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Through Charles, Emma acquires poetry. But he could not possibly put into words what she means to him, and if he could have articulated a thought on the subject, would have declared that she had brought poetry into his life. This is so. There was no poetry with his first wife, the widow. Emma’s beauty, of course, is a fact of her nature, and Charles has responded to it with worship, which is what beauty—a mystery—deserves. This explains why Charles, though quite deceived by Emma’s character, is not a fool; he has recognized something in her about which he cannot be deceived.
In fact the term “committed literature” is an antique, dating back to the post-war period and designating an alliance of certain writers with the then-Stalinist Party. It has no other meaning—as was demonstrated, if that was necessary, by the two speakers’ reluctance to define it—and for the radical young that meaning has been drained of significance by the desacralization of the Party, following the Twentieth Congress, Hungary, the Moscow-Peking split. In any case, outside the Soviet Union, where a state literature, “socialist realism,” had to meet rather strict norms of commitment to official policy, the slogan never had much connection with actual novels and poems. Unlike, say, surrealism, it did not denote a school or “way” of composition. A writer in the West was judged to be “engagé” by the number of manifestos and petitions he signed, the initiatives he took, the demonstrations he marched in. Those may be legitimate criteria to measure the activism of a citizen but they do not throw any light on what literature can do. Hence the shadow character of the debate at the Mutualité, where a practicing school of young writers with an overt body of aesthetic doctrine was opposed by elderly generalities of the kind usually found in the book pages of conservative magazines and newspapers. The students in schism with the Party had asked a serious question and got from those they had most counted on, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a very dusty answer. That was maybe what the young man meant when he interpreted the evening for his girl friend: “Those are the reactionary writers of the Left.”
It is as though, once he had resigned from the Indian Service, he wished to be acted upon, rather than to act, that is, to follow the line of least resistance and see where it led—a quite common impulse in a writer, based on a mystical feeling that the will is evil. Blair-Orwell detested and resented every form of power; in politics, he loved rubbing his opponents’ noses in reality, the opposite of the corporate or individual will, just as in language he hated abstraction, the separation of mental concepts from the plurality of the concrete. The line of least resistance, obeying a law of social gravity, led him naturally downward to gauge the depths of powerlessness and indignity, and the knowledge he brought back made it impossible for him ever to eat a meal in a smart restaurant again, in the same way as, later, after going down into the English coal mines, he wrote “I don’t think I shall ever feel the same about coal again.” Every now and then, in those four or five years of vagrancy, Blair surfaced, working as a tutor to a defective boy, staying with his older sister and her husband, staying with his parents, only to plunge back again into anonymity. Was this “coming up for air” a simple manifestation of the life instinct or some complicated testing of his forces of resiliency? By coming to the top he kept his freedom to sink once more, when the spirit moved him. He refused to drop definitively out of sight by an act of choice.
He hated intellectuals, pansies, and “rich swine,” as he called millionaires, and nothing made him angrier during the war than the fact that repairs were being made to the empty grand houses in the West End. He was also incensed at the suggestion that rationing should end. His extreme egalitarianism involved cutting down to size any superior pretensions. He was quick to catch the smell of luxury, material or intellectual; he sneered at Joyce for trying to be “above the battle” while living in Zurich on a British pension, at Gandhi for playing “with his spinning-wheel in the mansion of some cotton millionaire.” The luxury of being a pacifist (“fascifist”) in wartime drove him into furies of invective; at different times he compared Gandhi to Frank Buchman, Petain, Salazar, Hitler, and Rasputin. He was capable of making friends with individual plain-living pacifists and anarchists, e.g., George Woodcock, having attacked them in print, but he continued to regard anarchism as at best an affectation (at worst it was “a form of power-worship”); the pretense that you could do without government was mental self-indulgence. What he really had against intellectuals, pansies, and rich swine was that they are all fashion-carriers—a true accusation. Fashion is an incarnation of wasteful luxury (nobody needs a mini-skirt), and one thing he liked about the poor was that they could not afford to be modish—a somewhat tautological point.
