Every Intellectual's Big Brother

Introduction: George Orwell and His Intellectual Progeny

i G eorge Orwell (1903–1950) was the foremost political writer of the twentieth century and the widely acknowledged contemporary master of plain English prose. The following chapters orbit around Orwell’s intellectual legacy and cultural impact, focusing especially on his deep and ongoing influence on the generations of Anglo-American intellectuals that followed him. My chief intention in this study is to explore the politics of Orwell’s reception history as a dimension of cultural history, thereby to understand his unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life. Orwell’s reception in the midto late twentieth century is the subject of Part One of this book, in which I take the story of his complex heritage slightly further than I have in my previous two studies of his reputation and legacy.1 Each of these five chapters focuses on one or more literary circles in London or America and shows how networks of interpersonal and institutional influence acted to burnish and expand Orwell’s reputation . Key nodal points in these networks are the little magazines and literary quarterlies (e.g., Partisan Review, politics, Dissent, Modern Age, and Nation), whose editors or prominent contributors identified with Orwell and promoted his work. I am especially interested in the ideologically conditioned responses to Orwell by these intellectuals, in their political affinities with other writers and thinkers, and in the close, impassioned, even familial relationship—ranging from reverence to reproach—that so many of them openly displayed toward Orwell. Chapter One addresses the 1930s and ’40s, discussing Orwell’s distinctive “outsider ” relationship to the London Left. Orwell was “not one of us,” as an English leftist derided Orwell, whom he excluded from the rather cliquish Oxbridgeeducated Left intelligentsia of their day. This chapter thereby highlights the exintroduction George Orwell and His Intellectual Progeny 2 every intellectual’s big brother emplary value of Orwell’s life and work as a case study in the sociology of intellectuals .2 The chapter locates Orwell within an intellectual milieu but determines that Orwell was an “outsider” from the so-called Auden group of the 1930s intellectuals and intelligentsia. The argument relies on a close analysis of Orwell’s personal as well as his political history in order to understand his independent stance and his views on the social function of a writer-intellectual. Chapter Two is the lone section to address Orwell’s reputation among an intellectual group that consisted primarily of poets and novelists: the Movement writers of the 1950s (e.g., John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie).3 The chapter highlights the image of Orwell as a writer and man of letters (rather than a political intellectual), giving attention to his specifically literary qualities as well as his ideological influence. Here again, we are reminded how intellectuals bent Orwell and his work to their own aspirations. They projected a man and writer in whom they wanted to believe; they reconfigured a figure that could meet their professional and private needs. We move across the Atlantic to New York in Chapter Three, examining the elder two generations of the intellectual circle known as the New York Intellectuals , a highbrow, chiefly Jewish group clustered around Partisan Review (for which Orwell wrote a wartime and early postwar “London Letter”).4 Norman Podhoretz famously dubbed them “The Family,” and he and others viewed Orwell proudly as their English cousin. Our focus is on Orwell’s reception by a leading member of this New York group: Irving Howe, a prominent PR contributor, editor of Dissent , editorial board member of politics, and arguably the leading member of the second generation of the New York Intellectuals. As we shall see, Orwell’s work was immediately accorded an enthusiastic reception by Howe and other Partisan Review writers. (Orwell was even honored with the first Partisan Review Award in 1949.) The lavish tributes from reviewers of the first editions of his American works—from intellectuals such as Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Philip Rahv, and Podhoretz, among many others—exerted decisive influence on the development of his American reputation throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Chapter Four is devoted to Orwell’s reception by Russell Kirk, the best-known and most articulate voice of a much smaller literary-intellectual group, the American cultural conservatives associated with the literary quarterly Modern Age, which Kirk founded in 1957. Here too, Orwell’s positive reception by American conservatives (the John Birch Society accorded him the dubious honor of selecting “1984” as the last...