Orwell 25 Years Later: Future Imperfect

By Stefan Kanfer

"Eric Blair" suits him. The crisp syllables suggest a Briton of spare style and countenance. But he despised his real name; it smacked, somehow, of Aryanism and privilege. So he cloaked his origins in a common-sounding nom de plume. His disguise became him, and at last he became his disguise. Today the world remembers him only as George Orwell, seer of the future imperfect. Neither name nor reputation is quite correct.

Now, 25 years after his death at 46, Orwell is enshrined in the language as a cliche for apocalypse. Virtually every doomsday prophecy uses "Orwellian" to describe any impingement on freedom, from imprisonment to wiretapping. Yet the word derives from Orwell's least characteristic book, 1984.*

To remember him solely for this final volume is like recalling a life by its terminal illness. Indeed when he wrote 1984, Orwell was in the last throes of tuberculosis. The book's pervasive slogan, "Big Brother Is Watching You"; the portmanteau words "New-speak," "bellyfeel," "doublethink"; the inverted graffiti, "Freedom Is Slavery," "Ignorance Is Strength"--all these may be indelible. Nonetheless, if some of 1984's predictions have come true, most have not. If the book lives, it is more as a warning than as prophecy.

Properly, Orwell should not be commemorated for his novels, which he hoped would be enduring, but for his journalism, which he assumed to be ephemeral. It is his fugitive pieces--letters, critiques, articles--that Critic George Steiner justly calls "a place of renewal for the moral imagination."

The writer of those pieces never wasted a line. The only thing he seemed to squander was his life. The heir to a relentlessly middle-class colonial tradition, Orwell gained a scholarship to Eton, then made a false start as a policeman in Burma. Out of that five-year catastrophe came the embittered radical who could dissect his emotions and his country with pitiless surgery.

In the classic memoir, Shooting an Elephant, Orwell recalls the morning a behemoth ran wild and stomped a coolie. The animal might have been saved, but the psychology of the moment demanded a kill. "Here was I," recalled the ex-official, "the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind." After the ritual sacrifice, the writer confesses, "I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool." That is more than the bottom line of a 1936 article; it is the epitaph of the British imperial style.

Orwell was a master of exit lines. Yet it is his openings that remain in the mind: "As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me"; "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing"; "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Where is the reader whose eye could rove from a page with those beginnings?

It was no wonder that even in the limited circulation of British "little magazines," Orwell attracted an international following--and a roster of rabid enemies. For though he thought of himself as a thoroughgoing leftist, he was in fact an enemy of all political movements. When other Etonians sought upward mobility, Orwell literally immersed himself in dirty water and coal dust to investigate the lives of the dishwasher and the miner. When his peers went up to London to seek careers, he went to Spain as a correspondent and stayed to fight against Franco's troops. When many fellow leftists sang the praises of the Cominform, he was rude enough to point out that "the thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure it never happened."

During World War II he called pacifists "fascifists"; yet later he pleaded for clemency toward German war criminals. When half the Western world referred warmly to Joseph Stalin as "Uncle Joe," Orwell in 1946 produced his Swiftian satire Animal Farm, with its caricature of a U.S.S.R. where leaders are pigs and their motto is "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

At the time, much of this seemed sheer perversity, a quixotic desire to be history's odd man out. But the truth of Orwell's observations slowly vindicated him. The writer was first characterized as a crank, then as an apostle of common sense, and at last, in V.S. Pritchett's phrase, "as the wintry conscience of a whole generation."

Still, that generation has long since passed in review. By now, Orwell's perceptions have been duly noted, even by the obtuse. The world no longer needs English journalists to inform it of the obscenities of the Stalin years; the news comes out of Russia itself. The dangers of secrecy and invasions of privacy are piously trumpeted even in Congress. By now, Orwell should be no more than a footnote to a bad time. Instead, he is more readable and more germane than the writers who once overshadowed him.

In part, Orwell's durability is due to his central obsession. It was not politics or personalities that concerned him so much as language itself. In the '30s he saw words bent; in the '40s he chronicled the result: whole governments twisted out of shape. His best work was an attempt to restore the meaning to words, to prove that "good prose is like a window pane." "One ought to recognize," he wrote, "that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."

For most of his professional life Orwell sought to bring about that improvement. His weapons were not formidable. As Lionel Trilling observes, Orwell's pieces excel "by reason of the very plainness of his mind, his simple ability to look at things in a downright undeceived way ... he is not a genius--what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do."

Therein lies Orwell's lasting power. He holds out hope that ordinary citizens may see through systems and rhetoric, may speak and write the truth to each other, and demand the truth from their leaders. It takes little skill to imagine the furious response Orwell would have provoked on both sides of the DMZ, or what he would have said about the windy self-righteousness of the U.N., or about the excesses of Peking, Moscow, Paris and Washington. The need for an Orwell is more acute now than it was a generation ago. But the tonic power of his writings is still available to anyone who has, or appreciates, an independent mind. It is not necessarily 1984 that his writings concern; it could as well be 1975. sbStefan Kanfer

* Other writers have propelled words into the public consciousness; Orwell has done so with a figure. The 1974 World Food Conference in Rome was expected to produce a ten-year projection. Instead an eleven-year study was offered, presumably to avoid the horrific overtones of 1984.

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