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The eternal Orwell

On the 70th anniversary of his death, why is Orwell still our most useful writer?

In 1969 Sonia Orwell took the plunge. In the 19 years since George’s death, she had zealously guarded her late husband’s legacy but she had always declined to write about him at length. What changed her mind was Mary McCarthy’s waspish review of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, the four-volume Orwell anthology overseen by Sonia. McCarthy, who had never met George but had mutual friends, pondered what he would have made of Vietnam, Prague, CND, revolting students and so on. Some of her conclusions infuriated Sonia, who shot back in the pages of Nova magazine with a coldly furious six-page essay, ‘Unfair to George’. In McCarthy’s eyes, she quipped, Orwell seems “to fail if he does not set down his thoughts on events which happened after his death.” That process continues. Half a century later, people are still trying to turn him into the eternal commentator.

Orwell was fascinated by authors, such as Kipling and Swift, who had written themselves so deep into the national imagination that they couldn’t be written out. “Whether you approve of him or not,” he wrote of Dickens, “he is there like the Nelson Column.” Orwell has likewise become a cultural landmark but one with unique oracular power. On politics, in the broadest sense of the word, he is our must useful writer. To say that he is “more relevant than ever” is a cliché — he was pretty damn relevant in his lifetime — but Orwell has yet again become an indispensable authority in the age of populism and Big Tech. Whether you want to talk about Trump, Brexit, Corbynism, China, political correctness or the Amazon Echo, has he got views for you.

It does not end with his two unimpeachable classics, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Last year in Parliament, for example, Clive Lewis paraphrased ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, Robert Jenrick referred to Homage to Catalonia and Baroness Altmann dug deep for a line from one of his ‘London Letter’ reports for the Partisan Review. The section of ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ in which Orwell fretted that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” wasn’t published in his lifetime but it has been quoted recently by both the literary critic Michiko Kakutani in The Death of Truth and the Disney star Zendaya in Spider-Man: Far From Home. “He had a real gift — partly a great publicist’s gift — of summaring complex ideas in soundbites and tart phrases,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of This Is Not Propaganda. “He shares that with Marx, for example. He gives us a vocabulary to talk about slippery subjects.”

But why Orwell, above all others? His close friend Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Thirties is spangled with quotable observations, many of them still pertinent, but you don’t see any of them turned into Facebook memes. Mary McCarthy was more of an intellectual superstar in her lifetime than Orwell was in his but we don’t turn to her journalism for guidance on Trump and Putin. Hannah Arendt has found a new readership in the age of authoritarian populism but she has yet to figure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The simple answer is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Around two million of Orwell’s words are currently in print. Only a fraction of them would be available were it not for the last thing, give or take a few book reviews, that he ever wrote. Animal Farm was a sensation but not sufficient to make him a legend. It was Nineteen Eighty-Four that ensured scholars would round up every single scrap of paper they could find and journalists and politicians would never let him go. Orwell made clear that he considered much of his work not worth reprinting, so it would have been inconceivable to him that so much of his output as a cash-strapped, workaholic freelancer would one day acquire the status of gospel.

When Nineteen Eighty-Four entered the world, on 8 June 1949, Orwell was on the way out. He wouldn’t admit it but his ruined lungs were beyond repair, imprisoning him in his room at University College Hospital. That was where he filed his last articles; where he read books, wrote letters and kept tabs on a world in which he could no longer participate; where he married Sonia in October 1949; and where he breathed his last in the small hours of 21 January 1950, at the age of 46. He was buried under the birth name, Eric Arthur Blair, that he never got around to changing.

The timing of Orwell’s death made him look like a prophet cut down in his prime, and the obituaries were glowing. Muggeridge observed, somewhat enviously, “how the legend of a human being is created”. In the longer term, his passing meant that Orwell was incapable of letting anyone down by moving to the right, as many of his contemporaries did, or growing cranky and out of touch. Right on the major issues of his day, he was saved from being wrong about the post-war world.

The obituaries made much of his commitment to honesty. Lionel Trilling argued that Orwell, unlike Shakespeare or Joyce, was attractively accessible: “He is not a genius — what a relief! For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done any of us could do.” It’s true that Orwell’s deceptive simplicity allows other writers to feel inspired rather than daunted, but he was a genius of sorts, with an unrivalled gift for telling the truth as he saw it, especially when it was easier not to do so. That’s simple in theory but painfully difficult in practice, especially for a political writer. In that respect, Orwell had the immense advantage of never wanting an easy life. Austere and unclubbable, he revelled in bad food, old clothes, the venom of his enemies and the irritation of his friends. According to his friend, the novelist Anthony Powell, he could “only thrive in comparative adversity”. He was no glib provocateur, churning out the 1940s equivalent of clickbait, but he felt that if he wasn’t annoying his readers on a fairly regular basis, especially those who were ostensibly on the same side, then he wasn’t doing his job. Another novelist friend, Arthur Koestler, wrote that “his uncompromising intellectual honesty was such that it made him appear almost inhuman at times.” For his pains, Orwell was at various points blacklisted, censored, sued, surveilled and vilified.

As a writer on the left who is often fiercely critical of the left, the columnist Nick Cohen considers Orwell an invaluable spiritual ally. “Lots of writers are put in this position where they think, ‘Do I toe the party line and write what the bosses or readers want me to write or do I stand up for myself?’” he says. “It’s as bad on the right as on the left. When you do stand up for yourself George Orwell’s on your side. You hear this rather upper-class English voice saying, ‘Don’t listen to that bollocks. Don’t sell yourself out. Don’t suppress what you think is the truth.’ He does give you courage. He makes you think, well, the boss, the editor, the politician, the Twitter mob, they’re not powerful. You are.”

