Homage to Orwelliana

I

George Orwell continues to inspire worldwide readers and a tsunami of academic criticism.  “Orwellian” has two contradictory meanings: it may describe dark worlds of totalitarian oppression or, conversely, clear, honest and decent ideas.  His literary qualities are vigorous style, engaging honesty and sly wit; his personal qualities are integrity, idealism and commitment.  As political leaders — including the President of the United States — become increasingly authoritarian, his warnings are alarmingly up-to-date.  As Kingsley Amis observed, “No modern writer has Orwell’s air of passionately believing what he has to say and being passionately determined to say it as forcefully and simply as possible.”

The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell  (Oxford UP, 2025. 806p, $210/£161) contains essays by 48 authors of around 15 pages each.  It would have been useful to include more than one European academic and a chapter on Orwell’s posthumous influence.  The editor, Nathan Waddell, took five years to herd these unruly academics into the Oxford corral.  I sympathise: having edited seven collections of original essays, I finally decided it was easier to write the books myself.

There are only two references to unpublished material in the Orwell Archive in London, and no extended analyses of individual works.  The Oxford Handbook is solidly based on Peter Davison’s superb 20-volume edition of Orwell’s Complete Works and on his massive index that provides complete references to every subject.  So the critics don’t have to read all the books they discuss.

The audience for this expensive encyclopedic work, not meant to be read but only dipped into, is limited to Ph.D. students and Orwell scholars.  Few other readers would attempt to penetrate this heavy-going but often familiar and obvious book.  One author gives a two-page plot summary of Nineteen Eighty-Four (NEF); others unhelpfully affirm that Orwell has become an icon and enjoys a celebrated place among essayists, that his literary masterpiece is the fable Animal Farm and that NEF is set in a future of totalitarian rule.

In a plodding dissertation style, the authors frequently say what they’re going to do instead of really getting on with it.  Several indulge in obfuscation: “NEF is also structured with the subversive potential of analogical perception in mind.”  The proper style of certain awkward phrases should be: longest, not largest; less than a year, not almost a year before; perfect, not most perfect. “Raises hackles” is a cliché, “speech crashes” a mixed metaphor.

Though the Handbook is thematic rather than biographical, some personal details appear.  One contributor states that Orwell’s great-grandfather “was probably of Scottish ancestry” and—more assuredly on the same page—that “the Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish”.  The Indian Opium Agency, where Orwell’s father spent his entire career, “monitored poppy farmers and enforced contracts with local farmers on behalf of the East India Company”, though the difference between poppy farmers and local farmers is unclear.

Orwell often called the Auden generation the “pansy Left”, so it’s amusing to learn that his working-class friend Jack Common said that Orwell “talked a pansy English owing to his unfortunate education” at Eton.  Like Melville, Hemingway and Malraux, Orwell was a man of action who did not go to university.  Though he had the resources of the BBC and the Observer, he complained about how difficult it was to find certain books by Leo Tolstoy and George Gissing (whose imprisonment for theft aroused Orwell’s interest), but never joined the London Library where he could have found and borrowed those books.

He indulged in wilful privation and created self-torturing characters, and like many polemicists, he expressed opinions as if they were facts.  He was also capable of reversing accepted religious and legal truths with a Wildean paradox: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”  His greatest lines thrust a dagger into moral and theological weaknesses.  He observed of Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool, “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.”  The five alliterative “s” words link the pseudo-creators, buggers and idle parasites with the moral flaw of the writer.  One critic notes that Orwell “praises Graham Greene for the plots and explorations of moral dilemmas” in his “distinguished Catholic novels”. But he doesn’t mention Orwell’s devastating criticism of The Heart of the Matter: “If Scobie believed in Hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women.”

The Handbook includes a few insights about Orwell’s personal life and marriage.  He thought abstract and unintelligible “philosophy should be forbidden by law”, but bought a new set of braces to have lunch at the Ritz with Earl (Bertrand) Russell.  An author notes “Orwell’s beloved English cooking” and taste for fine restaurants, good food and drink, which clash—in a typical paradox—with Orwell insouciantly eating the eels his wife had left out for the cat.

