4 JULY 1998, Page 65

BOOKS

Going native at home

Bevis Hillier

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE ORWELL, 20 VOLUMES edited by Peter Davison, assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison Secker & Warburg L750 0 ne of the nicest and wisest men I have known — he died not long ago — was the British film director Sidney Gilliat. Though he never won the fame of a Michael Powell or a David Lean, he made the fine wartime film Millions Like Us and was earlier a screenwriter for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

During the war he was vexed that the Ministry of Information (MoI) seemed to prefer documentary film-makers to direc- tors of feature films, like himself. He felt that feature films would have been more effective as propaganda, and further complained:

The documentary film-makers had this notion that `real people' should be used, not actors. In other words, a billeting officer should be played by a billeting officer, to make the thing more realistic. He's come home for lunch when these calls come on the telephone for billeting; and this poor chap has literally got a hot potato in his mouth and is trying to remember lines that he hasn't been taught to speak.

Gilliat's memory was that

The documentarians felt they were a lowlier species with higher ideas; and we [the feature film-makers] were a higher species with lower ideas. Each side had a chip of a different kind on its shoulder.

Reading the early 1930s works of George Orwell in this stupendous edition of his writings, you can see that his dilemma was similar to that of the wartime MoI: he was torn between presenting his experiences as fiction and as documentary. It seemed right to him to tell things as they were — in a cliché he would have deplored, 'the unvar- nished truth' — rather than dressed up as a story. Yet he knew that fact never has the cachet of fiction. If Proust had served up his recollections as The Memoirs of Marcel Proust, instead of recycling them in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, their critical reception would have been muted. Of Orwell's coruscating book of essays, Inside the Whale, published in 1940, his biogra- pher Michael Shelden writes:

It was not then, and is not now, accorded the same respect which a good many second-rate novels receive merely because they are fiction.

In the Thirties, there converged two tendencies which made this decade a sur- prisingly uncongenial time for a writer of Orwell's stamp to be trying to establish himself. First, after the crash of 1929 — a caesura between the frivolous Twenties and the committed Thirties — everything became more political. That acute social observer Osbert Lancaster describes in his memoirs the change he witnessed at Oxford:

Aesthetics were out and politics were in, and sensibility was replaced by social awareness. Figures such as [Richard] Crossman, `broad of Church and broad of mind, broad before and broad behind', who as undergraduates had been widely regarded as jokes, as young dons now loomed large with prophetic menace. In Blackwell's the rainbow hues of the Duck- worth collected Firbank were soon over- whelmed by the yellow flood of the Left Book Club. and the recorded strains of 'Happy days are here again' floating across the summer quad were drowned by the melancholy cadences of 'Hyfrydwl' chanted live by Welsh miners trekking southward down the High.

`We never cane one another any more.' In the Twenties, Lancaster had been a Bright Young Thing. If the new mood impinged on a gadfly like him, how much more did it impinge on an Orwell. He felt impelled to write on the rise of fascism, the abuses of imperialism and the plight of the workers.

That would have been fine if he had just wanted to be a pamphleteer or journalist. But the literary forms which beckoned young writers of the Thirties were poetry and the novel. In a recent review of T. S. Eliot's early works I suggested, to the indignant yapping of his admirers, that he made the wrong choice when he decided to become a poet. (It was, by the way, clever Mr Eliot who in 1932 turned down for Faber's Orwell's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London; and it was again dis- cerning Mr Eliot who in a letter of 1944, described by Shelden as 'stiff and cold', rejected Animal Farm, thus doing Faber's out of millions of pounds.) Luckily, Orwell was a stringent enough self-critic to realise, after a while, that he was no poet. Michael Shelden hails as 'enduring' and of 'a simple poignancy' some lines to an Italian militia- man which Orwell wrote after returning from the Spanish Civil War; but even they strike me as high-falutin' and self- consciously 'poetic', the last qualities one normally associates with Orwell:

But the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit.

As late as 1933 Orwell could publish a lamentable poem about 'sere elms' 'Each tree a being, rapt, alone.'

