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My Orwell Right or Wrong
Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens. Basic Books,
2002, 211 + xii pages.
A book review by David Ramsay Steele
At the end of his book on George Orwell, Christopher
Hitchens solemnly intones that “‘views’ do not really
matter,” that “it matters not what you think but how you
think,” and that politics is “relatively unimportant.” The
preceding 210 pages tell a different story: that a person is to be
judged chiefly by his opinions and that politics is all-important.
Why Orwell Matters is an advocate’s defense of Orwell as a
good and great man. The evidence adduced is that Orwell
held the same opinions as Hitchens. Hitchens does allow that
Orwell sometimes got things wrong, but in these cases Hitchens
always enters pleas in mitigation. Hitchens’s efforts to
minimize the importance of Orwell’s objectionable views, or
in some cases his inability to see them, paint a misleading
picture of Orwell’s thinking.
Orwell’s Anti-Homosexuality
One way of playing down Orwell’s non-Hitchensian views is
to attribute them to his unreflective gut feelings. We are to
suppose, then, that when Orwell thought things over, he
anticipated the Hitchens line of half a century later, but
whenever Orwell slid into heresy, it was because he allowed
himself to be swayed by his intense emotions.
Of Orwell’s opposition to homosexuality, Hichens says:
“Only one of his inherited prejudices––the shudder
generated by homosexuality––appears to have resisted the
process of self-mastery” (p. 9). Here Hitchens conveys to the
reader two surmises which are not corroborated by any
recorded utterance of Orwell, and which I believe to be false:
that Orwell disapproved of homosexuality because it revolted
him physically, and that Orwell made an unsuccessful effort to
subdue this gut response.
Orwell harbored no unreasoning, visceral horror of
homosexuality and he did not strive to overcome his
disapproval of it. The evidence suggests that, if anything, he
was less inclined to any such shuddering than most
heterosexuals. His descriptions of his encounters with
homosexuality are always cool, dispassionate, even
sympathetic. His disapproval of homosexuality was rooted in
his convictions. He was intellectually and morally opposed to
it.
Compare Orwell’s opposition to homosexuality with his
opposition to inequalities of wealth and income. Both of these
standpoints involve an element of moral disapproval, but both
are reasoned and thoughtful, both draw upon an elaborate
theoretical structure conveyed by an ideological tradition––in
the first case, fin-de-siècle preoccupation with degeneracy, in
the second, equalitarian socialism. How apposite would it be
to dismiss Orwell’s income-equalitarianism, one of the
foundations of his socialism, by saying that it was an involuntary
shudder, that he could not rid himself of an inherited,
unreflective prejudice?
Orwell’s anti-homosexual position (definitely not
‘homophobia’, which would suggest irrational fear) flowed
naturally from beliefs and values about which he was quite
forthcoming, though he never provided a systematic
exposition. Orwell held that modern machinery and
urbanization were inhuman and degrading. City life was
rootless, alienating, and demoralizing. Although there was no
going back to the organic rural community which had been
shattered by the industrial revolution, any more than there was
any going back to religious faith, both losses were sad and
wrenching––in this respect, Orwell’s outlook is akin to that
of Mr. and Mrs. Leavis. Industrial and scientific progress
could not be stopped without unacceptable consequences, but
were essentially malign.
Orwell was decidedly against birth control as well as feminism
and homosexuality.[1] He singled out “philoprogenitiveness”
(a high valuation for having children) as one of a handful of
essential precepts of any viable society. He believed (as did
most intellectuals in the 1940s) that western society was beset
by a crisis of declining fertility. He routinely equated decency
with masculinity and masculinity with virility and physical
toughness. He expressed contempt for people who took
aspirin. He did not welcome reductions in the working day or
increasing affluence, because more leisure and more comforts
were liable to lead to ennervating softness and a life of
meaningless vacuity. As was remarked by someone who knew
him well, his human ideal would have been a big-bodied
working-class female raising twelve children.[2]
Though I cannot unpack all this here,[3] it forms part of a coherent and cogent worldview, and relates Orwell to the
“anti-degenerate” thinking of influential writers like Max
Nordau. During the Second World War, Orwell repeatedly
insinuated, or more than insinuated, that “pacifists” were
homosexuals and therefore cowards. The “nancy poets,”
Auden and his friends, were a favorite target. Apparently no
one ever explained to Orwell that ad hominem arguments are
generally fallacious, and he often made his point by unfairly
questioning the motives of those whose views he was
combatting.
