From: hjkhjkhd@hhhh.com   
      
   'To this day Orwell's unpopularity on the sectarian Left is notorious and   
   perplexing, but maybe there is a clue here. He was not the   
   crypto-reactionary he is painted by some, but he writes very significantly   
   about Anatole France, who was 'not a socialist but a radical', nowadays the   
   rarer of the two, and whose radicalism can be seen in 'his passion for   
   liberty and intellectual honesty'. Could Orwell more obviously be writing   
   about himself?   
      
      
   Spectator, 6 January 2007   
      
      
      
      
   More often right than wrong   
   Geoffrey Wheatcroft   
   Orwell in Tribune   
   edited by Paul Anderson   
   Politico's, 401pp, £19.99, ISBN 1842751557   
   Buy this book at Amazon.co.uk   
      
   After leaving the Burmese police, George Orwell held few regular jobs in his   
   too short life. He wanted to serve in uniform when his country went to war;   
   with his health precluding that, he worked for the Indian service of the BBC   
   until he became literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly edited   
   somewhat notionally by Aneurin Bevan. And from December 1943 to April 1947   
   he wrote a column for the paper, 'As I Please'.   
   Although everything he ever wrote has been collected in 20 sumptuous   
   volumes, and although he is one of the few journalists who can sustain such   
   a fate (contemplating our own work, some of us would find that a simply   
   horrific thought), he was by no means a consistent writer, and dedicated   
   Orwellians will know how uneven his journalism was. During the war he also   
   wrote a 'London Letter' for Partisan Review, the American political-literary   
   magazine, and some of those letters were tired or silly. He observes in a   
   Tribune column that 'I was usually wrong when it was possible to be wrong'   
   earlier in the war, and his insistence in PR that Churchill would soon be   
   swept from power by the irresistible Sir Stafford Cripps is indeed a warning   
   to all of us against confident prognostication in print.   
   But the Tribune columns were among his best things, personal, quirky, salty.   
   He will write about a sixpenny rose bush he once planted, or about 'good bad   
   books'. He snorts at the rudeness of shopkeepers and he worries about the   
   appalling loneliness of modern urban life. He complains that the traditional   
   English names of flowers are being replaced by pretentious Latin names, he   
   tells little jokes. He shows, when he spreads himself, that he was one of   
   the best literary critics of his age.   
   What makes the book eerie as well as readable is how often Orwell might be   
   writing a newspaper column today. At one moment he broods about wafer- thin   
   fashion models, with 'the overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty   
   that now seems to be striven after', the very thing the Daily Mail has been   
   lamenting lately, at another he warns against the rising tide of xenophobia   
   caused by an influx of Polish workers - 60 years ago! He even complains   
   about ubiquitous music blaring from loudspeakers, though he didn't know the   
   half of it, and was spared the complete horror of canned music in shops,   
   pubs and restaurants today.   
   But Orwell did not ignore the great world and its conflicts: some of his   
   best political obiter dicta are here, along with the wrong-headed assertions   
   ('laissez-faire capitalism is passing away'). While Orwell never became a   
   conservative pessimist, and was sharp about the revival of such pessimism   
   (or the refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved,   
   linking T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Muggeridge and Evelyn Waugh a little harshly   
   with Marshal Pétain in this respect), he concedes that 'plans for human   
   betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more   
   opportunities of saying "I told you so" than the optimist.'   
      
      
   When he joined Tribune he knew that he would be writing against the grain of   
   the paper, or at least of its horrible fellow-travelling public. Often he is   
   at odds with readers who are incensed by any criticism of Stalin at the time   
   of the Warsaw Rising in 1944, or of the Red Army the following year when   
   Tribune - to its great credit - published reports of gang rape by the   
   Russian soldiers 'liberating' Vienna. And he warns the Left that   
   dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that you   
   can make yourself the bootlicking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any   
   other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore,   
   always a whore.   
   Over and again one sees the themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four   
   taking shape. Orwell looks back on the Spanish civil war and the insane lies   
   that were told about it, wondering whether truthful history could ever be   
   written again. He writes about Yevgeny Zamyatin's fantasy novel We, which   
   influenced Brave New World as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four. He dissects   
   language, dismayed by the way that more and more people write and speak in   
   an inherently totalitarian style.   
   And of course, with his faults, there is that unusually high respect for   
   truth and justice which Waugh admired in him, and which distinguished him   
   from so many other writers then (or now). Orwell is appalled by 'this whole   
   business of taking vengeance on traitors and captured enemies', and   
   disgusted by the humiliation of women collaborators in France in 1944.   
   Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in   
   this attractively presented and well edited collection. The index is   
   useless, but Paul Anderson's notes are not only copious but informative, the   
   work of someone who knows the subject and the period, although he is   
   apparently unaware that Hermann Rauschning's I-knew-Hitler revelations have   
   been much discredited.   
   To this day Orwell's unpopularity on the sectarian Left is notorious and   
   perplexing, but maybe there is a clue here. He was not the   
   crypto-reactionary he is painted by some, but he writes very significantly   
   about Anatole France, who was 'not a socialist but a radical', nowadays the   
   rarer of the two, and whose radicalism can be seen in 'his passion for   
   liberty and intellectual honesty'. Could Orwell more obviously be writing   
   about himself?   
      
   C/O ROBBIE   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)