George Orwell's Legacy

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Lionel Trilling in his introduction to Homage to Catalonia made the point that Orwell was by no means a genius. He was just a reasonably good writer with a fair bit of moral courage. His work does not afflict me with the sense of uselessness that I feel when I read George Eliot or Marcel Proust. It shows, rather, what anybody with average integrity can do, as long as he does not give a damn what anyone else thinks of him.

A good writer and critic must be able to change his or her mind and be honest about the fact: Orwell despised Mahatma Gandhi for years as a stooge for British rule in India but later re-versed himself and made restitution. Anyone engaged in political and cultural wars should be wary of party-mindedness and party allegiance: Orwell did briefly join a small leftist party but never wrote as a loyalist or mouthpiece and often published self-criticism of his previous positions.

In his entire output I can find only one piece of genuine unfairness: a thuggish attack on the poetry of W.H. Auden, whom he regarded as a dupe of the Communist Party. But even this was softened in some later essays. The truth is that he disliked Auden's homosexuality and could not get over his prejudice. But much of the interest of Orwell lies in the fact that he was born prejudiced, so to speak, against Jews and the colored peoples of the empire, and against the poor and uneducated, and against women and intellectuals-and managed in a transparent and unique way to educate himself out of this fog of bigotry. (Though he never did get over his aversion to "pansies.")

Orwell was an egalitarian and a socialist but thought of Stalin's great "experiment" (what a revealing word) as the negation of socialism and not as a Russian version of it.

In The Captive Mind, written in the early 1950s, Czeslaw Milosz wrote that Eastern European intellectuals, reading 1984 in clandestine editions, were amazed to find that its author had never visited the Soviet Union. How then had he captured its mental and moral atmosphere? By reading its propaganda, and by paying attention, and by noticing the tactics of Stalin's agents in the Spanish Republic. Anybody could have done this, but few had the courage to risk the accusation of "giving ammunition to the enemy."

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening, and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call "cultural studies." His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word Orwellian in two senses. The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammeled power. The second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and that may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.

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