Such, Such Were the Joys

Anyone reading Orwell's early work will be aware of his hostility to all things Scottish, which takes various forms, most particularly his deliberate use of the word 'Scotch' instead of 'Scots', because he was fully aware of how much annoyance this caused. I used to believe that this dislike dated from his time in the Burmese Police, where he encountered a particular kind of Scotsman, once common in the Imperial service. It was only after reading Such, Such Were the Joys, his essay on St. Cyprian's, his prep school, that I became aware of the true cause.

Cicely Ellen Philadelphia Vaughan Wilkes nee Comyn, the co owner of the school, better known to Orwell, or Eric Blair, I should say, as Flip deliberately encouraged a 'cult of Scottishness', in part derived from her pride in an assumed Scottish ancestry.

The Comyns were one of the great nobel houses of Medieval Scotland, and one-time rivals to King Robert Bruce. But more than that the cult, brought out all of Flip's latent snobbery, and left poor Eric with a deep sense of resentment:

The School was pervaded by a curious cult of Scotland, which brought out a fundamental contradiction in our standard of values. Flip claimed Scottish ancestry, and she favoured the Scottish boys , encouraging them to wear kilts in their ancestral tartan instead of school uniform, and even christened her youngest child by a Gaelic name...But underlying this was something quite different. The real reason for the cult of Scotland was that only very rich people could spend their summers there...Flip's face always beamed with innocent snobbishness when she spoke of Scotland. Occasionally she even attempted to trace a Scottish accent. Scotland was a private paradise which few initiates could talk about and make outsiders feel small.

If anyone is puzzled by this (Scots most of all!) I should make it clear that this 'Scotland' is not to be found in the backstreets of Glasgow, Edinburgh or Dundee, but on the grouse moors and by the salmon rivers, where the only Scots to be seen were beaters, game-keepers and ghillies! Such, indeed, were the joys

When I was sent away from home for the very first time I must confess I was a little bit tearful and fearful, but before this I used to soak up stories about girls' boarding schools and quickly learned to make the most of the opportunities offered by Wycombe Abbey, my old school, which I came to adore. But Eric, promising as he was as a scholar, was socially and personally slighted, embarrassed by his rather down-at-heel middle class origins. Because of the perceived insults he received at the hands of the Wilkes a 'Bolshie' attitude began to form, fully developed by the time he went to Eton, an attitude seems to me operating like a form of emotional armour, more than anything else.

I can only speculate here, but the English class system was much more rigid in his day, and I think he always felt himself to be an outsider; an outsider from his own middle-class milieu and an outsider from the working-class he adopted but never really seemed to like. The protagonists in his novels are always the same lower middle-class types, which is really no surprise. What is revealing is the way that some become such self-pitying egocentrics. Just think of the tiresome Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who digs his own social grave then blames everybody else when he lies in it! Please do not think I am hostile to Orwell; I'm not-I love his work, though some parts more than others, and the essays more than most of the fiction

Orwell and Spain-the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four

I wrote this piece on the suggestion of a user I met on another website. For me it’s also a kind of exegesis, based on the discoveries I’m making in reading Orwell’s journalism and essays, in every way more revealing than his novels. Before proceeding I should say that the most important book to read on the issues I’m about to explore is Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his experience in Spain, where he served with a Marxist militia until the summer of 1937, when he fled the Republic in fear of his life, not from the fascists but from the communists.

I’ve heard it said that Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s nightmare dystopia, represents an amalgam of totalitarian thought; a synthesis, if you like, of fascism and communism. It's not: this is a future based on Stalinism and Stalinism alone. Why should this be? Precisely because Orwell saw Stalinism in action in Spain; he saw the terror, the abuse of power, the murder of opponents, the adulation of a god-like leader, the torture of language and simple truths; he saw two plus two being made to make five.

It’s still believed-and I’ve noted this from comments I read elsewhere-that the Soviets supported the Spanish Republic with the intention of advancing a social revolution; they did not. When they came to Spain a revolution was already underway, guided by the native anarchist movement, always much stronger than the communists, and by local non-Soviet Marxist parties like the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista, known simply as the POUM, in whose militia Orwell served, though by accident rather than design. The Soviets came not to start a revolution; they came to stop one.

