Orwell and the literary tradition

Gather from the air a live tradition.

Ezra Pound, Cantos, LXXXI

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), T. S. Eliot explained how the writer’s use of tradition was based on his understanding of literary history:

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.  This historical sense is what makes a writer traditional.  And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

Eliot slyly explained another way that authors could be nourished by the past: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

George Orwell, both a traditional and an original author, exemplified Eliot’s principle and enhanced his work by taking whatever he could use from the writers he admired.  His fiction and essays derived their resonance, meaning and value—and much of their inspiration—from his vital connection to significant authors of the past.  His relation to tradition and reception to influence, his use of the style, forms and ideas of his predecessors, all strengthened his work.  By interpreting, absorbing and transforming writers from Alexander Pope to Franz Kafka, he made them entirely his own, and benefited from the traditions of the past.

Alexander Pope by Michael Dahl

In his famous essay on the injustice of capital punishment, Orwell wrote within a centuries-old tradition.  Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” (1712) states that “Wretches hang that jury-men may dine,” suggesting that impatient jurors are complicit in judicial murder. Two centuries later, the doomed rapist and gangster Popeye, in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), makes an idiosyncratic request and minimal demand at the very end of his life.  A moment before the execution he whispers to the sheriff: “‘Pssst! . . . Fix my hair, Jack.’ ‘Sure,’ the sheriff said, ‘I’ll fix it for you’; springing the trap.”

Orwell’s “A Hanging” (1931), based on first-hand experience as a policeman in Burma, shows both the cruelty of the punishment and the individualistic behaviour of the prisoner.  In a striking human detail the victim, on the way to the gallows, steps aside to avoid a puddle—as if he feared he might catch cold en route. This diversion before his impending death shows that he’s in control and his life still has value.  Even though he’s about to die, he remains concerned about his health and appearance, and wants to go to his execution with human dignity and dry feet.  Orwell observes that when he witnessed this hanging, he “saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide”.

D.H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl (1920) gives a bitter, effectively repetitive description of escaping from a morbid England, whose authorities had persecuted him during the Great War: “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.”

The last paragraph of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). describing his return to England after fighting in the Spanish Civil War, shares the same sense of his country’s dangerous decline:

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers, 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.

By contrast to the furious Lawrence, Orwell first slowly recalls an idealised pastoral landscape; then, with the sudden “jerked” and a menacing twist in the last phrase, accurately and rapidly predicts the threatening war that will soon destroy everything he values.

Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724) also describes an ideal landscape, with clear streams and perfect conditions for fishing, that was doomed to extinction by industrial development in the next century:

[The Thames is] high enough to be navigable, and low enough to be 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.

E. M. Forster’s Abinger Pageant (1934) mourned the loss of pastoral England ruined by urban expansion and intrusive automobiles: “Houses and bungalows, hotels, restaurants and flats, arterial roads, by-passes, petrol pumps and pylons—are these going to be England? Are these man’s final triumphs? Or is there another England, green and eternal, which will outlast them?”

Portrait of Defoe in the style of Sir Godfrey Kneller

Orwell was a keen fisherman.  Like Defoe’s Tour, Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939) uses fishing to represent the lost world of childhood: “The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool—and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside—belongs to a time before the war. . . . There’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish.”

Orwell shared Forster’s distaste for urban ugliness.  When the hero, George Bowling, finally returns to his old village, he’s confronted with drab and soulless estate housing, and fishing streams that are polluted, drained and filled with tin cans.

E. M. Forster by Dora Carrington, oil on canvas, 1920

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) is a surprising source for Orwell’s belief that autobiographies cannot be honest.  The Russian author mentions the German poet “Heinrich Heine’s remark to the effect that sincere autobiographies are almost impossible and that a man is bound to lie about himself”.  Orwell takes a pessimistic view of his own life in his essay “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí” (1944).  He agrees that most authors lie when writing about themselves: “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.”

Portrait of Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

Lewis Carroll’s verse in Through the Looking Glass (1871) popularised a phrase that represented the union of England and Scotland under James I in 1603: “The Lion and the Unicorn / Were fighting for the crown. / The Lion beat the Unicorn / All around the town.”  Orwell adopted these words for the title of his wartime pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941).  He also admired the iconoclastic late-Victorian Samuel Butler and embraced his definition of plain style.  Both writers were masters of lucid prose, and advocated direct language and unambiguous expression.  Butler’s Note-Books (1912) stated, “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.”  Orwell’s influential essay “Why I Write” (1946) condensed this into an image of transparency: “Good prose is like a window pane.”

Lewis Carroll in 1857

Fatally ill with incurable tuberculosis when writing Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell had to race against time to complete his greatest work before he died.  The power of the novel comes from his realistic use of familiar material rather than from imaginary speculations about the future.  Orwell’s many borrowings from both literature and the history of Stalin’s Russia enhance the realism of Nineteen Eighty-Four (NEF).

