes from the catty rejection letter by T.S. Eliot - which really misses the point. Yes, more public-spirited pigs would have saved Animal Farm, but the essence of the book is that any social revolution which institutes a new hierarchy is going to be dominated by people whose commitment to the public good is ultimately overridden by pursuit of their own interests. You don't have to agree with that thesis, but it is compellingly depicted in the allegory whether or not one agrees with it.
And then there's the great factual book - Homage to Catalonia. There is, it's true, a small amount of his agonizing about the "true nature of socialism" in it, but that really occupies a tiny portion of the book, and is not its major theme. The book is so memorable for the gritty account of day-to-day life during the war, and the way in which the Republican cause was fatally ruined by the inability of those fighting for it to keep together, and the consequent tragedy of Spain collapsing into Fascism before Orwell's eyes.
So the nub of my problem is: you seem to be working from the premise that we can only call people great writers if their entire oeuvre (more or less) consists of masterpieces. And that seems to me simply wrong. Can't we crown a great writer on the basis of one or two great books? If Milton had not written Paradise Lost, he would be remembered as a decent minor poet and polemicist - but Paradise Lost outweighs everything else. One of my favourite 20th century novels is Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra - and I'm happy to call Fuentes a great writer on the back of it, even though nothing else Fuentes wrote is one quarter as good. Why shouldn't we say the same about Orwell?
The idea of CS Lewis, of all people, criticizing a work for having "too much in it of the author’s own psychology" is, I think, quite rich.
I don't have much opinion on Orwell's wider writings, but I think you have Animal Farm wrong. A "clever allegory" is the most common reading, but it's actually a political fable, which is an entirely different thing. I wrote about that here:
https://thecurriculum.substack.com/p/01-animal-farm-is-the-most-universal
I would be interested in anyone who has read Zemyatin’s ‘We’ recently, which clearly influenced Orwell. ‘We’ does not present a decaying world, but a rather shinny, new world, but interestingly the emphasis on the sexual relations is in ‘We’ as well. It’s the ultimate private world, the last refuge against the prying eyes of the state and neighbours.
Interesting thanks!
No worries. I hope you get a chance to read it. I think Orwell frankly, er, borrowed a lot from Zemyatin, but he’s simply nowhere near as well known as he should be. But, I read it a while ago: maybe it actually depicts viking orgies in a rocket ship.
"His purpose was seldom so much political as humanitarian (or moral) and where he tried to make it so, as in Road To Wigan Pier, the result is an unsuccessful medley of firsthand description, time-staled statistics and naive political exhortation. For all his polemical brilliance Orwell was not a profound thinker. There is something "occasional" about most of his writing, it is riddled with contradictions, he was too concerned with sociological currents - he never concerned himself that everything is filtered through the prism of self and stopped short of total revolt against all abstractions with which society traps, labels and affixes status to the individual, preferring instead to concern himself with "socio-economic vectors", "class-oppression" and all the other abstractions of the "socially-conscious", thus, he is of little interest for those of us who come after him, but then, one gets the feeling in spite of his constant references to politics that he was fundamentally unpolitical, that if he hadn't lived when it was fashionable to be "socially-conscious", the superb, poetical element present in all his work would have made him one of our models." - Alexander Trocchi
This is the best essay I've read on Orwell since that Trocchi piece in an old Evergreen Review. I don't want to cast any definitive judgments as I haven't read all of his work but for the most part I concur with you here, Henry. And yes, 1984 is a bad novel that has become a meme fest.
Oh I’m going to look that up it sounds great thank you!
Another emblem of "higher-middlebrow English-pessimism," Malcom Muggeridge describes acquaintances of Orwell describing him as "a gloomy sort of chap," and "a gate swinging on a rusty hinge." Regardless of how much one likes Orwell's books, there is certainly something to this critique.
Haha that’s excellent
I agree with almost all of this excellent critique, but it is not true that 'he was one of a small number of left-wing people who avoided being duped by Stalinism.' A very large number of left wing people were hostile to or at least highly sceptical of the Soviet Union, even though so much attention is given to a handful of fellow-travellers. The myth of Orwell as the uniquely courageous opponent of Stalin is only true of his time in Spain. I particularly agree with your point that he lacked empirical understanding. Wigan Pier is full of empathy and generalised opinion, particularly about his fellow-socialists, but lacks any hard analysis of how this country he describes came to be like that. The point of being a socialist is not just to have feelings but to have an analysis. Others did the job better - J B Priestley for one, whom Orwell would no doubt dismiss as a popular hack - English Journey is a popular book, not a political tract, but its analysis of 1930s Britain and its historical roots is more penetrating than anything Orwell wrote. It was Priestley not Orwell who became an influential wartime commentator; Priestley never had any doubts where he stood on Stalin or Hitler, or the prospect of postwar social-democratic Britain, while Orwell's attitude to the outbreak of war hardly stands up to examination.
Someone should write a good piece about J.B.P., yes, that would be interesting.
Well, I've written a book...
oh! link?
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719072871/
Thanks! Reserved at library! Do lmk if you'd be interested in writing a guest post for me about this...
I’d be glad to.
Orwell shaped my worldview, particularly 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying' and 'Down and Out,' but also 'A Clergyman's Daughter' and 'Coming Up for Air.' Yet I can't help agreeing with much of this critique. Also, I recently read Anna Funder's 'Wifedom,' which I'd feared would be predictable feminist boilerplate, but turned out to demonstrate - I'd say unarguably - what a bad husband he was to Eileen. The couple did indeed live that agricultural life, in both Oxfordshire and Jura, unsupported by any modern aids, in truly appalling conditions and worsening health.
My first exposure to Orwell was in high school, where 1984 left me, as you could imagine after 9/11, in a catatonic state of paranoia. Over time, though, I have come to appreciate his pre-war works the most, especially the novels, as this is where he is strongest. He is a good observer of his time, writing, despite his later insistence that the writer should efface himself from the prose, as someone with all the predicaments and peccadillos of that era. He's somewhat like Hemingway in that regard, in that the writer himself is the Rosetta Stone to appreciating the work, which isn't always the case.
Is the main point of this to diminish Orwell as a writer, a serious thinker, or to talk down to readers who very much like his work, and find its content meaningful and relevant still - even if it is "a fact" we are unable to recall "very little of what he wrote." (How do you know as a fact what we are able to recall or not?)
Btw, on my understanding of 1984, the Thought Police were anti-sex only because sex was recognized by The State as a (distracting) universal experience of human joy. Expressions of joy were only tolerated in Oceania so far as they demonstrated acquiescence to The State. Strip humanity of every last vestige of personal autonomy and freedom, and you control them completely. I'm surprised Lewis missed that.
And enough with the "A real literary genius..." canards already. An artist does not have to be widely regarded as a "genius," (even assuming there were a widely-agreed on, objective measure of genius) to be regarded as very good, does he? And heaven forbid a writer should permit his own worldview to inhabit his fiction!
"But the idea that he was uniquely honest or observant is exaggerated."
No it's not. I don't about "uniquely," but Orwell was nothing if not honest and truthful with his sentences, most of the time. Which is about as much as we can expect of any writer. And where exceptions are revealed...well, cherry pickers gotta cherry pick I guess.