RECEPTION

Since his death in 1950, Orwell may have received more academic and popular attention than any other British writer of the twentieth century. His work is now a standard source for authoritative comment not only on politics and ideology but also on culture. This commentary, however, has not been driven primarily by a search to evaluate and commemorate Orwell as a literary figure. Instead, it has been prompted by his central position in the political and cultural context of the Cold War and by his adoption, at a time when the future status and composition of England is the focus of general debate, as an archetypal representative of “Englishness.”

In an excellent 1984 essay that is still relevant today, Alan Brown noted that Orwell had been a constant presence on the British curriculum since World War II. Studying examination questions and syllabi, Brown concluded that the emphasis was not the literary quality of Orwell's works but on the quality of his ideas. Moreover, students were not asked to set Orwell's ideas against other ideas and events in the political, economic, and social environment but to put the “personal” before the “political.” Brown summarized: “It is characteristic of the ‘Orwell’ persona that it conveys a neutral, received wisdom, of ‘objective’ and ‘human’ truths.”¹

This process began with the immediate reaction to Orwell's death, which occurred less than a year after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-four. A detailed critique of Orwell's literary qualities fell away before the overriding political and cultural impact of his writing. Stephen Spender, whom Orwell had condemned as a “nancy poet” and “parlour pink,” labeled him “an Innocent, a kind of English Candide of the twentieth century. The Innocent is ordinary because he accepts the value of ordinary human decency; he is not a mystic, nor a poet.”² Tom Hopkinson summarized in June 1950: “I know only two present-day works of fiction before which the critic abdicates: one is Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the other Orwell's Animal Farm.”³

Orwell had become the icon of those claiming a moral center between the excesses of capitalism and communism. Julian Symons's obituary upheld Orwell's supposed faith in “the revolutionary power of the proletariat” while calling him “an Edwardian, even a Victorian” figure “whose unorthodoxy was valuable in an age of power worship.”⁴ V. S. Pritchett asserted that “George Orwell was the wintry conscience of a generation which in the thirties had heard the call to the rasher assumptions of political faith.”⁵ When Homage to Catalonia was finally published in the United States two years after Orwell's death, Lionel Trilling was selected to write the introduction. Trilling had established himself, in his novels and literary criticism, as the spokesman for the moral center in the America of the Cold War, and he represented Orwell as a fellow resident of this higher ground. He explained that Orwell told the truth “in an exemplary way, quietly, simply, with due warning to the reader that it was only one man's truth.”⁶

Even though Orwell had specified in his will that he wished no biographer to write an account of his life, full-length eulogies soon appeared. These works further hindered any effort to reclaim him as a literary novelist through their emphasis on his personal qualities rather than his skill with fiction. John Atkins opened his 1954 study, George Orwell, by saying that “[t]he common element in all George Orwell's writing was a sense of decency” and making clear that “the special connotation of this English word is a complex of English living and English attitudes.” Atkins even took up Orwell's battles with other socialists: “The intellectuals would not revert to a sense of decency.”⁷ Several years later, Orwell's friend Richard Rees wrote a short volume, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961), which was careful to claim a balanced view of the author, with his “mood of sulky rebellion against life,” but fell back upon Orwell's “kind of integrity and steadfastness almost unique in his generation.” Like Atkins, Rees contrasted Orwell with a hysterical English intelligentsia who supposedly wanted “a breakdown of law and order which would produce a situation in Britain comparable to that in St. Petersburg in 1917.”⁸

Amid this praise, any criticism of the politics of Orwell's work could easily be dismissed as the mutterings of Marxist cranks, such as the comment of the British historian A. L. Morton that “Nineteen Eighty-four is, for this country at least, the last word to date in counter-revolutionary apologetics.”⁹ Thoughtful commentaries, such as measured praise marking the belated American publication of Homage to Catalonia from George Mayberry of The New Republic (“Orwell's enthusiastic vision of an equalitarian socialism might have been paired with a recognition of the fact that ‘the road to socialism is paved with bedbugs’”) and Herbert Matthews of The Nation (“The danger in this case is that Orwell was writing in a white heat about a confused, unimportant, and obscure incident in the Spanish Civil War”), were set aside.¹⁰

