Used To Be A Socialist
Robert Colls’ George Orwell: English Rebel

3,162 words

Robert Colls
George Orwell: English Rebel
Oxford University Press, 2013

Yet on the political and cultural left, the very name of Orwell is enough to evoke a shiver of revulsion.
Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters

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Robert Colls’ 2013 biography of George Orwell intrigued me with the opening line of its introduction: “George Orwell was what they used to call a ‘Socialist.’”

Colls was persuaded by a friend to write on Orwell’s Englishness, and the result was George Orwell: English Rebel. This opening made me suspect the book might go some way to answering my big question about Orwell. Given that he was a self-avowed socialist, why have today’s socialists abandoned Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name)? Colls suggests that while Orwell thought he had found a home in socialism, he was never really at home as a socialist writer:

A lot of Orwell’s writing at this time is uncomfortable with itself and its subject. Although purporting to be on the side of the people, the sentiment is more misanthropic than political, and there is no voice.

Orwell was wary of the socialist “voice” in the wrong hands:

In Barnsley, he hears Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, speak from a socialist angle and ‘bamboozle’ his audience into believing he stands with them.

I had an email exchange with a friend in London about the Colls book. Like myself,  my friend – a journalist like Orwell – is of the political right but stated forthrightly that Orwell was “something of a hero” for him, and I agree. The Old Etonian (Orwell, not my friend) wrote from personal experience about becoming a tramp, going down coal mines, and getting shot in the throat – through the throat – while in Aragon in Spain, fighting Franco’s fascistas. Line up, O modern English essayists, journalists, and novelists, and remind me what it was you did today.

Orwell wanted to muck in, roll up his sleeves, be in the thick of things:

His answer to bad political writing was not more university degrees in English or Politics. The answer lay not in the lecture halls but on the streets, where you learned how to make yourself understood.

I have written about Orwell on a couple of occasions here at Counter-Currents. Last year’s was on Orwell and Englishness, and it has a potted biography should you need one of Orwell. If I may – with all due modesty – direct you to that, it will explain why I am not going to dwell on Orwell’s life here, but just on Mr. Colls’ reading of his attachment – or otherwise – to socialism, and Colls’ is a political biography. My piece can be read as a companion piece to this one if you are new, or relatively new, to Orwell. I also wrote here back in 2021 about 1984 read as a love story, which it is, and a very powerful one at that.

Colls gives the Englishman who should be on a banknote (it will probably be some black nurse next) quite a rough ride in this book at times, but his respect for Orwell is always present and correct. This is all well and good. Biographers who love their subject should never descend into hagiography.

Colls shows Orwell as a man of contradictions:

Orwell spent the best part of his adult life saying he was a socialist and a non-believer, but those who knew him well swore that deep down he was really a conservative, and there are a number of (good) books claiming he was a Christian.

A conflicted man seeking conflicts, then. The experience of Empire moulded Orwell, but Colls leaves the impression that the aspiring writer filling in arrest forms in the heat and humidity of Burma would have had more or less the same formative influences he took from the Burmese police force had he pursued any other career. Orwell was geared to find inequality wherever he went and in whatever he saw. You don’t have to look far if you seek inequality in this world, the question is what you think of it, what you judge it to be. The socialist sees inequality as an inherent evil, the conservative as part of the natural order, if not the natural order itself.

But Orwell’s natural order was partly constructed by himself, Colls suggests, and he was his own subject as much as the world he described with such journalistic precision. His own unease with himself externalizes itself. Early essays such as Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging show a writer who sees something which made me think of Mark E. Smith, having looked at his autobiography here last week.

The Fall’s second album, Dragnet, said Smith, was about “the horror of the normal”. So too Orwell’s writing. Colls quotes the famous passage from The Road to Wigan Pier, in which Orwell sees a woman from a train. She is poking a stick up a drain to unblock it, and Orwell’s description of the utter desolation in her expression is exemplary of his presentation of the everyday, but viewed under a shroud. An almost identical fictional version of the scene takes place in 1984.

Orwell shares with Smith a peculiar Englishness, difficult to define but irrefutably present. I agree with Colls that Orwell is a better essayist than novelist – “Orwell forged an aggressive, unrelenting essay style that would come to be his trademark”, writes the biographer. But to instantiate Orwell’s Englishness, a whole chapter is devoted to one of Orwell’s lesser-known novels, Coming Up for Air. The anti-hero – Orwell never really had novelistic heroes – George Bowling is an unlikeable Englishman, but Orwell situates himself with the English here, warts and all. There are, however, reservations for Colls:

I am trying to prove an absence: Orwell saw his identity as his own affair, Englishness as a backdrop, the British Empire in the wings, the state nowhere to be seen…

I am not saying in this book that Englishness is the key to Orwell. I am saying that it was something that he thought with as well as about, and that it stayed with him from first to last.

