70th Anniversary Thoughts

George Orwell died in January 1950. The seventieth anniversary of his death has prompted members of the Orwell Society to reflect on Orwell and what his life and work have meant to them.

Their thoughts will appear here over the coming days.

*

*

Steve Foulger:

I was born a couple of years after Orwell died and probably first encountered the name when I was about 14 when I read Animal Farm, followed by Nineteen Eighty-Four. I was at the time obsessed with Science Fiction and not at all politically minded so I fear that the message of both books was a bit lost on me. My ‘O’ level English teacher – we had a mutual hatred – asked if anybody in the class had read Orwell, I was the only person who had but received the reply, Oh the usual ones.

That there were other ones stayed in my mind and as I became more politically orientated I sought them out aided by the fact that I worked in a library. Homage to Catalonia was the tipping point however – it blew away my somewhat jejune Student Union view of politics and inculcated a much healthier scepticism about utopian and dogmatic politics. Partinost became a term of abuse not a praiseworthy position and democratic became more important than socialism in the philosophy and practice of ‘democratic Socialism’. I also sought out the novels, read them all and reread them and then made my way through the four volume Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters – with great pleasure.

Much as I enjoy Coming up for Air or Keep the Aspidistra Flying for me it is Orwell the essayist that I cherish most. Orwell can be infuriatingly wrong, inconsistent and contrary but he is always good to read, clear and comprehensible. And more often than not I believe firmly that he is right, bang on the target and not falling for squalid orthodoxies. He helped me form the set of values that inform my world view – not by providing a sort of catechism but by providing an example of the best way of looking at things – clearly, without subterfuge and above all honestly.

But, probably the only thing I have in common with Orwell is that I am the same height as he was – six foot three inches – so I know what it is to tower over most people around me, to be the sore thumb sticking up. And that may be a good metaphor for Orwell’s life,

Christopher Angel:

If I simply sit down to read Orwell’s writing, I find it surprising that it has been 70 years since his death.  His work, even his essays beyond the more famous novels, maintains a freshness and relevance to our experiences today. And as I talk to others about reading or re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s writing still has much to contribute as a warning to our society and political evolution now.

If I think back to the actual experiences of Orwell’s own life, I find it remarkable that he was able to extract from the early twentieth century some resonant and enduring truths about human nature and our political selves.  Orwell was a participant in imperialism; the homeless and unemployment crisis of the Great Depression; the fight against the rise of Fascism in Spain; the Blitz of London during World War II; the use of propaganda to fight the war; and the Cold War that descended on the world after World War II. How do you risk your life in these momentous historical moments, and then sit back and synthesize them into a fictional world?

Orwell was not perfect.  He was not Nostradamus.  I would argue that he missed the rising power of the mega-corporations and how they harness the technology of surveillance and influence the nation-state.  He didn’t leave many positive hints at how we could organize ourselves better.  Perhaps he would have developed those more had he not died at such an early age.  Perhaps those would not have been as interesting or as enduring.  Perhaps he was wise not to go there.

But I am glad that people still discuss Orwell’s writing every day, and hold it up as a mirror to our present world. Because surely, none of us want to live in the dystopia he created. And yet, it feels all too real.

Roger Howe:

There is nothing like sitting down to write a dystopian novel to restore the spirits. No sooner have you put pen to paper than the sun comes out, the sky turns blue and the birds start singing. The grim vision fades, the giant machines and threatening trends disappear like Xanadu. Most of us only manage a couple of paragraphs.

It has all been done before in any case, never more so, never better, than by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. A waste of time competing.

I first came to Orwell, as did his contemporaries, via H. G. Wells. Nineteen Eighty-Four left me unsatisfied. There had to be more. I read Brave New World, which seemed closer to the world we live in. More’s Utopia lacked narrative.

I began Zamyatin’s We but found it puzzlingly light-hearted, its algebraic characters hard to sympathise with. I came back to the book twenty years later and recognised with horror the outlines of the plot: the ancient house, the heroine’s death in the gas-chamber while the hero and the Benefactor (Lenin with his “great Socratic head”) look on laughing.

Why the space-ship was called Integral and whether it has any connection with the chapter ‘Integral Moves’ in Hope Against Hope where Nadezhda Mandelstam enlists Nikolai Bukharin to plead for her husband’s life after his first arrest, I have never established. A word with a special Soviet significance perhaps.

“He had an amazing knowledge of English Literature,” said Professor John Carey, going on to say Orwell must have had access to an ample stock of novels in Burma. Certainly one imagines Eric Blair doing the leisurely off-duty reading he assigns to George Bowling in Coming Up for Air.

The world Orwell created in Nineteen Eighty-Four has surreal traces plus a certain mordant humour; one of my favourite passages begins “On the sixth day of Hate Week..” Parodying the well-known Christmas song.

This cannot be the work of a dying man.

*

George Orwell photographed by O. Wild in 1940

Norman Bissell:

The death of George Orwell 70 years ago was a huge loss to the world. He was relentless in his pursuit of truth and fearless in confronting those who misused power. He believed in the decency and good sense of ordinary people and was a democratic socialist who hated Stalinism as much as Fascism. His forensic political insight would have been a very valuable asset in the rapidly changing world of the latter half of the twentieth century. As a believer in freedom of speech he would have defended those with whom he disagreed during the Cold War and the McCarthyite era in USA. His take on the ‘Swinging Sixties’ would have been a joy to behold.

His single-minded determination to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four by the end of 1948 did irretrievable damage to his health which led to his death some fourteen months later. He had several more novels and extended essays on Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh he intended to write and his wide-ranging knowledge of literature and ‘windowpane’ approach to writing would have been of continuing and lasting benefit to everyone who valued good writing.

After completing Nineteen Eighty-Four he desperately wanted to live — above all to see his infant son Richard Blair grow up on Jura where he had decided to settle and try to become as self-sufficient as possible. His premature death at the age of 46 was a great loss to Richard, his own sister Avril and his many friends. Today there is still much we can all learn from his work and life to try to make the world a much needed better place. The Orwell Society is a wonderful resource in that regard and I would urge others to join it to help carry forward his remarkable legacy.

(Norman Bissell is the author of Barnhill [Luath Press], a novel)

*