Orwell's Nose

by John Sutherland

  Despite the force he exercised within it, Orwell did not take up the offered salaried post on Astor’s paper. Independence – what he called the ‘as I please’ factor – was too dear to him. But being taken notice of was something he found he liked. He went on to accept (Astor may have been instrumental) the position of literary editor on the socialist weekly Tribune in November 1943. It meant a cut in salary to £500. But with a Labour government preparing for power, and eventually in office, the paper had lines of influence feeding directly into the most reformist government Britain has ever had – the ‘nationalizing’, welfare-state creating, Attlee administration. Party spokespeople and cabinet members, such as Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, used Tribune as an extra-mural platform and were directly involved in the paper’s management. Orwell attended editors’ conferences – kitchen cabinets. He was no longer a voice in the wilderness. He was also well enough known and respected to attract eminent contributors for the pittance Tribune coughed up. Sometimes not even that.

  Astor was a more generous paymaster for the fortnightly literary reviews Orwell continued to write for The Observer – they are generally agreed to be among his best literary commentary. He now had many voices: the Orwell of Horizon, or the more arid Polemic, is very different from the chatty Orwell of his ‘London Letters’ for the American Partisan Review. And for Tribune he wrote autour de mon chapeau columns under the ‘As I Please’ rubric, which are among his nimblest work. A notable ‘As I Please’ is his diatribe against the ‘fascistic’ behaviour of British football fans when Moscow Dinamo came to play in the winter of 1945. They beat Britain’s best, provoking an ugly reaction from supporters who could not bear the way Muscovite factory workers with unpronounceable names could run rings around the likes of Tommy Lawton and Stanley Matthews. As Orwell said, prophetically:

  The significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

  Fascism in the football stands. Orwell said it first.

  The Empson Connection

  He stank.

  WILLIAM EMPSON

  The British wartime government was very clever in recruiting the country’s cleverest oddballs – most notably Alan Turing – to help win the war. Chess masters, classicists with the dustiest scholarly expertise and crossword virtuosi did their bit and more. Had Lewis Carroll been alive he would quite likely have been summoned to Bletchley Park, Turing’s Wonderland.

  Although many clever ex-Etonians served, the government found no wartime use for George Orwell. That was a mistake. Where ‘propaganda’ was concerned, the necessary guarding of truth by lies, his mind would have been Turing-class. There were, presumably, too many black marks against his name – all that Trotsky/ILP baggage. Eventually something sufficiently riskless to the state was found for him in the BBC’s Indian section of the Overseas Service, as a talks assistant. The BBC did not impress him as an institution. ‘Half lunatic asylum, half girl’s school’, he called it in his wartime diary. In conversation it was ‘half whorehouse’. Auntie returned the compliment in 2011 by turning down ‘flat’ the offer of a bronze statue of George Orwell in the forecourt of the newly refurbished HQ, on the grounds that he was ‘too left wing’.101

  Orwell joined the BBC in August 1941 and resigned in September 1943. The salary for an assistant talks producer was generous – just about what he had been earning as an assistant superintendent in Burma. As Peter Davison neatly observes, George Orwell was always best paid when he was a servant of the Raj. The hours, given the time difference, were gruelling. It was a wonder, his closest friends thought, that he found time to turn out so much extra-mural journalism (something that niggled the BBC authorities, not least because it was so good). He was also writing a ‘fairy story’, which would eventually fight its way over a publishing obstacle race to emerge, delayed by years, as Animal Farm. For most of his two years at the BBC his desk was on the converted second floor of Peter Robinson’s department store in Oxford Street. In peacetime it specialized in school uniforms. His St Cyprian’s outfit may have been purchased there. His desk would be grimly portrayed as Winston Smith’s in Minitrue: the memory hole by his side, for the necessary perversions of historical fact. It was a private joke that Orwell, The Observer’s premier columnist, made Winston a Times (‘paper of record’) journalist. Orwell hated the toxins Northcliffe had injected into Fleet Street. The BBC canteen was on the ground floor, immortalized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its sugarless tea and pink-tinged lumps swimming in grease, ‘with a sour metallic smell’. To the disgust of his snootier colleagues, Orwell slurped his tea defiantly from the saucer, Wigan-style, and puffed his black shag ‘roll-ups’. All unlucky enough to be in smelling range agreed that the fumes were uniquely ‘foul’. George Orwell was, when he wanted to be, very ‘bolshy’.

