All Art Is Propaganda (3 page)

In the earlier essays Orwell sees totalitarian patterns of thought in the excuses made for Stalin by left-wing intellectuals; in the later essays he begins to see the same patterns in writers and thinkers of any political stripe who seek too much purity or too much goodness from the world. There is perhaps a biographical strain to this: widowed, tubercular, increasingly reclusive, and still brutally honest, Orwell was becoming a saint. Three of the late essays—on Leo Tolstoy, Graham Greene, and Mahatma Gandhi—deal with saints. Orwell doesn't like them. He had never particularly liked them: "If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?" he had asked in the great essay on dirty postcards. "Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul." But back then he thought the saint at least exercised a kind of good example for the fat little man inside us; by the end of his life he seems to have thought the saint a positive evil. Anything that would interrupt the free play of the mind, its commitment to the truth of experience as it actually is rather than as one would like it to be, was an evil. And saints, it turns out, are censorious—Gandhi wanted to throw out cigarettes and meat, which was bad enough, but Tolstoy wanted to throw out Shakespeare, which was even worse.

With great doggedness, then, Orwell keeps delving into the question of literature's position in society, and what might be done to keep it alive in a time of total politics. Eventually, the middle ground he'd managed to inhabit by admiring Henry Miller, Eliot's early poetry, and that essentially apolitical masterpiece,
Ulysses,
gives way beneath him. The pressure of totalitarianism is too great, and as he begins to contemplate the brutal unresolved reality of the postwar, with its two or three warring, nuclear-armed camps (Orwell was enough of a patriot to think that Britain might not actually be subsumed by the United States), he surrenders. In "Writers and Leviathan," dated 1948, he argues that writers must ultimately separate themselves from their political work. It's a depressing essay and it ends—one wonders whether Orwell was aware of this—with an echo of the line of Auden's he so reviled: The writer capable of separating himself from his political activity will be the one who "stands aside, records the things that are done and admits their necessity, but refuses to be deceived as to their true nature." Orwell was always a realist who knew that politics was a dirty business—but he was never quite such a realist as here. The realm of freedom had finally shrunk to a small, small point, and it had to be defended. As Winston Smith says in
1984,
"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull."

It's hard not to wonder whether the pessimism of this conclusion—its separation of art and politics, after so many attempts at an integration, or at least some kind of accord—was partly a response to the art (or propaganda) Orwell was himself creating in those years. He had published
Animal Farm
in 1945; weakened by the tuberculosis that would kill him, he was writing
1984
in 1947–48. After the reception of
Animal Farm,
and with the direction
1984
was taking, it must have been clear to him on some level that the world was going to use these books in a certain way. And it did use them that way. The socialist critique of Orwell's late work seems essentially correct—they were not only anti-Stalinist but antirevolutionary, and were read as such by millions of ordinary people (a fact that Orwell, who was always curious to know what ordinary people thought, would have had to respect). It cannot be entirely a case of devious propaganda that Orwell the avowed democratic Socialist came eventually to be claimed ("stolen," as he says here of Dickens) by the Right in the Cold War; that his "social patriotism" soon reverted, in the hands of many, into simple nationalism; that it was under the banner of Orwell, a convinced anti-imperialist, that some of the best intellectuals in Britain and the United States cheered on the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Writers write because they want to justify themselves to the world. Orwell's essays here, his final reflections on the separation of the politics of the man from the art of the man, can serve as a guide to the Orwell of the 1940s. Out of "necessity" he had chosen a position, and a way of stating that position, that would be used for years to come to bludgeon the antiwar, anti-imperialist left. That he had chosen honestly what seemed to him the least bad of a set of bad political options did not make them, in the long view of history, any better.

 

But what a wonderful writer he had become! That voice—once you've heard it, how do you get it out of your head? It feels like the truth, even when it's not telling the truth. It is clear and sharp but unhurried; Orwell is not afraid to be boring, which means that he is never boring. He had been shot through the throat by a sniper's bullet in 1937. A tall man, well over six feet, he was standing up in a trench at night, telling his fellow soldiers—as they later recalled—about some brothels he'd visited in Paris, when the bullet hit. It missed Orwell's esophagus by millimeters. He survived, but contemporaries report that Orwell's voice changed. It became slightly flattened and metallic. Some people found it disconcerting.

Orwell's voice as a writer had been formed before Spain, but Spain gave him a jolt—not the fighting or the injury, though these had their effects, but the calculated campaign of deception he saw in the press when he got back, waged by people who knew better. "Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper," Orwell recalled, "but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed....This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history."

This insight reverberates through Orwell's work for the rest of his life. The answer to lies is to tell the truth. But how? How do you even know what the truth is, and how do you create a style in which to tell it? Orwell's answer is broadly consistent with the philosophical movements—of which he would have been only a little aware—of his time. There is no necessarily anterior truth; language creates it. Orwell lays out the method in "Politics and the English Language": You avoid ready phrases, you purge your language of dead metaphors, you do not claim to know what you do not know. Far from being a relaxed prose (which is how it seems), Orwell's is a supremely vigilant one. It's interesting that Orwell didn't go to college. He went to Eton, the most prestigious of the English boarding schools, but he loafed around there and, afterward, went off to Burma as a police officer. College is where you sometimes get loaded up with fancy terms whose meaning you're not quite sure of. Orwell was an intellectual and a highbrow who thought Joyce, Eliot, and Lawrence were the greatest writers of his age, but he never uses fancy terms.

