Robert Colls
Oxford University Press, 2026, £14.99
I read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a teenager because it felt like a moral duty and as a student regarded the four paperback volumes of George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters as a sort of bible. So I wonder if Rob Colls (who taught me on my MA Victorian Studies course long ago) is right to say we are now living at peak Orwell.
The
imperative to read Nineteen Eighty-Four surely faded with the end of the
Cold War, even if Orwell’s picture of a world divided into three power blocs –
Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – is beginning to look prophetic. My impression
is that many who cite him today have been influenced by the American right
(“Make Orwell History Again”) and have little idea that Orwell remained, in his
writings at least, a revolutionary socialist until well after the outbreak of
the second world war.
There are many good things in this short book. Colls notes
how the Old Etonian Orwell took his preconceptions with him when he went to
lodge with working-class families so he could write The Road to Wigan Pier:
His local … contacts
reckoned he sought out the worst digs in the worst places. Having stayed a few
days with the Meades, “some kind of trade union official” on their new council
estate, Orwell seemed to think they couldn’t be working class because they
weren’t poor and the house didn’t smell.
Nor did Orwell show any understanding of the rich network of
chapels, clubs and societies that constituted working-class communities. Anyone
he found not to be living in abject destitution risked being dismissed as
“bourgeois”.
Colls is good too on the changing trends in Orwell scholarship. The importance to his work of Orwell’s two wives is becoming increasingly recognised, which is not something he always managed himself. It’s been said that it’s easy to read his Homage to Catalonia without realising that Orwell’s wife Eileen was in Spain with him the whole time.
Colls cheerfully admits Orwell’s limitations as a writer – too many generalisations, too many “beastly old boy adjectives”, too keen to deploy his “stage army of potty progressives” – but rightly praises his ability to write without condescension about the pleasures of the poor and insists Orwell is and will remain a vital presence in our culture. I hope he is right.
'It’s been said that it’s easy to read his Homage to Catalonia without realising that Orwell’s wife Eileen was in Spain with him the whole time. '
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
With some important caveats:
i) The first 'Mrs Orwell' was indeed in Spain, or much more precisely in the context of the SCW 'in Catalonia', as the great man himself was at enormous pains to highlight, for most of his time there. Certainly they left on the same train, fleeing for their lives from 'Republican-Stalinists' and posing as tourists in, from memory, late June 1937.
However she was almost exclusively working in a political office whilst he was undergoing training in barracks, then for a longish spell in a trench on the Aragon front, then on the top of the Teatre Polirama in Les Rambles during Els fets de maig, then back at the Aragon front, then in a series of hospitals being treated for a near fatal wound in the throat, then hiding from malevolent agents of the PSUC/PCE/ Republican government/ perhaps even murderous Stalinist agents in Barcelona; these latter few days in the company of his wife.
To what extent this constitutes being 'with him' in the ordinary sense of that phrase is, I contend, exceedingly debateable.
ii) The final points in (i) above are, like all the rest, chronicled in HtoC, so that most readers should have twigged that she was, at very least, somewhere in the mix.
iii) Nowhere in that fine book however is there any mention of the trip which Eileen O'Shaughnessy took to the front line, as evidenced by a contemporary photograph.
Whilst I have never read of the circumstances of the photo in question, it's very existence does, to some extent, highlight the strange nature of both the SCW and of its reporting; including subsequent elements of mythologising it. The latter almost invariably with the intense suffering and the repeated double dealing by Republican politicians of many stripes omitted.
Whilst Orwell is weak on the suffering, he is, in my opinion, pretty prescient on the double dealing; only being outdone in that respect among contemporaries by Franz Borkenau.
[For clarity, Franco was a vicious, sadistic murderer who rose in rebellion against the legitimate, elcted, republican government. But there were a few very dodgy characters amongst the loyalists too.]