More significant was the dismissal of Orwell's literary work with statements such as John Wain's that “Orwell's essays are obviously much better than his novels.”¹¹ Irving Howe, an admirer of Orwell's political views, noted that Nineteen Eighty-Four “is not, I suppose, really a novel, or at least it does not satisfy those expectations we have come to have with regard to the novel.”¹² Even Orwell's literary friends did not highlight his literature. Spender remarked that “[Orwell] had a kind of quality about him that reminded one of plain living, bread and cheese, English beer, and so on,” while Anthony Powell thought of Orwell as someone “for whom you felt a curiously protective affection.”¹³ Christopher Hollis attempted in 1956 to treat Orwell not as a biographical subject but as a writer worthy of considered literary criticism, but he ended by noting, “In an age when all good things were desperately assailed … he almost alone from first to last dealt out his blows impartially and defended without fear and without compromise the cause of liberty and the decencies from whatever quarter they might be assailed.”¹⁴

George Woodcock, who engaged in a heated exchange with Orwell over left-wing politics during World War II before becoming friends with the author, summarized in 1967 how Orwell the man had come to dominate the conception of Orwell the writer: “Those who knew Orwell have never been able to perform that act of faith demanded by so many modern critics, to see the writings isolated from the man. Always that gaunt, gentle, angry and endlessly controversial image intervenes, if only to remind one of how often his works were good talk turned into better prose.”¹⁵ Woodcock's own study was far from uncritical, but he labeled Orwell “The Crystal Spirit” (a reference taken from the opening to Homage to Catalonia) and rescued him from those who claimed him as a champion of their ideas: “In comparison with such dubious disciples, Orwell still shines out, half a generation later, as a noble and colourful figure, large in act and vision, the almost complete opposite of the narrow-visioned academics who have closed in during the present generation on the literary worlds of both Britain and North America.” Woodcock classified Orwell as “the last of a nineteenth-century tradition of individualist radicals.”¹⁶

None of these commentators expressed concern that Orwell was being viewed in exclusively political terms. It was left to a more skeptical reviewer, the political scientist and historian Isaac Deutscher, to raise the likely problem. Writing in 1954 about Nineteen Eighty-four, he noted that the use of the book was out of Orwell's hands: “The novel has served as a sort of ideological super-weapon. … A book like 1984 may be used without much regard for the author's intention. Some of its features may be torn out of their context, while others, which do not suit the political purpose which the book is made to serve, are ignored or virtually suppressed.” Deutscher extended the point to raise a worry about Orwell's lack of literary credentials: “Nor need a book like 1984 be a literary masterpiece or even an important and original work to make its impact. Indeed a work of great literary merit is usually too rich in its texture and too subtle in thought and form to lend itself to adventitious exploitation. As a rule its symbols cannot easily be transformed into hypnotising bogies, or its ideas turned into slogans.”¹⁷

The next wave of intense attention to Orwell began in 1968 with the publication of a four-volume collection of his essays, journalism, and letters, edited by his widow and the curator of the Orwell Archive at University College, London. A new edition of Nineteen Eighty-four was published, and the BBC produced its first televised study of Orwell. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams brought out two volumes, The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1979), documenting the author's life up to the Spanish Civil War and offering concise evaluations of his books. Not all of this reevaluation was positive, for Orwell was now being considered in the environment of social protest and the Vietnam War. Conor Cruise O'Brien, a prominent Irish writer, labeled Orwell “a Tory eccentric with a taste for self-immolation” and highlighted, amid revelations of CIA funding of intellectuals and authors, the influence of Orwell's anti-Communism upon imitators who were secretly sponsored by the U.S. government.¹⁸

The approach to Orwell as a special man, and thus to his writings as the output of a special man, was being modified. In 1971 a slight but significant volume, The World of George Orwell, brought together differing views of Orwell as person and as author. The work is a mix of memories of those who knew him, descriptions of the environments and contexts (Burma, Paris, 1930s Britain, Spain) that shaped his writing, and assessments of his cultural and political opinions. Some observations are trite (“He never allowed his imperfect sympathies to interfere with his actual judgement of what the situation demanded”), some irritating (“His first task had been to delouse the left-wing establishment”), and a few illuminating (“It seems that people of almost any political persuasion can find some of their beliefs expressed in Orwell's work, very eloquently”).¹⁹ The essays, however, laid the foundation for a richer interpretation of the author.

