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THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF GEORGE ORWELL
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PETER C. T. ELSWORTH
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A thesis ta the Faculty of Graduate Studies and
Research at MeGill University in partial fuI filment of the
requirements of the degree of Master of Art.s .
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Political Science.Department,
McGill University,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
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September 1981
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ABSTRACT
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This thesis is an examination of the po1itica1 phi1osophy of the
British writer George Orwe!l (1903-1950).
l want to argue that a1though Orwell eonsidered "himself a 'poUtiea1
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writer, he never deve10ped a coherent po1itical phi10sophy. Instead,
he was a mora1ist and his po1itical thought was never more than a simple
but abso1ute be1ief in liberty and justice. This be1ief served as a
standard from which to judge po1itical activity rather than a program
for po1itica1 action.
Following an introduc,tion outlining 9rwell's life, the,thesis traces

three main po1itic;a1 influences upon "s, thougnt. Fir,st, ,nine-
Qteenth-century 1ibera1ism, from which:tradition he emerged and whose re-

gard for individua1 liberty and decency under1ined his po1itica1 thought.
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socia1ism, to which he turned as an alternative ta what he
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considered to be the econofni injustice perpetrated by
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1ibera1ism. Thiraly, the tota1itarianism of Sta1inist Russia and Nazi 0
Genpany whose secular theocratic qua1ities and absorption with power per
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dominated his'later writings.
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Fina:lly, the thesis argues that the moral force of Orwell' s poliUca1 3
thought, around which the three po1itica1 influences cluster, founded
upon,his' passion for strong and sincere prose. l conc1ude that it was
conviction that sa long as men were free to pub1icly express, through
writing, their private cons!iences, an between the
rights of the free individua1 and the rights of the Just society wou1d
be maintained.
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PRECIS
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Cette examine
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la politique de Anglais,'
George Orwell (1903-1950). '. \
Je veu; disputer fondait son oeuvre sur une
politique Tout: simp'lement, il moralist ;Q,
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avec une foi absolue il se tenait la libert et la Cette 1
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foi, ne lui servait pas de programme ,complexe E!t raisonnee, mais elle
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lui permettait:, en effet,. de prononcer le jugement sur les vnements
politiques.
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Apres l'introduction biographique, sur l'auteur, la decrira
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led trois plus fortes influences sa en premier, le
du et ses traditions, qui lui avaient servi de base
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pendant sa jeunesse, et qui lui donnaient un fort egard pour la liberte
de l'individu;, en temps, tes du socialisme, qui lui
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semblaient offrir moyen efficace de circonvenir l'injustice economique
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par ce tr6ismement, t"ide de la puissance absolue,
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nee du Nazisme et du Stalinisme, que les 1ements
par ces deux', qui lui ,envers la fin de vie. /"
thse Se termine en la de cet auteur pour la
prose forte t A vrai dire, la puissance morale de son oeuvre
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en t ses racnes.
et ceux de la socit ne
L'quilibre dlicat entre les droits de l'individu
peut maintenu -- Orwell en convainc
que lorsque l'homme tient le droit de s'exprimer en public par moyen du
mot
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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INTRODUCTION ORWELL AND HIS CONTEXT
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EPik 'LIB . ISM: THE CRADLE
SOCJ:ALISM : THE OPTION
iatALITARIANISM : THE MENACE
C6NCLUSION : THE HERETIC IN UTOPIA
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1 BI BLI:0 GRAPHY

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... CEJL
GUA
DOPL
HTC
KAF
RWP
1984
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ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE TEXT
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Animal F,arm
Burmese Days
A Clergyman f s Daughter----.".
Collected Journalism and Letters of
George Orwell'; 4 volumes.
Coming Up for Air
Down and Out in Paris and London
to Catalonia
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
The Road to Wigan Pier
Nineteen Eighty-Four
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l have used the author-date system in citing references. The
author's name, date of publicition and page reference are given in
parentheses in the text, following the quotation. Page references
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are to the of Orwell's works. In the references,
only the page a starts has been given. In some
cases the over several oi the texte
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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l would like to aCKnow1edge the guidance and interest
l have received from,my academic advisor, Professor John D. Shingler.
l woulct like to thank the Orwell of Spring 1979 for the
generation of sorne of the ideas used in this thesis. l would also
like to thartk' Professor James Tully, and my frfends and colleagues
Beesh Per1in, James Booth, Ray Chamberlain and Howard Tessler for
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their encouragement and intellectual stimulation. F!nally, l would
like to E.L. Groulx, administrative assistant at the
Political Science Departmnt, help du ring sorne tricky financial
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moments.
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If you want to write
you'rself.
l am the
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about the
truth,
only truth l know.
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write about
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Jean Rhys
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VS
INTRODUQT'tON ORWELL' AND CONTE}{T
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George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair dn the 25 June 19Q;3
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in Moti,hari, Benga1" He was the second chi1d and only gon of Richard
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,Blair, a agent in Departrnent of the.
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Indian Civil Service. His famtly, he---}ater claimed, to the
(CEJL IV: 321) lower-upper-middle class (RWP: 106),
cOl}sequent1y suffered from the of self- torture tha' goes
1>y the parne of respectabili!=y" (CEJL IV: 486) ,.
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"People in this class owned 'no land,
but they felt that they were landow,ners
in the s ight of God and kept up a semi-
tristwcratic out1ook by going into the
professions and the fighting services
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.ather than into trade
To belong ta this class when you were
at the 1400 a year 1eve1 was a queer
Dusiness, for it rneant that your genti'-
". .lity was purely theorew.cal.
Practically the whole family income goes
i9- keeping up ap]?earanc'es." (RWP: lO6, 108)
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In the sununer of 1904 (CricI:. 7), Orwell' s mother brought
" him and his eIder sister to England. His father stayed in India until
his re-t-irefnent in 1912, with the exception of a reave period
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in 1907, spent in England. In 1911, Orwell was sent ta St.'Cyprian's,

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"an expensive and snobbish" (CEJL IV: 384) boys' pr,ep shoo1 in southern
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In 1917, having sp.ent the Lent te'rtn at Wellington, Orwell entered
Eton as a King' t Schplar. At this .he was remem,bered by his
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"1 was a stage rebe'l, Orwel1'a true one," wrote Cyril
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Connolly, a contemporary of Orwe11's, both at St. Cyprian's and Eton,
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pale with his flaccid cheeks, large
fingers, Iilnd- supercilious
'he as of t\,ose boys who seern borO,old. 0
as incapable of courtship and his
..... fav r went (at St. Cyprian' s) i t werie '
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The remarkab1e thing about Orwell'was that
arnong'the boys was an inte\lectual
and not a parrot' for he though't for him-
self .
l remernber a under a fig tree in one
of the inland boulevards of the se'a-sidEt'
town, Orwell striding me and saying
in his fIat, ageless voiee: 'You know,
only for aIl
disel;Jses'.' l felt the usua1 guilty tremor"
when sax was mentioned and hazarded, 'You ,
mean going to tbe lavatory?' 'No - - l mean
Death!' He was not a romantlc
'Of course you realize
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onnol1y,' said Orwell,
'that whoever wirts this war (World War 1), we

shall emerge a seeond-"rate nation.' "
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Orwell left Eton in 1921, and in 1922, partly at his' father's
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insistence (Buddicom1974: 116; Meyers 1975: 32) ,and partly because"he
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could not have gotten into Oxford if he had wanted to (rick 1980: 73),
he joined the Indian Imperial Police and served in for ftve years.
Al though he did not appear to be aware of i t (CE.fL 456), he served-
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during "the darkest period of Angl,o":Bunnese relations," which lasted"

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" from 1919" when the Government of
India Act was passed, to 1930,1 whn a
peasant's rebellion broke out against
the whole might of British ru1e."
(Htin Aung 1971:
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20)
Howevet', he came to loathe his role as a "part of 'the actua1 '"\

machinery of despotism" (RWP: 12.7), and was, in addi tian, badly, treated
by a district Superintendent (Beadon 1969: 755). Consequently, he re-
signed his commission whilst home on leave in 192Z'
This decision was not simply a rejecton of th.e imperialism he had C
been serving "wi th a bi tterness l probably cannot make c lear" (RWP: 126).
He had, in fact, been progressirtg very w.ell in the service, and "was
an As7sistant Superintendent of rich promise when he decided ta resign"
(Htin Aung 1973: 186), Rather, it was a coming ta terms with the knowl-
edge that he was outraging his true nature (CEJL 1: 23) in the sense

tht he had always fe1t that his vocation was ta write (Buddicom 1974:
76; CEJL 1: 23).
As Raymond, Williams argues, decision 'ta be a writer
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required
great deal of courage,
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'!- "He was liviijg, after at a time and
within a c1ass in which the whole
of writing was problematic ,
The 'writer', the true wri ter had no com-
mercial aims, but also, at root, no social
function and by derivation, no social'con-
tente He just 'wrote'." (Williams 1971: 29)
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However, as a writer Orwell rejected)with the English
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establishment of the Ai' it was a lItebellion
against maturityll (Green 1976: 171) wi th its,
" defiant readf.ness to adopt effete
or dandy gestures - and a distrust of
the major roles and the heartier
moral tones both and
poli tical matters. Il (Green 1976: 60),
i t represented to the" noralist in Orwell everything that was weak and
decadent with the modern world;, His defence of 'decency'ocan
thus be seen as much a reaction ta the aestheticism Qf the 1920s as a
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reaction ta the economic and social consequences of the General Strike
of 1926 and the depression.
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Consequently, 1.n 1928,
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Orwell went ta live and write in Paris --
although very little of he wrote has survived. During the last
ten weeks of his eighteen month stay, his saving
he half-voluntarily,
" sank to the lower depths of po:verty.
This advnture was partly forced upon him
(by robbery), but partIy it was' under-
tak,en ',to e-xpiate the social guirt: which he
een stolen,
fel!t" -ne had incurred in Burma. (Trilling 1952: 70)
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As Orwell,j later wrote, he had been IIconscious of an innnense weight of
guilt" (RWP: 129) that he had to expiate through submerging himself
among the oppressed,
" tQ be one of them and on their side
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!igainst the tyrants." (RWP: 130)
Thus, the robbery in Paris, Orwell worked as a dish-
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washer in a large hotel and in a restaurant. - On- his-return to England'
in 1ate,. 1929, he continued until 1932 to" periodically investigate the
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underwor1d of by living on the road with and hop pickers
as as in working c1ass districts of London.
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He adopted the pseudonym George Orwell when Down and Out in'Paris
and London, an account of these experiences, was pub1ished in
From 1932 to 1933, he taught at two sma11 private in
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Mipdlesex, and from 1934 to 1936 ,he worked as a part-time assistant in

a books tore in Hampstad. During thig time he continued to write, and
published a number of short articles and reviews, mostly in the Adelphi.
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In 1935, Orwell 's' first nove1 Bunnese Days was pub1ished, fol1owed
by A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra F1ying (1936).
The dominant themes of these novels, 10ss of faith, and
money respective1y, "reflected his personal concerns at this tne.
In 1936, Victo'r Gollancz of the Pro-Sovi.et Left Book Club 0 commissioned
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him to write on the depressed areas of northern Eng1and. He spent Febru-
ary and March of that year gathertng for his book The Road to
Wigan Piero A1though the first part of the book was a mixture of descrip-
tian and of his experiences in the north, the second part was
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a critical ana1ysis, not on1y of his own' c1ass background, but a1so of
what he considered t be the 'prob1em' with midd1e class English socialists.
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As such, it was deeply embarrass'ing to Left Book Club. Although
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Victor Gollancz did publish the wouk in }937, he wrote a long intro-
arguing witb man y of Orwell's
In April 1936, h rented The Stores, a small cottage and village
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store in Wal1ington, In June he married Eileen 0 tShaughnessy',
a "sophisticated, fastidious, highly' intelligent and intellectual" grad-
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uate from Oxford University. At the she was working on an M.A.
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degree in educationa1 psychology atQthe ifniversity Col1ege, London, a
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degree never completed (Fen 1960: 115, 118) .
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In December 19)'6,""Orwell 1eft England to report on the Spanish
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Civir War. However, through connections with the Independent Labour
Party, he the militia of the semi-Trotskyist Partido Obero
de Unificacion Marxista (P.O.U.M.), "because at that time and in that
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atmosphere i t se,emed the on1y conceivable tHing to do." (HTC: 8). He
served on the Aragon front, and was wounded in the tnroat in May 1937.
He convalesced in Barcelona unti1 June. Then, while he was back at the
front collecting his discharge papers, the 'P.O.U .M. was dec1ared' i11egal
Dy, the Communist Spanisp, Government. The su;ression of the
J.>.O.U-.M. fulfi11ed in part the of the Partido Socilista Unificado
de Catalunya (P.'S.U .C.), which,
" had been, fonned at the beginning of
the war by the fusion of various Marxist
parties, inc1uding the Catalan Communist
Party, but it was now entirely under
Communist control and was affiliated to
, the Third International." (HTC: 58)
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As a member of the P:O.U.M., Orwell, tgether with his wife
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had joind him in February, spent two days on the run from the Communist
organized purge in Barcelona. They final1y escaped across the French
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border on Ju1y 23.
Although he was disgusted by the,
" struggle for power between the Comintern
and the' Spanish"Left-wing parties, and the
efforts of the Russian Government ta prevent
revoltion in Spain." (CEJL -1: 295),
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he was hard1y surprised.
been, to a large extent,
part of The Road t:,Wigan Pi!r had
1:In attack upon the "doctrinaire priggishness,
party squabbles, and half-baked (RWP: 189) that he,found
to be dominant aspects of "most orthodox Bhtish socialist positions"
'(Williams 1971: 13).
'of major concern ta Orwell was the "party propaganda
that is ta sa-y, lies", wh ich the
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P.S.U.C. dominated Government used ta
disredit its enemies. He wrote that in Spain,
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" . for the first time, l saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation
to the facts l saw, in" fact, history
being written not in terms of what happened
but of what ought_to have happened accord-"
ing to various, "party lines'." (CEJL 1: "294)
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For Orwell, the of this was the possibi1ity that the
very c'once'Pt of -objective truth was fading out of the world (CEJL 1:
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?95). \ Cqnsequently, on his return to Eqg1and, -he wrote Homage to Catalonia
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(1938), his testament of what he believed, to have trl1Y happened in
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Spain. if to reinforce his fears, his pubisher Victor Gollancz
refused to publish the book "before a word of it was written" (CEJL 1:
319), and it waS published by Fredric Warburg in 1938.
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In the same year, Orwell spent rive months in a
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sanator1l;1lll-="-.n I<emt,
ill with a tubercu1ar 1esion of one 1ung. Seeking a drler
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for hea1th, he spent the winter of 1938 with in Marrakech,
cMorroeco, finaneed in part by an anonymous gift of l300 from the nove1-
lst L.R. Myers aecepted it as a 10an). Whi1e there he wrote
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CominS Up For Air (1939), in which he exp10red the themes of rnemory,
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historiea1 truth, and ehe libera1 tradition.
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Re and his wife ;eturned to Loadon in 1939, and in August
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Germany and Russia signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact. For Orwell it was an
"eye-opeT1er,' a verification of what he had seen in Spain, with "Fascism
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qeing impose, under the pretense of, Faseism" (CEJL '1: 314) .
As he
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'Sudden1y the seum of the earth and the
h1o'od-stained buteher of the workers (for
so they had deseribed one another) were
marching, arm-in-arm, their friendship"
'eemented in blood', as Sta1in eheerily
expressed it." (CEJL II: 40)
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With the out break of war in September, he e1aimed to have
foreseen sipee 1936 (CEJL 1: 590), Orwell found 'that he was a "patriot
at heart" (CEJL 1: 590); found, in other words, 'something worth fighting
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for' However, he entered at time '" into "a period of waste and
frustratWn" (Angus, CEJL 1: 601) , resulting from,
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"Financial worries, his disappointment
at being rejected as medically unfit by
the army or"to find any job in which he
cou Id ,serve his country, and the dis-' /
tration of war '" (Angu&, CEJL II:\" 510)/
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In 1940, his collection 'of essays Inside the Whale was published
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The title essay was devotea to an inquiry into quietism
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of the American writer Henry Orwell defended Miller's position'
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as symptomatic of, the modern world, where "progre.ss, and
out to be swindles" (CEJL 1: 576).
In the year he joined the Local Defense Volunteers, and wrote
his essay on En&land and democratic The Lion and the Unicorn
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(1941). he joined the B.B.C. in the Indian Section of its
Eas1:ern Service.
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1942 and 1943, in addition to his duties with the Home Guard
and the B'.Bfo, to the Horizon and the Tribune, the
New and Nation, and wrote for Poetry London and New Road. In

