21st March 2012 by
Stephen Armstrong joins Orwell Society AGM
Stephen Armstrong, who has just published an account of his attempt to retrace Orwell’s steps 75 years on in The Road To Wigan Pier Revisited, has confirmed his attendance at the Orwell Society AGM on April 28, where he will read a series of extracts from the book and be available to discuss the project. The AGM is open to all members of the society.
Stephen Armstrong is a freelance journalist who writes for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, GQ and Esquire as well as presenting the occasional documentary on Radio 4. His first book was The White Island, a history of Ibiza. Other books include War plc: The Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary and The Super-rich Shall Inherit the Earth.
I would not put too much store by GO empathising with the working classes. On the morning after his wedding in Wallington he demanded that the marmalade be presented in a cut glass dish, not served from the jam jar. This was a writer for hire and no traitor to his lower upper middle class. He admitted in his writing that he never understood what the working class was about. They simply do not exist in Eastbourne, Henley on Thames, Eton and Southwold; nor in gentrified Islington. He gets to his muse when he presents his Carrollesque masterpiece about Hamlet’s dilemma – Nineteen Eighty Four. Everything steadily meandered its way up to his final tour de force. The human condition purgatory novel. Too much is made of his superficial socialist sympathy and it reduces his attraction as a writer. His teacher, Aldous Huxley, had better dystopian arguments, but Orwell is simply the better storyteller of the two. Nineteen Eighty Four is his storytelling peak and legacy and it is certainly nothing to do with the working classes. There’s no point in revisiting the earlier journeyman stuff. He was just paying the rent with Gollancz’s cheques.. The real deal is in visiting the Psalm 23 world of Nineteen Eighty Four. That’s where GO was heading with it all and that’s what EAB left us with, what he worked so hard to leave us with. The one big book about a small thing, man. Not the small book about the big thing, mankind. It’s Orwell in Wonderland. Stuff the class society nonsense, once and for all. He did.
So ‘The Crystal Spirit’ was class nonsense, was it?
I see that Denis Frize has just joined. Welcome, mate. Tell us a bit about yourself if you fancy it. I’m not the best at getting around websites so forgive me if you’ve kissed and told elsewhere on the site. All the best anyway, and if you’ve got any queries steer clear of Instant Smith and contact Dione Venables instead. She’s a marvel. Maybe you already know here. Right – back to the football!
I have to say I don’t agree with you Pete, although I did enjoy the marmalade quote, I suspect it may have been on Eileen’s insistence that the cut glass replaced the jam jars!
One of my favourite memoirs of Orwell comes from John Morris who worked with him on the BBC far-eastern service at offices in Oxford Street in London. Morris writes of Orwell’s predisposition toward masking his lower middle-class sensibilities by strict adherence to working class habits at every opportunity. “Nothing could have turned Orwell into a working class man: yet I believe, nothing gave him more pleasure than being mistaken for one.” Morris cites examples. Whenever they would visit the canteen together, Morris notes that Orwell would on every occasion tip his tea into the saucer and draw the tea into his mouth from the saucer making loud sucking noises in the process. Another time when they went to the pub, Orwell mocked Morris for merely asking for ‘beer,’ to which, Orwell turned to the landlady and requested “a pint of bitter for me and a glass of beer for my friend.” When challenged by Morris, Orwell merely replied “you gave yourself away badly. A working-class person would never ask for a glass of beer.” When Morris pointed out that he was not a working-class person, Orwell replied “but there’s no need to boast about it.”
A particularly telling memoir refers to the time when Orwell relocated to Marrakesh on the bounty of a wealthy mystery benefactor in an effort to improve his health. Morris was certain that the mystery benefactor had been L.H.Myers and arranged a situation for the two of them to meet. Morris recollects that Orwell sat stiff and silent during the evening and found the whole meeting utterly distasteful and left at the earliest opportunity. It was as though he simply could not bear the thought of having been assisted by the moneyed class in any way.
