Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  One of Orwell's most famous political anecdotes anticipated a major theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the slavish submission to authoritarian rule. In August 1939, after Hitler signed the nonaggression pact with Stalin, which allowed him to invade Poland and start World War II, he was, according to the Communist Party line, suddenly transformed from an enemy into a friend. In June 1941, after betraying the mutually treacherous pact by invading Russia, he once again became an enemy. Stressing the mindless loyalty of Party members, Orwell recorded in July 1941 that “when the news of Hitler's invasion of Russia reached a New York café where some Communists were talking, one of them who had gone out to the lavatory returned to find that the ‘party line’ had changed in his absence.” Orwell emphasized the extreme suddenness of the Communist's mind-change by connecting his high-minded political beliefs with an ill-timed trip to the toilet.

  III

  During the last half of Orwell's career, as his books became darker and more pessimistic, he introduced humor to relieve the gloom and make his ideas more palatable. He began The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his account of coal miners’ lives in the industrial Midlands, with a description of the revolting tripe shop and the equally horrible lodging house above it. In the shop that sold sheep's stomachs, the food of the poor, “there was a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as ‘black tripe,’ and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled.” Using a Latinate word, he contrasted the cloudy stuff with the translucent trotters, which seem even worse when boiled and ready to eat.

  Incongruously joining excretion with ingestion, Orwell wrote of the lodging-house: “On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. The place was beginning to depress me. It was not only the dirt, the smells, and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles.” It's comical that he endured these horrors for some time before he decided to depart and that even then it was only “beginning” to depress him. The power of this passage—with the hapless Orwell quite willing to live in such a dump—intensifies during his progressive descent from squalor to stagnant decay to subterranean existence to subhuman creeping to repulsive blackbeetles.

  In the autobiographical second half of this book, which explains why he became a Socialist, Orwell took a few cracks at the lunatic fringe of that political movement. “The food-crank,” he wrote of wheat-germ and tofu eaters, “is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase.” Instead of making himself useful to society, the crank solipsistically concentrates on his own carcass, which—metaphorically—is already dead.

  Orwell could not resist lashing out, in a hilariously exaggerated broadside, against his particular bêtes noires, the creepy eunuchs in “pansy-left circles” who followed the crankish homosexual crusader Edward Carpenter. In his most notoriously offensive passage, which aroused howls of protest, he poured vitriol on “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” He also condemned “all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Finally, he rubbed salt in the wounds by wishing that all “the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City [a dreary planned community] to do his yoga exercises quietly!”

  Orwell's clever catalogue connected all sorts of weirdos to quackery in dress (or undress), food, sex, religion and ideology. He personally favored drab wooly steerage garb and was especially irritated by the brightly colored, open-necked shirts that oddballs wore at Socialist summer schools. He was so incensed by bearded fruit-juicers and sandal-wearers that he condemned them several times, and stressed their life-denying joylessness by comparing them to bluebottles (a variant of the disgusting blackbeetles) swarming over the carcass of a cat.

  George Bowling, the engaging hero of Coming Up for Air (1939), Orwell's last prewar novel, is a hedonistic, disillusioned insurance salesman, partly modeled on Joyce's Leopold Bloom. He, too, takes a shot at well-intentioned but hopelessly ill-informed women by contrasting “in fact” with “I believe” and making a far-fetched but effective pun on “Left.” Bowling says, “They've never had any direct connexion with the Left Book Club,” founded by the publisher Victor Gollancz to propagate Socialist ideas, “or any notion what it's all about—in fact I believe at the beginning Mrs. Wheeler thought it had something to do with books which had been left in railway carriages.”

  Bowling, who has intellectual curiosity and a lively sense of humor, satirizes both his own family and that of his wife. He remarks that “when I read books about Eastern countries where they practise polygamy, and the secret harems where the women are locked up with black eunuchs mounting guard over them, I used to think how shocked Mother would have been if she'd heard of it. I can almost hear her voice—‘Well, now! Shutting their wives up like that! The idea!’ Not that she'd have known what a eunuch was. But in reality she lived her life in a space that must have been as small and almost as private as the average zenana.” Contrasting the exotic East with humdrum England, Bowling exploits the sexual absurdity of eunuchs “mounting” and hints at the strange sexual practices of Arabian harems. He imagines his mother's indignant reaction to all this, yet concludes that she does, in her own limited way, fit into the “average” zenana, where women are secluded in a remote part of the house.

