George Orwell: into the lower depths

Orwell: Life and Legacy 

It can be forgotten just how unsuccessful George Orwell was for much of his writing career. In this excellent new short introduction to his life and work, Robert Colls, a retired professor of cultural history, calls Orwell the world’s most cited popular author: “No one has been more quoted or misquoted. … Invoking Orwell today is a lazy way of getting a hearing and you don’t have to read him to invoke him.”

In this age of AI, surveillance capitalism and fake news propagated on social media, no one ever tires of “invoking” Orwell. “Orwellian” is an adjective we all understand. Yet for much of his life, after he returned from Burma, where he worked for five years in the Indian Imperial Police serving the British empire, Orwell was scrambling for commissions as a freelance writer. He had no job security and no family trust fund to ease his way as he travelled, in his early years as a full-time writer, through what Maxim Gorky called, in a different context, the lower depths of society.

He was born Eric Blair in Bengal, the son of an imperial civil servant, and although he grew up in Henley-on-Thames and was educated at Eton, Orwell did not go to university. His early realist novels, such as A Clergyman’s Daughter and Coming Up for Air (a favourite of mine), were little read and scarcely known during his lifetime. His great eyewitness account of the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia (1938) – written after he volunteered to fight with the anarchist POUM militia and was shot in the throat for his troubles on the Aragon front - sold fewer than 1,000 copies.

One afternoon when I was editor of the New Statesman, a magazine with which Orwell had a troubled relationship, I was rummaging in the archive and came across a back issue featuring a book review by him. Scribbled in the margins, presumably by an editor, was a handwritten note: “He is keen. Will write more.”

Orwell was always willing to write more but never in the service of a party, movement or ideology. His politics were as unpredictable as they were misunderstood. Was he on the left or anti-totalitarian right? Does it even matter? For Colls, Orwell’s “first principle was always to write what he saw”.

Orwell was conflicted about being born into what he called the “lower- upper-middle class”, the class of the empire and the great public schools. In 1936, he was commissioned by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz to write a book about the effects of mass unemployment on the mining communities of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The experience of writing The Road to Wigan Pier changed him profoundly. Deep underground among the miners of Wigan, Orwell discovered for the first time an England he could believe in and respect.

At different times, he referred to himself as a “Tory anarchist” and as a “democratic socialist”. His first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, understood his politics better than most. In a letter to a friend as her husband was working on a long condition of England essay as the bombs fell on London during the Blitz, she observed that George was writing “a little book explaining how to be a socialist, though Tory”. That book became in my view his greatest, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Eileen captured well the essence and appeal of Orwell’s politics: he was of the left but never rigidly on the left or with the left.

The second half of The Road to Wigan Pier is a bracing polemical attack on the bourgeois London left, on what he calls “book-trained” socialists who have no feel for or understanding of the patriotism of the “submerged working class”.

Do we need another book on Orwell? If it’s written by Colls, the answer is emphatically yes. His style is accessible, free from academic jargon and he is witty. In his earlier work, English Rebel (2013), Colls explored Orwell’s ambivalent relationship with England and his own sense of Englishness. In this book, he is less concerned with how Eric Blair became Orwell and more with how he is perceived today, in an era in which, more than any other twentieth century writer, he has been “memeified”.

Colls is no hagiographer. He leans into Orwell’s flaws, both as a man and as a writer, and he cites approvingly Anna Funder’s recent book Wiefdom, in which she accuses Orwell of cruelty towards Eileen: “We live in a time of peak Orwell and it might be the only way is down.”

Towards the end of his life, as he struggled with the pulmonary tuberculosis that would kill him in January 1950 at the age of 46, Orwell must have known that, after the success of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, his name and work would endure. Today, everyone discovers the Orwell they want and takes from him what they need. If we have indeed reached Peak Orwell, and if a backlash has truly begun, the only sensible response is to return to first principles and read the work itself, the books, the journalism, the essays, all written in the same clear-eyed, unadorned style.

As Colls observes, Orwell was a documentarist and a truth-seeker. He was not always right, and he could be priggish, but he tried to see the world as it was. This was a self-appointed task far braver and more demanding than it might seem in retrospect, at a time when so many around him were what he called “orthodoxy sniffers”, or else were in thrall to fascism and communism.