In the Twenties, novel-writing had brought Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh great kudos. Graham Greene's first really successful novel, Stamboul Train, was pub- lished in 1932. Though Orwell had a masochistic penchant for basking in failure, he was ambitious. To try to excel in the prevailing literary forms was a challenge, and he courted challenges.

He assumed [Shelden writes] that he should be writing novels or poems, when his talent had never shone as brightly in these forms as it did in his sketches, his essays, his reviews and his non-fiction books.

Orwell's early novels, like Bernard Shaw's plays, are marred by an intrusive didacticism, the urge to interrupt the narrative, every now and again, with a mini-lecture on one of his hobby-horses. The American critic Margaret Carson Hubbard, reviewing his first novel, Burmese Days, in the New York Herald Tribune in

1934, wrote: The trouble with this novel is that the axe Mr Orwell is grinding is so vastly important to him that it has chopped to pieces all interest in the very situation he most wants to expose.

That was not quite fair. Burmese Days is an impressive debut, with an E. M. Forster- like plot: young colonial administrator sides with Burmese against the snarling white men in his club; takes Burmese mis- tress; falls in love with pretty white girl of limited 'colonial' outlook; is publicly dis- graced; is rejected by her; shoots self. But we are subjected to rather a lot of homilies. The book also suffers from the fact that Orwell seems to despise all the characters, including the one who represents himself, who is given a 'hideous' blue birthmark for good measure.

Like so many political theorists Orwell had, you feel, more compassion for human- ity than for individual humans. That comes through in his biography. When his wife Eileen died in 1945, he was reporting on the final months of the war, in Paris. (He had not bothered to come home for her hysterectomy operation.) On receiving the news of her death, he did fly home; but then, instead of staying around to comfort their young adopted son, he flew straight back to France. ' Perhaps after a few weeks of bumping around in jeeps etc. I shall feel better,' he wrote to a friend. A woman who shared a flat with him found him 'not easy to warm to . . . something hadn't blos- somed in him.' And his friend Arthur Koestler said, 'I don't think George ever knew what makes other people tick' something of a handicap in a novelist.

One senses, behind much of his writing, a seething anger, held in check only by good manners. What caused it? He spoke a lot about 'guilt' over his privileged back- ground, but I think that was a smokescreen and suspect some secret crippling of the psyche — or even the body — symbolised by that blue scar in Burmese Days. (Somer- set Maugham similarly gave one of his heroes a club foot as proxy for his own chronic stammer.) The central character of Burmese Days is an Englishman who goes native in the East. In an inspired phrase, V. S. Pritchett wrote that Orwell was an Englishman who went native in his own country. Orwell shrugged off his class and for a while became a tramp. (Was he perhaps influenced by W. H. Davies's Autobiography of a Super- tramp?) Not since Henry Fielding had an Old Etonian tried so hard to get under the skin of the working class. He wanted to be an honorary prole. When a Tyneside work- er with the somewhat allegorical name Jack Common met him in 1930 he could not make out whether he was a rebel pretend- ing to be a toff, or vice-versa. In his research into the working class of the north, Orwell, 6ft 3in tall, was prepared to crawl along coal-mine passages four foot high. Here was his alternative, 'documen- tary' mode of the Thirties. Away from fic- tion, he wrote Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938).

Of all 20th-century writers, he probably tried harder than any other to be honest: Pritchett thought him 'a saint'. But did he succeed? Like the film-makers, he thrust his lens, as it were, into the mines and the slums. But there was still some discretion, some calculation as to where exactly it went, and the span and chiaroscuro of the composition. Christopher Isherwood boast- ed, 'I am a camera', the implication being that he simply recorded what he found with no embellishment. It was no more true of him than of Orwell or any other artist. The truth is hardly ever unvarnished. , Right-wingers thought Orwell s tableaux were distorted by his socialist views. Kings- ley Amis, in What Became of Jane Austen? (1971), wrote: I often feel that I will never pick up a book by Orwell again until I have read a frank discus- sion of the dishonesty and hysteria that mar some of his best work.

