Every Intellectual's Big Brother

Prologue: "Orwell" Still Lives

i In May 2003, I co-chaired, along with my friend Thomas Cushman, a three-day centenary retrospective on Orwell’s work and heritage titled “George Orwell: An Exploration of His World and Legacy.” The international event was hosted by Wellesley College, near Boston, and it was one of the biggest Orwell gatherings ever held, as close to three hundred participants gathered to discuss the iconoclastic British writer and to ponder how his writings remain pertinent in the twenty-first century.1 Our conference took place as the public interest in Orwell’s life, which had peaked in 1984 with a spate of Orwell portraits and teledramas, was undergoing another sharp (if temporary) rise in 2003, highlighted by the appearance of two new full-length biographies and a new edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four introduced by Thomas Pynchon. Orwell’s biographers and critics pondered and plumbed in excruciating, seemingly endless detail the complexities and ironies of Orwell’s life. But quite apart from this task, Orwell—or “Orwell,” the outsized iconic figure elevated to world-historical status—possesses what I have elsewhere termed an afterlife.2 And indeed, the most illuminating as well as the most heated conversations at the conference—which ranged from disputes about Orwell’s antifeminism to speculations about his likely positions on the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq—addressed Orwell’s ambiguous afterlife, reigniting old Left/ Right controversies about his political stance and moral example that have repeatedly erupted since his death in 1950. During the quieter moments of the conference, I spoke at length with Christopher Hitchens, Robert Conquest, Todd Gitlin, and other intellectual admirers of Orwell. Each of them emphasized Orwell’s presence in their lives, remindprologue “Orwell” Still Lives xii every intellectual’s big brother ing me once again that even if Orwell the man is dead, “Orwell” the writer (and the Icon) still lives—and still provokes arguments among literary and political intellectuals.3 Especially my conversations with Robert Conquest and Dennis Wrong, both of whom spoke about their early encounters with Orwell’s work during his own lifetime, recalled my interviews with Orwell’s friends more than twenty years ago. Orwell came alive for me at that time, when I interviewed Julian Symons and John Atkins, and also corresponded with George Woodcock, V. S. Pritchett, and other acquaintances of Orwell’s—all of whom have now passed from the scene. My interest in Orwell during the “countdown to 1984” also brought me into contact with numerous intellectuals of the generation following his own, such as Russell Kirk, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy . Alas, they too have passed on.4 But, as the chapters in Part One attest, their intense engagement (or intellectual jousting) with Orwell is preserved in the pages of this book. That topic—“Orwell and the Intellectuals”—is the central theme of this book. Given that my discussions with several intellectuals at the conference still bear immediate relevance to the international political scene in the twenty-first century , I have decided to include certain portions of the interviews conducted during the conference in Part Two.5 The intellectuals who discuss Orwell in Part Two are, in some sense, Orwell’s heirs, and so it seemed fitting to include their responses here as evidence of his ongoing influence and enduring relevance more than a half-century after his death. ii Will Orwell—or “Orwell”—continue to engage readers deeply and provoke impassioned argument among intellectuals as the new century unfolds? Or was 2003 his swan song? Has Orwell’s historical moment passed? Every Intellectual’s Big Brother touches on those questions. Indeed, it is possible that Orwell—and even “Orwell”—may vanish down the memory hole in the upcoming decades, perhaps well before 2050, the centennial of his death (and, coincidentally, the target date for perfecting Oceania’s Newspeak). It is still too early to say. But this much can still be said today: Whereas the historical moment of communism (or even socialism) has evidently passed, neither Orwell’s literary voice nor his moral example—nor indeed his major books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which address those political ideologies—have yet lost their social relevance or literary power. prologue xiii For Orwell’s writings are about more than just “communism” or “socialism.” Indeed, the era of communism is likely over, but not yet the specter of totalitarian technology or...