The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  At the same time, it ought not to stand in the way of a clear judgment of Orwell’s work. Orwell was himself much concerned about what it is that makes for survival in literature and about the changing nature of literary reputation. In “Inside the Whale” (1940) he took up the change that had swept over the remains—that is to say, the poems—of A. E. Housman, who had been an important figure in his own generation when Orwell was young but seemed less so later. With typical good sense, he writes: “There is no need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago.” I don’t mean to imply that Orwell, too, was overrated; he said things crucial to his day, and in so saying helped form not only the terms of the discussion but the history of that day and became one its central writers. Rereading Orwell in our day, one’s admiration for his insight and intellectual courage do not lessen; quite the reverse, much that he wrote then seems no less pertinent now, and not as prophesy but as simple truth. Yet much in Orwell can also seem thin, or oddly skewed, inadequate, or simply wrong. George Orwell has reached that privileged position of high reputation where his weaknesses can be openly dealt with because his strengths are no longer in serious dispute. The time, surely, has come for a fuller portrait.

  It will not, for example, any longer do to consider George Orwell principally as a Cold War writer. He was partly that, of course, one of the best and most important, possibly the primary anti-totalitarian writer of the late 1930s and 1940s, a time of great denial of the murderousness of left-wing totalitarianism. Orwell was a strong and straightaway anti-Communist. It was an honorable and lonely position, and one which a man who earned a small living by his writings paid for by being denied entry into many magazines. The significance of this strain in Orwell cannot be gainsaid; nor is it quite time, at least in the gardens of the Third World, to shuck it all off as once pertinent but no longer. But Orwell’s anti-Communism grew not alone out of his historical experience—with his self-acclaimed talent for facing unpleasant facts—but also out of his exposure to intellectuals under political pressure. He repeatedly said that “the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people.” He said it in dozens of different ways, and none of them tactful. “The truth is, of course,” he wrote in “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1944), “that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini.”

  Although Orwell described himself in The Road to Wigan Pier as “a semi-intellectual,” he was among modern writers the fiercest anti-intellectual going. Perhaps he was just enough of an intellectual—bookish, someone interested in the play of ideas—to have understood and despised the type. Having gone to Eton but not on to university, Orwell was nicely positioned to feel no inferiority toward the general class of English intellectuals and yet not quite feel himself of that class, either. To become an intellectual was, for Orwell, to become deeply out of it, hypocritical, stupid, inhumanly corrupted, spiritually bankrupt. Here is a small bouquet of Orwell’s prime remarks about intellectuals:

  They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.

  —The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

  It is only the “educated” man, especially the literary man, who knows how to be a bigot.

  —The Road to Wigan Pier

  One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that [that America had entered World War II to prevent an English revolution]; no ordinary man could be so stupid.

  —“Notes on Nationalism” (1945)

  [The leftish politics] of the English intellectual is the patriotism of the deracinated.

  —“Inside the Whale”

  England is perhaps the only great nation whose intellectuals are ashamed of their country.

  —The Lion and the Unicorn

  Orwell wasn’t much cheerier on the subject of what one might think of as intellectual auxiliaries. “A humanitarian is always a hypocrite,” he wrote, “and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.” Of Ezra Pound in particular, but of the conduct of artists generally, he noted: “One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet.” And of course his devastating shot at the grotesque unreality of those who flocked to contemporary Socialism, which appears in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier, once read can scarcely be forgot: “The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types.” Details not withheld:

  One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

  It gets worse, wilder, and, if you happen to be sitting on the right side of the aisle, even funnier.

  Having declared intellectuals poison—and “the modern English literary world, at any rate the highbrow section of it, a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds can nourish”—Orwell was thrown back on the figure he frequently referred to in his writing as “the common man.” Sometimes this “common man” is assumed to be of the working class, a man who, quite rightly in Orwell’s view, is entirely uninterested in the philosophical side of Marxism, with its “pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” Sometimes he is the “ordinary man,” who “may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; [but] offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.” People of “very different type can be described as the common man,” Orwell wrote in his essay on Dickens.

  But what marks this common man above all for Orwell is “a native decency,” a distaste for abstraction, and an appreciation of the small pleasures and surface delights of life. When Orwell writes that “the common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism,” he means that the common man retains a bred-in-the-bone respect for loyalty and kindness, courage and freedom, a hatred of unfairness and oppression, and a love for life in its everyday quality that the intellectual has bred out of himself. Mary McCarthy, it will be recalled, felt Orwell’s concept of decency needed refining, but then she was herself almost the perfect type of intellectual and wasn’t, in Orwell’s view, likely to have understood it in any case.

