George Orwell’s collaboration with the British Council in the 1940s resulted in his famous essay, ‘In Defence of English Cooking’. As part of our 80th anniversary celebrations, Stephen Mullan spoke to David Dwan, Professor of Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, about Orwell’s contemporary relevance in Spain and beyond.
1. George Orwell’s ideas have long permeated our television, film and politics. 2020 even saw the release of an Animal Farm computer game. What is Orwell’s relevance for our time?
Orwell appears to be perennially relevant. This is because he often seems to represent a kind of attitude rather than a specific set of beliefs: a spirit of plain-speaking and resistance to mystification, partisanship for the little guy and a mistrust of highfalutin elites, a lonely iconoclasm in the face of all groupthink, an honesty that is willing to offend, etc. This can be endlessly impersonated or directly invoked in the polemic of our times. Of course, rising inequality can seem to make Orwell more relevant than ever. The fact that some one per cent of the world’s population control half of its wealth, is likely to have appalled Orwell, even if texts like Animal Farm make an ambiguous contribution to its redress. (The parable highlights the evils of inequality, but it also raises doubts about its abolition). However, it is the widespread impression that we have entered an age of ‘alternative facts’ that has made Orwell’s work seem particularly captious or prophetic. The fact that Orwell was already worrying about the demise of truth some 80 years ago might encourage us to play down some of our own (and indeed Orwell’s) hyperbole about a post-truth world: truth will survive whatever its Cassandras might say. Yet the connection Orwell drew between truth and freedom remains pertinent in an age when free speech has become so brazenly uncoupled from truth. As Winston Smith puts it in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows’. The issue here is not simply that we’re free to say our sums, but that we retain some commitment to their being correct. Without this commitment we can neither be accountable to ourselves nor to each other.
2. Those of us who studied Orwell at school were taught that his early works were influenced by his experiences among the ‘down and out’ of England, France and Myanmar (Burma), and his later works – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – were reactions to Stalinist Russia. But the great British essayist Christopher Hitchens argued that ‘the crucible – or the point where the hammer met the anvil – was in Spain’. Do you think there is a general tendency to underestimate the influence of Spain on Orwell’s work?
Certainly, Homage to Catalonia is less attended to than Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four. However, I’m not sure the importance of Spain for Orwell is unrecognised – not least because its significance was repeatedly advertised by Orwell himself. He proposed that everything he wrote from 1936 – that is the year he departed for Spain – was written in opposition to totalitarianism and in defence of democratic socialism. Of course, the Spanish Civil war revealed just how complicated the relationship between democracy and socialism could be. (Orwell would first downplay and then later talk up the democratic features of the Republican government.) The suppression of POUM –the militia which Orwell joined in December 1936 – informed Orwell’s sceptical view of the Republican government. It also sealed his opposition to Communism, particularly in its Stalinist form: he now regarded it as a ‘counter-revolutionary force’ wedded to murder and lies. Orwell’s concerns about truth also have a Spanish root. The propaganda wars of the Civil War made an objective account of that event hard to conceptualise, although some might argue that Homage to Catalonia – so casually partisan as it often appears to be – is expressive of the problem. As Orwell reportedly told Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’. The Spanish Civil War certainly stoked Orwell’s impression that the very concept of objective truth was disappearing from the world.
3. Paul Preston, one of the foremost historians of the period, argues that Orwell did not present ‘a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war’. Is Homage to Catalonia good literature but bad history?