In 1933 Stalin got what was perhaps the greatest political shock of his life when Hitler came to power, destroying the KPD in the process, the strongest communist party outside Russia. It made nonsense of the Comintern’s ultra-left ‘Third Period’ strategy, which saw the principal enemy as democratic socialists, not fascists. It also considerably weakened the security of the Soviet state. So, in response, he moved towards a new strategy, that of the popular front, uniting all ‘democratic’ opinion, from liberals to communists, in an attempt to arrest the further advance of the right. Stalin was determined before all else to obtain the support of ‘bourgeois’ parties and ‘bourgeois’ governments. Spain saw this policy in action. It also suited his ends to turn on other groups on the Marxist left, groups like the POUM, who were accused of being ‘Trotsky Fascists’ on much the same basis as those accused in the Moscow show trials.

So, Orwell found himself caught in the currents of history. He found himself involved in a civil war within a civil war, as the communists in the International Brigades turned their guns on the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. He saw the NKVD in action, with people-socialists and anarchists-imprisoned without trail, including some of his friends. He saw black turned into white and back into white again. He saw history rewritten and language abused, with yesterday’s orthodoxy becoming today’s heresy.

Consider this passage from his essay "Inside the Whale":

…the USSR is no more scrupulous in its foreign policy than the rest of the Great Powers. Alliances, changes of front, etc. which only make sense as part of a game of power politics have to be explained and justified in terms of international Socialism. Evert time Stalin swaps partners, ‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape. This entails sudden and violent changes of ‘line’, purges, denunciations, systematic destruction of party literature, etc. etc. Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday.

This is it: this is the world of Big Brother, of the Ministry of Truth, of Newspeak. There is no Nazi component-beyond simple totalitarianism-because, you see, Hitler said what he thought and thought what he said. There were no intellectual perversions in National Socialism because there was no intellect. There was in communism. Without communism, the communism of Stalin, I would go so far as to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been inconceivable, inconceivable by Orwell anyway. That would only have left Yevgeny Zamyatin to point to a possible future based on a murderous present.

Orwell and Ingsoc

As part of my holiday reading I’ve been glancing over the essays and correspondence of George Orwell, one of the true artists of English prose. Two of his pieces in particular, Why I Write and Politics and the English Language, should be compulsory reading for all those in public life.

Anyway, my explorations caused me to think specifically of the author’s political commitments, his commitment to what he calls ‘democratic socialism.’ It seems to me that his choices are at variance with his deepest sympathies: he says he is a socialist, yes, but he does not seem to like socialists or socialism. I would go even further: he seems to despise the practitioners and distrust the promise.

For me Orwell is a natural Tory in the way I would like to perceive all Tories: clear-sighted, honest and direct; people who embrace and preserve what is good in the past while always looking for ways of improving the present. Orwell’s commitment to honesty and sincerity in politics are almost palpable in his writings. I feel sure that he would have loathed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, those purveyors of the modern forms of Newspeak. I feel sure that he would have hated the lies, the hypocrisy, the spin and the deceit that are such a part of whole New Labour phenomena.

Consider this. Orwell’s utopias are past and conservative; his dystopias are future and socialist. Take, for example, Coming Up for Air, his last pre-war novel. In this George Bowling, disillusioned with modern life, with his life, comfortable as it is, goes of in search of the past, his memories of a particular time and a given place: a piece of Edwardian England just before the First World War, the world of his childhood. But Lower Binfield, the place he returns to, has changed beyond recognition. The thing he came to look for in particular, a pond full of fish, has gone, replaced by a rubbish dump. It’s there to serve a new housing development, populated by progressive oddities: vegetarians, nudists and socialists! Bowling retreats, with echoes of Nineteen-Eighty Four in his head.

Orwell’s experience of socialism is one of constant and continuing disillusionment. So, why did he embrace it at all, and why did he adhere to it? First, I largely suspect for personal reasons, rather than reasons of deep conviction. If one reads Such, Such Were the Joys, his account of his time at Saint Cyprian’s, his prep school, it’s clear that Orwell, who came from a respectable but rather down-at-heel family, felt slighted by the prevailing snobbery of the place, the cult of money and connections. He became something of an ‘outsider’, if you like, amongst his own class, the better-off members of his class. He did well enough in crammers to get into Eton, but he did not shine at Eton, deepening his sense of alienation. Socialism became the political expression, if you like, of his mood of personal resentment.