Above all else, Orwell was a rhetorician and a propagandist. He doubtless sincerely believed that homosexuals were more
inclined to be cowards and therefore more inclined to be
politically against war. But he certainly chose this kind of
argument because he thought it would work as an instrument of
persuasion, and perhaps it did. One remarkable thing, though,
is that the ‘pacifist’ views Orwell assailed in this manner
were precisely the opinions he had himself held until quite
recently, and had enthusiastically propounded for almost a
decade.
Among advanced and humane thinkers in Orwell’s day, there was still an overwhelming consensus that homosexuality was pathological. This had been the view of Krafft-Ebing and of Freud, for instance. The theory was still popular among intellectuals that the alienation of urban life encouraged masturbation, which led to all the perversions, particularly homosexuality. It is not especially surprising that Orwell, who was never one for intellectually striking out on his own, would assimilate this predominant view. At this time, anything perceived as sexual ambivalence was quite commonly taken as a symptom of decadence and disintegration, as witness, among many examples, the figure of Tiresias in The Waste Land.
Orwell and friends
In the mid-1930s Orwell resisted conversion to socialism
because he associated it with cranky and degenerate practices,
including vegetarianism, nudism, teetotalism, and sexual
abnormality. After he had become a socialist, he saw these
associations as a liability to the socialist movement, and
therefore saw it as incumbent upon him to fight against them
within the left. He perceived middle-class people as more
susceptible to crankiness than working men, and went out of
his way to emulate what he identified as working-class habits,
even to the extent of slurping his tea out of his saucer. Orwell’s machismo is therefore intimately linked with his
worship of the proletariat.
Orwell’s Anti-War Phase
Another of Hitchens’s techniques is to to tell us what Orwell
must have been thinking when he arrived at his mistaken
views. He reconstructs Orwell’s thoughts so as to offer a
rationale for Orwell’s views which is acceptable to
present-day political correctness and to Hitchens, while it may
not be the rationale that would have occurred to Orwell. Here’s an example:
So hostile was Orwell to conventional patriotism, and so horrified by the cynicism and stupidity of the Conservatives in the face of fascism, that he fell for some time into the belief that ‘Britain’, as such or as so defined, wasn’t worth fighting for. (p. 127)
Notice that Orwell “fell,” rather than reasoned his way, into
this position. Because Orwell’s anti-war standpoint up to
August 1939 is an opinion that Hitchens disagrees with, it is
implicitly attributed to Orwell’s emotional reactions, and these
reactions are presented sympathetically. We are invited to
admire Orwell’s motives and ignore his arguments.
However, this reconstruction of Orwell’s motives for being a
“pacifist” is not convincing. It is not a report of the reasons
given by Orwell, or by the bulk of the left, whose anti-war
theories and attitudes Orwell shared. You would hardly guess
from Hitchens’s remarks here that Orwell observed the
growth of anti-fascist pronouncements by Conservatives and
viewed them with concern as signs of warlike intentions
towards Nazi Germany, or that he condemned the
Chamberlain government for its arms build-up.
Orwell’s view, prior to his conversion to a pro-war position,
was very much in line with the “pacifism” of the left, harking
back to the First World War and expecting the next war to be
similarly indefensible. If, as Hitchens quite reasonably does,
we take Orwell’s real career as a writer as starting in October
1928, then for more than half of that career Orwell was a
“pacifist”. Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party
(I.L.P.) and his anti-war views were quite similar to those of
other I.L.P. members; he left the I.L.P. after he began to
support the war.
Orwell accepted the common leftist view that “fascism” was
nothing other than capitalism with the gloves off, and that going
to war would make Britain fascist (or speed up Britain’s going
fascist, which was probably inevitable in due course) so that no
true “war against fascism” was possible. War against
fascism, then, could only be a feeble pretext for a war driven
on both sides purely by the economic rivalry of capitalist states.
Here, as time and again throughout Hitchens’s book, we see
Hitchens concealing from his readers (inadvertently, for
Hitchens does not quite grasp it himself) that Orwell has a
reasoned way of arriving at conclusions Hitchens doesn’t
like. Orwell, of course, did not think up the reasoning or
conclusions for himself, but adopted both from the leftist
discourse of the times, though within the range of views on the
left, he selected some positions in preference to others, and
then engaged in controversies with fellow leftists.