  His wife's self-enclosed Anglo-Indian family also belongs to this Eastern world.

  As soon as you set foot inside the front door [Bowling observes] you're in India in the eighties. You know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you're expected to know the meaning of, the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in ’87. It's a sort of little world of their own that they've created, like a kind of cyst.

  The random yet amusing catalogue of Indian clichés creates an absolutely convincing picture of these exiles. Their world (introduced by the familiar “you know”), filled with exotic objects carefully collected and brought back “Home,” was based on his own Anglo-Indian family. (Orwell was born in India, where his father worked as a civil servant.) The hermetic existence reminded these people of their lost life, their large houses and polo ponies, cringing servants and social status. The boring stories of tiger-shoots and tiger-skulls were endlessly repeated. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell had compared the dreary tribe of Socialists to bluebottles flocking to a dead cat. He now shows the pathology of this atmosphere by comparing it to a kind of cyst—a bubbly sac of semi-fluid matter.

  Bowling, nostalgically in search of his lost childhood, gets a taste of contemporary life when he bites into a sausage:

  The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary false teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue…. It gave me the feeling that I'd bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of…. [When you] get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that's what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.

  By suggesting oral sex and ejaculation when the solid and then suddenly soft thing bursts in Bowling's mouth, Orwell conveyed his intense disillusionment with the modern world and his fears about the bombs that were about to rain down on Europe.

  Orwell, who'd supported himself as a smal
l-time farmer for several years in the 1930s, knew a lot about barnyard creatures and made good use of this knowledge when writing Animal Farm. Warning a friend who was looking after the farm while Orwell was living abroad, he gave instructions about mating his pet goat Muriel, who appears under her own name in the novel: “Whatever happens don't let her go to that broken-down old wreck of Mr. Nicholls's, who is simply worn out by about twenty years of fucking his own sisters, daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters.” Orwell felt that the old billy goat, breeding rapidly through several generations, was more clapped out by incest than by sex and that his favorite Muriel deserved a better sexual partner.

  Orwell could be tender as well as crude about animals. In one of his most charming passages, in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” he humanized the toad, combined close observation with fondness for the repulsive creature and ended with a comical twist. The toad “goes through a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and that if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad.” Toads, Orwell suggested, are like human beings: foolish, indiscriminate, easily deceived and clinging to false hope when driven by sexual passion.

  Animal Farm, despite its serious political theme of the revolution betrayed, has many amusing moments. When the ruling pigs take over Farmer Jones’ house, “Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial.” On this mock-solemn occasion, made worse by the “hanging” of the hams, the remains of the slaughtered relatives, cured and transformed into human food, are discreetly removed from sight and given a decent interment.

  The pigs demonstrate their superiority to the other farm animals by performing human tasks. After the revolution, Orwell wrote, “the pigs sent for buckets and milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well adapted to this task.” Orwell suggests, as “fairly” qualifies “successfully,” that the cows were not milked well and that their trotters were not adapted to this task. He took this ironic idea from Gulliver's Travels, one of his favorite books, when Gulliver, watching the Houyhnhnm horses use their hoofs, remarks: “I have seen a white Mare of our Family thread a Needle … with that Joynt. They milk their Cows, reap their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands, in the same Manner.”

  In contrast to the fierce pigs and hardworking horses, the white mare Mollie—representing the aristocrats and monarchists who opposed the Russian Revolution—wants to dress up and have a good time. With subtle wit, Orwell reveals Mollie's vanity, indolence and childish frivolity when Clover, a stout motherly mare, “went to Mollie's stall and turned over the straw with her hoof. Hidden under the straw was a little pile of lump sugar and several bunches of ribbon of different colours.”

  Even Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), written when Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, has a few comic moments. When Winston first sees Julia, “a narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.” Winston, missing the implications of the tight sash, is put off by her puritanical demeanor. In fact, as she later admits, Julia is defiantly promiscuous and sexually voracious; and their first physical encounter is filled with romantic clichés and fantasies about submissive women and potent men: “she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one. He had pulled her down on to the ground, she was utterly unresisting, he could do what he liked with her.”

