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.