It was the British scholar Raymond Williams, already noted for his studies of culture and society, who brought out the potential of this analysis in a series of books and essays in the 1970s. Considering the transformation of Eric Blair into George Orwell, Williams contended that “the contradictions, the paradox of Orwell, must be seen as paramount” and that the author should be evaluated in the context of England between the wars. He concluded, “Orwell recognises and emphasises the complexity [of England], but he does not develop any kind of thinking which can sustain and extend a critical analysis of structures.”²⁰ For Williams, admirers of Orwell have to treat his socialism as having mythical personal qualities because he had a limited conception of socialism: “Orwell hated what he saw of the consequences of capitalism, but he was never able to see it, fully, as an economic and political system.” He could succeed only through the “successful impersonation of the plain man who bumps into experience in an unmeditated way and is simply telling the truth about it.”²¹

Much of this interpretation was swept aside, however, with the juxtaposition of two events: the publication of the best-known and most influential biography of Orwell, Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life (1980), and the approach of 1984. Crick's work made an impact in part because it was the first biography based on Orwell's own papers and in part because Crick had a forceful political message that he wanted to put across. He wanted to return the author (and his country) to the exalted simplicity of “decency.” Orwell was a socialist, but he was an English socialist, a man concerned with morality rather than high intellect and theory: “What was remarkable in Orwell was not his political position, which was common enough, but that he demanded publicly that his own side should live up to their principles, both in their lives and in their policies, should respect the liberty of others and tell the truth.”²²

Like Williams, however, Crick firmly reestablished Orwell as a political rather than a literary figure. While Crick claims that certain of the novels, notably Coming Up for Air, have been underestimated, he is more concerned with Orwell as “a supreme political writer,” “a great essayist,” “a brilliant journalist.”²³ Crick also tried to sweep aside all debate, not about the complexity of Orwell's personality (“he was many-faceted, not a simple man at all”²⁴), but about the complexity of his political beliefs. In this respect, the biography is as much a defense of an “English socialism”—one that could avoid difficult questions about the continuing Cold War as well as issues of class and economic well-being in Britain—as it is a vindication of Orwell.

Similarly, much of the analysis in or soon after the pivotal year of 1984 reevaluated Orwell and his work in a context in which British and American politics had been pulled sharply to the right. Orwell was now being claimed by free-market, Cold War intellectuals in the United States. Norman Podhoretz was far from subtle in titling a 1983 article “If Orwell Were Alive Today, He'd Be a Neo-Conservative.”²⁵

Those who had established Orwell as the decent English socialist struggled to keep him out of the clutches of both the Right and the radical Left. T. R. Fyvel, a close friend and colleague from The Tribune, wrote an appreciative “personal memoir” about Orwell in 1982. Crick wrote numerous essays, advised the BBC on a three-part documentary on Orwell, and co-edited Orwell Remembered (1984), which featured the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances from the writer's earliest days. A collection of essays by various critics, George Orwell: A Reassessment (1988), was actually a reassertion of the standard line, Crick establishing the tone in the opening essay, “Orwell and English Socialism.” Most of the contributions focus on Nineteen Eighty-four. In another study published in 1988, Patrick Reilly asserted that “prevention is Orwell's aim, and not simply because prevention is better than cure, but for the far more terrifyingly urgent reason that there must be prevention because there is no cure.”²⁶ The journalist Crispin Aubrey insisted that Orwell's “unorthodox, libertarian position should appeal in fact to many on the current British left concerned for a broader, more humanitarian socialism.”²⁷

Other commentators were sidetracked by musings about the “predictions” of Nineteen Eighty-four, considering whether Orwell's “Big Brother” society had come to pass. There were numerous essays in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals about the manipulation of Newspeak by the media, surveillance by helicopters and video cameras, the rise of computers, and the shadowy activities of government secret services. These attempts to project Orwell's work into the present continue today—Orwellian is a commonplace adjective, and the “reality” television series Big Brother was a global phenomenon in 2000—but avoid the salient point that Orwell was concerned about his own era rather than the future in his writing.

