Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  I was mobbed by porters and bearers who offered to carry me—a humiliating alternative to hiking—up to the top. They followed me as I climbed the steep hill in the heavy rain, which quickly soaked my clothes and skin. Fog obscured the magnificent views on this one-hour via dolorosa. When I reached the top, I had to give my passport number and pay six dollars to enter what seemed, after all the shops along the way, to be the headquarters of Buddha, Inc. I proceeded with bare feet across the perilously wet, slippery tiled floor and, perched on a tilting rock, finally took a photo of the famed pagoda. The Israeli engineer I'd met, suddenly appearing out of the fog, explained that the rock was held like a ball-and-socket and may also have had a lead weight to balance the strange tilt.

  As he berated his wife for dragging him to this Buddha-haunted peak, I wondered why travel maniacs suffered great expense and extreme discomfort to see such inevitably disappointing sites. Burma is dilapidated, its people oppressed and rather unhappy, and once you leave the cruise ship, traveling there is exhausting. But the greater the hardship, the more memorable the experience. Unique, almost untouched by tourism, its rural regions still pristine, the country is for travelers who have done it all. It is now possible to stay for a month and visit places north of Mandalay and south of Rangoon that have been closed since 1948. There's still time to see the most remote, traditional and mysterious part of Asia before revolution, prosperity or Chinese dominance destroys the old way of life.

  THREE

  THE ETHICS OF RESPONSIBILITY

  Burmese Days

  My first essay on Orwell began with a contrast between Orwell and Henry Miller. I then defined Orwell as a man of letters and man of war, and showed his kinship to the themes of guilt, sense of responsibility and need for commitment of his French contemporaries in the 1930s, Malraux and Sartre.

  Passing through Paris on his way to fight in Spain in 1936, Orwell stopped to meet Henry Miller, whose books he had reviewed and admired. Miller cared nothing for the Spanish War, and forcibly told Orwell, who was going to combat Fascism and defend democracy “from a sense of obligation,” that he was an idiot.1 This striking confrontation reveals the polarity of political attitudes among modern writers. If Miller, as Orwell later wrote, is undoubtedly “inside the whale”—performing “the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting”—then Orwell himself is clearly “outside the whale,” responsible, active, rejecting the horrors of the modern world and committing himself to change them.2 He is part of the collective tragedy and shares in the collective guilt, and he would agree with Dostoyevsky that “every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”3 Spain was the magnet that attracted such crusaders as Orwell, Hemingway and Malraux—intellectual men of letters who are also courageous men of war, the very incarnation of the heroes they create in their books.

  Orwell is a literary nonconformist whose works defy genres, a writer who is hard to place. His satiric style has been likened to that of Swift, Butler and Shaw. He has affinities with the school of the great plain writers Defoe, Crabbe and Gissing—the writers of working-class realism, of human beings in conflict with the class structure. He has some similarities to the Auden-Spender school of the Thirties, though he was unsympathetic to them.4

  But more important than any of these influences and traditions, I think, is Orwell's close kinship—in his intense feeling of guilt, responsibility and commitment—to the French novelists, particularly Malraux and Sartre, who began to write during the interwar years, the “age of guilt.” They have been perceptively analyzed by Victor Brombert, who states that those French writers “who reached the age of reason around 1930, have suffered from a near-pathological guilt complex, and are haunted by what Paul Nizan has called the ‘social original sin.’ … The further removed from the scene of human anguish, the greater the self-reproach, the more persistent the feeling of responsibility…. Their message is permanent accusation. Silence in the face of social injustice or political tyranny is for them a shameful act, a manner of collaborating with evil. To give society a ‘bad conscience’ is, according to Sartre, the writer's first duty.”5

  It is not difficult to relate Orwell's ideas and ideals to those of the French writers. The evolution of his first novel, Burmese Days (1934), is an illustrative example, though many of his works attacking Fascism, Communism or capitalism would serve equally well.6 Orwell spent five years as a policeman in Burma, and he was responsible for the kicking, flogging, torturing and hanging of men. He saw the dirty work of Empire at close quarters and “the horribly ugly, degrading scenes which offend one's eyes all the time in the starved countries of the East” where an Indian coolie's leg is often thinner than an Englishman's arm.7

  By the end of the five years, writes Orwell, “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear … it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny…. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.”8 Orwell managed to relieve this intense guilt in two ways. He resigned his position and to expiate his country's political sin submerged himself among the oppressed poor of Paris and London and took their side against tyrants by becoming one of the common people. For obvious reasons of caste and race this kind of masochistic submergence was impossible in Asia, but for Orwell the European working classes “were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma.”9 Orwell also relieved his guilt through creative exorcism, for he writes that “the landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of a nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them.”10 This accounts for the novel's passionate and didactic quality.