The Banality of Orwell’s Politics
Hitchens praises Orwell for having noted that Catholics tended
to be pro-fascist. But it is misleading to present this as though
it were an isolated aperçu, without mentioning that Orwell was
doggedly anti-Catholic. In a letter to a girl-friend he casually
dismisses one writer as “a stinking RC,”[4] though there may
be an element of self-mockery here with respect to his own
anti-Catholicism, which was notorious among his
acquaintances, for earlier in this letter he refers to “my hideous
prejudice against your sex, my obsession about R.C.s, etc.” Orwell was very much a Protestant atheist; in his youth there
had been a vigorous Catholic movement in British letters,
against which he reacted strongly; Orwell saw the Catholic
Church as an old and still formidable enemy of freedom of
thought.
It’s perhaps necessary to add, since this seems so strange
today, that Orwell lived in a culture where it was
unquestionably the done thing to make derogatory or laudatory
generalizations about entire groups of people, however defined,
and at the same time minimal good manners to treat individual
members of those groups with complete respect, as well as
sporting and decent to take individuals as one found them. On
a personal level, Orwell was open and considerate to
homosexuals, Catholics, and Communists.
Hitchens often gives the impression that Orwell’s opinions
were exceptional, and occasionally seems to imply that Orwell
was almost isolated. This is a popular take but it won’t bear
examination. In broad outline, Orwell’s political views could
scarcely have been more commonplace. For the most part,
they were the leftist orthodoxy––and that means the
intellectuals’ orthodoxy––in the 1930s and 1940s. They
were mainly the political correctness of his day, just as
Hitchens’s views are of his. And on the rare points where this
characterization might be disputed, Orwell’s views were still
far from outré in that milieu at that time.
Hitchens’s primary exhibit is Orwell’s attitude to “the three
great subjects of the twentieth century . . . imperialism, fascism,
and Stalinism” (p. 5). By “imperialism” Hitchens means only
the British empire: he is an enthusiastic supporter of American
imperial expansion today. By “Stalinism” he means
Communism, his years on the left having left him with the habit
of being semantically charitable to Trotskyists. And within
“fascism” he loosely includes both National Socialism and
Spanish Nationalism. A crucial premiss of Hitchens’s thesis is
that being simultaneously opposed to these three entities was
unusual. This is a simple factual error. Thousands of people
held these views.
As an example, let’s look at Bertrand Russell, probably the
most influential writer of the British left in the 1920s and 1930s,
someone who knew Orwell and someone from whose opinions
on political questions Orwell seldom greatly diverged (though
their views on culture and personal fulfillment were quite
unalike). Orwell had a short life, so that some of the writers
who had influenced him in his youth outlived him––another
was George Bernard Shaw.
Russell was an active and outspoken opponent of the British
empire. He was chairman of the India League, pressing for
Indian independence. Russell was always a committed
opponent of Fascism, Naziism, and the Spanish Nationalist
rebels.
Immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in
1917, Russell displayed some general sympathy for the new
regime. He then visited Russia and wrote The Practice and
Theory of Bolshevism (1920), shocking many by his bitter
opposition to Communism (Bolshevism renamed itself
‘Communism’ just around this time). Russell remained
resolutely opposed to Communism until Orwell’s death and
then until at least 1958 (when he began to soften his opposition
to the Soviet Union because of his belief that the extinction of
humankind through thermonuclear war had become a serious
likelihood).
In the 1930s, both Russell and Orwell were at first opposed to
the looming war with Germany, both were classed as
“pacifists”, and both switched at around the same time to
support for the war. Russell wrote the anti-war book Which
Way to Peace? (1936), while Orwell wrote an anti-war
pamphlet which was not printed and has not survived, though
we can figure out much of what it must have said by scattered
remarks he made at the time. As Hitchens notes, Orwell also
tried to persuade his friends to form an illegal underground
group to sabotage the war effort.
Orwell reports that he changed his view about the war as the
result of a dream, on August 22nd 1939, ten days before the
outbreak of war. Hitchens’s statement that Orwell became
pro-war when “the war itself was well under way” (p. 127) is
thus inaccurate, though it is true that Orwell’s new position
did not become widely known until after the war had begun. Russell is on record as having switched to support of the war
by early 1940. He explained his change of position in a long
letter to the New York Times in February 1941,[5] in which he
dated his re-appraisal to the Munich agreement, and especially
to Hitler’s subsequent breach of that agreement by occupying
what remained of Czechoslovakia.
