The most searing and formative experience of Orwell’s engagement with the thirties was his enlistment on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, during which he took a bullet in the throat from the fascist side and—very nearly—another one in the back from the Communists. If there is a diary covering this intense period it almost certainly reposes in the archives of the Russian secret police in Moscow, having been seized from Orwell and his wife during a Communist police raid on his Barcelona hotel in 1937. However, references to Spain, and to the agony of its defeat at the hands of a military rebellion backed by Hitler and Mussolini, are scattered throughout every section of these English and Moroccan journals. In England, Orwell concentrates on attitudes about the war among workers and intellectuals and draws on his friendship with other radical British volunteers from the educated classes to propose a “Peoples’ Army,” along the lines of the Spanish militias, to defend Britain in the event of a German invasion. With the help of some seasoned veterans like Tom Wintringham, Humphrey Slater, and Tom Hopkinson, the idea of a “Home Guard” for precisely this purpose was actually officially implemented, contributing considerably to the quiet egalitarian revolution which swept Britain during the war and helped evict the Conservatives from power as soon as it ended.
From this period also dates some of Orwell’s best and most mordant egalitarianism. Readers who have followed the “99 per cent” campaign of response to the mixture of crime and capitalism on Wall Street in 2011 may be amused at the exactitude of Orwell’s observation in this culling from the press.
From a letter from Lady Oxford to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies:
“Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining . . . in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”
Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist.I
Franco’s invasion of Spain was initially launched from Madrid’s colony in Morocco and reinforced by the deployment of several Moorish colonial regiments. Orwell’s interest in the territory, then, was also heavily strategic. He thought that the Allies should declare in favor of Moroccan independence and then set up a provisional antifascist Spanish government in exile, thus taking Franco in the rear both militarily and politically. However, knowing the generally pro-imperial mentality of the British establishment, and its obdurate shortsightedness in preferring Franco to a victory of the Spanish left, he was sure that London would lack the imagination for such an emancipating move (and he was right). Nonetheless, it deserves to be remembered that, throughout the course of a protracted war which concentrated attention on the grand Atlantic and Pacific “theaters” and on the huge battles in Western Europe and Russia, Orwell always sought to focus attention on the liberation of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), on the independence of India and Burma, on the sufferings of the Maltese under Axis bombardment, on the aspirations of Arab nationalism, and in general on the end of imperialism. This was an outcome which he foresaw, and worked for, long before most intellectuals—even many leftist ones—could be convinced that the days of a white-ruled globe were over.
It was from his time making wartime broadcasts to India for the BBC that Orwell began to concentrate on the idea of history and falsification. He could see events being mutated into propaganda before his very eyes, even in the information headquarters of an ostensible democracy. Thus in the summer of 1942, when the British authorities resorted to massive force in order to put down demonstrations and riots in India, he noticed that the hitherto respectable name of Nehru—once the British favorite for the Indian leadership—had somehow become blacklisted: “Today the reference to Nehru was cut out of the announcement—N. being in prison and therefore having become Bad.” This is a slight but definite prefiguration of the scenes in the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where certain political figures are suddenly deemed to be “unpersons” and where rapid changes of wartime allegiance necessitate the hectic rewriting of recent history.
The culture of censorship and denial also necessitated a coarsening of attitudes to language and truth; earlier in the same year he had written:
We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.II
One has to use a certain amount of decoding to identify literary transitions like this, as they move from Orwell’s private to his published writing, whereas other sources of inspiration and provocation are more blunt and obvious. In 1939 he takes a “miscellaneous” diary note from the agricultural journal Smallholder: “Rat population of G.Britain estimated at 4–5 million.” Who knows in what part of his cortex he stored away that random finding, against the day when it would help form one of the most arresting images of terror in all of his fiction. Indeed, the whole leprous moral and social texture of “Airstrip One,” his dystopian name for a future totalitarian Britain, is taken from the dank, smelly, depressing, and undernourished society (“drowning in filth” in a less metaphorical sense) that he had been observing at close hand in peace and war. It was this that called upon his growing capacity “to see the world in a grain of sand / and heaven in a wild flower.”III
This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the “infinite capacity for taking pains” that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius. Hearing a rumor in 1940 that “Jews greatly predominate among the people sheltering in the Tubes [London underground stations],” Orwell minutes, “Must try and verify this.” Two weeks later, he is down in the depths of the transport system to examine “the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus and Baker Street stations. Not all Jews, but, I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size.” He goes on, with almost cold objectivity, to note that Jews have a way of making themselves conspicuous. Again, this is not so much an expression of prejudice as a form of confrontation with it: a stage in Orwell’s own evolution. Only a few days after he expresses the misanthropic and even xenophobic view that European refugees, including Jews, secretly despise England and surreptitiously sympathize with Hitler, he excoriates the insular-minded British authorities for squandering the talents of the Jewish Central European émigré Arthur Koestler. When he contradicts himself, as he very often does, he tries his best to be aware of the fact and to profit from it.IV
A good small example of the ways in which Orwell could discover virtues even in matters of which he disapproved is provided by an observation he makes during this same period of bombardment, while surveying the near destruction by the Nazis of London’s most beloved cathedral:
Appalled today by the havoc all round St. Paul’s, which I had not seen before. St. Paul’s, barely chipped, standing out like a rock. It struck me for the first time that it is a pity the cross on top of the dome is such an ornate one. It should be a plain cross, sticking up like the hilt of a sword.