  The central political principle in Burmese Days derives from Montesquieu who wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, “If a democratic republic subdues a nation in order to govern them as subjects, it exposes its own liberty.”11 The truth of this principle is illustrated by the Burmese judge U Po Kyin, who is clearly modeled on the physical characteristics of the Malay chief Doramin in Conrad's Lord Jim, for both Orientals are lavishly dressed, enormously fat, need assistance to rise from their chairs and habitually confer with their wives.12 U Po is the primum mobile of all events in the novel, an underling who has the most actual power in the English outpost of progress and through devious machinations controls even his rulers. He slanders the Deputy Commissioner Macgregor, ruins the Indian Dr. Veraswami, incites a rebellion in which two men are eventually killed and six imprisoned, and drives the hero, Flory, to suicide. A fair sample of a Burmese magistrate, U Po has advanced himself by thievery, bribery, blackmail and betrayal, and his corrupt career is a serious criticism of both the British rule that permits his success and his British superiors who so disastrously misjudge his character.

  The object of U Po's intrigues and the Nirvana for which he pines is the English Club, the last fortress of white insularity. Orwell's ironic juxtaposition of “native” and English social scenes (which he observed in A Passage to India) reveals the sleazy Club just after U Po's fabulous wish. Besides Flory, the British colony consists of the bigoted and malicious Ellis, the drunken and lecherous Lackersteen, his scheming and snobbish wife, the bloodthirsty and stupid Westfield, the boring and pompous Macgregor, the innocuous and inoffensive Maxwell and, later on, the arrogant and cruel Verrall. Orwell's work is unlike Forster's novel; there are no redemptive characters in his essentially negative and pessimistic novel, only the “dull boozing witless porkers” who observe the five beatitudes of the pukka sahib and exploit the country. They strive to impose the “Pox Britannica” which, prophesies Flory, will eventually wreck “the whole Burmese national culture. We're not civilising them, we're only rubbing our dirt on to them” (37).13

  These are the views that Flory presents in his everlasting argument with his friend Dr. Veraswa
mi, a loyal British subject who always defends imperialism and who also aspires to Club membership as protective prestige against his enemies. Flory reveals his moral weakness by first refusing to support his friend's nomination and then allowing himself to be coerced into signing a statement against native members. Like Orwell, Flory hates to see the English humiliating the Asians, and is ashamed of the imperialist exploitation and class distinctions. But he recognizes that “even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism” (61).

  This connection between political oppression and private guilt has been acutely described by Nietzsche, who wrote that “political superiority without any real human superiority is most harmful. One must seek to make amends for political superiority. To be ashamed of one's power.”14 Flory, of course, is ashamed, but his failure to come to terms with the intolerable colonial situation is symbolized by his hideous birthmark (as much a sign of guilt, a mark of Cain, as an indication of his isolation and alienation), but also by his failure to mediate between the three worlds of Burma: the English, the “native” and the natural world of the jungle.

  The second third of the novel begins with the arrival of the shallow and selfish Elizabeth Lackersteen, whom the desperate Flory sees as the only salvation from his Burmese misery. But they are unable to communicate in a meaningful way, and Flory's efforts to introduce Elizabeth to the Burmese world of dance plays and marketplaces, to make her appreciate and admire the country as he does, result only in insulting his Oriental friends and revolting Elizabeth, who prefers English society. Nevertheless, their parabolic courtship progresses in a series of physical adventures: they meet as Flory rescues Elizabeth from a water buffalo, decide to marry first after shooting a leopard and again after Flory's heroic swim to rescue the besieged Club members, when the rioting Burmese all want to “get into” the Club.

  Their only communion occurs during the central hunting episode. Flory teaches Elizabeth to shoot and she kills the beautiful jade pigeons that he had previously observed while peacefully performing a Thoreau-like baptism in the lonely jungle. He had sought refuge and relief there from the anguish of penitential solitude and guilt. When the limp, warm and iridescent fowl is placed in Elizabeth's hand, her desire for Flory is awakened, and the connection between sexual passion and destructive violence (foreshadowing Flory's suicide) is subtly revealed. Soon afterwards Flory shoots a male leopard and his gift of the skin silently seals their troth. Later on, this ruined leopard skin, like Flory's disfigured skin, is both a cause and a symbol of Elizabeth's disaffection.

  Flory's inability to meet responsibility under the pressure of an overwhelming guilt is revealed in his relationships with Dr. Veraswami, whom he proposes to the Club only when it is too late; with his Burmese mistress May Hla, whom he abandons and then bribes after a mutually destructive relationship, and who decays in a brothel after exposing him before Elizabeth; and finally with Elizabeth herself, whom he can neither enlighten nor engage. His suicide, an appropriate gesture of physical courage and moral weakness, is his terrible protest against these failures.