Amid this contest over Orwell and the meaning of his work, there was some skepticism. Indeed, with the polarizing of political discussion in the Reagan and Thatcher era, criticism of Orwell reached a crescendo. A volume edited by Christopher Norris, Inside the Myth—Orwell: Views from the Left (1984), focused “on the ways in which Orwell has been kidnapped by the forces of reaction, taken over triumphantly by those who hold him up as the great example of a socialist who finally saw the light”; the author had become “the patron saint of current Cold-War doublethink.”²⁸ Examples included the manipulation of Orwell and his texts by the popular media and by the school-examination system.

Some contributors to the Norris volume went further, charging that Orwell was not the passive victim of the Right but a collaborator with it, either through choice or through the ambiguity of his political writing. He was accused of misrepresenting and misunderstanding the facts and issues in the Spanish Civil War; of reducing women to passive dependence, frigidity, or ignorant sexual rebellion; and of treating working-class people as little more than simple-minded animals. These allegations overshadowed other essays on Orwell's attempt to understand the workings of the modern state and on the development of his literary narratives.

Perhaps most challenging was the allegation of Orwell's hostility to women. Beatrix Campbell sharply commented that in his writing he not only ignores “the culture of women, their concerns, their history, their movements” but also “makes women the bearers of his own class hatred.”²⁹ For Deidre Beddoe, Orwell's novels had “some of the most obnoxious portrayals of women in English fiction,” and his documentaries ignored any evidence of women's political activity.³⁰

Yet, the persona of Orwell as a decent political writer survived such scrutiny, if only because the 1950s portrayal, buttressed by Crick's biography, was so well established in English culture. As Soviet Communism collapsed, it could be casually observed that Orwell had been vindicated. John Rodden used his review of the battle for Orwell's reputation to make his own sweeping claim that Orwell was “a ‘true’ intellectual. … He flayed the Left intelligentsia in order to fortify it, not to weaken or abandon it.”³¹ John Rossi's 1992 essay in Contemporary Review sketched the lesson in cruder national terms: “Orwell never lost his faith in the rugged sense of the English people and their simple patriotism. They, and not the upper classes or the hopelessly degenerated intelligentsia, would save England.”³²

The strongest defenses came not from literary scholars but from philosophers. Richard Rorty observed, “In the forty years since Orwell wrote, … nobody has come up with a better way of setting out the political alternatives which confront us.”³³ Michael Walzer wrote, “The story of the last man was not intended to be his last word on politics. Nor need it be ours, so long as we speak with the terrifying awareness that was his gift.”³⁴

In 1991 Michael Shelden, a professor at Indiana State University, published Orwell: The Authorized Biography, the second substantial biography of the author. Shelden consciously reacted against Crick's “reporting Orwell's actions without commenting much on the motives and feelings behind them”; however, Shelden's study of the author's “inner life,” meticulously researched and supported by interviews with almost seventy witnesses, lacks focus. He rejects a political emphasis, yet there is no extended analysis of Orwell's literary output. Instead, Shelden, like Crick and others before him, offers another narrative of Orwell the “decent” man: “one of his remarkable qualities was his ability to face grim possibilities without losing all hope.” His conclusion is little more than the assertion that Orwell “was always analyzing, always standing to one side and observing, trying to make sense of this life.”³⁵

More recently, another reappraisal has been fostered by Peter Davison's completion of a two-decade project to publish almost all of Orwell's writings and correspondence. The twenty volumes added little that was not already known about the author, but press attention to their publication, in the period following the end of the Cold War, reopened debate on Orwell as a political writer and personality. Davison's analysis, George Orwell: A Literary Life (1996), is essentially a publishing history of the twenty-volume project, but it is also an attempt to enshrine Orwell as a lasting and positive influence.

