George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture

226 Pages·2012·1.96 MB·English

by  Peter Marks

George Orwell the Essayist
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George Orwell the Essayist
Literature, Politics and the
Periodical Culture
Peter Marks
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LONDON (cid:129) NEW DELHI (cid:129) NEW YORK (cid:129) SYDNEY
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Bloomsbury Academic
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2011 by Continuum International Publishing Group
© Peter Marks 2011
Peter Marks has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
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accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-4873-5
PB: 978-1-4411-2584-2
ePDF: 978-1-4411-9768-9
ePub: 978-1-4411-2823-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marks, Peter, 1958-
George Orwell the essayist : literature, politics and the periodical
culture / Peter Marks.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4411-4873-5
1. Orwell, George, 1903-1950–Criticism and interpretation. 2. English
essays–20th century–History and criticism. 3. Politics and
literature–Great Britain–History–20th century. I. Title.
PR6029.R8Z734 2011
824’.912–dc23
2011016498
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Orwell, the Essay and the Periodical Culture 1
Chapter 1 From Blair to Orwell: Finding a Voice (1928–36) 18
Chapter 2 The Radicalized Orwell: From Spanish to Global
Confl ict (1937–9) 49
Chapter 3 Orwell in Wartime: Socialism, Patriotism and
Cultural Threat (1940–5) 83
Chapter 4 Orwell and the Uncertain Future (1946–50) 134
Chapter 5 The Posthumous Orwell and the Afterlife of the Essays 187
Bibliography 203
Index 209
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Acknowledgements
The journey to the completion of this book began long ago. I wish to acknowl-
edge with immense gratitude the input of Professor Cairns Craig and Professor
Sir Bernard Crick at the start of that journey. As I wrote once before, then- Dr
Craig’s deft use of the intellectual carrot and stick stopped me making an ass
of myself. Professor Crick’s humane encouragement over too long a time was
crucial in my fi nishing this project. My sincere regret is that he did not live
long enough to see this book published.
I also need – as all students of Orwell now need – to thank profoundly
Professor Peter Davison, Ian Angus and Sheila Davison for their monumental
and breathtakingly detailed edition, T he Complete Works of George Orwell . Others
have already sung its praises, but I wish to add my voice as well. As readers
will see from the fi rst pages, the Complete Works is omnipresent. Every time I
opened one of the 20 volumes – and I opened them countless times – I learned
something.
All errors are my own.
To the many friends and colleagues and family members who have suffered
my rehearsal of the arguments contained here, apologies. Those closest to me
have endured the most, so I acknowledge the love and patience of Ella Watson
Marks, who will get her father back in reasonable condition. To Jo, whose ten-
derness and solicitude match her fortitude and forbearance, endless thanks.
This one’s for you.
A note on references: T he Complete Works of George Orwell is listed as C O in
references, with the appropriate Roman numeral designating the particular
volume.