Politically, Orwell was a slave to his own skepticism. Albert Camus says somewhere that he wished there were a political party for people who thought they might be wrong about things, and Orwell would have been a high-ranking party member. Situating himself between the twin poles of British political life was never going to be easy:

He loathed nationalism, but defined Englishness for a generation. He was an enemy of the right, but had little to say in favour of the left.

Orwell despised left-wing intellectuals, and this has relevance today as there are no left-wing intellectuals now, not in the sense of Stephen Spender or Malcolm Muggeridge (before he found out the ghastly truth about the USSR). There is a suggestion that Orwell finds these characters distasteful rather than intellectually negligible. Perhaps it was the lifestyle of the left which repelled this Old Etonian. Colls notes of Gordon Comstock, the anti-hero in Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying: “Gordon whinges a lot in the belief that this makes him left-wing.”

The rather dapper Orwell draws a cartoonish picture of the socialist which shows his distaste:

For his part, Orwell recognized a scribbler when he saw one: ‘Sometimes I look at a Socialist . . . the intellectual tract writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation— and wonder what the devil his motive really is.’

The three books which formed the script for Orwell’s version of socialism came at the problem from three different angles, and this is a large part of Orwell’s appeal. If he wanted to know what a particular societal environment or lifestyle (as we would call it today) was like, he went out and did it. Orwellian pragmatics, one might call it.

Down and Out in Paris and London immersed Orwell in the life of the tramping and itinerant poor on both sides of the English Channel, The Road to Wigan Pier took him down Lancashire coal-mines, and Homage to Catalonia got him shot [1] while seeing militant, military socialism in action. These texts triangulated Orwell’s socialism, but still didn’t offer him firm socialist ground on which to stand, although the impulse was there:

He was not averse to epiphanies of the people. He had had one in Wigan, and he had had one in Barcelona, and he had had one recently, or so he said, in a dream.

The dream was in 1939 and concerned the coming World War. It taught him that he was patriotic, and this may have jarred against the socialist epiphany he sought, or thought he sought. The only reason Orwell didn’t have an epiphany when down and out is that, as he notes, when you are poor “all you think about is money.”

But Colls’ original aim for his book, to write about Orwell’s Englishness, is what gives the book its lasting flavor. Orwell’s socialism is inextricably bound up with his own country, seen either from its industrial heartland, its poorhouses, or from a distance in Spain:

Orwell’s great reconciliation with England, his England, began in 1936 and was complete by 1940. It started out in working-class Wigan, gained ground in revolutionary Barcelona, and came home to him when war was declared in 1939.

Homage to Catalonia is dazzling war journalism, but Barcelona disillusioned Orwell. He was at war within himself as well as with Franco’s fascists, and as intrigued and pleased as he was to see a city with the left in charge, he saw too many of their anomalies too close at hand, as well as their ridiculous internecine squabbling.

The Road to Wigan Pier, in my view, is an excellent introduction to Orwell for the newcomer. The Old Etonian wanted to see the working man at work and, while the modern BBC (for whom Orwell later worked) would have interviewed a few miners and their families, with appropriate solemnity and empathy for the plight of the pit man, Orwell went down the pit with them. It could be up to three hours’ walk from pit shaft to coalface, bent double and walking in the dark through the coal dust, and miners were thus generally short, stocky men. Orwell was well over six feet and had TB. This is not journalism, it’s hyper-journalism.

Setting aside Orwell’s inner convolutions over the working class and their apparent inability or unwillingness to grasp socialism (the same lassitude which exercised Lenin over the failure of the international working class to rise up and seize the means of production), The Road to Wigan Pier is something of an industrial masterpiece. Its descriptions of the mines are on a par with those in Zola’s brilliant novel of the French pits, Germinal. But Orwell’s inner contradictions are located by Colls with as keen a psychological eye as a political one:

Orwell puts himself forward as the man who wants to save you with the truth, just as he was saved. But who is this ‘you’? Not the miners, that’s for sure. They may need saving, they may even need socialism, but they don’t need George Orwell. Orwell is writing on behalf of miners, but he is not writing for them. Rather, he is writing for himself, because he has seen great things; and then he is writing for those on the left, who need to see great things. Only then would socialists be able to put socialism right and make it popular. Orwell never proposed socialism as something that might be done unto him. Rather it is to be done unto them, with Orwell taking care of his own business.

Socialism would remain an ill-fitting suit for Orwell except as the very theorizing he so despised in left-wing intellectuals – fellow left-wing intellectuals, as Colls notes. It would go through phases, certainly, but whether Orwell’s reflexive class consciousness or a deeper political skepticism kept him from fully realizing his socialism, something did. He was certainly anxious not to be seen patronizing the poor:

Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, took him to task in the Daily Worker (17 March 1937) for saying workers were smelly, and the Worker repeated the charge over the summer. Orwell was at pains to refute it.

But Orwell could no more help his class than any Englishman can. A man who valued solitude as a writer, he noted that it was never possible to be alone in a working-class household. Colls has a tendency to criticize Orwell for his middle-class reactions to an alien environment, but that would be like criticizing the lanky Orwell for being 6’ 3″. Class consciousness has receded in England since Orwell died in 1950, but it remains a vestigial presence.

