Reading Eric Blair
Orwell’s collected letters, reviewed
The terrible fate of the most powerful writers is that they are too effective, and after death their literary personae are doomed to haunt the earth as archetypes. For political writers, the danger is even greater, for their arguments — or, more likely, snatch quotations of their arguments — will live on, devoid of nuance and ironic context, to give rhetorical ammunition to those their creators might have despised. No writer of the twentieth century who was not also a politician has influenced political discourse as George Orwell has, and, true to the rule, none has seen their legacy as used and abused.
In America, where Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are commonly taught — poorly — in schools, Orwell has become an anti-statist trope, his name routinely invoked by both political left and right and serving several generations of journalists with headline-ready clichés. Ignorance of Orwell’s other writings and of the man himself leads to sometimes ludicrous misappropriation.
I recall a cocktail party I attended not too long ago where a right-wing Wall Street financier explained that universal healthcare legislation prefigured grim dystopian slavery. “Everything Orwell predicted is coming true,” he assured me, with finger jabs for emphasis: “It’s the beginning…” — “of” — “the” — “end.” In fact, Orwell was a socialist — but don’t worry, my eighth-grade teacher never told me, either.
Orwell, difficult to pin down, even now, more than fifty years and numerous biographies after his death, was a born shit-disturber: contrarian, subversive, and hypocritical — and all the more interesting for it. The man born Eric Arthur Blair, respectably middle-class and Eton-educated, served as a colonial policeman in Burma, lived as a down-at-heel bohemian in Paris and homeless tramp in London, fought in the Spanish Civil War, and became a ferocious critic of communism, fascism, and conservative quietism, producing along the way two political allegories (Animal Farm, 1945, andNineteen Eighty-Four, 1949), several novels, three works of genre-blurring book-length nonfiction (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933; The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937; and Homage to Catalonia, 1938), and volumes of essays, criticism, and journalism, all before dying at the age of forty-six.
He also, like any literary man of his generation, wrote a lot of letters — more than 1,700, in fact, and sometimes to people, including T.S. Eliot, Arthur Koestler, and Henry Miller, more than famous in their own right. The release this August of a U.S. edition of George Orwell: A Life in Letters, Peter Davison’s meticulously selected and edited collection of correspondence written by, to, or about Orwell, offers an opportunity to strip away some of the ideological filters which have been overlaid on Orwell’s legacy and look once more at Orwell in his own words. It also offers an opportunity to try to penetrate the powerful, cultivated Orwell persona and search out Eric Blair beneath.
Anyone who has read any of Orwell’s nonfiction will recognize the Orwell voice: that warm, honest narrator, with the wry, self-deprecating humor; that English stoicism; that plain prose devoid of abstraction and jargon — all conspiring to make us believe everything Orwell tells us. The force of the literary persona is such that it requires almost an act of will to try to punch through and expose the gears and levers beneath.
That’s where things like letters collections come in. A Life in Letters, previously released in Britain, is a distillation of the massive Orwell archive. Because most of its contents have always been available, its American publication is not a historical event, though it is possibly a publishing event for those who do not care to travel to England to read through the archive’s two thousand volumes of papers by or about Orwell.
A collection like this necessarily suffers the constraints of a double bind: it will be confusing and, frequently, boring for those who know nothing of Orwell but Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four, and, conversely, for those of the Orwell cult, who’ve already read his biographies and encountered many of the included letters elsewhere, it will be largely lacking in revelation. Casual readers who want to get a sense of Orwell’s nonfiction work should turn elsewhere; they’re better off reading his collected essays or one of his classic memoirs like Down and Out in Paris and London or Homage to Catalonia.
Davison himself admits that most of Orwell’s letters are, well, “businesslike,” which, given how much business was conducted by post in the 1930s and 40s, should not be surprising, yet can still disappoint those expecting Orwell’s letters to be floods of observation and wit in the manner of his essays, or, a salacious collective exposé of his personal life and inner demons. The reality is that for every one sentence offering insight or intrigue, there are many more detailing debts owed or paid, manuscripts sent or received, and minor social comings-and-goings.