Orwell is fairly open about his own shortcomings in Homage to Catalonia. As he tells the reader: ‘beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events’. He certainly witnessed things from one small corner – the skirmishes at Huesca and the conflicts between Government and POUM forces in Barcelona in May 1937 – and as a broader account of the conflict his book is certainly inadequate. We hear a lot about internal feuding on the Left and very little about Franco’s activities in the war – not to mention the role of Italy or Germany in the conflict. Orwell admits to having exaggerated his own support for POUM’s policies in order to counteract the propaganda that was spread about them, but this was a dubious kind of objectivity. It is also worth stressing that he had very little Spanish or Catalan, so his comprehension of what he witnessed had some obvious limitations. Nonetheless, even Preston admits that Orwell’s insights are ‘invaluable for the historian’. He brings a keen eye and his famous nose to events, vividly summoning up the smell of war – largely ‘a smell of excrement and decaying food’ – and its sounds (‘the frosty crackle of bullets, the roar and glare of bombs’). He notes the discomfort and boredom of war and punctuates this with a tourist’s fascinate gaze – ‘the scenery was stupendous.’ He was clearly fascinated by Spanish customs and generalised enthusiastically about Spanish character. Though he took a bullet in the neck in Spain he clearly had a great affection for the place. He would emerge from the war with a strengthened belief ‘in the decency of human beings’.
4. Your book on Orwell has a striking title: Liberty, Equality and Humbug. ‘Humbug’ – tonterías in Spanish – is an unusual word, and, in the context, almost provocative. Why ‘humbug’?
The term ‘humbug’ was one of Orwell’s favourite put-downs. I use it to draw attention to problems that are basic not just to Orwell’s politics but arguably to everyone’s. The title obviously refers to the celebrated values of the French Revolution (liberty, equality and fraternity). Orwell explicitly based his socialism on this holy trinity, but his work also reveals that the relationship between these noble ideals can be fairly fractious. He showed better than anyone that collective freedom presupposes some basic equality of condition, but he also recognised that the attempt to enforce this through a centralised state could undermine libertarian notions of liberty. (Orwell himself would speak of ‘the nightmare of state intervention’.) Orwell often entertained a very sharp-elbowed ideal of liberty and it could make even fraternity seem like a coercive force. Brotherhood is extolled and sometimes sentimentalised in Orwell’s work (consider the opening pages of Homage to Catalonia), but Big Brother is also a lurid example of its tyrannical potential. So Orwell’s writing concedes to a tragic conflict within some of our most cherished ideals. In the light of this conflict, we might be tempted to write off political idealism as little more than ‘humbug’ – a confused or deceptive rhetoric that is used to sanctify power. The moving and vulnerable features of Orwell’s writing is that he remains a moralist, deeply wedded to the importance of moral ideals in politics. Even a hypocritical attachment to these values, he argued, was better than no commitment to them whatsoever (in other words, a duplicitous liberal is preferable to an honest Nazi). In this context, at least, he was prepared to give two cheers to humbug.
5. Could you say a little about Orwell’s influence on the English language?
Orwell is remembered both as a great theorist and user of the English tongue. In my view, his practice of the English language has survived better than his theories of it – not least of all his gloomy sense of the language’s decline. Orwell provided many sensible prescriptions for writing clearly even if the most basic of these still sound too categorical (‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’; ‘If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out’; ‘Never use [. . .] a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.’). When doling out the advice, he had at least the good sense to add a rule about rule-breaking: ‘Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.’ The use of ‘barbarous’ here is fairly exposing; underlying Orwell’s idealisation of clarity is a certain linguistic chauvinism. His outlawing of ‘foreign phrases’ (‘cul de sac,’ ‘status quo,’ etc) in the name of something more English can all sound a bit loco, and overlooks the mongrel character of English itself. Behind his admirable pursuit of clarity, there resides a naïve theory of meaning: diction that can’t be related to an empirical object – ‘sentimental’, ‘romantic’, or indeed the basic notion of ‘values’ – is dismissed as ‘strictly meaningless.’ Orwell sometimes overlooks the fact that some words and concepts are irreducibly vague. The absence of an agreed definition of democracy isn’t because a proposal for one ‘is resisted from all sides’: the concept itself is inherently contestable and therefore plural and vague. Indeed, Orwell often seems to a have a naively voluntarist view of language reform as if we could all get together in a committee and agree on a perfect set of definitions. This is not how language works. Of course Orwell has a brilliant eye for the way for the ways in which euphemism, abstraction and obfuscation operate in politics. He satirised these practices in Nineteen Eighty-Four and changed the language at the same time. Phrases like ‘Big Brother’, ‘Thought Police’ and even ‘Orwellian’ are ubiquitous, though when we’re tempted to enlist these once again we might wish to call to mind Orwell’s own advice: ‘Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’
6. As an organisation, we’re proud that our collaboration with Orwell resulted in his famous ‘Defence of English Cooking’. Admittedly it took us more than 70 years to publish the essay, but most of us recognise Orwell as one of the finest English essayists of the twentieth century. And the American critic Irving Howe said Orwell was perhaps the greatest English essayist since Dr Johnson. What do you think of Orwell’s standing as an essayist? And do you have any particular favourites you would recommend to those new to Orwell’s work?