Davison responded to the dismissal of Orwell as a literary author, but his most important mission was to reconfirm Orwell as an admirable person embodying all the values of the “liberal” society of the twentieth century: “Orwell's virtues are at their most attractive in his incredible determination to be a writer, whatever the difficulties and disappointments; in his passion for what he saw as social justice … to strive against the ‘beastly’ for ‘decency’ and, in writing to achieve that, to fight against the insistence of censors and publishers to ‘garble’ what he said.” Orwell's legacy is in the ongoing fight against the bad regimes (Davison uses the example of China) that could arise even at home: “Were we able to hope that such regimes had no place in the modern world, and that they would never arise in Britain, the ‘necessity’ for Nineteen Eighty-four would disappear and the novel itself could become a footnote, a mere ‘problem in intellectual history.’ Until that happy and unlikely state occurs, it will remain an essential warning.”³⁶

Davison's project was paralleled by the emergence of information on Orwell in British government documents that had been withheld, because of their sensitivity, for almost fifty years. One of the genuine finds in Davison's collection was the partial publication of Orwell's notebook, maintained after World War II, listing “suspect” left-wingers and containing correspondence between Orwell and British intelligence officers. The government documents confirmed that he had provided a selection of names from his list. Once again, questions of Orwell's literary merits were overshadowed by the political question of whether, in collaborating with British secret services, he had cooperated with the kind of state that he had castigated in Nineteen Eighty-four.

There have been efforts to redress this fixation on the political Orwell. In 1974, amid debate over Williams's interpretation, Alan Sandison analyzed Orwell as a Protestant author in the tradition of Martin Luther, focusing on Orwell's treatment of the individual and nature in his novels and nonfiction.³⁷ After the symbolic year of 1984, critics such as Jenni Calder emphasized that “the whole body of [Orwell's] work makes rewarding reading.”³⁸ Much of this praise, however, was overshadowed by the political dimension. Calder's study, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1987), strays from evaluation of the texts into a defense of the books against the specter of criticism from the Left, citing “a problem of interpretation brought about by [Orwell's] own honesty and refusal to compromise. … Far from being a renegade, Orwell brought Animal Farm directly out of his belief in socialism.”³⁹

As Calder's approach indicates, most criticism has focused on Orwell's final two books. One has to search for studies such as Lynette Hunter's essay on his early work, in which she analyzes the shifting relationship between narrator and character.⁴⁰ Roger Fowler's The Language of George Orwell (1995) is an excellent survey of the entire range of Orwell's novels. Fowler offers no sweeping conclusions, only an attempt to identify a great diversity of stylistic technique: precise description, striking figurative expression, pastoral, naturalism, surrealism, representation of thought, powerful evocations of violence, a keen eye for the grotesque and an ear for … ‘voices of the other,’ trenchant parody of political styles; finally, quite different from these heightened modes of writing, the purest simplicity of style in the satires of Animal Farm and the Newspeak Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-four.⁴¹

Orwell's legacy is likely to be that of the importance of the political writer. One American scholar might have claimed at a 1984 symposium that “Orwell was a ‘journalist’ and ‘didactic writer’ who ‘failed to live up to top literary standards,’” but another noted that conferences about him attracted more international participants than those on any other literary figure or issue.⁴²

Part of the fascination with Orwell is that his position has never been firmly fixed. In 1940 Frank Richards, the author of articles for boys' magazines, portrayed Orwell as a dogmatic left-wing theorist even as Q. D. Leavis was proclaiming, “He isn't the usual parlour-Bolshevik seeing literature through political glasses.”⁴³ Only months later, The Times Literary Supplement was ready to relocate Orwell, noting that he “seems to despair of the possibility of a virile right-wing ideology, yet his own thought tends that way and it may be that with more courage Mr. Orwell's provocative essay might have laid the foundation to a new conservatism.”⁴⁴

Because of these shifting perspectives, Orwell will always have something to offer many readers. For those claiming freedom not only through political rights but also through the free market, his comments on individual liberty, as well as his sustained attacks on other Socialists, can be adopted. For those who claim a position on the left, Orwell can be exalted as an independent thinker who resisted the orthodoxy of both fascism and Communism and criticized the excesses of capitalism. And, of course, those who seek a vision of a positive Englishness can always draw from Orwell's idyllic portrayal of the English people and environment. Rees's comment of 1961 still stands, inadvertently, as a backhanded compliment: “It is curious—or perhaps not so curious—that Orwell himself has become for some people the object of a nationalistic cult. He might well have included this personal cult in his list of nationalisms.”⁴⁵

WRITERS AND PHILOSOPHERS ON ORWELL

SEAN O'CASEY, 1935:

