Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  6. See Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936; London, 1962), p. 13, where Gordon attacks the “Snooty, refined books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews.”

  7. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London, 1962), p. 129.

  8. Samuel Johnson expressed the same idea: “Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil” (James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and Lawrence Powell, [Oxford, 1934], 1.511).

  9. G. B. Shaw, “Preface to Immaturity,” Selected Prose (New York, 1952), p. 54.

  10. Orwell, “Culture and Democracy,” Victory or Vested Interests? ed. G. D. H. Cole (London, 1942), p. 83.

  11. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

  12. Jack London, The People of the Abyss (New York, 1903), p. 1.

  13. Orwell, Burmese Days (1934; New York, 1951), p. 61.

  14. Orwell, “Culture and Democracy,” p. 81.

  15. Ravelston is based on Orwell's friend Sir Richard Rees, the editor of Adelphi, where Orwell published his first reviews and the mediocre poem that Gordon composes in the novel. Rosemary is based on Eileen O'shaughnessy, whom Orwell married in 1936 and who died unexpectedly during an operation in 1945.

  16. Besides quotations from Keats and Marvell, there are ineffectual allusions to the Bible, Virgil, Chaucer, Villon, Wyatt, Peele, Shakespeare, Milton, Mandeville, Blake, Baudelaire, Francis Thompson and D. H. Lawrence. In Lawrence's artistically superior Women in Love (1920), the numerous references to nineteenth-century English writers contrast the tradition and solidity of that period to the chaos and disintegration of the modern age.

  17. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, pp. 110–111.

  18. “Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed” is a theme of Orwell's novel as well as of Johnson's “London” (1738). “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol” are all portrayed in the book.

  19. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 148.

  20. The influence of Keep the Aspidistra Flying on Wain's Hurry on Down (1953; London, 1960) is particularly strong, as the following Orwellian quotations from Wain indicate:

  —his aim was to be outside the class structure altogether. (52)

  —He began to think increasingly about money. The poison was doing its work. (77)

  —He had turned his back resolutely on the world represented by Robert Tharkles; he had declared that he wanted none of it, that he would manage without its aid or approval. (81)

  —Can't get a short drink under two bob. Money. The network everywhere: no, a web, sticky and cunningly arranged. (84)

  —He comes to the illusory citadel called Renunciation of Ambition. (234)

  21. Quoted in Jacob Korg, “The Spiritual Theme in George Gissing's Born in Exile,” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis, 1958), p. 246.

  22. George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891; Boston, 1962), p. 56.

  23. Orwell, “Not Enough Money,” Tribune (London), April 2, 1943, p. 15. See also Orwell's important posthumous essay, “George Gissing,” 4:428–436.

  24. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 94–95.

  25. Orwell, Coming Up For Air (1939; London, 1962), p. 27.

  26. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 1949), p. 60.

  27. This scene is very close to the sense of freedom that Orwell experienced under the short-lived Anarchist government in Barcelona. See Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938; Boston, 1959), pp. 104–105.

  28. Orwell puts too much faith in common “decency.” Decent men seldom achieve political power; and if they do, they rarely remain decent.

  29. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854; London, 1961), p. 65.

  30. Ibid., p. 105.

  31. A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (New York, 1965), p. 238.

  32. Orwell, “Our Own Have Nots,” Time and Tide, November 27, 1937, p. 1588.

  33. Compared to Orwell's book, J. B. Priestley's English Journey (1934) gives a superficial outsider's view and conveys the impression of a rather cozy and pleasant jaunt.

  34. Orwell's desire to change things is related to another criticism of most Left-wing writing. In “England, Your England” he states: “The immediately striking thing about these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion” (2:74).

  35. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 120.

  36. Orwell's somewhat sentimental description of working-class domestic life reflects his own lack of family warmth.

  37. He can also be very muddle-headed about them. In The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 103–104, he writes: “Of course I know now there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school.”

  38. Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero (Chicago, 1964), p. 153.

  39. Ibid., p.154.

  40. “E” is his wife Eileen; “G” his sister-in-law, Gwen O'shaughnessy.

  6. “AN AFFIRMING FLAME”: HOMAGE TO CATALONIA

  1. John Wain, “Orwell in Perspective,” New World Writing 12 (1957), 85.

  2. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 1:6.

  3. The first part of Malraux's Man's Hope (1938) describes the initial events of the war and the victory of the workers in Madrid and Barcelona.

  4. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 46. Orwell may have been thinking of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917) and Eliot's Homage to John Dryden (1924) when he chose his title.

  5. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904; New York, 1960), pp. 83, 99.

  6. Georges Bernanos, A Diary of My Times, trans. Pamela Morris (New York, 1938), p. 185.

  7. By Remarque, Barbusse, Hemingway, Aldington, Graves, Sassoon and Max Plowman.

  8. Many images of Burma reappear as similes in Homage to Catalonia. The Spanish hills are “wrinkled like the skins of elephants” (25), a patrol is like “stalking a wild animal” (89), returning to Barcelona is like going from Mandalay to a hill station (108) and the noise of bullets is “like a tropical rainstorm” (131).

