Reviews of New Orwell Publications

• Harvill Secker, George Orwell: A Life in Letters, reviewed by Dominic Cavendish
• John Rodden: Every Intellectual’s Big Brother, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2006; pp. xiii+263. Peter Davison’s review.
• David Lebedoff, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. reviewed by Douglas Kerr
• The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell John Rodden, reviewed by Peter Davison
• The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell by Loraine Saunders, reviewed by John Rodden and Paul Anderson

Dominic Cavendish reviews Orwell: A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison

George Orwell: A Life in Letters, Harvill Secker, rrp £20

I didn’t expect to well up with tears reading Orwell: A Life in Letters – but several times, against the grain of my own nature, and against the grain of Peter Davison’s richly absorbing selection of Orwell-generated and Orwell-related correspondence, which satiates more generally with fact than feeling, I did so.

The first moment came early on, catching me – as I imagine it may do many readers – by surprise. Prof Davison, whose landmark contributions to Orwell studies need little introduction, albeit more ongoing praise, has arranged the material so that, four pages into the opening selection (From Pupil To Teacher To Author: 1911-1913), he jumps forward in time to 1972, and a letter written by Jacintha Buddicom to a relative. Orwell’s early youth, which has been rushed over with a startling lack of scholarly ceremony, recedes into the distant past.

Jacintha, his one-time close childhood friend, writes: “After the publication last year of The World of George Orwell for which I wrote the opening essay, I am now writing a short monograph of my own on the subject (they edited out most of the important bits) in the hope of ridding myself of a lifetime of ghosts and regrets at turning away the only man who ever really appealed on all levels.”

What follows is so emotionally unsparing, though sparingly written, that to read it feels like eavesdropping on the closest, most quietly whispered confidence. Twenty-two years after Orwell’s death, just before which (as this collection will reveal) the pair corresponded in a belated burst of half-reconciliation, Jacintha mourns the fact that she wasn’t ready to marry Eric when he proposed upon his return from Burma – at a time when their growing intimacy had been shattered by a premature attempt on his part to push her for a full physical relationship.

Bitterness, as well as regret, is recorded here, the bitterness fermented by what she saw as the vengeful portrait of her (as Julia) in Nineteen Eighty-Four. She felt “destroyed” by his public betrayal, and refers to the dell full of bluebells where Julia and Winston meet. “We always wandered off to our special place when we were at Ticklerton which was full of bluebells. They die so quickly if you pick them so we never did but lay amongst them and adored their heavy pungent scent.”.

It’s the detail of that last line that I find so poignant. In that remembered shared decision not to pick the bluebells but to lie among them, savouring their smell, is captured all the aromatic sweetness of blossoming youth, its tenderness, delicacy, sensitivity and still-lingering innocence. Jacintha here recalls the experience so keenly that it lives on in her, while becoming emblematic of the way Orwell, as she saw it, trampled on her feelings, or plucked their experiences apart. The reader gets a swift, almost unbearable glimpse of paradise lost.

Already the inclusion of this letter has caused excitement among those far more acquainted than I am with what is known and unknown about Orwell’s life and work – giving evidence, as it does, as to the strength of feeling he had for Jacintha. My own fascination is the more basic one that lies with Prof Davison’s decision to set down a decent, but by no means exhaustive, selection of letters side by side – allowing us to form our own judgements about what we read. The annotations are meticulous in points of contextual and biographical information, but there’s no attempt to supply a running commentary about Orwell’s interior life, or for that matter his development as a writer. We must piece together our own assessment based primarily on “externals” – passing remarks, references to matters-at-hand, the arduous churn of toil and intention.

If a newcomer to Orwell’s correspondence is initially disappointed that here are to be found few notable expatiations on politics and art – the kind of sustained thinking aloud that so brilliantly animates the essays – the cumulative effect of reading such disparate day-to-day material, which ranges across most of the distinct chapters of his life – Wigan, Spain, Morocco, wartime London, Jura – delivers its own swathe of insights. Orwell wasn’t writing for a wider public here so, for all the now-dated formality of his letters, the tone feels relatively unguarded. BBC-baiters will relish his insider’s assessment of the corporation as “mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum”. And the longer you look, the more you notice. As with Jacintha’s passing evocation of a lost world, much is said in the casual aside. Orwell’s life was famously crowded with adventurous incident – but it’s the incidental detail that gives “A Life in Letters” its identity and value.

There are more than a few delightful “who knew?” moments. Maintaining a fastidious and dry – at times drily funny – style throughout his letter-writing career, Orwell makes for a fine chronicler of his own otherworldly foibles while imbuing his reports with a certain kind of boyish obliviousness. There’s a sublime confirmation of his Stan Laurel tendencies in his description, to Brenda Salkeld in 1934, of nearly dying of cold “the other day when bathing, because I had walked out to Easton Broad not intending to bathe, & then the water looked so nice that I took off my clothes & went in, & then about 50 people came up & rooted themselves to the spot. I wouldn’t have minded that, but among them was a coastguard who could have had me up for bathing naked, so I had to swim up and down for the best part of half an hour, pretending to like it.”

Was there a strong romantic downside to that off-hand, aloof, gauche manner? In endeavouring to secure a female companion in the wake of his wife Eileen’s death, he combines a cool matter-of-factness with an ardency of need that makes his desperation, loneliness and confusion all the more involuntarily pronounced.

One smiles, but also slightly shudders, to realise that Orwell was writing a letter – and attending to business – on his wedding day in June 1936 (“Curiously enough I am getting married this very morning – in fact I am writing this with one eye on the clock & the other on the Prayer book”, he informs Denys King-Farlow). And one notes, thanks to the inclusion of chatty letters from Eileen to various parties, that their early days of wedlock were far from bliss-filled thanks to her husband’s workaholic tendencies (“I cried all the time.. Partly because Eric had decided that he mustn’t let his work be interrupted & complained bitterly when we’d been married a week that he’d only done two good days’ work out of seven.”) Was Spain the making of their marriage? Davison allows us to conclude as much. “You really are a wonderful wife,” Orwell gaily notes in a grateful missive in April 1937 – as if conscious of that fact for the first time.

Eileen comes across as never less than delightful. If Orwell was, as we glean him to be here, determined, diffident, at times vexingly difficult, one admires her indulgence of his ingrained eccentricities and writerly fixations. I loved the affectionate vignette of their rough crossing from Gibraltar to Tangier, when Orwell walked around “the boat with a seraphic smile watching people being sick and insisted on my going into the Ladies cabin to report on the disasters there” (p117). And how about the nugget of marital comedy in Morocco contained in the wincing allusion to “a copper tray four feet across” which “will dominate us for the rest of our lives” (Marjorie Dakin later flashes back a conspiratorial wink of sympathy: “My heart goes out to you over the four-foot tray”)?

I’ve barely scratched the surface of what lies in this volume for the attentive reader. In broad terms this collection will help counter the received idea of Orwell as a lone figure. He was far more single-minded about keeping the hand-to-mouth journalism going, and securing his literary ambitions, than some might allow, but there’s little sense of sour anti-sociability amid all the strenuous devotion. This was a life lived in connection with many other people (93 names appear in the biographical guide to correspondents and relations). And it does something, to cite George Bowling in Coming Up For Air, “to your heart and guts” when you see, unfolding in real-time, those connections being broken.

