Orwell (42 page)

9.
The echo of Milton's Satan (“by fraud or guile / What force effected not,”
Paradise Lost
, 1.646–647), emphasizes the hellish aspect of the school.

10.
Orwell,
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936; London, 1962), p. 42.

11.
Ibid., p. 46. This is surely not “the greatest cruelty one can inflict,” but it was the one Orwell suffered.

12.
Quoted in G. K. Chesterton,
Charles Dickens
(New York, 1965), p. 37.

13.
See Rudyard Kipling,
Something of Myself
(New York, 1937), p. 17: “afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”

14.
Charles Dickens, “Preface” to
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839; London, 1964), p. xvi.

15.
Dickens,
Nicholas Nickleby
, p. 87.

16.
James Joyce, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916; New York, 1956), p. 50.

17.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, p. 127.

 

3.
T
HE
E
THICS
O
F
R
ESPONSIBILITY:
B
URMESE
D
AYS

1.
Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” in A
Collection of Essays
(New York, 1954), p. 247.

2.
Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” p. 249. In the same essay Orwell writes: “To say ‘I accept' in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned foods, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders” (223).

3.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, 1943), p. 356.

4.
See Stephen Spender,
World Within World
(Berkeley, 1960), p. 202: “We were divided between our literary vocation and an urge to save the world from Fascism. We were the Divided Generation of Hamlets who found the world out of joint and failed to set it right.”

5.
Brombert,
The Intellectual Hero
, pp. 143, 147, 220.

6.
Orwell wrote about imperialism in his essays “Shooting an Elephant,” “A Hanging,” “Rudyard Kipling,” “Reflections on Gandhi” and in the last half of
The Road to Wigan Pier.

7.
Orwell, “Review of
The Sword and Sickle
by Mulk Raj Anand,”
Horizon
6 (July 1942), 71.

8.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, pp. 126, 129.

9.
Ibid., p. 130.

10.
Quoted in Christopher Hollis, A
Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works
(London, 1956), p. 29. In “Why I Write,” A
Collection of Essays
, p. 315, Orwell suggests the limitations of this novel: “I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first completed novel,
Burmese Days
, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.”

11.
Compare this with Orwell's “Shooting an Elephant,” A
Collection of Essays
, p. 159: “I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”; and with Orwell's “Travel Round and Down,”
Time and Tide
, October 17, 1936, p. 1453: “When a subject population rises in revolt you have got to suppress it, and you can do so only by methods which make nonsense of any claim for the superiority of western civilisation. In order to rule over barbarians, you have got to become a barbarian yourself.”

12.
Compare Joseph Conrad,
Lord Jim
(1900; New York, 1931), p. 259:

Doramin was one of the most remarkable men of his race I had ever seen. His bulk for a Malay was immense, but he did not look merely fat; he looked imposing, monumental. This motionless body [was] clad in rich stuffs, coloured silks, rich embroideries … the flat, big, round face [was] wrinkled, furrowed…. When he walked, two short, sturdy young fellows … sustained his elbows; they would ease him down and stand behind his chair till he wanted to rise … and then would catch him under his armpits and help him up…. It was generally believed he consulted his wife as to public affairs;

with
Burmese Days
, pp. 5, 13:

 

unblinking, rather like a great porcelain idol, U Po Kyin gazed out into the fierce sunlight. He was a man of fifty, so fat that for years he had not risen from his chair without help…. His face was vast, yellow and quite unwrinkled … he wore one of those vivid Arakanese
longyis
with green and magenta checks…. [His wife] had been the confidante of U Po Kyin's intrigues for twenty years and more.

13.
See Orwell, “England, Your England,” A
Collection of Essays
, pp. 277–278: “By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the
grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilised men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.”

14.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Notes” (1874),
The Portable Nietzsche
, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), p. 48.

15.
Orwell, “Why I Write,” A
Collection of Essays
, p. 316.

 

4.
O
RWELL:
T
HE
H
ONORARY
P
ROLETARIAN

1.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968).

2.
John Wain, “The Last of George Orwell,”
Twentieth Century
155 (January 1954), 72.

3.
The editing and the index have been highly praised and deserve commendation. But I would like to note the following errors, which can be corrected in future printings. The editors claim the “War-time Diaries” have never been published; in fact, about half the 1940–41 Diary was published in
World Review
16 (June 1950), 21–44; the book jacket says Orwell wrote ten books (excluding essays) during his lifetime while the Introduction says he wrote nine (which is correct); “said” in 3:31 and “there” in 4:146n1 are both misspelled; in 3:358 “José” lacks an accent; in 4:48–49 the quotation from Herbert Read is garbled. The references to Samuel Johnson in 3:6 and to D. H. Lawrence in 3:166 are missing from the index; and the index references to
Talking to India
in 3:428 are incorrect.

