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Buy the Book
My Orwell, Right or Left
Conservative can embrace his “socialism,” or at least some of it.
George
Orwell: Diaries
Edited by Peter Davison,
Introduction by Christopher Hitchens
(W.W. NORTON, 597 PAGES, $39.95)
I SUSPECT THAT GEORGE ORWELL would not have wished his surname to become an eponym. My 1996 Chambers gives two definitions for the adjective “Orwellian”: “relating to or in the style of the English writer George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair, 1903–50)” or “characteristic of the dehumanized authoritarian society depicted in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.” This second sense has become hackneyed: in the past month I have seen it applied to the president and his flip-flops, bureaucratese, the National Hockey League, the editorial page of the New York Times, social networking, the Republican Party, digital rights management technology, and the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Orwellian” is now a surefire signal of cant or sloppy thinking, a meaningless word like “moderate” or “fascist.”
If we are to continue making use of “Orwellian,” I suggest that we do so in something like the former sense, that is, to identify a writer with the complex salade de fruits of habits, attachments, tics, and convictions that characterize the author of The Road to Wigan Pier. What made Orwell himself was his indigence, his wanderlust, his shabby clothes, his poor health, his love of fishing and gardening, his fondness for suet pudding and draught beer, his dogged devotion to P.G. Wodehouse and the Church of England, his unflagging physical courage, and his unfailing moral sense. Rod Dreher, Wendell Berry, and Theodore Dalrymple (whose travel memoirs, unfortunately out of print, are as good as Orwell’s early books) are all Orwellian writers.
The late Christopher Hitchens, who provides an uncharacteristically lackluster introduction to the American edition of Orwell’s Diaries, was witty, urbane, intrepid, a great many things, but never, one thinks, Orwellian. Sure, there are some obvious parallels, like their mutual love of smoking, but these are just that: obvious. I never met him, but I do not gather from his writing that Hitchens was ever one for drinking stout beer. (His spirit of choice, Johnnie Walker Black, is one that Orwell could not have afforded to drink at any point in his life.) Rarely did Hitchens express anything but contempt for Christianity. Orwell, by contrast, was a defender of the Anglican Church, albeit an enormously heterodox one, who helped his vicar bring Communion to the elderly and infirm and was buried in a country churchyard according to the rites of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. One simply cannot envision Orwell feeling comfortable at a Condé Nast holiday gala: I like to imagine him showing up in an oversized Harris tweed, a gravy-stained shirt, and wrinkled wool trousers, complaining to anyone who will listen about the enormity of “holiday” usurping Christmas. Still, I suppose someone ought to be called the Orwell of our age, and why should it not be Hitchens, the best popular literary critic of the soixante-huitard set? (Orwell himself will probably never be given a place among the ranks of great critics, if only because of giants like F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot, and Cyril Connolly who walked the earth in his own day.)
Hitchens asserts in his introduction that the appearance of the diaries in book form “can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” About this I am not so sure. Enormous portions of the diaries have already appeared in print, and not only as reworked by Orwell for later books and essays. The hop-picking diary, for example, can be found, minus editor Peter Davison’s not very illuminating notes, in the first volume of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters. Gavin Freeguard, deputy director of Britain’s most prestigious journalism award, the Orwell Prize, has been posting entries from the diaries on a WordPress blog for two years now. Scholars like Michael Shelden, author of the 1991 authorized biography of Orwell, have had access to the diaries for decades. Moreover, the majority of the entries, especially those dating from 1939 onward, do not involve Orwell’s work. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four go almost unmentioned even while they are being written. Instead, Orwell plans his garden, reports on the vagaries of English weather, and catalogues his few possessions. He was apparently a great maker of lists. In a June 1940 entry, he indexes the advertisements appearing in an issue of the Sunday People, noting that
Of 9 food and drink adverts., 6 are for unnecessary luxuries. Of 29 adverts, for medicines, 19 are for things which are either fraudulent (baldness cured, etc.), more or less deleterious (Kruschen Salts, Bile Beans etc.), or the blackmail type (“Your child’s stomach needs magnesia”).