  Orwell understood it and tried by his best lights to live it. After his youthful years in the British imperial police in Burma, after his days of deliberately going down and out, he tried to live like the common man, at least in the outward appurtenances of his life. Bernard Crick’s biography of Orwell, the most complete we now have, recounts several of the details of Orwell’s almost aggressive anti-bohemianism. On the other hand, he was blocked off from living in an easy middle-class way not only by his meager earnings as a freelance writer but even more by his strong antipathy to the bourgeois life from which he had come. (“To have a horror of the bourgeois,” said Jules Renard, “is bourgeois.”) The result was that Orwell and his wife Eileen tended to muddle along somewhat grimly between working- and lower-middle-class living arrangements, with Orwell affecting proletarian habits. He smoked shag cigarettes, slurped his tea out of the saucer, cared not at all about clothes. In the last years of his life, with the royalties that were beginning to come in from Animal Farm, he bought a farm in Jura, in the Scottish Hebrides, where, with his sister and adopted son under his roof, he attempted to live the life of the hardscrabble farmer. As best he could, Orwell attempted, to use the French phrase he himself would doubtless have abjured, to live dans le vrai.

  He attempted to write, too, dans le vrai, and one of his working assumptions, though so far as I know he never put it straight out, was that the truth of life has been distorted by much literature. As a literary critic, he was best as a revisionist—revisin
g the received opinions about other writers that felt wrong to him. Allowing for Kipling’s worst thoughts, he goes on to make the points that “Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent,” that “few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot,” that he wrote “with responsibility” and knew that “men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.” (W. H. Auden, in his political phase during the 1930s, Orwell called “a sort of gutless Kipling.”) He de-Marxified Dickens, showing how little interested in politics Dickens was, and asserted that “he was popular chiefly because he was able to express in comic, simplified and therefore memorable form that native decency of the common man.” Brilliantly, he notes: “The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail.” In what is Orwell’s best literary essay, “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947)—an essay that anticipates and is superior to Isaiah Berlin’s “The Hedgehog and the Fox”—he sides against Tolstoy, whose “main aim, in his later years, was to narrow the range of human consciousness,” and with Shakespeare, who “loved the surface of the earth and the process of life . . . [and whose] main hold on us is through language.”

  George Orwell was half an artist. This was not sufficient to make him a memorable novelist, but it did put him in the class of the best English essayists, all of whom have also been, in their various ways, half artists. Serious visual art and music never come in for mention in Orwell; he is dead to the artistic significance of religion, toward which he was generally—and in the case of Roman Catholics particularly—antagonistic. But about literary art he was passionate:

  So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth [the same phrase he uses in connection with Shakespeare], and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

  In another time, he might have been able to give way to this side of himself. But not in that in which he lived. In his own time, politics was unavoidable, and he saw his job as reconciling “my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.” As for his own ambition, about this he is entirely clear: “What I have wanted to do throughout the past ten years,” he remarked in “Why I Write,” “is to make political writing into an art.”

  How successful was Orwell at turning political writing into an art? Very, is one’s unhesitating first response. A tradition of sorts was there. Burke, Paine, Cobden, Hazlitt, Macaulay had each produced political writing that—sometimes in flashes, sometimes in sustained patches—remains powerful, beautiful, greatly moving. In this tradition, political writing that aspired to art tended to go for the searing and the soaring, flamethrowers followed by French horns. Part of Orwell’s distinction as a political writer is that he departed from this tradition by playing it flat and playing it straight. He described the indecency of shooting a Fascist when the man is running while trying to hold up his trousers; he described the loathsomeness of tripe on a coal miner’s table; always and everywhere he described smells and filth, discomfort and disgust, and made plain that in war and in poverty “physical details always outweight everything else.” When he took on a political subject, Orwell regularly warned against his bias, he struggled on the page before the reader to be as honest as possible within that bias, and his interest in any political event or issue had nothing to do with his establishing his own superiority to it. This was, in political writing, revolutionary, and, since Orwell’s death in 1950, it remains without parallel.

