'Why Orwell Matters': The Independent of London
By GEORGE PACKER
( review of WHY ORWELL MATTERS By Christopher Hitchens.)
[ I am on record as being impressed by Hitchens' work on Kissinger. Making him into some big heroic left/right conversion case seems perhaps a little excessive, though. Having written a hatchet job on Mother Teresa, of all things, Hitchens does seem to show some loose cannon attributes. ]
To most readers, George Orwell is the author of two dimly remembered satirical fantasies that were assigned in high school. To a more politicized group, he's the independent radical who saw through Communist lies during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the 20th century's crucial voices against totalitarianism and for what Orwell himself often simply called ''common decency.''
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And then there is the smaller, intense membership of the Orwell cult. I joined it -- in 1984, by chance -- on reading the first line of ''Homage to Catalonia,'' his account of fighting on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War: ''In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers' table.'' Nothing dazzling here (''He is not a genius,'' Lionel Trilling wrote -- ''what a relief!''). But even a simple declarative sentence can convey a certain character. The ''I'' is forthrightly present, but without show; what counts more is the Italian militiaman, whom Orwell invokes at the start because ''with his shabby uniform and fierce pathetic face he typifies for me the special atmosphere of that time.''
For members of the cult, the true Orwell is to be found in his essays and his autobiographical books on Spain, coal mining and being poor in Paris and London. What matters is the particular pitch of that ''I'' -- the writer capable of joining an anarchist militia and saying so in a subordinate clause. This Orwell is one's ideal self, braver and more cleareyed than the real one (and a better, harder-working writer), but always there as an aspiration.
Christopher Hitchens rightly warns against the sanctification of St. George, and it was Orwell who famously wrote that ''saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.'' But Hitchens, who has absorbed every word Orwell ever published (in a recent 20-volume edition), spends most of his new book defending the author of all those words against various attacks. It's a strange experience to read a critic best known for extreme acerbity writing about a subject he loves. And if the encounter between Orwell and Hitchens is a disappointing one, it's partly because affirmation doesn't play to Hitchens's strength. ''Why Orwell Matters'' is presented by its publisher as a case of posthumous affinity between writers across generations, but critic and subject turn out to be mismatched, and it's the critic who suffers as a result.
Hitchens addresses a series of short chapters to the key topics in Orwell's life and work: the empire, the left, the right, Englishness, fiction, truth. ''The three great subjects of the 20th century were imperialism, fascism and Stalinism,'' Hitchens says, and, he continues, Orwell got all three right. He did so not simply through personal rectitude, still less by pursuing a correct political ''line.'' Orwell came to politics through fairly devastating personal experience, above all in what Hitchens calls his two great epiphanies -- as a colonial policeman in Burma, where he saw and practiced cruelty and self-censorship in the name of empire, and in Barcelona, where he became both a committed socialist and an unillusioned anti-Communist. This helps to explain the consistent soundness of his judgments. ''It has lately proved possible to reprint every single letter, book review and essay composed by Orwell,'' Hitchens says, ''without exposing him to any embarrassment.'' They were at bottom moral judgments, often squeezed out of intense struggles with his own nature and an almost perversely hard life.
Orwell once wrote that he had ''a power of facing unpleasant facts.'' Hitchens adds that they ''were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.'' The best pages in this book show how Orwell's radical politics were often at war with deeply conservative instincts. A man who felt tenderly toward the English countryside, English beer and, incredibly, English cooking, who distrusted abstract language along with most 20th-century inventions, who was something of a homophobe and antifeminist, and who struggled in print against his own antipathy toward Burmese, Jews and the poor, is not an easy fit with ''progressive'' thinking. The pressure of these conflicts, and Orwell's honesty in working them out, help to account for the vivid prose and its moral strength. Orwell's sentences are so forceful that hardly a single one of them escapes political incorrectness of one type or another, yet he remained on the left to the premature end of his life, in 1950. ''By teaching himself in theory and practice, some of the teaching being rather pedantic,'' Hitchens writes, ''he became a great humanist.''
For a slender book, ''Why Orwell Matters'' is oddly unfocused and hard to get through. What Hitchens has to say is what a sympathetic reader of Orwell would want said. But he never sustains a line of thought long enough or searchingly enough to reach a truly provocative insight. There's no sense of a deepening engagement with the subject; one is never allowed to forget the gesticulating presence of the critic. The valuable reflections on Orwell keep getting interrupted by a series of asides, ripostes and thrusts into tangled little backwaters.
Hitchens's main energy goes into scrapping with writers who have Orwell wrong. The British critic Raymond Williams, the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon, Edward Said, Anthony Burgess, Salman Rushdie, T. S. Eliot, Norman Podhoretz: one after another Hitchens summons them to account for intellectual sins against Orwell, then sends them sprawling in the dust while gaunt, sad-eyed Orwell remains standing alongside his red-faced champion. ''Raymond Williams . . . is my prime offender and I'm saving him up for later,'' Hitchens says at one point; and at another, ''I personally cannot read the Orwell-Eliot correspondence without experiencing a deep feeling of contempt.'' Hitchens once wrote that ''contempt'' is an honorable and underused word. Contempt is the key in which Hitchens sings most comfortably. It's the driving force behind his recent books on Mother Teresa, the Clintons and Henry Kissinger, with titles like ''The Missionary Position'' and ''No One Left to Lie To.'' Even paying tribute to the writer he admires most, Hitchens has to keep finding fights to pick, it seems, just to stay interested. He always wins, but it wears his reader down. The really absorbing quarrel, as Orwell showed, is with oneself.
''It matters not what you think,'' Hitchens concludes, ''but how you think.'' A corollary says that style is character. It's in this sense that Orwell and Hitchens, who agree about almost everything, are nonetheless badly matched. In defending Orwell, Hitchens sounds more like his hero's critical contemporaries, who thrived, as Orwell once said, on ''squalid controversies imported from across the Atlantic.'' Hitchens's talent is polemic, a satisfying form over short distances. He possesses the knowledge, the rhetorical skill and the range of hatreds to have made an amazingly productive career of it. In a sense his literary character is the opposite of Orwell's. As a writer Hitchens is not, in a felicitous phrase he applies to Orwell, ''forever taking his own temperature.'' Lacking Orwell's range of concrete experience, he never examines the conflicts of the ''I'' as a way of getting at larger themes -- yet one is constantly aware of him performing on the page. Somehow the larger themes serve to direct light onto the writer rather than the other way around.
Intellectually, Christopher Hitchens stands in the tradition of the British dissenter -- the line of rationalists and humanists that includes Hume, Paine, Hazlitt and, of course, Orwell. But Hitchens has the disadvantage of writing in an age that no longer fears its dissenters but condescends to them, tolerates them as gadflies and offers them a handsome deal. We take celebrity more seriously than ideas and, perhaps as a result, the subjects of Hitchens's books over the past few years have been celebrities of one sort or another, making him a minor one in the process. This seems the wrong direction for a serious polemicist to take. The deterioration of subject matter plays into a weakness for display of personality and quick rhetorical victories. Hitchens seems to have sensed this, and he's turned to Orwell as if to cleanse his palate. ''Much more civilized to be writing about him'' than Mother Teresa, Princess Di or Bill Clinton, Hitchens said in his last book, ''Letters to a Young Contrarian.'' But as it turns out, the postmodernists were wrong: there is something inescapable in literary character. ''At 50,'' Orwell wrote in one of his last diary entries, ''everyone has the face he deserves.'' |