As the above suggests, Orwell had little patience for culinary fusspots or the health-obsessed, though by contemporary standards his own diet of garden strawberries and fresh fish seems fairly wholesome. (Less conducive to his flourishing was his 50-plus cigarette a day tobacco habit, a regimen that, while it places him among the upper echelons of British smokers, does not match that of such three- and four-pack per diem luminaries as the Right Hon. Michael Foot and Anthony Burgess.)
IF NOTHING ELSE, the present volume brings into somewhat better focus the picture of Orwell already on display in his own writing and in various biographies. With the Orwell centenary nearly 10 years behind us, its appearance also serves to elicit reconsiderations of the sort that tend to be of interest mainly to critics. Orwell’s literary reputation is secure. But what of his place in the Valhalla of fallen conservative warriors? The right’s attitude toward Orwell, especially in his native Britain, has always been somewhat ambivalent. For every Anthony Powell, who helped choose the hymns sung at Orwell’s funeral, there has been a Maurice Cowling. (Cowling once quipped that “Orwell had a nasty mind and, probably, a nasty body.”) In a 1999 National Review symposium on “The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century,” Florence King called Orwell “Every conservative’s favorite liberal and every liberal’s favorite conservative.” This was a rare miss from a rare Miss. Never for a moment was Orwell a liberal in either the classical or contemporary sense of the word. Till 1934, he called himself a “Tory anarchist,” a self-designation he later replaced with “democratic socialist.” Orwell’s professed socialism is something from which his conservative admirers typically shy away, like Mencken’s social Darwinism.
Unlike the Sage of Baltimore’s eugenicist tendencies, however, I think that conservatives can embrace Orwell’s “socialism,” at least in part. The author of The Lion and the Unicorn had no desire to “fundamentally transform” England. Instead he sought to preserve the things that he loved most about her, namely, her language, literature, religion, landscape, and cookery. (This caused him to be very soft on the monarchy, doubtless to the chagrin of latter-day republican admirers like Hitchens.) Orwell’s idiosyncratic socialism, with its roots in Blake’s “Jerusalem” and Ruskin’s Praeterita, was a proposed Disraelian alliance of journalists, poets, and novelists, the aristocrats of the mind, with the working class. It meant Old Etonians like himself having common cause with tobacco-chewing coal miners.
In the last chapter of his authorized biography, Michael Shelden summarizes Orwell’s hopes for his country. I do not think that in as many words I could give a better idea of Orwell’s politics (if one can stand sullying such iridescent dreams with that ugly noun), so I shall quote it in full:
There must be a place in the modern world for things that have no power associated with them, things that are not meant to advance someone’s cause, or to make someone’s fortune. There must be room, in other words, for paperweights and fishing rods and penny sweets and leather hammers used as children’s toys. And there must be time for wandering among old churchyards and making the perfect cup of tea and balancing caterpillars on a stick and falling in love.
About the Author
Matthew Walther is the assistant editor of The American Spectator.
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Arnie| 1.7.13 @ 9:26AM
That Orwell was a self-described democratic socialist fails to register with many American conservatives is because they have an inability to understand the huge gaping difference between European/Latin American/Southeast Asian social democracies and totalitarian Stalinist communism. They think because Orwell was so completely opposed to authoritarianism, that he must be by definition, against any type of "socialism". This misunderstanding of the differences in the "Left" explains such retarded policies such as Reagan's terrorist war against farmers, poets, and priests in Nicaragua because he deemed the Sandinistas, who were democratic socialists, as hard line communists.
Bob K| 1.7.13 @ 10:27AM
Sandinista Nicaraguan farmers, poets and priests who admired greatly the "social democrat" Castro who, as we all know opposes authoritarianism and who has brought freedom to Cuba.
pogybait| 1.7.13 @ 11:20AM
Bingo!
Arnie| 1.7.13 @ 1:39PM
Bob,
This is clear.