When the Soviets failed to meet their unrealistic production quotas, the bureaucracy desperately attempted to rally the masses with slogans like “The Five-Year Plan in Four Years.”  In their propaganda posters this became the mathematically false but officially true “2+2=5.”  In a letter of December 21, 1817, John Keats defined his concept of the poet’s imagination as Negative Capability: the ability to embrace uncertainty, mystery and doubt without an “irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Orwell changed this positive idea into the negative concept of Doublethink: the ability to hold simultaneously two contradictory opinions—whether 2+2=5 is true or false.  The title of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907) inspired Orwell’s description of the totalitarian regime, “Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

The Russian poet and exile Joseph Brodsky recalled with a shudder “those huge loudspeakers they used to have everywhere in the Soviet Union that would come on now and again to announce something that was considered of special importance to the people.”  In NEF, these intrusive loudspeakers enforced Thought Control and told people what to do as well as what to think.  T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) explained how the timid hero had to mask his true feelings and defensively “Prepare a face to meet the faces” that he meets.  Winston Smith finds it necessary, when facing the ever-vigilant Telescreen—the indoor equivalent of the oppressive outdoor loudspeakers—to prepare his face with a false expression of quiet optimism.  The unequivocal declaration in Matthew 5:28 that there’s no real difference between thought and deed, “whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” influenced the concept of Thoughtcrime.  He subverts the Christian view of sin and guilt, and makes it stand for the loss of freedom to think.

T. S. Eliot in 1934

In NEF the Party condemns and punishes with equal severity both the actual deeds and the secret beliefs that oppose their regime.

The literary critic D. S. Mirsky, who died in the Gulag after returning to Russia, reported that “compulsory collaboration, expressed mainly in a system of informing, was officially regarded as the duty of a good citizen.  In a society of mass psychosis, where fear is paramount and denunciation officially encouraged, awareness of the secret police is uppermost in everyone’s mind.”

In Russia, the legend of the 13-year-old Pavel Morosov began in 1932 when he denounced his father for disloyalty and deviationism, and in retaliation was killed by his family.  His brave but misguided martyrdom was weirdly used to encourage Soviet children to inform on their parents.  Orwell saw the parallel between the Soviet Union and Eton, his prestigious Public School, where spying on and betraying intimates was actively encouraged.  Under the honour system the offender was required to confess his crime; if he did not, his peers were expected to inform on him.  In NEF Parsons, Winston Smith’s neighbour and colleague in the Ministry of Truth, is thoroughly indoctrinated and blindly submits to the Party line.  He is proud of his daughter who hears him speaking against the Party in his sleep and quite properly turns him into the police.

W. H. Auden’s editor writes that in December 1940, a year after World War Two had broken out and a year before America declared war, the poet “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 repeats an actual scene with the frantic screams during the daily catharsis of Two Minutes Hate: “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.”  No one in the audience dared to be the first to stop screaming.

W. H. Auden in 1939

In a brilliant prediction, the 16th-century soldier 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 reframed this elegant and logical formula of controlling wealth by replacing historical fact with effective propaganda: “Who controls the past controls the future.  Who controls the present controls the past.”

In a famous letter of January 7, 1889, Anton Chekhov, the son of a freed serf, described his struggle to escape from the crushing bondage of his past and finally achieve freedom: “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.”  Winston Smith, the last thinking man in Europe who’s trapped in the oxymoronic slogan “Freedom is Slavery,” hopelessly yearns for freedom but fails to escape.  John McCrae’s war poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915) pronounces the gloomy phrase “We are the dead.”  Winston repeats this prophecy of doom when he’s finally arrested, tortured and brainwashed.

Anton Chekhov in 1889

Two great modern writers expressed the hopelessness that people in Eastern Europe felt between the wars.  The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova lamented in “The Last Toast” (1934), there is no new future and “God has not saved us.”  Franz Kafka pessimistically exclaimed in a 1920 conversation with his friend Max Brod: “There is hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for us.”  His despair is even stronger in German: “Es gibt Hoffnung, unendlich viel Hoffnung, nur nicht für uns.”  Orwell writes, “If there’s hope, it lies in the proles.”  But in his bleak and tragic novel the proles are ignorant, degraded, oppressed, slave-like and hopeless.

Anna Akhmatova, c. 1926–1928

Even Orwell’s disconcerting marriage proposal came out of a perverse personal tradition.  In 1896, the 39-year-old Joseph Conrad told the mother of his fiancée, “one of his chief reasons for haste was that he hadn’t very long to live.”  In 1936, the 33-year-old Evelyn Waugh warned his prospective bride, “I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you.”  In 1945, the 42-year-old Orwell made a morbid, off-putting offer by asking a promising candidate, “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.”

Jeffrey Meyers has published 5 books on Orwell: A Reader’s Guide, a Descriptive Bibliography, a Critical Heritage volume, a collection of essays Orwell: Life into Art and a biography Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000).

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