It cannot be entirely a case of devious propaganda that Orwell the avowed democratic Socialist came eventually to be claimed ("stolen," as he says here of Dickens) by the Right in the Cold War; that his "social patriotism" soon reverted, in the hands of many, into simple nationalism; that it was under the banner of Orwell, a convinced anti-imperialist, that some of the best intellectuals in Britain and the United States cheered on the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Writers write because they want to justify themselves to the world. Orwell's essays here, his final reflections on the separation of the politics of the man from the art of the man, can serve as a guide to the Orwell of the 1940s. Out of "necessity" he had chosen a position, and a way of stating that position, that would be used for years to come to bludgeon the antiwar, anti-imperialist left. That he had chosen honestly what seemed to him the least bad of a set of bad political options did not make them, in the long view of history, any better.

 

 

But what a wonderful writer he had become! That voice—once you've heard it, how do you get it out of your head? It feels like the truth, even when it's not telling the truth. It is clear and sharp but unhurried; Orwell is not afraid to be boring, which means that he is never boring. He had been shot through the throat by a sniper's bullet in 1937. A tall man, well over six feet, he was standing up in a trench at night, telling his fellow soldiers—as they later recalled—about some brothels he'd visited in Paris, when the bullet hit. It missed Orwell's esophagus by millimeters. He survived, but contemporaries report that Orwell's voice changed. It became slightly flattened and metallic. Some people found it disconcerting.

Orwell's voice as a writer had been formed before Spain, but Spain gave him a jolt—not the fighting or the injury, though these had their effects, but the calculated campaign of deception he saw in the press when he got back, waged by people who knew better. "Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper," Orwell recalled, "but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed....This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history."

This insight reverberates through Orwell's work for the rest of his life. The answer to lies is to tell the truth. But how? How do you even know what the truth is, and how do you create a style in which to tell it? Orwell's answer is broadly consistent with the philosophical movements—of which he would have been only a little aware—of his time. There is no necessarily anterior truth; language creates it. Orwell lays out the method in "Politics and the English Language": You avoid ready phrases, you purge your language of dead metaphors, you do not claim to know what you do not know. Far from being a relaxed prose (which is how it seems), Orwell's is a supremely vigilant one. It's interesting that Orwell didn't go to college. He went to Eton, the most prestigious of the English boarding schools, but he loafed around there and, afterward, went off to Burma as a police officer. College is where you sometimes get loaded up with fancy terms whose meaning you're not quite sure of. Orwell was an intellectual and a highbrow who thought Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence were the greatest writers of his age, but he never uses fancy terms.

These essays typically open with a very strong, flat, memorable statement: "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful"; "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent"; or even just, "There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression on me." They often do a bit of summarizing—Orwell's style is perfectly adapted to dry, funny plot summary, because it often happens that if you summarize the contents of a novel straight they will sound very funny. (And much of the time Orwell means them to.) Typically, he moves on to a more general philosophical question—"Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a by-word for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there." Why is that? Orwell goes on to explain that Kipling cannot be defended as a humanitarian, or nonracist, or anti-imperialist—he was clearly on the wrong side of all those questions. But then Orwell shows the vividness of Kipling's descriptions of life, the singular musicality of his "good bad poetry," and you begin to see what has allowed Kipling to endure.

You could say that Orwell was not essentially a literary critic, or you could say that he was the only kind of literary critic worth reading. He was most interested in the way that literature intersects with life, with the world, with groups of actual people. Some of the more enjoyable essays in this volume deal with things that a lot of people read and consume—postcards, detective fiction, "good bad books" (and poetry)—simply because a lot of people consume them. Postwar intellectuals would celebrate (or bemoan) the "rise of mass culture." Orwell never saw it as a novel phenomenon. He was one of the first critics to take popular culture seriously because he believed it had always been around and simply wanted attention.