1. You're an idiot.
2. You only prove my point that many on the right are idiots, and hence make retarded foreign policy decisions.
3. There were many German Americans (like millions) that admired Hitler. So from your logic, a foreign country should have come in and attacked those farmers too.
So I guess training and funding terrorists in another harmless country was the conservative thing to do, huh?
I suppose Ron Paul would approve?
Again, if you don't understand my point, it's because you're S.T.U.P.I.D.
Bob K| 1.7.13 @ 5:59PM
And you are an uneducated half-wit!
There were millions of German Americans who admired Hitler?!
What Universe are you living in? The Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces in Europe, General Eisenhower, was a German-American!
And look up the leadership of the Sandinistas, you twit! These people were all admirers of Castro and not the democratic Socialists they wanted everybody to think they were!
Arnie| 1.7.13 @ 7:39PM
http://www.rationalrevolution......_europ.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund
Now there were millions of German Americans that were opposed to FDR fighting Germany. Many in fact, in the 1930s admired what Hitler had done with Germany. Now you might have learned the Mickey Mouse version of U.S. history Bob, but I still contend you're a moron.
And the Sandinistas drafted a constitution with free speech, with open elections, multi-pluralistic party system, where anyone could be a candidate. Is that too communistic for you.....IDIOT? LOL
Arnie| 1.7.13 @ 7:39PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C....._Nicaragua
Arnie| 1.7.13 @ 7:56PM
Hey Bob,
Can you answer some other questions with your awesome knowledge of history?
Did Iraq attack the U.S. on September 11th?
Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3, and were they determined to attack the U.S.?
Please enlighten me!!! ROFL
Al Adab| 1.8.13 @ 1:16PM
Good questions Arnie. Answers are:
1. Not directly but helped finance Al Queda
2. Yes. Much was shipped to Syria but a great amount of chemical weapon component chemicals was found stored in semi-trailers and warehouses. Some buried in sand. Aircraft and missiles for delivery also found.
Did the Iraqi government intend to attack US? Unknown. Certainly through proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Queda they hoped to get at U S bases around the world.
Have a great ostrich life.
Bill8472| 1.8.13 @ 1:38PM
I've seen it reported that the recent disruptions in Syria may unearth those WMDs in Syria.
I hope so. I'm so tired of hearing the old routine of how (despite the opinions of the arms inspectors that Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq and that re-opening Iraq for inspections was crucial to world peace) President Bush was lying about them in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Arnie| 1.8.13 @ 4:50PM
Yea, history and reality has a liberal bias. Actually the U.N. arms inspectors were of the opinion that it was very unlikey that Saddam had weapons. Of course, they were willing to entertain the idea that he did have some for the U.S.'s sake, and they were doing inspections and could have finished their jobs with a yea or nay conclusion. But the Bush administration told them to get out of Iraq, because Bushy and Co. couldn't wait to start raining down bombs on Iraq.
4,400 troops dead and over 100,000 - 200,000 Iraqis dead.
Arnie| 1.8.13 @ 4:46PM
"1. Not directly but helped finance Al Queda"
Oh, you mean like the U.S. had and how citizens from across the Middle East had, including much money from Saudia Arabia. hmmmm, good try, but it still doesn't make Iraq unique for invasion.
"2. Yes. Much was shipped to Syria but a great amount of chemical weapon component chemicals was found stored in semi-trailers and warehouses. Some buried in sand. Aircraft and missiles for delivery also found."
And there's absolutely no proof that these "components" constituted any type of working weapons program, much like the Bush administration had to admit. Your Syria connection is purly hypothetical. Yes, of course, Iraq had a program in the early 90s, but it was disarmed by the mid to late 90s.
"Unknown. Certainly through proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Queda they hoped to get at U S bases around the world."
Oh, so you admit that there were no direct or indirect attacks planned from Iraq on the U.S. (or at least no known proof) They "hoped".
Good job Al Adab!!!! What a way to scrounge for completey flimsy and baseless reasons to invade another nation!!!
Have a great propaganda filled life!!!!!