November 1943, he 1eft the Home Guard on medica1 grounds, and in the
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same month resigned from the B.B.C. ta become 1iterary editor of the
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Tribune.
In Febr4ary 1944, he completed his satire on theoRussian Revolution,
Animal FagU, but great difficulties in finding a publishr
for the, book owing to r s with the lu.es since
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Fbr exa'tnple, finding it lia distinguished piece of writing",
T.S. Eliot (at the time a direetor for and Faber) rejected the
,book on grounds that,
." we have no conviction this
is the right point ofe' view from which
to criticize the polit-ieal situation at
the present time." (ELiot 1944: 9)
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It lls f-inally published in August 1945 by Fredric Warburg.
Orweli's with his anti-utopian Nineteen Eighty-
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Four, has earned him the reputation of a reaGtionary, as,
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"The bloke who showed tht revolution
couldn.' t work - a11 it means is going
round in circles swopping one ,lot 'lof
bosses for anqther.".. 1
Because you can't change human nature,
you see. The?r'll aiways,qe those on
top and the mugs uaderneath, always'has
been and will be." (O'Flinn 1975: 14)
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as 0' Flinn argues, Orwell! s ,_
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, " life as a socialist matches almost
exactly the era of Stalinist domination ,
and of revolutionary hopes .
a period of combined and interconnected
Stafinist stranglehold and broken working-
class militncy." (O'Flinn 197j-:qn)
Thus, while his writings were often pessimistic and of 0
revolut.ionary hopes, Orwell' s belief in socialism cannot be disputed ,
(CEJL 1: 28). For although he hated both the aesthetie literary
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of .J'he the "connnut).ist literary Mafia" of the 1930s,
Conor Cruise O'Brien' that had he lived ta witness,
"Through the fifties, the t'ise of an-
other Mafia, this ,of' anti-
communists, 'dedicated' ta the unavowed
service of Uhited States policy . it is
clear from the whole tenor of his
that his disgust would have saon found
vent." , (O'Brien 1968:' 797)
In February 1945, Orwell gave up the literary of the
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Tribune, and trave1led ta France as a war correspondent for the/Observer
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However, he returned ta England at the end of March on hearing that
his wife Eileen, whose health had been failing for sorne time, had died
.during an operation.
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He returned to the continent in the beginning of April, writing
for" the Manchester Rvening News and the Observer from France and Germany.
He rturned ta England in May, and in July began ta write Nineteen Eighty-
Four. In he of the
founded ta "deal with cases of the infringement of the ivi-l
liberties of any citizen of the British Empire " (CE.rL IV: 431n).
In September 1945, Orwell visited the island of jura off the coast
of Argyllshire in Scot land. In May 1946, in fu1fillment of a,wish he had
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expressed in the early years of the war (CEJL II: 400}, he'rented a house
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there,
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"He went up ta the north of the is1and, 1
and he saw the house, Barnhill, standing
unoccupied and immediately fell in love
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with it and thought that he'd 1ike ta
rent it and live there in complete
privacy he felt that he really could
settie down and write there in peaee
and quiet.
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(Dunn 1961: 258)
J
He stayed at Barnhill untii October. his sis ter Avril
Bla,ir joil'led him there, and in July, he fetthed his two year old son,
Richard Horatio Blair (whom he and his 1ate wife had adopted in June ,1
" :.
1944) up from London.
In August 1946, Animal Farm was published as the American Book of
the Month Club choice, and the subsequent sales of over half a million
'

'copies freed him from for first time sinee he had
-
'JI>
from the Indian Imperial Pliee 1927.
{i
Having spent the w!nter in London, Orwell to Jura in
April 1947 with his son and Avril Blair. They joined in July by
Richard Rees, a lifelong friend of Orwel1
l
s, and in November by Bill Dunn,
. a ,Scotsman :recently demobilised from the army, who was subsequently
marry, Avril Blir in 1951 (CEJL IV: 446n).
In September, he deeided ta up The Stores in Wal1ington,
Hertfordshire, intending ta make his permanent home on Jura.
Despite the fact that he was increasingly ill at the of the
sununer o'f i947, Orwell fini shed the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four
,
by late October. In December, he entered Hatrmyres Hospital, near
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Glasgow, with tuberculosis of the left lung, .nd remained there for
seven months. He responded weIl to a cours'e of ,antibiotics, _ and in May
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1948 began the second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Upon his re1ease the hospita1 in late he insisted on
returning to Barnhi1l in spite of the strain his weakned state,
"If he 1 d gone into a convalescent: ,home
then, he probably would have been cured,
but was he came back and
on living a quite ordinary life. It
really was extremely stupid but some-
how one doesnlt have an awful lot ot
authority over onels own fami1y, and he
never was one much to listen to other
people." (Dunn 1961: 260)
Orwell fini shed the final draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the
late summer of 1948. It was published in June 1949, and in July it was
chosen by the American Book of the Month Club.
However, through November and he was seriously ill with
tuberculosis, and in January 1949 entered the Cotswold Sanatorium in
Ir
G1oucestershire. tn late September he was moved to the University College
,
Hospital, London, t4e following month married Sonia Brownwell,
,
,
torial assistant on Horizon, whom he had met in 1945.
On 21 January 1950, Orwell died in of pu1monary tubercu1osis.
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LIBERALISM
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THE .RADLE
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The moral of Orwell's poiiticai thought can be traced
to liberalism. In particular, to the England of
the Edwardian era, when it was "summer a11 the year round" (CUA: 37),
which represented ta him a harmonious form of politica1 association.
t
He felt it was a time when people had.a,
..
" . feeling of security evenwhEm they weren't
secure. More exactly, it was a feeling of
continuity . they didn't know that the order
of things could and didn't think of
the tuture as something .to be terrified of."
(CUA:" , 107,106)
In one sense, it could that this vision mere1y reflected
,
Orwell' s immaturity during that- q,i,mt! when he "was years old and
. \ ."
a11 around (him) it was early summer" (CUA: 58). However, the feeling
of\ "not being in a hurry and not being frightened" (CUA: 104), which
" he ascribed to that world, formed" l wish to argue, foundation
for his criticism of the
1
At the same time, he knew that there couid be no returning to
, 0 ,
that wor1d. 'k6wever' m"u'ch--h"is t)t against the
l
wor1d, his intelligence refused ta deny its existence. For
,
Philip Rieff, this "tension or inbelligence and morality hars a1ways
. \
described the liberal imaginaticbn" (Rieff 1954: 233).
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Orwell did come to fully appreciate the
of the wor1d until the last fifteen years of his'life. oHis
. )
ch"iYdhood, as we have seen, was fairly typical for someon!:! of his J,
1') ,
. ' '
background. He hardly saw his belore the 'age of and
spent two-thirds of his early life, of eight to
j, '-,/" V
away frqm home at alI-male borading schools. The vast majority,of 0

English middle-class men survived that sort of inJ 'Christian-
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century without
1
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debilitating efiects. However, Orwell had a considerable, often melan-
, '\ '
cnolic .ego (Powell 1967: 65),' and was con,sequently .acutely' sensitive
to'the contradictions of his background.
However, being an "undemonstrative' boy'" (Buddicom 1974: 131),
OrweL l' s do not remember him \s being particu'larly un-
happy. But, while he did not lack for attention from his mother and
"
- 0
his sisters, his re1ationship wi th his "a gruff-voiced e1der1y
/]
,
D man forever saying 'Don' t "' (CEJL IV: 412), was not congeni'al (Buddicom
,
.
tt
. -
1974: 132).
At school, he was the "arch-individualist" 1954: 383),
"incapable of (Connelly 1938: 170) With non serviam,"
he l{lcked,
\
"
the virtues without which no
one can enjoy a public school.
"
(ConneUy 1938:
i
... t.,u,f"-
Cri tics have chargd that his own account of his school "days at
St. Cyprians in Such Such Were the Joys (1947) , are coloureCi not only
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by a "sense of se1f-<iramatization
ll
(Powell 1967: 67), but also by
the tbemes of IIpoverty, fear, guilt, masochism and sickness" (Meyers
1972: 56) -- the major concerns of his 1ater 1ife. However therel
can be no question tpat Orwell 1eft schoo1 with a deep sense of fa .
and social inadequacy,
"Failure, fai1ure, fai1ure - fai1ure behind me,
failure ahead of me - that was by far the deep-
est that I."carHed away." (CEJL IV: 417)
That his peers do not remember him as being unhappy cannot be taken
aa a testament to his happiness. Richard Rees one wrote that a strik-
ing qua1ity in Orwell was his pudor (Rees 1971: 93). As Orwell himse1f
D 4 .,
wrote,
/"-
"A chi1d which appears reasonabLy happy may
actua11y be suffering horrors;which it cannot
or will not reveal." IV: 419)
In any event, Orwe11's of his suffering at St. Cyprians
resu1ted in a "haunting sense of guilt" (Meyers 1972: 61). And this
sense of guilt ripened with time into a powerfl "social conscience"
(Powell 1967: 64); lia feeling of responsibility for the suffering of
others" (Meyers 1972: 62).
Orwell later c1aimed that Eton, where he was "re1ative1y happy"
(CEJL IV: 422), had had nu formative influence on his life (CEJL II: 38).
,
However Christopher Hol1is, a contemporary of there, claims that
Eton gave him more than he appreciated,
" for le t-hink that at Eton that peculiar ex-
cess of individualism is more kindly treated
than.elsewhere. An Old far more
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likely to )dare to be a Daniel' than is a
Nonconformist .. His private school may, for
all-I know, have played its part in driving
him to spiritual loneliness, and this lone-
~ i n e s s certainly was sharpened and embittered'
by a life in Burma, in which none of his .
fellow Europeans were people at aIl sympathetic
to him, but l think that Eton pad a good deal
to do with the unique courage with which he
gav(! expression to that spiri.tual loneliness."
(Hollis 1954: 383)
"
Thus while Orwell may have set off to Burmh with a troubling 1ack
of self-confidence and consequent cynical streak (Crick 1980: 55, 57),
it seems to me he was at 1east armed with the>' public, school virtues

of honor, courage, self-control, fair-play and a snse"of responsibility
-'
(Quinton .1954: 213). In Qther words, he had an appreciation of what
constituted the peculfarly English concept of 'decency, which might
best be defined as 'generosity of spirit. '
'Orwell used the word constantly. In Raffles and Miss Blandish,
he defined it not as a moral code, nor as a religion, nor as a social
~
consciousness (CEJL III: 260). Rather, he, c1aimed that it incorporated
certain rules of behavour which are observed,_ semi-instinctively (CEJL
iII: 249),
. '
"They (the Raffles stories) belong to a time
when people had standards, though they happened
'to be foolish standards. Their key phrase is
"not-done." The lne that they draw between
good and evil is as senseless as a Polynesian
taboo, but at least, like the taboo, it has
the advantage that everyone accepts it."
(CEJL III: 251)
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Simi1arly, prwell wrote of Dickens that his morality is the
Christian morality (CEJL 1: 502)', the guiding principle is,
"If men would' behave decently the worle;!
would 'be decent." (CEJL 1:
He argued that this was not just a platitude. it was
the moral foundation of a "native generosity of mind," ''(olherein "one
,
is always on the side of the underdog, on the side of the weak against
the strong," (CEJL I: 503).
For Orwell; the concept of decency was authentic because it did
n9t incorporate a "consciousness that the structure of society can
be changed" (CEJL 1: 460), only an "emotional perception that something
J
is wrong
ll
(CEJL 1: 501). Orwell felt that ha-.Jlng an ,"emotiop.al
"
perception that something was Wrong" meant having a vision based on
feelings. rather than abstract ideas, of how things ought to be.
He thus argued that Dickens 1 decency "acts as a kind of anchor
and nearly always keeps him where he belongs" (CEJL 1: 503). In the
,
last analysis, he 'sees' Dickens as a,
..
" man who is always Iighting against some-
thing, but who fights in the open and is not
... a man who is generously ansry -
in other words, . ,a nineteenth-century"
li beral) a free intelligence ... " (CEJL 1: 504)
However, Orwell felt Dickens' world, and the climate of mind
that belonged ta it, was For him, the Edwardian h'armony, which
(
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he c10se1y identified with ,Dickens' morality, of "a stable society
in marriage is indissoluble and 'family loyalty taken for
granted" (CEJL 189), "before the slumps and before the dc1t-"
(CUA: 97), was limi ted in the modern world to the "ordinary, decefft,
labouring poor" (CEJL 1: 477) who were "still living in the mental
world of Dickens" (CEJL 1: 503; Rosenfe1d 1:150: 187),
"1 have often been struck by the peculiar
easy completeness" the perfect synnnetry as
it were, 'of a working-class interior at its
best. Especial1y on winter eyenings after
tea, when the fire glows in the open ranges
and dances mi rrored in the steel fender,
when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the
roc king chair at one side of the fire
ing the racing finals, and Mother sits on
the other side with her sewing, and the
children are happy with a pennorth of mint
humbugs, and the dog 1011s roasting him-
self on the rag mat - it is a. good place to
be in provided that you can be not only iri
it but sufficiently of it to be tak,en for
granted." (RWP: 104)
.,.
The. sentimental texture of this passage compares with his descrip-

tion of the "mental wor1d" of the two boy 15 weekly magazines, the
Gem and the Magnet,
"You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of
fourteen in posh, tailor-made clothes, sitting
down to tea in your stQdy on the Remove passage
aiter an exciting game of football which was
won by an odd goal in lsst half-minute.
is a cosy fire in the study, and outside
the wind i8 whistling. ivy clusters thick-
ly round the old grey stones. The King is on
his throne and the pound is worth a pound.
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in Europe the comic foreigners are
jabbe",ring and gesticulang, but the grim
battleships of the British
are steaming up the Channel and at the
outposts of the Empire the monocled English-
men are holding the niggrs at bay .
Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable.
Ever,ything will he the same for ever and
ever. Il' (CEJL I: 518)
",'" (
In a sense, i t was Orwell that never experienced
, ....
the harmony of the latter be;ause of his unhappiness at
school, and could never experience the former becaus he was an in-
tellectual, always the self-conscious observer on the outside of the }
,
-".. - -
working-class home,' There can be little that the decency he
to exist in working-class homes was a product of Qis in-
\
tellectualising his need to belong, Ahd it seems to me that this
,
need his spiritual loneliness helped him 10 understand the
attraction that social bOdie:, such as the Catholic Church and
the Communist Party (as weIl as the more formless attractions of
nationalism), had for individuals.
It was in Burma that Orwell,
Il, already remarkably free of illusions
for his age, lost most that he might-still
have had about human nature." (Odle 1972: 38)
For already suffering from a deep sense of incoherence with
regard to his own life and background, to go and live in a II pl ace
wher the white man had no resting place hetween being a god and being
\.
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a joke" (Od1e 1973: 39) only served to further confound his sense
He describes his reaction in his essay Shooting an
,}
"In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, l was hated
by large of people - the on1y time
in my 1ife that l have.been
enough for this to happen to me In the'
end the 1neering ye1low of young men
that met me everywhere, insults hooted
after me when l was at a safe distance,
got badly on my nerves . Al1 this was per-
p1exing and upsetting .... As for th job l
was doing, l hated it more bitterly than
l can perhaps make c1ear. In a job 1ike
that you see the'dirty work of the Empire
at close quarters. The wretched prisoners
hudd1ing in the stinking cages of the lock-
ups, the grey, cowed faces of th long-term
convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men
who had been f10ggd with bamboos - a11 these
oppressed me with an into1erab1e sense of
gui1t. But l could get nothing into per-
spective." (CEJL 1: 266)
. In addit;i.on, "lacking the ape-like virtues", Orwell suffered
"
f'
from'the same prob1em he had had at schoo1. For, given their extra-
position regard to the indlgeneous inhabitants, the
. .
emphasis amongst' the ,Europeans upon 'social life', with the "unbearab1e
club Hfe" (CEJL II: 251), tended to be a11 important. Consequep.t1y,
t. as he was not a "spcialite in any way" (Beadon 1969: 755), the contra-
dictions he perceived had to be thought out in the "utter silence that
is imposed on every Engllshman in the East" (CEJL 1: 266);
"1 a night l spent on the train with
a man in the Epucational a stranger
to myse1f whose name l never discovered. It
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was too hot to sleep.and we spent the
night in talking. Half an hourIs cau-
tious questiQning decided each of us
that the other was 'safe'; and then for
hours; while the train jolted slowly
through the pitch-black night, sitting
up in our bunks with bbttlesof beer
handy, we damned the British Empire' -
damned it from'the inside, intelligently
and intimately. It did us both good.
But we had been speaking forbidden
things, and in the haggard morning
light when the train crawled into )
Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as
any adulterous couple." (RWP: 127)
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Orwell could not delude himself, as he claimed Kipling had,done,
that imperialism was a "sort of forcible, evangelizlng" (CEJL II: 217).
However hard he tried "ta be the impedal policeman" (Hollis 195':+.:
383), like the small boy in the nursery tale who saw that the Emperor
,1 .
had no clothes, helsaw the empire, as "primarily a money-making con-
cern". (CEJL II: 21 ), "an un justifiable tyranny" (RWP: 126), and his
1
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own role .as a "part of the actual of despotism" (RWP: 127).
1
Consequently, it was in Burma that Orwell came to see the practice
of the ideals of liberal-Christianityas essentially hypoc'ritical.
He began ta develop an "indescribable loathing for the 'o/ha.l-e m.achinery
of so-called justice" (RWP: 128), and was "haunted by a of
guilt" (RWP: 127). In the end he worked out an "anarchistic theory
that aIl government is "evil," that "people can be trusted to behave
"" '
decently if only you@ll let them" (RWP: 128). Ta sum up, Orwell,
" !'law for himself in Burma a more stylized
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dr the njustices and ironies
he wa. to point ut aIl his life: the
e ploitation of m n by man; the hum-
b g of liberals; the deliberate phi-
l stinism df the minor Surrey golf
c'ub transported to a tropical setting;
t e sense of honour and evn decency
i some,of these terrifyingly limited
p op1e - a very important counter-
wight; and underlying it aIl, the
injustice of the old concept that the
end justifies the-means. The end in
Burroa was the maintenance of British
ru1e, to sec ore which a1l kinds of
and things were done in >
of Britain which would never
have been accepted if they were known
about at That same truth-seeking
later turned on the great
r\;periafism, Communism,
without ilinching from what it saw,
had hs apprenticeship in Upper Burma."
(Odle 1972: 39)
\
Wh en. Orwell \ from BU:, he "conscious
, weight of guilt to- expiate",
\ : 1 -
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"1_ had -everything to the simple
,
theory that the oppressed are always
right aIle': the oppressors are wrong:
, .. r r had got tO,escap not
merely from imperialism but from every
forro of man's dominion over man. r wanted
to submerge myself, ta get right down
among the oppressed, to be one of them
_and on their side against their tyrants .
.. that time failure seemed to me tq
be the on,ly virtue. Every suspicion of
sel f-advancement , Even to 'succeed' in life
to the extent of making a few hundreds a
-year, seemed to me,spiritually ug1y, a
species of bullying." (RWP: 129)
)
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At this time Orwell's main concerns were personal: His polit ..
ical thought was ,of the simplest kind; the oppressed against the
D
oppressors, in itself a manifestation of what he understood to be
Dickensian conscience. Even his "anarchist theory

of government," with its emphasis upon decent behaviour, had its
roots in of nineteenth-century laissez-faire llberalism.
When Orwell to Europe, he bega? periodically submerging
\. \ 14' l ,...
himself among the lowest.of the low .. the extreme pases, the sQcial
outcasts: tramps, beggld, prostitutes, (RWP: 131).
Philip Rieff argues that experience k.poverty a maturing
'effect upon Orwell's consciousness in the sense that it represented
a loss of innocence. For it was among the economically oppressed
.
that he,
" discovered that money was the root of
aIL good. Money was 'the shield of faith
that made the liberal-Christian life
livable, Il silky-smooth as the inside of
a shell," a hard skin protecting those
who had it, from the ultimate misfortune
of being without it. Il (Rieff 1954: 228)
Orwell came to terms with this loss of faith in Christian-
liberalism in his second novel, A Clergyman's Daughter. Rieff argues
that there are three stages to the liberal imagination,
"The tirst stage ls being Christian with-
out being liberal ,- action with belief.
The second stage ls being Ilberal without
being - action without helief; .
The third stage is the post-liberal -
neither _action nor belief." (Rieff 1954: 229)
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The novel traces the plight of a parson's unmarried daughter
who cannot reject the conditioned pattern of her life despite losing
her fai th. As Rie ff argues, the pro tagoni st, Dorothy Hare, "moves
from the first stage to the second, but rejects invitation to move
to the third." Her loss of faith resulted in a great: emptiness, and
she cannot accept li fe "when al1 the meaning 1 s been taken ou t 0 fit. "
By contrast, her suitor, the post-liberal Mr. Warburton, replies,
"Good gracious! What do you want with a
meaning? The 1 s full of amusing
things - books, pictures, wine. travel;
friends - everything. rIve never seen
any meaning in it aIl, and l donlt want
to see one. Why not take life as you
End it?1I (CD:
Orwell 1 s dilemma' to Dorothy's. Although he never
be1ief in Christianity (Hopkinson 1952:
"