The inconclusive abruptness of the last words written by Eileen from her Newcastle on Tyne hospital bed, just before she died under anaesthetic, leaving Orwell biting back the grief and holding their newly adopted baby Richard, are once again emotionally searing in their unplanned, spontaneous succinctness: “This is a nice room – ground floor so one can see the garden. Not much in it except daffodils & I think arabis but a nice little lawn. My bed isn’t next the window but it faces the right way. I also see the fire & the clock.” And you try to picture it for yourself, the flowers, the fire and the clock – as he must have done.

Dominic Cavendish

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John Rodden: Every Intellectual’s Big Brother, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2006; pp. xiii+263. Peter Davison’s review.

Towards the end of his rightly acclaimed study, The Politics of Literary Reputation ((1989), Professor Rodden wrote that one did not expect ‘the Orwell centennial in 2003 to be more than an academic affair’ (p. 403). After the furore occasioned by 1984/Nineteen Eighty-Four that seemed likely. The work I had been involved in was planned to be published in 1984, but, as has been often told since, disasters in the publishing world meant that only the Facsimile of the manuscript of Orwell’s last book appeared in that year and then only at its very end. But Orwell did not fade away, especially in the public consciousness. I shall hastily skip over the television programme, Big Brother, which I have to confess never having been able to drag myself to watch. To select just a few of the more obvious non-academic productions on the road to 2003, one might select a modernized version of Down and Out by Nick Danziger in 1993; Ken Loach’s film, Land and Freedom: The Revolution Betrayed (1995), which had clear Orwell undertones; a disappointing film adaptation of Keep the Aspidistra Flying directed by Robert Bierman (1997), described by my wife as ‘No more than “R” for Romance’; Simon Schama’s final section of Volume 3 of his History of Britain: The Fate of Empire which concentrated on Sir Winston Churchill and Orwell (broadcast on 18 June 2002 and published later that year); in 2003 there was the excellent television production directed by Chris Durlacher, George Orwell: A Life in Pictures (14 June 2003) with Chris Langham as Orwell – a production that won in the following year the Grierson Award for Best Documentary and the International Emmy for Best Arts Production; on 17 July 2003, D.J. Taylor devoted a television South Bank Show to Orwell; and a cast of what was supposed to be Room 101 was created by Rachel Whiteread which was displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in that year. (It was, alas, the wrong room, a fact which made no impression on the Museum’s Director, so it was very far from ‘academic’.) And 2003 was not the end of the matter. In 2004 there was a charming and informative trail through contemporary Burma by Emma Larkin, Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, and, most surprising in the following year, Lorin Maazel’s opera, 1984, with libretto by J. D. McClatchy and Thomas Meehan, given in May at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is but a selection and it is apparent that there seems to be no stopping even to the non-academic. As I write, in August 2008, a dramatisation of Coming Up for Air as a dramatic monologue by the Daily Telegraph’s drama critic, Dominic Cavendish is being performed with considerable success by Hal Cruttenden, at the Assembly Supper Room at the Edinburgh Festival.

Four biographies appeared in 2000 and 2003. The first, Jeffrey Meyers’s Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation, was, as Professor Meyers stated, ‘the first biography of Orwell to make use of the rich literary and documentary material’ in the Complete Works of George Orwell. In 2003, D. J. Taylor’s Orwell: The Life and Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell were published and they were skilfully analysed by Stefan Collini in ‘Plain Speaking: The Lives of George Orwell’ (Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics, OUP, 2008, pp. 72-83). Also in 2003, Scott Lucas’s less than adulatory Orwell appeared.

What of the strictly academic? My own involvement was in a very small-scale, low-key summer school held at Wedgwood Memorial College, Barlaston, Staffordshire, organised by Dr Robert Fyson. This had several delights including, on Orwell’s Centenary Day, a walk retracing Orwell’s footsteps by two dozen of us along the shore of Lake Rudyard (after which Kipling was named) with a visit to Cliffe Park Hall which overlooks the Lake. It is now a private home, but when Orwell made his journey to Wigan it was a bleak hostel where, all alone, he spent the bitterly cold night of 3 February 1936. It was, he recorded in his diary, ‘A most peculiar place . . . A great barrack of a house . . . Miles of echoing stone passages’ with only candles for lighting and a smoky little oilstove on which to cook (Complete Works, X, p. 420). I had the honour and pleasure of dedicating a tree of my choice that morning to Orwell’s memory in the College’s fine arboretum. Naturally I chose a walnut tree. It was a most enjoyable summer school but it must pale into academic insignificance when contrasted with the three-day centenary retrospective entitled ‘George Orwell: An Exploration of His World and Legacy’ co-chaired by John Rodden and Thomas Cushman. This was an international event, hosted by Wellesley College near Boston, and there were almost three hundred participants. It put into the shade our couple of dozen at Barlaston! Professor Rodden’s new study does, in the main, three things: it takes forward the study he initiated in 1989; it gives a valuable account of the disparate groups who have been associated with Orwell and his work, especially in the United Kingdom and the USA, since the 1930s; it offers a series of stimulating interviews and discussions with some of the leading participants of the Conference at Wellesley, with a discrete section devoted to an interview with Professor Daphne Patai (pp.156-66, and see the two notes on p. 237); and concludes with Professor Rodden’s ‘Unlessons from My Intellectual Big Brother’ (pp. 167-179), and his Epilogue which reiterates the ‘invaluable lessons that must be repeatedly discovered, honored, and learned anew’ from this ‘intellectual big brother’ (p. 191). There are extensive notes and those repay careful scrutiny: they are informative and stimulating.

In a curious way, Orwell, although easily understood by the general reader, seems to present academics with problems that are at odds with his apparent straightforwardness. I have in mind not so much the severe reservations of Professor Daphne Patai and feminist critics, or the strictures of Scott Lucas (of which something briefly below), but the general run of academe. It is remarkable that the University where the major Archive of Orwell’s work is held has no – and has had no – Orwell specialist since the foundation of the Archive in 1961. He is simply not recognised and does not feature on its syllabuses. Is he just too transparent for them? Having probably read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four at school, and not found them challenging enough, that seems in academe to be the end of the story. Yet when teaching undergraduates and supervising postgraduates I have found Orwell excites them, though sometimes liable to misunderstanding. There are so many texts that lead to fruitful discussions from the seemingly transparent ‘The Sporting Spirit’, to ‘Some Notes on the Common Toad’, to the background to Homage to Catalonia; from the ‘Benefit of Clergy’ to (pace Scott Lucas) Orwell’s relationship with the IRD. I found rather to my surprise that undergraduates took a far deeper interest in The Road to Wigan Pier than I had expected, especially when coupled with seeing such documentaries as Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Sir Arthur Elton, 1935) and Enough to Eat? (Edgar Anstey, 1936) (both films, at first sight ironically, sponsored by the Gas, Light & Coke Company).