  He was, of course, well up on Burma (currently under savage Japanese occupation), but apart from being born there he had no first-hand knowledge of the larger subcontinent or its languages. There were two burning concerns. India was seething with revolt (both Gandhian-peaceful and mutinously militant). Hard-to-spare military forces were needed for internal policing as well as to fend off Japanese invasion. India, like Ireland in the First World War, was a thorn in Britain’s thigh.

  Orwell had stated his considered view on how to defuse the Indian powder keg in The Lion and the Unicorn:

  What we must offer India is not ‘freedom’, which, I have said earlier, is impossible, but alliance, partnership – in a word, equality. But we must also tell the Indians that they are free to secede, if they want to. Without that there can be no equality of partnership, and our claim to be defending the coloured peoples against Fascism will never be believed.

  It went on in the same colonially patronizing (‘coloured peoples’?), doublethinking vein for several pages. Britain had won India by the sword. It would hold on to the vast country by the sheathed sword – a defence pact, with all the defence armaments (and canes?) in one partner’s hands. As Crick notes, Orwell skilfully sidestepped the hottest Indian topic (independence) in the talks he was responsible for, playing the cultural, topical interest cards instead. His diaries, which have survived, record someone with a keen ability to see through propaganda to geopolitical fact. But his BBC years would have been mere time-serving, were it not for one thing: the man in the adjoining cubicle.

  That man, William Empson, was the cleverest literary critic of the century. A poet himself, Empson was fascinated by polysemy in verse. The ways, that is, in which ‘ordinary language’ – words and lines – could ‘compress’ so much diverse meaning into themselves and explode on the page. He had begun his investigation as a brilliant Cambridge postgraduate under I. A. Richards. Richards was the co-inventor, with C. K. Ogden, of ‘Basic English’ – language boiled down to its ‘kernel’ state. Empson’s doctoral thesis, published in 1930 as the monograph Seven Types of Ambiguity, revolutionized the reading and teaching of English verse. For his part, Orwell was fascinated by linguistic simplification of the Basic English kind. He conceded that the ambiguity (which he called ‘coincidence’) that Empson so relished was, doubtless, a very good thing in poetry. But ‘disambiguation’ – ‘straight talk’ – was what was necessary in political discourse. Who wanted a prime minister adept in seven kinds of ambiguity?

  Orwell had spent a lot of time in the company of fervent Esperantists, for whom language had the compression of the oxo cube. The Esperanto evangelist aunt Nellie was a constant, shadowy presence on the outskirts of his life. The packing and unpacking of language was of primary interest to both men, doing their routine office work in Oxford Street, and in the pub (famously the ‘glue-pot’, the George – so nicknamed because once you went in, you never came out). The BBC was, in these years, positively clogged with poe
ts: Dylan Thomas, Roy Campbell (hated by Orwell for having fought for Franco), Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and W. R. Rodgers. Orwell was physically closest to Empson. Too close for comfort, as it happened. Orwell ‘stank’, Empson said. His ‘foul’ black shag roll-ups were a prophylactic. Both men chain-smoked. On his side, Orwell was close enough to observe Empson’s ‘hairiness’ – his hallmark moustache and other face-fungus.102