453), he had had faith in t e basic liberal virtue of decency. He
never lost his faith in dece cy, but he did 10se the idea that de- l
cency'and nineteenth-century liberalism were Integral to one another.
That idea been by his in Burma, and his
struggle, in symbqlic forro, was that of,
" .. the Christil.an who has lost his Chris-
tianity, but keeps up the essential
Christian aetton of brotherliness and
compassion." (Rieff 1954: 228)
Like Dorothy, he Just not accept the post-liberaI-solution of
j
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worshipping the meaningless, the "arts for arts sake of the 'cu1-,
tured circles" (CEJL 1: 557).
Il
.The final paragraph of the novel describes Dorothy glueing to-
gether the paper armour for the school pageant "w{th pious concentration"
(CD: 263). For her, the solution 1ay in "the trivial round, the
common tsk" (CD: As she prays ,in desperation-to a God she no
longer believes in for help'in her the smelt of glue reminds
her of her immediate responsibilities. The smell is,
For Dorothy,
" .. the answer ta her prayer. She did not _
know this. She did not reflect, conscious-
ly, that the solution to her difficulty
1ay in ace epting the fac t tha t ,there was
no solution; that if one gets on with the
job to hand, the ultimate purpose of the
job fades into insignificance; that faith
and no faith are very much the same pro-
vided that one is,doing what customary,
useful and acceptable. She could not
formulate these thoughts as yet, she could
on1y live with them. -'Much lter, perhaps,
she would formu1ate them and draw comfort
from them.1\ . "(CD: 261)
"Glue replaces Christian love as the sign
of unit y in the religion of the exhausted ..
(and the) ... only avai1able liberal sub-
stitute for faith was the action of glue-
ing together what had fallen ta pieces."
(Rieff 1954:
"
OrWell's solution was similar. Caught betwen a past he loved, 6
but knew was go ne for ever, and a future he dreaded (Muggeridge 1971:
!
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172), his response was ,to "meet the demands O'f the day," an "ethic
of action for morally an attempt to hold himself
and the world together." (Rieff 1954: 2'34).
At the same time, he could never overcome his loss of faith in
that tradition. A'dominant theme in aIl his novels is the protago-
nist's vain attempts to escape a feeling of impotence, whether social
(Burmese Days, Coming Up for Air), "economic (A Clergyman' s Daughter,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying) or po1itical
Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four). each case e
return, exhausted, to accept the of the the rltree
of life" (KAF: 255), which has '''no virtue other than persistence"
(Rieff 1954: 233).,
\
More important, Orwell never 16st sight of the fundamental
tenets of nineteenth-century the of the
individual and par1iamentary democracy. Not a literaI sense, but
in the sense that,
" . minori ties have some power 0 f making
themse1ves' heard -(and) public opinion
cannot be disregarded when it chooses to
" itself." (CEJL III: 32)
In this sense, Orwell saw himself iij the "English puritan tradi-
tion" with -its "half-belief that the who1e apparatus of government is
unnecessary" (CEJL I: 471). Seeing himself in that traditiorl', he was
capable of appreciating that nineteenth-cntury American capita1ism
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was capitalism at its best (CEJL IV: 287). However, he knew that
that world had been dependent upon "unheard-of freedom and security'l
(CEJL IV: 286), and was completely innocent of the "nightmare of
, .

unemployment and the nightmare of state iI'lterference" (CEJL IV:
287).
"
\
For Orwell, the peri'od from 1890 to 1930 had been the "golden
aftemoon" of the capitalist age '(CEJL II: 251). 19/30, h '
feH it was "obviously doomed" (CEJL IV: 194), with "manifestly no
future" (CEJ IV: 429),
l"It is obvious that the period of free
'fapitalism is coming to an end af\d that
pne cpuntry after another is adopting a
centralized economy that one can calI
Socra1ism or state capita1ism according
as one prefers.'1 (CEJL II: 162)
He welcomed the dying of a system that had, in his lifetime, resulted
in "economic c-haos and individua.ism" (CEJL IV: 130) thrlDugh 'its em-
phasis upon competitions that somebody had to win (CEJL III:
However, as a liberal, he was concerned that,
" . the economic liberty of the individual,
and to a great extepthis liberty to do
what ,he likes, to 'choose his own ,work, to
move to and fro across the surface of the
earth, (had come) to an end." (CEJL II: 162).
&> In this sense one ould argue that Orwell wanted a socialist
\
economy without destroying the political foundations of liberalism;
o '!.' >
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"a sort of moraHzed libe)falism
ll
(CEJL 11: i62).
,
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For
"
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whilst he
had an acute s<;lcial his of respoQ.sibility towards
the economica'Lly oppressed did not blind him to the potical ideals
"

0\
of the wOFld with p:s ,emphasis upon
,/
/'
freedqnrand decency. As he wrote in Inside the Whale
/' ,
obviously happ.:ing,
wf or no war" is the break up 0 f
capitalism and of the
liberal-Christian culture. Until
recently the full intplfcams of
this were not foreseen, because it
was generally imagined 'that Social{sm
could presenTe and even eU/large the
1
atmosphere 0 f lib!?ralism. .It 'is now
beginnin'g to l:ie realized, how false /
this idea waSt Almost cE7,rtainly we ,
are "moving into an age or to ___talitarian
dictatorshi ps - /age which free-
,dom of ,be/ at, first a
deadly latr a "
,,3bst}:a-tton:./ the autonomous -indivtdual
is be s'tampeo 'out of existence.,It
/;/ (CEJL 1: 576)
// "
\ ---
/'
//
indi vidu'f
in '1940,
// ,
. short,' .Orwell sa'W" the dispensation of 'the liberal-Christin
culture coll_spsing,around him. He retained his faith in decency
. ,
() 1;' ..
the bedrock value of 'tha!? culture,l but he had lost faith in the
,
bedrock itself.
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SOCIALISM THE OPTION
a
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- 30 -

Orwell's experiences in Burma shattered his belief in the
liberal-Christian political trdition. He came to look upon himself
as being involved ,in a hypocritical 'racket,' puffed up with "demo-
cratic phrases," but basd on a "coolie empire" (CEJL II: 305). His
sense of ,moral responsibility was too emotionally strong for his
o
intelligence for him to be able ta sus tain a sense of proportion.
Unlike most men in his position time did not numb his "hypersensitive
'"
conscience" (Rees 1961: 11) to "the grey cowed faces ... (and) the
scarred buttocks" (RWP: 128). Rather, the opposite.
His sense of responsibility for the suffering he not only saw,
but personally inflicted (RWP: 129), increasingly haunted him. Worst
of aIl, he had come to see his own role as essentially that of a puppet
of his personal integrity manipulated by the expectations
\..)
of the natives he was supposedly ruling,
" when the white man turns tyrant it is
his own freedom that he destroys. He be-
cornes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, She
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For
it is the condition of his rule that he
1
t
shall spend his life in trying to impre s
the 'natives' and sa in every,crisis he
has got to do what the 'natives' expect \
of him. He wears a mask, and his face \
grows ta fi t it." CCEJL 1: 269)
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Back in his early years were spent in coming to terms
with this personal crisis of his conscience. His ear1y books are
consequently concerned with the private prob1ems of oppression,
both po1itica1 and economic (poverty) , and the question of lost
fai th.
Richard Rees argues that up to 1930, Orwell had a sort
of Bohemian (Rees 1962: 48). Orwell himself wrote
that,
"Up to 1930 l did not on the whole
look upon myse1f as a Socialist. In
fact l had as yet no clearly defined
po1itica1 views. l became pro-Sociatist
more out of disgust with the way the
poorer sections of the industria1 workers
were oppressed and neg1ected than out of
any admiration for a planned
society." (CEn III: 456)
It was not unt,il "the Spanish war and other events in 1936 - '37"
that he reached a decision to work toward the establishment of
demoratic Social ism, "as he understood i tIf (CEJL I: '28). At the same
time, by the summer of 1936, Orwell had read Marx's writings with
suff1cient care and understanding (Zwerdling 1974: 20) to astonish
everyone, "inc'luding the Marxist
,
theoreticians," at a Summer School
organised by the Ade1phi, by his interventions 'in the discussions (Rees
1962: 147).
From the beginning of his interest in Socialism, however, Orwell
felt i11 at ease with orthodox Socia1ists. At first, the disaffection'
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was a personal one. In April of 1936, he wrote that the Socialist
bourgeoisie gave hirn the "creeps" (CEJL 1: 245). And in October of
.
the same year, he wrote that the se1f-conscious use of the word
~ ,
"cornrade" was probably responsible for keeping many possible recruits
,
away from the Socia1ist movement (CEJL 1: 262),
Orwell later articulated this 'feeling' as a fear that,
"The basic trouble with a11 orthodox
.Marxists is that, possessing a system
which appears to explain everything,
they never bother to discover what is
going on inside other people's heads."
(CEJL 1: 290)
In essence he was objecting to the "Marxist Scholasticism" of the
estab1ished 1eft. As Alex Zwerd1ing arg4es.
"He treated Marxism as the dialectica1
system of thought it claimed ta b e , ~ n o t
as a repository of final truths."
(Zwerd1ing 1974: 21)
Consequent1y, Orwell' s "democratic Soctalism" can be seen. as not
sa much a belief in socialism, as a "disbe1ief in other choices ,"
"Socialism was the last forro of faith
of th liberal-Christian era, (Rieff 1954: 233)
For Orwell himself Socialism, as he understood it, was not complicated,
"The only thing i2! which we can combine
is the underlying ideal of Socialism;
justice and liberty," (RWP: 189)
. .
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Orwell's first inkling of what was ta later cause him to re-
ject the economics of laissez-faire capitalism in favour of socialism
came to him in 1922 on board a liner bound for Burma. He had noticed
a particular in whom he had, with confessed immaturity, irnbued
g@dlike qualities of power and skill. was consequently shocked ta
one day see this man "scurrying like a rat 'long the side of the
deck houses" with a nalf-eaten pudding in his hands (CEJL IV: 307).
For Orwell, the fact,
" that a highly-skilled craftsman,
who might literally hold aIl of our
lives'in his hands, was glad to steal
scraps of food from our table . "
(CEJL IV: 308)
-,l
.... ,,' revealed to him the "gap between function and creward." Twenty-five
CI'

ye'ars later, he clairned that this revelation had taught him tn0re than
half a dozen soialist pamphlets IV: 308).
Orwe11's conept of socialisrn always retained this practical and
commensensical quality. It was based on a simple - a close friend of
-his once climed hirn to have been "in man y ways the most' naif person"
, 1
he had ever deliberately had much ta do with (Heppenstall 1955: 36-7) -
but deeply felt" appreciation that "privation and, brute labour have
to be abolished before the, real problems of humanity can, be tackled"
(CEJL II: 304). Consequently', the basic aims of his soci,a1ism were
materialtstic. As he "approximte equality of incornes (it need
, 1
be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of _
, --
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"
a11 hereditary privilege, especially in education" (CEJL II: 101).
In short, a "sort of moralized liberalism" (CEJL Il: 162), with,
....
"Enough to eat, freedom from the haunting
terror of unemployment, the knowledge'
that your children will get a fair chance,
a bath onc a day, clean linen reasonably
often, a roof that doesn't leak, and
short enough working hours to leave you
with a little energy when the is done."
(CEJL II: 304)
It disturbed him that these humble ambitions were limited to
,
working classes. The middle classes, the "politicians, priests,
iterary men and what not," seemed more concemed about their souls
materialism thanwhat exactly constituted the
"indispensable minimum" neede.d to live a "decent, huma1 life"
(CEJL II: 304).
Orwell never lost sight of the fact the "belly cornes before
the soul, not in the scale of values, but in point of time" (CEJL II:
304), This conviction goes a long way toward explaining the value he
gpve to the "ordinary, useful\ unspectacular (CEJL II: 15),
, w t
For his appre'Ciation of the "decency" (CEJL 1: 581) of the common
people refleeted his belief that the aetual process of life should be
constantly celebrated, if by nothing else than retaining an awareness
of its existence in spi te of aIl one'!;l problem's,
"1 think that by retaining one' s child-
hood love of such things as trees,
Hshes, butterflies and .. ", toads, one
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makes a peaceful, and future a
little more probable ... " (CEJL IV: 175)
A number of critics have charged Orwell with idealizing the
..
common man. However, a more serious,question, ie seems to me, is to
l'
{
,ask whether the qualities he perceived in the working class were not
confused with his for England. a number of cri tics
have argued that Orwell was not so much a socia11st as a Puritan in
the English tradition (Hollis 1954, O'Brien 1968, Potts 1957, Raymond
1956).
This question is interesting in the first instance because of
Orweil's claim that democratic Socia1ism should be based on hrother-
hood (CEJL IV: 485) and internationa1ism (CEJL IV: 425). Indeed, he
argued that it was just that made it 50 potent a force
against the influence of nationalism which he increasingly came to re-
g;id as the major problem of the modern age (CEJL II: 253).
At the same time there can be little doubt that his patriotism
\ .
was founded upon qualities strikingly similar to his of
democratic Socia1ism. For whi1st many of the qualities Orwell loved
about the English way of life were particular to England - "the pub,
,
the football match, the baek garden, the fireside and the l niee cup f

of tea "' (CEJL II: 78) - he be'lieved that this "privateness of English
life" (CEJL II: ,77) was founded upon the ideals of nineteenth eentury
liberalisnr,
"The liberty of the individual is still
believed in, almost as in the nineteenth"

- 36 -
t
6
century. But thi, has to do
with economic liberty, the right to
exploit others,for profit. It i8 the
liberty to have a home of your own, to
do what you like in your apare time,
to choose your own amusements instead
of having them chosen for you
above.
1I
(CEJL n:f@8)
Orwell's attempts to dissociate from
seem to indicate a difference in quality rather than in kind, a dif-
ference that was for him peculiarly .English. Fo'r whi.lst the IItradi-
tional patriotism
ll
(CEJL II: !09) of the Englishman was an "old
fashioned" (CEJL II: 139) loyalty, impervious' to :the attractions of
any of the new loyalties, such as Socialism or Fascism ,(CEJL II: 128),
he wrote that it was, the "overwhelming strength of patriotism" that
Hitler and Mussolini had exploited 'in their rise to power (CEJL II: 75).
Orwell claimed that patriotisfu in England was stronger than class
Q
(CEJL II: 84), being more akin to "family loyalty" III: 518).
He claimed that it was this quality that protected the,English from
blatant propaganda (CEJL III: being infected with
:1:""
power worship, unlike other European peoples (CEJL II: 148). Rather,
the patriotism of the English was not "vocal or even conscious" (CEJL
II: 80).
Consequently, Orwell's understanding of democratic Socialism is
imbued with characteristics of the English liberal tradition. For,
wh'ilst he revered the basic liberal ideals of parliamentary democtacy
and individual liberty, he alsa had an appreciation qt the metaphorical
'-,
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-37 -
notion of growth in a culture (CEJL IV: 517). In other words, he
did not believe that'human communites cpuld be created from theo-
retical blueprints, but that they evolved Over time (Wain 1961: 195).
Consequently, he wrote that the aim of Socialism was "not to make the
world perfect but to make it better" III: 282). For although
the common ownership of the means of production the essence of
socialism, for Orwell it was only a necessary pre-condition (CEJL IV:
36), a,
" . first step in a transitional d '
that is bound to be laborious, un mfort-
able and long." (CEJL LV: 484)
In this sense, he was aware that one of the "enormous questiq:ns"
in how to reconcile freedom and organization (CEJL IV:
70). The liberal foundation to his understand{ng of democratic
Socialism allowed him to contemplate the network of compromises"
(CEJL 83) in the English political tradition as a healthy aspect,
of its life because of its ability to go sorne way towards
reconciling this problem in humanitarian way.
It pan thus be seen that Orwell's patriotism beyond a simple
love of country, a hatred of seeing "England humiliated or humiliating
anybody else" (CEJL III: 339). Rather, it contained an unders\:anding

