Orwell and Us

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. -- George Orwell

George Orwell died 54 years ago this January, in a hospital bed in central London, of the tuberculosis that had afflicted much of his adult life, yet his legacy is everywhere around us. Like Chales Dickens, perhaps the writer who comes closest to him in long-term impact, several of his more resonant utterances are used on an almost daily basis by people who have never read a line of his books. Like Dickens, too, people mysteriously know about Orwell at second hand: that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others; that Big Brother is watching you; that Room 101 is where you go to be confronted by your worst fears. No other 20th century British writer has influenced the mental lives of ordinary citizens in quite the same way; equally, no other 20th-century British writer has so dramatically colonised the view that we take of the 21st century world.

In a professional career that barely extended beyond its second decade, Orwell produced a phenomenal body of work: half-a-dozen novels, two books of blistering reportage (The Road To Wigan Pier and his account of six months spent fighting on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia), countless essays, reviews and occasional pieces for periodicals ranging from the Observer to the tiniest of little magazines. Peter Davison's magisterial edition of his Complete Works (1998) runs to 20 fat volumes and takes up nearly four feet of shelf space. Trying to cut a path through his groaning forest of print, and to distinguish what in the last resort separates Orwell from practically every one of his contemporaries, one returns--inexorably--to the moral scent that rises off the page like sulphur. For Orwell is, above all, a moral force, a light glinting in the darkness, a way through the murk. His status as a kind of ethical litmus paper stems not so much from the repeated injunction to 'behave decently'--and some of the implications of behaving decently for the average western lifestyle--as from the armature that supported them.

Broadly speaking he realised--and he did so a great deal earlier than most commentators of either Right or Left--that the single most important crisis of the 20th century was the decline of mass religious belief and its corollary, personal immortality. God was dead, and yet the secular substitutes erected in His place, whether totalitarian societies of the kind exposed in Nineteen Eighty-Four or western consumer capitalism, merely travestied human ideals and aspirations. The task facing modern man, as Orwell saw it, was to take control of that immense reservoir of essentially spiritual feeling and use it to irrigate millions of ordinary and finite lives. The atrocities of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia--and this point is repeated endlessly in his later work--could only have been planned by the godless, because they presupposed a world in which there is no moral reckoning and where the only power that matters is the ability to control your fellow men, the history of which they are a part and the knowledge on which that history rests. 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,' runs the party slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Man's duty, consequently, was to fight against--that eternally memorable phrase from the essay ‘Inside The Whale,’ published in 1940--'the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.'

It takes only a glance at the world of international power politics to establish that Orwell--to borrow the original title of Christopher Hitchens's recent polemic--'matters' in a way that 99 out of 100 writers do not. As a reader I have always been wary of 'relevance' in literature: so often it means the cast-off manuscripts of Group Theatre, Soviet-style 'social realism,' and novels with titles like Brixton Superfly. All art, Orwell famously pronounced, is propaganda; equally, not all propaganda is art. At the same time it is accurate to say that in the half-century since his death, Orwell has managed to colonise our thinking about politics and language in a way that would have seemed extraordinary to the friends who gathered round his deathbed in University College Hospital. A century after his birth, all of us are living in Orwell's shadow, from the journalist who writes a newspaper essay about 'Englishness' to the Pentagon hawk grimly surveying the divisions of the New World Order--you, me, Tony Blair and the latest asylum seeker to Europe.

In his essay on Dickens, Orwell remarked that he was the kind of writer of whom you found yourself thinking half-a-dozen times a day. In much the same way, I can never look at a picture of Stalin, read one of those opaque pieces of official prose put out by government departments, or even pick up a book for review, without thinking of the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Were I to come across Orwell in the celestial equivalent of the Groucho Club--not, you imagine, a place Orwell would want to be found--I shouls want to say to him what Larkin maintained that he said to Cyril Connolly when they met at Auden's funeral: 'Sir, you formed me.’

It is hardly exaggerating to say that he forms us all.

D.J.Taylor is a writer living in London.