  There was the by now routine Orwellian sexual foolery. Empson had been dumped in this lowly place in the BBC for the same reason as Orwell. There were black marks against his name. His partner, later his wife, Hetta Crouse, was beautiful, an equal in intelligence, a journalist, and more radical politically than ‘Bill’. Orwell fell head over heels for the woman. He would, he said, divorce (ailing) Eileen and marry Hetta if, on her part, she gave up Empson. Apparently he meant it, as earlier he had meant his mad proposal to set up a ménage à trois with Brenda Salkeld. Hetta (soon to be Mrs Empson and the mother of children, not all her husband’s) declined, although she was flattered by his being ‘crazy’ about her, and spread the fact about. It must have got back to Eileen. Empson was amused. Although a believer in Leninist free love before and during marriage, Hetta would not sleep with Orwell.103 She ‘didn’t like him enough’, she said. It was the smell, Empson grimly implied. Hetta and Eileen had jointly bemoaned the problem of George’s disgusting body odour. And he didn’t smoke while copulating. At least Bill had that protection.

  Through the collectively generated nicotine fug and after-hours beer, there developed a disputatious conversation between these two supremely clever men on the English language and ‘honest’ usage. Two variant positions were crystallized. Empson’s considered position emerged, sadly too late for Orwell, in his 1951 monograph, The Structure of Complex Words. Poetry – language at its highest pitch – is, Empson argued, not ‘diction’ (a separate dialect), but supercharged ‘ordinary language’. Cambridge ‘Ordinary Language Philosophers’, notably Wittgenstein, pursued a parallel line. Orwell’s position, not congruent but compatible, was that the language of journalism and of political discourse had its own necessary rules. He wrote relatively little about verse but his aesthetic theory is stated succinctly in a radio essay, later printed in The Listener, ‘The Meaning of a Poem’. The poem in question is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Felix Randal’ (1870s). Orwell loved the sonnet. He recited it, by heart, to comrades in the trenches in Spain. It’s easy to see why he loved it. The dying man, to whom the poet priest will give final unction, is a village farrier, a man whose life is among horses, in a blacksmith’s forge. Orwell loved equine smells and smithy smells (the only smell he had liked in Wigan was that of burning red coal).

  But for Orwell, a poem can have only one meaning – ‘emotional’, he called it. Unsurprisingly the poet he writes about most, Kipling, attracts him because the meanings of the barrack-room ballads are plain as plain can be. There is no mystery about what ‘The White Man’s Burden’ means. It means the white man’s burden. Whatever the elegant ‘pattern of words’ that Hopkins dazzles us with, for Orwell it is the single core meaning that one has to extract. Empson’s position is as different as can be. And Hopkins, as it happens, is one of his prime examples in Seven Types of Ambiguity. In the poet’s most famous poem, ‘The Windhover’ (1877), the hovering falcon ‘buckles’ its wings to fall, like a stone, on its prey. For Empson, ‘buckle’ can legitimately suggest a belt buckle (the wings ‘locked’ together), something akin to a bicycle wheel being buckled (‘crumpled’ or ‘broken’), or Christ’s wounded arms clasping together as he is taken down from the Cross. There is no ‘essential’ meaning: only meanings. Where Orwell was concerned, language should say what it means. For Empson, the more meanings generated the richer, and all are valid. It was a fascinating conflict between the journalist and the poet, each with his own linguistic imperative. Above all Orwell sees ‘plain’ language as vital for the politician, and the political journalist. It is widely called his ‘windowpane’ thesis. For Empson, language at its highest, poetic level of expression is a stained-glass window. And the stains matter.

  The relationship between Orwell and Empson is laid out in the conversations between Winston Smith (journalist) and Ampleforth (poet), and Orwell’s appendix on ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four (‘that dreadful book’, Empson called it in The Structure of Complex Words, meaning praise). Ampleforth, ‘a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature . . . with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres’, occupies an adjoining cubicle to Winston’s. Ampleforth ‘was engaged in producing garbled versions – definitive texts, they were called – of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies’. ‘Hairy Ears’ is a low blow. The two men have desultory conversations in the abysmal canteen. They meet for the last time in the Miniluv, awaiting their respective Rooms 101. ‘Ampleforth!’, Winston exclaims. What, he wonders, has brought him to the place where there is no darkness?

  ‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in the entire language?’

