The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War

A Review

Working with the late William Abrahams Peter Stansky published The Unknown Orwell in 1972, and Orwell: The Transformation in 1980; biographies of George Orwell up to his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Professor Stansky’s interest has never waned, and he is today a regular participant in Orwell Society events as well as academia

Professor Stansky’s premise in The Socialist Patriot is that “George Orwell not only participated in but was also deeply influenced and shaped by the wars that he was involved in during his lifetime: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War and the beginnings of the Cold War.” After his Preface, which also acts as “An Autobiographical Introduction”, there are five chapters, the first of which is “Before the First World War”, and then chapters on Orwell and each of the wars. Three of the war chapters of are of similar lengths, with that on the Second World War being about fifty percent longer than any other.

George Orwell’s writings are frequently a melange of the personal, literary and political. “Such, Such Were the Joys”, his recollection of his days at prep school in Eastbourne, 1911-1916, are full of personal details but also wonder what happened to the wealthy Russians who found their families had no wealth to flaunt after 1917. Later, Orwell’s meditation on political responsibility, “My Country, Right or Left” (1940), would reflect not only on what England (the term Orwell and his contemporaries used for the whole United Kingdom) meant to him as a second World War broke out, but on what it had meant to him in the earlier conflict when he had been a schoolboy. Given that Orwell came from the governing class (his father was a civil servant in India; his paternal grandfather was an Anglican clergyman) but not from the ruling class (as Peter Stansky points out, due to being the younger sons of younger sons when titles and wealth cascaded by primogeniture) the generations of Blairs had become poorer and poorer. By the time that Eric Blair was born the only way that his family could give him a “good” education was by his winning scholarships. This is how he obtained his place at St Cyprian’s, and later at Wellington and Eton.

St Cyprian’s was founded in 1898, thirteen years before Orwell arrived, and housed about 80 students: that is, fifteen to twenty must have been in each year. 155 old boys served in the forces during the War, of whom 36 were killed – about a quarter. Professor Stansky does not have the figures for those injured, but the proportion is horrific. This makes his observation “somewhat oddly, the war itself doesn’t figure to any extent in his piece about the school, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’” a remarkable understatement. Orwell entered Eton in May 1917 (after a term at Wellington, a school with an even greater martial ethos, as its name suggests), where more old boys were going to their deaths. 5,687 Old Etonians served, of whom 1,160 were killed – close to that quarter proportion. The family, though, had already been struck – Mrs Blair’s nephew, Neville Ward, her sister’s son, died during the Battle of Mons in August 1914. Mr Blair volunteered and served at a military base in southern France transporting horses and mules to the northern battle fields. Professor Stansky is neutral in reporting this, but other biographers tend to treat Lieutenant Blair’s service as a joke even though the logistics must have revealed the horrors of the meat grinder on the battlefield: animals went north and never came back, constantly more had to be obtained.

Orwell’s recollections of the First World War, then, are remarkably sanguine, given that boys must have seen the year above them sent into battle and learned that one in four of them was to be killed. Much later Orwell was to write of Arthur Koestler, that he had spent “a long stretch in one of Franco’s fortresses, with the sound of firing squads ringing through the walls twenty or thirty times a day”. In essence, every schoolboy in Britain had experienced the same thing for four years. Whether they were in council board schools, ancient grammar schools, private or exclusive Public Schools, boys saw the years above them sent – some to their deaths, some to mutilation, only some to return physically whole.

Although Burmese Days seems to summarise Orwell’s anti-colonial attitudes his fictional depiction of George Bowling’s father-in-law, Mr Vincent, “full of stories about cobras and cummerbunds and what the district collector said in ’93” might also epitomise what his service in uniform in the Imperial Police, and his interactions with the military there, meant to him. Consequently, Professor Stansky writes “Ever since his return from Burma in 1927 he had been moving to the Left, but it was not until Spain that his political ideas reached a coherent and firm shape”. The truth of this can be found in the conjunction of Orwell’s letter to Cyril Connolly “I have seen wonderful things & at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before”, and knowing that Orwell had written the letter while recovering from the throat wound he had received from a fascist bullet on the Huesca front.