Orwell’s wife Eileen was willing, though not happy, to accept their working-class existence.  A contributor quotes Orwell’s letter to his lover saying that Eileen “wished I could sleep with you about twice a year, just to keep me happy”. Eileen died after uterine surgery.  But the chapter on feminism quotes with approval Richard Keeble’s ludicrous medical diagnosis that portrays Eileen as the heroine of a sentimental romance: “his constant affairs during his marriage may well have contributed to the sudden death of his wife in 1945 from a broken heart.”

The authors have been programed to blindly accept some influential but biased “authorities”.  Edward Said’s Orientalism is not “towering”, but filled with distortions, lies and crude propaganda.  If Westerners hadn’t written “Oriental” history, their history would not exist.  Orwell volunteered and was wounded in the Spanish Civil War, so the approval of Salman Rushdie’s attack on his “political quietism”, rather than on Henry Miller’s, is absurd.

II

The Handbook is uneven and spoiled by many weak chapters, especially those on race and childhood.  The most pointless chapter includes deadly charts and statistics; the most otiose are two chapters totalling 31 pages on obscure women, dragged into the book as a sop to feminists.  They have no significant connection to Orwell and add nothing to our understanding of his work.  The discussion of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian nightmare, The Handmaid’s Tale, influenced by the man she called “her hero”, is more à propos.  The Diversity chapter on mediocre and off-putting works about Afrofuturism and Queer Speculative Fiction cites Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, is wildly off the mark and should have been excluded from this overlong tome.

The editor is pleased to announce that his authors “rightly don’t shy away from taking Orwell to task for his failures”.  An Indian contributor, who seizes the high moral ground and thinks her current PC views will prevail forever, tediously and predictably condemns Orwell as a racist (five times) and imperialist.  She dutifully ignores his portrait in Burmese Days of the sympathetic educated Indian, Dr. Veraswami, and his vitriolic attack on imperialism.  Elizabeth Lackersteen in Orwell’s novel has, to quote Orwell’s cockney speech, “nudding whatever to do wif” Dr. Frankenstein’s Elizabeth.  The author of “Race and Empire” also deplores “our continued amnesia about the legacies of British imperialism,” but cites 36 endnotes on this subject.  The British Empire did not “begin to spawn a new afterlife” after World War II.  In fact, bitter anti-colonial wars broke out in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus.  Her feeble conclusion is “black and brown lives matter”.  We don’t need to hear this ill-informed and propagandistic attack yet again.

Many contributors summarise and repeat previous work on their subject, and then make a desperate effort to add their own mite.  Orwell’s childhood, exhaustively explored by his biographers, leaves scant space to maneuvre, and his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom’s Eric & Us is a completely unreliable source of information about him.  She never answered his lonely letters from Burma, never mentioned the young Orwell’s absurd and impossible marriage proposal to her when he was alive.  In old age, this nonentity became convinced she was the inspiration for Julia in  Nineteen Eighty-Four.  She drew attention to herself and got some reflected glory by inventing his putative marriage offer and telling a friend, who repeated her fantasy in a posthumous reprint of Buddicom’s book.  Richard Keeble has foolishly swallowed her bait.  He concludes his weak chapter by citing his own work—since no one else will—six times.

The copy editors have been sleeping at the switch and this scholarly work is plagued by errors.  The text should read: tries, not trials (76), Edmund, not Edward (176), Internacional in Spanish (647)  and a parenthesis needs closure (704).  Orwell did not take his pen-name from Wells.  The victim in “A Hanging” is Indian, not Burmese, and John Flory in Burmese Days has nothing to do with Montaigne’s translator John Florio.  The machinations of the corrupt magistrate U Po Kyin are completely different from Goethe’s description of Hell in Faust.  Since most young Englishmen serving in the East took Burmese mistresses, Flory is not “weighed down by self-loathing over his sexual exploitation of Burmese women”.  Bernard Crick’s statement (quoted with approval) that there was nothing to do in the tropics but read, drink and fornicate ignores sports like pig-sticking, shooting, tennis and polo, which the aristocratic Verrall plays in Burma.  Orwell does not ignore “the subservience of the Burmese people to foreign capitalists”.  Flory clearly admits, “I’m here to make money, like everyone else.”

