George Orwell: A Life

Thoughts on Michael Shelden’s biography “Orwell”

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Eric Arthur Blair—more famously known as George Orwell (named so because “George” is a nice, familiar British name and he once lived near the Orwell River)—it must be said, was never a pussy. He lived what might be called a vertiginous existence. Dead by 46, he’d lived down and out among the working poor in London and Paris and among the miners in the north of London; had survived Tuberculosis since boyhood; had ridden a motorcycle on and off all his life; had been a policeman in Burma (at the time one of the most murderous areas in the British colonial empire) and had served valiantly in the Spanish Civil War, being shot in the throat. (Despite this he tried to serve in World War II but was rejected.) The man, let’s face it, had guts.

Orwell has always been a mystifying, misunderstood man. Reading about him in Michael Shelden’s biography “Orwell: The Authorized Biography” (1992) I realized how many similarities I share with the man. (No, I do not compare my writing talent with the genius that was Orwell. Not even close.) For one: He struggled to get his work published. His first published book (“Down and Out in Paris and London”) was released in 1933, when Orwell was 30. (As was my first published piece of fiction.) He was, surprisingly, not a formally educated writer. He attended St. Cyprian’s and then Eton College for grade and high school, and he wanted to go to Oxford, but his parents couldn’t afford it and he wasn’t able to get a scholarship and so he never attended college. (Eton covered his teen years.)

(It’s ironic, I think, that most of our best, most famous and most mimicked authors of the 20^th century (and many in the 21^st) never even went to college, let alone did an MFA in writing. Of all the writers you’d have expected very much to have gone to college, Orwell, the most acerbic, intelligent, witty political satirist would have been the one. But, no. Let this be a lesson to young writers today, being victimized by the upper-class delusion that they “must” do an MFA in order to be a “serious” writer. It’s also worth noting that everyone from George Washington (general in the American Revolutionary War and first United States president) to Earnest Hemingway *also* did not go to college.)

I did go to college, but it was spastic and erratic: I attended seven different colleges over the span of 11 years before finally getting a BA in writing from San Francisco State in 2013. (None of which, minus one class, helped me as a writer in any serious way. Life experience, particularly surviving alcoholism, gave me my creative element.)

Born in 1903 and dead by 1950, Orwell lived in fascinating, scary times. Totalitarian times. He witnessed the approaching end of the British Empire, World War I and II, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Franco, Mussalini, Hitler. The encroachment of western Democracy by nationalism, fascism, authoritarianism. He saw the earliest stages of the Cold War between the United States and Russia.

Orwell identified as a “democratic socialist,” but he spent his literary fuel and personal life criticizing socialism and socialists. He also, of course, did the same fighting against the scourge of fascism. But he grasped something profoundly crucial, which has been lost in our current time: He understood that when you go too far to the left, you end up clutching hands with the right. In other words: Leftism (socialism/communism) when gone too far will ultimately become a form of authoritarianism. This was largely his point in his brilliant, ironic political satire, “Animal Farm.” Orwell always loathed and mistrusted Stalinism and communist Russia. He grasped that the idea of a centralized state was dangerous. He also possessed incredible self-honesty and self-awareness; he understood that he himself was of the middle-class and was in essence a capitalist whether he liked it or not. Really, if you had to pick someone most similar to his values in action, it’d be Bernie Sanders.

Bernie—who I was thrilled by in 2016 and have since outgrown and fallen out of favor with, and see as unrealistic—embodied Orwell’s mixture of capitalism and socialism; maintaining a capitalistic free-market enterprise…but with strong regulation, and with things like socialized universal healthcare and strong social safety nets. Something like FDR’s New Deal plan of the 1930s. A more western European type of regulated capitalism. But nothing like the centralized planning of communist Russia.

Orwell always appreciated socialism, but criticized and often mocked the absurdity and naïve utopianism of socialists themselves.

“On the one hand you have the warm-hearted unthinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilisation down the sink and is quite willing to do so.”

― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions — notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful — are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Orwell of course has been hailed by the Left as an anti-fascist spokesman and hero, and strangely in modern times by the Right as a sort of anti-Woke free-speech thinker. Both are true and not true. Orwell was as heterodox as it gets. The very definition of a “free-thinker.” Even at his most loyal to socialism—when he belonged to the ILP, the Independent Labour Party—he was never fully “in” that or any other group. Not fully. Not completely. Orwell slipped labels and ideological chains like escaping slaves in 1850s Alabama. He was a man who constantly felt trapped by both sides. He needed freedom, of mind, body, and expression. He was an artist of the most consummate deliberation. A careful thinker, speaker and especially writer. He once said he completely rewrote most of his published books three times all the way through before publication, and sometimes whole pages and paragraphs up to half a dozen times. He was a writer interested in clarity, precision, communication. He would mock current day MFA “writing wizards” who love to use billion-dollar words every five sentences and long, flowery purple prose. Orwell was a true writer in the clearest sense: He wanted to tell you exactly what he thought and how he felt.