Most leftists at the beginning of the 1930s were anti-war (or,
as they were loosely called, “pacifists”).[6] Some remained
against the war, but many, including Russell and Orwell,
switched to support for a war against Hitler. I mention this to
emphasize that in case Hitchens wants to take support for the
British war effort as evidence of anti-Naziism, Orwell was a
late convert to support for the war effort (as Hitchens, of
course, fully acknowledges), and in this respect was a fairly
ordinary leftist intellectual of the period. Though there isn’t
space to document it here, Russell’s commitment to all three
of Hitchens’s correctness tests was more resolute, more
unswerving than Orwell’s. At times, for instance, Orwell
wobbled on the issue of Indian independence, asserting that it
was not really practicable (just a few years before it became a
reality).
Goodbye to the Empire
Aside from Russell’s views, there is much wider evidence for
the broad opposition to the empire, to Naziism and Fascism,
and to Communism. The tide of leftwing support for
dismantling the empire was so strong that the Labour Party,
following its landslide election victory in 1945, was able to rush
through independence for Burma and India.
After all, what was at stake? There had long been a widespread view within British politics that the empire was a net drain on Britain’s resources and would better be abandoned.[7] The majority of those in favor of holding onto the empire accepted that the colonies would gradually acquire more self-government until they achieved ‘dominion status’, the stage reached by countries like Canada and Australia. India in the 1930s was already largely self-governing, except for foreign policy, and more self-government would no doubt have arrived even under Churchill.
Orwell and T.S. Eliot defend the Empire at the BBC
During the war, the Indian Congress, under Gandhi’s
inspiration, opposed the war and took the position that the
Japanese or Germans would be no worse as rulers than the
British. Britain therefore suspended the Congress and imposed
martial law in India, an important piece on the strategic
chessboard. Though critical of martial law, Orwell (again, like
Russell) was not in favor of giving India independence while the
war was going on, a position that flowed automatically from his
support for the war effort.
Orwell believed that the empire was “a money racket,” that
Britain benefitted economically from exploitation of the
colonies, and that decolonization would necessarily bring about
a sharp drop in British living standards. Orwell, writes
Hitchens approvingly, “never let his readers forget that they
lived off an empire of overeseas exploitation, writing at one
point that, try as Hitler might, he could not reduce the German
people to the abject status of Indian coolies” (p. 44). Orwell
might be forgiven for overlooking, in the heat of the moment,
that the Indian coolies’ status was abject before the British
arrived, after which it became less abject, but what to make of
Hitchens, all these years later, holding aloft this daft remark as
if it were a penetrating observation?
The abandonment of the empire coincided with the beginning of
the most rapid rise in British living standards ever experienced.
Taken overall, the empire probably was a net drain on British
resources. Certainly, there is no clear indication that the British
people as a whole suffered economically from giving up the
empire.
The Left Loves Orwell
Orwell wrote for leftwing intellectuals, they were his intended
audience, and he strained to make his opinions acceptable to
them. He was adroit at trimming his utterances to gain
maximum acceptability by the left. When, in his final years, he
suddenly attained literary fame, he acquired a much larger
audience. and this was embarrassing, like one of those
Hollywood comedies where someone whispering to an intimate
acquaintance discovers too late that the public address system
has been switched on, and his words are being carried to
everyone in town.
Hitchens reproduces some choice examples of leftist hostility to
Orwell. Any Communist Party member or fellow-traveller and
any orthodox Trotskyist defender of the Soviet Union as a
progressive workers’ state, was bound to regard Orwell as a
bitter enemy. Hence the nasty attacks by Raymond Williams,
E.P. Thompson, and Isaac Deutscher, which Hitchens deftly
dissects. It is rather surprising that Hitchens doesn’t similarly
excerpt some of the feminist examples of anti-Orwell diatribe,
among which Daphne Patai’s is, though sometimes unfair,
often quite perceptive.[8]
It is easily confirmable that the bulk of books and articles on
Orwell are both leftist in political orientation and very
well-disposed towards Orwell. The left has all along been
predominantly pro-Orwell. The most common view among
leftists is that Orwell is the property of the left, and that it is
therefore outrageous if a rightwinger cites Orwell in opposition
to totalitarianism. If you start researching Orwell, you soon
lose count of the times you have read about the sacrilege of the
John Birch Society in using ‘1984’ as a telephone number.