Here is one excerpt chosen at random:
About our arrangements. If the bank sends us the money in time we’re going to take a boat which sails from Casablanca on the 22nd or 23rd and ought to get to London about the end of March.
And another:
It was very nice to hear from you after all this time. I heard almost simultaneously from M. D. Hill, who wrote to me apropos of the Gem and Magnet and George Lyttelton, who is now editing a series for Home & Van Thal and wanted me to write something.
Not exactly compelling reading, which is why I find some of the advance praise that this collection has received in the popular press somewhat suspicious: I find it hard to believe that general readers, no matter how educated and intellectually curious, are shivering with anticipation at the prospect of reading Orwell’s letters to his literary agent.
In fact, some of the most interesting letters included aren’t Orwell’s. In particular the warmth and wit of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, his first wife, overflows. As her lively letters show, she was incorrigibly spirited and stoic — presumably a minimum requirement in a woman crazy enough to marry the man who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Eileen not only put up with her husband’s principled, reckless decision to fight in the Spanish civil war, but embraced it. Here she writes her mother from Catalonia:
I enclose a “letter” I began to write to you in the trenches! … You may as well have a letter written from a real fighting line …. I thoroughly enjoyed being at the front.
After Orwell was shot through the throat by a Fascist sniper and evacuated near death, she sent his parents a hasty and masterfully understated telegram explaining, “Eric slightly wounded.” (One of the many drawings and photos included in A Life in Letters is actually a diagram Orwell’s militia commander sketched showing where Orwell was wounded.)
Eileen’s thread ends heartbreakingly prematurely. Near the close of the Second World War, while Orwell was away working as a war correspondent in France, she died unexpectedly during a normally routine surgery; her last letter to Orwell stops abruptly in the middle, put aside as she was wheeled away to undergo the operation which killed her.
As for Orwell: I said that these letters are not constantly illuminating, and they’re not. Yet if we read closely and patiently we are rewarded with not only a sense of Orwell the writer but even a few glimpses of the man beneath. Perhaps you feel that I’ve been teasing you, so here is Eric Blair, the man, laid bare:
Here is the man on his deathbed, pathetically attempting to set his affairs in order:
We have agreed that if I should die in the near future, even if I were already married, Avril shall be [Orwell’s son’s] guardian. Beyond that I can’t make plans at present.
Here is the man sometimes excruciatingly inept with women:
I hope you will let me make love to you again some time, but if you don’t it doesn’t matter, I shall always be grateful to you for your kindness to me.
Here is the young man embracing the precocious homoeroticism of English prep school:
I am afraid I am gone on Eastwood. This may surprise you but it is not imagination I assure you. […] … I think you are too …. I am not jealous of you. […] Of course I dont ask you to resign your share in him only dont say spiteful things.
Here is the little boy miserable at boarding school but putting on a good face for his mum:
My dear Mother, I hope you are alright.
It was Mrs: Wilkes birthday yesterday. we had aufel fun after tea and played games all over the house. We all went for a walk to Beachy-Head.
I am third in Arithmatick.
Sometimes it is liberating to read Orwell’s letters — how cathartic to know that the man who wrote the most terrifying dystopian novel in history was once a little boy who played games and wrote his mother dutiful letters.
But there is always also an element of discomfort in reading the collected letters (or diaries, or unfinished manuscripts, or biographies) of writers of stature — letters strip away varnish to reveal not gods, but men.
For many years Orwell biographers have wondered why he and his childhood friend and crush Jacintha Buddicom broke off contact for almost thirty years; part of the answer, as discovered in 2006 and recounted here, is that he may have abortedly attempted to force himself on her when he was eighteen. But when you read the letters, or diaries, or biographies of literary gods you accept the risk that one paragraph in five hundred pages might forever stain them.
Fittingly, Orwell’s collected letters chart the life of a writer whose own political views were complex, unsettled, and often contradictory.