Wokeism and Conservatism today would both be anathema to Orwell’s thinking.

Quotes:

‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’

--"Orwell on Freedom”

“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

1984

“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

1984

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

        1984

Orwell was a man of principle when it came to his writing, but he was also human and flawed and weak like us all. He cheated on his first wife, an educated intellectual, Eileen Maud Blair. (She worked in the “Censorship Department” during WWII.) He resisted getting as much help as he could and should have related to his “weak lungs” which he’d had since boyhood. Born in British India, raised in rural England, he was a voracious reader, good in school, and yet often a little lost in life, a little directionless, and desirous of serious life experience. (Which he got as a cop in Burma.) He’s known globally of course for “Animal Farm” and, most notoriously, for his last novel, written in 1948 and published in 1949 just before he died, his magnum opus, the brilliant Mark Twain-like irony-riddled political dystopia/satire, “1984” (the title came from reversing the date he wrote the book, 1948).

But before “1984” (1949) and “Animal Farm” (1945) and in fact even before the year 1940, he’d published seven other books, all slim, a mix of nonfiction and novels, which ultimately created the foundational myth and popularity that was George Orwell. From “Down and Out in Paris and London” in 1933 (wherein he’d lived with and like the poor, Henry Miller-style) through Burmese Days (his first novel, highly autobiographical, covering his time as a policeman in Burma) to “Homage to Catalonia” (about the Spanish Civil War) to “Coming up for Air,” Orwell slowly wrote and published his books between 1933 and 1939, publishing roughly a book a year, until he finally landed at “Animal Farm,” which, due to the perfect timing (end of WWII and the start of the Cold War) and the inclusion of the book in the Left Book Club, sold 44,000 copies and essentially assured Orwell’s unruly, and unlikely fame. Four years later “1984” came out and he was lionized forever. That book was left as if hurled into the distant future by the author and we’ll probably still be referring to it in literary and pop culture in five hundred years.

Orwell, like many writers, was a loner. He liked living in rural, quiet areas, such as small rural towns in the English countryside, such as Southwold, where he was raised. (Though he did live on and off in London, and for eighteen months in Paris in his youth.) He was once a small-town grocer. He loved gardening. He spent hours and hours writing alone, particularly in 1948, while working on 1984 at his house he called Barn Hill, in Jura, an island off the coast of Scotland, while he was literally dying slowly of T.B. In many ways, Orwell preferred thinking, reading, writing, ideology, politics, gardening, being alone, to carrying on with other humans. (Another thing I relate to deeply.) He was an imperfect thinker, just as he was an imperfect man. He used far too many superlatives, especially related to politics; “All people who” and “all systems are” and “All totalitarian states say…” etc. His wife, Eileen, often teased him for this tendency. For being such a generally non-black-and-white binary thinker, his writing sometimes carried the strong carrion whiff of binary thinking.

It's impossible to pigeonhole someone like George Orwell and we shouldn’t attempt to. Ditto thinkers like Christopher Hitchens, or say Krishna murti or Aldous Huxley or Fyodor Dostoevsky, H.L. Mencken, etc. Instead, we should simply bask in their prose, what they left us, which, often, was a basket of rich, lush language, clear, concise prose, contradictions, open discussions, unfinished arguments, and belligerent, raw truths. If you want cheap political banners pulled out of context, like the Left now abuses Martin Luther King with to say support Woke racial rioting, you can do that with Orwell, too, whether it be for the cause of the far left or the far right. It’s hard to know exactly what Orwell would have thought of woke identity politics in the third decade of the 21^st century. Certainly it seems clear he would have supported the general idea of the white man having to give up systemic power and control after thousands and thousands of years. (Read his essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” about the notion that one day the Burmese will rise up against their white Anglo oppressors one day.) He probably would have cherished the lifting up of minority voices. He would have enjoyed the project of more government regulation and financial support to the American people.

But he would no doubt have hated the anti-free speech censorious totalitarian culture emerging both from the far right and the far-left, the book banning on both sides and the attempts to restrict speech. He would have hated the recent spat by lefties and DEI on Stanford University wherein a group of Wokies heckled a Federalist-inspired judge to speak about the law. He would have loathed, with an almost ribald anger, the left’s attempt (again, on Stanford University campus) to restrict hundreds of specific words (such as “rule of thumb” and “you guys” among many others) from use by college students. He would have absolutely detested the idea of “equity” and “equality of outcome,” versus equality and the equality of opportunity.