A particularly crude example of the most prevalent leftist view
is Orwell for Beginners.[9] The For Beginners series is a set
of socialist tracts, in the form of easy introductions to modern
thinkers illustrated with cartoons. Orwell for Beginners is one
of the most inaccurate and amateurish of this commercially
successful series; it exemplifies the conventional opinion that
anyone who mentions Orwell in criticizing socialism is doing
something unconscionable, because, to a leftist, Orwell is ‘one
of ours’.
Hitchens refers to “the intellectuals of the 1930s” (p. 56) as though most of them were pro-Communist. He mentions Orwell’s “innumerable contemporaries, whose defections from Communism were later to furnish spectacular confessions and memoirs” (p. 59). Hitchens is not alone in exaggerating the importance of Communist influence in the 1930s. The notion that most British intellectuals were bowled over by Communism is an inflated legend.
Orwell in Spain. His wife is sitting in front of him, to the right
There were those very few intellectuals, like Maurice Dobb
and Maurice Cornforth, who remained Communists
throughout. There were those promising young intellectuals like
Christopher Caudwell who became Communists and died
fighting for Communism in Spain. Whether they would have
remained Communists for long had they survived a few more
years is not certain. I doubt it. There were those who enjoyed
whirlwind romances with Communism, like Auden and
Spender, and who could never furnish spectacular confessions
and memoirs because they had nothing spectacular to recall or
confess. There were some who left the Party or never joined it
but remained devout fellow-travellers. There were some sui
generis cases, like J.B.S. Haldane, whose wife left him and
wrote an informative book that may be considered a slightly
spectacular confession and memoir, and who himself faded
away without actually breaking with the Communists, or John
Strachey, a non-C.P. member who preached the Communist
line with great eloquence for a few years, then put it all behind
him to seek a career as a Labour politician. Then there were
the broad ranks of the left, who had spasms of sympathy for
Soviet Russia now and then, but who were not to be dislodged
from support for the Labour Party or the I.L.P., both
essentially anti-Communist organizations.
The rarity of the individuals who conformed to the pattern
described by Hitchens is illustrated by the fact that Richard
Crossman couldn’t find a single convincing British example of
a former Communist intellectual turned anti-Communist for the
landmark volume, The God that Failed, and not wishing to go
to press without one British specimen, had to make do with
Stephen Spender.
The lack of any such examples did not arise because large
numbers of intellectuals joined the Communist Party and never
left it. It arose because very few joined the Communist Party
at all, and nearly all of those who did left quickly before they
could get up to any skullduggery worth memorializing. My
guess would be that prior to 1941 more British intellectuals
joined the I.L.P. than joined the C.P.G.B. And, it goes without
saying, far more joined the Labour Party than either of those. The gigantic Labour Party, with a membership of millions,
operated a rigorous and active policy of excluding all members
of the Communist Party or any of its front organizations.
To say all this is not to belittle the effectiveness of the
Communist Party of Great Britain. It had an extraordinary
impact on British political and intellectual life, given that it was
always such a small group of people with so little popular
support.
It might be contended that the real influence of the Communist
Party was not in its membership but in the spread of
pro-Communist ideas among non-C.P. members. But first, this
too can easily be exaggerated. Much of it was akin to Western
admiration for Japan in the 1970s. It did not mean that the
admirers wanted to do the bidding of the admirees.
Second, Orwell was not as implacable an anti-Communist as is
often supposed. The Road to Wigan Pier, for instance, has
some cracks against the Communists and some compliments to
them. It comes down in support of their line du jour, the
Popular Front, and it dismisses resolutions “against Fascism
and Communism” with “i.e. against rats and rat poison,”[10]
a remark as idiotically pro-Communist as anything in Les
communistes et le paix.
But Stink He Does
After Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier came out in 1937, Orwell was twitted by Communists, who gleefully quoted his scandalous slander against the English workers: that they smelled. Orwell branded this a “lie” and persuaded his publisher Victor Gollancz to make a fuss about it.
The British working class in the 1930s. But did they smell?"
Hitchens indignantly denies that Orwell wrote the sentence,
“The working classes smell.” Hitchens vouchsafes that this
would be a “damning” sentence, a “statement of combined
snobbery and heresy.” All his hormones of outrage firing,
Hitchens rushes to poor Orwell’s defense: Orwell “only says
that middle-class people, such as his own immediate forebears,
were convinced that the working classes smelled” (p. 46). According to Hitchens, to accuse Orwell of saying that the
workers smelled is a “simple––or at any rate a
simple-minded––confusion of categories,” and he refers
readers to The Road to Wigan Pier, where what Orwell says
about the odiferous working classes can be “checked and
consulted.”
