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More reviews by Wayne E. Yang
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Orwell: The Life by D.J. Taylor
People across the political spectrum like to think of George Orwell as one of their own. Those who know anything about Orwell, however, know how ironic it is when political conservatives attempt to associate him with anti-communism. Works such as 1984 and Animal Farm are "not exclusively anti-Communist but anti-totalitarian," as D.J. Taylor says in his absorbing book Orwell: The Life. "Wars, the argument runs, are fought by people: ideology is merely a backdrop." Indeed, Orwell was avowedly socialist, a stance the author backed with gunpowder and blood during the Spanish Civil War.
Some readers seem loathe to place Orwell more firmly among the pantheon of 20th Century writers because his best known works are often characterized as allegories -- as if that form was necessarily synonymous with an inferior "primitivism." Orwell, however, was deliberate in choosing this style. He said later in his life that the flowery language in Burmese Days, his first book-length work, detracted from that novel. That governments really do employ the sloganeering that you see in Orwell novels can be hard to believe for those who have never lived in fascist or communist societies (though, certainly not even the country that serves as the "leader of the free world" is devoid of such language).
Part of Orwell's allure has dissipated as his novels have come to seem more like hollowed history (we ticked our calendars down to and then past the year 1984) -- like science fiction gone stale -- and less predictive over the years. The passing of time has not diminished the importance of the works, however, given how world events reconfirm the relevance of Orwell time and again. The books are not simple allegories, but tales of dystopia, stories of futurist societies "in which all the best-laid plans have gone wrong," a fascination that Orwell had held "since his childhood worship of H.G. Wells."
Dystopias, for some inexplicable reason, often seem born of revolution, emerging from the caul of a grotesque quest for utopia: Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, the "killing fields" of Cambodia. Taylor suggests that one of the reasons why Orwell's literary dystopia was so effective was because he anchored his fiction in geographies that resembled ours, implanting the idea that the situations he depicted could become real. Into the middle of such horrific milieu, Orwell would employ his usual "trick [...] of setting up a solitary anti-hero in opposition to a hostile world."
"Each of Orwell's novels, by extensions, is the story of a rebellion that fails, of an individual -- in the case of Animal Farm a mini-society -- who however feebly or obliquely, attempts to throw over the traces. Each ends in more or less the same way, with the protagonist humbled, defeated, sent back to square one," says Taylor.
These feelings of futility might have stemmed from the internecine warfare that Orwell saw in Spain. Orwell's time as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War is often cited as a key formative experience (his experiences in Spain later formed the book Homage to Catalonia), yet Taylor says that the five years Orwell spent in Burma are inaccurately portrayed "as a dreadful, meaningless exile." The young man, then still calling himself by his given name of Eric Blair, "had deep [family] roots in the East." A grandmother had settled in Burma, (though to Orwell's chagrin, she never learned the language), and his father worked as a civil servant of the British Empire, ultimately rising to the ranks of Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, 5th grade, in the Government of India's Opium Department. When he entered the civil service and was asked his preference for a posting, the young Eric Blair placed Burma first, "ahead of the United Provinces."
By Taylor's account, Orwell was the model (or perhaps stereotypical) civil servant of Imperial England, a man who as a member of the Burmese police was not above wielding his truncheon. "[But] Burma haunted Orwell's imagination, both as a practical demonstration of Imperial wrongdoing and as a more elemental sensory tug." Poignant experiences there turned into essays such as "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant." The years themselves ultimately found form in Orwell's book Burmese Days, an "'Eastern' novel built on a conventional foundation with an obvious influence from Somerset Maughan." Writes Taylor: "Five years as the servant of an oppressive system had left him with a `bad conscience.' As a result he felt he had to escape not just from Imperialism 'but from every form of man's dominion over man.'"
The disillusionment turned him off of a career in the civil service, and when he returned to England, he informed his parents that he was leaving the Burma police to become a writer. Success came more quickly for some of his Etonian friends and contemporaries, but it did not come overnight to Orwell. Orwell paid his writing dues with journalism; he sold fiction when he could. He was a tireless journalist (he once reviewed as many as 100 books in 1940), but early in his career he showed a lot of uncertainty as to what kind of author he wanted to be, says Taylor, dabbling in "social reportage; novels; translation work [and] 'long' poems."
His early books generated little in funds for him, and Orwell fell into the life of a vagabond, sleeping among railway embankments with the homeless. The time ultimately served as grist for his book Down and Out in Paris and London, which "loosely documented this four- or five-month period in Orwell's life." Taylor, calls Down and Out in Paris and London "a primer to the range of special effects that characterises his work: the wintry eye for detail [...]; the eternal fastidiousness over dirt, squalor, and bugs tumbling in the milk; the unfeigned sympathy for people who, unlike the narrator, will be chained to this environment for the rest of their lives." Already in less than robust health due to his time in Burma, the rail-thin Orwell would be known for the rest of his life for his ill health. One of his admirers described him as a "kindly man, clearly in bad health, heedless of his personal appearance."
Having experienced such deprivation for himself, Orwell's socialism thus relied less on intellectual underpinnings, "more out of disgust with the oppressed and neglected life of the poorer sector of the industrial worker than out of any theoretical understanding of a planned society.'" Like a lot of writers and intellectuals from his time, however, Orwell grew anti-Stalinist as he grew disillusioned with the cult of personality he saw grow during the Soviet communist experiment, yet his disillusionment did not change his political stripes. "'I belong to the Left and must work within it,'" he explained to a friend.
Orwell felt that what ensnared men in ideological prisons, no matter whether their metal bars were steeled by communism or fascism, was a politico-religious fervor that he actually saw as displaced religious sensibility -- an issue over which he was obsessed, says Taylor. "God was dead and yet the secular substitutes put in His place, whether totalitarianism and Western consumer capitalism, merely travestied human ideals and aspirations," says Taylor, whose book hits home this pet issue of Orwell. "The task facing modern man, as Orwell saw it, was to take control of that immense reservoir of spiritual feeling -- all that moral sensibility looking for a home [...]. The atrocities of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia [...] could only have been designed by the godless because they presuppose a world in which there is no moral reckoning, and where the only power that matters is the ability to control not only your fellow men but the history of which they are a part and the knowledge on which that history rests." Taylor shows us that Orwell's great skill was in showing us how these worlds, devoid of moral reckoning, might look. The fact that many of the events Orwell depicts have not come to pass exactly as he described is sometimes said to be one of his failings. Detractors who make this argument miss the point: the problem is that the worlds Orwell describe frequently still become too real.
Wayne E. Yang
14/06/2003
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Wayne E. Yang is based in New York, where he lives with his wife and two children. His web site is www.wayneyang.com. |
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