What does it mean when a man calls his wife 'not a bad old stick'?
PAUL JOHNSON
George Orwell, born a century ago this week, is the only writer of his generation to be honoured by at least two uniform editions of his complete works, including all his letters. It is true that letters from him keep turning up: a group of poignant ones to Muggeridge was published in the Times Literary Supplement recently. More will surely emerge and the public feels that every scrap of his is precious. Of all the writers of his times who sought to tackle the great ideological crisis of the 20th century — and they include Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Aldous Huxley, Hemingway, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Andre Malraux, Sartre, Raymond Aron, Thomas Mann, Ernst Ringer and Solzhenitzyn, as well as fallen idols now pounded into dust like Berthold Brecht — Orwell was the most consistent in hitting the nail on the head, both at the time and still more in retrospect. He got things right: in tone and voice, in emotion and passion, in fact (though not always in theory), in heroes and villains. He was the conscience of that age of horror and wickedness.
He is also the only writer who inspires, among young and old, at home and abroad, of Left and Right, a genuine degree of affection. Why is this? His works themselves don't quite explain it. Granted his short life and the attrition of his incurable disease, they are substantial. His accounts of experiences among the poor in London. Paris and the mining districts, and during the Spanish Civil War, are wonderfully vivid and thoughtful — never a false note. He resurrected the art of satire (and allegory) and wrote two of the few classics in the genre. He hugely expanded the art of the essay in terms of subject matter, and wrote a dozen of the finest examples fit to rank with the best of Lamb and Hazlitt. His writing is a model for the young, using words, as he put it, to form a sheet of transparent glass through which the subject matter could he seen in all its clarity and richness: 'Good prose is like a window pane.' He enriched the language of wisdom. He said it all about totalitarianism in a few memorable phrases: Big Brother, Newspeak, Doublethink, the Un-person, Thoughtcrime; 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'; 'All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.' It was he who coined the phrase about the thin man inside the fat man, on which Connolly dined out ever after (and posthumously). He had a knack of crys
tallising what we vaguely think: 'At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.' He is not always right, but he is always interesting and he makes you think honestly in areas where the received wisdom is strongest. He never hurts you by behaving badly in print.
Orwell also has a metaphysical quality which is at the heart of the love he inspires. He generates trust. Whether we agree with him or not, we know he has come by his views honestly by the reasoning of a wholly independent mind, and that he has taken all the opportunities in his power to verify his conclusions by direct experience. He is the opposite of the unlovable intellectual. He always puts people before ideas. He seizes every occasion to get away from his desk to see with his own eyes, to work with his hands as well as his brain, to risk pain, even danger. He is valorous, physically but also morally. He never flinches from telling the truth at the risk of offending the powerful — naturally — but also at the risk of hurting friends and alienating allies. He is the only socialist of his generation who consistently told the truth about the workers, and never sought to glamorise them. He wrote honestly about the Spanish Civil War at the risk of his life, from the communists, and of his livelihood, by affronting powerful people in the left-wing media, such as Victor Gollancz and Kingsley Martin.
Martin refused to publish Orwell's criticisms of Soviet policy in Spain in his paper, the New Statesman, though he knew they were true. His reasons, though understandable enough — he told me he did not want to undermine the morale of the Left — were still discreditable. So Martin went into the ranks of those Orwell despised, along with Auden ('a gutless Kipling'). He thought he fitted perfectly into his saying about 'the face he deserves' and that he had become the visual image of moral corruption. Muggeridge told me that, in the mid-Forties, he and Orwell were sitting in a restaurant when Orwell asked him to change places. They did so and afterwards he asked the reason for the request. Orwell replied, 'That man Martin had just come in, and I could not bear to see his corrupt face.'
Since he died, Left and Right have fought for possession of Orwell's soul and reputation to put into their respective pantheons. He belongs in neither. By intellect and conviction he was a man of the Left and, though he refused to be carried along by the spirit of the age, tacking and steering in his frail cockboat in honest response to the crosswinds of experience, he remained on the Left (of a sort) to his death aged 47. By instinct, however, he was a traditionalist, a cross-grained patriot, a profound lover of the English people with all their faults and weaknesses which he so ruthlessly diagnosed. From an early age he created not so much the fact he deserved as the face he wanted. He was, first and last, a short-back-and-sides man, almost defiantly so, underlining the haircut by a short, well-clipped moustache which emphasised the tight grim line of his disciplined mouth. Visually he remained an officer of the Burmese Police, quite capable of attending a hanging unperturbed or shooting an elephant in musk. In certain external — but not superficial — ways he was emotionally of his class and time and, not least, sex. He was ill at ease with women, inhibited in all personal relationships, incapable or ashamed of voicing or writing down his deepest feelings. In contrast to his essays, his letters are cloudy, cliché-ridden, hiding thoughts rather than illuminating them.
Stephen Spender told me a story about Orwell which gets to the warm, gritty heart of the man. He asked Orwell about his first wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy, whose tender, wideeyed face peers out at us from old photographs, and whose death left her husband stunned but inarticulate. Orwell thought for quite a time, and then said, 'She . . wasn't
. . a . . . bad . . old stick.' Spender knew exactly what he meant to convey and that, behind the lame words, Orwell was paying her the greatest compliment in his emotional vocabulary. But when, in turn, Mary McCarthy asked him about Orwell, whom she had never met. in the 1950s, and Spender recalled the phrase about his wife, McCarthy exploded, 'How could he say such a thing about her! What an unhuman monster! I always knew that Orwell was a fascist at bottom beneath the socialist veneer. "Old stick!" — that was the real man speaking.' This led directly to her attack on Orwell in print, presenting him as an incipient ultra-conservative who was moving inexorably to the far Right at the time of his death. On such grievous misapprehensions are solemn judgments so frequently founded!
Whether Orwell would have ended a conservative if he had lived a normal lifespan we can never know. I think it likely; but a conservative with a radical difference. One thing is sure: in our present dishonest, confused, tortured and self-deceiving age we stand forlornly in need of an Orwell's honest perception to set us right and tell us the truth about ourselves.
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