A pity, then, that Hitchens did not take a minute or two to
check or consult it. Orwell broaches the topic of proletarian
smelliness by stating that in his childhood “four frightful
words” were “bandied about quite freely. The words were:
The lower classes smell.”[11] So far this is consistent with
Hitchens’s reading, and must have been where Hitchens
stopped. Orwell now pursues this theme for three pages.
At first he does not strongly commit himself on the factual issue
of proletarian redolence, though he does imply that the
comparative uncleanliness of navvies, tramps, and even
domestic servants is a matter of observation. He quotes from a
Somerset Maugham travel book: “I do not blame the working
man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social
intercourse difficult to persons of sensitive nostril.” Then
Orwell confronts the inevitable factual question:
Meanwhile, do the ‘lower classes’ smell? Of course, as a whole, they are dirtier than the upper classes. They are bound to be, considering the circumstances in which they live, for even at this late date less than half the houses in England have bathrooms. Besides, the habit of washing yourself all over every day is a very recent one in Europe, and the working classes are generally more conservative than the bourgeoisie. . . . It is a pity that those who idealise the working class so often think it necessary to praise every working-class characteristic and therefore to pretend that it is meritorious in itself. (p. 121)
The “Meanwhile” indicates that though Orwell feels he can’t
evade answering the question, he wants to put it in its
unimportant place, as an aside to his main argument. He
avoids answering it directly or literally, while making his
meaning quite clear: the smelliness of the lower classes is not a
false belief held by the upper classes, but a fact.
A little later Orwell mentions the notion “that working-class
people are dirty from choice and not from necessity,” again
accepting that they are dirty while trying to leave that point in
peripheral vision. “Actually, people who have access to a
bath will generally use it” (p. 122). He has already told us that
most households don’t have bathtubs, which means that the
great majority of working-class people don’t have baths in
their homes. Earlier, Orwell has closely identified being dirty
with smelling (pp. 119–120), so there is no room to interpret
him as accepting the griminess of the lower orders without also
acknowledging the olfactory corollary.
We see then, that despite some references by Orwell to the
middle-class belief that the lower classes smell, worded almost
as though this belief were in itself wrong, Orwell ultimately does
not flinch from the objective fact that the English working
classes of 1936 are dirtier than their social superiors like
himself, and that they therefore smell––though it’s not their
fault. This is not an invention of Orwell’s detractors, as
Hitchens heatedly asseverates, but Orwell’s very own
opinion. And Orwell’s opinion on this point is correct.
As an English working-class child in the 1950s, when things
were a lot better than twenty years before, I can recall that,
though most homes by then had bathtubs, it was out of the
question to pay for hot water to be available all the time. The
water was heated for the occasion, and when it was bath night,
once a week at most, barely enough was heated for one bath
per person; this meant that if the depth of water in the tub
exceeded about two inches, it would get uncomfortably cold.
(Showers did not become common among the English working
class until the 1960s.) You didn’t wash your hair as often as
you had a bath (so the shoulders of jackets and coats were
always greasy, as therefore were places like chairbacks that
they frequently touched), and you “could not afford” (the
opportunity cost was too high, because of your low income) to
change your socks, underwear, or shirt every day. Clothes
had to be washed by the housewife, by hand, in a sink, with
soap flakes and then hung on a line, every Monday unless it
rained, to dry in the wind. Wearing the same clothes for many
days or weeks at a stretch is probably more conducive to a
noticeable smell than not bathing.
After The Road to Wigan Pier appeared, Orwell must have
kicked himself for having given the Communists such an easy
way to ridicule and discredit him. He blustered, not quite
honestly, parsing his written words, trying to make something
of the fact that he had never literally said “the lower classes
smell,” except in attributing these words to middle-class
snobs. Yet Orwell had unmistakably intimated that the
working classes smelled, and it is both careless and pointless of
Hitchens to maintain otherwise.
I’ve Got a Little List
In 1945 the Labour Party swept to power in Britain, with a
landslide electoral victory. Orwell saw himself as a supporter
of this government, though he speedily became disappointed in
it.
The British Foreign Office had a covert section known as the
Information Research Department (I.R.D.), concerned to
counteract Communist propaganda. George Orwell supplied
this department with a list of names, annotated with comments
mainly on their possible Communist connections, but also their
sexual habits, their characters, their ethnic backgrounds, and
their political soundness generally.[12] Orwell, it now seems to
some, was a McCarthyist before McCarthy.
