Notes from a Black Country

THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER (264 pp.)--George Orwell -- Harcourt, Brace ($4.50).

George Orwell was a pilgrim who hated progress and found an empty shrine at the end of a blind alley called socialism. Famed British Critic V.S. Pritchett has called him "the conscience of his generation." An extremely troubled conscience it was, and Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier does much to explain why.

First issued in 1937 and now published for the first time in the U.S., Orwell's book, like James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, has become a period classic, evoking for the middle-aged a dismal time of economic troubles, when sensitive men became angry about the near starvation of their near neighbors. Agee's book dealt with Southern sharecroppers in the U.S. Orwell's people had an even smaller share in any crop: they were the barely fed and scarcely tolerated unemployed of England. What Benjamin Disraeli called England's "two nations" had in the '30s bred a third -- the untouchables of 20th century industrialism. Orwell, born a Brahmin, lived among them like a martyr.

The record of Orwell's social immolation is still fascinating reading today, not only for the great clarity with which Orwell describes an appalling landscape-with-figures but for the honesty with which he argues with himself about it all. That rare creature, a bitter man with no self-pity, Orwell writes in a style beside which today's Angry Young Men sound like a party of petulant pixies.

The New Untouchables. In the '20s, Orwell -- still known as Eric Blair* -- was serving in Britain's Burma police and slowly becoming disillusioned with his Kiplingesque career. He could not bring himself to go on governing the "lesser breeds without the Law,'' but when he took his bad conscience home, he was soon to find, in the unemployed of the Depression, the least of breeds within the law. The industrial North impressed him as the dark side of a lunar slagheap landscape on which Empire's sun had set. After Orwell turned to socialism -- an Old-Etonian socialist who was prepared to be serious about it was a rare thing in those days --he was quickly tapped for great things in the world of left-wing propaganda. He went on his pilgrimage to the poor on commission from the influential Left Book Club, run by a notable socialist triumvirate -- Publisher Victor Gollancz, London School of Economics Professor Harold J. Laski and John ( The Coming Struggle for Power) Strachey. When Orwell finished his book, his sponsors found that they were getting more than they bargained for.

As a job of reporting, The Road to Wigan Pier is unmatched in the set pieces of industrial sociology. In the black country, Orwell first took lodgings above a shop that sold nothing much but "black tripe" (the "grey flocculent stuff" and the "ghostly translucent feet of pigs" were kept in a beetle-infested cellar). To get his story, he wandered in and around Wigan (population then a little under 87,000), and the account of these wanderings still makes the reader feel that he has been dragged heels first through a municipal garbage dump. Orwell lived in rooms that smelled "like a ferret's cage" and ate unmentionable meals at tables under which there was sometimes a full chamber pot. Even Louis-Ferdinand Celine's vomitive delineation of the Paris slums could not bring more repulsive social maggots into focus than those fixed by Orwell's baleful lens. He went down the wet, dripping, insecure coal mines on the heels of the naked miners--the comparatively fortunate who still had jobs. His picture of the unemployed miners and their wives scrambling for coal on the slag heaps is a shame to his age.

To their surprise, Orwell's sponsors of the Left Book Club discovered that they had not sent a tame canary down the mine to expire obligingly while testing the foul air; they had to deal with a cornered mine rat. Having sketched his Daumier-like cartoon of misery, George Orwell turned with ruthless, cold caricature on the socialists themselves, who thought they had the answer to the inhuman conditions he had described.

Curious Indiscretions. Thus began Orwell's difficult position in the hagiography of modern liberalism: though he started out on the left, he spent his best eloquence on exposing the left's hypocrisies. Orwell was honest enough to know that neither he nor any new society could change his nature; he knew that his Old School Tie set him off from other men in Britain, and he wore it with the same mixture of pain and pride as the Blessed John Ogilvie, a Jesuit missionary, might have shown toward the halter with which he was hanged at Glasgow (1615), not far north of (nor so very long before) Orwell's social researches.

Orwell himself had a few notions which some critics today would find odd. For instance, he was convinced that British bellies were largely fed on the loot of Empire; it has not turned out that way. But Orwell's polemics against bearded, fruit-juice-drinking pacifists, cranks, snobs, snob-bolsheviks, cowards in the socialist movement is devastating stuff, and this lends sharp irony to the book today. With great acumen the present publishers have reprinted Victor Gollancz's original foreword, in which the socialist publisher apologizes for the heretical opinions of his socialist writer. Says Gollancz in shocked tones: "He even commits the curious indiscretion of referring to Russian commissars as 'half-gramophones, half-gangsters.' " Such indiscretions should have been more common at that time.

In a bitter, self-derisory revision of Marx's famous exhortation to the workers of the world, Orwell ends his book with an address to his ruined brothers of the British middling classes, crippled by debt and (in his view) shackled by snobbery. He invited them to descend with him into the nether regions of the "working class where we belong," for, says he, "we have nothing to lose but our aitches." The British middle classes, however, have stubbornly continued to cling to their social aspirations and their aspirates. Class war may be 'ell. but the better-bred Briton has decided to huff it out on his own side of the phonetic fence.

*He did not like the Scottishness of Blair or the Norseness of Eric, took Orwell as his pen name from an English river he loved.

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