These essays typically open with a very strong, flat, memorable statement: "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful"; "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent"; or even just, "There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression on me." They often do a bit of summarizing—Orwell's style is perfectly adapted to dry, funny plot summary, because it often happens that if you summarize the contents of a novel straight they will sound very funny. (And much of the time Orwell means them to.) Typically, he moves on to a more general philosophical question—"Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a by-word for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there." Why is that? Orwell goes on to explain that Kipling cannot be defended as a humanitarian, or nonracist, or anti-imperialist—he was clearly on the wrong side of all those questions. But then Orwell shows the vividness of Kipling's descriptions of life, the singular musicality of his "good bad poetry," and you begin to see what has allowed Kipling to endure.

You could say that Orwell was not essentially a literary critic, or you could say that he was the only kind of literary critic worth reading. He was most interested in the way that literature intersects with life, with the world, with groups of actual people. Some of the more enjoyable essays in this volume deal with things that a lot of people read and consume—postcards, detective fiction, "good bad books" (and poetry)—simply
because
a lot of people consume them. Postwar intellectuals would celebrate (or bemoan) the "rise of mass culture." Orwell never saw it as a novel phenomenon. He was one of the first critics to take popular culture seriously because he believed it had always been around and simply wanted attention. These essays are part of a deeply democratic commitment to culture in general and reading in particular.

His reading of writers who were more traditionally "literary" is shot through with the same commitment. Orwell had read a great deal, and his favorite writers were by many standards difficult writers, but he refused to appeal to the occult mechanisms of literary theory. "One's real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually 'I like this book' or 'I don't like it,' and what follows is a rationalisation. But 'I like this book' is not, I think, a non-literary reaction." And the "rationalization," Orwell saw, was going to involve your background, your expectations, the historical period you're living through. Orwell often launches off on fairly long digressions—like the one on A. E. Housman in "Inside the Whale"—that no other literary critic would even consider, much less get away with. But he does get away with them (more or less), because they're so clearly in the service of trying to pin down a general view of life, and history, and politics. Nothing is ever separate from anything else in Orwell, though at the same time nothing is ever allowed to overshadow the task at hand. "While I have been writing this book," he writes in the essay on Miller (the first three essays in this volume were published under the title
Inside the Whale,
in the spring of 1940), "another European war has broken out....What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the break-up of laissez-faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture." And this means we ought to read Henry Miller!

This is great, a belief in the tenacity of politics and bombs but the equally powerful tenacity of literature and personality. If we compare Orwell to his near-contemporary Edmund Wilson, who was in many senses a more sensitive critic and with whose range in literary interests and languages Orwell could not possibly compete, we see Orwell's peculiar strength. At almost the exact moment as Orwell, in early 1940, Wilson published a psychobiographical essay on Dickens in which he traced much of Dickens's later development to his brush with poverty as a young man. Orwell's treatment is much more sociological and political, and in a way less dramatic than Wilson's. Yet at one point Orwell encapsulates Wilson's argument with a remarkable concision: "Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel." This is stark, and fair, and that "terrified" is unforgettable.

It's possible to imagine a kind of tragedy to Orwell's style. He was a writer who saw both sides to every issue, and argued with himself about them, but whose style could only come down on one side at a time. You can imagine him trapped in that style, even as he used it to slash through cant and falsehood. You can imagine him trapped in it, too, whenever he expressed a vision of what the good society should be like; for it is, finally, a destructive style, peculiarly ill suited to expressing positive visions of anything. It's a funny, brutal, dry, destructive style. One of the slightly surprising things about these essays is how funny they are—in the elegant, deadpan plot summaries, but also in the retorts. To see Orwell slash through H. G. Wells, and Dalí, and Tolstoy—and to see his glimmer of self-recognition in contemplating the work of the fantastically misanthropic Jonathan Swift—is to learn a bit of what language is still capable of.

Orwell might not have admitted, as we would automatically admit today, that there were multiple subjective truths in the world, that a writer must negotiate the various possibilities of those many truths; and still, even while we know this and Orwell didn't, he always seems to be telling
the
truth. Part of the magic is that he never speaks from a point of view that is anything but his own, while at the same time he believes that any normal unprejudiced person—the "common man," the common Englishman—would see it the same way. The belief in a common man—in his existence as well as his decency—is a profound animating principle of these essays, and Orwell rarely misses an opportunity to stress this decency, as when he undramatically notes that anti-Jewish postcards disappeared from British newsstands after the rise of Hitler in Germany. Having established the common man's existence and his decency, Orwell is empowered to speak for him. There is a doubleness then to the point of view: Orwell is telling us only what he himself has seen—in Spain, in the coal mines, in the books he's read—but he's also convinced that a whole mass of people, standing behind him, would see it the same way, if only they saw it as clearly. And his gift is to convince us that we are those ordinary people, and we see it that way, too.

You can tie yourself in knots—many leftist intellectuals have done this over the years—proving that Orwell's style is a facade, an invention, a mask he put on when he changed his name from Eric Blair to "George Orwell"; that by seeming to tell the whole story in plain and honest terms, it actually makes it more difficult to see, it
obfuscates,
the part of the story that's necessarily left out; that ultimately it rubber-stamps the status quo. In some sense, intellectually, all this is true enough; you can spend a day, a week, a semester proving it. There really are things in the world that Orwell's style would never be able to capture. But there are very few such things.