  9. Yet Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive From the Camp of Victory (Carbondale, Illinois, 1962), p. 60, writes, “it is predominantly a gay book.”

  10. Quoted in Nathan Cohen, “A Conversation with Joyce Cary,” Tamarack Review 3 (1957), 15.

  11. Orwell's metaphorical and emotional description is quite different from Georges Kopp's more precise and factual account in a letter from Barcelona on May 31, 1937: “Eric was wounded on the 20th of May at 5 a.m. The bullet entered the neck just under the larynx, slightly on the left side of its vertical axis and went out at the dorsal right side of the neck's base. It was a normal 7mm bore, copper-plated, Spanish Mauser bullet, shot from a distance of some 175 yards. At this range, it has a velocity of some 600 feet per second and a cauterising temperature. Under the impact, Eric fell on his back. The hemorrhaging was insignificant” (British Museum Additional MS 49304).

  12. See Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (New York, 1963), p, 424n: Orwell's account of the Barcelona riots “should be read with reservations. It is more accurate about war itself than about the Spanish War.”

  13. The Independent Labour Party was more radical than the Labour Party and, according to A. J. P. Taylor, was “a refuge for middle-class idealists” (English History, p. 238). John McNair was the ILP representative in Barcelona. The CNT were “Syndicalist unions controlled by the Anarchists” (53).

  14. Thomas, Spanish Civil War, p. 191. See Franz Borkenau, The Spanish Cockpit (London, 1937), p. 73, on Barcelona in August 1936: “All languages are spoken and there is an indescribable atmosphere of political enthusiasm, of enjoying the adventure of war, of relief that sordid years of emigration are passed, of absolute confidence in speedy success.” Orwell calls this work “by a long
way the ablest book that has yet appeared on the Spanish war” (Homage to Catalonia, p. 57n).

  15. For a similar thought, see Orwell's “War Diary” of June 16, 1940, when Britain was threatened by invasion: “If the USA is going to submit to conquest as well, there is nothing for it but to die fighting’ (2:349).

  16. See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (New York, 1965), p. 290: “The Soviet bureaucracy succeeds, with its treacherous policy of ‘people's fronts,’ in insuring the victory of reaction in Spain and France—the Communist International is doing all it can in that direction.”

  17. There are fascinating similarities between Homage to Catalonia and Malraux's description in Man's Fate (1933) of the betrayal of the Shanghai workers by the Communist International in Hankow.

  18. Orwell, equally confused about England's motives, writes in 1938: “The real meaning of British foreign policy in the last two years will not become clear until the war in Spain is over” (1:347).

  19. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1960), p. 425.

  20. André Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, trans. A. W. Fielding (London 1952), p. 119.

  21. Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That (1929; London, 1961), p. 112, describes a similar episode of military humanism: “While sniping from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loop-hole, I saw a German, perhaps seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line. I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant with me. ‘Here, take this. You're a better shot than I am.’ He got him; but I had not stayed to watch.”

  22. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 131.

  23. Ibid., p. 132.

  24. Compare Homage to Catalonia, p. 83:

  The place was alive with rats. The filthy brutes came swarming out of the ground on every side. If there is one thing I hate more than another it is a rat running over me in the darkness, However, I had the satisfaction of catching one of them a good punch that sent him flying;

  with Graves, Good-bye to All That, pp. 116–117:

  Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly … [one man] found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.

  25. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 132–133.

  26. Ibid., p. 130.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid., p. 134.

  29. Ibid., p. 137.

  30. See Bernanos, A Diary of My Times, p. 118: “The Spanish tragedy is a charnel-house. All the mistakes by which Europe is bringing about her death, mistakes which she tries to spew forth in frightful convulsions, mingle there in putrefaction.”

  31. For a vivid account of Fascist jails, see Arthur Koestler's Spanish Testament (1938).

  32. Orwell's descriptions of dawn with “the first narrow streaks of gold, like swords slitting the darkness” (40); of the cherries whitening on the trees in no man's land; and of the silver poplar leaves that “fringed our trenches and brushed against my face” (187) are deeply moving affirmations of life. These glimpses suggest the “real” Spain that Orwell could never see until he was discharged: the sierras, goatherds, vineyards and palaces that had held his imagination since childhood.

  33. Spender, World Within World, p. 170.

  34. Orwell, “Review of The Forge by Arturo Barea,” Horizon 4 (September 1941), 214. See also K. W. Watkins, Britain Divided: The Effect of the Spanish Civil War on British Public Opinion (New York, 1963).

  8. ORWELL's APOCALYPSE: COMING UP FOR AIR

  1. Orwell, Coming Up For Air, p. 160.

  2. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 16.

  3. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 2:58.

