From: keepontruckingbyrobertcrumb@fhfhfhfhfhfh.com   
      
   Daily Telegraph   
      
    Books   
      
   World of books   
   By A N Wilson   
   (Filed: 14/06/2004)   
      
   So wide of the mark on The Road to Wigan Pier   
      
      
   The early 20th century abounds in men in disguises. T E Lawrence dressed up   
   as an Arab not to become one, but in order to disguise some of his less   
   acceptable personal characteristics, such as sadism. George Orwell dressed   
   up as a parody of working-class man to hide his darker impulses from   
   himself.   
   Orwell is regarded as semi-divine, especially by those who enjoy his digs at   
   "vegetarians with wilting beards, earnest ladies in sandals, birth-control   
   fanatics and Labour Party backstairs crawlers". Animal Farm will always   
   remain a classic analysis of the Soviet experiment, but it is hard to see   
   the Orwell who trod The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 as an especially wise   
   prophet of his times, with its belief that England would eject socialism in   
   favour of fascism.   
   In his direct reportage of what life was actually like for working-class   
   people in the depressed industrial districts of northern England, Orwell has   
   no rival. Who, having read The Road to Wigan Pier, can ever forget his   
   description of a coal miner's working day, in which he points out that in   
   order to start a seven-and-a-half-hour shift, the miner has to make a   
   subterranean journey of at least an hour, sometimes several hours, through   
   dark, low dripping passages?   
   Or the common sense of his observation that it was the small landlords who   
   were the worst. "Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked   
   man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate   
   rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life's savings   
   in three slum houses, inhabits one of them and tries to live on the rent of   
   the other two - never, in consequence, having any money for repairs."   
   All the reportage in The Road to Wigan Pier has the ring of truth. So, too,   
   does his vivid treatment of statistics. He reminds us that an unemployed   
   man's dependants never appear on the list, and, when you remember this, the   
   figure of two million must immediately be multiplied to six. Then take in   
   those who are not unemployed but are living on money which is less than a   
   living wage, and you quickly come to a figure like 10 million people.   
   In the second half of the book, there is a change of gear and Orwell the   
   camera turns into Orwell the ranter. The fact that it is rant delivered in a   
   quiet, grammatical parody of a sensible voice does not stop it being rant.   
   His hatred of literary London is congenial. "In the highbrow world, you 'get   
   on', if you 'get on' at all, not so much by your literary ability as by   
   being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of   
   verminous little lions."   
   Orwell, like most English writers of the period, is class obsessed. He   
   especially hates the ex-working class types who have become writers or   
   intellectuals. "It is not easy to crash your way into the literary   
   intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being." The man who   
   supposes that he has transcended the class barrier here in fact sounds   
   perilously like an old Etonian snob complaining about the literary   
   equivalent of counter-jumpers.   
   One senses disappointment that the sons and daughters of miners when they   
   train as doctors do not go on speaking with an Oliver Mellors accent or   
   tying their moleskin trousers with pieces of string. At the end of the book,   
   Orwell has a fantasy in which the poor middle classes, including himself,   
   will, in the future generation, all sink down the social scale. "We have   
   nothing to lose but our aitches."   
   This ending, after the first half of the book, is bathos. He has   
   demonstrated that if anyone sank to the level of the poor in the industrial   
   North in 1937 they would lose far more than their aitches.   
   They would lose their health, their liberty, their chance to have a bath or   
   read a book, in the relentless struggle to survive. Orwell shows no interest   
   in technology. It never occurs to him that the future will be one in which   
   business, and technology, will transform politics and daily life, rather   
   than the other way about.   
   His reflections upon the attractions of fascism are also wide of the mark.   
   It is no surprise that Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife regarded The Road to   
   Wigan Pier as a treasured text, which fully justified all their political   
   adventures. Even by the time he wrote the book, the British Union of Fascism   
   was losing support - largely because of its abhorrent thuggery.   
   Within two years of Orwell's book being published, the war had broken out,   
   and the English revolution had begun. This did not mean an end to the class   
   system. But it meant that encounters between members of different classes,   
   which Orwell describes as such an outlandish adventure, became commonplace   
   with the coming of war.   
   A form of benign state socialism of the kind he advocated was indeed brought   
   in by the wartime government. When it came, Orwell disliked it and used it   
   as a model for the austere tyranny of 1984.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)