Getting Orwell wrong

In the New York Re­view of Books not long ago, the well-known British au­thor Ju­lian Barnes ran his eye over some com­pi­la­tions of George Or­well’s work. Think­ing about the school where a young Or­well was sent to live and learn, Barnes de­cides:

“You have to feel a lit­tle sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, or “Sambo” and “Flip” as they were known to their [stu­dents]. Dur­ing the first decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, they ran St. Cyprian’s, a prepara­tory school in East­bourne, on the south coast of Eng­land. It was no worse than many other such es­tab­lish­ments: the food was bad, the build­ing un­der­heated, phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment the norm… [The chil­dren’s] daily morale was de­pen­dent on whether a boy was in or out of favour with Flip.”

So Barnes would have us keep our sym­pa­thy for the pair of sadists who ran Or­well’s pri­mary school like a hideous boot camp and he jus­ti­fies their cru­elty by main­tain­ing that other schools were much the same. He ex­presses no feel­ings at all for the un­for­tu­nate peo­ple that Or­well spent time writ­ing about in his es­says ‘How The Poor Die’ or ‘The Spike’ (des­ti­tute tramps).

Just as im­por­tantly though, ac­cord­ing to Barnes (as an adult), Or­well was a “moral­ist and a pu­ri­tan”. But a sin­gle quick read of Or­well’s novel “1984” would show you that Or­well was well-versed in mat­ters of the flesh and de­sire. The sex­ual re­la­tion­ship be­tween the main char­ac­ter Win­ston and his lover Julia makes it abun­dantly clear that Or­well was no pu­ri­tan. (Ap­par­ently, away from his writ­ing Or­well was some­what of a lech, whose meth­ods of se­duc­tion oc­ca­sion­ally in­cluded the sud­den kiss and grope tech­nique).

As far as Or­well being a moral­ist, of course Barnes is right. I have read all of Or­well’s non-fic­tion (much of it sev­eral times) and can see that there is hardly a sen­tence that does not have a moral as­pect to it.

But Barnes is using the word moral­ist as un­com­pli­men­tary in his book re­view. The ques­tion must be whether some­one’s morals are hu­man­i­tar­ian and pro­gres­sive morals, not whether they have any at all. An ab­sence of morals or ethics is a vac­uum of be­liefs about how we treat each other.

He also cor­rectly crit­i­cises Or­well for being wrong about the fu­ture, and Or­well was cer­tainly mis­taken about some as­pects of the “1984 Or­wellian world”. For ex­am­ple, the state is shriv­el­ling rather than being the mon­ster ma­chine Or­well pre­dicted. That func­tion has been as­sumed by in­ter­na­tional cap­i­tal­ism rather than in­ter­na­tional gov­ern­ment.

Ju­lian Barnes also says that Or­well “is deeply un­the­o­ret­i­cal and wary of gen­eral con­clu­sions that do not come from spe­cific ex­pe­ri­ences.” But of course a thought is an ex­pe­ri­ence and when it is re­peated then built on it can be­come un-sin­gu­lar enough to pro­duce the­o­ries.

I think Or­well was pro­foundly the­o­ret­i­cal, in fact. He sim­ply did an ex­cel­lent job of dis­guis­ing it be­cause he did not trust in ideas alone. A good idea can quickly be­come a bad one when it bumps up against the phys­i­cal world and human na­ture. Com­mu­nism is an ex­am­ple of this, as he dis­cov­ered.

I think it would be more ac­cu­rate to say that Or­well was cer­tainly sus­pi­cious of those who did not ’love the soil’ as he did. He had a sen­si­ble dis­taste of pre­tence, pom­pos­ity and the grandiose. In short, he dis­liked in­tel­lec­tu­als as a species but used his in­tel­lect to point out his own short­com­ings as well as those of oth­ers.

Barnes is wrong to say that Or­well was “deeply un­the­o­ret­i­cal” just be­cause Or­well’s writ­ing did not use ob­vi­ously the­o­ret­i­cal lan­guage. Un­der­neath the plain phrases and con­tin­ual draw­ing from his ex­pe­ri­ences, Or­well’s work was burst­ing with the­o­ries about the human con­di­tion.

It’s a pity that Barnes has seem­ingly missed that.