Often as Wrong as Right

Simon During

George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters 4 vols. Published by Seeker and Warburg.

As One reads through the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, one is struck by the fact that personal honesty need not lead to political accumen. Orwell was the most honest writer of the time one might say of the century (who else would include "Books Borrowed and not Returned' in a list of his library?), yet his analysis of political situations were as often wrong as right, The most obvious example is his attitude to the Second World War. Until early 1940 he believed that England ought not to fight and with his limited knowledge of the whole situation he could give convincing reasons for his belief. Hitler's meglomania, the concentration camps and the brutality of Nazism were hidden from him by propaganda, and his conclusions were thus based on propaganda. In this stale of blindness the most liberal and logical outlook led to conclusions that were objectively wrong, while conservative and bigoted attitudes gave an analysis supported by history. It is ironic that it is only since the people have had a say in government that governments have devised means of systematically deluding the people.

The virtues Orwell believed in were exactly those that cannot cope with the distortions of politicians and propaganda. He believed in an honesty which does not depend on intellectual subtlety but on common decency and a judgement which relies on personal analysis rather than orthodoxy. No wonder he became more pessimistic as he grew older, decency and forthrightness crumple at issues which involve the murder of six million people and the burning of cities. One notices the existence of sophistry in some of his later writings. For instance he defended the bombing of Dresden, on the grounds that the killing of civilians was less harmful to a nation than the killing of its soldiers. Here one feels, the judgement of a decent man has been overwhelmed.

In non-political matters his honesty could not be so easily distorted. He wrote his best says on what he called good-bad literature, and on writers like Swift, Dickens and Tolstoy, whose political beliefs are important to their fiction. For in these fields the virtues he admired bring relevant standards to bear.

He notes Dickens's ambivilent social attitude and Tolstoy's intellectual dishonesty because they, unlike Stalin or Hitler, claimed that their ideals appealed to what is decent and honest in man. When he writes on Kipling, Donald McGill and the Edwardian thriller he is even more enlightening, for these are vulgarises of his ideals, so he sees them as forerunners of the worst in modernity and with this perception they are given a significance and critical value way beyond their intrinsic worth.

His prose style echoes the straightforwardness of his thinking. It aims to avoid all the poetical and emotional overtures of language and in this looks forward to the non-styles of expository journalism. He even uses this expository prose to describe his own emotions, and thus many of his essays contain a description of a happening (say, a hanging) and then a description of his emotional reaction all in the same rather colourless prose. This is an essayist's technique not a novelist's, and so his novels, as critics have noted, tend to be thinly clothed social comment.

This is why these volumes bring out Orwell's characteristic qualities more sharply than ever before. Through his letters one the pogression of his life, through his essays the progression of his thought. His low-keyed prose dims the tragedy of a movement to sickness and pessimism, but one cannot escape the feeling that with Orwell when the possibility of the open and simple writing which was typical of much pre-war literature (Wells, Bennett . . .) but which is now gone. In the future one will read Orwell for a kind of moral refreshment, turning aside from complicated issues and complicated responses to a more decent and honest outlook.