No, it is printed in the Wallington church brochure. A quote from Eileen herself that she was instructed to use cut glass containers for the marmalade by her new husband. She describes it as laughable, but he was serious. Eton College serious. I have a copy of it here. I have visited the church there a few times. You don’t have to agree with me, but you cannot call her a liar. She was Orwell’s true devoted love. How can you deny what she says? It’s printed in the church literature. To deny Blair his inbred elitism is to misunderstand his position. Blair invented Orwell to express views that the lower upper middle class Blair could not express, ever. We are staring at a duality here. Every time Orwell hit the road it was Blair who came running back to the warmth and hot water of home, in Southwold, Wallington or Islington. I have had a good look at all of them. Like the Henley on Thames that I grew up and live in, they are as divorced from Wigan, Liverpool and Hull as Mills is from McCartney. It was Orwell who demanded of Eileen that the marmalade be served in the cut glass.Please go to Wallington and see for yourself. You can’t deny it. But hold on a minute here. If you informed guys are getting it wrong, like upside down and inside out, what’s going on? You can’t just rewrite history to make our man into something he wasn not. Blair was an elitist who invented Orwell as his nemesis. I am a huge fan of TE Lawrence, but I have to accept that he was a sado-masochist. It’s on record at Clouds Hill. That’s life, Ron. All this veneration of Orwell as a working class hero has got to stop. There’s no evidence to support it. He couldn’t give a rats for politics. He was developing his skills as a writer. One, who as all writers must do, was working up to his literature tour de force, Nineteen Eighty Four, for the sake of literature, not the proletariat. He got there. Hooray! Who cares about the working class anyway? Is there a working class member of the Orwell Society. You can certainly count me out at £350 with my Russell Group university degree and South Oxfordshire accent. I understand him so well because I’m one of his lot. We all are who are from Henley on Thames. Best to admit it. The Henley Royal Regatta is next week. Blair loved it. It’s got a bit tacky, but then I have always enjoyed looking down on things, like Eric Arthur Blair did. Just read Eric & Us to confirm that.
I see the insult is there now, Peter Caldwell. Call me Instant Smith if you will. Can you challenge what I say and can I ask you, how quick is your brain compared to mine? I had thought that maybe I was the least intelligent of the members of The Orwell Society but there you go proving me wrong in an instant! Peter Caldwell now introduces the personal insult to intelligent debate. What’s he going to say to Eric Blair in Heaven one day? Maybe ‘it’s good to be cheap, mate?’. What are you after Peter? Consensus? Working class cred? Ever read Animal Farm? Maybe you just cannot keep up. Personal insult is banned both in Parliament and in The Oxford Union. Grow up. Try presenting a rational argument based on research and proof. And please don’t set me up against my friend Dione. She came to Christmas lunch here. We are not opposed personally. Dione can take a good intellectual spar. Our son, Lt Oliver Nicholas Burness-Smith BA MA RN, he of HMS Dragon, carries her late husband John’s Dartmouth dress sword, at her behest, you idiot. Hey, this Forum thing is getting good and lively. Reminds me of my undergraduate days. Can you say the same, Peter?
The Crystal Spirit was class nonsense. Now you’re getting somewhere, Peter Caldwell, if you can think about it after the football (?) What prole nonsense is that? Watch out for the corporate ads placed for the TV all around the ground, rattling their stick in the bucket of swill, mate. Orwell said that, matey. Adios, Instant Smith.
On the contrary Pete, I am fascinated by the marmalade incident. This is the first I’ve heard of an account written by Eileen being in existence – I hope you can scan it and share it with us. I clean forgot that Bernard Crick interviewed friends of Eileen’s who also recounted the story. (I believe one to be Lydia Jackson).
Does this incident confirm him as an elitist? I can most effectively disprove this point by answering your second point. “Are there any working-class people in the Orwell Society” – yes there are Pete, yours truly! My family moved to Swindon from Bromley when my dad was offered an engineering job that came with the guarantee of a council house in what is now the least desirable area of the town. When my parents moved into their new council house, my dad had to take the seats out of the car so that they had something to sit on. I was born in that council house, went to a state comprehensive school and have worked in manufacturing all my life – heavily involved in industrial relations I might add – I don’t think you can get any more working-class than that. Now some people occasionally buy me a nice bottle of Tawny Port because they know I like the stuff. When they do, I often like to serve it out of a cut-glass decanter. Does that make me an elitist? Of course it doesn’t! And neither does Orwell enjoying his marmalade out of a cut-glass jam-dish make him an elitist!