Part One of this study is divided into five chapters which analyse Orwell in relationship to various groupings in England and the USA. The first chapter discusses Orwell and the London Left of the thirties and forties summarising him in derisive words as ‘a disgruntled left-wing journalist’; ‘He’s not one of us’ (p. 10), ‘us’ being especially W.H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender. What differentiated Orwell was that he was poorer, slightly older than the decade’s radicals, and crucially, Blair’s service in the Burma police. This divided him ‘permanently and irrevocably from his coevals, even after his return home’ (pp. 18-19). In one of very many excellent notes – notes worth reading in their own right – he quotes from Francis Hope writing in the New Statesman in 1969 (with here a rather apt misprint for ‘Catalonia’): ‘He always overgeneralized from his own experience: just because he went to Lancashire or to Catatonia (sic), exposed himself to something he did not enjoy, and then wrote it up very well, he was taken as The Authority on a much wider problem – the Communists and the Spanish Civil War as a whole, or British working class life in general’. And then the killer comment: ‘But at least he went there’ (p. 203, n. 44). Rodden again, ‘Orwell’s independent stance toward the Left intelligentsia of his generation furnishes one man’s answer by word and deed to a normative issue in the sociology of intellectuals’ (p. 27).

Chapter two discusses Orwell and the Movement writers of the 1950s and centres on John Wain’s reception history of Orwell. The politics of the Movement ‘was an antipolitics, and Orwell served as a sort of negative political model’ (p. 39). By the end of the sixties, Rodden records Kingsley Amis, who having broken with the Left became, with Wain, one of the few British intellectuals who supported the Americans in Vietnam, pondering on where Orwell would have stood on Vietnam. Would he have supported ‘the fight against Communist aggression. . . . I don’t know whether he would have had the courage’ (pp. 45-6). Then, ‘as Wain moved to the right, he began comparing Orwell’s stance with the Toryism of Samuel Johnson, ‘recasting Orwell in his own image through Johnson’s. In such ways do readers struggle to resolve problems of identity and authors acquire reputations’ (p. 52), not, perhaps, reputations directly of their own making.

It is hardly surprising that, for an English reader, even with a modest knowledge of American cultural life, and in particular of such journals as Partisan Review, politics, Dissent, Nation, and New Republic, chapters three, four, and five are particularly informative. The cast of characters is stimulating, whether one agrees with the individuals or not, especially Irving Howe, Russell Kirk, and Christopher Hitchens. Amongst much I learned was the need to read Howe’s study, World of Our Fathers, which, I am ashamed to say, I did not know. The political shifts in attitudes are excellently told. I was particularly struck with the way Rodden shows Irving Howe’s rejection of ‘the view of most liberals that Orwell should be seen as a “good” man, a “conscience,” or a “saint.” Such characterizations, Howe thought, softened or spiritualized Orwell’s angry radicalism’ (p. 63). (There is a very interesting footnote on Howe’s regard for Ignazio Silone and the later revelations about Silone that came to light in the 1990s: p. 215, n. 36.)

Chapter Four discusses Orwell and the American Cultural Conservatives, in particular the work and responses of Russell Kirk. In the light of my contribution to the Orwell Forum on the sources of Orwell’s ethical values it interested me that to Kirk Orwell was ‘an atheistic socialist who despaired about socialism yet firmly rejected religious belief and faith in the afterlife’ (p. 75). With Chapter Five we are brought up to date. This concentrates on the reception history of Orwell by Nation, from the rejection of Orwell by Alexander Cockburn to the lavish response of Christopher Hitchens. (The notes often give useful key references to their debates and that of others, see, for example, p. 224-5, note 14.) It was in Nation on 27 December 1952 that Herbert Matthews reviewed Homage to Catalonia – welcoming it with two cheers – in which he quoted at length from a letter Matthews had solicited from Juan Negrín, prime minister of the Spanish Republic, 1937-39. This concluded with Negrín’s assessment that Orwell had had a ‘distorted image . . . of the happenings of 1937 in Barcelona’. What I had not realised (because I had read the review in Jeffrey Meyers’s Critical Heritage volume) was that the title Matthews gave his review – and Rodden is surely correct in suggesting it was ironic: ‘Homage to Orwell’. Rodden gives Christopher Hitchens’s 2002 study of Orwell considerable attention. The book has different titles in the US and the UK (US: Why Orwell Matters; UK: Orwell’s Victory; see p. 93). In the text and the notes the two titles seem to be given indiscriminately and because the paginations must be very different (thus, note 83 refers to p. 216 of Why Orwell Matters but Orwell’s Victory has only 150 pages) it is not easy to relate the two; only the US title is given in the Bibliography.

The second part of Every Intellectual’s Big Brother is devoted to a Centennial Report, ‘Iraq, the Internet, and “the Big O” in 2003’, summarising the discussions at the Wellesley Conference. It features fourteen scholars, including Professor Rodden, who reports and summarises their responses. Among the topics discussed are Orwell’s political relevance in the twenty-first century, Nineteen Eighty-Four after 1989 (the date of publication of The Politics of Literary Reputation), and Orwell’s Literary Legacy. What might be picked out of the latter was Orwell’s gift for writing in language ‘that was clearly artistic and yet crafted in plain speech’ (Michael Shelden); Orwell as ‘a great essayist’ (Todd Gitlin); and his ‘directness. The sense of the person responding’ (Morris Dickstein). A separate section of reports is concerned with ‘The Man within his Writing’, from which again I would select three aperçus: Orwell’s ‘penchant for changing his mind’ (Morris Dickstein), ‘truth is not statistical’ (Erika Gottlieb), and ‘people who don’t really accept his moral authority are those who don’t accept his critique of the Soviet Union’ (Ian Williams).

This section concludes with a discussion between Professor Daphne Patai and John Rodden in response to the question: ‘Orwell’s Moral Authority – or Authoritarianism?’ Perhaps I should devote a little more space to this eight-page section than the earlier discussions or I might be accused of running away from Professor Patai although I have nothing really to add to the few lines I wrote on pp. 74-5 of George Orwell: A Literary Life (1996), in which I drew attention to the almost total absence of women who featured in a number of studies published between 1913 and 1948, several by women, including the redoubtable Ellen Wilkinson. The authors, male and female, concentrated almost exclusively on men. What intrigued me was that though, very understandably, Professor Patai’s maintains her criticism of Orwell (for being anti-women and ‘an anti-Semite in a purely conventional sense’, p. 162), she is reported as admitting ‘in the light of her negative experiences with academic feminism, that The Orwell Mystique represented an indulgence’ (p. 237). Curiously, my own experience of ‘academic feminism’, in England, has been wholly positive and has led to long-lasting friendships with my colleagues, but reading the account of the reaction of women at Wellesley College to Professor Patai’s declaration that Orwell was a misogynist, shocked me. The very conference itself was condemned by Wellesley students who expanded their ‘indictment into a wholesale dismissal of the entire corpus of “that sexist Orwell” (p. 156).’ Such ‘wholesale dismissal’ verges on the events of seventy years earlier (bar just six days) in Germany, emotionally if not physically.¹ Although he only appears briefly in Every Intellectual’s Big Brother (e.g., pp. 105, 232, and 233), Scott Lucas has also roundly condemned Orwell in two books, both published in 2003, The Betrayal of Dissent and Orwell. He was particularly incensed by Orwell’s provision of names to the Information Research Department. His animus does, it seems to me, distract from what is often pertinent analysis. He concludes that ‘It is not George Orwell who needs to be rescued for us. We need to be rescued from “Orwell”’ (Orwell, p. 138). (I have wondered how my colleague and translator of Orwell into Polish, Dr Bartek Zborski, who suffered considerably under the Soviet Communist regime for studying Orwell, would react to aspects of Lucas’s critique.)

