Orwell (35 page)

Orwell in person could be unintentionally comical. The poet Ruth Pitter recalled the young writer earnestly but awkwardly trying to get started, desperately in search of material and ludicrous in his attempts to use it: “We lent him an old oil-stove and he wrote a story about two young girls who lent an old man an oil-stove…. One story that never saw the light of day began ‘Inside the park, the crocuses were out.' Oh dear, I'm afraid we did laugh.” He later satirized his own behavior in the absurdities of his fictional characters.

In his forties Orwell affected working-class habits and a cockney accent, much to the amusement of his colleagues, to show his kinship with the working class. In the BBC canteen during World War II he would pour his tea into a saucer and drink it with loud slurping sounds. During the war he shared the austerity and deprivation of ordinary people by eating the worst food he could possibly find. The more wretched the dish, the more cheerful he became. He'd gobble up over-boiled cod with bitter turnip tops and annoy his dining companions by gleefully remarking, “I'd never have thought they'd have gone so well together!” He once even ate boiled eels that his wife had left for the cat and found them quite tasty. Arguing with an Indian colleague in the BBC Eastern Service in a self-consciously cockney voice, Orwell could be heard through the thin partitions insisting, “The FACK that you're black … and that I'm white has
nudding whadever to do wiv it.
” His fake accent made the gauche yet well-intentioned remark hilarious.

Orwell was not afraid to offend people when forcefully expressing his ideas. In his essay “Funny, But Not Vulgar,” he insisted that humor was essentially serious: “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order…. All great humorous writers show a willingness to attack the beliefs and the virtues on which society necessarily rests.” In fact, the more shockingly offensive he became, the funnier he was.

In his essays, journalism and letters Orwell used all the weapons in his humorous arsenal, from the subtle to the crude, to enhance his polemical arguments and persuade readers that he was speaking the truth. Recalling his schooldays, he challenged the assumptions about British superiority by mocking the mindless way that history, rigidly divided into periods, had
been taught: “in 1499 you were still in the Middle Ages, with knights in plate armour riding at one another with long lances, and then suddenly the clock struck 1500, and you were in something called the Renaissance, and everyone wore ruffs and doublets and was busy robbing treasure ships on the Spanish Main.” Using familiar clichés about each historical period, he satirized the supposedly instant transition from one age to another, when every class wore exactly the same costume and scarcely had time to change from clanking armor to velvety doublets.
(Nineteen Eighty-Four
, by the way, opens as “the clocks were striking thirteen.”)

He loved to drive home his point with the schoolboy slang he'd perfected at prep school and Eton and with the colloquial language he'd learned as a policeman and a tramp. When contrasting British and American crime novels in “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” he turned from a genteel to a brutal book and expressed his moral and physical disgust for the latter by using a shocking metaphor and comparing it to a dive into the slime: “So much for
Raffles.
Now for a header into the cesspool.” He liked to yoke disparate images together for comic effect. He first called the atmosphere of the BBC “something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum,” then sharpened this image by defining it as “a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum.” Though the comparison seems far fetched, he believed he was prostituting his talents by working under an absurdly bureaucratic regime and broadcasting wartime propaganda to India, which had very few radios.

Orwell, who thought of himself as unattractive, mocked buildings, statues and even people he disliked by calling them ugly. In one of his “As I Please” columns, he wrote that if you climb the hill in Greenwich Park, which had several handsome works by Sir Christopher Wren, “you can have the mild thrill of standing directly on longitude 0°, and you can also examine the ugliest building in the world, Greenwich Observatory … that shapeless sprawling muddle at the top of the hill.” The climber would be rewarded not with a handsome prospect, but (as Orwell challenges the reader to think of an uglier building) with a hideous astronomical observatory that ruins the “mild thrill.”

Referring to the monument of the famous hymn writer, Reginald Heber, bishop of Calcutta, Orwell told a friend, “if you are ever near St. Paul's [cathedral] & feel in a gloomy mood, go in & have a look at the statue of the first Protestant bishop of India, which will give you a good laugh.” Orwell was amused not only by the statue, but also by the very idea of a Christian bishop preaching (as Orwell did at the BBC) to the Hindu masses.

Orwell also used humor (as well as quirky behavior) to cut the upper classes down to size by connecting them, with deliberate absurdity, with
physical ugliness. “Looking through the photographs in the New Year's Honours List,” he wrote, “I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst like a tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer.” Contrasting the tentative “it seems” with the definitive “the rule” and inventing a fanciful aristocratic name, he placed those honored by the King between two distinctly lower-class types: a fat bartender and a dyspeptic tax-hound. He then zeroed in on a particularly distinguished personage, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian newspaper tycoon and wartime minister of supply, who actually had a simian countenance. Suggesting that the minister was being manipulated by the government, he wrote that Beaverbrook looked more “like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.”

Recalling his grim experience as a dishwasher in an expensive Parisian restaurant, Orwell took gleeful pleasure in describing disgusting acts that were motivated by class hatred. In
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) he revealed that “a French cook will spit in the soup” and that a waiter proudly told him that “he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.” The waiter not only upset the expectations of
haute cuisine
, but also took grim pleasure in watching the customer consume the polluted soup. Orwell concluded with a startling though irrefutable premise: “Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.”

In addition to schoolboy slang, the adolescent mockery of physical ugliness and delight in disgusting details, Orwell also took pleasure in practical jokes. He had amused himself in childhood by answering a fake advertisement for a weight-reducing course and, pretending to be an obese matron, had deliberately prolonged the cruel correspondence. “Do come before ordering your summer frocks,” the weight-reducer insisted, “as after taking my course your figure will have altered out of recognition.” This went on for some time, he recalled, “during which time the fee gradually sank from two guineas to half a crown, and then I brought the matter to an end by writing to say that I had been cured of my obesity by a rival agency.”