- _, '<;4-
of political association that was founded on the liberal values of
decency and "plain integrity" (Rieff 1954: 233).,' an
understanding that in turn cdloured his concept of democratic Social-
ism.
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However, such an understanding of socialism was complicated
for Orwell by'the 'picture
'
of Rusaia, and by the character of many
socialists,
"We have reached a stage when the very
word 'Socialism
'
calis up, on the one
hand, a picture of aerop1anes, tractors,
and huge glittering factories of glass
and concrete; on the other, a picture
of vegetarians with wilting beards, of
Bolshevik commissars (ha1f gangster,
half gramophone), of earnest ladies in
sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing
polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-
control fanatics, and Labour Party
backstairs-craw1ers. Socialism, at
least in this Island;' dot;s not smell
any longer of revo1ution and the over-
throw of tyrants; it smells of crankiah-
ness, machine-worship, and stupid
cult of Russia." (RWP: 190)
...
For Orwell, tao man y socialists did not have an emotional appre-
ciation of human suffering (Warncke 379). it seemed to
him, their appreciation was all tao often an intellectual one, an idea.
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the protagonist Gordon Comstock attacks
Philip Ravelston, the middle-class socialist, for his failure to really
understand poverty,
"Ah, but you only understand it out of
Marx! You don't know what it means to
have ta crawl-'along on two quid a week.
It isn't a question of hardship - it's
nothing so decent as hardship. It's the
bloody, sneaking, squalid meanness of it."
(KAF: \..97)
1
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Orwell argued that the majority of socialists 'were so enlight-
ened that "they cannot understand the most ordinry emotions" (CEJL 1:
592) 0 By contrast, his own liberal morality was rooted in a "love
for the surface of the earth," in "solid objects and scraps of use-
\, , -'-
less information" (CEJL 1: 28) 0 lt was this emotional aspect to his
soial conscience that explains his intellectual integrityo For it
served to keep his mind concentrated on the material facts of life, on,
cl
"000 the thralldom of the familial connnon-
place, and from the materiality and con-
creteness by which it exists, the hardness
of the cash and the hardness of getting it,
the inelegance and intractability of family
things." (Trilling 1952: 72);
where i t is the intellect that,
" .. ogives'us power over intangibles and
imponderab1es, such as Beauty and Justice,
and permits us to escape the cosmic ridi-
cule which in our youth we suppose is
inevitab1y at those who take
seriously the small concerns of the mate-
rial quotidian world, which we know ;0 be
inadequate and doomed by the very fact
that it is sp absurdly conditioned - by
things, habits, and
and the foolish errors and solemn absurd-
of the men of the (Trilling 1952: 72)
"
In short, Tri1ling argues that; the "gist of'Orwell's criticism of the
l-
1iberal intelligentsia wa; they refused to understand the conditioned
nature of li fe" (Trilling 1952: 72).
Consequently, despite his sentimental descriptions of the "perfect
" ,
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synnnetry" of working c 1ass homes, Orwell did not delude himself with
regard to the very real suffering working class life. He knew
instirictive1y that human beings do not like living in "labyrinthine
sIums" with "dark back (RWP: 16), and cou1d see no reason
to accept the fact that many peop'1e were forced to do just that. Wh en
travelling in the North of England _in 1936, he recorded in his diary
a particu1arly depressing sight,
, r
"Pa!3sing up a horrible squalid side-alley,
saw a woman, youngish but very pale with
the usua1 draggled exhausted look, knee1-
. ing by' the gutter outside a house and
";'1:\ poking a stick up the 1eaden waste-pipe,
which was blocked. l thought how dreadful
a destiny.it was ta be kneeling in the
gutter in a. back-alley in Wigan, in the
bitter prodding a stick up a blocked
drain. At she looked up and
caught my eye, and her expression was as 0,
desolate as l have ever seen; it struck me
that she w,as thinking just the same othing
as l was." (CEJL 1: 203) "
In face of this quality of misery, socialism for Orwell,
o
was not the solution. In tact he fe1t that the socialism of the middle
,
class Marxists was very different from that of the working man (CEJt 1:
371). The intellectuals of the estab1ished left were, he fe1t, stuck
ih a of theor,y; utter1y ignorant of the way things actu'ally
happen (CEJL 1: 395). It was, he wrote, a,
.
" notable effort ta get the thinking
man down from his chilly perch of super-
iority and back into contact with the
man-in-the-street." (CEJL 1: 260)
)
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It is possible ta argue that Orwell' s apparent .contempt for"
m,iddle-class Marxist intellectuals was "founded on envy, spite,
ignorance, and a kind of puritanism
ll
(Zwerdling 1974: 38). Although
he claimed, in The Raad ta Wigan Pier, ta be arguing "i2.!, Sacialism,
not against it
ll
from a position of advocatus diabo1i (RWP: .151),
criticism of l'eft-wing waS extreme1y personal and
bitter. For examp1e, he argued that "Socia1ism, in fOrIn in which
it is now Eresented, appeals chief1y to unsatisfactory or even inhuman
types" (RWP: 159), and that the worst argument for So'cia1ism was its
.;ldherents (RWP: 152). And he attacked the aesthetic wor1d of "b'ri<ght
'- ...
young things" (KAF: 70), wherein, he argued,
.. you 'get on,' if you
aIl, not so'much by your
ity as by being the life
the cocktail parties and
bums'of verminous little
'get on' at
literary abil-
and sou1 of
kissing the
lions. Il
(RWP: 144)
, At fi rs t, thes e Il eunuch types wi th vegetarian smells" (CEJL 1:
245), seemed to Orwell to be innocuous in aIl but their hypocrisy. The
tenor of his ear1y criticism of faddish whether left-
\
wing or literary, is fired by a livid and contemptuou9 wrath at
self-serving small mindedness. For xample, it disgusted him that
intelligent men and women should spend' time worrying obsessively about
\ .
their diets' "in the hopes of adding five years to the life of their
carcass (es)" (RWP: 152). For Orwell, the worst aspect of this kind of
"
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42
person was that they often thought of their actions as somehow con-
\
'0 tributing to the genera1 cause of the suffering. He just"
could not see wha-t connec tion there cou1d b between the<' deso'lation. 1
of ."kneeling in the guttx: fn a in Wigan, . in the bitte:,
cold, prodding a stick up a b10cked drain" (CEJL 1
0
: 203), and
fruit juice. On the contra
7
y, Orwell believed, , ta become >bsessive
about such petty concerns as one 1 s di et ;!:evealed that one was "oqt of
11
touch with common humanity" (RWP: 153).
"

T)lis rejection of the hO'ller-than-thou attitude was" based on an
,
undeE'standing the ('essel."l.'c of being human is that one does not
.",
seek that "8'ainihobd is .. a thing that beings must
avoid" (CEJL. IV: 527). In his The Art of Dpn
s
l1d McGill, Orwell
argued that tne aanger of seeking perfection was that it"left no room
for a humorous view of 1ife (CEJL II: 193), . For,9rwe11;
demanded harm1ess rebellions against the virtuous 'standards of 'society
because s,lcietyo "has a1ways to demand a little from human beings
\ tpan it will get in practice" (CEJL n';, 193). This appreciation of

the gp between human aspiration,., and humant performance Orwell' fe1t to
{
be missing in,
.. " that dreary tribe of high-minded
.women and sanda1-wearers and beardftd
.frui t- juice drinkers wHo come flocking
toward the' smell 0.1; 1 progrel?s 1 1 i ke
b1uebott1es to 'a dead cat." ,(RWP: 160)
l'h
q. ,,'IV
,
J"
In addition to this inhuman humour1ess. attHude, he felt that 1eft-
,
"
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- 43 -
wing intellectuals were hypocritial.in their attitude towards the
Empire. Orwell never lost sight of the fact that the "overwhelming
bulk of the British proletariat do es not live in Britain, but in
Asia and Africa" (CEJL 1: 437), and that Europe, and especially Britain,
owed Us standard of living to the "direct or indirect
of the coloured peoples" (CEJL IV: 427). The left-wng
however, seemed to be blind to this fact,
"Under the capitalist system, in order
that England may live in comparative
comfort, a hundred million Indians must
live on the verge of starvation Yet
the 1eft-winger continues to feel that
no moral responsibility for
imperialism. He ready to
accept the products of the Empire and
to save his soul by sneering at the
people who hold the Empire together."
. (RWP: 140)
At first, Orwe11's into1erance of this kind of hypocritical wish-
fuI thinking was personal, a "reflex hostilityl' (Zwerdling 1974: 40).
As Zwerdling argues, to a large extent, this was the defensive reaction
of a man outside the literary life of London lwerdling 1974: 40).. With
\
time, h'owever, the persona1 nature of his attacks upon the midd1e class
socialists dec1ined, and he began ta search for their underlying motives.
In The Road tb Wigan Pier, Orwell argued that "Socialism, aS usu,ally
.
presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanica1 progress, . a1most
as a kind of religion" (RWP: 165), and aIl mechanical progress tends
towards a "world in which nothing wrong" (RWP: 169). For Orwell,
(
- 44 -
there was something "ins,t;incti vely" (RWP: 167) sus piciou,s in this
attitude. accepting the ideal of mechanical efficiency, he argued,
"you tie yourself to the ideal of softness," and to Orwell this was
"repulsive" (RWP: 172)'". He also felt that this was "moronic" (RWP: 172)
because he believed that it was the tendency of the machine to make
the' fully human Hfe - the life of work and effort - impossible (RWP:
167, 173). In its place, he a world "liberated" by the machin'e,
-
".
in which "enlightened sunbathers" wou'l.d ceaselessly discuss their
. .. "
?

superiority to their ancestors (RWP: 178). Consequently, behind the
self-serving hypocrisy of the class socialists, perceived
in them a desire for a "hypertrophied sense of arder," where the world
would be reduced to "something resembling a chess-board" (RWP: 157);
"an ordered, an efficient world" (RWP: 166).
The implications of this desire for " mechanization, radonalization,
and molernization" (RWP: 176), when coupled wi th an 'ignorance of the way
things actually happen,' and a refusa1 to face that imperialism
was a 'racket', were, Orwell argued, dangeros,
"
"The tcuth is that, to many people call-
ing themse1ves Socialists, revolutian
do es nqt mean a movement of the masses
with which they hope ta ,assaciate them-
) selves; it means a set of refarms which
the c1ever ones, are going to im-
pose upon 'them', the Lower Orqers."
(RWP: 157)
It is in this sense that he argued in his essay Charles Dickens that:
o
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"Most revolutionaries are potential
Tories, because they imagine that every-
thing can be put right by altering the
shape of society " (CEJL 1: 502)
At the same tlme, he wrote that,
" 1 t would be a mistake to regard the
book-trained'Socialist as a bloodless
creature entire1y incapable of emotion.
Though seldom giving much evidence of
affection for the exploited, he is
fectly capable of displaying hatred -
a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacuo
hatred - against the exploiters."
(RWP: 157)
It was this quality of hatred that he felt accounted for so many
socialists being either "unsatisfactory or inhuman."
o "
He also fell; that this "queer, theoretical in hatred" was
responible for the "tactless kind of Socialist propaganda" that tended
to drive many otherwise well-meaning ,especia11-y
midd1e c1ass, into the opposite camp, being Fascism (RWP: 186). Zwerdling
argues that Orwell's class analysis was partly a critique of Marxist
1abels. Rather th an the simp1istic battle between the downtrodden pro-
letariat and the fat, top-hatted rwel1 argued that'the
\ c1ass-in-between, the "clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller,
the midd1e-class man who has 'come down world', the village
grocer, the lower-grade civil servant" (RWP: 200) had to be persuaded
that their interests lay within the ideals of socialism. Sucn persuasion,
he implied an understanding and appreciation of that class's
i

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position and prob1ems (RWP: 186).
In this sense, Orwell was arguing against the "grand old Social-
4
ist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie" (RWP: ,158). Just as he never
lost ,sight of the role that the Empire played in maintaining Bri,tain' s
standard of living, so he never lost sight of his own origins.
In his book-Fugitive from the Camp of Victory, Richard Rees re
7
al1ed
\
a moment in Sheffield in early 1936, whert Orwell angrily interrupted
a militant Communist propagandist who was routinely vilifying the
bourgeoisie,
"Look here, l lm a bourgeois and my family
are bourgeois. If you talk about them
like that l'Il punch your head."
, (Rees 1962: 146)
,As a member of the sinking middle c1ass (RWP: 203), (tha't quarter
of the population in between the capitalist and the proletariat (RWP:
199) ), Orwell feit that there was a real danger that the orthodox
socialists would drive his own class away their inability to
see the c1ass war in anything but archetypica1 images. As he wrote,
"It is quite easy to imagine a middle
class crushed down to the worst depths
of poverty and still remaining bitterly
anti-working-clasw in sentiment; this
being, of course, a
Party." > _________ 198)

Consequently, it was important to Orwell for the socialists ta
concern themselves less with "'capitalist' and 'proletarian, 1" and more 1
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with "the robbers and the robbed" '(R\o{P: 200),
\1
"Less about 'class consciousness',
'expropriation of the exproprtators',
'bourgeois ideology', and 'proleta-
rin solidarity', not to the
sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis; and more about justice,
liberty, and the of the unem-
ployed. And less about'mechanica1
-progress . that, kind of thing. ' . dri,.ves
away many people whom the Socia1ist
ause needs .. All that is needed is
to hammer two facts home into the
public consciousness. One,. that the
interests of aIl exploited,people are
the same; the other, that Soci1ihm is
, ' compatible with connnon decency."
(RWP: 202)
Socialists,
", . cannot afford to waste any more Ume
in preaching to the converted. Their
job is to make as rapidly as
possible; instead of aIl too often
they are making Fascists." (RWP: 186)
Orwell believed the situation to be desperate,. For him the essen-
tia1 aim of Socialism was to "see tyranny overthrown" (RWP: 194). As
Stlch, it was an appreciation of the ideals of justice and
liberty (RWP: 189). The Socialist movement, however, he found M be
only p1agued by large numbe,s of unsatisfactory people, but a1so'py