  Alongside Ampleforth and Winston in the Minitrue office and canteen is the odious goblin Syme, inspired by Joseph Goebbels. As a lexicographer, Syme’s role is to impoverish language so that with the perfection of ‘Newspeak’, thoughtcrime is no longer possible. ‘The whole climate of thought will be different,’ Syme tells Winston: ‘In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

  Winston and Ampleforth are, in their different ways, fervent believers in Oldspeak. Syme is the new-speaking future. He does not live to see the completion of the eleventh edition of his Newspeak dictionary, or the universal linguistic lobotomy it will bring about. Too clever for his own good, he is vaporized shortly after his lecture to Winston.

  Orwell resigned from the BBC in September 1943. Empson stayed on, to become an old China hand. Hetta, Mrs William Empson, slept with lots of other men. But never George Orwell.

  Windowpane Language

  The louder people yap about the proletariat the more they despise its language.

  ‘Propaganda and Demotic Speech’ (1944)

  Ask what is the best Orwell essay and you will start an argument. Shot elephants, hanged men, Billy Bunter and Raffles will be invoked. Ask what is Orwell’s most influential essay and there will be no argument.

  ‘Politics and the English Language’ was first published by Horizon in April 1946. The date is significant. Orwell was nauseated by what politics had done to language over the war years. It wasn’t merely an ‘English’ problem. Günter Grass would begin his literary career from the ground-zero point that Nazism had so soiled the German language that an honest writer must scrub it clean and start all over again. In Russia, Vasily Grossman was a journalist and novelist judged so dangerous that the NKVD even confiscated his typewriter ribbons. Post-war language, for all these writers, was a bombsite. What D. H. Lawrence called ‘hygienisation’ was required. All this was 1946 and very post-war. Orwell’s essay, and its five-rule catechism, have since become, via the ‘national curriculum’, universal ‘best practice’ in British education. Children are fed the ‘rules’ as their unluckier wartime predecessors were fed cod-liver oil (I remember the daily dose well). Astor, when he was in charge of The Observer, decreed that every newly appointed journalist to the paper should be given a copy of ‘Politics and the English Language’.

  Despite its universal prescriptions, Orwell’s ‘windowpane’ thesis has been deplored. Denis Donoghue, a critic with a very fine ear, concludes, sorrowfully, ‘The shoddiest part of Orwell was his determination to link plain English to freedom and trut
h-telling.’104 In a merrier vein (although he took Orwell very seriously), Raymond Williams offers mock applause for Orwell’s ‘successful impersonation of the plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way, and is simply telling the truth about it’.105 The plain man’s plain man. A fake, through and through, Williams concluded. Objections to Orwell’s ‘reductionist’ view of English language are numerous and eloquent. Scorn is poured on his ‘good prose = windowpane’ analogy.106 Did the foolish man not realize that the complexities of life and politics cannot be boiled down into baby talk? To which Orwell might have answered that simple prose is not where one starts, but where one ends. As is clear thought. Few make it.

  The notion that Orwell, contra-Orwell, was advocating his own kind of Newspeak is grotesque. He and Empson had worked out their positions. On his side Orwell revered the stark richness of the ‘ordinary’ English language. His example of best English is from Ecclesiastes, the King James version: ‘I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.’ What could be plainer? What could be more complex? Historically, Orwell’s argument is in a long tradition of stylistic polemic. It goes back to the great Senecan/Ciceronian style battles of the seventeenth century. Simplicity versus copia was the central issue. Donne is an arch-exponent of the Senecan style, as in: ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls/ It tolls for thee.’ Twelve monosyllables. Not a Latinism among them. Compare it with the Ciceronian floridity of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘When I take a full view and circle of myself without this reasonable moderator, and equal piece of justice, death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant.’ Both are fine English prose, but chalk and cheese (Browne would have put it more colourfully). Orwell is Senecan to the core. His model, as he proclaims in another late essay, is Swift. ‘Johnson said once to me,’ recalls Boswell, ‘speaking of the simplicity of Swift’s style, “The rogue never hazards a metaphor”.’ Johnson would have said the same about that other rogue, Orwell.