The Limitations of George Orwell

THE LIMITATIONS OF GEORGE ORWELL ID. J. Dooley George Orwell is well on the way to being enshrined as the patron saint of left-wing journalism. Some of the most respected English and American critics have taken up his cause. The process was begun by V. S. Pritchett, who in an obituary notice in the New Statesman and Nation praised Orwell as "a kind of saint" and as the "wintry conscience" of a whole generation.1 In the United States, the chief advocate has been Lionel Trilling; in an introduction to an American reprint of Homage to Catalonia, be described this book as one of the most important documents of our time and a demonstration of one of the right ways to confront life, and in fact his introduction (reprinted in The Opposing Self) might be described as a panegyric based on the text "He was a virtuous man."2 With these two leading it, the work of beatification has gone on, until today there is hardly an article on the contemporary literary scene in which Orwell's name is not mentioned, and mentioned with veneration. The devil's advocate has had some support. For example, Anthony West, in a critical article in the New Yorker,' attributed Orwell's remorseless pessimism to apsychic wound. In some reminiscences in Twentieth Century,' Rayner Heppenstall, who shared quarters with Orwell in 1935 and 1936, characterized him as the most intellectually naIve person he had known and described an occasion when Orwell, in a mood of sadistic exaltation, had hit him with a shooting stick. Kingsley Amis, discussing (with reference to Ivy Compton-Burnett) the refusal of admirers to give their hero less than ten out of ten for everything, made this passing comment: " . . . I often feel I will never pick up a book by Orwell again until I have read a frank discussion of the dishonesty and hysteria that mar some of his best work.'" But Amis's rival for pre-eminence among the younger English writers, John Wain, has been strongly influenced by Orwell and writes of him with the highest praise: "After reading a page of Orwell one knows 292 D. J. DOOLEY instinctively, even without knowing anything about his personal story, that here was a man who would be prepared to give his life for what he believed in.'" Robert Conquest, in a survey of the poetry of the fifties, emphasizes Orwell's continuing literary infiuence: "One might without stretching matters too far, say that George Orwell with his principle of real, rather than ideological honesty, exerted, even though indirectly, one of the major influences on major poetry."1 J. D. Scott, in an issue of the Saturday Review devoted to contemporary British writing, surveys without great enthusiasm the mixed bag of postwar writers and then suddenly becomes rhapsodical: "Yet there was Orwell. Looming over all the estheticism and 'social consciousness,' over all the Twenties and Thirties stuff which lingered on into the Forties and Fifties, was a great writer who really understood what was happening to Britain...."8 Donald Barr, in an assessment of Orwell in a later issue of the same periodical, estimates that he would never again be as famous as he was in the late 1940's, "when he seemed almost the only writer who could explain what all that dingy turbulence was leading to," but nevertheless enshrines him among the authors of the Great Books: "from now on one cannot be a really educated man without knowing a little of him."· The canonization, it would seem, has already taken place. But perhaps it is not too late to suggest that the enthusiasm of his devotees should not blind us to Orwell's limitations. For all his integrity and courage, he may have been a victim of his own "doublethink." In their praise of Orwell's clear-sightedness, Scott and Barr are echoing the eulogy by V. S. Pritchett: "In corrupt and ever worsening years, he always woke up one miserable hour earlier than anyone else...."'0 However, the evidence does not show that Orwell always had a clearer understanding of events than his contemporaries did; his opinions sometimes appear, not unusually acute, but unusually idiosyncratic...