Some misreadings are wildly off the mark.  Homage to Catalonia, which describes how Orwell was gravely wounded and nearly hunted to death, does not have an “almost festive attitude towards warfare”.  POUM, his political affiliation, should be translated more correctly as the Unified Marxist Workers Party.  One author claims the animals in Animal Farm “cannot read”. But there would be no point posting political slogans if all the animals were illiterate, and the pigs, the dogs, Muriel the goat and Benjamin the donkey can read.  “Under the spreading chestnut tree” in NEF comes from Longfellow’s popular poem “The Village Blacksmith.”  Down and Out  in Paris and London is not a novel, and NEF is not an allegory.  The book is certainly not “optimistic”.  A more perceptive author says the “total defeat experienced at the end of the novel is pessimistic”. It’s worth noting, as Orwell would say, that E. M. Forster reluctantly agreed to finish the lame story written by five different authors that Orwell commissioned for the BBC, because his close friend Malcolm Darling, who’d invited him to India, was head of the Eastern Service.

One author claims Orwell had “no desire for vengeance or urge to punish”.  But he famously recalled that in Burma he “thought the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts”.  While suffering agonies in a tuberculosis sanatorium, he alleviated the pain by thinking about torturing his enemies and having them suffer with him.  Another author doesn’t question Orwell’s statement that “no one ever writes of an execution with approval.  The dominant note is always horror.”  But in 1946, after the Nuremberg trials and execution of the Nazi war criminals, many writers agreed with Rebecca West, who declared, “it would be treachery against truth not to concede that justice has been done.”

Orwell regrets  that England has no “concentration camp literature.”  It’s surprising that Orwell, who reported for the Observer in Germany from February to May 1945, never mentioned the Nazi extermination camps, which were liberated by the Russian army in Poland beginning with Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945.  This grim subject would have provoked his passionate fury and insight.

III

This Handbook comes alive with the most interesting and incisive section on Influences.  The chapters on Shakespeare and Milton show Orwell’s expert knowledge and extensive use of their work.  One author convincingly argues that “Shakespeare becomes a—arguably the—cultural reference point against which the brutal modernity of Big Brother’s totalitarian state can and should be judged”.  Orwell was nourished and stimulated by his literary touchstones and cherished precursors, and his use of great writers explodes Harold Bloom’s influential but crudely mistaken The Anxiety of Influence.

The chapter on Swift, which strangely comes after Dickens, explains what Swift meant to Orwell as well as how he used the great satirist.  But the author doesn’t mention that in Gulliver’s Travels, “Horses milk their Cows, and reap their Oats, and do all the Work which requires Hands.”  Similarly in Animal Farm, the pigs “milked the cows fairly successfully, their trotters being well adapted to this task.”  In Swift’s Academy of Lagado and in NEF, books are written by machinery.  One author quotes Tom Hopkinson’s statement that Orwell’s “sympathy resided with humanity in general rather than with individual human beings”, but doesn’t state that it exactly reverses Swift’s belief: “I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.”

The chapters on Henry Miller (which includes four of his letters to Orwell) and on the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge are fresh and original.  After their deaths, the reputations of both writers fell as Orwell’s rose.  Miller was always twelve years older than Orwell, not only “at the time of their meeting”.  He gave Orwell, en route to the Spanish war, a warm winter jacket; Hemingway gave him a pistol after the Liberation of Paris.  It would have been illuminating to compare Orwell’s “Marrakech” on Morocco with Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi on Greece.