i
ideo10gica1 orthodoxy, aI1d consequent "doctrinaire priggishness (and)
party squabb1es" (RWP: 189). Of this aspect of the established 1eft
he wrote:
fi
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,
"Sometimes l g'et the impression that,
to (the majority of orthodox Marxists),
the whole Socialist movement is no more
than a of exciting heresy-hunt -
a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-
doctors to the bftat of tom-toms and the
tune of 'Fee fi, fo, fum, l smell the
blood of a right-wing deviationist!"
(RWP: 194)
In 1937, Orwell nad first hand experience pf the threat that
Fascisrn posed against the ideals of democratic Spcialism. In 1936
he had gane to Spain to fight for the Republican cause. On his retum
to Barcelona after a term fighting on the Aragon front, he realized
that the ideological infighting amongst the Marxists was not
only an impediment to the socialist cause, but was itself capable of
becoming Faslist in nature. When he had first arrived in Barcelona
from England, he had felt that it was the first time that he had ever
been in a "town where the working class was in the saddle,"
"Servi l and ceremonial forms of
speech had ternporarily disappeared.
Nobody said or 'Don' or even
'Usted 1 ; ,everyone called everyone else
'Cornrade' and 'Thou', flnd said 'Salud!'
instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping was
forbidden by law; The revoluonary
posters were everywhere, flaming from
the wal}s in clean reds and blues that
made the few remaining advertisements
look like daubs of mud
everyone wore rough working-class clothes,
or blue overalls, or some variant of the
mitia unifonn. AU this was quee:r and
moving. There was much in it that l did
not understand, in sorne ways l did
even like it, but l recognized it imme-
diately as a state of affairs worth fight-
irtg for." .-'\ (RTe: 8)
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In June
the,
- 49 -
\l,
1937, however, he retumed to
a city trans formed
" ... horrible atmosphere of suspicion
and hatred, the lies and rumours
,culating the posters scream-
ing from the hoardings that land every-
one like me was a Fascist spy." ,(RTC: 212)
\
with
Richard Rees provides testimony to this atmosphere. He had arrived
in Barcelona in April 1937 to find Eileen Blair in,
" .. a v,ery strange mental state. She
seemed absentminded, preoccupied ,ang
dazed." (Rees 1962: 147)
.
He realized afterwards she had the first person in whom
he "had witnessed the effects of living under a political terror."
If it can be said that it was in Burma that Orwell lost any lin-
gering illusions he may have had about human nature (Odle 1972: 38),
it was in Spain lost any illusions he may have had about ortho-
dox Marxists. In his book The Road to Wigan Pier, finished just before
he left for Spain, he had already signed his "public resignation from
th official IBritish Left and its fat connections" (Watson 1917: 39).
II 1
Now, having witnessed the internedne s:ruggle within the Left in Spain,
?
he .realized that the Cq1lllIlunist Part,Y affiliated with the Third
International (HTC: 58), and as such was an instrument of Soviet imperi\-
alism and an anti-revo1utianary force (CEJL 1: 302, 310).' However, he
wrote that despite this "appalling disaster,"
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" curious 1y enough the who1 --experience
has 1eft me with not 1ess but more belief
in the decency of human beings." (HTC: 220)
He fel t that he had at 1eas t experienced, for however short a p'eriod
of time, an authentic forro of politica1 association, that fufi11ed
his understanding of democratic Socialism. As he wrote to Cyril
Conne1ly, just before the P.O.U.M. had been dec1ared i11e-
.'
"I have seeI). wonderfu1 things and at' last
really b1ieve in Socialism which l never
did before." (CEJL 1: 301)
However, Orwe1l's major concern in Spain was the Communist Party's'
tactic of deliberately distorting the facts. What frightened him was
seeing, as he wrote in his essay Looking back oh the Spanish War,
" history' baing written not in terms
of what happened but what happened ac-
cording to various 'party lines. "'
(CEJL II: 294)
This fear that the "very concept of ob,jective truth is fading out
of the world" (CEJL II: 295) was, for Orwell, inextricabli assaciated
with politics,
i'
"1 rememL saying once to Arthur Koestler,
, 'history stopped in 1936,' at which he
, in immediate understanding. We were
bath thinking of totalitarianism iq general,
but more particularly of the Spani,ah Civil
War. Early in life l had noticed/that no
'\. event i8 ever correctly, reported /ln a news-
paper, but in Spain, for the firJt time, l
/
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For Orwell,
..
- 51 -
saw newspaper reports which did not
. -
bear any relation to the facts, not
even in the qat10nship which is im-
plied in an ordinary lie. l saw gTeat
battles reported where there had been
no fighting, and complete silence where
hundreds of men had been killed. l saw
,troops who had fought bravely denounced
- as cowards l:md traitors, and other's
had never s'een a shot fi red hai led as the
heroes of imaginary victories, and l saw
newspapers in, London retelling these lies
and eager intellectuals building emotion-
al superstructures over events that had
never happened. Il (CEJL II: 294)
"The irnplied objective of this line of
thought is a nightmare world which
the or some ruling clique, con-
o
troIs not only the but the Rast.
If the Leader says of such and such and
an event, lIt never happened" - well: it
never happened. If he says that two, and
two are five - weIl, two and two are five.
This prospect frightens me much more than
bombs - and after our experiences of the
last few years that is not a frivolous
statement. Il (CEJL II: 297)'
Against this nightmare vision, he argued that there were only
two safeguards,
. ,
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"One i8 that however much you deny the
truth, the truth goes on existing, as
it were, behind your back, and you con-
sequently can't violate it in ways that
impair military rhe other
is that sa long as sorne parts of the
earth remain unconquered, the liberal
t;radition can be kept alive."
(CEJL II: 297)
(
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-L,
The bettaya1 of the revo1ution that Orwell witnessed in Spain,
Zwerdling argues, was ta obsess him for the rest of his 1ife (Zwerd1ing
1974:- 82). He a SociaHst because he eould see no other
option between Fascism (CEJL 1: 374), which seemed ta him, at the time,
ta be a development of capitalism (CEJL 1: 318), and imperialism (CEJL
,.
1: 367). Certainly he could see no other alternative between Russian
Authoritarianism and Ameriean Materialism (CEJL III: 48).
At the same time, his previous eontempt and distrust for the
.'"
majority of socialists had become a conviction that they not so
much given ta machine-worship, and the stupid cult of
Russia", (RWP:, 190), as they were to power worship"
"lt would seem that what you get over
and over again is a movement of the pro-
letariat whieh is promptly canalized and
betrayed by astute people at the top, and
then the growth of a new governing class.
The one thing that never arrives is equal-
ity. The mass of people never get the
chanee ta bring their innate decency into
the control of affairs, so that one is _
almost driven ta the cynical thought that
men are only decent when they powerless."
(CEJL 1: 372)
In the early thirties, Orwell had written that the age him
so sick that he was sometimes "almost impelled to stop at a street
,
,
corner and start calling down curses from Heaven like or Ezra
or s omebodyll (CEJL l: 164). xperience in Spain confirmed his

rears, and as he wrote to Stephen Spender in 1938,
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UI sometims feel as 'if 1 hadn' t been
properly alive since about the beginning
'. of 1937,nt (CEJL 1: 346)
For the rest of his life, his mind was consumed by the question
or the relationship between power and political propaganda. By draw-
ing it to its logical conclusions, it seemed to him that the distortion
,
of information for political ends, either directly through the fabri-
catipn or omission of objective facts, or indirectly, through the
euphemistic manipulation of language itse1f, only leid to a wor1d
with no objective reality.
The writing of his novel Coming uE for Air, with its central theme
l ,-
of the vain attempt to ta the 'Village Eden of the Christian
,era', revealed ta him the enormity of the problem he was addressing
(CEJL 1: 406). In early 1936, Orwell had mainly been concerned
the apparent of the majority of middle-class socialists. By
194U, he was convinced that the political intrigue he had witnessed
"
in Spain "between a lot of cosmopolitan Communists, Anarchists etc"
- '
(CEJL 1: 323), which he saw as "Fascism' being imposed under the pretence
of resisting Fascism" (CEJL 1: 314), was in fact only a symptom of the
modern age.

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, TOTALITARIANISM THE MENACE
1
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.most famous symbol of the modern world was the frank-
,.Jo ,
,
furter whicti' Bowling, the protagonist in Coming up for Air,
':
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(
attempted to e4t in a "mi1k.bar ," !
1
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'''ThEl frankfurter had 'a rubber skin, of
,
coutse, and my temporary teeth weren't
of a fi t. 1 had to do a kind' of
movement before 1 could get my
teth through the skin. And then sudden-
1/ - pop! Th' thing burst in my mouth
l.ike a rotten pear. A sort, of horri,ble
ptuff was oozing aIl over my tongue. But
/the taste! For a moment 1 just couldn't
, believe it. Then 1 rolled my tongue
! round it agaifi and another try. It
/ w'as.ll!h! A sausage, a thing calling it-
/
self a frankfurter, fille with fish! ...
It gave me the feeling that l'd bitten
into th modern world and discovered what
it was really made . Rotten fish in a
rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting in-
side your mouth." (CUA: 26)
In the' book, fish and fishing represent the past (CUA: 74) 1 and Jibombs
'l',
/
represent the future (Lee 1969: 93, 95). As the "bombs of filth" had
swallowed the ,Hah, sa the future was swallowing the pasto When Bowling,
in search of his past, Lower Binfield, the village of his
..
.hildhood and, s'ymbolically, the "Village Eden of the liberal-Christian
')ra" (Rieff 1954: 23L), he finds that it too had been swallowed by the

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modern world, "buried somewhere in' the midd1e J (a) sea of bricks"
(Lee 1969: 177).
What Bowling found in Lowr Binfield reHected Orwel:l' s despair
wi th the modern wor1d ,
"1'11 teU you what my stay in Lower
Binfield had taught me, and it was this.
It's aIl going to happen. AlI the
things you've the back of your
mind,-the things.you're terrified of,
,
the things that you tell yourself ,are
jus.!: a nigh,tmare or only" happer. in
foreign countries. The bombs, the food-
queues, the rubber trunchegns, the
barbed wire,' the coloured sI:tir.ts, the
slogans, the enormous 'faces, .the machine-
guns squirting out of bedroom windows.
It' s aIl going to happen." (GUA: 223)
,
To a large, extent, Orwell' s disaffection with the modern world
was a matter of personal taste. In a 1940 autobiographical sketch he
'-.
.wrote that he disliked "b'ig towns, noise, lntor cars, the radio, tinned
, .
food, central heating and 'modern' furniture" (CEJL 1'1: 39).' In aV'
sense, .... all these things contributed he dsribed as a soft 9
_ (11 . - 1 1
environment, wllich he believed led .to" a weakening of
. b,' 1
ness (CEJL IV: 106). At the he them'as merely symptoms
of the.modern age that he flt was by an illness CEJL III:
f
191, IV: 289), an il1ness he once ascribed to the 1ack of an essl?ntial
vitamin (CEJL III: 38?).
\, A'major aspect of the modern age, he a.rgueq, that, although it
to be dominated .by th.e notion of speed (CEJL II: 27, IV: 275),
. /
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it did not seern to be going anywhere. The notion of progress, he,
o
wrote, had turned out to b a "swindle" (CEJL 1: 576, II: 233, ,236).
This perception weighed agains't any possibility of hope for the
future,
"It is an age in which every positive
attitude has turned out to be a failure.
Creeds<, parties, programmes of every
description have simply flopped, 9ne
after another. The only 'ism' that has
justified itself is p'essimism."
.. '(CEJL 1: 585)
Consequently, for Orwell the age was dominated by feelings of "futility
1
and impermanence" (CEJL II: 36), in which "aIl decen,t people" fel t
1
utnerly helpless (EJL 1: 575, II: 454, IV: 287).
A1though he 4id ascribe one of the prob em to mid91e-ciass
!
1: 564), of more importance to h'm was spiritual
malaise that had resu1ted from the decline in the
, . /
towards (CEJL II: 159). The nature of
, - /
rob1em was that
Dorothy Rare writ large. For whilst in __
theme of 19s5 of faith and consequent 10ss of me an ng had been private,
by 1940 the public implications of that problem had become his
concern. Just Dorothy had been unable to Mr. Warburton's
so Orwell was incB;pable acce.pting the modern world.
o
"To say '1 accept' in ap age like our
own is to say you accept concentration
camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin,
bombs, aeroplanes,.tinned !ood, machine-
guhs, putsches, slogans, Bedaux
,
For,
1
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57 .:!o.
belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies,
Erovocateurs, secret
prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and
political murders.
1I
(CEJL 1: 548)
He' once described a "rather cruel he "once played on a
wasp, Il and turned it into an exquisite metaphor to describe the spiritual
dilemma or the modrn age,
-
"He was sucking jam on my plate, and l
eut him in half. He payed no attention,
merely went on with his meal, while a
tiny stream of jam trickled out of his
oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly
. away did he g:Easp the dreadful thing
that had happened to him. It is the
same with modern man. The thing that
has been cut is his soul, and there
'Was a period - twenty years, perhaps --
during which he did not notice i t. Il
(CEJL II: 30)
lAt the same time, Just as Orwell' s rejection or laissez-faire

capitalism was total, so was his existential of death as
,
_. 1
final. As he wrote in Coming up for Air, he was fini shed with trying
to get the past (Cu1: 215), and argufd that the religiou.s belief
that up as a "choir practice
o
in a jeweller' s shop" (fEJL II:
277) had tq- be "a bandoned " analysis was a class one,
,
,-'
p
"By the nineteenth century it was already
in essence a lie, l semi-conscious device_
'for keeping the rich. rich and the poor "
poor. ,
Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a
week for ,you, but we are aIl the children
1f Gad. And through the whole fabtic of
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capitalist society ran a similar' lie,
which it was absolutely necessary to
rip out." (CEJL II: 30)
Hwever, the broader implications of this development were more
serious. As a liberal, Orwell believed that human beings needed 8
sense of purpose (CEJL IV: 116). The prob1em was that the dec1ine in
faith had resu1ted in a dec1ine of meaning (CEJL II: 237), and a con-
sequent decline in the belief in abso1ute good and evil (CEJL III:
122). Orwell thus argued that the tragedy of the modern age, that
whiqh made it so terrible and so real (GUA: 219), was that decline
in re1igious be1ief had not been accompanied by any disappearance of'
"the need for something to believe in" (CEJL 1: 564). Consequent1y,
for Orwell, the,
" real problem was how to rest'ore the
religiQus attitude whi1e accepting death
as final." (CEJL III: 281)
In short, to restore a '''system of good and evil independent of Heaven
. and Hell'" (CEJL III: 127).
By religious attitude, Orwell meant no more than the sense of
right and wrong (CEJL III: 123) of the liberal-Christian morality of ,
standing up for the oppressed against oppressors (CEJL 1: 502).
In tnis sense, it can be seen that he meant no more than the ideals ,'of
his understanding of democratic Socialism, an understanding rooted in
the liberal concept of decency. In short, justice and liberty 190).
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White Orwell always remained confident that "the' conunon people'
still had a belief in absolute good and evil (CEJL III: 259), he
noticed that a striking characteristic of the "unsatisfactory and
inhuman" type of socialist was that they wE!re drawn "from a rootless
town-bred section of the middle-class" (RWP:- 160). As a consequence
of his appreciation of the "decay in the belief in personai immorta1-
ity" (CEJL II 1: 126), he argued tha t the
"Conununism of the English is something
enough. It is the patriotism
of the deracinated.
lI
(CEJL 1: 565)
Orwell believed that this rootless class originally emerged from
the "rentier professional class" (CEJL ,1: 551). This' was the new moneyed
class that had risen in the nineteenth (CEJL III: 311), whose
lI safe and civilized life" (CEJL II: 293) had been dependent upon the
1
Empire (CEJL IV: 278). For Orwell, this class was irresponsible be-
cause, protected by money and guns (CEJL II: 200), it was unable to come
to terms with reality. He argued that this irresponsibility was depen-
1>'
'{'
dent upon the fact that the Empire had been large1y maintained by the
navy (CEJL II: 261), and consequent distance between the exploitd
>" '}...
and the exploiters had allowed the latter to de1ude themselves as to the
origin of their wealth. This (CEJL 11: 261), it seemed -to him;
,xp1ained how the intellectuals of this. class were capable o'f "making
mock of uniforms" (CEJL II: 21'8) without acknowledging that their com-
fortable and secure way of depended upon those very uniforms.
1
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This irrespo?sibility, Orwell argued, had resulted in an intel-
lectual elite who "overcivilized" (CEJL II: 275) and ','over:sensi-
(CEJL II: 293). Horrified by the' "ugliness and ritual
einptiness of the machine age'-l (CEJL II: 275), they had at first "des-
and then sought refuge from the "consciousness of futility"
(CEJL II: 276) by escaping from individualism into either the Catholic
Church or the Communist_Party (CEJL II: 237). The British Left in'
particular, he1argued, having "lost their patriotism and their religious
belief (hoaving lost) .the need-for a god and a fatherland,"
had come ta worship Stalin as a Father or God .(CEJL II: 328). 'They
the "unresolved contradictions" (CEJL IV: 467) of the 'orthodox
Communist Party because it was something to believe in (CEJL 1: 564).
Orwell believed that the very environment that. had nurtured the
liberal concept ?f .decency was indirectly responsible for 50 many
English intellectuals being capable of "swallowing the reality" of
totalitarianism. Its implications were outside of their scope of ex-
perience, and they could consequently accept "necessary murderslt (CEJL 1:
1
," 566) without comirig to 'terms with murder really' meant.
He saw this development as being "as important as the rise of
machine civili}ation." For him,' there was,
" little doubt that the modern cult of
power worship is bound up withthe mod-
ern man's feeling that life here and
now is th'e only life there is
One c'annot'hope ta have any worth-white
picture of the future unless one realizes
, ,
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" ,
how much we have lost by the decay of
Christianity. Few Socia1ists seem to
be aware 0 f this." (CEJL III: 126)
Orwell saw in the propensity of intellectuals to sink their
1
individualities into all-encompassing orthodoxies forms of which,
whether poli tica1 or religious, were anathema to himL a major symptom
of the illness of the modern world. He 1abelled thls i11nes's national-
ism. For him, nationalisrn differed from patriotism, which he defined .
as'
,
" . devotion to a particular place and
\
a particular way of 1He, "fhich one
to be the best in the world
but has no wish to force upon 'other
people." (CEJL III: 411)
Nationa1ism, on the other hand, he defined as synonymous with
the des ire for power (CEJL III': 411). His understanding of nationali}m
,
was not to competitive prestige on a pure1y pational scale.
1
For him it inc1uded Neo-Toryism, Zionism, Communism, Political Catholi-
cism, Colour Feeling, Class Feeling, Pacificism, Anglophobia, Anti-
semitism and Trotskyism (CEJL III: 422)., As such, it was a state of
mind whose dominant characteristics obsession, Indifference to
and instabi1ity, in"the sense that only could 10yalties be
,
.
tran$ferred from one group to another, but could even be re-transferred
back again (CEJL III: 416).
Natipnalism, he
" . is power hunger tempered by self
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- 62 -
deception. Every nationa1ist i8 capable
of the mbst fla'grant dishonesti, but he
is a1so - s,ince he is' conscious of serv-
ing something bigger himse1f -
unshakeab1y certain of being in the right."
(CEJL III: 412)
From a religiou$ point of view, in the 'cause' abso1Vd the
,
nationalist from evi1 (CEJL II: 74). Consequent1y,
" .. his hold on rea1ity, his lite>rary
taste, and even to sorne extent his moral
sense, were dislocated as soon his
nationa1istic loya1ties were invo1ved."
(CEJL III: 416)
Orwell argued that the extreme nationa1ist was a bare1y sane fanatic
(CEJL III: 42-7), "not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily in
dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the rea1
wor1d" (CEJL III: 412).
As has a1ready been noted, Orwell first became aware of the system-
atic fa1sifying of history in Spain (CEJL lIT: 334). He maintained
enough of a sense of humour ta appreciate the joke about the Communist
in a New York cafe at the time of Hit1er's invasion Russia, who, in
the midd1e of discussion, had gone to lavatory and came out to find the
- ,
'party 1ine' had changed (CEJL'TI: 463). However, the combination of
viciousness and dishonesty (CEJL III: 329) with which the practice of
altering the past to fit the present (CEJL III: 420).was carried out,
together with the readiness with which many people accepted such propa- '
. ganda (CEJL II: 467, III: '195), depressed him with i,ts implications,
" '
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63 -
"Since about 1930 the world has given
no reason for optimism whatever. Noth-
ing is in sight except a welter of
lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance,
and beyond our present troubles loom
vaster ones which are on1y now entering
into the European consciousness. ".
, (CEJL III: 281)
The of the fanatical adherenct to
Orwell argued, was in the process of unhinging the very basis, of
European civilized 1He. Fa,r whilst he welcomed the dec-line of insti-
tutionalized religion, he regarded as a "semi-conscious device
ror 'keeping the rich rich and the poor poor" (CEJL .11: 30), he, was
appa11ed by the increasing1y apparent consequences of the decline in
the religious belief in 'personal immortality. It seemed to him that
the positive loyalty men fe1t towards their awn countries, which he
understood as patriotism, "could- be transferred to humanity- itse1f"
- (CEJL 32). he saw the-rise of race hatred instead of
human brotherhood. The "democratlc vistas" had'ended in barbed wire

