The Other Side of Orwell

I’ve been reading the large Everyman edition of Orwell’s Essays and discovering how instrumental the shorter Penguin version has been in fixing the idea of Orwell beloved of a certain sort of English leftist (and, I should say, by myself). The Penguin Orwell is right about everything. On the rare occasions he gets things wrong, he at least does so in quixotic, admirably wrong, so that you wish that he'd been right. He takes the correct and decent Labour reformist view on British Imperialism, the Spanish Civil War, the struggle against fascism and the Soviet Union, in that order and with the emphasis, in the Penguin, on the last two.

The Everyman Orwell is a stranger writer, closer to the Marxist left, more open to crankish enthusiasms (he comes close to recommending Esperanto in an essay that also shows him to have a more flexible view on language than he’s often credited for), and much more obsessed with Catholicism – to the extent of denying that Catholics can write decent novels (when Waugh and Greene were in their respective primes). He is also wrong about things. He insists until very late in the day that fighting Nazism will only lead to British Fascism, an opinion he went on to mock in exactly the same cocksure tone he used in making it. He is unconcerned about the bombardment of civilians, on the strange grounds that civilians call the loudest for war anyway, a theme he returns to repeatedly. He recycles material, often for use in entirely different arguments. He is more flawed and more interesting than the saintly radical-patriot of the Penguin.

Despite all these changes, the familiar pleasures of reading Orwell are all here. We have the entertaining and sometimes unfair swipes at the proto-Guardian gang of pacifists, middle class liberals and high minded fellow travellers whose descendants still litter the English scene.  We have the analytic enthusiasm for "late-capitalist" (he uses this expression) flotsam –junk shops, penny dreadfuls and “good-bad books”- that make Orwell the nearest Britain has come to Walter Benjamin. We have a morally driven worldview that never loses sight of the ordinary and the everyday. And we have a test, that of returning, repeatedly, to the defence of the underdog, of making sure that one is always on the victim’s side. It is a test that those of us who consciously write "after Orwell" should set ourselves more often.