Orwell is a wonderful essayist. His own prescriptions about prose – it should be as transparent as a windowpane – can downplay the artfulness of his own simple style. One of the striking things about Orwell’s essays is their diversity: he can move from vivid, first-person sketches like ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to full-blown confessional pieces like ‘Why I Write’. The self-anatomising is combined with unflinching sociological observation in essays like ‘The Spike’ or ‘How the Poor Die.’ He wrote several searching pieces of literary criticism – a critique and appreciation of Dickens’ moralism (and his own), a clear-headed assessment of Yeats’s fixation with fascism, and an interestingly ambivalent account of Kipling. He also produced some innovative pieces of cultural criticism – essays on Boys’ Weeklies or on the naughty post-cards of Donald McGill in which the ‘worm’s-eye view of life’ is given its proper due. Of course, there is often a coercive unanimity in the tone – ‘everyone knows’, ‘everyone believes,’ ‘no one believes’ etc. – and the sense of certainty can feel a bit relentless. But there is also irony behind the swagger and the attitudinising is often very funny. He applauded the spirit of rebellion that lurked within humour – ‘every joke is a custard pie’ in the face of the moral authorities – but he also felt it was bound up with a sense of evil. In a perfect society there would be no jokes, because there would be no vices or failings to mock. Luckily, Orwell was spared this dull fate. His essays communicate both a love and horror of others: a deep compassion for human suffering and a fascinated disgust for human vices, squalor and smells. It is this volatility that given the essays their edge. This tonal unsteadiness is best observed, I think, in essays like ‘A Hanging’ or in his self-revelatory account of Swift.
7. ‘Happiness’ is the title of the last chapter in your book. What can Orwell, ‘the gloomy sage’, teach us about happiness?
Orwell might not seem like the first port of call for advice about happiness. In 1943 he denied that socialism had anything to do with happiness – socialism’s true objective, he maintained, was human brotherhood – and it says a lot about Orwell’s politics that brotherhood was not necessarily a happy matter. Yet Orwell also argued that socialism had everything to do with happiness. He had little truck with puritanical socialists who might question the basic propriety of happiness in an unjust world. Some sense of life’s joys was a necessary pre-requisite for building a better future. That said he was keen to distinguish happiness from a vulgar hedonism – in particular the thoroughly commercialised forms of ‘fun’ under capitalism and its mind-sapping distractions. His attempts to distinguish higher and lower orders of pleasure could sometimes sound a bit priggish; they were also unabashedly romantic (flowers and toads were good; jukeboxes, drive-in cinemas and even telephones were dubious luxuries). Gardening was one of his major joys. Of course, Orwell was acutely aware of the hedonic paradox: that a fixation with happiness as the true object of life was the best means of imperilling that same goal. Perhaps, that is why he often seemed to keep mum about his own happiness and to put his efforts into building a more just world. This silence about happiness is arguably the most instructive thing he had to say about it.
David Dwan is Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Oxford. Liberty, Equality, and Humbug, his book on Orwell’s political ideals, is published by Oxford University Press.
Stephen Mullan has taught literature and intellectual history at universities in Ireland, England and Spain. He currently works as an English content editor for the British Council in Spain, with whom he also teaches English at the University of Alcalá de Henares.