(CEJL 1: 548), and,
"Ruman types supposed1y exUnct for
centuries, the dancing dervish, the
robber chief tain, the Grand
have sudden1y reappeared, not as io-
mates of 1unatic asylums, but as the
maaters of the world." ,(CEJL II: 31)
"
Orwell he had had a horror of po1itics since Spain
(CEJL II: 39? Re wrote that the disease of nationalism had resu1ted
-.
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64
in a modern cult of realism (CEJL III: 176) which was gain-
ing ground to such a degree that he concluded that "a11 poli tics con-
sists of the struggle for power" (CEJL IV: 193), where "on,e can never
,. -
do mo-re th an' decide which of ,two' evi ls i8 the lesser" (CEJL IV: 469).
Within this understanding of political behaviour, he argued, every
political development is judged'according political expediency
(GEJL IV: 185), on the grounds that "Might is Right, victis!" (CEJL
II: 368). Virtue is seen only in terms of success (CEJL II: 372), re-
sulting in a "moral pigsty" (CEJL II: 267), wherein there could be no
crimes because there are no laws, only power (CEJL II: 363)',
"No one, in qur time, believes in any
sanction greater th an mllitary power;
no one believes that it is possible
ta overcome force except by greater
force. There is no 'Law', there ls
only power." (CEJL II: 216)
At the same time, he argued that the love of power was not limited
'1
to the success of the strong over the weak (CEJL II: It a1so
contained a"streak of paranoic (CEJL II: 479) pul1y worship (CEJL 1:
521), and a love of 8uccessfu1 cruelty (CEJL III: 358),
National Socialism, which Orwell had' originally seen as an exten-
sion ,of capitalism, he later saw as being in essence'no different from
Russian Communism (CEJL IV: 191)1
"National Socialism is a form of Social-
ism, ls emphatically revolutionary,
crush the pro pert y owner Just as surely
as it crushes the (CEJL II:
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Just as the Communist movement ln had degener,ated into an
extension,df Russian for po1icy (CEJL 1: 562), so Orwell saw the
1
aim of the Nazis as bein "simply power'and not any particular form
of society" (CEJL II: 41). Arguing that the " military parade is really,
a kind of ri tu al dance, . express ing a certain philosophy of li fe, "
he cited the Nazi goose-step as evidence of "an affirmation of naked
power
ll
(CEJL II: ._81)
Whi1st Orwel1's main concern was with the abuse of power (CEJL 1:
469),he noted that a large number of,intellectuals manifested a
fascination for power (CEJL IV: 202, 373). he argued
;If ...
that James Burnham, books "'The ManagetfLRevo1ution and The
.
Machiavellians he read with interest, ... "why people want
power" (CEJL IV: 211). Rather, it seemed to him that Burnham's own
power worship blurred his pQlitical judgement, causing him to predict
everything on the basis of a continuation of present trends in an un-
stable and melodramatic way,
"This habit of mind leads to the be-
lief that things will happen more quick-
ly, comp1etely, and catastrophically
than they ever do in practice Burnham's
writings are full of apocalyptic visions."
(CEJl IV: 207)
For Orwell, even Pacificism was a species of power mongering
because its orthodox creed, which appeared to be free from the "ordinary
of politics," in fact gave its, adherente a moral right to
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bully everyod'e else in'to thinking likewise (CEJL IV: 347). This
,
tendency, he argued, was a central aspect of totalitarian politics,
in that it dictated what individuals should think,
,-
"In a society in which there is no law,
and in theory no compulsion, the only
arbiter of behaviour is_public opinion .
When human beings are governed by 'thou
not', the individual can practise
a certain amount of eccentricity: when
1
they are supposedly governed by 'love'
or __ !-relson 1, he is under continuous
pressure to make him behave and think
in exactly the sarne way as everyone else."
(CEJL IV: 252)
.
Orwell saw Germany, Russia and, 'Ital'y as totalitarian in structure
(CEJL II: 162) in that they were collectivist without being democratic;
they were ruled by,
" ... a caste of managers, scientists and
bureaucrats who (had destroyed) old-style
capitalism.and (were keeping) the working
classes permanently in subjection."
IV: 364)
At the same tme, the sole aim of totalitarianism was not to make
people "think the right thoughts." Rather, Orwell argued, it was to
"make them -less conscious" (CEJL IV: ,251). For he argued that it was
the partlcularity of totalitarian politics that it was not simply a
cult of power. Rather, it was a theocracy (CEJL IV: 86), combining the
emotional (CEJL III: 177) of an uprooted Christian civiliza-
tion with of the twentieth century for
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the mass dissemination of propaganda.
It was a1so, Orwell argued, different from the orthodoxies of

the past in the sense that although its aim was to control thought, it
did not aim to fix it (CEJL II: 163). As he wrote, ovemight, "yester-
day's proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous
(CEJL II: 289), and "blood stained murderers" cou14 turn into "public
,
benefactors" (CEJL III: 122) t
"The unquestionable dogma of M;oriday may
become the damnable heresy of Tuesday,
and so on." (CEJL 1: 563)
-i
\,
Consequently, the past was constantly being cancel1ed out (CEJL IV:
"
504), history being created, not 1earned (CEJL IV: 86). As such,
totalitarianism was undermining the very foundations of objective
reality, of sanity itse1f (CEJL IV: 530). History was ceasing to exist,
becoming a plastic image of the 'Leader's' subjective illusion at any
"" n."':
... "
partiu1ar moment (Spender 1953: 134).
In his 1ast book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell attempted to come
to terms with tJta1itarian po1itics. A1though the book has been cited
as being purely anti-Left, this was not Orwell's intention. As he wrote
in a 1etter to Francis Henson of the U.S. United Automobile Workers,
"My recent novel ls NOT intended as an
attack on Soc1a,1ism or on the British-
Labour Party (of which l am a supporter)
but as a' show-up of the perversions to
whieh a centra1ized economy i8 1iable
and which hav already been partIy real-
ized in Communism and (CEJL IV: 564)
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In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, worked in the
" ..,
Records nepartment of the Ministry of Truth. He was' actually employed
in 'the constant falsi fying of history,
"Day by day and almost minute by minute
the past was brought up to date. In
this way every prediction made the
Party could be shown by documentary evi-
dence to have been correct." (1984: 35)
Orwell had already explored this theme his satire on the Russian
Revolution, Animal Farm. As the original revolutionary fervour diSr
integrated into a porcine the constant justifications of
the propagandist Squealer served ta obfuscate the past to the point
where the rest of the animals could no longer trust their memories ,
"
"Sometimes the 0 lder ones among them
racked their dirn rnernories and tried ta
determine whether in th early days of
the Rbelli6n, when Jones's expulsion
was still recent, things had been better
or worse than now. They could not remem-
ber, There was nothing with which they
could compare their present lives: they
had nothing to go upon except Squealer's
list of figures, which
strated that everything was getting
better ,and better ," (AF: 110)
The final change cornes to the Seventh Commandment of the farm, 'that
"All animals are equal" (A11: 23). The old mare, Clover, asked Benjamin
the whether the Commandments were the as they used to be,
"For once Benjamin to. break
his rule, and read out to her what was
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written on the wall., There was nothing
there except a single cemmandment.
It ran:
\
ALL ANlMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT. SOME ARE MORE
,EQUAL OTHERS." (AF.: 114)
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell '.!1ttempted to define the "inner
- n
10gic of totalitarianism. In essence, he a,rgued, the totalitarian state
was in teres t,ed in power, not as' a means, ,but as an end ,
"The Party seeks power entirely for ite
own sake . The objet of power is power."
- (1984: 211)
,
This culJt of power exp1ained the brutality and emotional nationalism
of the daily "Two Minutes Hate" (1984: 11), and the annual Rate Week
(1984: ll}). The logic of the Party 16 explained to Slith his

incarceration in "the Ministry of Love by O!.Brien, a member of! the Inner
Party,
"Power is inflit!ting pain and humiliation.
Power is in tearing human minds ta pieces
and putting them together again in new
shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin
ta see, then, what kind of world we are
creating? 1s the exact opposite of
the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the
old reformers imagined. A world of fear
and nd torment, a world which
will grow not less but more merciless as it
refines itself The
claimed'that they were founded on love and
justice. Ours is founded upon hatred
Already we re breaking down thla habits of
thought which have survived fr,om before the

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Revolution. We have cut the links be-
tween chi1d,and between man
.. and man, and between man and woman .
,There will be n9, 10ya1ty
towards the Party. will be no
love, except the love of Big Brotger.
wil1
u
be no l&ughter, except the
lauit of over 'a defeated enemy ..
There no curiosity,
of the process"of'life. ALI cOmpeting
p1easures will be destroyed. always
'0' do not forget this, Winston - .always there
"will be the intoxication of con-\
stant1y and constantly growing
subtler. A1ways, at every,moment,
wi1l'be the thri11 of victory, the sensa-
tion of trampliqg on an enemy who is help-'
1ess, If you want a picture of, the futur,e,
imagine a boat stamping on a human face -
for ever," (1984:
o
,
4
J
The extent to which mind was consumed with the prob1em
o \ \,. '(:1
. of totalitarianism evident, pot on11 from the writings in he
"
Q
1
direct1y addresses the issue, but also from relatively unconnected
1-
writings. _
Such. Such
,
ror example, his' essay 'on his at St." Cyprfans,
, ,
were the Joys, is full of incidents 'more descriptive of a

1.' " h
-_sta:e than a prep school, 1972:

..
lt was, wrote, a "wor1d of force and .fraud and secrecy" (CEJL IV: 400),-
Q
,
wherein.; the pattern of life was a " coni!inuous triumph of the strong over
,the weak," virtue consisti-ng in nothing else but winning (CEJL IV: 411).
\ '
He a sCflnda1 at the schoo1, '\probab1y
. "
1 \ (, 0
suddenly eruptitrg into a "tremendous row,
, ,.
,IIThere ,<,,"interrOgations,
,confessions, f1oggings,
... "'" .
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.. 71 -
soleron lectures of which one understood
nothing except-that sorne irredeemable
sin known as 'swinishness' or 'beast-
liness' had been committed. One of the
a boy named Horne,lwas
flogged, according to eye-witnesses,
for a quarter of an hour before being
expe11ed. His yells rang through the
house. But we were aIl implicated.
Guilt seemed to hang in the air like a
paU of smoke." (CEJL IV: 402)

,,4
Orwell att:ributed his "sense of desolate 10neliness and help- "
lessness" to the ,impotence of childhood (CEJL tV: 382), his vivid des-
criptions of that "hostile" world, ruled by the "armies of unalterable
law" (CEJL' IV: '412), convey a"quality 0t terror that 'seem closer to
> ...
his horrot 0 f totali tarianism (Fyvel 1959: 60) "
-"
Another is his 194p,essay How the Poor Die, a description
of his stay in a public hospital in Paris in'1929. It was, he wrote,
0
a hospitiil in which '''something of the of the nineteenth
century had was a "place of filth,
""", '
torture and death, a sort of antechamber to the tomb" (CEJL IV: 269).
, .
This memory 0 f his in Paris is in marked contrast to his.
. ,
account in Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. The
gay sense of adventure in the latter work stands in such contrast to
, \
the sombre account written many years later that it would seept to in-
..
dicate more bout his state of mind in the 1940s than 'about his experience
in 1929. lndeed, had he written about his t;e,rm in hospital in the early
1930s, it i8 possible to imagine that he would have described 'the
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experienee in the same way he deserihed heing shot in Spain in 1936;
;; in other words, as "very interesting," and "worth descrihing in de-
taU" (RTC: 177)'.
In other writings, Orwell's pessimism unmistakable. At times
he was, eonvinced that civilization was destined ta be swept away (CEJ1 1:
569), let alone ever he sane again (CEJ1 II: 72). Civi1ization as he
saw it, was "spiralling dOwn into a nightmare" (CEJI,. II: 355), wherein
"we are a11 drowning in filth" (CEJ1 II: 478), with "no hopeful pieture
of the future" (CEJL IV: For Orwell, the end of thewar brought
the IIpeace that is no peaee" (CEJ1 IV: 26), with the potential for
the division of tqe wor1d i9-t6 -the "two or three superstates foreeast
in James 13urnham's The Managerial Revolution" (CEJL Ill: 374, Deutscher
-
1955: 38n). The next war, he wrote, was due in "aht 10-20 years" in
whih England would he "hlown off the map" (CEJL IV: 441). In any
event the future was the "holiday ca..mp, the doodlehug, and the" secret
poli,ce" (CEJL III: 364), full of "b1oodshed, tyranny and privation"
(CEJL III: 280).
Sa great was his despair that, for a while it seems, he seriously
eame to terms with the post-liberal option Dorothy Hare had rejected
in A Clergyman's Daughtr. Philip Rieff argues that, in the American
writer Henry MiPer, Orwell "discovered his Mt'. Warburton" (Rieff 1954:
234)'" Orwell was attracted ta because, like Dickens, in this
l
capac!ity at least, he was 'not frightned" (CEJL 1: 569). Although
Miller, as an American living in Paris, was a deracinated intellectual,

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Orwell argued that his lack of fear would not permit him to "lock
himself up in a constipating little cage of lies" (CEJL 1: 569) t by
refusing to "notice what is happening," or by "leaping forward
to the ego-projections which (he) mistake(s) for the future"
(CEJL 1: 570). Rather, like Mr. Warburton, chose ancattitude
of the "completest indifferenee, no matter happens" (CEJL 1: 571):
In his essay Inside the Whale, Orwell defended this "declaration of
irresponsibility" (CEJL 1: 570) on the grounds that,
"Progress and reac'tion have both turned
out to be swindles. Seemingly there is
nothing left but quietism - robbing
reality of its terrors by simply sub-
4
mitting to it .. ydurself over to
world-process, stop fighting against
. it or pretending that you control it;
stly accept it, endure it, record it."
"h-
-' (CEJL 1: 577)
o
In the end, however, Orwell was incapable of embracing the post-
liberal position of political quietism. His essay on Henry Miller was
written in 1939, and in August of the sme year, "almost overnight, s
ft seems" (Williams 1971: 63), he discovered,
" that (he) was a patriot at heart,
wouldnot sabotage or aet against, (his)
own'side, would support the war, would
fight in it if -possible." (CEJL I: 590)
/
This affirmation of patriotism allowed Orwell to overcome the despair
over his loss of religious faith. It provided him with

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a foundation upon which ta aet. We have already noted that he saw
democratic Soeialism as an antidote to nationalism (CEJL II: 253).
So too, he saw patriotism as an "innoculation against nationalism"
(CEJL III: 430). It was the strength of his patriotism
that eqabled him to come to terms with the rea1ity of tota1-
, 1
itarian politics without eradicating his belief in democratic Socialism.
Certain1y, against capitalism, which 1ead to IIdole queues, the seramble
for markets, and war," and against collectivism, which lead to "concen-
tration leader worship, and war
ll
(CEJL III: 144), he saw demo-
cratic Soialism as the only alternative.
Indeed, he argued that activity only have meaning for socialists
if "we assume that Socidism be established" (CEJL IV: 423). As he
wrote in 1946,
"Every line o"f serious work f that l have
written since 1936 has been written,
directly or indirectly, against
tarianism and for democratie Socialism
,as l understand it." (CEJL 1: 28)
The problem, as Orwell saw it, was to somehow combine a planned
economy with the freedom of the intellect, lI wtich can only happen if
the concept of right and wrong is restoredl'to politics" (CEJL III: 144).
\
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CONCLUSION: THE HERETIC IN UTOPIA
(
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Orwell' s political philosophy can thus be seen as "a fom of
q
moralized liberalism" (CEJL II: 162), a Tory anarchism combined with the