Chapter Eight, ‘Unlessons from My Intellectual Big Brother’, is a very personal essay by the editor which was, in the main, reproduced in The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell (2007) as ‘Orwell for today’s reader: an open letter’. In this the editor movingly describes his experience of reading and learning from Orwell despite his having a very different personal, religious, and political stance. He adapts Orwell’s six rules for good writing to six ‘unlessons’ from ‘My Intellectual Big Brother’ which he says he might entitle ‘Politics and the Literary Intelligentsia’ (p. 174). I especially liked his advice to ‘Avoid addressing primarily the cultural elite . . . Address instead the informed layperson, the literate public – not merely the literary intelligentsia’ (p. 177). In his penultimate section he argues ‘One can learn by doing’ as Orwell had done (p. 178). This appealed to me because of advice (drawn from Goethe) given by Hermann Bahr in his Expressionism (1916) which I have found helpful: ‘all our knowledge is only half-knowledge, therefore our knowledge is ever hindering knowledge . . . only by doing does knowledge become complete’. A curious misconception appears in the third paragraph of this chapter and is repeated in the Companion. Rodden finds ‘surprising personal links’ between his father and Orwell in that Rodden’s father worked as a day labourer ‘two miles away from the Gloucestershire working-class hospital in Scotland’ where Orwell convalesced. This confuses Hairmyres Hospital, East Kilbride, near Glasgow which Orwell entered on 21 December 1947 and left in the last week of July 1948, and the Cotswold Sanatorium, Cranham, near Stroud, Gloucestershire, which he entered on 6 January 1949. He left Cranham for University College Hospital, London, on 3 September 1949 where he was to die. I don’t think that either Hairmyres, and certainly not Cranham, would be described in the UK as a specifically ‘working-class hospital’ then or now, at least as my wife and I have experienced such hospitals. (Cranham, incidentally, is four miles from Slad where Laurie Lee was born and which features in Cider with Rosie.) John Rodden concludes this volume with what seems to me to be an invaluable chapter, ‘On the Ethics of Literary Reputation’. This suggests four precepts: 1. avoid anachronistic interpretation; 2. accept that human beings are imperfect; 3. discriminate the man from his work; and 4. beware bounty hunters: ‘Weigh – and discount – the influence of both supporters and skeptics’ (p. 187). One might add a fifth precept (which Rodden himself displays), ‘clear writing and plain speaking’ (p. 190).

Despite the euphoria, despite Wellesley College, despite Scott Lucas, interest in Orwell, has continued apace since the Centenary. John Rodden’s George Orwell Into the Twenty-First Century appeared in 2004. Dione Venables’s Postscript to a new edition of Jacintha Buddicom’s Eric & Us, 2006, proved revelatory and led to the setting up of the remarkably successful ‘Orwell Forum’ website in 2008 which has so usefully collaborated with the Orwell Prize website which, among other things, has posted Orwell’s diary entries seventy years later, day by day, from 9 August 2008. My supplementary volume to the twenty-volume Complete Works, The Lost Orwell, was also published in 2006 and simultaneously, Jean-Michel Place of Paris reproduced the Orwell-Raimbault correspondence from The Lost Orwell (in a slightly different version). In 2007, Dan Leab published Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ – another revelatory study (and now in paperback) – and The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell appeared. In 2008, Loraine Saunders looked afresh at Orwell’s novels, especially those of the 1930s, in The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell. This but skims the surface of interest in Orwell and is restricted to English-language work. As long a list could easily be produced of work in, say, Poland, Spain and Japan.

So, Orwell continues to arouse interest and passion (a passion almost amounting to hate in some) in the academic world and to excite and inform popular interest. To give but one example of the latter. In the course of writing this review, the Daily Telegraph published a leader on 6 September 2008 with an extract from Nineteen Eighty-Four. This was the wretched Parsons’s pride (and note his typically significant Orwell name) in his daughter for listening at his keyhole and reporting him for shouting ‘Down with Big Brother’ so that he joined Orwell in his cell (IX, p. 245). It was headed ‘Orwellian nightmares’ and referred to the recruitment, à la Stasi, of thousands of British children ‘to shop adults to local bureaucrats’, offering them up to £500 in reward for so doing.² As the newspaper comments: ‘It is grotesque. Orwell’s novel was meant to be a warning, not a policy document for a future Labour government’. The man and woman in the street can see this link and appreciate Orwell for it. I sometimes wonder if Orwell is dismissed by some academics, not so much as ‘too easy’ – he seems to present them problems enough – but because, as that disgruntled left-wing journalist I quoted earlier complained – ‘He is not one of us’, not today of that milieu of thirties’ clubbishness, but not as an academic; he did not even attend a university; he did not teach in a university; he had no degree; and, perhaps worst of all, his formative experience was not in the groves of academe or among the literary coteries of the capital, but was in the police service in Burma, in hopping, tramping, amongst the dispossessed, and fighting in Spain, in a world only too exposed and real.

Peter Davison 10 September 2008

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David Lebedoff, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. New York: Random House, 2008.

Who would make a suitable subject for a double biography? Wordsworth and Coleridge, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Morecambe and Wise, very well – but George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh? Wasn’t one of them left-wing and earnest, the other reactionary and comic? Didn’t one of them want a revolution for England, and the other a counter-revolution? Surely one was a Tory who liked aristocrats while the other was a socialist who consorted with tramps, one was skinny and ascetic and pretended not to be a gentleman, the other …. And so on. Yet not only has David Lebedoff written a double biography of Orwell and Waugh, he has even provocatively entitled it The Same Man.

There is something to this. They were born in the same year, 1903, and contemporary Englishmen of the lower upper-middle class were brought up in a pretty homogenous culture and education (unlike Orwell, Waugh went to university, but didn’t spend much of his time there in studying). “The class system absolutely stamped the lives of Orwell and Waugh from early childhood,” says Lebedoff, and he is quite right. His two subjects were also possessed of something like perfect pitch when it came to class awareness. It is something else they had in common. They also shared a serious vocation for literature, but they both had to turn often to more ephemeral forms of writing to pay the rent. Both were exemplary English stylists. Both lost a first wife, remarrying later. Both could be difficult, but had a gift for friendship. Too young for the First World War, both were patriotically keen to serve in the war against Hitler, but most of their wartime work was boring and frustrating.