This forms an admirable example of what I have elsewhere described as Orwell’s version of the Protestant ethic and the Puritan revolution. In his essays, he generally ridiculed the Christian religion and displayed an especial animus toward its Roman Catholic version, but he admired the beauty of the Anglican liturgy and knew much of the King James Bible and the Cranmer Book of Common Prayer by heart. In this image of a possible St. Paul’s, drawn almost from the rhetoric of John Milton and Oliver Cromwell, he evinces an understanding that certain traditional values may become useful for radical purposes: the ceremonial symbol pressed into service as a weapon of popular struggle. (His ambitions for the Home Guard clearly drew on his admiration
for Cromwell’s “New Model Army.”)
The Protestant revolution was partly centered on the long battle to have the Bible made available in the English vernacular and removed from the control of the linguistic priesthood or “Inner Party.” So it is perhaps surprising, given his lifelong near-obsession with the subject, that Orwell does not appear to expend much energy here in his famous preoccupation with the mutations of the English language for purposes of propaganda. There is one vivid example, but it has more to do with another element of “Newspeak”: the need for compression in order to produce journalistic neologism. In the early days of the bombing of London, he observes that “the word ‘blitz’ now used everywhere to mean any kind of attack on anything. . . . ‘Blitz’ is not yet used as a verb, a development I am expecting.” Three weeks later he laconically records that “the Daily Express has used ‘blitz’ as a verb.” At a slightly later stage, while analyzing the way in which he finds himself scouring the press for deeper sources of interpretation, he decides that “nowadays, whatever is said or done, one looks instantly for hidden motives and assumes that words mean anything except what they appear to mean.” So the outline of a discourse in which, for example, “freedom is slavery,” was slowly taking shape in his mind. This is not a thesaurus of eurekas, in other words, so much as a gradual and often arduous set of connections being slowly pieced together.
It seems to be an open question whether that very weight—the strain and tedium and approximation of everyday existence—was a hindrance to Orwell or an assistance. He himself seems to have thought that the exigencies of poverty, ill health, and overwork were degrading him from being the serious writer he might have been and had reduced him to the status of a drudge and pamphleteer. Reading through these meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings, however, one cannot help but be struck by the degree to which he became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.” Here, then, is some of the unpromising bedrock—hardscrabble soil in Scotland, gritty coal mines in Yorkshire, desert landscapes in Africa, soulless slums and bureaucratic offices—combined with the richer soil and loam of ever-renewing nature, and that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion. Out of the endless attrition between them can come such hope as we may reasonably claim to possess.
(Reprinted, in slightly different form, in Vanity Fair, August 2012)
* * *
I. It perhaps counts as an irony of British society that the little Oxfordshire churchyard in which Orwell was laid to rest, in the village of Sutton Courtenay, became also the “last resting place” of Margot Asquith’s husband, the former prime minister and Earl of Oxford and Asquith. Equality between the one and the ninety-nine was attainable at least in death.
II. This is a very acute register of what Orwell himself called “a power of facing unpleasant facts.” Netted in a world of lies, he wanted not to be spared the bad news or coddled by victory propaganda at his place of work. And he despised the alternative flow of information and insight, which was gossip and rumor. Like Winston Smith, he was first and foremost activated by a raging thirst to know: a thirst that could only be slaked by a personal quest for the least varnished version of the truth.
III. It is from this poem of William Blake’s that Orwell also claimed one of his favorite lines, and one of the clues to his personality: “A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.”
IV. It deserves to be said that Orwell went on to write several analyses and condemnations of anti-Semitism and to attack contemporary writers like G. K. Chesterton who exploited it in their work. Among his colleagues and friends at the socialist weekly Tribune he numbered two Jewish colleagues, Jon Kimche and T. R. “Tosco” Fyvel. Not to recycle any corny allusion to “some of my best friends,” but Fyvel regarded Orwell as free from prejudice and even as having been slightly prescient in his misgivings about Zionism, then a popular cause on the left. (Orwell thought that even if it were a just cause it would necessitate a garrison state to defend itself against the rival nationalism that it had defeated.)
What Is Patriotism?
PATRIOTIC AND TRIBAL feelings belong to the squalling childhood of the human race, and become no more charming in their senescence. They are particularly unattractive when evinced by a superpower. But ironies of history may yet save us. English language and literature, oft-celebrated as one of the glories of “Western” and even “Christian” civilization, turn out to have even higher faculties than used to be claimed for them. In my country of birth the great new fictional practitioners have in their front rank names like Rushdie, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Mo. This attainment on their part makes me oddly proud to be whatever I am, and convinces me that internationalism is the highest form of patriotism.
(The Nation, July 15/22, 1991)
Christopher Hitchens was born April 13, 1949, in England and graduated from Balliol College at Oxford University. The father of three children, he was the author of more than twenty books and pamphlets, including collections of essays, criticism, and reportage. His book god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and an international bestseller. His bestselling memoir, Hitch-22, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. His 2011 bestselling omnibus of selected essays, Arguably, was named by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year. A visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York City, he was also the I. F. Stone professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a columnist, literary critic, and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, New Statesman, World Affairs, and Free Inquiry, among other publications. He died in Houston on December 15, 2011. The following year, Yoko Ono awarded him the Lennon-Ono Grant for Peace.
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Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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Mortality
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Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
ESSAYS
Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
Arguably: Essays
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Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
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When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)
International Territory: The United Nations, 1945–95 (photographs by Adam Bartos)
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
Left Hooks, Right Crosses: A Decade of Political Writing (edited with Christopher Caldwell)
Is Christianity Good for the World? (with Douglas Wilson)
Hitchens vs. Blair: The Munk Debate on Religion (edited by Rudyard Griffiths)
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Index
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absolutism, 273