2 Who was George Orwell?
To begin to get a greater understanding of who George Orwell was, now listen to Geoff Andrews of The Open University’s politics department interview D. J. Taylor, a writer and biographer, and the author of Orwell: A Life. Listen to Audio 1 a couple of times (which was originally recorded as a video) and then complete Activity 1.
Download this audio clip.Audio player: Audio 1
Transcript: Audio 1
GEOFF:
Thanks very much, Donna. And I guess it's appropriate that we're doing this session by telescreens. We’re delighted to discuss 1984 in the company of Orwell’s biographer. And I wanted to ask David, to start with, what was there in Orwell's early life in his schooling, family background that remains particularly influential for him, do you think, in the writing of 1984?
DAVID:
It's a very interesting question, and Orwell once said of the American writer Jack London, that he could foresee fascism because he had a fascist streak in himself. And although I wouldn't labour that point too prodigiously with regard to Orwell, we have to remember that he was effectively a son of the Raj, and his whole career was predicated on the idea of empire, imperial service. And we do know-- I think it is possible to say that he did have a kind of slight authoritarian streak that could only have been planted early on in his career.
But the key piece of evidence with regard, I think, to the impact of his early life on the writing, on the making of 1984 and the world it embodies is the famous essay "Such, Such Were The Joys," which is about his career at Cyprian's prep school, near Eastbourne, mostly during the years of the Great War. And it's a very odd piece of writing because we don't know when it was written. We only know that it was written sometime in the 1940s. It could have been written before 1984. It could have been written in conjunction with it. We just cannot date it.
And the thing about St Cyprian's, a boys’ preparatory school on the Sussex coast, is it is effectively presented as a totalitarian state, where the headmaster is the tyrant, the dictator and those-- and on several occasions, Orwell recasting his younger self says that if you went out to buy a packet of sweets, the headmaster's spies would be after you.
And the interesting thing about this is it works both ways in that when you come to read 1984, particularly the passages in which Winston is interrogated by O'Brien, a trap had been sprung on him, O'Brien is several times described as being rather like a headmaster, rather like a head or schoolmaster trying to encourage a promising but slightly wayward boy, this kind of thing. So I'd say it's impossible to draw a conclusive, definitive conclusion about that essay.
On the one hand, you could say that 1984 is the projection of Orwell's infant misery. On the other hand, you could say that when he started thinking about 1984, it encouraged him to recast his school days in a kind of totalitarian form. But there's obviously a relationship between those two pieces of writing. And together, they say something very profound, if not about the way in which Orwell's childhood actually happened, but the way in which he thought about that childhood and then how he projected it into the world in 1984.
GEOFF:
Yeah, and actually that generation of writers that he comes from-- Cyril Connolly being another one-- talk a lot about their early school life. And also, people who attended Gresham's school as well, that was obviously a formative experience for them, as it was for Orwell.
DAVID:
I think it was that to your average upper middle-class, upper-class schoolboy at around that time, going to school-- and though, obviously, Orwell didn't go there going to university-- was in some ways the most intense experience of your life. I mean, Connolly himself, Orwell's great friend, said that really after he'd been to Eton and got a scholarship to Oxford, his life was really downhill all the way. And it's interesting-- Orwell, of course, is a kind of different kettle of fish in that regard in that he frankly slacked through his days at Eton and then went off and joined the Burma police.
So he sits rather to one side of that great contingent of early 20th century British intellectuals who never really got over their school days.
GEOFF:
Just moving on a bit, David, in your biography, you say that Orwell's time in Spain was a defining experience for him and indeed influenced his view of totalitarianism. Why was that?
DAVID:
One of the great questions about Orwell’s biography is the seed. When were the seeds sown of Orwell's political awakening? And it's always assumed that in some cases-- it's assumed that he came home from Burma in 1927 as a fully fledged anti-imperialist with all his political opinions in place. Now, I found a letter last year in a cache that's only just become available, written to a girlfriend in 1931 from London. Just at the point when the National government is forming, just at the point when we're going off the gold standard, crucial time in British history in the 1930s, and Orwell writes to his friend Eleanor and he says, there's probably going to be civil unrest, social unrest here in London in the autumn. But I don't really know anything about it because I know nothing of and I am not interested in politics. That was written in 1931.
Even when he goes to Wigan in 1936, and he begins-- he will write that Mr. So-and-so who I met, he said, is active in the labour movement, and it's almost anthropological. Orwell doesn't really know what the labour movement is, but he's concerned that he should investigate these curious people who are members of it. But it's when he gets to Spain, when he gets to revolutionary Barcelona in early 1937 that he suddenly sees, he imagined that he sees a society run on properly egalitarian lines. And it takes his breath away. And I think that it forms-- most notably, it's the crucible in which most of his later political opinions were forged.
GEOFF:
Yeah, and as you say, he wasn't, as in the case of [INAUDIBLE] or Cambridge University students, he wasn't converted to communism before he went. Was interested in socialism, but as you say, in a very loose way. How significant was that then in helping him to maintain a more critical independent position during and after Spain?