They had reviewed each other’s work, and corresponded a bit, but they did not meet until Orwell was dying in the Cranham Sanatorium and was visited by Waugh. It is a meeting of which neither left a record, unfortunately, though we do know that each admired the other’s writing, however far apart they were on matters of politics or religion. Afterwards Waugh told his friend Malcolm Muggeridge that he had found Orwell “very near to God,” a phrase that could mean more than one thing.

Apart from matters of provenance, Lebedoff’s central argument for putting the two together is that both were English moralists, and visionaries properly and similarly fearful about the future. They saw not only their own times, he says, but ours. “The real war against the future,” Lebedoff goes on, “would have to be taken to the heart of the enemy camp, which was neither Moscow nor Berlin but the salons of educated but powerless fools in the democracies, where hatred of merit was packaged as disdain for absolute morality.” This is eloquently put, but I am not really convinced that either Orwell or Waugh thought that the future would be decided in salons anywhere. But it’s clear that moral relativism, along with the arrogance of elites, is very much what Lebedoff dislikes about our own times. He takes a bit of a ramble in a late chapter in which Orwell and Waugh – and Aldous Huxley – are enlisted as the godparents of his own diagnosis of modern times.

Part of this is a valiant and interesting attempt to link Orwell and Waugh as champions of spirituality and of the common man. Waugh, he reminds us, was an enemy of authority and expertise in office. Orwell, he notes, worried with increasing urgency “how people would live after ceasing to believe in immortality”. Is this enough of a case for treating them as “the same man”? In the end, Orwell was a democrat, and Waugh was a Christian. It would be a tough assignment to argue that Waugh was a democrat and Orwell was a Christian in any meaningful sense.

Orwellians will find David Lebedoff not always entirely accurate (“As I Please” was not written for The Observer, for example) or up-to-date. He mentions the 20-volume Complete Works but his citations from Orwell are from the 4-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of 1968. Lebedoff’s own style is chatty (“The people of Southwold felt sorry for the poor old Blairs. Every time their unemployed son showed up he looked a little worse”). This can have its charm, but still he should have resisted the temptation to entitle a chapter “The Waugh to End All Waughs”. But though it has its faults, much can be forgiven of a book in which the author’s enthusiasm for his subject –singular or plural – shines through so genially. Douglas Kerr

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The Cambridge Companion to George Orwell by John Rodden, reviewed by Peter Davison

ed. John Rodden, 2007 (hardback 978-0-521-85842-7, £45; paperback 978-0-521-67507-9, £15.99).
Peter Davison

This excellent collection of essays by fifteen Anglo-American scholars, edited by the distinguished Orwell scholar, John Rodden comprises a Chronology, sixteen articles which ‘concentrate on the fiction and documentary writings, but they also cover Orwell’s prose style, his patriotism, his positions on war and pacifism, and his anti-Communism’ (p. xi), and a list of further reading. In the first essay, John Rossi and John Rodden analyse economically and perceptively Orwell’s development as a political writer. Although Orwell himself referred to his BBC years as ‘wasted’, one can (like him) underestimate what he set in train – for example, launching a prototype of the Open University, based on Indian degree syllabuses, attracting very distinguished literary and scientific speakers. Orwell’s suggestion that he was something of a socialist before 1935-6 might refer to his fierce arguing with Eugène Adam in Paris ‘that the Soviet system was the definitive socialism’ (Stephen Wadhams, p. 42).

Gordon Bowker tells a remarkable story of the attempts and frustrations of those essaying to become Orwell’s biographer. He couples this with observations on the nature of ‘English’ biography and analyses the work of six biographers from the late Crick to the present, concluding that ‘Biographies of Orwell . . . are better regarded as works of informed imagination than photographic realism’ (p. 25). Professor Jonathan Rose argues that Orwell’s writings, ‘taken together, may offer the most comprehensive profile ever produced by one individual’ (p. 28), with ‘his feet planted firmly in two different and antagonistic words’ (p. 29). He refers interestingly to ‘the anonymous anti-war satire, 1920: Dips into the Near Future (p. 31), published originally in The Nation. He gives a very good picture of England in the first half of the twentieth century and draws on some fascinating statistics. Professor Margery Sabin, discussing Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, subtly teases out the way that Orwell ‘moves the reader outside their own preoccupations’ and perfectly delineates the essential falsity of the Wigan Heritage Museum where ‘The Orwell’ advertises itself as ‘the perfect venue for your wedding or private party’. She is also very good at the need to refrain from taking the first of these as an ‘objective document of historical scholarship’ and analysing Orwell’s attachment to ‘his initial direct experience in Spain’. In the light of these qualities I am reluctant to suggest two slips, but I do so because they seem pervasive. The Road to Wigan Pier was not an ‘assignment from the Left Book Club’, for it was then, as D.J.Taylor puts it, ‘barely a gleam in Gollancz’s eye’ (pp. 174-5). Indeed, in letter to Orwell’s agent of 29 October 1936, Gollancz was driven to asking what it was that Orwell was writing. Referring to Orwell’s retention of his direct experience in Spain, she notes that Orwell wished the political chapters (v and xi) removed to the end of the book as appendixes. She says that though the French translation of 1955 followed Orwell’s instructions, ‘English-language editions continue to interrupt the narrative with the chapters of political analysis’. However, the very volume she refers to, Orwell in Spain (2001), does make the chapters appendixes. This followed my edition of Homage to Catalonia of 1986. I attracted much flak for doing this, much made up for by the Catalans who approved and translated what I had done in their Orwell en España, Barcelona, 2003.

Professor Michael Levenson discusses the four novels of the 1930s arguing that in these Orwell ‘never allowed himself to forget the degraded social reality that surrounded his literary work, a recognition of imminent catastrophe’ (p. 59) for, as he concludes, at the end of the 1930s ‘The form is doomed, as the autonomous individual is doomed, and as “liberal Christian culture” is doomed . . . the age of totalitarianism is imminent’, Yet ‘Orwell’s instinct is to keep writing’ (p. 74). Between these poles, Levenson shows Orwell as a young professional sustaining a career after modernism and in the teeth of social collapse (p. 59), writing of ‘states of emergency within the familiar situations’ in each novel (p. 63). Possibly a word might have been spared for the effect on Orwell’s storytelling of the savage in-house censorship he suffered, especially in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Thus ‘Orwell’s notorious solution’ – Dorothy’s amnesia – which Orwell admitted was ‘an inherent fault of structure’ (pp. 63-4) was not helped by this censorship. Lists of the changes are instructive, especially to Warburton’s attempt to rape Dorothy (p. 41, line 2 of the novel): see CW, 3, 299-302; or, for a shorter list, the Penguin edition, 1986, pp. vi-viii. Professor William E. Cain writes of the special experience of reading Orwell’s essays: ‘bracing, illuminating, invigorating’ (expressions that might, incidentally, be applied to the essays in this Companion). He appositely goes on, ‘It is not the specific judgements Orwell makes as much as the action of his thinking and the movement of his feeling that distinguish him’. He likens Orwell as an essayist to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘man thinking’ (p. 76). Professor Rossi contributes an essay on Orwell’s patriotism: ‘Orwell’s uniqueness among English leftists arose from a residual sense of patriotism, a love of things English that he was never ashamed of’ (p. 89). He argues that ‘Orwell believed that patriotism was the defining element of the English character. Patriotism is something palpable and real, not a useless sentiment’ and that this was underestimated by the Left (p. 95). One minor detail: is it quite correct to say that Orwell’s father ‘held a high level administrative position’ in India in the Opium Department (p. 88)? Michael Shelden describes his service as ‘humble’ (p. 126). It certainly took him over thirty years to progress from 5th to 1st Grade Sub-Deputy Opium Agent just five years before he retired in 1912.

