The important thing is that the writer himself believe it.

But there are certain things—here is where Orwell begins to extend and then to contradict his thinking—that you simply can't believe. "No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition," he asserts. Is that true? At almost the exact same moment, Jean-Paul Sartre (a writer Orwell thought, incorrectly, was "full of air"), in What Is Literature? was writing, "Nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism." Is that true? It seems to have been a problem that leftist writers of the 1940s were going to face by sheer bluff assertion. For Orwell the number of beliefs hostile to literary production seemed to expand and expand. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is labeled "Petainist"—a fairly strong term to hurl at a long experimental poem that doesn't even rhyme. And Salvador Dalí, in "Benefit of Clergy," is a "rat." Orwell wants to chart a middle course between the philistines who would dismiss Dalí out of hand for his outrages and the aesthetes unable even to acknowledge the problem, but Orwell's own trouble is that he loathes Dalí, above all for abandoning France in its moment of danger. After asserting that the painter is more talented than most of the people who would denounce his morals, Orwell proceeds to denounce those morals, and the morals of those who enjoy Dalí's paintings.

As the war goes on, then ends, Orwell's sense of peril grows sharper, and he looks at literature in a different way. He comes to think that no matter who wins, the world will find itself split again into armed camps, each of them threatening the others, none of them truly free—and literature will simply not survive. This is the landscape of 1984 and it is also the landscape of the later essays in this volume—"The Prevention of Literature," "Politics and the English Language," "Writers and Leviathan." There is even, momentarily, a kind of hallucination, in the curious short piece "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," where some of Orwell's old interest in the starving writer crops up, now mixed with the wintry gloominess of his later years: "In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it ... He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if only his pair were not chronically lost." Who is this but Winston Smith, the failed hero of 1984, figured as a book reviewer? Or who, conversely, is Winston Smith, but a book reviewer figured as the prisoner of a futuristic totalitarian regime?

In the earlier essays Orwell sees totalitarian patterns of thought in the excuses made for Stalin by left-wing intellectuals; in the later essays he begins to see the same patterns in writers and thinkers of any political stripe who seek too much purity or too much goodness from the world. There is perhaps a biographical strain to this: widowed, tubercular, increasingly reclusive, and still brutally honest, Orwell was becoming a saint. Three of the late essays—on Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, and Mahatma Gandhi—deal with saints. Orwell doesn't like them. He had never particularly liked them: "If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?" he had asked in the great essay on dirty postcards. "Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul." But back then he thought the saint at least exercised a kind of good example for the fat little man inside us; by the end of his life he seems to have thought the saint a positive evil. Anything that would interrupt the free play of the mind, its commitment to the truth of experience as it actually is rather than as one would like it to be, was an evil. And saints, it turns out, are censorious—Gandhi wanted to throw out cigarettes and meat, which was bad enough, but Tolstoy wanted to throw out Shakespeare, which was even worse.

With great doggedness, then, Orwell keeps delving into the question of literature's position in society, and what might be done to keep it alive in a time of total politics. Eventually, the middle ground he'd managed to inhabit by admiring Henry Miller, Eliot's early poetry, and that essentially apolitical masterpiece, Ulysses, gives way beneath him. The pressure of totalitarianism is too great, and as he begins to contemplate the brutal unresolved reality of the postwar, with its two or three warring, nuclear-armed camps (Orwell was enough of a patriot to think that Britain might not actually be subsumed by the United States), he surrenders. In "Writers and Leviathan," dated 1948, he argues that writers must ultimately separate themselves from their political work. It's a depressing essay and it ends—one wonders whether Orwell was aware of this—with an echo of the line of Auden's he so reviled: The writer capable of separating himself from his political activity will be the one who "stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature." Orwell was always a realist who knew that politics was a dirty business—but he was never quite such a realist as here. The realm of freedom had finally shrunk to a small, small point, and it had to be defended. As Winston Smith says in 1984, "Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull."

It's hard not to wonder whether the pessimism of this conclusion—its separation of art and politics, after so many attempts at an integration, or at least some kind of accord—was partly a response to the art (or propaganda) Orwell was himself creating in those years. He had published Animal Farm in 1945; weakened by the tuberculosis that would kill him, he was writing 1984 in 1947–48. After the reception of Animal Farm, and with the direction 1984 was taking, it must have been clear to him on some level that the world was going to use these books in a certain way. And it did use them that way. The socialist critique of Orwell's late work seems essentially correct—they were not only anti-Stalinist but antirevolutionary, and were read as such by millions of ordinary people (a fact that Orwell, who was always curious to know what ordinary people thought, would have had to respect).