‘Oh well, Orwell’: a critique of his latest critic

But the magic of the everyday does not include many interesting and significant events in Orwell’s life.  Waddell inexplicably leaves out accounts of Orwell meeting his friends and writing his books.  The “Rising” chapter doesn’t mention how Orwell’s waking routine was completely changed when he had to care for his infant son.  The “Walking” chapter doesn’t relate the most striking example of Orwell’s preference for walking.  When sailing off Jura with his young niece and nephew, his boat overturned in a dangerous whirlpool.  They were rescued, but he refused a ride home in the boat.  After losing their shoes, they had to walk a few miles home with bare feet.

These thematic chapters lack focus.  Waddell scatters comments on the books, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four(NEF), in 14 different chapters instead of discussing them in one place.  He quotes long extracts from Orwell and relies heavily on previous critics, noting that one writer “puts it well when he says that ‘Eric Blair thought his career in Burma would be a great adventure.’ ”  These preemptive quotations take up most of the text and Waddell himself makes no original contributions.

The book lacks an index. The bibliography omits the important Orwell Society Journal, but includes Anna Funder’s mendacious and dishonest book on Orwell’s first wife, Eileen.  The dust wrapper claims that Orwell “showered”, but he didn’t own a shower and always took a bath.

Waddell’s faithful colleague Emma Smith, thanked twice in the acknowledgements, provides a blurb that unconvincingly calls this book “cleverly structured and beautifully written”.  In fact, it has an awkward style, stale diction and many clichés: spill the beans, nooks and crannies, let or hindrance, cut the mustard, fly in the ointment, nothing to laugh at, curiosity kills the cat and “get my head around”.  It’s extremely repetitious: “gibberish” is mentioned three times in two lines.  To animate the book, Waddell repeats that Orwell was fascinated by waking up, the everyday, nature, “human-animal equivalence,” prison cells and nationalism.  He includes many long plot summaries and even admits that “anyone even vaguely familiar with Nineteen Eighty-Four may find themselves nodding at this point.”

Waddell also offers his vaguely defined audience too many obvious statements. He writes that T. S. Eliot, “the modernist poet,” is the author of an “epic modernist poem”; “ ‘A Hanging,’ as we’ve seen, describes the execution of a prisoner”;  “Experiences in Spain changed the author forever”;  “He died an extremely sick man.”

Despite having published several books on Orwell, Waddell has a poor understanding of his works, and in this rather pointless and inept book makes a surprising number of errors: MacDiarmid is misspelled;  “Enormity” does not mean large; Orwell did not “ensconce” himself on the wet and windy Scottish island of Jura—he was extremely uncomfortable there; Amedeo Modigliani was not an “expressionist” painter; The British Home Guard did not wear a “tricorn” hats; “I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls” is not “an allusion to Lewis Carroll”, but a song by the Irish writer M. W. Balfe.

Orwell stopped wetting his bed at St. Cyprian’s prep school more from public shame than from beatings, which he bravely said didn’t hurt.  The young Orwell was not “clearly in love with” his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, who fantasised about his infatuation after he became famous. Another fantasy, never mentioned when she was alive, was that he tried to force himself on her.  But later on, after she’d been impregnated and abandoned by another man, she transferred her resentment and hostility to Orwell.

In Burma Orwell didn’t “witness criminals executed and animals killed”, but killed the animal himself.  In “Shooting an Elephant” the animal “was dying, very slowly and in great agony. . . . It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die.”  The author misses Orwell’s point: that the fatal wound and slow collapse of the dying elephant symbolises the impending end of the British Empire.

Waddell states that on his global journeys Orwell “traveled to Burma and beyond”.  In fact, he did not visit his birthplace in India nor, apart from a brief port stop in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), travel anywhere else in southeast Asia.  He was not a “full-throated critic of empire”, but believed that the British had to remain in Burma and India, which were not yet ready for independence.  John Flory in Burmese Days was not “ousted from Elizabeth’s affections” by the dashing officer Verrall; he never really had her affections.  It’s not true that “we never see John Flory do any work as a timber merchant”.  In chapter 18 Flory visits his timber camp in the jungle and deals with missing workers, a sick elephant and broken machinery.

Orwell did not “publish six major works of fiction”, but condemned and rejected what he called his “pot-boiling novels”: A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  Coal miners did not have to “endure hellish conditions every day of their lives”. Their work conditions were not hellish before they became miners nor after they retired.

Ignoring the sexual role of roosters in his “Animals” chapter, Waddell writes that “one of his chickens . . . copulated with his first hen within 5 seconds.”   He also contradicts himself on the same page by stating, “Animal Farm is about people. . . . Animal Farm is about animals.”  NEF is realistic, not “nightmarish.”  Winston Smith is not killed at the end of NEF, but dreams of being killed in the future.  In the weirdest error, Waddell mangles the names of “Celia Paget (née Kirwan),” which should correctly be “Celia Kirwan (née Paget).”