Ian Williams writes on Orwell and the British Left dividing his essay, after an introduction, into seven succinct sections: Striking Back at the Empire: Orwell and Class (p. 101); The Independent Labour Party (p. 103); The Spanish Disconnection (p. 105); The Second World War and Orwell’s Politics (p. 106); Socialist Anti-Soviet (p. 108); The List (p. 108); and finally, Orwell’s Socialism (p. 109). He defends Orwell’s preparation of his List of those too unreliable to write for the Government. One of those he would bar was Peter Smollet (aka Smolka), an NKVD agent awarded the OBE by a grateful if obtuse Government, who was probably responsible for persuading Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm (see The Lost Orwell, pp. 210-11). Robert Conquest in ‘Orwell, Socialism and the Cold War’ is on territory he knows expertly and is particularly interesting on the way Orwell (despite denials by such Marxist critics as Bernard Williams) targets ‘the Stalin régime . . . in great specificity’ (p. 130). Having written ad nauseam about the increasing misuse of the English language along lines Orwell indicated, I was delighted to see Robert Conquest linking this to ‘the present decline of the universities’ (p. 131). Professor Morris Dickstein makes an excellent case that Animal Farm is not ‘Orwell Lite, a kind of Totalitarianism for Beginners’ (p. 134) and shows how ‘the influence of intellectuals distorts the ideals with which the revolutionary movement began’ (p. 137). I am not sure that Orwell would have gone quite so far as to suggest that ‘There is no single tipping point in the inexorable shift from the genuine equality’ of the early Revolution (p. 140). In the copy of Animal Farm that Orwell gave Geoffrey Gorer he marked the pigs eating the milk and apples as the key passage (Crick, p. 490). Professor Goldstein quotes from the 1951 Penguin Animal Farm. Perhaps if he had had the 1989 edition by him, or CW, 18, he would have seen that not only did Orwell tell Dwight Macdonald that this was indeed ‘The turning-point of the story’ (CW, 18, 507; Penguin, p. xix) but that when the story was broadcast as a play by the BBC on 14 and 15 February 1947, he wanted this ‘turning point’ made even clearer, adding four lines of dialogue not in the novel. (I need hardly say, with the arrogance with which we are all familiar, the BBC ignored Orwell’s request.) The lines (last of speech 259 and speeches 260-2), are printed in the Penguin edition, p. xx and CW, 8, p. 153.

Sir Bernard Crick, doyen of Orwell biographers and critics, contributes a fresh and lively essay on Nineteen Eighty-Four: context and controversy’. The novel, he points out, does not have any single message but a series of multiple messages; it is both satire and warning – a difficult mixture to bring off. He discusses Orwell’s satiric rage, the importance of mutual trust – ‘there is a categorical imperative to treat people equally’. He effectively links the novel to ‘The Prevention of Literature’ and suggests that the ‘importance of memory, of mutual trust and of plain language work together as a satire on modern mass-produced writing’ (p. 152). It seems that hearing John R. Baker’s lecture to the PEN Conference, 22-26 August 1944 on how Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Director of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science under Stalin) had provided ‘a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a totalitarian regime’. Further, that lecture seems to have impelled Orwell into seriously setting about writing the novel (see The Lost Orwell, 2006, which reproduces previously unknown correspondence on Lysenko between Orwell and Dr Cyril Darlington, at the time director of the John Innes Horticultural Institution).

Some years ago I was told that Orwell was now quoted more often than Shakespeare, though no evidence was provided. Neil McLaughlin does not discuss Shakespeare, but his essay, ‘Orwell, the academy and the intellectuals’ gives, and analyses, the results of extensive research into citations of Orwell and his books between 1976 and 2003. He argues, ‘The explanation for the contradiction between Orwell’s non-academic status . . . and his clear but uneven academic reception is sociological’ (p. 169). In discussing ‘Orwell and the literary critics’ he concludes that ‘the Orwell tradition’ will be ‘transformed by new realities but motivated and energised by his concern with writing, ideas, clarity of thought, literary judgement and political principles’ (p. 177). The editor of this Companion offers a very personal essay, ‘Orwell for today’s reader: an open letter’, in which he movingly describes his experience of reading and learning from Orwell despite his having a very different personal, religious, and political stance. He adapts Orwell’s six rules for good writing to six ‘unlessons’ for ‘Politics and the Literary Intelligentsia’. I especially liked his advice to address ‘the informed layperson, the literate public – not merely the literary intelligentsia’ (p. 187). In his penultimate section he argues for learning by doing as Orwell had done (p. 188). This appealed to me because of advice (drawn from Goethe) given by Hermann Bahr in his Expressionism (1916): ‘all our knowledge is only half-knowledge, therefore our knowledge is ever hindering knowledge . . . only by doing does knowledge become complete’.

Erika Gottlieb contributes an informed and critical ‘bibliographic essay’ in which she summarises and analyses the wide range of studies of Orwell and his writing. She is particularly good in placing ‘the voices of political hostility camouflaged as aesthetic criticism’ (p. 194) and she appositely quotes Christopher Hitchens’s statement that it is hard to believe the ‘sheer ill will and bad faith and intellectual confusion [that] appear to ignite spontaneously when Orwell’s name is mentioned in some quarters’ (p. 195). Raymond Williams comes out particularly badly in this analysis. Christopher Hitchens sums up his contribution, ‘Why Orwell still matters’, and the whole of this excellent series of essays, with, ‘It was not a matter of what [Orwell] thought but how he thought, which in turn is the explanation of why he still matters, and always will’ (p. 207).