I know you have a theory on Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four that you will never relinquish Pete. It reminds me of common conspiracy theories – they endure because the perpetrators are selective about which ‘allegations’ they include, while ignoring the great weight of evidence that disproves their claims. Some people would love us to believe that the US murdered 2,753 of its own citizens on 9/11, or that the Titanic never sank, or that men never actually walked on the moon. It seems to me just as fantastic to believe that Orwell, who took a bullet in the throat for the cause of the working-class, was actually an elitist who didn’t give a stuff about the working-class.
Orwell took a bullet in the throat for the working classes? Now I’ve heard it all. Like he chose to, before he high-tailed it off from Barcelona, lying low on the train and went to have dinner with Ernest Hemingway at the George Cinq in Paris before cognacs with the Koestlers later the same evening. No one takes a bullet for the working classes. Try standing at Lutyens’s Thiepval Memorial in The Somme and saying that. It’s absurd. Read Eric Remarque’s excellent book. Eric Arthur Blair did. How come you flag wave your working class cred, Ron? How come you indulge in faux intellectual debate about George Orwell, the product of Elitist Eton? Just doing it breaks your bond. I have no more time for the working class than Churchill or Eric Arthur Blair did. The greatest Orwell work is nothing to do with the working class. It’s all metaphysical. I say it. People dismiss what I say, but they cannot deny it. Nineteen Eighty Four is pure Hamlet. Dickens, Shakespeare, Blake, Hardy, Swift – the writer’s heroes – hardly men of the working classes are they? Look at Dickens. He’d check out of the hotel in Boston and New York if it didn’t have the right champagne. Who wants to be working class? Orwell maybe, but certainly not Eric Arthur Blair. Crystal glass does make you an elitist. Believe me, I am one and I love it. We have the marmalade out of a dish round here in St Marks Road, just down from the Blair family home. I insist on it. The place was built in 1897. It would be inappropriate not to. There’s a way of doing stuff that you half learn, half know instinctively. We Henley boys call it standards. Eric Arthur Blair was a Henley boy. I went to Dione’s for tea a few times. Delightful. Sometimes a single malt whisky after, in a cut glass tumbler. . . Some soup kitchen, in Chichester. I introduced her to Christopher Edwards of the suave salons of Wallingford. I went there once. Akl heavy drapes and red velvet, lined by bookshelves of leather bound classics. Some den of the dole! I introduced him to Charles Wiggin of leafy Shiplake where even the Sub Post Office where Eric Arthur Blair used to buy his pink sugar pigs sells claret, and copies of Eric & Us, darling. . And I brought Christopher Organ of Russells and Kent University into the OS, hardly a hop-picker himself I’d say. So allow me to rephrase the question, Ron. Are you the only working class member of the OS and if so, what are you doing hanging out in swanky London hotels and having Society AGM lunches? Not very Alf Garnett is it? Come off it. Our pet dog can work that one out. And he’s a classy piece of work too. All roast chicken and no Chum. Eric Arthur Blair was an elitist. You know – Eton, Eastbourne, India, Henley, Henley Golf Club, Islington, Astor, Sutton Courtenay. He invented George Orwell to be anything he liked. Even working class. But George Orwell never existed. There’s no deed poll document. Like Sherlock Holmes never existed. Like Lewis Carroll never existed. It’s fact, not conspiracy theory. That’s too easy. Let me ask another question, then. How many hypocrites are there in the OS? People calling Orwell an atheist but singing carols at Christmas? I’m sticking to my thesis, of course. It is properly researched and has support of evidence. And I defend the intellectual and social elitism that defines me and that probably saved the cause of mankind’s freedom – Churchill, Smuts, Nelson, Wellington, Geldof, Atlee, The Kennedy’s and so it goes. We rely on this class, the Eton College boys, like Eric Arthur Blair, to get us through this thing, with their brain power. . If Orwell was a lefty prole lover, why did he give MI6 a list of political left wing undesirables? Because he aspired to the Washington DC British Intelligence club of Dahl, Coward and Fleming that he himself failed to get into. He thought that he might curry some favour with the establishment. It didn’t work. I asked Richard Blair about this when we had lunch and he said it was his father’s darkest hour. The record shows that Orwell’s mother warned Eileen that her son was some piece of work, a demanding elitist type. Eileen said she could handle it. The evidence is all there in the church in Wallington. You must have been there? Or can you not afford the bus fare? I cannot tell. I have an Honours Sociology degree from a Russell Group university. We didn’t have any working class people in my year group. I went to Public School, ditto. I have lived in Henley on Thames for 50 years, double ditto. It’s the same life experience as Eric Arthur Blair pretty much. What do people like us, like Eric Arthur Blair and me, know or care about the working classes? Why would we? That’s for Lenin to pretend to do. Not even Tony Blair would go that far. I am meeting the Queen on Monday as a designated and recognised ambassador of Orwell. That’s what it dsays on the embossed invitation. Cool Britannia. It’s the Royal Regatta here next week. Hooray! Will the politburo of the OS have me expelled? I confess, I read Animal Farm and OK, yes, I understood it. Double hooray for the boys from Henley on Thames, Eric and Pete.