  4. See Orwell's BBC talk (no. 31), “Calling All Students” (June 13, 1943).

  5. John Wain, “Here Lies Lower Binfield,” Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1963), p. 208.

  6. E. M. Forster, “Abinger Harvest,” Abinger Harvest (New York, 1955), p. 343.

  7. Isaac Rosenfeld, “Decency and Death,” Partisan Review 17 (May 1950), 516.

  8. D. H. Lawrence, “The Captain's Doll,” Four Short Novels (New York, 1965), p. 245.

  9. Orwell, “The Male Byronic,” Tribune, June 21, 1940, p. 20. Orwell's novel has thematic affinities with H. G. Wells’ Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916), which portrays the destruction of these “golden years” by the Great War.

  10. Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Harry Moore (New York, 1962), 1:378.

  11. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way (London, 1967), p. 9.

  12. ORWELL's BESTIARY: THE POLITICAL ALLEGORY OF ANIMAL FARM

  1. See 1:279, for Orwell's letter of July 31, 1937: “We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels.”

  2. See Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, pp. 51–52: “With the utmost stretch of fancy it would be difficult to imagine a contrast more striking than that which exists between the schema of the workers’ state according to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and the actual state now headed by Stalin.”

  3. John Atkins, George Orwell: A Literary Study (London, 1954), p. 233, writes of two books critical of the Soviet Union: “Orwell had read both of these books and he reviewed one. They are The Life and Death of Stalin by Louis Fischer … and The Real Soviet Russia by David J. Dallin.” If Orwell read Dallin's book (1944), it was too late to influence Animal Farm; if he reviewed the book, it is not listed in any of the bibliographies. He could not have read Fischer's book, which was first published in 1952.

  4. Alexander Pope's couplet in The Essay on Man (1734) is typical:

  How instinct varies in the groveling swine

  Compared, half-reasoning elephant with thine!

  See also Boswell, Life of Johnson, 4.373: Miss Seward told Johnson

  of a wonderful learned pig, which I had seen at Nottingham; and which did all that we have observed exhibited by dogs and horses. The subject amused him. “Then (said he) the pigs are a race unjustly calumniated. Pig has, it seems, not been wanting to man, but man to pig. We do not allow time for his education.

  5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (New York, 1958), p. 224.

  6. Orwell, Animal Farm (New York, 1946), p. 22.

  7. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, pp. 219–220.

  8. Atkins, George Orwell, p. 221.

  9. Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell (Chicago, 1956), pp. 140, 145, 150.

  10. Rees, George Orwell, p. 85.

  11. Edward Thomas, Orwell (London, 1965), p. 71.

  12. George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell (Boston, 1966), p. 192.

  13. One line of the speech is borrowed from Thomas Hobbes. See Leviathan (1651; New York, 1962), p. 100: “The life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and Major's “our lives are miserable, laborious, and short” (6).

  14. See C. M. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (New York, 1967), p. 127, on Mayakovsky: “He became more and more a public figure, a tribune of the Revolution, who through his rhetorical verse did much to convince the proletariat that it lived in a wonderful world and must make every effort to preserve and improve it.” Orwell had read Bowra's essay on Mayakovsky (see 3:105).

  15. By an anonymous Russian poetaster, quoted in Fischer's The Life and Death of Stalin (New York, 1952), p. 32, and cited by Atkins, George Orwell, p. 228.

  16. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, pp. 104–105.

  17. See Robert Tucker and Stephen Cohen, eds., The Great Purge Trial (New York, 1965), p. xviii, quoting Stalin: “To choose one's victim, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world.”

  18. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 1921–1929 (New York, 1959), p. 28.

  19. In The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 190, 165, O
rwell attacks the “machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia,” and states: “the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development, but as an end to itself, almost as a kind of religion.”

  20. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 288.

  21. Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 309–311.

  22. Ibid., p. 311.

  23. Quoted in Woodcock, Crystal Spirit, p. 196.

  24. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 325.

  25. Deutscher, Prophet Unarmed, p. 5.

  26. Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, p. xxix.

  27. Ibid., p. xxiii.

  28. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929–1940 (New York, 1963), p. 360.

  29. Quoted in Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, p. 508.

  30. B.T. Oxley, George Orwell (London, 1967), p. 81, mentions this striking similarity as well as the parallel to the Kronstadt revolt.

  31. Tucker and Cohen, The Great Purge Trial, pp. xxvii and note.

  32. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 434.

  33. Ibid., pp. 519–520. Atkins, George Orwell, p. 230, mentions this similarity.

  34. Isaac Deutscher, “1984—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” Russia in Transition (New York, 1960), p. 263n.

  35. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow, 1959), p. 73: the worker “in his human functions no longer feels himself to be anything but animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

  36. Tom Hopkinson, George Orwell (London, 1953), p. 29.

  37. Laurence Brander, George Orwell (London, 1954), p. 171.

  38. See Animal Farm, p. 72: “In the old days there had often been scenes of bloodshed equally terrible, but it seemed to all of them that it was far worse now that it was happening among themselves.”

  39. Conrad, Nostromo, pp. 406, 414. Orwell was working on a study of Conrad's political novels when he died.

  For a similar idea, see Homage to Catalonia, p. 180: “every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.”