This is a genuine companion. The essays are sharp and to the point; never outstay their welcome; and, unlike so much academic writing which seems to be more concerned to address a narrow field of fellow academics, is completely free of jargon. Orwell would have been delighted. The single disappointment of this Companion is the ‘Further Reading’ (pp. 208-10). So far as Orwell is concerned it is surprisingly dated. For example, the selection of editions of individual books by Orwell is curious. One almost thinks the compiler plucked personal copies of paperback editions off his or her shelves and recorded their dates of issue (and having two copies of Coming Up for Air, both are listed dated, successively, 1970 then 1950). No reference is made to any of the individual, modern, corrected editions which have now been in print for almost twenty years; several have specially-written introductions and all have notes on their textual problems. Carey’s edition of Orwell’s Essays (2002), has been preferred to the four volumes of essays, fully annotated, published by Penguin in 2001. (Carey only includes Orwell’s own notes and overlooks many of those.) Space might have been found for the facsimile edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) which shows in his handwriting when Orwell originally set the story – 1982, then 1983, and only, as time went by in the course of illness and composition, 1984. Although The Complete Works is listed, it is only the second, paperback, revised and updated edition, and the date given is only for volumes X, XI, and XII. I reiterate, these are excellent essays, and further editions should be called for. In that case Further Reading should by up-dated, especially the single-volume editions of Orwell’s books (after all, most readers cannot afford the twenty-volume Complete Works), and space found for Gillian Fenwick, George Orwell: A Bibliography (1998), J. R. Hammond, A George Orwell Chronology (2000), Emma Larkin, Secret Histories (2004), the Microform George Orwell: Letters and Documents to be found in Libraries and Archives in the UK (9 reels of microfilm 2004; Reel 2 includes the facsimile of Nineteen Eighty-Four by courtesy of Brown University), The Lost Orwell (2006, the supplementary volume to The Complete Works), and Dan Leab’s valuable study, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (2007). It might be useful to mention two collections of Orwell’s essays intended for North American readers, with notes selected from the 2001 Penguin volumes, currently in the press from Harcourt, edited by George Packer: All Art is Propaganda and Facing Unpleasant Facts.

I should like to end on a more positive note so I am taking John Newsinger’s excellent article, ‘Orwell, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust’ last, partly to point to its excellence but also because it raises general and personal issues focusing on ‘what we can be expected to know’. Newsinger writes very fairly and perceptively and I think I learned more from this essay than any other (and that is saying something given the quality of the essays). Perhaps the nub of his argument is that ‘although Orwell knew the “facts” of the Holocaust, that six million Jews had been murdered by the Nazis, he never actually understood either the enormity or the significance of the crime’ There is, he writes, ‘no mention of Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, no specific discussion of the concentration camps . . ’ (p. 123). In fact, Orwell does refer to Dachau and Buchenwald in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ and his ‘London Letter, 5 June 1945’ (CW, 17, 147 and 163), on the second occasion making the interesting observation that, when he wrote, ‘it is possible now [Orwell’s italics] to rouse a certain amount of indignation about Dachau, Buchenwald etc., and yet before the war it was impossible to get the average person to take the faintest in such things’. Orwell puts these atrocities into the context of the Ukraine famine of 1933 and Soviet concentration camps, which, with other atrocities he lists, are all part of what he sub-titles, ‘Indifference to Reality’ (p. 147). Orwell does pay rather more attention to the persecution of Jews than is suggested in the essay (for example, CW, 14, pp. 32, 234, 246, 271, and 361). Nevertheless, I have no difficulty in going along with John Newsinger’s argument, but one tiny point he made brought me up sharp and raised two issues. At the end of his essay, he asks, ‘it is difficult to believe that [Orwell] never read [Hannah] Arendt’s “The Concentration Camp” that appeared in Partisan Review in July 1948’. But is it? A brief chronology: Orwell wrote the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1947, often so ill that he had to work in bed; from 20 December 1947 to 28 July 1948 he was a very sick man in Hairmyres Hospital; he then got back to Jura and on 4 December 1948 he had completed the fair copy – often typing in bed on a manual typewriter – no handy laptops then. He left Jura about 2 January 1949 and from then on was very ill and in two hospitals. He was desperate to complete the novel. I wonder, how much incentive he would have had to get copies of Partisan Review from America? Not just John Newsinger, but do we all expect and demand the impracticable?

Now let me turn the question of Orwell’s ‘omission’ to ourselves. Suppose I wrote, very provocatively, ‘it is difficult to believe that scholars writing in North America had never noticed the up-dating of Orwell editions over the past twenty years’? O.K., I’m being rude, but I cannot but help notice that only one such scholar refers to any of the up-dated books in Penguin and the Complete Works. The single exception refers to Orwell’s wish that chapters v and xi be moved to the end of Homage to Catalonia – but then says that has never been done in English editions, even though it has been done in the very volume from which this request was drawn (see Orwell in Spain, 2001, pp. 169-90 and 190-215) If I am being impertinent, let me turn the spotlight on myself. John Newsinger refers to a service on behalf of Polish Jews held at a synagogue in St John’s Wood in 1943 which Orwell discusses (p, 121). By a curious coincidence I was living at 43 Marlborough Place, bang opposite that synagogue at that time. Further, I was then working at the Crown Film Unit on a film about the submarine service, Close Quarters. The cutting room in which I worked was opposite that of the famous Stewart McAllister, currently editing The Silent Village, a dramatised account of the Lidice massacre set in the Welsh mining village of Cwmgiedd – a Czech not a Jewish atrocity. My mother ran a boarding house mainly for music students but we cared for many Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany – and simultaneously for a short time, men of the Polish Air Force after the Fall of France. Refugees were not just on our doorstep but living and eating with us for several years from the mid 1930s. I still have the Register with the names and home addresses of these exiles from Austria, Germany, Poland, and Iran, etc. I mention this for two reasons. One, though this was so close to my home – in my home – I am pretty sure my knowledge of what the Germans were doing to the Jews was pretty sketchy. Orwell would, of course, have been much better informed than a 16-year-old boy, but so much more seemed to demand immediate attention (something to which I admit with a certain shame). But what strikes me in the context of Newsinger’s article is my mother’s response printed in her memoir, when the police came to take our Jews for internment on the Isle of Man. Yes, she was very angry; yes, she actually got them released and into work which did much to contribute to the war effort. Yet her explanation for their being taken, which did not strike me at the time, was they were being imprisoned ‘because they were Jews’. She who had done – and did – so much for these people still saw them as ‘Jews’. They were taken, of course, because they were German. As Orwell put it, ‘Indifference to Reality’, even by those particularly kindly disposed to our Jewish guests.

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John Rodden

John Rodden’s latest book is The Cambridge Companion to Orwell, edited by him. It will be reviewed in this section by Professor Peter Davison.  Rodden is also author of The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "St. George Orwell", Scenes from an Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell, and Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings – among other books.

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The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell by Loraine Saunders  reviewed by John Rodden

Ashgate Publishers
159 pages
ISBN 978-0-7546-6440-6

‘Disclosing the integral aesthetic components of the distinctive style that Orwell developed in his early realistic novels of the 1930s, Loraine Saunders hits just the right note in her literary analysis of Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidestra Flying and Coming Up for Air.  In reminding us of the power and optimism of these neglected writings in Orwell’s oeuvre, Saunders provides an invaluable service: her study serves a much-needed corrective to the established critical tendency to undervalue Orwell’s novelistic artistry and inbstead helps us to appreciate his full achievement and artistic legacy.’

Loraine Saunders’ The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell, reviewed by Paul Anderson

(Ashgate Publishing, £45)

Unlike Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the four novels George Orwell wrote in the 1930s – Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air – have never enjoyed either great popularity or much in the way of critical reputation.

