Why Orwell still matters

As an essayist and polemicist, he has few rivals.

It is not without justification that Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have become the keystones of George Orwell’s legacy. Personally, I’ve always favoured his essays, more often quoted than read in full. I recently wrote an article about his essays for the Washington Post, focusing on their relevance to today’s febrile political climate. You can read the article here. I would draw particular attention to the multitude of comments from left-wing readers who are apparently outraged at my argument (actually, Orwell’s argument) that authoritarianism is not specific to any one political tribe. They seem oddly determined to prove the point.

Orwell is unrivalled on the topic of the human instinct for oppressive behaviour, but his essays are far more wide-ranging than that. In these little masterworks, one senses a great thinker testing his own theses, forever fluctuating, refining his views in the very act of writing. The essays span the last two decades of his life, offering us the most direct possible insight into this unique mind.

A few early essays recount his formative years and how his opposition to imperialism developed during his time as a police officer in Burma. Later, there are vivid reflections on his role in the Spanish civil war, a foray into anti-fascism that formed the basis of his memoir Homage to Catalonia (1938).

Some of the best essays are unexpected diversions from politics. There’s the evocative account of his favourite pub, “The Moon Under Water” (1946), its décor and clientele described in affectionate detail and only later revealed as a fabrication of our author’s imagination. “A Nice Cup of Tea” (1946) is a simple guide to the successful brewing of this quintessentially English drink.

All of which is quite the contrast to the grisly experience of “Shooting an Elephant” (1936). One of Orwell’s most unpleasant duties as a police officer was to kill an elephant that was rampaging through a Burmese town, although it has often been claimed that his story was embellished as a form of commentary on the horrors of colonialism. His narration is propelled by a sense of guilt at the injustices of the regime he is compelled to serve, but also by his anger towards the local bureaucrats who sustain it. The honesty is often brutal:

“With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.”

Yet Orwell’s humanity is always evident. In “A Hanging” (1931), it is the smallest gesture of the condemned man that stirs Orwell into an appreciation of what it means to obliterate a perfectly healthy human life. “When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle,” he writes, “I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”

I find Orwell’s disquisitions on literature to be among his most rewarding. “All art is propaganda,” he declares in his extended piece on Charles Dickens (1940). This conviction, flawed as is it, accounts for his determination to focus less on Dickens’s literary merits and more on his class consciousness, which is found wanting. Even better is Orwell’s rebuttal to Tolstoy’s strangely literal-minded reading of Shakespeare (1947’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool”), which is so rhetorically deft that it seems to settle the matter for good.

Another impressive essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940), opens with a glowing assessment of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1935) but soon broadens its range to cover many contemporary novelists and their approach to social commentary. The title is a reference to Miller’s remarks on the Biblical tale of Jonah, suggesting that life inside the whale has much to recommend it. Orwell puts it this way:

“There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens.”

Orwell invites us to imagine that the whale is transparent, and so writers of Miller’s ilk may snuggle contentedly within, observing without interacting, recording snapshots of the world as it bounces by. This kind of inaction is anathema to Orwell, whose every written word seems to be driving towards the enactment of social change.

Orwell’s essays often serve as a cudgel to batter his detractors. He dislikes homosexuals, or those “fashionable pansies” who lack the masculine vigour to take up arms in defence of their country. He displays a similar lack of patience for the imperialistic middle-class “Blimps” and the anti-patriotic left-wing intelligentsia, or indeed anyone who adheres slavishly to any given political ideology. His work bears much of the stamp of the old left; that mix of social conservatism and economic leftism that we see most powerfully expressed in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”. Bad writing is also a recurring bugbear; Orwell’s loathing of cliché and “ready-made metaphors” is one of the reasons his own prose style is so effervescent.

He is at his worst when he is snide or cruel. As he recalls bisecting a wasp with a knife while it is eating the jam on his plate, one cannot help but feel repulsed. “He paid no attention,” he writes, “merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.” The telling of it seems almost gleeful, although of course he is describing the moment to make a further point; in this case, modern man’s obliviousness to the amputation of his own soul.

One could be forgiven for supposing that the metaphor occurred to Orwell before the killing of the wasp itself. So often he deliberately seeks out experiences as subject-matter for his essays. In “The Spike” (1931), he recounts a night spent in a foetid London workhouse. “Clink” (1932) is Orwell’s account of drinking to excess so that he could write about being arrested and imprisoned overnight. Such excursions, familiar to anyone who has read Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), have been criticised as “poverty tourism”, a case of an Eton-educated man romanticising the working class. His biographer D. J. Taylor argues that Orwell “spent much of his time projecting visions of himself that he thought compatible with the kind of person he imagined himself to be”. Even if this is true, it does not make his efforts any less compelling.

When Orwell pessimistically refers to “the remaining years of free speech”, one cannot help but be reminded of the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of today’s British government. He expresses irritation that more writers are not wielding their pens in the service of improving society. His own work, by contrast, is what he would term “constructive”, profoundly moral, and purposefully crafted in the hope of actuating real-world change. While other writers resigned themselves to a life inside the whale, Orwell was determined to cut his way out.