Jacob McCandles| 1.7.13 @ 10:39AM
Socialism, in any form, takes power away from the individual and gives it to the government. May not always be totalitarian, but it's a step in that direction. As our American "experiment" is proving, once you start sliding toward centralized power, it's very hard to climb back up to freedom.
PolishKnight| 1.7.13 @ 11:19AM
It's funny that the same leftists who get into a hissy fit over eating genetically engineered foods because, somehow, the genetic mutations in the food will somehow get into their own DNA OR declare that all private ownership of guns should be outlawed due to school shootings then turn around and cherry pick democratic socialist republics to proclaim that mass murdering regimes are an exception rather than a rule.
The lesson of 1984 is that it's quite possible that once a set of oppressive socialist republics gain power, there may be no stopping them. The image of humanity of the future is a boot stomping upon a human face forever or at least until humanity itself is eliminated.
In the meantime, socialist western Europe isn't the paradise that the left makes it out to be. If you're not connected, you get a small apartment and live a meager life much like the former USSR. That is until their economy collapses or immigrants take over.
Occam's Tool| 1.7.13 @ 11:40AM
A mediocre life like my sister lived, with mediocre medical care.
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 2:47PM
Orwell lived a life that was pretty adventurous. He served as a front-line infantry for the Spanish anarchists, POUM, and was shot in the throat.
Then he spent some time drifting in Paris and London, and worked in the mines with English mineworkers.
He didn't have any money because he was living life in the raw at the bottom of the pyramid (by choice) and writing about it in inimitable prose.
Bill8472| 1.8.13 @ 1:35PM
Oh yeah, I forgot. Orwell also served as a colonial policeman in Burma, and wrote about his experience shooting a rampaging elephant in his bailiwick.
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 2:52PM
American conservatives admire Orwell the way they do because he told the truth about totalitarians. Today, the totalitarians are the leftists. In Orwell's day, the most public ones were the fascists (although Orwell was one of the few who would talk about Communist totalitarianism).
Orwell's love of the truth is why leftists, as a rule, are not comfortable with his thoughts about politics.
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 2:59PM
Orwell defined himself as a socialist, all right. If you read his writings, you will learn that he was a socialist because he distrusted big government and political thought. Today's conservatives are more like Orwell than today's socialists.
I don't know what political movement Orwell would espouse today, but he put his life on the line in his day for the anarchists, not the socialists and not the communists. And he was wounded (it was a miracle that that shot to his throat didn't kill him) fighting for anarchism, not socialism.
Will| 1.8.13 @ 8:34PM
Nonsense. Orwell an enemy of big government?
If you read the closest thing we have to an Orwellian (in the 1st sense of the word) manifesto, the "Lion and the Unicorn", advocated:
1) Nationalisation of "all major industries" and all agricultural land above the level of smallholdings of "at most 15 acres". Orwell defined nationalisation as the belief that "all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people".
2) "Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one". Sounds pretty socialist to me
3) "Abolishing the autonomy of the public (i.e. private) schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability". In modern language, this policy would be called affirmative action.
The point to understanding Orwell is that a total commitment to political liberalism sits with a commitment to socialist economics. This made him unusual, as most intellectual leftists of the time believed political liberalism to be a fake, a bourgeois conspiracy against the masses. However, his economic beliefs were absolutely socialist. As the author says, we should embrace all Orwell's thought and works, and wrestle with them, rather than cherry-pick quotations and ignore everything about him that we might disagree with.
PolishKnight| 1.7.13 @ 3:52PM
One of the great leftist myths is that Josef Stalin was the ONLY bad thing about the USSR and that if not for him, the USSR would be a lollypop candyland.
Lenin murdered at least 4 million people. Krushchev and Breshnev sent millions of the gulags and the mortality rate is uncertain.
In the modern era, the more "moderate" leftists simply engage in Jim Crow style repression: Bashing their own working and middle class working men supposedly represented by the revolution as a bunch of white male oppressors and while the left buys votes via the welfare state and granting favors to their fascist cronies. This goes even for Sweden or Germany. Sure, it's not death camps but what we see is that the moderate socialists never really go after the rich but rather target the very groups they claim to represent.