Orwell’s war was once again a mass of contradictions.

He had seen the reality of warfare from close quarters in Catalonia, but this was very different. The tubercular Orwell stood no chance of seeing action, but in an age of long-range aerial bombardment there was no need to go abroad to get blown up, as Orwell and his wife would have been had they been at home when their house in Kilburn was hit by a V-1 flying bomb. They were with relatives. Orwell had what used to be called “a good war”, but as a writer, a chronicler of events:

Not fit for the forces and possibly not thought reliable enough for intelligence work, he had to make do with the Home Guard. By night he did theatre reviews, unwillingly. By day he pondered on what he saw and heard, watched the drama unfold, and turned his diary into a war diary.

After the end of the war and despite his firm backing of Clement Attlee’s landslide government victory in 1945, bringing with it an avowedly socialist program, “Orwell was beginning to forgive the right more than the left”, writing favorably of Waugh and defending two of England’s most consummate 20th century English writers of Englishness, Kipling and Wodehouse, both of whom he might have been expected to disapprove of.

In the aftermath of war, and having produced Politics and the English Language and The Lion and the Unicorn (complete with its six-point socialist plan for the masses), Orwell turned to the book for which he is rightly most famous on the political Right (but on which the Left are not so keen).

Colls brings home a fact often overlooked, which is that Orwell wrote The Last Man in Europe (a title later changed to 1984) on the Scottish island of Jura as a dying man. Hie wife and family had died, his brother-in-law had made what the newspapers have always called “the ultimate sacrifice”, killed in action in World War 2. Death was hardly a stranger.

As prescient as it is, and as brilliant as Orwell’s use of the philosophy of language he must have absorbed undoubtedly is, there is a major difference between 1984 and today’s Britain. Winston Smith has it explained to him that Newspeak is the only language which actually gets smaller year on year. This is not what Starmer’s people want. They want the same amount of words, more even, and they wish to genetically modify them in order to entrap the white populace into using them in a public forum, undeniable and indelible. O’Brien wants to reduce language so people are literally incapable of committing thought crime. Starmer wants language just as it is but as ambiguous as possible so people can commit thought crime, even unwittingly. For Orwell, language devolved to prose and good prose was like a clean glass window. For today’s socialists, language is a means of entrapment. Orwell would have rebelled against authority today just as he did when he was at the height of his literary powers:

Orwell spent his life fighting those who wanted to ‘control life’ and ‘entirely refashion people’ ‘with an absolute authority which penetrates into a man’s innermost being.’

See today’s Airstrip One. Colls draws an accurate picture of the relevance of 1984 to England’s current plight:

Nineteen Eighty-Four envisages the end of England (‘Airstrip One’) by the wiping out of its identity, the brutalization of its people, and the manipulation of its language, truth and logic.

This last sentence is a direct reference to A. J. Ayer’s 1926 book, Language, Truth, and Logic. Orwell would almost certainly have read this seminal work of philosophy of language (despite Colls finding him “a writer with a taste for the ethnographic over the philosophic”), and I wrote on it here at Counter Currents. Colls neatly isolates Orwell’s own philosophy of language:

The more language was removed from everyday life, he argued, the more abstract and untestable it became. And the more abstract and untestable it became, he argued, the more likely it would come to serve ideological purposes.

Orwell’s quest may have been for socialism, but his lesson is that political writing need not be about politics. Pleasingly, Orwell’s varied choice of subject matter is reminiscent of the regimen here at Counter Currents, where although there is a political center of gravity, you cannot predict the canon. Here, you will find essays on paganism, parenthood, politics and punk rock, just as Orwell wrote on boys’ comics, saucy seaside postcards, football and how to make the perfect cup of tea. As Colls notes, Orwell was writing for himself and not for the socially dispossessed. We are fortunate in this.

By the end, a sea change had come over Orwell’s socialism, and it returns him to us as a writer who must be read in the context of our struggle against very dark forces today. Don’t theorise; act:

Orwell had given up on seeing socialism as a set of correlates and had come to see it as the life of the people as applied to the life of the nation.

Orwell is very much still with us, whoever claims him politically: “Rodden [one of Orwell’s many biographers] cites him as ‘more quoted and referenced than any other modern writer.”

We all know the importance and the prescience of 1984 – the kufr Koran – but Orwell needs a thorough re-reading from the political Right. It isn’t necessary to explain away Orwell’s socialism or appear to be an apologist for it because Orwell is important despite his socialist leanings, not because of them. His internal struggles personify why socialism is wrong. It is time to claim this greatest of Englishmen for our own, to induct him into the pantheon. The left don’t want Orwell and they certainly don’t deserve him, while the right have not made enough of him.

Notes

[1] Wrote Orwell of the ordeal: “I thought of the man who had shot me…I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment, I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting.” Homage to Catalonia. San Diego (CA): Harcourt Brace. 1952: 185–7, 190.