Orwell’s deeply-felt if inconsistent leftism was, like his writing, forged in lived experience: the “lower-upper-middle class” boy who attended Eton on scholarship later wrote witheringly of finely-graded English class snobbery; the former Burmese colonial policeman grew to hate imperialism and the pact of silence that enabled it; the slum journalist and one-time tramp loaded and aimed his Remington Portable at the hypocrisy and apathy of the bourgeois classes faced with the fact of widespread British poverty.
But, despite his very real commitment to socialism, Orwell was constantly frustrated by his fellow socialists. His letters often disparage leftists:
What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.
(The perennial complaint.) Orwell resented his fellow leftists both for failing to offer an effective alternative to the conservative political status quo and also, more importantly, for the dangerous naïveté which made them pawns of the hardline Stalinist left.
Orwell’s own hatred of communism was forged in the crucible of Spain, where his workers’ militia was betrayed by the supposedly allied Communists, and Orwell’s experiences in Spain directly informed Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. His letters reveal the logical progression of Orwell’s thinking, and, as early as 1943, Orwell incidentally outlines the basic premise of Nineteen Eighty-Four in a letter to a friend:
…I think you overestimate the danger of a “Brave New World” — i.e. a completely materialistic vulgar civilisation based on hedonism. I would say that the danger of that kind of thing is past, and that we are in danger of quite a different kind of world, the centralised slave state, ruled over by a small clique who are in effect a new ruling class…. Such a state would not be hedonistic, [but] on the contrary its dynamic would come from some kind of rabid nationalism and leader-worship kept going by literally continuous war ….
Orwell’s most fundamental foe, even more than unchecked power, was always ideology itself.
Whatever his politics, Orwell’s letters, like his essays and journalism, demonstrate the often instinctively conservative temperament of a man who loved the idiosyncratic, the stubborn, the individual, the human, the organically-rooted.
He recounts with amusement how, seeing a man, presumably Communist, selling copies of the Daily Worker on the side of the street in England, he asked for a copy and the comrade responded, “Yes, sir.” As Orwell puts it, almost with satisfaction: “Dear old England!”
How can we reconcile that Orwell with the other Orwell described here, the one who arrived in Spain, an extra pair of boots around his neck and pockets stuffed with proletarian rolling tobacco, eager for the chance to participate in socialist revolution; or the man who, even after he grew to hate communism, sometimes addressed letters “Dear Comrade”?
In a letter written years later reflecting on her first encounter in Barcelona with, as she puts it, “a tall thin man with a ravaged complexion,” Jennie Lee, a contemporary of Orwell’s, explains:
He was a satirist who did not conform to any orthodox political or social pattern. […] The only thing I can be quite certain of, is that up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity … ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions — he never had much — in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.
So perhaps the deliciously oxymoronic “Tory anarchism” Orwell once ascribed to Jonathan Swift might be the best expression of his own outlook — politically progressive by conscience and commitment, yet conservative by character.
At the least, it explains Orwell’s enduring appeal: despite his clarity and forcefulness as a writer, casual readers and political commentators can always find, somewhere in that lacuna between his politics and temperament, an Orwell they can tailor to their needs.
So, what will you find in these letters? Do you find affirmation of the towering anti-totalitarian icon? Or, do you stumble onto some stark dichotomy between the persona George Orwell and the man Eric Blair? Or, perhaps, do you see that the Orwell you know is a cartoon of the corporal Orwell — basically the same, but with the face a bit longer, the hair a bit more tousled, the typewriter louder, the cigarette fouler?
The easy answer is all of the above. The harder answer is also all of the above.
Fellow English writer Stephen Spender once asked Orwell in a letter why he had previously disparaged Spender in print but then, after having met him in person, ceased to do so. Orwell responds:
…Because not having met you I could regard you as a type [and] also an abstraction. Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet someone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas.
Perhaps it is time we treat Orwell on his own terms, not on the terms we prefer to see. We owe it at least to Eric Blair.
This feature-length review essay was originally published at Open Letters Monthly and can also be read there.