Orwell had as much chance of reaching the stature of Joyce as a tit has of reaching that of an eagle.⁴⁶

HENRY MILLER TO ORWELL, 1936, ON DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON:

I don't think your argument holds water, but I like it enormously. I don't for one minute believe that we will ever get rid of the slave class, or rid of injustice. For example, I would criticise your attitude throughout the book, if I were to be harsh and just, and say that what you endured was largely the result of your own inadequacy, your false “respectability” or your bloody English education.⁴⁷

MILLER, 1962:

I was crazy about his book Down and Out in Paris and London; I think it's a classic. For me it's still his best book. Though he was a wonderful chap in his way, Orwell, in the end I thought him stupid. He was, like so many English people, an idealist, and, it seemed to me, a foolish idealist.⁴⁸

EDITH SITWELL, 1937, ON THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER:

He seems to be doing for the modern world what Engels did for the world of 1840-50. But with this difference, that Orwell is a born writer, whereas Engels, fiery and splendid spirit though he was, simply wasn't a writer. One had to reconstruct the world from his pages for oneself.⁴⁹

V. S. PRITCHETT, 1941, REVIEWING THE LION AND THE UNICORN:

Mr. George Orwell has many of the traits of the best English pamphleteers: courage, an individual mind, vehement opinions, an instinct for stirring up trouble, the arts of appealing to that imaginary creature the sensible man and of combining original observations with sweeping generalization, of seeing enemies everywhere and despising all of them. And like the two outstanding figures of our tradition of pamphleteering, Cobbett and Defoe, both of whom had his subversive, non-conforming brand of patriotism, he writes a lucid conversational style which wakes one up suddenly like cold water dashed in the face.⁵⁰

JOHN BETJEMAN, 1946:

I have always thought you were one of the best living writers of prose.⁵¹

EDMUND WILSON, 1946:

[Orwell] has the good English qualities that, in the literary field at any rate, are beginning to seem old-fashioned: readiness to think for himself, courage to speak his mind, the tendency to deal with concrete realities rather than theoretical positions, and a prose style that is both downright and disciplined. If it is true that he has never succeeded in satisfactorily formulating a position, it is true, also, that his impulses (though they sometimes conflict), in pointing to what he does and does not want, what he does and does not like, make, in their own way, a fairly reliable guide, for they suggest an ideal of the man of good will (to use an overworked and wistful phrase) still in a benumbed and corrupted world.⁵²

EVELYN WAUGH, 1946:

Mr. Orwell seems … unaware of the existence of his Christian neighbours. … He assumes that all his readers took Mr. H. G. Wells as their guide in youth, and he repeatedly imputes to them prejudices and temptations of which we are innocent. It is this ignorance of Catholic life far more than his ignorance of the classic Catholic writers which renders Mr. Orwell's criticism partial whenever he approaches the root of his matter.⁵³

BERTRAND RUSSELL, 1950:

Orwell would have been genial if he had lived at a less painful time. … He preserved an impeccable love of truth, and allowed himself to learn even the most painful lessons. But he lost hope. This prevented him from being a prophet for our time. … I find in men like Orwell the half, but only the half, of what the world needs; the other half is still to seek.⁵⁴

E. M. FORSTER, 1950:

No one can embrace Orwell's works who hopes for ease. Just as one is nestling against them, they prickle. They encourage no slovenly trust in a future where all will come right, dear comrades, though we shall not be there to see. They do not even provide a mystic vision. … What he does provide, what does commend him to some temperaments, is his belief in little immediate things and in kindness, good-temper and accuracy. He also believes in “the people,” who, with their beefy arms akimbo and their cabbage-stalk soup, may survive when higher growths are cut down. He does not explain how “the people” are to make good, and perhaps he is here confusing belief with compassion.⁵⁵

PHILIP TOYNBEE, 1959:

The fact remains that though he was human to his would-be calloused finger-tips, Orwell was a much better man than most of us. We are reminded of this when we re-read his books, just as we are also reminded of the fact that he was a man of damaging and often irritating limitations.⁵⁶

CANADIAN POET PAUL POTTS, 1960:

What made Orwell so permanently attractive as a person, and so readable as a writer, was that he was so ordinary really, normal if not average. … He was Britishly balanced and Saxonly sane.⁵⁷

IRVING HOWE, 1969:

As a “saint” Orwell would not trouble us, for by now we have learned how to put up with saints: we canonize them and are rid of them. Orwell, however, stirs us by his all too human, his truculent example. He stood in basic opposition to the modes and assumptions that have since come to dominate our cultural life.⁵⁸

KINGSLEY AMIS, 1970:

I often feel that I will never pick up a book by Orwell again until I have read a frank discussion of the dishonesty and hysteria that mar some of his best work.⁵⁹

CYRIL CONNOLLY, 1973:

Orwell was a political animal. He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.⁶⁰

A. J. AYER, 1977:

His moral integrity made him hard upon himself and sometimes harsh in his judgement of other people, but he was no enemy of pleasure. He appreciated good food and drink, enjoyed gossip, and when not oppressed by ill health was very good company. He was another of those whose liking for me made me think better of myself.⁶¹

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, 1993, ON WHY ORWELL IS HIS “FAVORITE RADICAL JOURNALIST”:

He really would follow logic and honesty to their full conclusion. He would not be deflected by the fact that this might offend someone he knew or some cause with which he was associated or, more important, wouldn't even discompose himself. In other words, he thought, okay, if I don't like this conclusion, I'm still sticking with it if it's been arrived at honorably. …

That was a little harder to do than it sounds. And then I think he was a very witty and brilliant stylist, I think his writings on other authors like Dickens, for example, his reflections on eternal subjects like capital punishment or family life, ordinary things, arguments that never go away, [are] always worth rereading.⁶²

Notes

1. Alan Brown, “Examining Orwell: Political and Literary Values in Education,” in Orwell: Views from the Left, edited by Christopher Norris (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), p. 40.

2. Stephen Spender, “Homage to Catalonia,” World Review, 16 (June 1950): 51.

3. Tom Hopkinson, quoted in Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1982), p. 490.

4. Julian Symons, Orwell obituary, in Orwell Remembered, edited by Audrey Coppard and Crick (London: Ariel, 1984), p. 275.

5. V. S. Pritchett, “George Orwell,” New Statesman and Nation, 39 (28 January 1950): 96.

6. Lionel Trilling, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth,” in The Opposing Self (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955), pp. 151-152.

7. John Atkins, George Orwell (London: Calder & Boyars, 1954), p. 1.

8. Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), pp. 12, 45.

9. A. L. Morton, quoted in Crispin Aubrey, “The Making of 1984,” in Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984: Autonomy, Control, and Communication, edited by Aubrey and Paul Chilton (London: Comedia, 1983), p. 11.

10. George Mayberry, review of Homage to Catalonia, New Republic (23 June 1952): 22; Herbert Matthews, review of Homage to Catalonia, Nation (27 December 1952): 597.

11. John Wain, “The Last of George Orwell,” Twentieth Century, 155 (January 1954): 71.

12. Irving Howe, “Orwell: History as Nightmare,” in his Politics and the Novel (London: Stevens, 1961), p. 236.

13. Spender, interview, 7 May 1963, reprinted in Orwell Remembered, p. 262; Anthony Powell, “George Orwell: A Memoir” (1967), reprinted in Orwell Remembered, p. 247.

14. Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works(London: Hollis & Carter, 1956), p. 208.

15. George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (London: Cape, 1967), p. 7.

16. Ibid., pp. 50-51.

17. Isaac Deutscher, “‘1984’—The Mysticism of Cruelty,” in his Russia and Transition, and Other Essays (London: Hamilton, 1957), pp. 230-231.

18. Conor Cruise O'Brien, “Honest Men,” Listener, 80 (12 December 1968): 797-798.

19. Miriam Gross, ed., The World of George Orwell(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), pp. 38, 125, 158.

20. Raymond Williams, Orwell (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 23.

21. Ibid., p. 26.

22. Crick, George Orwell, pp. 17-18.

23. Ibid., pp. 18-20.

24. Ibid., p. 39.

25. Norman Podhoretz, “If Orwell Were Alive Today, He'd Be a Neo-Conservative,” Harper's, 266 (January 1983): 30.

26. Patrick Reilly, The Literature of Guilt: From Gulliver to Golding (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1988), p. 99.