But as an Etonian Orwell was suspect to the Left too. The communist Harry Pollitt sneered in the Daily Worker that The Road to Wigan Pier was a travesty which distract- ed the reader's attention from genuine social problems to the life of 'a disillu- sioned little middle-class boy . . . and late imperialist policeman'. And in the Partisan Review in 1942, George Woodcock, he of the Miracle-Gro eyebrows, denounced `Comrade Orwell' as a reactionary. Hugh Thomas, as the recipient of a Thatcher peerage, might not be regarded as a natural soul-mate for Orwell, but most would accept that his The Spanish Civil War is fair-minded and generally reliable. This is what he says of Orwell's Homage to Cat- alonia:

His account of the [Barcelona] riots [of 1937], marvellously written though it is, should be read with reservations. It is more accurate about war itself than about the Spanish War.

I think Orwell might have taken that as a compliment.

Having failed in the Thirties to find a genre ideally suited to his genius, in the Forties he did light on one: fantasy satire. In depicting a society going wrong (Animal Farm) and one that had gone horribly wrong (Nineteen Eighty-Four), his character flaws almost became assets and his imagi- nation came into full play. Now the docu- mentary element gave substance to fantasy, instead of fantasy undermining documen- tary.

He was well schooled in satire. Gulliver's Travels was his favourite book: he reread it each year. Samuel Butler's Erewhon must have been an influence too. But I have a theory about the particular genesis of Ani- mal Farm. In 1939 Duckworth published Napoleon, a small book by the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield. He suggested that the French Revolution had moved on its own momentum to an inversion of its original ideals, and concluded:

Napoleon is the heir — if he is not the logical conclusion — of the French Revolution. . . By a process that has been repeated many times since — always with similar technique and similar tricks of intellectual sleight-of-hand the Revolution itself found formulas for the future enslavement of mankind, and pro- duced, while Napoleon was still unknown, all the ingredients of his system — the dictator- ship based on the plebiscite.

It might be argued that anyone with his head screwed on can see that revolutions spew up dictators, and clearly the Soviet Union was Orwell's target. But I think it possible that Butterfield's eloquent little book sparked off the idea for a novel about a well-intentioned revolution that lurches into totalitarianism. Anthony Powell was a friend of Orwell — 'the only Tory I have ever liked,' Orwell said — and worked for Duckworth's in the 1930s. He resigned in 1936; but perhaps he put Orwell on a complimentary copies list? Even if he did not, it is quite on the cards that Orwell read Butterfield's book. And he did name his dictator-pig Napoleon.

It is no part of Professor Davison's task to indulge in such speculations. He also refrains from wondering whether Old Ben- jamin, the misanthropic donkey in Animal Farm, was modelled on Eeyore, the misan- thropic donkey in A. A. Milne's Pooh Bear books; or whether the antique glass paper- weight in Nineteen Eighty-Four, containing 'a fragment of coral, a tiny crinkle of pink like a sugar rosebud from a cake', might be a subconscious harking back to the smashed paperweight and the muttered name 'Rosebud' in Orson Welles's 1941 Citizen Kane (The link comes as no shock — 'Orwell' always did sound like a tele- graphic address for Orson Welles.) Welles's name occurs in the list of sus- pected Soviet sympathisers, published in this edition, which has been the object of so much press interest. Orwell has been reviled as some kind of Senator McCarthy and a betrayer of his 'friends'. But he was dying; he was half in love with the woman he sent the list to; he had made no secret of his anti-Stalinism; and anyway, those on the list were not about to be liquidated, as they might have been under the regime Orwell thought they supported. The list is just about the least significant part of this edition.