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Introduction:
Orwell, the Essay and the Periodical Culture
Reading the obituaries of his friend George Orwell, the writer and com-
mentator Malcolm Muggeridge observed with cleared-e yed cynicism that he
could understand how ‘the legend of a human being is created’ (Coppard and
Crick, p. 271). At the time of his death Orwell was a well- considered writer
chiefl y famous for the crystalline brilliance of his political allegory A nimal
Farm (1945). N ineteen Eighty- Four had been published in Britain and in the
United States six months before Orwell died in January 1950, and was receiv-
ing highly enthusiastic reviews. It had already sold over 70,000 copies and been
selected by the Book-o f-t he-M onth Club in America. Despite these portents,
Muggeridge could never have guessed that of all his literary contemporaries
Orwell would survive best into the twenty- fi rst century, surpassing in infl u-
ence, prestige and public awareness the likes of W. H. Auden, Graham Greene,
Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh. Orwell would enter the cultural
footnotes of Britain, read as an acute and authoritative interpreter of England
and Englishness (Scruton, 2006). Some judge him one of the pre-e minent
English prose stylists of the last century, while a less controversial evaluation
would place him comfortably among the greatest political writers of the mod-
ern era. Probably he is the most widely read author of political fi ction of the
last hundred years and almost certainly the most referenced and recognized,
even by those who have never opened A nimal Farm or N ineteen Eighty- Four .
All this is well known. His essays, which this book examines at length, are
appreciated individually but have been less fully or extensively considered.
Yet essays made up a substantial part of Orwell’s literary output, contributing
signifi cantly to his cultural and political development while transmitting his
observations and arguments to a varied and vivid assortment of readers. They
also helped fashion the posthumous image of Orwell as a broad-r anging pub-
lic intellectual able to examine with a fresh and attentive intelligence an array
of subjects: the political and cultural forces at work in totalitarian societies;
seaside postcards; the qualities that make Charles Dickens ‘worth stealing’;
the potential future under the atom bomb; the sociological implications of
common toads; the decline of political language and the complex allure of
Gandhi. Their impact has been felt in surprising areas, the cultural theorist
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2 George Orwell the Essayist
Simon During seeing Orwell’s essays on popular culture as important to the
genesis of cultural studies as an academic fi eld (During, p. 35). The OED cites
‘You and the Atom Bomb’ as the fi rst instance of the term ‘cold war’, while
the writer and academic David Lodge has used ‘A Hanging’ to analyse sali-
ent distinctions between fi ction and non-fi ction. Orwell’s essays are a staple
of composition courses at American universities. British Prime Minister John
Major quoted from ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ in painting a cloying portrait
of Britain’s virtues, and ‘Politics and the English Language’ was used as a ref-
erence point for a book on political discourse in the United States in the run-
up to the election of Barack Obama. Scores of Orwell’s essays entertain and
provoke long after the initial circumstances that prompted them have passed,
anthologies regularly bringing together different gatherings for appreciative
international audiences. ‘A Hanging’, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’,
‘Politics and the English Language’ and ‘Why I Write’ are recognized as clas-
sics of the form. Not that the essays are universally lauded. Salman Rushdie
reads ‘Inside the Whale’ as ‘advocating ideas that can only be of service to our
masters’ (Rushdie, p. 97), and academic Scott Lucas accuses ‘The Lion and the
Unicorn’ of being ‘a vehicle for cultural nationalism that knew no complexity’
(Lucas, p. 21). Some critics read Nineteen Eighty-F our as the work of a writer
doomed by ill- health recording his existential despair and the rejection of
socialist principles. But in fact his essays provide substantial counterevidence,
revealing an engaged, argumentative fi gure, a perceptive cultural analyst
arguing against political quietism and continuing to champion Socialism as
he understood it.
Tracking Orwell’s development through his essays highlights his inquisitive,
often combative intelligence, his keenness to contribute on contentious issues
and his unaffected curiosity about popular culture. This approach also shows
how, for all his assertiveness, he was capable of changing his views radically.
So, for example, in a July 1939 review article published in the journal T he
Adelphi he labels the British and French empires ‘a far vaster injustice’ than
Fascism ( CO , XI , p. 360). Yet in ‘My Country Right or Left’, published in F olios
of New Writing in autumn 1940, he recalls a dream on the eve of the war which
convinced him ‘that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against
my own side, would support the war, would fi ght in it if it were possible’ (C O ,
XII , p. 271). The confi dent expression of views in his famously lucid prose did
not inoculate him from errors of judgement or from the need to reconsider
those views. Orwell was responsive to new conditions, and the essay supplied
him with a versatile medium through which to broadcast opinions and, where
appropriate, his subsequent revisions. His essays also enjoyed an ‘afterlife’,
becoming integral to the posthumous assessment of Orwell as a great prose
stylist and a perceptive cultural commentator. And as Rushdie’s assertion
shows, they also furnished critics with material to expose perceived blind spots
and biases. This study assesses the essay’s signifi cance to his larger literary
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Introduction 3
achievement, arguing that collectively these short, seemingly ephemeral pieces
are central to his literary, political and cultural achievement. The vast number
of essays he wrote precludes consideration of them all. But this book argues
that we understand the complexities, subtleties, contradictions and evolution
in Orwell’s writing and thinking better by understanding his essays.
His place among the fi rst rank of essayists needs explaining at this intro-
ductory stage if only because in the twenty-fi rst century that status seems
unproblematic. As early as 1969 the infl uential American critic Irving Howe
was calling Orwell ‘the greatest English essayist since Hazlitt, maybe since
Dr Johnson’ (Howe, p. 98), and John Hammond declared in 1982 that in ‘vol-
ume, range and intellectual depth his essays are unrivalled in this century’.
Hammond adds that in pieces such as ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Charles Dickens’
Orwell ‘made a lasting contribution to English literature and moreover
enlarged the horizons of the English essay in a signifi cant and dynamic way’
(Hammond, p. 226). Graham Good devotes a chapter to Orwell’s essays in his
extensive study of the form, observing that Orwell ‘can be seen as revising the
tradition of the political essay’, a line ‘which runs from Swift through Hazlitt’
(Good, p. 174). More recently, Claire de Obaldia readily locates Orwell in the
‘great tradition’ that includes the founding fi gures of the genre such as Michel
de Montaigne and Francis Bacon alongside an international elite stretching
over several centuries: Saint- Beuve, Renan, Roland Barthes, Addison, Steele,
Dr Johnson, Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Benn, Mann, Unamuno, Ortega, Jorge Luis Borges and others (de Obaldia,
p. 2). Commentators and critics repeatedly compare the quality of his essays
favourably against Orwell’s other work. His fi rst major biographer, the British
political scientist Bernard Crick, judges that the essays ‘may well constitute his
lasting claim to greatness as a writer’ (Crick, p. vii). From a literary perspective
the American critical titan Harold Bloom, introducing analyses of N ineteen
Eighty-F our , declares bluntly that ‘Orwell, aesthetically considered, is a far bet-
ter essayist than a writer’ (Bloom, p. 1). Unless he is damning with faint praise,
Bloom’s statement counts as a considerable recommendation. John Rodden,
the most diligent and informative observer of Orwell’s reputation, questions
whether Orwell’s literary status ‘can bear the weight of esteem and signifi -
cance which successive generations have bestowed upon him’. But he is willing
to make an exception ‘perhaps in the essay form, where his compelling ethos
so strongly appeals’ (Rodden, p. x). Even when doubts arise about the quality
of works as talismanic as A nimal Farm and Ninety Eighty- Four , then, Orwell’s
essays still get praised.
For all this acclaim, Orwell died having published only two volumes of essays:
Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940) and Critical Essays (1946). And even
this brief list overstates the truth, for C ritical Essays contained two of the three
essays from Inside the Whale . If we add to these volumes his pamphlet essay for
democratic socialism, ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’ (1941), his contributions to
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