Table Of ContentGEORGE ORWELL: THE AGE'S ADVERSARY
By the same author
JONATHAN SWIFT: THE BRAVE DESPONDER
GEORGE ORWELL: THE
AGE'S ADVERSARY
Patrick Reilly
M
MACMILLAN
©Patrick Reilly 1986
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 978-0-333-39388-8
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First published 1986
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Typeset by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Reilly, Patrick
George Orwell: the age's adversary.
I. Orwell, George-Criticism and interpretation
I. Title
823'.912 PR6029.R8Z/
ISBN 978-1-349-18127-8 ISBN 978-1-349-18125-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18125-4
To my children
Edward,Joseph, Patricia,}a mes, Roseanne and Annemarie
He who appeals to experience renounces faith.
(Feuerbach)
They lived at the end ofa n epoch, when everything was dissolving into a
sort ofg hastly flux, and they didn't know it.
(Coming Up for Air)
Contents
Preface
IX
Acknowledgements xu
Source Abbreviations
X Ill
PART ONE: THE MAN
Introduction: The Awkward Oracle 3
2 The Honest Man 30
3 The Severed Wasp 59
PART TWO: THE WORKS
4 Innocents Abroad 97
5 The Orphic Impulse 133
6 The Transient Paradise 169
7 The Secular Epiphany 197
8 The Utopian Shipwreck 236
9 The Deed's Creature 269
Notes 298
Index 311
vii
Preface
In Saul Bellow's novel Mr Sammler's Planet the aging hero is
persuaded against his better judgement to give an evening lecture
at Columbia University on the British political scene prior to the
outbreak of the Second World War. He is incautious enough to
praise George Orwell for his sanity and commits the
unpardonable blunder of quoting Orwell's remark that British
radicals in the 1930s were protected in their forthright views by
the shield of the Royal Navy. Only later does he learn that he's
filling in for someone whose subject was to have been 'Sorel and
Modern Violence'. The violence is directed instead at Sammler as
the radicals of the 1970s hurl abuse against both speaker and
subject: 'Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counter-revolutionary.
It's good he died when he did. And what you are saying is shit.' 1
Later, Sammler's unscrupulous young impresario rebukes him
for being so politically maladroit: 'Lots of young radicals see
Orwell as part of the cold-war anti-Communist gang. You didn't
really praise the Royal Navy, did you?' 2 Orwell's gift for injury,
that talent for unpalatable truth that drives the scandalised
fanatic to excremental fury and his more sophisticated colleague
to deprecations about breakdown and disease - all this is the
irrefutable sign of a fierce relevance, a living presence, a writer
who must be read, by opponents above all, if opposition is to be
any more dignified than latrine abuse.
Yet Orwell's greatness remains problematical, impossible to
deny though difficult to explain. The claims advanced by
Professor Crick in the Introduction to the biography are surely
justified (Life, pp. xiii-xxii). Orwell is a political thinker of
genuine stature and a supreme political writer, the finest in
English since Swift, and Nineteen Eighty-Four does stand towards
the twentieth century much as Leviathan did towards the
seventeenth. He is, moreover, a great essayist and a brilliant
journalist, and he did succeed, despite a tragically early death, in
moving, even in his lifetime, from being a minor English writer to
IX
X Preface
being a world figure, a name to set arguments going wherever his
books are read. Despite this, everyone who reads him remarks the
artistic unevenness of his work, the obvious novelistic
shortcomings, technical and imaginative, that makes it absurd to
rank him with such giants as Joyce and Lawrence.3 He himself, it
should be noted, made no such claim-there is no harsher critic of
Orwell the novelist than Orwell himself. Nevertheless, the
aesthetic defects notwithstanding, Orwell's reputation and
influence have increased since his death and show no sign of
diminishing, and the very fact that Orwellian is now an adjective
on a par with Swiftian or Johnsonian certifies that the greatness,
however puzzling; has been achieved. To go on complaining that
Orwell is notJoyce is unreasonable and otiose.
Not the greatness, then, but its nature is what needs to be
ascertained, and two very different men, Oscar Wilde and
Thomas Carlyle, can help us unlock the secret. In An Ideal Husband
the hero contradicts his father who has just praised a man for
genius - Lord Goring prefers to commend him for the much
scarcer commodity of pluck.4 Carlyle, similarly, identifies
sincerity as better than grace.5 The central assumption of this
book is that Orwell's greatness is intimately related to these
qualities of pluck and sincerity - he is the outstanding
twentieth-century example in English of the writer as hero, with
the courage to speak the unfashionable, unwelcome truth. It is a
moral rather than an artistic greatness.6
Anyone who enters Ephesus to denounce Diana is worth a
hearing; the Ephesians will, understandably, not like what they
hear, but is it too much to ask them to listen? Orwell must be
answered, not vilified. The key argument of this book is that few, if
any, of the answers hitherto made have engaged Orwell with the
full seriousness he deserves. His premonitions of disaster are not
to be accounted for simply in terms of political and economic
foul-ups - he himself despised and feared those who sought to
explain man's predicament as a species of mechanical breakdown,
errors of the surface, malfunctions in the social machine which the
engineers could be left to correct. He dreaded, rightly or wrongly,
a deformation of human nature, and traced it, astonishingly in
view of his own atheism, to the fallout from the religious fission of
the modern age. For almost two centuries social critics had
warned that bourgeois society was living off the accumulated
moral capital of traditional religion and traditional moral