This is a sensitive matter for Hitchens. He has an unbroken
record of detestation for ‘McCarthyism’, recently speaking
out in condemnation, yet again, of Elia Kazan’s co-operation
with HUAC in naming old Communist associates, which led to
the interminable vilification of Kazan by Hollywood and the
mainstream media. Hitchens has also been labelled
“Snitchens” by Democratic Party faithfuls, because he gave
testimony to Congress corroborating the fact that Sidney
Blumenthal had been spreading dirt about Monica Lewinsky at
the behest of his boss the Arkansas Rapist.
Here Hitchens tries to show that there is a great gulf between
what Orwell did and what McCarthyists did, but he is not very
convincing.[13] He draws various distinctions, some of which
are questionable, while others are quite genuine, though they
don’t gainsay a certain family resemblance between the two
endeavors.
“A blacklist is a roster of names maintained by those with the
power to affect hiring and firing,” says Hitchens. Why would
Hitchens say this, except to imply that Orwell’s list was not
truly a ‘blacklist’? Yet Hitchens quotes Orwell as writing
that “If it [the listing of ‘unreliables’ by the I.R.D.] had been
done earlier it would have stopped people like Peter Smollett
worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they
were probably able to do us a lot of harm.”[14] So Orwell’s
intention was that his list should be used as (or as part of) a
blacklist, to stop suspected Communists from being hired.
In another attempt at exculpating Orwell by legalistic definition,
Hitchens says that “a ‘snitch’ or stool pigeon is rightly
defined as someone who betrays friends or colleagues in the
hope of plea-bargaining or otherwise of gaining advantage” (p.
166). Does this mean that the same behavior for motives other
than “advantage,” such as sincere concern about the
Communist threat, would grant immunity from these labels? Many like Kazan who told the truth about their involvement
with the Communists to the F.B.I. or to HUAC did it as a
matter of conscience. And as for the fact that Orwell did not
personally know most on the list, Hitchens surely needs to do
more work on this angle. Can it be right to report to the
authorities one’s suspicions of a stranger’s Communist
sympathies, intending that this will hurt his employment
chances, and simultaneously wrong to report one’s definite
knowledge of a friend’s Communist Party membership?
On the Daily Telegraph’s reference to “Thought Police” in this connection, Hitchens protests that “the Information Research Department was unconnected to any ‘Thought Police’.” Must conservative newspapers be subject to a ban on the most elementary use of metaphor? Compiling secret government files on the ideological outlooks of people who have broken no law but are suspected of holding certain opinions is surely one aspect of the phenomenon satirized in Orwell’s Thought Police.
Was Orwell right to tell tales to the government?
My point is not that Orwell should not have given this list to the
I.R.D., though perhaps he shouldn’t, but that Hitchens should
be more understanding of “McCarthyism”, a term now most
often used for activities with which McCarthy himself was not
connected. Many of the elements now collectively referred to
as “McCarthyism” were wrong, and there were some
horrible injustices. But, contrary to most conventional
accounts, there actually was a Communist conspiracy; it was
no hallucination. When it is known that the Communist Party is
under the control of Moscow and its members are used for
conspiratorial work such as espionage and disinformation,
should it be out of the question to deny sensitive government
posts to Communists? That’s what Orwell and Tail-Gunner
Joe wanted to do, and I think both of them had a good general
case.
There is also a suggestion in Hitchens’s account that Orwell
and Celia Kirwan, his old flame at the I.R.D., were doing this
anti-Communist chore for democratic socialism, which renders
it more virtuous. It would surely be hard for Hitchens to argue
that democratic non-socialists ought not to be entitled to do
anything to combat Communism that democratic socialists are
entitled to do. Furthermore, since most Labour voters were
not “socialists” even in a very broad sense, there would be
something not very democratic about employing a secret
government agency for disseminating democratic socialism.
Hitchens is now a militant supporter of Bush’s war against
what Hitchens calls “theocratic terrorism,” though its next
step is apparently to terrorize a lot of non-terrorists in secularist
Iraq. Any threat posed to Americans by Islamic terrorism
today is paltry by comparison with the Communist threat of the
1940s and 1950s. The current “war on terror” is committing
more injustices than were ever committed by
“McCarthyism,” though the victims this time do not include
well-connected academics, bureaucrats, or movie stars. Far
from complaining about these injustices, Hitchens smacks his
lips at Bush’s magnificent “ruthlessness”. Hitchens has yet to
get his ducks in a row on the question of when it is right to give
information to the government.