Orwell praised Victor Serge, who was also involved in the Spanish Civil War, as “one of the outstanding figures of the European school of political writing”.  Though the Spanish War was a disaster, it paradoxically gave Orwell illusory hope.  But the revolution failed in Animal Farm and Winston Smith’s pathetic rebellion failed in NEF.  The hero’s benign poem “Mice” in Keep the Aspidistra Flying turns into the horrific rats in Orwell’s last novel.

The most perceptive chapter, by Alan Munton on Wyndham Lewis, analyses Lewis’ complex ideas and defends him against Orwell’s negative and sometimes inaccurate criticism.  He concludes that “Orwell conceived the future as divided, controlled, and auto-destructive, whilst Wyndham Lewis hoped that it would be integrated, co-operative, and truly internationalist.”

The chapters on Influence, focused on a single author, miss many other influences and analogies that strengthen and illuminate Orwell’s work.  In the satiric “Rape of the Lock,” Alexander Pope shows executioners hastily complicit in judicial murder: “Wretches hang that jury-men may dine.”  In William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, “a moment before the execution the prisoner whispers to the sheriff, as if to make his last minimal demand upon life: ‘Pssst! . . . Fix my hair, Jack.”  A striking human detail in Orwell’s “A Hanging”, a death by cervical fracture or strangulation, describes the prisoner on the way to the gallows for an unnamed crime.  He doesn’t want to get his feet dirty and steps aside to avoid a puddle on the path.  The detour before his imminent death shows that he still has control of his body and values his life.  He wants to go to the gallows with human dignity and be executed with dry feet.  Orwell writes that when he witnessed this maneuvre, he “saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide”.

D. H. Lawrence’s description of leaving England at the end of The Lost Girl was effectively repetitive, bitter and morbid: “For there, behind all the sunshine, was England, England beyond the water, rising with ash-grey corpse-grey cliffs, and streaks of snow on the downs above, England, like a long ash-grey coffin slowly submerging.” In the last paragraph of Homage to Catalonia, on returning to England after narrowly escaping from the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell’s nostalgic pastoral description suddenly speeds up and repetitively changes into a final menacing Lawrencean twist: “Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens . . . all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs” [my italics].

Daniel Defoe described the pristine pastoral landscape, and J.R.R. Tolkein the pollution, of the English countryside.  In Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain Defoe writes of the unsullied Thames: “high enough to be navigable, and low enough to be a little pleasantly rapid; so that the Stream looks always cheerful, not slow and sleeping, like a Pond.  This keeps the Waters always clear and clean, the Bottom in view, the Fish playing, and in sight; and in a Word, it has every Thing that can make an Inland, or, as I may call it, a Country River, pleasant and agreeable.”  In The Return of the King, Tolkien described the desecration of this idyllic scene: “There was a whole line of ugly new houses all along The Pool Side.  An avenue of trees had stood there.  They were all gone.  And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a full chimney of  brick in the distance.  It was pouring out black smoke in the evening air.”  In Coming Up For Air, George Bowling remembers fishing in his ideal childhood landscape: “sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to the time before the war.  There’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish.”  When he returns to the rural past he finds the Thames polluted and the sacred pool half full of tin cans and exclaims: “1913!  My God 1913!  The stillness, the green water, the rushing of the weir!  It’ll never come back again.”  Bertrand Russell observed that people born after 1914 “are incapable of happiness”.

In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky mentioned “Heinrich Heine’s remark in Confessions (1854) that even “with the greatest will to be sincere, nobody can tell the truth about himself”.  Orwell’s belief in “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí” pessimistically agrees that it’s difficult to be honest in this genre: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass described the symbolic conflict between England and Scotland: “The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown: / The Lion beat the Unicorn all around the town.”  Orwell adopts Carroll’s phrase as the title of his wartime propaganda book The Lion and the Unicorn.  Samuel Butler’s Note-Books recorded, “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.”  In “Why I Write,” Orwell advocated an unobtrusive and transparent style, and agreed that “Good prose is like a window pane.”