They were for the most part favourably reviewed when they first appeared, but none sold well. Orwell himself refused to sanction new editions of A Clergyman’s Daughter or Keep the Aspidistra Flying during his lifetime and was scathing about their inadequacies. “They are both thoroughly bad books and I would prefer to see them go out of print,” he wrote to his agent, Leonard Moore, in 1944. Two years later, in a letter to his friend and intellectual sparring-partner George Woodcock, he wrote of Keep the Aspidistra Flying:

There are two or three books which I am ashamed of and have not allowed to be reprinted or translated, and that is one of them. There is an even worse one called A Clergyman’s Daughter. This was written simply as an exercise and I oughtn’t to have published it, but I was desperate for the money, ditto when I wrote Keep the A. At that time I simply hadn’t a book in me, but I was half starved and had to turn out something to bring in £100 or so.

Shortly before his death Orwell dictated a note reiterating that A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying should not be reprinted.

Biographers and critics have tended to take a similarly dismissive view of these two novels, treating them as failed minor works, of interest only insofar as they reflect Orwell’s own experiences and show him developing as a writer.

Burmese Days has done better but has been praised more often for its insights into the barbarities of imperialism than for any literary merit. And although some commentators have gone so far as to declare Coming Up for Air Orwell’s best novel on literary grounds, far more treat it as a period piece, important mainly because its themes and characters prefigure those of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

For at least 40 years, certainly since the appearance of the Collected Journalism and Letters edited by Ian Angus and Sonia Orwell, writers on Orwell have paid much more attention to his books of reportage, his essays and his everyday journalism than to the four 1930s novels – and particularly since the end of the cold war there has been something approaching a consensus that it is Orwell’s non-fiction, even more than Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, that secures his reputation as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

Loraine Saunders has nothing against Orwell’s non-fiction – but she strongly believes that it is a grave mistake to downplay the significance or the quality of the 1930s novels. The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell is, as she writes in her introduction, an extended attempt “at redressing an imbalance in Orwell studies that has insisted Orwell’s reputation as a first-rate novelist must rely solely upon the continued appreciation of his last two works”.

She goes about her task with verve, and many of her arguments are telling. She is surely right that too many writers on Orwell have made the reductionist assumption that he was simply putting his own opinions into the mouths of his fictional protagonists: the expat manager John Flory in Burmese Days, the clergyman’s daughter Dorothy Hare, the would-be poet Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the disillusioned insurance salesman George Bowling in Coming Up for Air. She is right, too, to emphasise the complexity and plurality of authorial voices that sustain the narratives of the novels. She develops these points convincingly with detailed textual references, though perhaps a little too exhaustively for my taste. No matter: it is good to be reminded that, for all the autobiographical elements in Orwell’s 1930s novels, he was writing not autobiography but fiction, and doing so with some subtlety and skill.

Saunders says that Orwell should be understood as a “proletarian novelist”, which on the face of it is problematic: the Old Etonian former colonial policeman was not in any but the most formal Marxist sense proletarian. Although he had no option but to work for a living, his background, tastes, manners and most of his social circle were anything but working-class. None of his novels has more than a walk-on role for a working-class character, and in Nineteen Eighty-Four the workers become the proles, alien creatures (to Winston Smith) whose vulgar subculture somehow survives the triumph of the totalitarian state.

Yet Saunders is on to something important here, even if she doesn’t get it quite right. I don’t think Orwell ever saw himself as a proletarian writer. Nevertheless, he grasped precisely how the downwardly mobile middle class had become formally proletarian – because, like him, its members had nothing to sell but their labour power – but had remained estranged politically, socially and culturally from the working class. In his 1930s novels, Orwell was imagining himself into the shoes of people he believed the socialist movement needed for success but was hopeless at attracting. Saunders argues, rightly I think, that the results are strikingly more effective politically than the overtly propagandist novels of the 1930s by such left-wingers as Edward Upward.

There are a couple of places where Saunders ties herself in knots – her discussion of the extent to which Orwell introduced fictional elements into his books of reportage is hard going, and she explains away Orwell’s dim view of A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying rather too easily – and in the end I remain unconvinced that Orwell’s 1930s novels deserve to be considered in the top rank of 20th-century English literature. But The Unsung Artistry of George Orwell is an impressive piece of work that deserves a wide readership – although with a retail price of £45 it is unlikely to get it.

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Review Quotes for Eric & Us by Jacintha Buddicom and Dione Venables

“ YOU are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up.’ This one quote provides the best early clue in Eric & Us to the developing intellectual perspective of the would-be Famous Writer, George Orwell.”

Henley Standard

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“..written by Orwell’s childhood friend, ...Jacintha Buddicom was persuaded to write of that time... of poetry and romance.”

The Bookseller

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“Every now and then something new and hitherto unknown turns up in the bookshops which lifts the chill of a winter day, and that is my reaction on turning the last page of Eric & Us....but it is the Postscript.... which introduces the excitement.  The Postscript makes poignant and fascinating reading.”

West Sussex Observer

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“...These revelations undoubtedly cast new light on Orwell’s life. Aspects of Jacintha probably appear in most of his heroines, and the countryside ramble leading to the sudden pounce does not just figure in his fiction; it remained his preferred mode of seduction.”

The Times Literary Supplement

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“... she had been thinking of him tremendously often since they had lost touch....She never married.  Nobody ever came up to his standard.”

The Sunday Times

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“....but Venables’ postscript changes all that.  It also accounts for a moment in 1974 when, under gentle questioning, Buddicom was asked about the events in Eric & Us...the usually imperturbable woman broke down and cried.”

The Guardian Review

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“Eric has a bit of a cough.  He says it is chronic.” wrote Lillian Buddicom of George Orwell in 1917. Jacintha Buddicom’s book, Eric & Us about Eric Blair’s early life before he took the name of Orwell is claimed to be the only book to cover Orwell’s Shropshire links...Their developing relationship and no doubt some of Orwell’s formative experiences, were played out in Shropshire.”

The Shropshire Star

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“Throwing new light on why his association with Jacintha ended, she writes of the literary ambitions of the young Orwell and the influences which helped to shape his distinctive style and approach...”

The Oxford Times

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“This book describes in exquisite detail the childhood friendship of Jacintha Buddicom and Eric Blair.  The new postscript...adds fascinating insight into the early life of one of this Country’s most iconic 20th century authors.”

The Best of British

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“ Indeed it is a memorable book, first published in 1974 which has long been the only secure basis for all the future Orwell books and biographies that have poured out.  Yet what it does do is provide a new perspective on why Eric Blair was such an awkward spirit...”

The Camden New Journal

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“...the most complete account of the great man’s formative years and one which has proved a boon for researchers has now been republished, and it has lost none of its charm.”

This England

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“A vivid picture of growing up together. Despite the biting satire of George Orwell’s later work, it is surprising to read how happy and peaceful  that childhood was, though his dream of marrying Jacintha faded.”

RPM Newsletter

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“ Jacintha Buddicom’s memoir has already become a valuable resource in the Orwell Archive but for the rest of us, it is a charming and entertaining account of the early years of Eric Blair and his friends, the Buddicoms.

Images Magazine

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“An unusual sort of biography comes from Dione Venables, who writes of Jacintha Buddicom, the first love of Eric Blair...”

U3A News

Give us your responses and opinions in our new Forum section.

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