The annotations are inconsistent. R. H. Tawney and William Empson get explanatory footnotes but Frank Buchman and Lord Rothermere do not. The lines in Orwell's footnote on 2:4 from Marvell's “The Garden” are not identified, nor is the mysterious reference to “18b” in 3:80. The note on Rayner Heppenstall in 2:18, “their friendship continued until Orwell's death,” is misleading in view of the denigrating and destructive portrait of Orwell in Heppenstall's
Four Absentees
(1960). And the “backward boy” (1:546) whom Orwell took care of in 1930 is called a “congenital imbecile” in
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933; New York, 1961), p. 84. He is probably the subject of Orwell's lost short story, “The Idiot.”

4.
But not always balanced. In a letter of July 1940, he writes, rather perversely: “I actually rather hope that the [German] invasion will happen. The locale morale is extremely good, and if we are invaded we shall at any rate get rid once and for all of the gang that got us into this mess” (2:34).

5.
“My early childhood had not been altogether happy…. I knew very well that I merely disliked my own father, whom I had barely seen before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘Don't'” (4:334, 360).

6.
See Orwell's
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
(1936; London, 1962), p. 13, where Gordon attacks the “Snooty, refined books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews.”

7.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937; London, 1962), p. 129.

8.
Samuel Johnson expressed the same idea: “Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil” (James Boswell,
Life of Johnson
, ed. G. B. Hill and Lawrence Powell, [Oxford, 1934], 1.511).

9.
G. B. Shaw, “Preface to
Immaturity,” Selected Prose
(New York, 1952), p. 54.

10.
Orwell, “Culture and Democracy,”
Victory or Vested Interests?
ed. G. D. H. Cole (London, 1942), p. 83.

11.
Edmund Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790).

12.
Jack London,
The People of the Abyss
(New York, 1903), p. 1.

13.
Orwell,
Burmese Days
(1934; New York, 1951), p. 61.

14.
Orwell, “Culture and Democracy,” p. 81.

15.
Ravelston is based on Orwell's friend Sir Richard Rees, the editor of
Adelphi
, where Orwell published his first reviews and the mediocre poem that Gordon composes in the novel. Rosemary is based on Eileen O'shaughnessy, whom Orwell married in 1936 and who died unexpectedly during an operation in 1945.

16.
Besides quotations from Keats and Marvell, there are ineffectual allusions to the Bible, Virgil, Chaucer, Villon, Wyatt, Peele, Shakespeare, Milton, Mandeville, Blake, Baudelaire, Francis Thompson and D. H. Lawrence. In Lawrence's artistically superior
Women in Love
(1920), the numerous references to nineteenth-century English writers contrast the tradition and solidity of that period to the chaos and disintegration of the modern age.

17.
Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, pp. 110–111.

18.
“Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed” is a theme of Orwell's novel as well as of Johnson's “London” (1738). “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol” are all portrayed in the book.

19.
Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, p. 148.

20.
The influence of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
on Wain's
Hurry on Down
(1953; London, 1960) is particularly strong, as the following Orwellian quotations from Wain indicate:

—his aim was to be outside the class structure altogether. (52)

—He began to think increasingly about money. The poison was doing its work. (77)

—He had turned his back resolutely on the world represented by Robert Tharkles; he had declared that he wanted none of it, that he would manage without its aid or approval. (81)

—Can't get a short drink under two bob. Money. The network everywhere: no, a web, sticky and cunningly arranged. (84)

—He comes to the illusory citadel called Renunciation of Ambition. (234)

21.
Quoted in Jacob Korg, “The Spiritual Theme in George Gissing's
Born in Exile,” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad
, ed. Robert Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis, 1958), p. 246.

22.
George Gissing,
New Grub Street
(1891; Boston, 1962), p. 56.

23.
Orwell, “Not Enough Money,”
Tribune
(London), April 2, 1943, p. 15. See also Orwell's important posthumous essay, “George Gissing,” 4:428–436.

24.
Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
, pp. 94–95.

25.
Orwell,
Coming Up For Air
(1939; London, 1962), p. 27.

26.
Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(New York, 1949), p. 60.

27.
This scene is very close to the sense of freedom that Orwell experienced under the short-lived Anarchist government in Barcelona. See Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia
(1938; Boston, 1959), pp. 104–105.

28.
Orwell puts too much faith in common “decency.” Decent men seldom achieve political power; and if they do, they rarely remain decent.

29.
Charles Dickens,
Hard Times
(1854; London, 1961), p. 65.

30.
Ibid., p. 105.

31.
A. J. P. Taylor,
English History, 1914–1945
(New York, 1965), p. 238.

32.
Orwell, “Our Own Have Nots,”
Time and Tide
, November 27, 1937, p. 1588.

33.
Compared to Orwell's book, J. B. Priestley's
English Journey
(1934) gives a superficial outsider's view and conveys the impression of a rather cozy and pleasant jaunt.

34.
Orwell's desire to change things is related to another criticism of most Left-wing writing. In “England, Your England” he states: “The immediately striking thing about these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion” (2:74).

35.
Orwell,
Down and Out in Paris and London
, p. 120.

36.
Orwell's somewhat sentimental description of working-class domestic life reflects his own lack of family warmth.

37.
He can also be very muddle-headed about them. In
The Road to Wigan Pier
, pp. 103–104, he writes: “Of course I know now there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school.”