DAVID:
Well, as you say, he came to Spain not exactly cold because there is that long polemical second half of The Road to Wigan Pier, where he tries to work out what he thinks about socialism. But he came to say, and we know that the remarks that he vouchsafed to people in the week before he went to Spain, there were not in the least ideological. He was saying to people, terrible isn't about the Spaniards, something has to be done, poor chaps, we have to get over there and help – without really knowing how he was going to help or what the situation was.
And I think that the fact that he came to Spain with a relatively open mind and saw the sights that he saw in proto-revolutionary Barcelona in January 1937, it was that I think that helped him, that made him be so shocked six months later when the Soviet squads were at work in Barcelona, where he gets out, gets out with his life because he spent some-- I've just been rereading some of the essays he wrote about Spain subsequently and looking back on the Spanish war, essays like that. And he says that he still can't actually work out what the Russians were up to, and it was as if certainly we know that the Russians, the Soviet leadership thought that they didn't actually want a revolution in Spain in 1937, that it didn't serve their international purposes. And Orwell can't understand this because he'd seen what he regarded as conditions so far of social equality in a European country. And he thought that obviously it was the duty of everybody there to see that that position was maintained and enhanced.
He couldn't understand why anybody would want the Spanish revolution to fail, especially somebody on the left.
GEOFF:
You mentioned The Road to Wigan Pier, and, of course, in the second part of that book, he's very critical of left-wing intellectuals. He's critical of their, what he sees as their doctrinaire politics, the language they use, and contrasted that really with the experiences of ordinary citizens. And obviously, it was in an early writing on socialism on the left, although I think there were some themes he continued subsequently. But it was quite controversial at the time because, of course, the Spanish Civil War and '30s generally saw some of the great causes of the left.
And I was wondering, the later significance of this critique of intellectuals and how important that was in the work you did subsequently.
DAVID:
I think it's very important. And I think a lot of the work, a lot of the writings that he's doing at that point, both with Wigan Pier and the months and years after it, are in a certain sense-- you can see those later opinions coming to-- not coming to grip but beginning to incubate. As for the distaste for doctrinaire positions, either of left and right, only this morning, quite by chance, not actually in prep-- not prepping for this particular conversation, but I read a fascinating review that he wrote of a book called English Ways by Jack Hilton.
Now, Jack Hilton, as you doubtless know, was a very prominent distinguished working-class writer in the 1930s. He wrote another book called Caliban Shrieks, which is one of the great title for a proletarian autobiography. And English Ways is the story of a journey. In fact, it's The Road to Wigan Pier in reverse because Hilton and his wife start out at Epsom, and then they tramp all the way up to the North of England.
Orwell really liked this book, and he liked it because of the individualistic spirit that Hilton showed. And Orwell said he tries to define his political position. He says, Hilton is obviously a man of the left, but after you've said that, you realised that he's very idiosyncratic. And he likes having a bit of a flutter on the horses, and he loves it when he sees the King arriving at the Derby. And he's only disappointed that the King is in a motorcar and not in a coach and six.
And he says, and obviously from the point of view of the socialist intellectual, somebody like Jack Hilton is completely beyond the pale because he has no formal defined opinion. He will never nail his colours to any particular ideological mask and that he's an ordinary working man, and therefore, his opinion counts. And I think that you can see this view being developed. And obviously, Orwell's derision of the extreme Communist Party in the early years of the war who were dancing to a particular tune in 1939, 1940.
And as soon as Russia was at war with Germany had completely had a 180 degree turn and pretend they believed in something else. So I think you can see those ideas fermenting in the late 1930s.
Audio 1
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Activity 1
Having listened to the discussion between Geoff Andrews and D. J. Taylor, note down what you see as being the key influences in Orwell’s early life which may have set him aware of some political themes. What were these and how significant do you think they were?
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Discussion
You may have come up with the following:
- The significance of his private school upbringing on developing suspicion of authority.
- His experience of fighting in the Spanish Civil War and suspicion of Russian communists he met.
- A critique of left-wing intellectuals for their political orthodoxies. In particular he was becoming suspicious of the power of political parties and the power of language. This is something he took into his later writing, notably Nineteen Eighty-Four.
To add to D. J. Taylor’s comments in Audio 1, you should recognise that George Orwell (educated at Eton) saw himself as a democratic socialist, but never a communist.
Socialism
Socialism as an ideology emerged in the West during the early 19th century as a reaction to the economic and social inequalities generated by industrial capitalism. A core aim of socialism is to advance the interests of the working classes by promoting social and economic equality. However, there are a number of strands and divisions within socialism, and each 'sees' the means for attaining social and economic equality differently. So-called 'hard' variants of socialism (those within the communist tradition) advocate the complete abolition of the capitalist system through revolution. In contrast, 'softer' versions (such as those within the democratic socialist tradition) aim to achieve necessary reform through democratic means (the ballot box). The 'softest' version of all (social democracy) does not seek to provide an alternative to capitalism. Rather, it aims to modify capitalism (e.g. through the provision of a mixed economy and a welfare state).
The Labour Party (which emerged out of the trades union movement at the very end of the 19th century) was never a revolutionary socialist party. The Labour Party has always been a 'broad Church' with some members and MPs on the extreme left, while others occupy a position just to the left of centre. Under Attlee, the Labour Party (after gaining office in 1945 following a landslide election victory) was responsible for the implementation of an extensive welfare state, including the establishment of the NHS.