Skip to main content

Phillips on Orwell and Plain Speech

The misappropriation of ‘Orwell’ (the mythical version of Eric Blair) by different factions has gone on for much of the six decades since his death. During the Cold War, and the years running up to the actual 1984 in particular, his last great fictional dystopia was routinely misinterpreted as a frontal assault on all forms of socialism and, in some cases, a defence of the individual libertarianism favoured, at the time, by Margaret Thatcher. Such distortions of both 1984 itself and Orwell’s ‘position’ generally were promulgated by right and left alike, the latter resorting to some quite peculiar means to ‘prove’ that the man who’d committed the fundamental leftist sin of criticising the Soviet Union in the 1930s was a reactionary. In Inside The Myth, for example, a collection of ‘views from the left’ edited by Christopher Norris and published in 1984 (of course), you’ll find Alaric Jacob’s ‘Sharing Orwell’s ‘Joys’ - But Not His Fears’, an essay which, in attacking Orwell’s depiction of preparatory school life in ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’ for being unduly negative, effectively defends private education. Orwell, it’s implied, was a greater enemy to progressive thinking than an entire nation’s socially unjust education system.

Post-Cold War, of course, there have been some more sober reappraisals but two serious misapprehensions persist. The first is that 1984's pessimism is the product of Orwell’s ill-health. Only the other week, on the 60th anniversary of the 1949 publication of the novel, the Observer’s Robert McCrum directly linked Orwell’s TB diagnosis with the grimness of the tale. No doubt, illness made typing up the manuscript difficult but, as anyone who’s read ‘Homage to Catalonia’ will have noticed, the experience of Winston Smith is noticeably similar to that of a certain Eric Blair, member of the Trotskyite POUM in Spanish Civil War Barcelona when the Stalinists turned on their former allies. It’s probably fair to say that 1984 owes more to Stalin’s paranoid intervention in Spain than it does to the novelist’s chest X-rays.

The second misapprehension is to do with language and form. Orwell, after all, made some seemingly unequivocal statements about the need for clarity, for language like a window pane. He also seemed to attack the avant garde (most noticeably in his essay on Salvador Dali and the more wide-ranging ‘Inside the Whale’). On the face of it, he was an opponent of experimentation, a champion of plain-speaking, one of Al Alvarez’s famously ‘negative feedbacks’ on post-war English writing.

It seems hard to refute this. And yet Orwell also championed the likes of Joyce and Henry Miller and, in his own fiction, proved a tireless experimenter. After the Forster-esque Burmese Days (arguably his least successful novel), there was the decidedly Joycean stylistic mixed bag of ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ (complete with playlet echoing the ‘Nighttown’ episode in ‘Ulysses’), the bitter streams of consciousness in Keep The Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air (a blunt parody of Proust, with a watery sausage standing in for the famous Madeleine) and then, of course, the fables, Animal Farm and 1984 (which draw on European traditions as much as the legacy of Swift). Equally, all three of his full-length (so-say) ‘documentaries’ play with convention, pushing at the boundaries of the relatively new genre of reportage, The Road To Wigan Pier in particular throwing journalism and polemic up against autobiography and satires. This is not a literary conservative’s body of work. Opacity and self-indulgence were his enemies, not modernism and experiment.

Tom Phillips is a Bristol-based poet and writer. He reviews for Eyewear.

Comments

Donald Brown said…
Nice distinctions, thanks. And a forceful reminder that I should read more Orwell.

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".