If Orwell was alive today seeing a literally gay leftist party that despises the very men he worked with, he would be even more disillusioned.
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 4:30PM
The 1921 famine was Lenin's creation.
Michele San Pietro| 1.7.13 @ 11:34AM
I wouldn't even quote a madman like Hitchens, who has absolutely nothing to do with freedom, democracy and conservatism. He got to the point of throwing mud against Mother Theresa, proving to be just a despicable man.
Bob K| 1.7.13 @ 11:41AM
Orwell earned his living as writer. His greatest contribution to his trade and to his art was his great essay "Politics and the English Language." All writers and journalists, and they can be mutually exclusive, should be required to read this work of genius at least once a year! One hopes that some of it's wisdom will be retained and have a salubrious effect on their writings thereafter.
Also it is highly unlikely that Orwell would have had much use for that unctuous, well traveled and connected Southern Gentleman and social critic Wendell Berry, whose writings many people misread as either conservative and even here as "Orwellian." He is the opposite of everything Orwell was.
Berry describes himself as a Democrat, a child of the New Deal, and recently stated he voted of Obama both times. Although he was admired by Russell Kirk, who wrote about him kindly before he died; Kirk might have had a change of mind had he lived longer.
John Miller had a long article about him in July of 2012 in National Review after Berry was honored by being asked to deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Miller's article is entitled, ironically, "A Jeremiah For Everyone."
http://www.nationalreview.com/.....n-j-miller
Orwell lived too close to poverty and was too close to the real poor to countenance this sort of ignorance of reality.
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 3:09PM
I could be argued that Orwell made as much money during most of his life from working in French and English restaurants and as a mineworker as he made from writing in those days. I don't know if he got paid during the war years for his civil defense work. After the war he made some money, but he died in 1950, so he didn't enjoy any prosperity he earned for very long.
Derek Leaberry| 1.7.13 @ 1:18PM
George Orwell was one of the great writers of his time and was a committed socialist. His money started coming in only after he was too ill to enjoy it. I wonder if Orwell, like George Harrison, would have re-thought his socialist Labour Party inclinations when he realized that the government got nineteen cents of what he earned to every penny he got to keep.
PolishKnight| 1.7.13 @ 2:30PM
One delightful example of buyer's remorse Socialism (ironic term there) is John Cleese crying how London no longer "looks English":
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....mpics.html
Hahahaha! Well what did he expect? After decades of leftism and political correctness that bashed working class whites in his native Britain, suddenly he finds himself yearning for the working class schlubs he made fun of. Monty Python and leftists of then and now bash the evil "blueblood" rich and claim that they're out to make a Marxist paradise but the reality is that they then turn around and attack the working class that see through their hypocrisy.
The fictional and real Archie Bunkers of the early 70's were ahead of their time. They saw right through the Marxist false promises. In the end, the left throws us all under the bus but they seek to boil the frog slowly rather than load us onto the death trains right away.
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 2:44PM
Forgive me if I seem presumptuous, but there's no one like Orwell. No writer possesses Orwell's clarity on totalitarianism and politics. Not Hitchens, not anyone else.
He's also great about boys' adventure stories.
Derek Leaberry| 1.7.13 @ 3:43PM
Like Ian Fleming, Orwell was very proud of English cuisine and considered English roast beef, with the potatoes cooked underneath the roast, one of the world's great suppers. He also had contempt for vegetarians. So there was a lot to like in Orwell.
Will| 1.8.13 @ 8:39PM
There's a quote that goes something like "the word "socialism" attracts like bluebottles every non-smoker, teetotal, sex-maniac, vegetarian and orange juice-drinker in England".
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 4:31PM
Such Were the Days!
Bill8472| 1.7.13 @ 4:35PM
Oops, "Such, Such Were the Joys."
Pecos Pete| 1.7.13 @ 9:11PM
Arnie, another Village Idiot, is a waste of time.