No I don’t have a Russel Group degree Pete, my own honours degree was entirely funded by my own sweat and toil. Furthermore, I may not know much about Royal etiquette, but I do know my subject. Two things need clearing up on that subject and that’s me finished Pete. The purpose of this forum is for all members to have their say and I sincerely hope they do because what you are suggesting does Eric/George a great disservice.
Point 1 – Orwell went to Spain with some idea about writing newspaper articles. At that time, for Orwell, Socialism was no more than a general idea in his mind that stood in opposition to inequality, imperialism and, of course, fascism. Upon arriving in Barcelona he conceded that it was the first time he had been in a place where ‘the working class were in the saddle.’ He recognised it immediately as ‘a state of affairs worth fighting for’ and the following year wrote to Cyril Connelly that ‘I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism.’ These are George Orwell/Eric Blair’s words – not mine. The only reason Eric Blair was stood in that trench that morning was in support of the Spanish working-class in opposition to Franco’s top-down revolution. It wasn’t just George Orwell who took a bullet in the throat for the cause of the working-class Pete – it was Eric Arthur Blair – and I would say that at the Thiepval memorial, Fleury-devant-Douaumont, or at any of the other memorials on the battlefields where the working-class of Europe slaughtered each other in 1914-18. You should read Homage to Catalonia again Pete – it’s probably Orwell’s most important book.
Point 2 – Blair became Orwell because when Down and Out was published he was earning his living as a teacher. The reasons are obvious. Boring isn’t it but it’s as simple as that. Second, and more important, by clinging to your theory Pete, you are also completely missing the point of what Orwell the writer was all about – that of social conscience. As I sit here in my library (yes working class people do have libraries Pete) and draw upon a hundred quotations to illustrate my point. I’ll settle for one, Writers and Leviathan published in 1948 and you will see what I mean. Orwell’s spells out exactly why he became a political writer:
“The invasion of literature by politics was bound to happen. It must have happened, even if the special problem of totalitarianism had never arisen, because we have developed a sort of compunction which our grandparents did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery in the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible.”
You see? From the start, Blair decided to be a writer – something outside of normal life – “enormous novels with purple passages and unhappy endings.” But the above is an account of an invasion! Read Inside the Whale! He could not be the aesthetic writer of the twenties that he wanted to be. He embraced the invasion of literature and chose content before form and became the politically/socially conscious writer of the thirties. Read Why I Write – he chose four reasons why, the forth being political purpose. In any other age, the first three would have outweighed the forth. Sorry, but bang goes the theory Pete! Orwell was Blair – the two are indistinguishable.
For the record Pete, I’ve been to all the Orwell houses, including Wallingford, AND St Marks Rd for that matter. I was surprised to discover that ‘Roselawn’ is still called ‘Roselawn.’ Had I known you then, I guess I could have dropped by for that single malt in a cut-glass tumbler. Now that I’ve let my working-class cat out of the bag, I guess I wouldn’t be welcome – I prefer Kentucky Bourbon anyhow.