27. Aubrey, “The Making of 1984,”in Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984, p. 13.

28. Christopher Norris, introduction to Inside the Myth—Orwell: Views from the Left, edited by Norris (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984), p. 7.

29. Beatrix Campbell, “Orwell—Paterfamilias or Big Brother?” in Inside the Myth, p. 131.

30. Deirdre Beddoe, “Hindrances and Help-Meets: Women in the Writings of George Orwell,” in Inside the Myth, p. 141.

31. John Rodden, “Orwell and the London Left Intelligentsia,” in George Orwell, edited by Graham Holderness, Bryan Loughrey, and Nahem Yousaf (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 177-178.

32. John Rossi, “Orwell and Patriotism,” Contemporary Review, 261 (August 1992): 95-98.

33. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 170.

34. Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (London: Halban, 1989), p. 135.

35. Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (London: Minerva, 1992), p. 484.

36. Peter Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 143-145.

37. Alan Sandison, The Last Man in Europe: An Essay on George Orwell (London: Macmillan, 1974).

38. Jenni Calder, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Milton Keynes, U.K.: Open University Press, 1987), p. 5.

39. Ibid., p. 17.

40. Lynette Hunter, “Stories and Voices in Orwell's Early Narratives,” in Inside the Myth, pp. 163-182.

41. Roger Fowler, The Language of George Orwell (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1995), p. vii.

42. See Robert Mulvihill, Reflections on America, 1984: An Orwell Symposium (Athens: University of Georgia, 1986), pp. 1-4.

43. Frank Richards, “Frank Richards Replies to George Orwell,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), volume 1, pp. 485-493; Q. D. Leavis, “The Literary Life Respectable: Mr. George Orwell,” Scrutiny, 9 (September 1940): 174.

44. “The British Miracle,” Times Literary Supplement, 8 March 1941, p. 110.

45. See Rees, George Orwell, pp. 87-108.

46. Sean O'Casey, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, p. 258.

47. Henry Miller, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, p. 307.

48. Miller, quoted in Jeffrey Meyers, introduction to George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).

49. Edith Sitwell, quoted in Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation (London: Constable, 1979), p. 150.

50. Pritchett, New Statesman and Nation (1 March 1941): 216.

51. John Betjeman to George Orwell, 18 April 1946, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, p. 493.

52. Edmund Wilson, review of Dickens, Dali and Others, New Yorker, 22 (25 May 1946).

53. Evelyn Waugh, review of Critical Essays, Tablet (6 April 1946): 176.

54. Bertrand Russell, “George Orwell,” World Review, 16 (June 1950): 5-7.

55. E. M. Forster, review of Shooting an Elephant, Listener (2 November 1950): 471.

56. Philip Toynbee, “Orwell's Passion,” Encounter, 13 (August 1959): 81.

57. Paul Potts, “Don Quixote on a Bicycle,” in Orwell Remembered, p. 258.

58. Irving Howe, “George Orwell: ‘As the Bones Know,’” Harper's, 238 (January 1969): 101-102.

59. Kingsley Amis, quoted in D. A. N. Jones, “Arguments against Orwell,” in The World of George Orwell, p. 163.

60. Cyril Connolly, The Evening Colonnade(London: David Bruce & Watson, 1973).

61. A. J. Ayer, Part of My Life (London: Collins, 1977), p. 287.

62. Christopher Hitchens, interview by Brian Lamb, Booknotes, C-SPAN, 17 October 1993. See also the chapter on Orwell in Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2000).

Additional coverage of Orwell's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 3; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 5; British Writers, Vol. 7; Children's Literature Review, Vol. 68; Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, 1945-1960; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 132, 104; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 15, 98, 195, 255; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors 3.0; DISCovering Authors: British Edition; DISCovering Authors: Canadian Edition; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; Exploring Novels; Literature and Its Times, Vols. 4, 5; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Novels for Students, Vols. 3, 7; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2; St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 4; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Science Fiction Writers, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 4; Something about the Author, Vol. 29; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vols. 2, 6, 15, 31, 51; World Literature and Its Times, Vol. 4; and World Literature Criticism.