My own view is that while you shouldn’t give the government
the time of day on a matter of drugs, pornography, insider
trading, or illegal immigration, when it comes to murder, rape,
or being a member of the Communist Party and therefore ipso
facto a Soviet agent, under the conditions of fifty years ago,
you may sometimes, according to the precise circumstances,
be morally obliged to co-operate with a government body by
telling it what you know. Whereas “McCarthyism” was
mainly concerned with people who lied about their past deeds
in behalf of a specific organization, Orwell’s list was mainly
concerned with people’s ideological sympathies whether or
not these had resulted in illegal acts. This aspect of the
comparison surely does not favor Orwell.
Why Orwell Matters, Really
Orwell matters because he was a great writer. Orwell’s social and political views are interesting, as are those of Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift, but they are most interesting for their nuances and their precise expression rather than for their gross anatomy, which was unexceptional and sometimes fashionably silly.
Orwell wrote two novels worth reading, Burmese Days and Coming Up for Air. He wrote a wonderful little allegory, Animal Farm. He wrote by far the most powerful of all dystopian stories, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which made many a Westerner feel like committing suicide and many a Communist subject feel like not committing suicide (because someone outside hell understood what hell was like). He wrote excellent accounts of his own experiences, somewhere between investigative journalism and sociological participant observation.
The language of politics
That’s quite a lot for an individual who died at forty-six. Yet
there is something of greater weight than all of these put
together: the numerous short pieces, the essays and reviews he
turned out rapid-fire, week by week, mainly to put bread on
the table. Although Orwell was not an original theoretician,
and his ideas, broadly characterized, were all off-the-shelf, he
had a superb gift for formulating them sharply, so that their
implications appeared fresh and unexpected. These writings
sparkle with polemical virtuosity; they throb with life.[15] They
will make entertaining reading for centuries to come.
"This article first appeared in LIBERTY magazine. Their
website can be found at
http://www.libertysoft.com/liberty/index.html "
[1] Orwell himself was sterile. He and his wife adopted a son, whom Orwell devotedly cared for after her death.
[2] Most of the above views are clearly propounded in Chapter 11 of The Road to Wigan Pier.
[3] See my forthcoming book, Orwell Your Orwell: An Ideological Study (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004).
[4] Complete Works, Volume 10, p. 268.
[5] Reprinted in Ray Perkins Jr., ed., Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell: A Lifelong Fight for Peace, Justice, and Truth in Letters to the Editor (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), pp. 177–182.
[6] This term was commonly used to include those who were not strictly pacifists.
[7] See for example Peter Cain, ed., Empire and Imperialism: The Debate of the 1870s (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999).
[8] The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
[9] David Smith and Michael Mosher, Orwell for Beginners (Writers and Readers, 1984).
[10] Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989 [1937]), p. 206.
[11] Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, p. 119. Orwell’s italics.
[12] George Orwell, Complete Works, Volume 20, pp. 240–259. Unfortunately Secker and Warburg have not handled the Complete Works happily. The hardbound edition is available only as a set at a monstrous price. Volumes 1–9 are Orwell’s nine book-length works. Volumes 10–20 comprise all of Orwell’s other output, arranged chronologically. These last eleven volumes, but not the first nine, have been released in paperback, with no volume number or series title on the cover or title page. None of them can be bought in a regular way from bookstores in the U.S., though they can be purchased from British suppliers online. They are usually listed by title, with no indication that they belong to the Complete Works. Volume 20 has the title Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living, 1949–50.
[13] With the air of one setting the facts straight, Hitchens declaims that the “existence” of Orwell’s list “was not ‘revealed’ in 1996.” But no one has ever suggested that it was. The fact that Orwell had passed on this list to a secret government agency was revealed in 1996.
[14] Hitchens, p. 163; Orwell, Complete Works, Volume 20, p. 103.
[15] The essays are now available in one 1,400-page volume: George Orwell, Essays (Knopf, 2002). Also invaluable are the four volumes of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell (Godine, 2000 [1968]).
Further reading:
"A collection of essays, reviews, articles and letters which Orwell wrote between the ages of seventeen and forty-six (when he dies). A splendid monument to one of the most honest and individual writers of the century."
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