Orwell’s Awareness of The Human Condition

In 1938, while recovering in Kent from a likely Tubercular fit, not long after his time fighting in the Spanish civil war, George Orwell wrote a letter to the playwright Stephen Spender explaining why he had previously attacked him in print. The letter--written 85 years ago--speaks volumes about our contemporary internet moment in connection with political polarization.

Below is the crucial part of the letter and the link. Enjoy.

“You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you. I don’t know that I had ever exactly attacked you, but I had certainly in passing made offensive remarks about ‘parlour Bolsheviks such as Auden & Spender’ or words to that effect. I was willing to use you as a symbol of the parlour Bolshie because a. your verse, what I had read of it, did not mean very much to me, b. I looked upon you as a sort of fashionable successful person, also a Communist or Communist sympathizer, & I have been very hostile to the C.P. since about 1935, & c. because not having met you I could regard you as a type & also an abstraction. Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas.”

https://theamericanreader.com/15-april-1938-george-orwell-to-stephen-spender/