Vol. 2 No. 1 · 24 January 1980
pages 26-28 | 4102 words
The Unhappy Vicar
Samuel Hynes
- Orwell: The Transformation by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams
Constable, 240 pp, £6.95, October 1980, ISBN 0 09 462250 7
George Orwell was one of the great self-mythologisers. He sought out extreme experiences, was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of England and among soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war. Everything that he wrote has the feel of direct experience, as though the books composed one long autobiography: yet everything is transformed, moulded into meaning, by his fierce moral sense. It’s no wonder that myths grew up about him, or that they still persist, screening the actual man.
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Letters
Vol. 2 No. 4 · 6 March 1980
From Glyn Ford
SIR: Samuel Hynes’s review of Stansky and Abrahams’ Orwell: The Transformation (LRB, Vol. 2, No 1) was short on review and long on opinion. As a reader, I favour discursive reviewing, yet a writer who adopts this style has a duty to restrain his enthusiasm for his own political views and predilections. Hynes singularly fails to keep his under control. Admittedly, George Orwell – like most human beings – was a complex individual, difficult to categorise. Yet at least five assertions made by Hynes are bizarre enough to warrant comment. These are: Orwell was not a political thinker; had no philosophy of political action; was never able to relate himself comfortably to any political party; wrote nothing before 1936 that could be called political; his political idealism died in Barcelona in 1937.
Hynes turns Orwell into a minor literary figure of the Isaac Disraeli mould who flirted with politics. Orwell himself stated that he became a socialist in 1930, and the Adelphi, for which he wrote in the years following, was recognised as the vehicle of the intellectual Left within the Independent Labour Party. Similarly, if his idealistic socialism died in 1937, how come he joined the ILP in 1938 and later wrote so consistently for Tribune? As for Orwell’s tendencies towards nationalism, Luddism and anti-intellectualism, and his limited philosophy of political action, he shared those with the British Left. They remain today – much to the disgust of the programmed Left – as part of that set of ideas held within, for example, the Labour Party. Finally, Orwell’s political thinking in Animal Farm and 1984 has outlived the pronouncements of many of the political theorists of the succeeding decades. Ideology has yet to end, and as the US completes its switch in allies from Russia to China, 1984 keeps its point.
Glyn Ford
Ashton-under-Lyne