Crucial to Orwell’s integrity was his capacity to give himself a hard time. He was a journalist for 21 years, from October 1928 to March 1949, during which time he never budged from his fundamental principles — freedom of expression, social justice, individual liberty — but changed his mind many times when those principles collided with events. Capitalism and fascism were “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” in 1937, until he decided that the real Janus-faced threat was totalitarianism. War with Germany was first a nightmare to be avoided, and then an existential necessity. Unlike more doctrinaire writers, he could learn from his mistakes because he asked himself tough questions: Why do you think what you do? What are your unacknowledged biases? What explains your false predictions? In his last ‘London Letter’ of 1944, he took his previous columns to task: “Of course there are many mistaken predictions… many generalizations based on little or no evidence, and also, from time to time, spiteful or misleading remarks about individuals.” Can you imagine any newspaper columnist in Britain writing those words today?

Dr Nathan Waddell, who teaches English Literature at the University of Birmingham, says that his students “relish Orwell’s clarity of critique, simple language, and unwavering bravery in speaking his mind, no matter the possible consequences. He continues to enjoy the status of a cultural sage in their eyes: someone who holds some of the intellectual and critical keys with which they might unlock the secrets of the times.” While Waddell’s students are critical of Orwell’s failings, such as his faint streak of homophobia, pre-war antisemitism and sketchy representation of women, they don’t regard them as disqualifying. “I was pleased to discover that my students didn't find him particularly problematic or outdated,” says Waddell. “They were more interested in focusing on what he has to offer to us, today.”

Recognising Orwell’s weaknesses is not just more interesting but more respectful to his memory than canonising him as The Man Who Was Always Right. He could be petty, unfair and emotionally tone-deaf. Some of his generalisations and prescriptions, notably in ‘Politics and the English Language’, don’t hold up to scrutiny. He had numerous blindspots, from feminism to cinema to the importance of establishing the NHS. Anthony Powell remembered that Orwell could be enthralling company when a subject interested him but when it didn’t he would turn away, “like a horse refusing an apple it suspects of sourness”. “His mind was limited, but he knew his own limitations,” Powell wrote. “Inside those wide limits it was a first-rate mind.”

Orwell is adored in England for his lancing insights into the national character (although Cohen suggests that his portrait of a sensible, pragmatic nation has taken “a hell of a pounding” in recent years). His clear-sighted integrity and intellectual doggedness have also made him an international figure. While western apologists for communism were trying to tear holes in Nineteen Eighty-Four, readers behind the Iron Curtain were weeping with amazed gratitude over a book that explained to them the surreal nightmare in which they lived. Ece Temelkuran, the Turkish journalist and author of How to Lose a Country, recalls seeing the 1954 animated movie of Animal Farm shortly after her country’s 1980 military coup. She was seven. “I remember my ‘defeated’ leftist mom and dad watching it with me, feeling overwhelmed,” she says. “As if it was a secret sign for resistance, after the final defeat, that reminds them they still exist. This is Orwell at his purest, I guess. The man knows how to remind humans of their basic dignity.”

Like many of Orwell’s admirers, Temelkuran draws inspiration from his personality as much as his writing. More than any individual book or essay, she respects his punishing work ethic, his vigour, and his resistance to comforting illusions. “I do believe in pessimism,” she says, “because those of us who see the evil clearly actually contribute to humankind more than the shiny happy people.”

The pessimism of Nineteen Eighty-Four is immortal because, in trying to illuminate the reality of totalitarianism in the 30s and 40s, Orwell revealed timeless truths about the psychology of power, deception and self-deception. While undertaking the first new Russian translation since the 1980s, Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky was informed by recent developments such as Putinism, Brexit and resurgent nationalism: “None of that background was there in the 1980s, but it’s what went into my translation.”

This is why Nineteen Eighty-Four has lived far beyond 1984. The same is true of many of his essays. ‘Antisemitism in Britain’ still helps to explain how people excuse or deny their own bigotry. ‘Notes on Nationalism’ delineates the phenomena that we would now call confirmation bias, filter bubbles and groupthink. ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’ remains one of the clearest accounts of the problem of separating the art from the artist. Reading Orwell does us the immense service of reminding us that the dilemmas of our time aren’t new. “Orwell lasts because he taps into something eternal: the struggle to bear an honest witness when it’s difficult,” says Cohen. “Trying to tell the truth about what you see and what you believe matters and it has always mattered. These are battles that never end.”

For Temelkuran, “Orwell is like a flag waved when the need occurs.” Many writers, some more talented than him, are still enjoyed but Orwell has the rare distinction of being needed. Seventy years after his death, he is still the voice in our ear saying: Think again. To assign to him opinions he never stated about events he never lived to see may be a cheap trick but you could do a lot worse than to ask yourself, when the going gets rough, “What would George do?”

Inspirational books

Ten great non-fiction books WHICH have influenced my own writing.

John Bew — Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (riverrun, 2016)

Sarah Churchwell — Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (Penguin, 2014)

Masha Gessen — The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Granta, 2018)

John Higgs — The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (W&N, 2013)

Florian Illies — 1913: The Year Before the Storm (Melville House, 2014)

Dave Itzkoff — Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (Times Books, 2014)

David Margolick — Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (Ecco, 2001)

George Packer — The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013)

Rick Perlstein — Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2009)

Claudia Roth Pierpoint — Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (Jonathan Cape, 2014)