Pleased to assume moral superiority, Waddell imposes current cant on the attitudes of the past and discharges a fusillade of accusations at his defenseless subject. He indulges in a cringe-making, knee-bending PC attack on Orwell. He calls his favourite author a patriarchal, misogynistic and racist writer, suffering from ill-advised, voyeuristic, male-centred and masculine bias, toxically combined with inappropriate, ill-judged, tactless and creepy statements.  If Orwell were such a monster, why has Waddell wasted most of his academic life writing about him? Orwell, in fact, was not a misogynist and adored women.  Two of the ladies he proposed to, whom I interviewed, told me that he was desperate to remarry after his wife died and that they had to firmly but politely reject him.

Despite the tsunami of books and essays on Orwell, it’s still possible to illuminate his life and works.  Waddell mentions that the prisoner in “A Hanging”, en route to the gallows, “steps aside to avoid a puddle.”  But he doesn’t explain that the victim instinctively steps this way to show that he still has control of his body and to emphasize his identity as a sentient human being.  In NEF Winston Smith also dodges filthy puddles near the old St. Pancras station.

Waddell quotes a phrase from Burmese Days, “a file of sweepers, each with his load half hidden beneath his garment”, and calls them “people on the verge of dying.”  He doesn’t seem to know that street sweepers are outcasts, or “untouchables”, and the load that they are carrying and trying to hide is excrement.  At the start of A Clergyman’s Daughter Dorothy Hare is “wrenched from the depths of some complex, troubling dream.”  This echoes the opening of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”: “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams.” Wyndham Lewis called G. K. Chesterton “a fierce foaming Toby jug.”  In A Clergyman’s Daughter Orwell refers to a “huge Toby jug of a woman.”

Waddell mentions the impact of bombing on sleep, but doesn’t connect it to the last sentence of Homage to Catalonia: we shall never wake “from the deep, deep sleep of England . . . till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”  The title of this disillusioned book is ironic since Orwell, who fought and was wounded in Aragon, was hunted and nearly killed by the Communists in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia.

Waddell quotes Orwell’s essay “Marrakech” in which natives are seen as “undifferentiated brown stuff”.  He doesn’t see that this idea is not racist but the opposite: it comes from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, where the English see the mass of Indians as “mud moving”.  The title Coming Up for Air not only refers to being “Inside the Whale,”  to underground miners, and to George Bowling’s escape to the country from submersion in London, but also to Orwell himself gasping for air and trying to fill his tubercular lungs.  Waddell says that Orwell “associates fat people with stupidity”.  Bowling in that novel is fat but not stupid.  Orwell may have resented fat people because he himself was wasted by disease and as thin as Samuel Beckett.

During the war Orwell, indifferent to food, ate the eels his wife had left out for the cat.  When food was especially appealing he told his little son: “Gosh boys, this looks good!”  His repulsive descriptions of food at St. Cyprian’s and his lodging house in Wigan were influenced by James Joyce.  In  Ulysses Leopold Bloom, after watching the crude feeders in the Burton restaurant “swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches,” repairs to a hotel for a refined lunch of minted lamb and wine.  George Bowling’s rotten sausage, like “bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth,” suggests oral sex.  Like Bloom, Bowling also retreats to a more delicate luncheon of cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy.

Waddell says, “it’s surprising for someone who spent so much time on the radio that it could seriously irritate him.”  He doesn’t explain that Orwell, who’d worked for several war years at the Eastern Service of the BBC, later discovered that very few Indians had radios, that he had no listeners in India and that all his propagandistic efforts had been wasted.  Waddell writes that in Animal Farm Orwell notes that weeding was “a job the animals are peculiarly well placed to do ‘with a thoroughness impossible to human beings.’ ”  He doesn’t realize this ironically perverse idea comes from the Houyhnhnms’ mistaken belief in Gulliver’s Travels that their clumsy hooves were particularly well suited to threading needles.

The title of Waddell’s book, “A Bright Cold Day,” quoting the ironic opening words of NEF, also echoes W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939): “The day of his death was a dark cold day.”  The original title of NEF, “The Last Man in Europe,” echoes Olaf Stapledon’s “Last Man in London” (1932).  Winston Smith dreams of “the place where there is no darkness”, in contrast to the intensely bright lights that nearly blind him during his cruel interrogation.

It’s worth noting, as Orwell would say, that his warnings about totalitarianism—“an unjust, laborious and fear-ridden society . . . that uses violence to frighten people and force them to accept its ideological doctrines and practical lies”— could well describe the oppressive regime of Donald Trump.

Epilogue:

It’s essential to remember that:

–Orwell’s childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom was a liar and unreliable source.

–He could have gone from Eton to Oxford or Cambridge if he had wanted to attend a university.

–The people on the list of crypto-Communists that he gave to the British government were already well known.  He rightly felt they should not be trusted as propagandists.

–His years on Jura were unhealthy and shortened his life.

–Sonia Brownell, who refused his proposal in 1945 and did not visit him on Jura, married him on his deathbed to get his money and then queened it up as the wealthy widow of a famous writer.

Jeffrey Meyers has published 60 essays and 5 books on Orwell’s life and work: a Reader’s Guide, Annotated Bibliography, Critical Heritage, Orwell: Life and Art and Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (Norton, 2000).

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