The word “Orwellian” constantly appeared in 2003, Orwell's centenary year, and has become essential to our political discourse. But the term is ambiguous. In the negative sense, it stands for the kind of oppressive totalitarian regime that he created in Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially political manipulation of the media to deceive the public. In the positive sense, it suggests the personal honesty, bravery and idealism in both his life and his writing. For Orwell, writing has two essential aspects. The first concerns an individual writer (like Winston Smith) who sits down alone to communicate his most secret thoughts, even to an unknown future reader. He must have courage and dedication, and an optimistic belief in his own ideas. The second concerns the writer's desire and power to ameliorate society. For Orwell clear language and independent thought were an aesthetic as well as a moral responsibility.
Ironically, Orwell's subtle and morally acute lessons on how to read and write have been misunderstood and misapplied after his death. Neoconservatives have singled out his warnings about the totalitarian aspects of the Socialist state and claimed him as one of their own. A recent account of the Cold War described Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the canonical text” of conservative anti-Communism, as “the key imaginative manifesto of the Cold War” and gave Orwell credit for having “invented … a complete poetics of political invective.” Willfully obscuring the complexity of its vision, this reduces the novel to a clever piece of propaganda. More grotesquely, the John Birch Society used to sell his novel in its Washington office and even used 1984 as the last digits of its telephone number.
Since Orwell himself was so scrupulous about his own limitations as a political observer and criticized the Left as sharply as the Right, it is easy to cite his ideas out of context and simply ignore his professed belief in democratic Socialism. Like devout Mormons baptizing their helpless ancestors, the neo-cons, by trying to co-opt him, have missed the whole point of his life and work. In an anxious, atheistic age like our own, he resisted the temptation to submit to religious or political dogma, and believed that ordinary people had to participate in the conduct of political life. Despite his vast influence, Orwell was never part of a movement, and remained a solitary, individualistic writer with a stubborn message: think for yourself and write the truth.
In a famous statement the eighteenth-century French naturalist Count Buffon said: “the style is the man himself.” Like his hero Jonathan Swift and other writers of the Enlightenment, Orwell derived his clear style from moral integrity. There was in Orwell an unusual consistency between the gritty, combative persona that emanates from his lucid writing and his courageous, civilized and intellectually truthful character. His description of Charles Dickens, another of his literary heroes, applies equally to himself: “In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root…. The strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny…. As a matter of course he is on the side of the underdog, always and everywhere.” Dickens, Orwell observes, has “the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry—… a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” Irving Howe summed up Orwell as “craggy, fiercely polemical, sometimes mistaken, but an utterly free man. In his readiness to stand alone and take on all comers, he was a model for every writer of our age.” Orwell belongs with Johnson, Blake and Lawrence in the great English tradition of prophetic moralists.
NINETEEN
ORWELL's SATIRIC HUMOR
My three general essays (of which this is the third) were written after my analyses of Orwell's major works. Though it's difficult to explain jokes, this piece showed that “Gloomy George” could be quite funny and lightened his dark warnings with sardonic wit. He used many different kinds of humor—from puns and obscenities to sexual innuendoes and suggestions of perversity—to express his political beliefs.
I
Orwell called the doom-laden Thirties “a riot of appalling folly that suddenly becomes a nightmare, a scenic railway ending in a torture-chamber,” and wrote that “since about 1930 everyone describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.” “Everywhere,” he exclaimed in 1940, “there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm.” For him, to think was to be miserable.
Gloomy George (as friends called him) was tubercular, guilt-ridden, masochistic and self-destructive. He relished physical discomfort and was extremely pessimistic. John Carey writes that Orwell was personally “prickly, diffident, ill at ease with ordinary people.” His brother-in-law Humphrey Dakin called him “a skeleton at the feast” and recalled that in pubs Orwell “used to sit in a corner by himself, looking like death.” Noel Annan said that he “remained a biting, bleak, self-critical, self-denying man.”
Though never a bundle of laughs, Orwell had a lively sense of humor. He revealed another, more human, side of his austere character when he lightened his dark warnings with an idiosyncratic, sardonic English wit. Using different voices, from charming to cruel, and always finely tuned to the chronic problems of his age, he consoled his readers for his grim message that conditions would not change and might even get worse. His humor expressed his intelligence and showed that he was still alive and protesting, no matter how grim the state of the world.
Orwell in person could be unintentionally comical. The poet Ruth Pitter recalled the young writer earnestly but awkwardly trying to get started, desperately in search of material and ludicrous in his attempts to use it: “We lent him an old oil-stove and he wrote a story about two young girls who lent an old man an oil-stove…. One story that never saw the light of day began ‘Inside the park, the crocuses were out.’ Oh dear, I'm afraid we did laugh.” He later satirized his own behavior in the absurdities of his fictional characters.
