Bernard Crick: George Orwell — A Life, Penguin, 1982, £2.95
'The Trotskyite with big feet' was how HG Wells once described George Orwell. Whilst perhaps agreeing on the size of his feet, writers and critics cannot agree on interpretations of his writings each claiming him for their own. From 'Tory anarchist' to proto-fascist to Social Democrat, Orwell has been described in a variety of ways.
The latest biography of the man and his work by Bernard Crick attempts very successfully to put the record straight. His appreciation of Orwell documents in great detail the extraordinary process whereby an old Etonian and member of the Burmese colonial police force, became a revolutionary socialist.
Born in 1903 in Bengal, Arthur Eric Blair decided to leave the Imperial Indian police force in 1927 after five years service because 'I had got to escape from every form of man's dominion over man'. This spontaneous hatred of imperialism became the starting point for his journey towards socialism.
Filled with middle class guilt feelings and the need to purge himself of his background, Orwell spent the next years living amongst the poor and the vagrants of Paris and London. If his journey onto the other side of the class barriers strikes us today as somewhat false, it did open Orwell's blinkered eyes to the conditions in which so many people lived. He tried to communicate what he had found to the rest of the world in his first successful novel 'Down and Out in Paris and London'.
It must be noted here that although Orwell succeeded in shaking off his background and in identifying with the oppressed rather than the oppressor, Crick's biography rather glosses over the treatment of his own wife, who serviced Orwell as a writer and died at an early age under anaesthetic from an operation for cancer, with little support from her husband. Perhaps the women's movement of the 1930s and 1940s was not strong but it is regrettable that a modern-day biographer tries to shrug this off, when Orwell's own contemporaries did in fact remark on it.
Orwell's experiences in Paris and London combined with the huge political upheavals of the 1930s brought Orwell, Crick argues, towards a 'democratic Socialist' perspective. For example, Orwell was in Marseilles after leaving Burma for what was to be the last time when Sacco and Vanzetti, the two Boston anarchists were executed, and he remarked sardonically upon a conversation in a Bank at the appearance of a mass demonstration in their support: 'It was instructive to hear two clerks saying "Oh well you've got to hang these blasted anarchists" and to see their half-shocked surprise when one asked whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty of the crime for which they were condemned.'
But it was Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, according to Crick, which finally made Orwell a socialist and it was on his return after being wounded in 1937 that (for a brief period) he joined the Independent Labour Party.
Crick argues forcefully that Orwell went to Spain to fight fascism and not just to comment on the sidelines. On arrival he was drafted into the POUM militia (the one which was labelled as under Trotskyist influence). He soon realised that a huge debate was raging between the left factions as to how to fight the fascists and initially he took the Stalinist view and attempted to be transferred to a Communist Party-controlled militia in Madrid. The Communists were arguing against the POUM that the key task was to fight fascism and that socialism and the revolution could be left till later. The POUM argued that the two tasks were inseparable and had to be achieved by organising the mass of workers as was happening in Barcelona when Orwell was there. Orwell's experience in Barcelona was decisive and when he witnessed the way the Communist Party crushed the revolution, their fear of the workers in arms, and the mass arrests of his comrades in the middle of battle with the fascists, he was horrified. He wrote angrily of the tragic death of Andrés Nin at the hands of the Communists and from that time on aligned himself with the POUM and the anarchists.
However, the basis of Orwell's views did not change from the experience of the Spanish Civil War and Crick attacks those who argue that Orwell became disillusioned with the socialist cause and use his later works — Animal Farm and 1984 — as examples of cold war propaganda. To understand these works it is important to appreciate Orwell's profound hatred of the Communist Party and the background to it.
On his return to England from Spain, Orwell and his friends were hounded by the Party. Crick tells an amusing tale of a Russian Communist journal which wrote to Orwell (not realising who he was) and asked for a review and a copy of 'The Road to Wigan Pier'. Orwell wrote a polite letter back saying that he would write a review but he was still ill from wounds received while serving in the POUM militia. He received this reply: '... Our magazine has nothing to do with POUM members; this organisation, as the long experience of the Spanish people's struggle against insurgents and fascists has shown, is part of Franco's "fifth column".'
Crick describes 1984 not as a polemic against revolution, as cold war-mongers in the USA would have it, but rather as a book about 'revolution betrayed', a polemic within the Left about what could happen and about the dangers of totalitarianism. Orwell was undoubtedly pessimistic but not fatalistic in his attitude. He admitted that 'all revolutions have failed' but added that 'they are not all the same failure'. Any hope there is in 1984 lies with 'the proles'.
Orwell's writing, explains Crick, was not intended to be prescriptive or didactic — he was less a propagandist for socialism than a prophet attempting to alert the Left to what he regarded as the crucial dangers of his age. In a preface to 1984 written after Hiroshima, he was indeed prophetic: 'But suppose — and really this is the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it or the threat of it against people who are unable to retaliate? ... If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a "peace that is no peace".'
Crick points out that English critics who knew Orwell and knew that he was literary editor of Tribune, active on civil rights etc, did not misinterpret his work in the same way as American critics. If Orwell perhaps did not effectively scotch suggestions that he was a cold war warrior of the Right, it could have been because he was by this time dying of TB. He did, however, write fairly unequivocally from his sick bed that: 'My recent novel is not intended as an attack on socialism or on the Labour Party which I support, but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised [illegible] will arrive but I believe [illegible] for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...'
Crick paints a portrait of a very courageous man who did attempt to identify with the oppressed despite his privileged background and who sacrificed his health and wealth to the cause of finding out and publicising the truth about the world around him. This individualism [illegible] laid him open to misinterpretation by all comers but as 1984 approaches, it is to be hoped that this biography will open the way to a general appreciation that his hostility to Communism was not the hypocritical paranoia of a bourgeois politician but was in the name of freedom and a truly socialist society.
Judith Arkwright is a former women's correspondent for Socialist Challenge and currently a member of the NUR.