Celebrating England’s greatest blogger: George Orwell

I go through a phase of reading George Orwell every five years or so. Of course, I have all the novels, but I haven’t reread them for years (although I enjoyed them hugely when I was teenager, despite our English teacher’s dismissal of them as “journalistic”). It’s the non-fiction I return to regularly: the four volumes in the Penguin Collected Essays, Letters and Journalism of George Orwell series, five of the eleven volumes in Secker & Warburg’s Complete Orwell series, a collection of his Observer stuff, and I’m currently reading the 2008 paperback edition of  Orwell in Tribune 1943-7, edited by Paul Anderson, who did a great job. 

Orwell’s work for Tribune reads like the world’s best-ever personal blog. As the title of his column - “As I Please” - suggests, he covered exactly what he wanted, and he covered everything. Read most personality columnists or bloggers, and they stuff rapidly falls into a recognisable pattern - daffy dame in her twenties, married journo with a useless husband and crazy kids, jolly angry right-winger, compassionate, bleeding heart liberal female... they have a shtick, as I believe it’s called. Orwell was shtickless. In fact, he was so brilliant, so relentlessly original, so immediate, so eclectic, so down-to-earth and so erudite, his columns are unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Orwell was undoubtedly, by a mile, the greatest essayist and jobbing journalist working in England in the 20th Century (there were better letter-writers, diarists and novelists). 

I’m hardly the first person to reach this conclusion, and I certainly won’t be the last. The question is, given he’s such a confirmed lefty, and given how incredibly irritating most left-wing writing is, why do so many right-wingers adore him?

Unlike most contemporary commentators, he isn’t trying to show how clever or caring or witty he is: he really does appear to be that strange animal – the writer who’s more interested in what he’s saying than in what it tells us about him. Consequently, he was as honest as they come. Who else, when discussing a short story competition organised by the journal he’s writing for would tell his readers, “…the great majority [of the stories] were, in my opinion, very bad… without character interest and usually written in a slovenly way”. Nothing like buttering up your audience!

He is refreshingly, uniquely untribal – his fellow-socialists, famously, come in for a terrible mauling, and this is in a left-wing publication! He constantly attacks the idea that leftists should hide certain facts because they would be “unhelpful” to the cause – in one example, he cites the refusal of socialist journalists to report that, as Russia occupied large parts of Europe at the end of the war, its beast-like soldiers were raping anything that moved. 

Orwell constantly attacks cherished left-wing notions. For instance, far from agreeing that sport helps to spread international understanding and harmony, he describes it as “an unfailing cause of ill-will”. He dismisses the notion that scientists are largely on the side of internationalism by pointing out that the vast majority of them are only too happy to do what they’re told, no matter who’s in power. He savages the notion that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” or that “all parts of the world are now interdependent” - “Actually, the effect of modern inventions has been to increase nationalism, to make travel enormously more difficult, to cut down the means of communication between one country and another, and to make the various parts of the world less, not more dependent on one another…” He is brilliant on the way the word “fascist” is sprayed around as a largely meaningless insult (some thing really never change). He has a go at the TUC for refusing to allow Polish refugees to work down the mines, even thought their contribution was needed for the war effort (Workers of the world...etc.)

No wonder Orwell hated the phrase “toe the line” – not only was it a cliché, but he was simply incapable of doing it.

He is often astonishingly prescient. This what he has to say on the use of music in restaurants and holiday resorts: “Its function is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude”, and goes on to suggest that the aim is to return us to the womb “where one’s thoughts, if any, were drowned by a continuous rhythmic throbbing”. But his predictive powers often fail him:  he’s dead right about the world resolving itself into two or three hugely powerful spheres of influence after the war - but utterly wrong about what’ll happen inside these spheres. But at least he was always willing to stick his neck out.

Then there are the small details of everyday life: wondering whether lifting the injunction against turn-ups on trousers is really a good thing and comparing 1944 to pre-war prices (“Small, very bad quality coconut fibre scrubbing-brush, price before the war 3d: present price 1/9d.”)

He is painfully honest about his own profession – his explanation of why reviewers are so timid when it comes to attacking the books they’ve been sent sounds spot on (they don’t care about the vast majority of them, barely glance at them, and they won’t be sent any more if they’re nasty). He’s also endlessly interesting when writing about other areas he knows about, such as the BBC, political journals, Spain, internecine left-wing fighting, newspapers, farming, the poor and nature. 

Of course, there’s quite a lot of socialist nonsense in there as well – his attitude to religion and the upper-classes quickly grates, as does his relentless refusal to accept that capitalism – as represented by America – can ever really work. Only a lefty could write: “there is no reason to think that the supposed acquisitive instincts of the human being could not be bred out in a couple of generations”, or this: “If the poor are not much better dressed, at least the rich are shabbier”. When entering this mode, he seems to temporarily switch off his intellect and run along the rails that almost all other left-wing writers lazily ride. But, on the whole, you can never be quite sure what line he’s going to take on any subject - or which subject he’ll choose to cover.

Apart from the liveliness of his mind, the depth of his reading, his genuine interest in the minutiae of daily life, his honesty and courage, the sheerquality of the writing makes him marvellously readable – and re-readable. For instance, this is from an article about British attitudes to Jews:  “Nor is it any use, in my experience, to talk about the persecution of the Jews in Germany. If a man has the slightest predisposition to anti-Semitism, such things bounce off his consciousness like peas off a steel helmet.” What a brilliant image!

Why do I think of him as a blogger? Because so much of what he writes seems so contemporary - on practically every page (screen?) he’s discussing things we’re still still talking about today: I hate the idea that writers from the past have to be made to sound relevant to the here and now - but Orwell just is!

All that makes George Orwell, to my mind, one of the greatest Englishmen of the 20th Century, and a socialist we can all cherish, no matter what our political leanings.