The edition is a wonder. Those who have bought Penguin editions of Orwell's works in recent years will be familiar with Peter Davison's punctilious scholarship. He sifts through all the variant texts and makes judicious choices. His task has rarely been simple. As an instance, Burmese Days was first published in America in 1934. When Gollancz brought out an English edition in 1935, many changes were made to guard against libel actions — for example, the newspaper Burmese Patriot was changed to Burmese Sinn Feiner. Orwell regarded that edition as 'garbled' and asked that the Pen- guin edition of 1944 should follow the American edition. So you might think the Gollancz edition could be ignored. Not so. In altering the American edition to soothe Gollancz's worries about libel, Orwell also made changes on literary grounds and picked up some errors — so that 'footling' (as Davison comments, very much an Orwell word) replaced the erroneous 'fool- ing'. The 17 years Davison has spent on this enterprise have ensured that none of these tricky choices has been arbitrary. Each work is now more satisfactory than any that Orwell handled. In the juvenilia, we see the future mas- ter's toddler and adolescent phases. Then there is a wealth of book reviews and arti- cles. I note his verdicts on Eliot's poetry (`frigid and snooty') and on Ezra Pound Can entirely spurious writer'): Orwell had a low bullshit threshold. Some of the most impromptu and unbuttoned pieces are in his 'As I Please' column in Tribune. In these articles he often allows himself a breather from politics, writing on topics as diverse as junk shops, rare books and 'the ugliest building in the world' (the Green- wich Observatory). It can be a relief when he gets off politics. Though his political writings are as fluent as all his other work, he was infected enough with factional in- fighting and polemics to make habitual use of such words as 'filthy', 'dirty', 'foul' and — most over-used in his vocabulary of opprobrium — 'silly'. He saw that to defeat fascism he needed to join the socialists, but at the same time he detested 'all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contend- ing for our souls'. What held him back from extremism was his sense of humour. Explaining why the British would never put up with goose-stepping storm-troopers, he wrote:

There are, heaven knows, plenty of army offi- cers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.

Before Orwell came along, critics who were asked for a model of English prose tended to recommend — and justly — Car- dinal Newman. Orwell gave us a template for 20th-century prose which shows no signs of obsolescence. Admittedly, he was being disingenuous when he wrote that good prose should be 'like a window pane'. The effect is pellucid, but much artifice goes into it. There is his arsenal of adjectives and his inexhaustible reservoir of perfect-pitch analogies. One of his secrets is to make very frequent use of single- syllable words. He acknowledged that he owed this trait of style to the Bible. His upper-middle-class C of E education gave him his grounding in the gospels. Ironical- ly, it also gave him, in the Eton cadet corps, a military training which came in useful in

the Spanish Civil War. (He was aghast to find that his comrades-in-arms had never heard of a `pullthrough' — the widget for cleaning a rifle barrel.)

Cyril Connolly was at Eton with Orwell (Eric Blair, as he then was) and had suf- fered with him at the horrible prep school which Orwell immortally slanged in his essay 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. Connolly liked Orwell but was envious of his success with novels. He made the cattiest and fun- niest remark about his friend, 'He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.'

Was Orwell, as that implied, political to the core? Anthony Powell has suggested that literature meant more to him than pol- itics. If that is true (and I think it is), per- haps Orwell beat Marshall McLuhan to it in recognising that the medium is the mes- sage. Thus Nineteen Eighty-Four pits the deathly impersonality of Newspeak against the vital individuality of Orwellspeak, the language in which the novel is written. The novel is a harbinger of political correctness. And, of course, it foreshadows so much else, as prophecy was another arm of Orwell's genius. (His only 20th-century rival in that art was H. G. Wells.) I think of the surveillance cameras that track our movements and are doing so much for loranorder. I think of the proposed identity cards which will be oh so 'strictly voluntary' at first — until all shops demand to see them, just as those in Los Angeles refuse to believe you exist if you can't produce a driving licence. And I think of dear Dame Stella Rimington, who after her sterling service at MI5 'admits she is now spying for Marks & Spencer' (Sunday Telegraph, 21 June 1998).

In 1971 Raymond Williams (of Culture and Society fame) brought out a short book on Orwell in the Fontana 'Modern Mas- ters' series. An excusably opportunist sec- ond edition was published in 1984. To the original book was tacked on a new final chapter, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984', which began with the sunny observation:

It was never at all likely that any actual soci- ety, in 1984, would much resemble the hell- hole of Orwell's novel.

It sounded suspiciously like a sigh of relief. In 1997 Gilbert Adair, a writer in the Orwell tradition (brain and elegance allied in novels, reportage, essays), made this metaphysical point about Nineteen Eighty- Four in a footnote to his Surfing the Zeit- geist:

A thought for first-time readers of Orwell's novel today: is its narrative still set in the future or else in the past, or even in what might be regarded as the conditional?

Let's avoid the obvious gag about 'future imperfect', shall we?

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