So, to take the second dimension, why did he continue to embrace socialism when he saw what socialism was in practice? Simply because he was filled with a bogus sense of historical inevitability, the sense that the old had to give way to the new, and the new had to take the form which left him and others like him looking for a place; déclassé intellectuals who had nothing to fear but dropping their aitches! He held to socialism because he hoped to humanise socialism. If he had lived just a little longer I feel sure that he would have returned to his natural political home. But, whatever direction he may have travelled in, he deserves to be placed alongside Edmund Burke and Jonathan Swift, alongside the best of our critics and satirists.

Orwell and Communism

I have always felt it to be wrong that Orwell has been classified as an anti-Stalinist, when a reading of his work gives plenty of indications that he was opposed to Communism in general. Even Animal Farm is only in a partial sense a parable against Stalinism, though this is the form in which it is generally understood. But careful reading will show that the ideal is corrupted well before Napoleon takes absolute power.

On the wider point, let the author speak for himself;

It is probably a good thing for Lenin's reputation that he died so early. Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would have been preferable to Stalin. (New English Weekly, January, 1939)

The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is absolutely false, creates the impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to communism; but it is doubtful if there is much difference. (Notes on Nationalism, October 1945)

Now, as far as his membership of the Marxist POUM during the Spanish Civil War is concerned, this seems to have come about largely by accident;

I was associated with the Trotskyists in Spain. It was chance that I was serving in the POUM militia and not another, and I largely disagreed with the POUM 'line' and told the leaders so freely...(Partisan Review, Sept.-October, 1942)

Orwell's own politics are neatly summarised in two of his essays, The Lion and the Unicorn and The English People. He draws his inspiration from a long native radical tradition, a tradition deeply hostile to the abstractions of alien political theories;

The various other Marxist parties, all of them claiming to be the true and uncorrupted successors of Lenin, are in an even more hopeless position. The average Englishman is unable to grasp their doctrines and uninterested in their grievances. And in England the lack of a conspiratorial mentality which has developed in police-ridden European countries is a deep handicap. English people in large numbers will not accept any creed whose dominant notes are hated and illegality. The ruthless ideologies of the Continent-not merely Communism and Fascism, but Anarchism, Trotskyism, and even ultramontane Catholicism-are accepted in their pure form by only the intelligentsia, who constitute a sort of island bigotry amid the general vagueness. (The English People).

Burke and Orwell

This is the bicentenary of the death of Thomas Paine, a political writer I have no particular respect for, despite the modish enthusiasm, I thought I would add a piece on the two I admire most: Edmund Burke and George Orwell.

Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Reflections on the Revolution in France might be read as prophecies and warnings. Orwell's chief concern is with the globalisation of totalitarianism. Edmund Burke, writing in 1790, warned that the upheavals in France would only lead to further political destruction, terror and dictatorship.

Both men also expressed views that were not wholly welcome in their own political and intellectual milieus; in the case of Burke, the radical Whigs of Charles James Fox; and in the case of Orwell, the circle most associated with the left-wing demimonde. Their critiques were thus all the more trenchant because they were made from within the citadel, so to speak, not from the perspective of the establishment.

Orwell and Burks also shared a distrust of their fellow intellectuals. Orwell expressed his contempt of a certain kind of 'Bloomsbury highbrow' in The Lion and the Unicorn, his wartime essay on socialism and patriotism, just as Burke disliked Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'literary cabal', as he put it, of the French philosophes. On the fate of Marie Antoinette he wrote "But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded."

Both Burke and Orwell, two of the greatest political writers in the English language, were, in essence, defending human values threatened with destruction by waves of violence and intolerance. Both stand against the notion that cruel means justify abstract ends. I'm reminded, in particular, of Burke's warning in Letters to a Noble Lord to those aristocrats of his day who embraced radical chic-"...these philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump."

But it is in his riposte to Rousseau, the grandfather of Fascism and Communism, that he is at his greatest: "Society is indeed a contract...but becomes a partnership...between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born." You will find an echo of this in Orwell’s defence of patriotism as "…the bridge between the future and the past."