  But Orwell himself continued to bear that guilt he acquired in Burma and to defy that “whale” which swallowed up so many other writers. His whole life was a struggle against barbarism and for what he called “comparative decency”: a sane, clean, friendly world, without fear and without injustice. He felt it was his duty to prepare the future; he opened himself to the suffering of others and changed the world in a small way. His one great motive for writing was a “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”15 Is this sort of intense commitment, so desperately needed, still possible today, or have our Orwells been overwhelmed and extinguished by the increasing horrors of modern life?

  FOUR

  ORWELL

  The Honorary Proletarian

  This breakthrough review-article on Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1969) was my first long piece, at the beginning of my soi-disant career, in a prestigious scholarly journal, Philological Quarterly. It enabled me to formulate my essential ideas about him and make a case for the importance of his minor works, and it became the solid basis of my later articles and books. I placed Orwell in the English moral tradition of Johnson, Blake and Lawrence (and later wrote lives of both Johnson and Lawrence). My Orwellian prediction that a definitive edition would appear in the future came true thirty years later when the 2,000 pages of this four-volume edition were expanded to 8,500 pages and twenty volumes.

  The letter to me from his Eton tutor A. S. F. Gow (a friend of A.E. Housman) about why Orwell chose the Burmese police instead of going to university seemed definitive at the time. But I later discovered from interviews with Sir Steven Runciman, Orwell's classmate at Eton, and with Michael Meredith, the librarian at Eton, that Orwell could easily have won a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge.

  When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity, I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed.

  (Samuel Johnson, Diary, April 1775)

  There has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling.

  (George Orwell, Diary, early 1949)

  These entries are remarkably similar in the fervor of their unjustified selftorment, and they suggest Orwell's close resemblance to Johnson as well as his place as the last of the English moralists—Johnson, Blake and Lawrence—whose passionate intensity is nearly prophetic. Both Johnson and Orwell had unhappy childhoods, struggled long with severe illness and bitter poverty, spent many years as hack journalists and did not achieve fame until their mid-forties. Both men were independent, combative, harsh on themselves and others, and often wrong-headed in a fascinating way. Both had limited imaginations but great critical faculties; and their satire was an expression of high principle, integrity and compassion. Both were pessimistic, patriotic, pragmatic, courageous, commonsensical, intellectually curious, scrupulously honest, fundamentally decent, oddly humorous and quintessentially English.

  The new edition of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters enables us to sharpen our appreciation of Orwell and to place his life and works in a more precise perspective.1 Reviewing Orwell's posthumous essays in 1954, John Wain wrote, “It is clear enough that this will be the last volume of barrel-scrapings from the Orwell stock, so that anything not included here will have small chance of emerging in the future.”2 In fact, only one third of Orwell's short articles and reviews have even here been included (about 230 out of 700) so that a definitive edition may still appear in the future. Orwell too would have been surprised by the existence of this collection, in which the majority of items are very short pieces, for he firmly stated, “I would never reprint in book form anything of less than 2000 words”; and he would have been amazed by the price (and royalties) of these four large volumes, for the ten dollars he received for each “London Letter” was probably his highest fee for a short article and he rarely earned more than four or five pounds a week until the success of Animal Farm in 1946. Nevertheless, we now have two thousand more pages of Orwell's writing, a quarter of it published for the first time, and it is first appropriate to state what has been omitted and what included.

  The editors give no indication of exactly how much unpublished material has been excluded; two unpublished letters I remember are to Humphrey Slater in September 1946, mentioning a draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to Leonard Moore in July (?) 1947, giving a chronology of his life. The BBC material and
many trivial notes have been rightly omitted; and though Mrs. Orwell writes, somewhat unclearly, “there is nothing either concealed or spectacularly revealed in his letters,” the unpublished letters and papers in the Archive at London University are not available to scholars, while those in the New York Public Library and the University of Texas can be read but not quoted. Only selections from the last Notebook are published, so that Orwell's notes for a projected essay on Evelyn Waugh are printed while those for an essay on Conrad and a long short story are not.

  Though Mrs. Orwell writes, “Anything he would have considered as an essay is certainly included,” the long political essays in The Betrayal of the Left and Victory or Vested Interests?, and the Introduction to British Pamphleteers (which is better than “Pamphlet Literature”) have been omitted. The following published though uncollected writings have considerable value and deserve to be printed in a fifth volume: the sixteen film and drama reviews for Time and Tide (1940–41); the fourteen war reports from France and Germany for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News (early 1945) which (pace Mrs. Orwell) are much more like “straight reporting” than his wartime “London Letters”; the very important book reviews on Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Butler, Edmund Wilson and F. R Leavis; the other interesting reviews of Milton, Byron, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Chekhov, Rilke, Mann, Hardy, Hopkins, Joyce, Silone and Richard Wright; and finally the shorter reviews on the subjects of his major essays in which he first worked out his ideas on novelists who influenced him: Dickens, Gissing and Koestler, and on those whom he criticized for their reactionary political views: Swift, Tolstoy, Kipling, Wells, Wodehouse and Henry Miller.3