Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation
By Jeffrey Meyers
Norton, 2000
380pp, $39.90 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"Big Brother is watching you"; "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" — these epigrams from Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, George Orwell's two most famous books, have been part of the political furniture for half a century. The term "Orwellian" has come to describe political hypocrisy and the rewriting of the past.
What is also true, however, is that observations applicable to all undemocratic political systems have been overwhelmingly used as an ideological tool by the right against the left. When some naive half-wit prattles on about the desirability of socialism, good old George can be whipped from the cultural holster to level the proto-Stalin with deadly effect: "Look at Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and see what communist revolution gets you — dictatorship, inequality and Big Brother".
Jeffrey Meyers' biography of Orwell contains plenty of clues as to why the political right have been able to so easily take an anti-Stalinist leftist like Orwell to their reactionary bosoms.
Orwell's paradoxical politics were the result of his muddled class biography. Born Eric Blair in 1903, Orwell's early education in middle-class superiority began at home and continued at private schools, including Eton, which also trained him in the service of Empire. Five years as an officer in the quasi-military Burmese Police in the 1920s, however, opened Orwell's eyes to what it meant to rule a colony — racism and brute oppression.
Orwell hated doing "the dirty work of the empire" and his burgeoning radicalism found vent in a political rejection of imperialism: "The official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets."
Changing his name to Orwell, Blair sought to expunge his guilt at his elitist upbringing and role as colonial policeman. He tried on a new class identity, living the life of a tramp in the company of social outcasts, beggars, prostitutes and the homeless. Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier, written at the height of the Great Depression, displayed deep sympathy for the human casualties of capitalist economic slump, the destitute and marginalised, and the exploited working class.
The rise of fascism, which offered scapegoats not solutions, led Orwell to decide to fight the scourge in Spain in 1937, where he was wounded in the throat by a fascist sniper. He saw "wonderful things" in Spain, where the working class was "in the saddle" in Barcelona. The revolutionary fervour of Homage to Catalonia marked the height of Orwell's commitment to socialism. The descent started almost immediately.
When the non-Stalinist Spanish left, including the semi-Trotskyist POUM (in whose militia Orwell fought), came under the evil eye of Stalin, Orwell was forced to flee for his life. The Stalinist betrayal of the Spanish Revolution had a profound impact on Orwell. He became a bitter opponent of "communism" and a champion of "democratic socialism", by which he meant the anti-Marxist British Labour Party.
In the last half of the 1940s, Orwell wrote Animal Farm, the political fable about the fate of the Russian Revolution, which was the grim overture to his gloomy masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, his bleak vision of global totalitarianism modelled on an all-seeing, all-powerful Stalinist state. Both books shot to the top of the Cold War hit parade and Orwell had barely enough time to supply to the British Foreign Office a list of "crypto-communists and fellow-travellers" among the country's actors, journalists and writers before his death from tuberculosis in 1950.
How could a man of the left, who denounced imperialism in Burma, sympathetically investigated the working class and the poor in the depression and celebrated revolution in Spain, turn out two books lapped up by the vilest of reactionaries, promoted by the CIA, and "worth a cool million votes to the Conservative Party" (as his publisher said of Nineteen Eighty-Four)? The paradox of Orwell's politics lies in his class biography and its historical juncture.
Orwell tried to break from his class inheritance but it was not a complete severance. He never lost his middle-class sense of superiority, or lost his scepticism about the political capacities of the working class. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell maintained that only the advanced middle-class individual could intelligently grasp socialism. In Animal Farm, the rise to power of Napoleon is explained, not in terms of the material pressures on the Russian Revolution which decimated the working class, but on the stupidity of the ordinary worker. Boxer, the cart-horse and symbol of the proletariat, has the power to topple Stalinism (and capitalism) but is too stupid to use it.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the hope Orwell posits, with "mystical reverence", in the proles is undermined by their passivity and their animal-like seduction by "prolefeed", the "rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, and films oozing with sex" which Orwell detested in England. Orwell's working class is deprived of intellect and organisation, and doomed to drink, gamble, gossip and superstition.
The one exception, Barcelona under proletarian self-government, was defeated and joined a long list of defeats for the working class and revolutionary socialism — the Depression, the rise of Hitler and Stalin, the Second World War.
Orwell was not the only middle-class radical to succumb to pessimism and despair, but to understand the causes of Orwell's gloomy vision in his later books is not to endorse their message that socialism can never work in practice. Orwell wanted to, but couldn't, believe that the working class were up to the job of socialism — and history verified his class prejudices.
Orwell may have named his poodle Marx but all he borrowed from Karl was an ethical condemnation of capitalism, not Marx's materialist history of class conflict. As Edmund Wilson noted, accurately summing up the influential writer , Orwell belonged to the tradition of "middle class British liberalism that depended on common-sense and plain-speaking". The road between right-wingers and "plain-speaking" liberals is paved with "common-sense" such as revolutions always end in tyranny and the working class wouldn't know how to run society. No author can set a world record with sales of 40 million books (and still counting) without those books passing the political safety test.
After Spain, Orwell had become increasingly isolated with little contact with the socialist or working-class movements. He wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four whilst living for four years in an isolated cottage on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. The "If there is a hope it lies in the proles" tacked unconvincingly on to the end of the novel was a weary gesture of a dwindling faith which the narrative fails to sustain. With more emotional conviction, Orwell expressed the stony pessimism of his vision of the future: "A boot stamping on a human face — forever."
Orwell's admirers have included the hard right, from a pro-fascist writer like Wyndham Lewis ("Nineteen Eighty-Four will lead the wavering lefties out of the pink mists of Left Land into clear daylight") to liberal ideologues, who have turned Orwell into a latter day saint whom it would be sacrilegious to criticise.
Meyers, regrettably, is a devotee of "St George", counting off the rosaries of religious veneration — praising Orwell's gritty individualism and endorsing his anti-communism as "necessary", even "commendable".
That Orwell's books have figured so prominently as ideological super-weapons in the many "Hateweeks" organised by capitalism against challengers to its rule, is because of the failure of Orwell's anti-communist liberal politics. Orwell may have been the "wintry conscience of a generation" but spring, like political struggle, exists, too, and even recent history is littered with the corpses of Big Brothers who thought they had the proles in a state of permanent victimhood.