  Winston also has an ironic encounter with his neighbor Parsons, who blindly follows the Party line and is proud of his children's fanatical vigilance:

  “By the way, old boy,” he said, “I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.”

  “I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,” said Winston.

  “Ah, well—what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course.”

  The disappointment about missing the public execution, suitable entertainment for children in the world of 1984, and keenness about spying eventually turn the daughter against her father. But, ever loyal to the state, he praises her treachery: “‘Who denounced you?’ said Winston. ‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons, with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don't bear her any grudge for it. In fact I'm proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’”

  Orwell's satiric humor, sharpened by his style, included puns and obscenities, schoolboy slang and practical jokes, self-deprecation and mock solemnity, ironic contrasts and startling juxtapositions, wild exaggerations and coruscating catalogues, disgusting details and morbid comparisons, sexual innuendos and suggestions of perversity. His sly sense of humor, a vivid contrast to his dour public persona, revealed that George was much less gloomy than he seemed to be.

  ORWELL AFTER ORWELL

  TWENTY

  REVIEWING THE ORWELLIANS

  I. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams,

  THE UNKNOWN ORWELL (1972)

  This review began with an account of my unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Orwell Archive in London University. Though Stansky and Abrahams made use of the Archive, what they called the “unknown Orwell" was in fact quite well known. They failed to show how an unremarkable youth became the man who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  A Personal Prologue:

  In the spring of 1968 I won a grant from my university to do research at the Orwell Archive in University College, London. I wrote in advance to the director of the Library asking if I could read Orwell's unpublished letters and manuscripts, and I duly received his permission. But when I arrived that summer and certified in writing that I was not working on a biography of Orwell, I was icily informed by Ian Angus, deputy librarian, that the unpublished material was closed and that I could read only what was already in print (which I had already done). As I appealed to the English sense of fairness, and then expostulated angrily, tapping the letter with the backs of my fingers for emphasis, I was told first that only Sonia Orwell, who had married the tubercular Orwell in University College Hospital two months before he died, could grant me access to the papers, and second that she would never do so.

  Gradually I learned the reasons for this distressing volte-face. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus were just completing the four volumes of Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters that were about to appear with a splash in the fall and were not at all enthusiastic about what James called “a publishing scoundrel” prospecting in their gold mine. Even more to the point, Orwell had asked in his will that no biography be written. Between the time of my letter and my arrival, two Americans (one of them from Boston, where I had just come from), who knew that Malcolm Muggeridge had once been authorized by Sonia Orwell to write Orwell's biography but had abandoned it because he could not be entirely candid about his friend's life, protested their biographical innocence (so I was told), combed through the Archive and, like Lovelace in Richardson's Clarissa, only revealed their intentions when it was too late to stop them. I could only admire the resourcefulness of Stansky and Abrahams and realized that a biography of Orwell, like that of Kafka and T. S. Eliot, was both inevitable and desirable.

  The four Orwell volumes appeared in the fall and, after the critics’ initial enthusiasm had subsided, I wrote a long review-essay in Philological Quarterly, based on my familiarity with Orwell's eight hundred uncollected articles, on how much had in fact been left out of these deceptively incomplete volumes, which claim
ed to be a full revelation of Orwell's life and a substitute biography. I continued to publish articles on Orwell, and eventually met William Abrahams, who was enthusiastic about my work and made several suggestions that never materialized. In the summer of 1970 I did some burrowing in the India Office Library in London and discovered some new information about Orwell's constabulary career in Burma. The substance of my article on this subject, accepted in the fall of 1970 but not yet published, has been (quite independently) fleshed out and turned into the best chapter of The Unknown Orwell.

  This book and an unpleasant letter in TLS by Sonia Orwell appeared simultaneously last fall. In the letter Sonia Orwell states, ex cathedra, that the book “contains mistakes and misconceptions” and that it was “written without my cooperation and without my permission to quote from the work in copyright”—a considerable disadvantage for Stansky and Abrahams. She also states, with perhaps unconscious irony, that Bernard Crick, a political scientist, has been engaged to write the authorized biography. (This is quite in keeping with current publishing practice: a translator and indexer is editor of the entire twenty-volume Abinger Forster, and a history graduate edited T. E. Lawrence's poetical anthology, Minorities.) This announcement is not only a free advertisement for Crick's work, but also a staking out of territory that will inhibit publishers from bringing out books that might compete with it.