In his forties Orwell affected working-class habits and a cockney accent, much to the amusement of his colleagues, to show his kinship with the working class. In the BBC canteen during World War II he would pour his tea into a saucer and drink it with loud slurping sounds. During the war he shared the austerity and deprivation of ordinary people by eating the worst food he could possibly find. The more wretched the dish, the more cheerful he became. He'd gobble up over-boiled cod with bitter turnip tops and annoy his dining companions by gleefully remarking, “I'd never have thought they'd have gone so well together!” He once even ate boiled eels that his wife had left for the cat and found them quite tasty. Arguing with an Indian colleague in the BBC Eastern Service in a self-consciously cockney voice, Orwell could be heard through the thin partitions insisting, “The FACK that you're black … and that I'm white has nudding whadever to do wiv it.” His fake accent made the gauche yet well-intentioned remark hilarious.
Orwell was not afraid to offend people when forcefully expressing his ideas. In his essay “Funny, But Not Vulgar,” he insisted that humor was essentially serious: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order…. All great humorous writers show a willingness to attack the beliefs and the virtues on which society necessarily rests.” In fact, the more shockingly offensive he became, the funnier he was.
II
In his essays, journalism and letters Orwell used all the weapons in his humorous arsenal, from the subtle to the crude, to enhance his polemical arguments and persuade readers that he was speaking the truth. Recalling his schooldays, he challenged the assumptions about British superiority by mocking the mindless way that history, rigidly divided into periods, had been taught: “in 1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main.” Using familiar cliché
s about each historical period, he satirized the supposedly instant transition from one age to another, when every class wore exactly the same costume and scarcely had time to change from clanking armor to velvety doublets. (Nineteen Eighty-Four, by the way, opens as “the clocks were striking thirteen.”)
He loved to drive home his point with the schoolboy slang he'd perfected at prep school and Eton and with the colloquial language he'd learned as a policeman and a tramp. When contrasting British and American crime novels in “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” he turned from a genteel to a brutal book and expressed his moral and physical disgust for the latter by using a shocking metaphor and comparing it to a dive into the slime: “So much for Raffles. Now for a header into the cesspool.” He liked to yoke disparate images together for comic effect. He first called the atmosphere of the BBC “something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum,” then sharpened this image by defining it as “a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum.” Though the comparison seems far fetched, he believed he was prostituting his talents by working under an absurdly bureaucratic regime and broadcasting wartime propaganda to India, which had very few radios.
Orwell, who thought of himself as unattractive, mocked buildings, statues and even people he disliked by calling them ugly. In one of his “As I Please” columns, he wrote that if you climb the hill in Greenwich Park, which had several handsome works by Sir Christopher Wren, “you can have the mild thrill of standing directly on longitude 0°, and you can also examine the ugliest building in the world, Greenwich Observatory … that shapeless sprawling muddle at the top of the hill.” The climber would be rewarded not with a handsome prospect, but (as Orwell challenges the reader to think of an uglier building) with a hideous astronomical observatory that ruins the “mild thrill.”
Referring to the monument of the famous hymn writer, Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta, Orwell told a friend, “if you are ever near St. Paul's [cathedral] & feel in a gloomy mood, go in & have a look at the statue of the first Protestant bishop of India, which will give you a good laugh.” Orwell was amused not only by the statue, but also by the very idea of a Christian bishop preaching (as Orwell did at the BBC) to the Hindu masses.
Orwell also used humor (as well as quirky behavior) to cut the upper classes down to size by connecting them, with deliberate absurdity, with physical ugliness. “Looking through the photographs in the New Year's Honours List,” he wrote, “I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer.” Contrasting the tentative “it seems” with the definitive “the rule” and inventing a fanciful aristocratic name, he placed those honored by the King between two distinctly lower-class types: a fat bartender and a dyspeptic tax-hound. He then zeroed in on a particularly distinguished personage, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian newspaper tycoon and wartime minister of supply, who actually had a simian countenance. Suggesting that the minister was being manipulated by the government, he wrote that Beaverbrook looked more “like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.”
Recalling his grim experience as a dishwasher in an expensive Parisian restaurant, Orwell took gleeful pleasure in describing disgusting acts that were motivated by class hatred. In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) he revealed that “a French cook will spit in the soup” and that a waiter proudly told him that “he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.” The waiter not only upset the expectations of haute cuisine, but also took grim pleasure in watching the customer consume the polluted soup. Orwell concluded with a startling though irrefutable premise: “Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.”