Ideals of socialism, wherein the left-wing concerns social and
economic responsibility are combined with autonam-OUS democratic rights.
Now the major problem in unravelling this complex bond, it seems to me,
i in locating an' intellectua1 a constant and consistent 1ine of
thought, around which the various political influences in a
balanced forme
, That i!l! de conducteur in political thought is his ,under-
standing of what it meant to be a writer.
In 1936 Orwell wrote of the "last occasion when Punch produced a
l' N
genuinely funny joke.
li
It was a picture of,
" an Intolerable youth telling his aunt
that when he came down from the University
he intended to 'write' . 'And what are you
going.to write about, dear?" his aunt in-
qui res. 'My dear lI.unt', the youth replies
crushingly, 'one doesn't write about any-
thing; one Just writes
t
(CEJL 1: 288)
For Orwell, this attitude summed up the "arts for arts sake" mentality
of the aesthetic writers who had been active from the l890s to the late
19208 (CEJL II: 150). He found the Jake "genuinely funny" because he
.... \
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"
felt 1930 such aesthetic detachment from te wor1d had been

impossible ta sense of responsibility (CEJL Il: 152).
_"
,
Rowever, whilst he welcomed th decay in aesthetic scrupu10usness
(CEJL II: 153), based, as it on comfort and security (CEJL II: 151),
he was concerned that the modern emphasis upon subject matter, combined
" /
with the of power politics, had resulted in the writer becoming
no more than -a propagandist, sacrificing his intel1ectua1 integrity in
the name of politica1 rectitude;
Orwell'addressed this concern ear1y in his writing. Indeed, the
major theme of the' Aspidistra (1936) was the, plight of the
poet struggling to survive in a wor1d dominated by money and lower middle
class respectabllity.
'.
\ .
The protagonist, Gordon Comstock, wants to be a writer. lUs fam:i:ly,
however, is horriJied when'he turns down tlfe opportunity to go to work as
a c1erk;
"There were fearful rows, of course. They
coqld not understand It seemed ta
them a kind of b1asphemy 'to refuse such a
'good' job you\, gQt the chance of it.
Re kept reiterating th6t he didn't want
-that kind of job. Then what did he want?
they aIl demanded. Re wanted to 'write, ,
them sullenly . But how could qe
possibly make a living by 'writing'? they
demanded :again. And of course he couldn't
answer. At the back_of his mind was the
ida that he could somehow live by writing
,poetry; but that was tao absurd even to be
mentioned. But at any rate, he wasn't going
into business, into the money world. He'
would have a job, but not a 'good' job. None
of them had the vaguest ide what he meant."
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(KAF: 52)
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But his mother's illness persuades Comstock to aecept
,
another such job, which he plugs away at for six years. Then. four
months after his mother 1 s death, he " sudden1y walked out of his job"
giving lino firni reasons" (KAF: 54). For aeven "devastating" months,
he set ab6ut trying !'to make a living of sorts by 'writing 'll (KAF: 5.5).
,
During that time, Comstock discovers that,
and that,
"Laek of money means discomfort, means
squalid worries, means shqrtage of to-
baeco, weans ever-presnt eonsciousness
of failure -- above a1l, it means lone-
Hness. Il . 7)
"Life on two quid a week ceases to be a
heroie gesture and dingy,habit."
" (KAF: 63)
Finally, after being turned out of his room spending three days on
the street, he gets a job at tbe New Albion Publicity Company, an ad-
vertis ing fi nn.
Orwell places crOCklS doomed attempts to become a 'writer
'
in
ironie contrast to h s success as a writer of advertising copy, for'which
he showed, "almost fr m the start a remarkable talent" (KAF:' 59). The
, rest of the book traces Comstock's attempts, aIl finally in vain, to
aasert himself as a 'writer' over his bad conscience in succssfully
"wr1ting lies-- to 'tiekle the money out of fools l ,pockets" (KAF: 59).
As Orwell believed adve:rtising to be the "rattling of a fttick inside
';::'
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a swill-bucket" (KAF: 57), he is clearly contrasting the two kinds of
writing in Keep the Aspidistra Flying on the basis of the writer's
sincerity. Thus the writer who sacrifices his conscience for the sake
of money i8 essentially the same as the one who sacrifices his purity v
of purpose for politieal' ends. To use Orwell's own terminology, in
Comstock's case, the writer's "aesthetic enthusiasm" ls sacrificed fOl:
money, and in the case of the propagandist, the writer' s "historieal
impulse" is sacrifieed for a combinat ion of "sheer egoism
l
and "political
purpo8e" (CEJL I: 25).
For Orwell, the prose form of novel, was a product
of rationalism (CEJL IV: 92), a Protestant form'of art, dependent upon
,
(
the mind of the autonomous individual 1: 568). He believed
that the subject matter a writer chose to write about was determined by
the age he llved in (CEJL' I: 25), and thus every novelist had a message
"whether he admted it or not (CEJL 1: 492).' As far as he was
there was no, such thing as non-politieal literature (CEJL IV: 88). Con-
his major conce!n with regard to the modern world was that
\ j"-
the "invasion of .literatu.cl; /by poli tics" (CEJL IV: 404) forced the writer
/ "
l '
into either accepting a label, or into a heretie (CEJL IV:
82).
Orwell defined the heretic Il -polltical, moral, religiqus, or aesthetic.i.
II
as the man who refuses to outrage his conscience (CEJL IV: 82), and 1t ls
this eonnection between the free writer and the conscience that serves to
explain not only his lifelong contempt of a11' orthodoxies (CEJL 428),
(
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but also the special importance he ascribed to writing. For he did
not believe that literature and freedom of thought were entirely
dependent upon each other (CJL IV: 95), but that "humsn beings are"
not autonomous per Il that their depends upon freedom of
speech (CEJL III: 160).
Unlike the middle class whose itresponsibility with
regard the source of their security had allowed them to

, ,
intellectually accept Russian totalitarianism whilst ignoring the reality
of that form of politicai association, Orwell believed that "the priee
of liberty is eternal vigilance" (CEJL III: 294)., And he identi fied
essential qualities that the writer must have if the spirit of lib-
o
eralism was to be kept slive (CEJL IV: 463). First, good couid
only be written by people who were not frightened (CEJL 1: 569) and
second, the writer &hould believe he is writing (CEJL 1:
573)
This 'quality of sincerity, of "being able to care" (CEJL 1: 574,),
was for Orwell as 'close to the truth as a writer could hope' to come. In-
deed, his fear of whethe,r political or religious, was
\
the A priori assumption in such writing that the truth had already been
The .result. he argued, was inevitably bad prose (CEJL II: 163),
'lt'
timidity (CEJL IV: 464), and mental dishonesty (CEIL:II: 265).
IIli:trtre is For Orwell, was no question that doomed if

l
i
freedom of t1,ought perishes" (CEJL IV: 95),
n
1
"To write in vigorous language
",
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one has to think fearlessly, and if one
thinks fearlessly one cannat be,'politi-
cally orfhodox." (CEJL IV: 89)
This attitude toward writinr explains Orwell' capacity to at
once praise the work of certain artists, whilst remaining critical of
their personal morality. For example, he admired Henry Miller for not
being frightened, and praised his book, Tropic of Cancer, as an "impor-
,0
tant book" ,because, although it provided the peculiar relief that comes
not so much from understanding as from being understood (CEJL 1: 543L/
\' .
it demonstrated the "impossibility of any major literature until the
world -ftas shaken itself into its new shape" (CEJL 1: 578). At the sarne
r.;
time, he predicted that Miller wou1d "descend into unintel1igibility,'
or into charlatanism" (CEJL '1: 577). Six years later he characterized
~
Miller' s 1ater writings as hollow, as "banging on a drum" (CEJL IV: 134).
Likewise, although he found Rudyard Kipling to be "morally insensitive
and aesthetically disgusting" (CEJL II:, 214), he wrote that Kipling had
at least had a "sense of responsibility" (CE.JL II: 218). For he argued
that although the "imperialis1n to which: (Kipling) chose ta. rend his
genius" may hav:e been "sentimental, ignorant and dangerous," at least
,
"it was not entirely despicable" (CEJL 1: 183),
"The ,p\cture then called up by the ward
,'empire', was a picture of overworked
officiaIs and frontier skirmishes, not
of ~ o r d Beaverbrook and Australian butter.
It was still possible ta be an imperial-
ist and a gentleman, and of Kipling's
penonal decenc," there can be no doubt."
(CEJL 1: 184) :;'.'
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.,
Ezra Pound was la1so,. for Orwell, "inte11ectua11y and ooorally
disgusting" (CEJL III: 106), as Salvador Dali was a "disgusting human
being
11
(CEJL III: 190). In both cases, however, .Orwell argued t at the
important thing was to realize that "aesthetic integrity and common
peceney were two separate things
l1
(CEJL IV: 552), and that one must be
prepared to admit that Pound a good poet as Dali was a good
that the quality that them bath was rather a " symp_
tom of the wor1d's iUness" (CEE III: 191).
In his essay on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Trave1s, Polities vs.
Literature (1946), Orwell distinguisped between I1 preebling ooerit in
( ,
a writer with whom one deeply disagrees
l1
and "enjoyment of his workll
,
(CEJL 257). He argued that beeause the aesthetic judgement was sub-
,
jective. it cou1d be "upset by politica1 or moral disagreement." And
he accused "eurrent literaryl1crities of being unduly in
this way in constructing aesthetic theories to show that work with which
they disagreed 'politically or mora11y had no Orwell
turned the upside down,
c Q
Il enjoyment can overwhelm disapproval
ev en though one c1early recognizes that
one is en,joying something inimica1.
11
(CEJL IV; 2-58) ,
'1
. J
r
Swift was a particularly example of this, .because his
\ "
warld view being "so peculiar1y unacceptab1e, Il he was IIneverthe,less a9
extremely popular writer" (CEJL IV: 258). For Orwell, Swift'was-a great
\
"
"
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\
,
,
r
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- 82 -
writer because, although his hatred of the human body (CEJL IV': 243)
caused him to endlessly h!3:.rp -on disease, dirt and deiormity (CEJL IV:'
260), at 1east his views were in line with aIl great writers in that
they were,
" compatible with
cal sense, and with
uous thought."
sanity, in the medi-
the power of contin-
(CEJL IV: 261)
Beyond those criteria, a writer must have a talent, which Orwell ,
maintained was another name for convition (CEJL 1: 547; IV: 261); 'cer-
tainly Swift, he concluded, possessed a terrible, if bare1y sane,
intensity of vision (CEJL IV: 261).
The stress he gave to the sincerity of a writer, regrdless of his
1
moral, po1itical or re1igious character, seems at firt to contradict
his crtticism of orthodoxy. However, he that there was a strong
between the writer who is working merely an orthodox
mouthpiece, and the writer
still retains' nough
meaning (CEJL II: 276),
who, ,a1thou
g
h to an orthodox
individuality ta want to express a
"In so far as a' writer is a propagandist,
the most one can ask of him is that he
shatl genuinely believe in what he ia
saying, and that it. sha'll not be some-
thing blazingly silly." (CEJL IV: 260)
)
he maintained, was the distinction between art and
"
" for a creative writer possession of
"
,'i' ;'
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and"

-
- 83 -
,
the 'truth' is less important than emo-
tional sibcerity." (CEJL 1: 57;3)
"Writing of any consequence can on1y be
produced when a .,!IIan the truth of
what he is sayingi 'without that, the
creative impulse is lacking." (CEJL II: 164)
At 'the same time, he arged .that "a writer can only remain honest
if he keeps fre of party labels" (CEJL II: For Orwell, the only,
truth about human beings was sub'jective. He argued that it was a moral
effort to know one's subjective feelings, but that the effort was re-,
quired if one was to hope to b objective (CEJL III: 430).
,<
"It is a question first of a11 of dis _ , v
covering what one really what one's
own feelings.rea11y and then of
making allowance for the inevitable
bias . The emotional urges which are in-
escapable, and are perhaps ueces-
s4ry to 2,0litical action, IIhould be able
to by side with an acceptance
of reality. But this, l repeat, needs a
moral effort." ,( CEJL III: 431)
- ,
"
, 1
/
A example 0 f Orwell putting into practic:k his beHef that
it required a moral effort to struggle against prejudice (CEJL III:
.
430) is demonstrated in his essay Antisemitism in Britain (1945),
" the startiqg point for investi-
gation of ntisemitism shoul not be 'Why
does this irrational belief a peal to
other people?' but 'Why does aptisemitism
1
"
'l
,
(,
, .
(,
84
ppea1 What is there about it
that l feel to be true?l' If one asks
. this question one at least discovers
onels own rationalizations, and it may
be possible ta hnd out what lies be-
neath them.'" (CEJL III: 388)
"
In this sense, Orwell was aware of the between the con-
crete world of things and the of nameless feelings that men have
in common "inside the (CEJL II: 17). As a writer, he was frus-
'. .
trated that latter world was sa difficult ta describe. In 1940,
- '1.
he went sa far as ta write an article proposing, with the helt> of
"gifted but nonnal people" (CEJL II: 23),
,
" ta invent a vocabulary, perhaps
amounting ta severa1 thousands of won1s,
which deal with parts of our ex-
perience now practically to
1 anguage. " CEJL II: 17)
1
He wanted to the between the intellectual the man
on the street" "ta invent new words as deliberatlyas;:We 't7ou1.d :i:'nvl!nt
new parts for a motor-car engine" (CEJL II: 21). -He was concernd that

"words we1:'e not exact enough" (CEJL II: 21), and wanted ,ta 'reduce them
ta- common experience (CEJL II: 24). Essentially, he was dttempting ta
articulate the subjective wortd, an attempt that was linked ta his con-
cern with the political fa1sifying of history and, rea1ity,
"Examine your thought at any casual
moment. The main movement in 1t wU1
be a stream of nameless things - sa
nameless that one hardly knows whether
,

,
Q,
(
(
J
85
l,
to calI them thoughts, or feel-
ings ..
rh a way, this un-verbal part of Y'0ur
mind is ev en the most "part"
for it is the source of deArly aIl'
motives. and dislikes, aIl,
aesthetic feeling, a11 notions of
and wrong (aesthetic and morat consider-
ations are in any case inextricable)
spring from' fee1ings'which are. general1y
admitted ta be subtler than words. When '
you ftre asked 'Why do you do, or not do,
Sa and sa?' you are invariably aware that
yOl.lr Ileal reason will not go into words
even when you have no wish to coneeal it; "
consequent1y you your conduct,
or less dishonestly." (CEJL II: 18)


\ ,
He cocluded, that he coula COme no closer to subjective
"
>
truth than by feeling the truth (CEJL rI: 163), and argued
. ,
"., the more ,one is aware of poliUeal
bias the more one ean be independent of
it, and the more one claims to be im-
partiaL the more one is biased."
r V (CEJL IV: 567)
"
, .
Following his article proposing's new voeabulary, a subject he
o )
never again addressed, Orwell increasingly wrote language and writing.
In English People (1944), he that there were no rules
, ta writing" good English,

there i5 only geneta1: prineiple
that eonerete ward,!, are better than ab-
straet ones and that ths shortest wa7 of
saying anything i'8 alw{iys the best."
(CEJL III: 42)
ln the same essay, he eomplained tnat the decline in the standards
.'
, ,
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t
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t
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(
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...
. (
... 86 -

,
for the use of English language was due to the faot that the
f
people who set the 1ntellectuals - had lost contact with physi-
.
. ..
cal reality (CEJL III: 43). He argued that language be the.
joint 't:reation of poets and manual workers, Il although he onfessed
that it would be difficult in modern England for the two classes ta
..
meet (CEJL IiI: 465.
. ....
...
1
For example, he wrote that feature .of the lan-
guage of orthodoxis like Marxism was the "endless use of ready-made
.
. metapho.rs" (CEJL III: 134). He wrote that when the Da.ily Worhr "urged
the 'British AdmiraIt y to sweep the mad d?BS from the seas,'
IIClearly, capable of using such
. phrases have ceased to that
. words have meanings." (CEJL III: 134t
he accused Professor Harold Laski of,writing
that bore no relation ta the language of everyday use. capable
of speaking or writing," he wrote, 'such phrases as,

1
"1 an economic power

organized which was in its turn related
to certain aristaeratic vestigia still
able to influence profound1y the habits
of our society' have simply,forgotten
what everyda)/', language is lik'e."
(CEJL III: 164) V
For Orwell, ,there was a between totalitarianism and
the corruption of language",., (CEJL IV: 188, 190) 1 that the' decline of
.:
language must ultimate1y have political and economic causes (CEJL IV:
,
.' .
(
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( J
,
/
- 87 -
156); indeed that .'Ione ought) to recognize that the politieal
chaos is connected with the decay of (CEJL IV: 169).
The main prqblem was polities,
ItIn poli tics one ean never do more than
decide which of two evils ts the
and there are SOMe situations from which
one ean only escape by acting like,a
devil or a lunatic. Il (CEJL IV: 469)
AlI po1itiea1 writing, to Orwell, was bad writing,(CEJL IV: 165).
This wlts sa' becausJ! political language was "designed ta make lies sound
truthful, and murders 'respectable" (CEJL IV: 170). He argued that words
, -
changed their meaning in the mouths of (tEJL IV:.449) and
. '\ .
modern polities had reduced human beings to dummies mouthing phrases
(CEJL IV: 165).
v
Consequently, the only was being done by
rebels with private opinions (CEJL IV: 165),
, ,
"It is easy tb pay to the
of the moment, but writing of
can only be pfodueed
when\a man feels the truth of what he is
sayipg: without that the creative impuLse
, " n: 163)
corrupted language, Orwell believed that language
\ )
'was
\
capable of corrupting thought (CEJL IV: 167). For, in the'same
Fay he believed that dependence on the macbine led to a reuced'
state of (CEJL IV: 165; RWP: 173), so'he believed that
the constant unrefleet!ve use of ready-made phrases "anaethetizes a
of onels brain" (CEJL IV: 167). For example, he argued that

1
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the word Faseism was "almost entirel'y meaning1ess" (CEJL III: 138);
or that it had I"no meaning except in sa far as it signt fieS!
....... '
oot desirab1e" (CEJL IV: 162).
In Polities and the English Language (1946) Orwell listed a
(>
"catalogue of swind1es and "'perversi90s" IV: 162) that 'were re-
aponsible for bad writing, being: dying metaphors, false limbs, pre-
tent}ous diction and meaning1ess words .. He defined dying metaphors
as those used "because they save people the ,trouble of inventing phras,es"
for themselves." Examp1es included,' " .. toe the line, .. play thtg
the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mil1; Achilles' hael
,
(and) swan song." (CEJL IV: 159).
Regarding false limbs, Orwell wrote that the "k,eyuote is the
nation of simple verbs, Il
"lnstead of being a simple word, such as
stop, spoil, kill, a verb
becomes a phrase, made up of a no un or
adjective tacked on ta some general-.
verb such as prove, i2!m,
]!!y, render. In addition, the
\ .
voiee is whereve'r possible used in pref-
erence to the active,. and noun construc-
tions are used instea'd 'of gerunds."
(CEJL IV: 160)
'b

P}etentfous occurs, he wrote, when words like Il ph enomenon,
element, individusl (as noun), objective, catagorical . are used to
dress up simple statements and 'give an air of scientiflc impartiality
o
to' biased statements" (CEJL IV: 160). Orwell. eVr the patriot, was
a
(
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(
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(
1
89
" ,
partieu-larly ineensed that bad wri ters"
cism,
.

