These essays are part of a deeply democratic commitment to culture in general and reading in particular.

His reading of writers who were more traditionally "literary" is shot through with the same commitment. Orwell had read a great deal, and his favorite writers were by many standards difficult writers, but he refused to appeal to the occult mechanisms of literary theory. "One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it,' and what follows is a rationalisation. But 'I like this book' is not, I think, a non-literary reaction." And the "rationalization," Orwell saw, was going to involve your background, your expectations, the historical period you're living through. Orwell often launches off on fairly long digressions—like the one on A. E. Housman in "Inside the Whale"—that no other literary critic would even consider, much less get away with. But he does get away with them (more or less), because they're so clearly in the service of trying to pin down a general view of life, and history, and politics. Nothing is ever separate from anything else in Orwell, though at the same time nothing is ever allowed to overshadow the task at hand. "While I have been writing this book," he writes in the essay on Miller (the first three essays in this volume were published under the title Inside the Whale, in the spring of 1940), "another European war has broken out....What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture." And this means we ought to read Henry Miller!

This is great, a belief in the tenacity of politics and bombs but the equally powerful tenacity of literature and personality. If we compare Orwell to his near-contemporary Edmund Wilson, who was in many senses a more sensitive critic and with whose range in literary interests and languages Orwell could not possibly compete, we see Orwell's peculiar strength. At almost the exact moment as Orwell, in early 1940, Wilson published a psychobiographical essay on Dickens in which he traced much of Dickens's later development to his brush with poverty as a young man. Orwell's treatment is much more sociological and political, and in a way less dramatic than Wilson's. Yet at one point Orwell encapsulates Wilson's argument with a remarkable concision: "Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel." This is stark, and fair, and that "terrified" is unforgettable.

It's possible to imagine a kind of tragedy to Orwell's style. He was a writer who saw both sides to every issue, and argued with himself about them, but whose style could only come down on one side at a time. You can imagine him trapped in that style, even as he used it to slash through cant and falsehood. You can imagine him trapped in it, too, whenever he expressed a vision of what the good society should be like; for it is, finally, a destructive style, peculiarly ill suited to expressing positive visions of anything. It's a funny, brutal, dry, destructive style. One of the slightly surprising things about these essays is how funny they are—in the elegant, deadpan plot summaries, but also in the retorts. To see Orwell slash through H. G. Wells, and Dalí, and Tolstoy—and to see his glimmer of self-recognition in contemplating the work of the fantastically misanthropic Jonathan Swift—is to learn a bit of what language is still capable of.

Orwell might not have admitted, as we would automatically admit today, that there were multiple subjective truths in the world, that a writer must negotiate the various possibilities of those many truths; and still, even while we know this and Orwell didn't, he always seems to be telling the truth. Part of the magic is that he never speaks from a point of view that is anything but his own, while at the same time he believes that any normal unprejudiced person—the "common man," the common Englishman—would see it the same way. The belief in a common man—in his existence as well as his decency—is a profound animating principle of these essays, and Orwell rarely misses an opportunity to stress this decency, as when he undramatically notes that anti-Jewish postcards disappeared from British newsstands after the rise of Hitler in Germany. Having established the common man's existence and his decency, Orwell is empowered to speak for him. There is a doubleness then to the point of view: Orwell is telling us only what he himself has seen—in Spain, in the coal mines, in the books he's read—but he's also convinced that a whole mass of people, standing behind him, would see it the same way, if only they saw it as clearly. And his gift is to convince us that we are those ordinary people, and we see it that way, too.

You can tie yourself in knots—many leftist intellectuals have done this over the years—proving that Orwell's style is a facade, an invention, a mask he put on when he changed his name from Eric Blair to "George Orwell"; that by seeming to tell the whole story in plain and honest terms, it actually makes it more difficult to see, it obfuscates, the part of the story that's necessarily left out; that ultimately it rubber-stamps the status quo. In some sense, intellectually, all this is true enough; you can spend a day, a week, a semester proving it. There really are things in the world that Orwell's style would never be able to capture. But there are very few such things.

 

 

Orwell did not want to become a saint, but he became a saint anyway.