The most significant literary influences, not mentioned in the Oxford Handbook, were on NEF.  The Russian historian D. S. Mirsky’s description of praising Stalin, when “no one dared to be the first to stop applauding”, matched Orwell’s portrayal of praise for Big Brother.  In a society of mass psychosis, Mirsky observed, “compulsory collaboration, expressed mainly in the system of informing, was officially regarded as the duty of the good citizen. . . . Where fear is paramount and denunciation officially encouraged, awareness of the secret police is uppermost in everyone’s mind.”  He clearly foreshadowed the terrifying powers of the Thought Police, of Syme’s enthusiastic approval when he’s betrayed by his own child, and Charrington’s betrayal of Winston and Julia.   The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky recalled the use of broadcast machines that blasted out state propaganda: “those loudspeakers they used to have everywhere in the Soviet Union would come on now and again to announce something that was considered of special importance to the people.”

W. H. Auden’s biographer described his attendance at a cinema in a pro-Nazi section of New York in December 1940, after the outbreak of World War II and before America entered the war: “He went to a cinema in the German-speaking Yorkville district of Manhattan and, while an official German newsreel portrayed Nazi victories in Poland, he heard the ordinary middle-class audience around him shouting in murderous fury at the defeated Poles.” Orwell wrote of a similar moment of fanatical madness, “In its second minute the hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening blasting voice that came from the screen.”

The 16th-century poet and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh declared, “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”  Orwell expresses a similar rhetorical pattern and theme of world dominance: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

Anton Chekhov, the son of a freed serf, managed to escape from his inherited bondage.  In a famous letter of January 7, 1889, Chekhov explained how he liberated himself from his background: “this young man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and on awakening one fine morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a slave but that of a real human being.”  Trapped under the oxymoronic slogan FREEDOM IS SLAVERY Winston Smith, like Chekhov, yearns for freedom—but fails to achieve it.

Hemingway observed in A Farewell to Arms that after the war “Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow were obscene.”  Orwell echoes this by stating, “Countless other words such as honor, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science and religion had simply ceased to exist.”

Three great European writers expressed the extinction of hope theme in Orwell’s last novel.  Vladimir Nabokov wrote with weak optimism in Pale Fire: “I have returned convinced that I can grope / My way to  some—to some—‘Yes, dear?  Faint hope.”  In “The Last Toast”, Anna Akhmatova concluded: “There is no future and God has not saved us.”  And Franz Kafka bitterly exclaimed: Es gibt unendlich viel Hoffnung . . . nur nicht für uns (“There is an infinite amount of hope…only not for us”).  Orwell concludes, “If there’s hope, it lies in the proles.”  But the proles are completely crushed by the system and there is no hope from them.

Orwell’s pessimistic insights have an uncanny connection to Donald Trump’s mendacious propaganda: “Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists,” and to his dictatorial oppression: “figuring out how to prevent power from being abused is the central problem to be solved.”

On the personal level, both Joseph Conrad and Orwell perversely stressed their poor health and impending death in their weird marriage proposals.  Conrad told his fiancée’s mother, “one of his chief reasons for haste was that he hadn’t very long to live.”  Right after he and Eileen had adopted a baby and she suddenly died, the tubercular Orwell shocked a prospective wife by asking, “Would you like to be the widow of a literary man?  If you think of yourself as essentially a widow, then you might do worse.”  As Orwell lay dying, Sonia Brownell eagerly accepted this lucrative offer.

The Orwell Handbook, though handsome, well-researched and impressive, has many foolish mistakes and poor contributions.  As Orwell said of a scholarly book on Shakespeare, it is “well meant but not altogether successful”.

Jeffrey Meyers has published a biography of Orwell, the Critical Heritage volume,

3 other books about him, and 57 essays on his life and work.

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