I have nothing against the working class, Ron, although none of my friends are them, of course. . Nor did Eric Arthur Blair have anything against them per se. Why would he? They were a source of livelihood for him as a writer. And we are both equal opportunity drinkers. So Orwell was invented because Blair was a teacher? What? That has no foundation as theory whatsoever. You say that Orwell and Blair are indistinguishable. So why did he bother with them both? What happened? He woke up one Monday morning and said to himself, “I know, I’m a teacher. Better invent a pseudonym!” Our man did not lack purpose in this way. Orwell expresses views that are of a fictional character and not of Blair himself. You wallow, or glory, I am not sure which, in your working class image. That’s a pose of course. Orwell wrote that one up. The professional Cockney thing. A bit passé don’t you think? A bit worn-out for holidays in Capri and genteel Society AGM lunches, I say. Blair just wanted to be a writer of worth and to leave us his literary legacy. He admitted himself that he would have written about anything. Victor Golancz ditched him for being so mercurial. That’s a fact. Then Blair shops the whole of the intellectual and political Left to the Government with his Quisling list. . That even bemused Richard Blair. How does that fit with your hero of Socialism? That’s some attachment to Socialism. Then we get Nineteen Eighty Four, which has nothing to do with politics or Socialism at all. It’s just a tour de force of monumental literary significance. He wasn’t about to waste it on Lefty politics. His mother and sister told Eileen in Wallington that he was a difficult elitist piece of work. Eileen said she could handle him. She did. It’s all there, recorded in Wallington. I guess that you didn’t make it up to the church in Wallington? They sell an excellent facsimile of the wedding certificate. I have it here in the bookcase. I guess it’s not that working class people don’t have bookcases, but more what they put in them or on them, like those vulgar big flat-screen TVs for watching the football. . I like this Blair fellow. You keep your hybrid Labradoodle cross of Ghandi and Scargill, both of them reactionary menaces of course. . I think that’s doing the writer a disservice. I’m polishing the real deal here – Eric Arthur Blair, the fan of Lewis Carroll, and the creator of that non-person commentator, George Orwell, the author of the sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nineteen Eighty Four. . Adios, Pedro (Instant Smith). Please don’t take all this as Lefty baiting, but if it is, I’m loving every minute of it, as Eric Arthur Blair, he of the undesirables list, did.
I wanted to put this separately. Ron Bateman says that Orwell was a supporter of the Socialist Left and that he took a bullet for the working classes in Spain. We know that the communists fired the shot, but what I want to know is this. How come the respected Left Wing publisher, Victor Gollancz, sacked Orwell after Spain for being politically mercurial? And how come Orwell then compiled a list of Left Wing intellectual and political personalities that he considered to be a threat to HM Government and gave it willingly to MI5 without being asked? How is that supporting Socialism and the Left? I asked Richard Blair and he could not answer me. Can anyone marry Ron’s claim to the facts? Or was it all just him taking revenge on the people who shot him?
We have Beatrix Potter put forward as the seminal influence to Animal Farm, credibly. So how about-
Down and Out is a lift of A Tale of Two Cities…… Homage to Catalonia is a lift of All Quiet On The Western Front……….and, of course, Nineteen Eighty Four is a synthesis of Through The Looking Glass with James Burnham’s What Is Happening In The World Now and HG Wells’ Time Machine. It’s an open question, not rhetorical.
Then I would like to move on to why he never went to America to follow up on the transference of Fascism to The Confederacy. Coward, Fleming, Dahl, Hemingway – they were all in DC but no sign of our man. So ironic that without America Orwell would be of tertiary interest to the bookworm. So remarkable that American Intelligence turned Animal Farm into propaganda against The Kremlin as he so naively allowed. But then, if he hadn’t realised his good fortune and his bad mistake we would never have Nineteen Eighty Four, where he gives up all the mercurial faux political posturing at last and applies himself to the big one with such resounding effect and success…Adios, Instant Smith (name and address supplied)
Peter Caldwell and Ron Bateman are big footy fans and I was feeling left out, so my son, Lt Oli BA MA RN, and I sat down last night to watch Italy beat England. Carole went off to watch the black Julius Caesar upstairs, which was a wonderful, I hope intended, antidote to the goings on in Kiev. The end to end game was most entertaining. I opted for a couple of large Bells. I don’t know anything about football, but I thought that everyone knows you don’t let anyone called Ashley take penalties. That’s Rule No.1…Anyway, the Orwellian point I wish to make is that the FA now have to address the big issue of the beautiful game, which of course is endemic racism at home, not abroad, as championed by J. Terry Esq. This national game of the workers is rife with racism and corporate exploitation, with a shot of MAFIA thrown in as Graham Greene informed us, quite like the Olympics and Tennis are (Wimbledon starts today). I take the Eric Arthur Blair attitude to organised sport. It’s a snakepit of international right-wing racist corporate manipulation driven and controlled by the global Fascist media Imperium (aka The Ministry of Truth). Anyone on the terraces care to comment, mateys? Stick to Fives in the Quad, like Eric always did, I say. Addio and Adios, Instant Smith (Name and address supplied).