In this diverting playlet, the adult advertiser assumes that the cheeky schoolboy is actually the sort of woman who orders frocks from her dressmaker each season instead of buying them off the rack in a shop. Her fee is as sharply reduced as his figure is supposed to be. Never revealing that his fraud matched her own, Orwell neither enrolled in the promising course nor
rejected it. Instead, he twisted the knife by claiming to default to another agency. The advertiser, promising a radical transformation, thinks she's deceiving Orwell but is herself deceived.

Orwell's humor could be self-deprecating in a characteristically English way. In his autobiographical first novel,
Burmese Days
(1934), he portrays the comical aspect of a humiliating incident. Flory, courting Elizabeth and taking her through the jungle, shoots a leopard, seems heroic and achieves a long-sought moment of intimacy with her. He promises to cure and give her this symbolic trophy, but is horrified to discover that “the skin had been utterly ruined. It was as stiff as cardboard, with the leather cracked and the fur discoloured and even rubbed off in patches. It also stank abominably. Instead of being cured, it had been converted into a piece of rubbish.”

Flory, of course, should have thrown it away and pretended he'd lost it. But, desperate to see Elizabeth, he feels compelled, in an extremely awkward scene, to present it to her: “It looked so shabby and miserable that he wished he had never brought it…. She stepped back with a wince of disgust, having caught the foul odour of the skin. It shamed him terribly. It was almost as though it had been himself and not the skin that stank.” Elizabeth, edging away from him, is predictably horrified by the disgusting hide and by the offensive smell that seems to drift from the skin to Flory himself. This incident terminates all hope of marrying a girl who is, though he doesn't realize it, quite shallow and worthless.

Courting a girl in England when starting out as a writer and using a comically far-fetched image, Orwell compared his own work to Joyce's great novel. When I read
Ulysses
, he said, “and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.” Taking a course in voice production is as useless as the weight-reducing course and only gives the impression of being what Joyce (alluding to a brand of ale) called a “bass barreltone.” (In any case, a truly ambitious eunuch would try to become a countertenor.) Orwell freely admits that his literary faults are all too clear and that, compared to Joyce, he's a castrato.

Orwell often used satiric wit to expose the faults of the literary world. Reviewing Cyril Connolly's novel
The Rock Pool
(1936), he defined, in a neatly phrased alliterative sentence, the moral chasm between himself and his old friend: “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.” Exploiting the sexual suggestion of spending sperm, Orwell exposed Connolly's arty frauds as both parasites and buggers.

Orwell could be both a blunt Englishman and a supercilious Etonian. In a review of
The Hamlet
in 1940, he put down William Faulkner by satirizing the perverse, Southern Gothic characters: “people with supremely hideous names—names like Flem Snopes and Eck Snopes—sit about on the steps of village stores, chewing tobacco, swindling one another in small business deals, and from time to time committing a rape or a murder.” The wit derives from the casual way in which these revolting characters progressively degenerate from disgusting habits to minor frauds to violent crimes.

Orwell began to write after returning from Burma in 1928, but did not achieve success until he published
Animal Farm
in 1945. In the course of his long struggle a lot of his work was rejected and his animal fable turned down by T. S. Eliot himself. In
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936) Orwell, who did not go on to university after Eton and remained a perennial outsider, pierced the polite façade and exposed the snobbery and clubbyness of literary life. Once again, he contrasted opposite extremes of discourse—excessive delicacy and brutal frankness—to drive home his point. His hero Gordon Comstock, bitterly enraged after his rather feeble poem has been rejected by an editor, asks: “Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, ‘We don't want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with.'”

When Orwell became literary editor of the Socialist newspaper
Tribune
in 1943, he didn't have the heart to send out rejections and meekly accepted manuscripts he knew he could never print. In another deliberately absurd comparison, the ex-colonial policeman used a prison metaphor to show that a reversal of roles would be fatally anarchic if a mere writer were suddenly promoted to a position of power: “It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison.”

One of Orwell's most famous political anecdotes anticipated a major theme of
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
the slavish submission to authoritarian rule. In August 1939, after Hitler signed the nonaggression pact with Stalin, which allowed him to invade Poland and start World War II, he was, according to the Communist Party line, suddenly transformed from an enemy into a friend. In June 1941, after betraying the mutually treacherous pact by invading Russia, he once again became an enemy. Stressing the mindless loyalty of Party members, Orwell recorded in July 1941 that “when the news of Hitler's invasion of Russia reached a New York café where some Communists were talking, one of them who had gone out to the lavatory returned to find that the ‘party line' had changed in his absence.” Orwell emphasized
the extreme suddenness of the Communist's mind-change by connecting his high-minded political beliefs with an ill-timed trip to the toilet.

During the last half of Orwell's career, as his books became darker and more pessimistic, he introduced humor to relieve the gloom and make his ideas more palatable. He began
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937), his account of coal miners' lives in the industrial Midlands, with a description of the revolting tripe shop and the equally horrible lodging house above it. In the shop that sold sheep's stomachs, the food of the poor, “there was a slab upon which lay the great white folds of tripe, and the grey flocculent stuff known as ‘black tripe,' and the ghostly translucent feet of pigs, ready boiled.” Using a Latinate word, he contrasted the cloudy stuff with the translucent trotters, which seem even worse when boiled and ready to eat.