  Yet the limitations built into making political writing an art, and thus giving it a chance for survival, are considerable. For one, political writing is called into being by events and issues, and events and issues are in the fullness—sometimes in the leanness—of time settled, dissolved, simply forgotten. Of the writing about them, only the rhetoric remains, trailing the stale odor of once-strong opinion. For another, in politics, unlike in art, it is important that one be correct, or at the very minimum not altogether wrong. In “Politics vs. Literature” (1947), his essay on Swift, whom he called “one of the writers I admire with the least reserve,” Orwell asks: “What is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and enjoyment of his work?” Orwell doesn’t quite get around to answering this question, so let me answer it for him by saying that, in politics, where agreement exists it is usually immensely improved.

  As for Orwell’s own politics, a subject of much contention, it can be said that all interpretations are equal, but some are more equal than others. In “Why I Write” he set them out in a single sentence: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 [since, that is, his experience of international betrayal in the Spanish Civil War] has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” That sounds plain enough, but a twist is added: the progressive party of Orwell’s time so revolted him—as, he notes, Swift was revolted by the progressive party of his own—that Orwell’s most penetrating and original writing is about the detachment from political reality of left-wing intellectuals and its serious consequences in a world where horror, suffering, and organized murder are real enough. Yet, throughout his work there is a persistent rattling against the evils of “the utter rottenness of private capitalism”—for leftists of Orwell’s generation, capitalism was a weigh station directly on the road to fascism—clichéd references to the filthy rich (“The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is now more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goring’s bombing-planes,” he wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn), false assertions (“Laissez-faire capitalism is dead”), and much else that one could pop into print in next week’s issue of the Nation without anyone noticing.

  On his deathbed, apropos of Evelyn Waugh, in his journal Orwell wrote: “One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.” In Homage to Catalonia, he wrote: “when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask which side I am on.” (The man could be a rapist, George; better ask.) Israel was for him just another variant of nationalism, and he despised nationalism in all its forms, case closed. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” he wrote, in a sentence that not only illustrates Conor Cruise O’Brien’s remark that “plain language has a tendency to become extreme” but has caused great mischief by being interpreted to mean that, at bottom, everything in the world is political in any case, so let ’er rip. Orwell was wrong about many things, and about some things not merely wrong but crudely, callowly wrong.

  But on many important things Orwell was right. He was right to trust his instincts over his political opinions whenever the two clashed. He was right in recognizing that the major political question of his time was how best to confront totalitarianism and all its deceptions; and right again to do so head on, with all his art and all his heart and the vast quantity of courage at his command. He was right in his impatience with intellectual cant, and percipient in early underscoring the connection between totalitarian habits of thought and the corruption of language. Orwell was scarcely a genius, nor even, in any striking way, an original thinker. What he was was honest, and what he had was unshakable integrity, and these qualities, working their magic, lent his writing great force and made him a figure crucial for his time and left him a model for our own. However high George Orwell’s reputation may have risen, no matter how low it may one day fall, all this is finally part of the history of publicity. What matters is that through moral effort, he made himself into a good writer. That is permanent, not subject to fluctuation, and can never be taken away.

  Proust

  (2012)

  Five or six years ago, I found the seats at classical music concerts becoming uncomfortable. I blame the seats, but in fact I had lost the Sitzfleisch—in Germ
an literally “seat meat,” in looser translation “bottom patience”—to sit through a concert. In concert halls, my mind wandered. I counted the people around me who had fallen asleep, searched the audience for anyone under 40, frequently checked my watch. Time seemed to pass more slowly than in a laundromat.

  I used to go to from 12 to 20 concerts a year. With my loss of attention at concerts, and given the expense of concert tickets, it finally occurred to me that I was wasting time and money in dragging myself to these events. I love serious music; it was only at concerts that I couldn’t seem to enjoy it. My condition was not unlike that of the English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, who once wrote that he couldn’t take his mind off thoughts of God, and it was only when he entered an Anglican church and the vicar began speaking that for him God was gone.

  George Santayana late in life also found he could no longer bear to attend concerts. Going to hear serious music, he reports in one of his letters, had come to resemble an act of piety instead of one of pleasure. In Rome, where Santayana was living at the time, there was lots of good street music, and he achieved a useful compromise by listening to this music, out-of-doors and standing up. I listen to most of my music on CDs driving around the city in my car.

  I recently attempted a concert-hall comeback. An all-Mozart program was scheduled a few weeks ago by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with Mitsuko Uchida, the foremost Mozart interpreter of our day, playing and conducting two Mozart concerti. Uchida was splendid, the CSO turned in its usual smooth performance, and as the program ended to a standing ovation for Uchida, I said to myself, “Please don’t let her play an encore.”