George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary PDF
Preview George Orwell: The Age’s Adversary
GEORGE 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 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1986 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Wessex Typesetters Frome, Somerset 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
The list of books you might like