In addition to schoolboy slang, the adolescent mockery of physical ugliness and delight in disgusting details, Orwell also took pleasure in practical jokes. He had amused himself in childhood by answering a fake advertisement for a weight-reducing course and, pretending to be an obese matron, had deliberately prolonged the cruel correspondence. “Do come before ordering your summer frocks,” the weight-reducer insisted, “as after taking my course your figure will have altered out of recognition.” This went on for some time, he recalled, “during which time the fee gradually sank from two guineas to half a crown, and then I brought the matter to an end by writing to say that I had been cured of my obesity by a rival agency.”
In this diverting playlet, the adult advertiser assumes that the cheeky schoolboy is actually the sort of woman who orders frocks from her dressmaker each season instead of buying them off the rack in a shop. Her fee is as sharply reduced as his figure is supposed to be. Never revealing that his fraud matched her own, Orwell neither enrolled in the promising course nor rejected it. Instead, he twisted the knife by claiming to default to another agency. The advertiser, promising a radical transformation, thinks she's deceiving Orwell but is herself deceived.
Orwell's humor could be self-deprecating in a characteristically English way. In his autobiographical first novel, Burmese Days (1934), he portrays the comical aspect of a humiliating incident. Flory, courting Elizabeth and taking her through the jungle, shoots a leopard, seems heroic and achieves a long-sought moment of intimacy with her. He promises to cure and give her this symbolic trophy, but is horrified to discover that “the skin had been utterly ruined. It was as stiff as cardboard, with the leather cracked and the fur discoloured and even rubbed off in patches. It also stank abominably. Instead of being cured, it had been converted into a piece of rubbish.”
Flory, of course, should have thrown it away and pretended he'd lost it. But, desperate to see Elizabeth, he feels compelled, in an extremely awkward scene, to present it to her: “It looked so shabby and miserable that he wished he had never brought it…. She stepped back with a wince of disgust, having caught the foul odour of the skin. It shamed him terribly. It was almost as though it had been himself and not the skin that stank.” Elizabeth, edging away from him, is predictably horrified by the disgusting hide and by the offensive smell that seems to drift from the skin to Flory himself. This incident terminates all hope of marrying a girl who is, though he doesn't realize it, quite shallow and worthless.
Courting a girl in England when starting out as a writer and using a comically far-fetched image, Orwell compared his own work to Joyce's great novel. When I read Ulysses, he said, “and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.” Taking a course in voice production is as useless as the weight-reducing course and only gives the impression of being what Joyce (alluding to a brand of ale) called a “bass barreltone.” (In any case, a truly ambitious eunuch would try to become a countertenor.) Orwell freely admits that his literary faults are all too clear and that, compared to Joyce, he's a castrato.
Orwell often used satiric wit to expose the faults of the literary world. Reviewing Cyril Connolly's novel The Rock Pool (1936), he defined, in a neatly phrased alliterative sentence, the moral chasm between himself and his old friend: “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.” Exploiting the sexual suggestion of spending sperm, Orwell exposed Connolly's arty frauds as both parasites and buggers.
Orwell could be both a blunt Englishman and a supercilious Etonian. In a review of The Hamlet in 1940, he put down William Faulkner by satirizing the perverse, Southern Gothic characters: “people with supremely hideous names—names like Flem Snopes and Eck Snopes—sit about on the steps of village stores, chewing tobacco, swindling one another in
small business deals, and from time to time committing a rape or a murder.” The wit derives from the casual way in which these revolting characters progressively degenerate from disgusting habits to minor frauds to violent crimes.
Orwell began to write after returning from Burma in 1928, but did not achieve success until he published Animal Farm in 1945. In the course of his long struggle a lot of his work was rejected and his animal fable turned down by T. S. Eliot himself. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) Orwell, who did not go on to university after Eton and remained a perennial outsider, pierced the polite façade and exposed the snobbery and clubbyness of literary life. Once again, he contrasted opposite extremes of discourse—excessive delicacy and brutal frankness—to drive home his point. His hero Gordon Comstock, bitterly enraged after his rather feeble poem has been rejected by an editor, asks: “Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, ‘We don't want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with.’”
When Orwell became literary editor of the Socialist newspaper Tribune in 1943, he didn't have the heart to send out rejections and meekly accepted manuscripts he knew he could never print. In another deliberately absurd comparison, the ex-colonial policeman used a prison metaphor to show that a reversal of roles would be fatally anarchic if a mere writer were suddenly promoted to a position of power: “It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.”
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