Hail to the Orwell Society website

Professor Peter Davison, July 2011

THERE is a paradox that – to me at least – seems to affect the serious study of the work of George Orwell. Few twentieth-century writers are as widely and frequently quoted as George Orwell.  I don’t include the mindless repetitions of ‘Big Brother’, or ‘1984’, or ‘Room 101’, even to the extent of misplacing the location of the last of these three.  Of how many other politicians or writers in the English-speaking world does one ask ‘What would So-and-So say of this?’ Winston Churchill? James Joyce? Kingsley Amis? Sir Isaiah Berlin? Bertrand Russell – or perhaps P.G. Wodehouse?

Yet this is not to claim that Orwell is the outstanding political figure or intellectual mind of the twentieth century. Despite all my admiration for him, I do not make those claims.  It is, I think, partly explained because what Orwell expressed was so readily understood, so clear, so unproblematic as to retain its capacity to make an immediate appeal to the understanding.

Whereas there have been many worthwhile biographies – the names Stansky and Abrahams, Sir Bernard Crick, Michael Shelden, Jeffrey Meyers, Gordon Bowker, DJ Taylor, spring to mind – for  the Academy, despite a number of serious studies – among them those of William Steinhoff, John Rodden, Douglas Kerr, Loraine Saunders, Dan Leab, and Philip Bounds – Orwell does not seem to pose sufficiently complex or intractable problems.

Orwell reads ‘too easily’. His work does not demand the kind of attention of scholarly interpreters that does, say, Finnegans Wake. Interpreting such a text seems to earn higher academic kudos than does Orwell’s work, especially that which seems to be based on ‘mere’ reportage. Hence, I believe, the careless inability to distinguish between the creative in Orwell’s writing and reportage.

This failure is noticeable in, for example, readings of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’.  Orwell is often far more subtle than he is assumed to be.  Sonia Orwell’s benevolence in founding the Orwell Archive and its later development have not attracted as much attention from scholars, apart from biographers, as might have been expected. Orwell has been misinterpreted as too open to the plain reader, too academically undemanding.

In the past few years however, there has been a resurgence of serious interest in Orwell and his work.  The Orwell Prize has been revivified by Professor Jean Seaton of Westminster University, assisted by Gavin Freeguard, and has developed a valuable website reproducing, among other things, Orwell’s Diaries.  Dione Venables, having herself republished her cousin Jacintha Buddicom’s Eric & Us, adding a valuable postscript, set up, and personally financed, a website which published high-quality articles every two months.  And there is hope that Dr Michael Sayeau will promote new life into Orwell studies at UCL.

However, although there has been an Orwell Society in Japan publishing annual volumes since 1982, they are chiefly in Japanese so not readily accessible to most of us, and, of course, a modest social society at Eton named after its onetime student, there has been a gaping chasm in the provision of such a society in the United Kingdom.  Now, at last, we have a fully-fledged Orwell Society with its own website edited by the critic and author Dominic Cavendish, notable to Orwellians for his excellent dramatization of Coming Up for Air in 2008.

When I started to edit Orwell in 1981 I could not imagine that we would ever enjoy such riches! My only regret is that I am too old to be able to contribute very much beyond this expression of delight to what the future has in store.

I started work – in a film cutting room of all places – in July 1942 only becoming an academic in 1960 after a decade of private study. I gave my last lecture some forty years later in 2001 and since then have written or edited six books, three devoted to Orwell.  If this strikes the reader as being too self-centred, I hope it may excuse my fear that there is little more that I can offer except profound delight that events are turning out as we can see all around us in Orwell studies, and this despite the intensely depressing state of the world.  (Perhaps that in itself matches Orwell’s time.)

It is enormously heartening to be able to welcome, in addition to the Orwell Prize and its associated activities, the launch of an Orwell Society and, in particular, this, its website. In addition to encouraging and airing new insights into Orwell and his work, which the society can encourage, there are specific tasks that demand attention, for example:

1. A corrected version of The Complete Works, Vols X-XX,  taking in material which surfaced after that edition was published – in, for example, The Lost Orwell and A Life in Letters, and all the corrections and additions reported in The Lost Orwell.
2. Incorporation of the proof corrections to A Clergyman’s Daughter andKeep the Aspidistra Flying reported by Richard Young (see A Life in Letters, pp. 491-2).
3. Publication of the one or more Diaries written in Spain and believed to be in the NKVD Archive, Moscow.
4. Publication in full of the letters to Brenda Salkeld which Gordon Bowker had to restrict to summaries in his biography of Orwell.
5. Publication of the letters to Eleanor Jaques withdrawn from sale by Bonhams.
6. Finding and publication of letters which Emma Larkin believes he wrote when a police officer in Burma and held by the Burmese authorities.
7. And, of course, recovering Orwell’s voice. Despite several searches none of the discs of programmes he recorded for the BBC has yet been traced although their BBC numbers are given in The Complete Works.

Alas, nearing 85, I am not in a position to contribute very much more to Orwell studies but I am thrilled to have lived long enough to witness this renaissance in Orwell studies.  I wish all those who are working so hard to launch these ventures my warmest good wishes – and my gratitude.  Let us hope that the Academy will at last take note!

Peter Davison, July 2011