" . (flnd espeeial1y scienti fic, poli t ieal
and,' sociologiea1 writers, ar..e near1y al-
.ways haunted by the notion that Latin
or Greek words are grander than Saxon
and unneeessary words like expedite,
ameliorate, prediet, extraneous, deracinated;
and hundreds of
/bthers eonstant1y gain graund from their
, Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers." (CEJL IV: 161)
j Jf
In ceftain kinds of writing, art and literary criti-
,,' ,
is normal to come across long Oniell wrote that "it
fJJ>1 r
.
'.
, .
- 'Which ate almost completely 1acking in meaning." Such usual1y
. "
..
included words like, " rOlantie, 2lastic, values, ... natural."
He argued that this was evident in politieal'
/
1/
writing, where the words, "democraey, ,socialism, freedom, patriotic,
,
realistic, justice, have each. of them d.i.fferent' meanings whieh eannot

.he reconciled with one another" (CEJL IV: 162). For examp1e,
,Ic'
"In the case of a word like democracy,
not only ls there no agreed definition,
c but the attempt to make one is resisted
from a11 sides. It i8 a1most universally fi
felt that when we calI a country democratic
we are praising consequently the de-
fenders of every kind of regime claim that
i,t is a democracy; ... " o(CEJL IV: 162)
Ror Orwell, the problem with modern prose was that it tended away
from concreteneas (CEJL IV: 163). onsequent1Y, he that."to
think elearly (would be) the first step towards political regeneration"

9

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o
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t
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,-
90
, ,
(CEJL IV: 157). He demanded writers to rather than to ac-
.
cept phrases (CEJL IV: 169), and. to simp1ify their1anguage (CEJL
.
IV: 170). In generai-, the scrupulous writer 'should ask himself .four
every he writes a sentence,
, ...........
"What am 1 to say? . What words
will express What image or idiom
will make it c1earer?o Is this image
fresh enough ta ha,ve an effect?"
(9EJL' IV: 165)
' 1
In an ear1ier essay, Propaganda and Demotic ppeech (1944), he had
offered a simpler alternative consisting or two questions: "Could 1
,
.imp1ify this? C'ould 1 make it more like speech?" (CEJL III: 165).
. '
\
As for the role of the writer, just 'as Orwell claimed the
..
priee of libertf was eternal vigilance (CEJL III: 294), so he claimed
. ,
,- that the priee. of that vigilance was unpopularity. He wrote, for ex-
ample, of the importance 'to the socialist movement of "lonely individuals

.
willing to face (CEJL III: 443). For he argued that it
...
a di'lemma tha\ "society cannot be'" arranged for the benefit of ar-
tists," but"lmat at the jam time, ."without artists civilitation per_ '
ishes" (CEJL III: 266). Thus, ta be a writer, he Iater wrote,
1 - _ '
't!l like a sparrow, "tolerated, not encouraged" (CEJL IV: 238). As far
as he could judge, there couid be no resolution lfetween a vital society's
1
\ 1
need for sincere art, and the tension between sincerity and the demanda
for political conformity.
Orwell claimed that he a1ways nad had a "power of facing unpleasant
truths" (CEJL I: 23). In the modern he feIt that his role as a
. .
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writer was ta expose the he felt w,ere being made on "the

idea of intellectual liberty," theoretic"ally by the apolog.ists of
\,
,
and practically by monopoly 'and bureaucracy (CEJL
""
IV: 82). Any attack on intellectual liberty, he argued, threatens
\ .. 1 '
ever1 deprtment of thought (CEJL IV: 94) . -
He defined freedom of intellect as being abls to "report what
... -
one has seeIJ' heard and fe1t" (CEJL IV: 84). This was, for h'm, the
closest writer could come ta sincerity, for i8 right only
,
when fear or wish dd not (CEJL IV: Consequently, h
,
argued 'that it was the' dut y of $ri ters to between literary
and po1itical loyalties (CEJL 468). Writers should thus never
write.' Rather, they should wri te about
- a
politics as an "unwelcome 'guerilla 'on the flank of a regular armyll
.. '

(CEJL IV: 469). For to attempt ta escape fram the politieal
of the ag -- like Henry Miller
'\
Orwell felt was "impossible and un-
,
desirable," But ta 'Iyield subjectively, not merely ta' a part-y. machine,
.
even ta a id,ealogy," hd ta the destruction of a writer
IV: 469).
In his essay Why l Write. (1946), Orwell outlined four "great' motives
... '
for writing" being "8heer egoism;" "Aesthetic enthusiasm," "Historiea1
'l\
impulse."--'and purpose" ECE.TI.. 1: 25). He wrote that he was
not by nature a pol:ical writer (CEJL 1: 26), but that the politcal
,
'\
realities of the age had "forced h.im. into becoming'8 sort of pamphleteer""
(CEJL 1: 26), where "the pamphlet ought ta be the li terary form of an
,
./
,
1
l,
1
-,'
"for plugging holes in histot"y the pamph-
let is the ideal form, -and'the essence
of pamphleteering is to have some-thing >
you want to ta as mdny people as
possible- " (CEJL 11: 326)
,
, ,
His in ws thu$ to makfl people conscious (CEJL IV: 312),
to "(bring) home to the mass of the people what kind of wodd' they
are living in" (CEJL '1: 586),
"My sta:rting point' 18 al.ways a feeling
of partisanship, a sense of injustice
1 write (a because there is some
lie that 1 want ia expose, sorne fact to
which 1 want ta draw attention, and my
initial concera is to get a hearing."
(CEJL 1: 28)
<!?' '
It was in thi$ sense that he,argued that the war was primatily
about the question of freedom of intellect (CEJL IIi: )32), and the "
..
English language a "weapon of (that) war. ". /or he wrote th:at it WaS v
'j
a t'funnel for ideas deadly to the Fascist view of life" (CEJL II: 254).
This understanding helps explain Orwell's he pid not
"think it matters killing people ao long aS you do not hate them"
(CEJL'III: 241).
"By shooting at your enemy' you are not
... ij
in'the deepest senseowronging him. But
by hating him, by inventing lies about
him and bringing children up ta be1ieve
\
them, by c1amouring for unjust peace
terms which make further wars inevitab1e,
1
o
..
)
....
/
(
...
(
..
D -
L
93 -
you are striking not at one
generation
n
but at 'humanity .
. ", '('CEJL III: 233)
Ever sinc 1936 Orwell had .. wanted to "make polical'
.
in ta 'an art" (CEJL 1: 28). He -feit he had achievE!d this ambition'
il. '( '"
with Animal Farm.(Empson 1971: 100; Hopkinson 1952: 469; Symons 1963: .

.
,
204): But he never allowed "aesthetic enthusiasm" to ov.ershadow his
u
..
committment to "political purpose,"
Il 1Q;,king back through-.my work', l see
that it is invariably when l lacked a
political purpose that l wrote lifeless,
'books and was befrayed into purple -pas-
sagQs, sentences without meaning, deco-
rat ive adjectives humbug generally."
(CEJL 1: 30)
For where literature and politics cross,
,
its greatest the (CEJL IV: 86). The
issue was the 'truth, and although he argued that
t
,in England the "im-
Mediate enemies of and hence freedom of thought," were
Il
the "press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrate, Il
" the weakening of the desire for'
liberty among the intellectua1s them-
selves is the most serious symptom of
'aIl. " (CEJL IV: 87)
The extent to which felt .that Many of the intellectuals'
had a propensity to rationali their absolution of political respon- .
sibility is clearly revealed in an incident in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
\
\
"
.1,
{
(
..
The protagonist, 'Winston Smith, and itis gir1friend Julia, ar1;.ange
a c1a.ndestine meeting witt: "a high-ranking member of the
ruling Party, but whom they suspect to he an undercover member
""
of the subversive Brotherhood.
receives 'them in his house, and assures them that the
..

Brotherhood exists without ever actually dec1aring that he is a mem-
q ,
ber. Howevel", he behavs exact1y as though he was a member, and
\
begins' asking them questions in Lapparent effort to test their
, .
potential 10yalty to Brotherhood.
'.
"You are colunftted to give ?,our lives?" e
0
1
Brien asks. Smith replies: "Yes."
"You are prepared to commit murder?"
"Yes."
,
(1984: 140) ,
.,
&/-.
ready acceptance to commit murder is immediately remlnis-
. .
cent of Orwell's contempt of those intellectuals who, during the Span-
A -
ish War, c,ould contemp1ate "necessary murders" (CEJL I: 566).
'After some more O'Brien asks:

,
"If, for examp1e, it wou1d Somehow serve
our interests to throw sulphuric acid in
a child' s face -- are' you prepared to do
that?"
Without 'hesitation, replies:
"Yes." ,(1984: .140)
, ,
1

,
, .
J
1
,JI
r
"
, ..
?
1
- 95
thus shifts the fQcus of from the polit-
i4al realm, to 0}be, the that .. a "totalitarian
state i8 in a CEJL IN: 86)" the
..
to the 8ymbolic torturing of to acnieve a 'political end
echoes the posd by Dostoyevsky in The Brother Karamazov,
'\
',/
,"4
L,
"Imagine that you are creating a fabric
of human destiny with the object of'
.

men,bappy. ift the end, ,giving

peaee aqd rest at last. that '
ou are doiqB this but that itris essen-
ial and to torture to' aeatl} 11
n1y one t,iny creature .. in order to'. "'
its unavenged
Would ytu consent be the architect"on
those c.nditions?", (D'bstoyevsky 1957: 226)
o
, ' , , b
'tt is, in this sense that 0rwell was of the
w
Left" (Crick 1980: 245). For although he, wa.s incapable of coming to
.., r;
t (. J
trms with eCQnomic and social injustice, he was a political
and fundamenta1ly of theoretical to the
,
problems of political association.
\..
6 ,
concept of democratic Socialism (CEJL 1: 28), a simple
but belief in liberty and justice, was not SQ much a pro gram
y

0'
..
. ,
. ,
1. for political action as i t was a ,standard frb.m which -to judge "P9,lit!Fa1
, .r- " 'l _,
action. He could thus never be comfortab1e with the practical demands
" .
of po1itical action. Against what he perceived<to be the rising tide
. '
','
of he argued for the indiVidual' s :right to be .
\
J
responsible for his or her t1tonomy. -', "

---- -: :"
this context, carried on t.he t'9th cntury liberal tradition
o
Stuart Mill whoae'seminal statement at lirat to exactly
. '
,

.
"
..
",
l,
i
1
1
1
!
t
t
!
\.
(
()
- 96 -
lect Orwell's thinking,
"If aU\1 mankind minus one we,re of one
opinion, mankind would be no more justi-
fied in silencing that one person'than
he," ff he had the power, would be justi-
fied it.. silencing mank:L.nd." (Mill 1976:
\
, '
" .
the central to Mill's argument Was his failure,
in determining,
"1
" the nature and the l imi ts 0 f the
power which can be legitimately
by society ovr the individua1."
..
JI ' '
to between "moral reprobation" and " physical
punishment" as proper means' of social retribution. Specifically, with
regard to moral reprobation, although Mill recognized that,
'il'
"AU ailenc;i.ng of dscussion is an assump-
tion of infallibility." (Mill 1976: "7)
he failed to address 'the problem that,
li ... there needs protection ... a.inst the
tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling."
(Mill 1976: 63)
III
Orwell this very tyranny, as the central aspect of total-
it'arian Mill' s concern 'W'as with the freedom Gf the individual '
from external corcion; Orwell's concern was with the freedom ofJthe
individual from'the internaI coercion of total i tari an persuasion.
.
Thus, while Mill noted that "there needs protection against the
"-
\
\t
.. , ...
---... ,. _ ....... .. * . - - -- <, ,.'._u"
, )
"
'"
(
, .
\
97
4
tyranny of majority opinion," fo-/OrweU,
"In a society where there is no 1aw,

in theory no compulsion, the only

arbiter of behaviour is public opinion."
.' -. (-CEJL IV: 252)
And the danger of this kind of political association was that,
I1When human bings are governed by 'thou
shalt not,' the individual can practise
a certan amaunt af eccentricity: when
they are supposedly governed by 'love'
or 'reason, "he is under continuous pres-
sure te make him behave and think in ex-
actly the same way as everyone e1se.1\
(CEJL IV: 252)
For Orwell, therefore, as for Hapnah' Arendt, the tyranny of
,totalitarian politics was not just the, frcing of the individual to
.. (7
, aet in;' certain1way'contrary ta his character, but the forcing of the
\ -
individua1 to think in a certain that was prescribed by the state.
To Orwell, the implication of this was clear,
"For if you have embraced a cl'eed which
appears to be free from the ordinary
of pQLitics - a creed from
.. which you yourself cannot expect to draw
any material advantage - that
proves you are.in the right. And
the more you are' in the right, 'the more
naturai that everyone else should be
bullied into thinking 1ikewise." (C,EJL IV:. 347)
As Arendt wrote in The Origins ofOTotalitarianism,
"total terraI' (" .. the essence of total-
"
..
- - f
1
l
,u
(
98 -
, ,
.. .

.. '\ ..
itarian domination." (Arendt 1951: .464,
substitutes for the boundaries and channels
of communication between individua1 men
a band of iron which holds them so tight1y
together that it is as though" their p1u- , \
ra1ity had disappeared into One Man of
gigantic dimensions." (Arendt 1951: 465)
......
Consequent1y, while it might.have been against Mill
s,tood for to'define the 'practica1' "limit ta the 1egitimate inter-
ference of collective opinion with individua1 independence" (MilL 1976:
,
63), he could not have foreseen the capacity of 20th century totali-
tarian states to objective truth through Certainly,
it is likely that he wou1d have treated Orwell' s Btatement that "the

,very concept of objective truth"is fading out of the wor1d" (CEJL II:
295i as meaning1ess.
Therefore, Orwel1's statement in defense of individua1 liberty
has a slight1y different texture to Mill's in its implication that
heresy is an integral right in a fre society,
"
"If liberty means anything at a11 it
the right to tell people what they do not
,want to hear." (Orwell 1972: 1039)
To neither 19th century 1ibera1ism nor to socia1ism, therefore,
Orwell give his complete a1legiance. The former, he be1ieved,
1ed to economic deprivation for the majo,rity, and he considered the
latter marred by the power hunger of most socia1ists. He c1ung to his
, )
, ,
belief in democratic Socialism, and, after 1939, to a fierce patriotism
for which served to reso1ve his anarchistic be1ief in the
'.
"
-,
(
- 99 -
natural: decency of all' men with his distrust of power For
- the future, he despaired: for he was armed with neither the
hope nor the believer's
His despair a mourning for the Judeo-Christian tradition
whose knelt he as the belief in personal immottality faded.
As Orwell saw it, th,e virtue of decency 1ay in the subordination of
')
priVijte interest to the public
..
the war, bath Orwell and
,
,his wife'mae a supporting the war effort by


, using. les,s food than they were entitled to.) . Consequently, ,his despair
.
','
,was founded on.,the 'conviction that the central problem with the modern

world was individua1 pride, or the unfettered will ta power with the
.
perception as the ultimate good, failure as the ultimate
evil. In the final analysis, Orwell was wrestling with the central
qestion t'o ,have emerged out' of the tdilitarian experiences of Nazism
.
and Stalin.ism: what is the me.finin'g' of good and evil in a post-religious
world when the state condones barbarism in the name of virtue?
Orwel1's politicai philosophy can thus be as a tension
10
his principle9, belief in and his emotional belief in liberty.
In this sense, he cannat be given a simple polit!cal label. He was a
,
liberal because he believed in freedom for the He was a
r:t
socialist because he believed that justice was incompatible with,l9th
century liberalism. He was an anarchist because he that'people
were innately decent. He was a'democrat he distrusted any
notion of an,ascrlptive right to and because he distrusted the
..
'(
Il
- 100 -
...
\.
. .
corruptive nature power .. He was a because he re-
pw
spected histo'ry. And he was finally a, pat,riot because, to
come to terms' with the inevitable tension qetween lierty and justice,
his hope turned into sentiment.
, . .
o J
he was always a heretic because he was none af"he and
,ft thereby avoided "being blinkered hy any one poli tical line.
e
,He can, in this sepse, be seen as an angry prophet crying in the moral,
.
wilderness that followed the fragmentation al the liberal-Christian
cosmology.
Orwell' s contribut1n to 20th, century palitical thought:' therefore,
,
lies ultimately in his moral cqurage. His analysis af 'totalitarianism
-has prov.ided us with a common language,. with which ta put it into
spective. Words he i.nvented, such as "Newspeak," "Daublethink" and
"Big Brather" are now part Di, the English lan'guage. And the year' 1984
\
is a landmark in Western cultural cansciousness.
This, it, ta me, is ,his th political context he
gave ta hi, "passionate care for the purity and lucidy", (Lehmann f98l:
62) of the English language. Quite simply, he saw strang and clear
prose - his window pane (CEJL 1: 30) 'into the free indi,vidual conscience;
or "crystal spirit" (CEJL II: 306) - as the last defence against the
modern tyranny of majority opinion totalitarianism.
1
"
.......
(
r
B+BLIOGRAPHY
D
.,
..
("
"
/
1
'9
, "
J
1
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.J .

(
(
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i
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1
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f


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f
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.,
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..
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. "
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,'7 '
1
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,
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------
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