Orwell also came back from Spain a pacifist, opposed both to fascism but also what he saw as the threat of militarism in Britain. It was a dream, he revealed in “My Country, Right or Left”, that made him realise that he would fight for “my country”. Conditions of war seem to have super-charged Orwell – although he could not join the forces (his health was not good enough), he did join the Home Guard, where he taught the guerrilla tactics developed in Spain. He had full time jobs, at the BBC and then at the left-wing Tribune magazine, and meanwhile he was writing his freelance journalism that produced articles in Horizon magazine, columns in daily newspapers, and reports for magazines in the USA. During all this, he also wrote his satire on the Russian Revolution, Animal Farm. Finding a publisher for his “fairy tale” was a task in itself. Finally, in the Spring of 1945, he became a war reporter, following the army of liberation and seeing what first the Nazis and then the war had done to Europe. Before most of this, though, he had spent 1940 writing his short book The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. This was his call to make the war a revolutionary war: that is a social, and a Socialist, struggle.

Where Orwell had lost only a cousin in the First World War, in 1940 he lost his brother-in-law, Laurence O’Shaughnessy, and then in 1945, while he was in Europe, Eileen, his wife, died. During the years in-between his mother died of natural causes (she had gone back to work, to help the war effort), and not long after the War his older sister died, too. Remarkably, Orwell carried on working. He returned from Europe to begin reporting on the summer 1945 General Election, which saw Clement Attlee’s Labour Party elected, who would go on to introduce the Welfare state. Although he had seen the Russian Revolution betrayed, and the consequences of Stalinism in Spain, Orwell, Professor Stansky writes (removing his double negative), “hope[d] that some form of socialism might be achieved, as extremely difficult and unlikely as that might be”.

The final war discussed in The Socialist Patriot is the Cold War, the one to which Orwell gave a name. In 1947 Orwell wrote “… the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery… [in] a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.” Political pundits who took up the term used it to refer to the confrontation between the North Atlantic nations and the Soviet bloc, but Orwell had used the phrase once before, in 1943. He wrote then, discussing the ideas of his politically sympathetic friend Arthur Koestler, “One of the greatest advantages of the dictators in the period of ‘cold war’ was that the mass of English people could not grasp what totalitarianism was like.” That is, to Orwell, “cold war” was the condition in totalitarian states, not the conflict between totalitarian and liberal societies for which the term came to be used.

“Orwell was a deeply patriotic socialist, shaped significantly by his growing up before and during the First World War. On the face of it, patriot and socialist are not concepts that one might normally link. Some might think that they are somewhat contradictory terms” Professor Stansky writes in his chapter “Before the First World War”. Reading those sentences, one realises that, despite his Anglophilia, Professor Stansky is not British, and one might think of Orwell’s own observation, in his essay on Rudyard Kipling: “… things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American”. One such thing, to a native, would be that Socialism and patriotism are not incompatible, and modern commentators such as Billy Bragg have quoted Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn in support of this opinion.

Another quirk one notices in The Socialist Patriot, is that unless he is quoting Orwell (for instance, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”) Professor Stansky fails to capitalise “Socialism”, contrary to Orwell’s practice. Perhaps this, again, is an American editorial standard, as the only place where the uncapitalised phrase “democratic socialism” can be found in Orwell’s Complete Works is his 1947 essay “Towards European Unity”, which was first published in Partisan Review in the USA. It leads, though, to the fear that Professor Stansky’s “socialism” is less important than Orwell’s “Socialism”. These worries, though, are petty.

“The Spanish Civil War had completed his commitment to socialism but also made him acutely aware of how it could be threatened and undermined. The Second World War, with England so endangered, reinforced his love for his country but also convinced him that it would be at its best if it were a socialist society”. These are some of the concluding remarks of this book – the first of a number of promising, thoughtful reconsiderations of the life and work of George Orwell appearing in 2023.

*

The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War by Peter Stansky

(Stanford University Press, 2023, ISBN13: 9781503635494)