Non-doctrinaire approach: In a letter to an old schoolmate (1 January 1938), Eileen wrote that they called their little dog “Marx” “to remind us that we had never read Marx, and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him.”
Orwell’s revulsion towards all “the smelly little orthodoxies that compete for our souls” explains also his distrust of and contempt for intellectuals. This attitude dates back a long way, as he recalls in a letter of October 1938: “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen. I was always struck by this when I was in Burma and used to read anti-imperialist stuff.” If the colonial experience had taught Orwell to hate imperialism, it also made him respect (like the protagonist in a Kipling story) “men who do things.” “Intellectuals depress me horribly” is another theme often encountered in the Letters. “Intellectuals are more totalitarian”; “the danger is that some native forms of totalitarianism will be developed here, and people like Laski, Pratt, Zilliacus, The News Chronicle and the rest of them seem to me to be simply preparing the way for this.” If the situation was depressing in London, in Paris (which he visited in 1945) it was dismaclass="underline" “Sartre is a big bag of wind”; “French publishers are now commanded by Aragon [famous writer and leading member of the Communist Party] and others not to publish undesirable books.” His own Animal Farm was being translated into nine languages, but “the most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was ‘impossible for political reasons.’” “In France I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the Press, etc. The Occupation seemed to me to have had a terribly crushing effect upon people or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war.” (Though he adds: “The queer thing is that, with all this moral decay, there has over the past decade or so, been much more literary talent in France than in England, or than anywhere else I should say.”) He unfortunately missed meeting Camus at the time, which he regretted. These two men would have found a common language. In a letter of May 1948, he launched a well-aimed attack against Emmanuel Mounier and his flock of Christian fellow-travellers: “It’s funny that when I met Mounier for about ten minutes in 1945, I thought to myself, that man’s a fellow-traveller. I can smell them.” (And — if I may intrude here with a personal experience — how I know them myself! My benighted co-religionists, cretinous clerics and other Maoist morons who, twenty years later, were to preach the gospel of the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”…)
One last note on the subject of Orwell’s politics: in the end, he seems to have essentially reverted to his original position of “Tory Anarchist.” In a letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (4 December 1948—it resurfaced very late and, unfortunately, is not included in Davison’s edition of the Complete Works, nor in Life in Letters; it was reproduced in the Times Literary Supplement when the Complete Works first appeared), there is a statement that seems to me of fundamental importance: “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries, but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
THE HUMAN FACTOR
Even in the heat of battle, and precisely because he distrusted ideology — ideology kills — Orwell always remained acutely aware of the primacy that must be given to human individuals over all “the smelly little orthodoxies.” His exchange of letters (and subsequent friendship) with Stephen Spender provides a splendid example of this. Orwell had lampooned Spender (“parlour Bolshevik,” “pansy poet”); then they met. The encounter was in fact pleasant, which puzzled Spender, who wrote to Orwell on this very subject. Orwell replied:
You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, and on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you…[Formerly] I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a) your verse did not mean very much to me; b) I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist, or Communist sympathiser, and I have been very hostile to the Communist Party since about 1935; and c) because not having met you I could regard you as a type and also as an abstraction. Even if, when I met you, I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude because when you meet someone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone, I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like Labour MPs who get patted on the back by Dukes and are lost forever more.[2]
Which immediately calls to mind a remarkable passage in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell described how, fighting on the frontline during the Spanish Civil War, he once saw a man jumping out of the enemy trench, half-dressed and holding his trousers with both hands as he ran: “I did not shoot, partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists,’ but a man that was holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he’s visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”
LITERATURE
In an otherwise stimulating essay, Irving Howe wrote: “The last thing Orwell cared about when he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the last thing he should have cared about, was literature.” This view is totally mistaken. What made the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four such a gruelling struggle (of which the Letters provide abundant evidence) was precisely the problem of turning a political vision into “a work of art.” (Remember “Why I Write”: “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”) If, in the end, Nineteen Eighty-Four could not fully satisfy Orwell’s exacting literary standards, it is only because he had to work in impossible conditions: he was pressed by time and reduced by a deadly illness to a state of invalidity. That in such a state he could finally complete such an ambitious work was in itself an amazing achievement.
From the very start, literature was always Orwell’s first concern. This is constantly reflected in his correspondence. “Since early childhood I always knew I wanted to write”—this statement is repeated in various forms, all through the years, till the end. But it took him a long time (and incredibly hard work) to discover what to write and how to write it. (His very first literary attempt was a long poem, eventually discarded.) Writing novels became his dominant passion — and an accursed ordeaclass="underline" “Writing a novel is agony.” He finally concluded (accurately), “I am not a real novelist.” And yet, shortly before he died he was still excitedly announcing to his friend and publisher Warburg, “I have a stunning idea for a short novel.”