He would have cringed at the notion of racial obsession vastly overtaking the old-style traditional concerns of class, which affect all races and always have. He would have bashed the fact that many wealthy and upper middleclass white Lefties pretended that the worry was really race, regardless of class, and that poor whites don’t even really exist except as a distant, unimportant symbol of the past. (As if poor whites could even vote when the American nation was formed. As if white slaves hadn’t ever existed, in, say ancient Greece. As if white indentured servitude had never happened, servants who were literally bought, sold, beaten, raped and killed. As if the poor Jewish, Irish, Italian, Russian, German and other “white” races hadn’t experienced brutal poverty, prejudice, starvation and death in 19^th and 20^th century America. As if slavery and racism had never existed before the West “invented” it, as if Africa itself hadn’t enslaved fellow Africans far before the West as we grasp it today was even conscious of the trade.)

In short: Orwell would have mocked both sides. Yes, I said it: BOTH SIDES. Because both sides are fucking ridiculous. It’s not just the right. Or Trump. Or DeSantis. It’s AOC. The “Squad.” BLM. Social justice Warriors. Identitarians (usually white upper middleclass people) like Robin DeAngelo who absolutely *obsess* about race to the exclusion of anything else (particularly class), and Ibram X Kendi, the black Woke “thinker” (read: Woke Conspiracy Theorist, on par as the leftist version of say Alex Jones) who believes black people need to be racist against white people in order to level the playing field.

Orwell grasped intuitively that human beings are human beings—hence the problematic, complex human condition. Due to this condition, in reality socialism nor fascism could never likely prevail for long. Capitalism—which, whether mostly pure or with socialistic elements imbedded, like in western Europe—essentially runs and is the broad foundation of the globe now. Most of Western Europe is not socialist; they are capitalist nations with socialistic elements. (Some of which, such as socialized healthcare, we could stand to potentially use here in the States.) Even Russia is really a mix of capitalism and authoritarianism, but they aren’t strictly only one or the other. Poor African nations are rife with intertribal warfare and inner corruption, but even they are basically trying to be included in the global capitalist structure. Money runs the world. Capitalism—though deeply imperfect—seems to be the best of the worst systems man has been able to create so far. Perhaps something better will come down the pike in 500 years. People on the far-left of the political spectrum seem to forget about that funky thorn in the side of utopianism: Human Nature. The irony is that, by obsessing about identity the way these activists do, they’re in effect showing us their cards in real time; the tactics they use, trying to shut down free speech, eliminating books and harmful language they disagree with, shouting down law professors they are offended by: All this does is show the rest of us exactly how “human” we all are; we’re so blind to our own hypocrisy; we can’t even achieve a utopian notion of love without using illiberal hatred to “get” there.

In closing. Orwell knew better than perhaps any other thinker of the past 75-100 years that extremism, especially economic, class, racial, political, only leads in the end to national pain and suffering, and of course to more extremism. MLK—now rejected by the far left for his non-extremism—understood this, which is why he included poor whites in his class warfare analogies and discussions. He talked often about how the fight against segregation and racism wasn’t solely about black people, it was about all people. It was about America. (This remains true now.)

The grotesque, boring, predictable tug-of-war in current times between Red and Blue, Right and Left is beyond a caricature. It’s impossibly silly. Neither side can see itself at this point. Neither can take any personal or community responsibility. It’s pure tribal warfare; mud-slinging of the worst, most childish kind. When I talk to lefties they roll their eyes about people “on the right,” seeing them as anti-intellectual buffoons who don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Ditto those on the Right when speaking of Woke lefties. Everyone’s in an uproar about the very term “Woke,” as if the word itself doesn’t exist and is itself a “right wing hack.” But the truth is: Most words used in a political, racial, or gender area in 2023 have no true “definitions” anymore. It’s pure newspeak; doublethink. Define “racism.” Exactly; you can’t. Ask ten people what “racism” means and you’ll get twelve different answers. (12 on 10!) Ditto “woman” or “truth” or “free-speech” or “hate” or “black” or “white” or “Jew” etc etc etc, it goes on and on ad infinitum.

For the past ten years I’ve thought often to myself, Ok, now we’re really living in 1984. But all those previous years I was wrong. Now. Here. In 2023, and since 2020, really, and to a lesser degree starting in 2016, when Trump ran and the left reacted, we’ve “been” in 1984.

One day we’ll find our way through the political-psychological maze to something better, something more human, more compassionate, more sane. But until then, you’ll find me with my head buried in an Orwell book, reading what the man wrote about 2023, decades and decades ago.