Table Talk

By Martha Duffy

THE WORLD OF GEORGE ORWELL edited by MIRIAM GROSS

182 pages. Simon & Schuster. $12.95.

Coming Up for Air, George Orwell's fictional elegy for a vanished England, includes a celebration of boyhood fishing. The catch is lowly tench and carp, but the thrill comes from sitting by a green pool ringed with beech trees and watching a huge pike "that was basking in the reeds turn and plunge." Pike were beyond the boy's reach: "They'd have broken any tackle I possessed."

Orwell himself was just such an elusive creature. He was a great political journalist, the disquieting conscience of socialism during the '30s and '40s, and finally, a marvelous sort of intellectual Aesop (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four). A description he wrote of Dickens fits Orwell just as well: "A free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

When he was dying in 1950 of tuberculosis, Orwell asked that his biography not be written, and so far no full-scale life has appeared. Meanwhile, there is this heavily illustrated but rather thin collection of essays and recollections by British friends and critics. It must be said that the big fish sails easily past all 18 contributors, but by now Orwell's admirers are willing to settle for discussions of tackle. Novelist-Critic John Wain and Journalist Ian Hamilton write knowledgeably about Orwell's extraordinary intellectual independence and social concern in the '30s. Critics William Empson and Malcolm Muggeridge provide more personal touches about the last decade of his life. Almost a quarter of the book is pictures. The best, of the saucy boy and the sepulchrally thin young Etonian, are new and fascinating; thereafter the material tends to decline toward portraits of miners, soldiers and literary friends of the author.

Wain is particularly acute on Orwell's impact on his contemporaries. Orwell saw through leftist cant and he saw through Stalin -- which tended to make him unpopular with his natural allies.

In 1935 the late leftist publisher Vic tor Gollancz subsidized The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell's classic report on wretched British mining conditions. It turned out to be a hot coal indeed. In a pusillanimous preface, Gollancz deplored Orwell's "general dislike of Russia" and added with evident shock: "He even commits the curious indiscretion of referring to Russian commissars as 'half-gramophones, half-gangsters.'

In "Arguments Against Orwell" D.A.N. Jones, a longtime contributor to the New Statesman, presents the only openly anti-Orwell opinion. Jones' arguments boil down to the complaint that Orwell was a spoiler who despised committees and wrote "unhelpful articles."

No doubt he did enrage manifesto writers and other sincere activists. In his passion to clarify, he could see both sides of almost every question. If he were alive today, according to Jones, he would be reminding antiwar demonstrators about Viet Cong atrocities.

The freshest parts of the book are the glimpses of the private man. Orwell suppressed his real name, Eric Blair, and depicted his early years as dismal; but a childhood friend, one Jacintha Buddicom, remembers him as a funny, spirited lad. She thinks Orwell effaced his real name and childhood simply be cause they were ordinary and happy. It seems likely, however, that the young writer was simply forging a new artistic identity for himself and discarding the privileged-class identification. Later on he liked to affect a Cockney accent and slurp his tea from the saucer, having first blown upon it vigorously.

Malcolm Muggeridge writes touchingly about Orwell's last days. He was only 46 when he died, and he had been married three months to a beautiful young woman named Sonia. The wedding took place in the hospital, and Novelist Anthony Powell gave him a mauve smoking jacket for the occasion, which he continued to wear. The man whose pessimistic view of the future is embodied in Nineteen Eighty-Four was personally joyful, doubtless because of his new wife, and full of plans, including one for a kitchen with all-black rubber fixtures. If he were alive today, he would only be 68. One wonders hungrily what he would be saying now, just twelve years before 1984.

. Martha Duffy

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