Though aware of the impossibility of it, he would have liked to find some acid test to subject works of art to which would tell the scientific investigator whether they were good or bad. Survival, he typically decided, was the only measure of greatness, but of course this leaves the problem of what causes an author to last. He devised a test for characters in fiction: a character in a novel “passes” if you can hold an imaginary conversation with him. In his own novels, only Big Brother, probably, would meet that eccentric requirement. He was a Sherlock Holmes fan and a lover of puzzles and brain-twisters, also of the odd fact of the “Believe It or Not” variety. His book reviews often turn on the methodical solution of a puzzle (“What’s wrong with this picture?”), as when he discovers—quite astutely—that the fault of Koestler is “hedonism,” something that is not apparent to the untrained eye. He was not a natural novelist, having no interest in character or in the process of rising or sinking in ordinary society or in a field of work—a process that engaged the sympathies not just of Proust or Balzac but of Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Zola, Dickens, Dreiser. He would have been indifferent both to success and to failure. It is hard to imagine the long family-chronicle novel in several volumes he was planning to write just as the war was breaking out. Maybe he did not have enough human weaknesses to be a real novelist.
chuckled at the last line
Possibly Blair-Orwell was corrected too often in youth to brook it afterward. Though he tots up for the record the mistakes in prophecy he has made in his “London Letter” to Partisan Review, he is generally convinced of his own rightness. Once he has changed his mind he seems to be unconscious of having done so and can write to Victor Gollancz early in 1940, “The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that democracy & fascism are the same thing depress me horribly,” evidently forgetting that he had been saying that himself a year earlier: “If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle ‘against fascism,’ i.e., against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting fascism in by the back door.” On the occasions when, conscious of a possible previous injustice, he starts out to write a reappraisal, as in the cases of Gandhi and Tolstoy, he slowly swings around to his original position, restated in less intemperate language. In “Why I Write,” he declared “I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood.” This is loyal and admirable in the man, but it is a grave limitation on thinking. Lacking religion and mistrustful of philosophy, he stayed stubbornly true to himself and to his instincts, for which he could find no other word than “decency.” The refusal to define this concept (is it innate or handed down and if not innate what is the source of its binding power?) makes Orwell an uncertain guide to action, especially in the realm of politics, unless he is taken as a saint, that is, a transmitter of revelation—a class of person he had a great distaste for.
solid critique
If he is entitled to be called “the conscience of his generation,” this is mainly because of his identification with the poor. He was not unique in tearing the mask off Stalinism, and his relentless pursuit of Stalinists in his own milieu occasionally seems to be a mere product of personal dislike. The rigors of his life, his unswerving rectitude entitled him to assume the duties of a purifying scavenger. Nobody could say that Orwell had been corrupted or would ever be corrupted by money, honors, women, pleasure; this gave him his authority, which sometimes, in my opinion, he abused. His political failure—despite everything, it was a failure if he left no fertile ideas behind him to germinate—was one of thought. While denouncing power-worship in just about everybody and discovering totalitarian tendencies in Tolstoy, Swift (the Houyhnhnms have a totalitarian society), and in gentle local anarchists and pacifists, he was in fact contemptuous of weakness—ineffectually—in political minorities. Apparently he did not consider how socialism, if it was to be as radical and thorough-going as he wished, could secure a general accord or whether, failing such an accord, it should achieve power by force.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK is the only writer I have ever read whose perception of what it means to be a woman and a writer seems in every way authentic, revelatory, entirely original and yet acutely recognizable. She seems to have seen early on that the genteel provincial tradition of “lady” novelists and essayists served mainly to flatter men, that there would be certain wrenching contradictions between growing up female and making any kind of sustained commitment to write. She understood at the bone the willful transgression implicit in the literary enterprise — knew that to express oneself was to expose oneself, that to seize the stage was to court humiliation, that to claim the independence implicit in the act of writing could mean becoming like the women she described in Sleepless Nights, left to “wander about in their dreadful freedom like old oxen left behind, totally unprovided for” — and she accepted the risk. Every line she wrote suggested that moral courage required trusting one’s own experience in the world, one’s own intuitions about how it worked.
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The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. Part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the first acts, the bright woman — with her children, her presents, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of “heaps of money” — can be a suitable candidate for liberation. No, that role should by rights belong to the depressed, child-less, loveless Mrs. Linde and her lonely drudgery. The truth is that Nora has always been free; it is all there in her gaiety, her lack of self-pity, her impulsiveness, her expansive, generous nature. And Nora never for a moment trusted Helmer. If she had done so she would long ago have told him about her troubles.
The habit is to play Nora too lightly in the beginning and too heavily in the end. The person who has been charming in Acts 1 and 2 puts on a dowdy traveling suit in Act 3 and is suddenly standing before you as a spinster governess. If the play is to make sense, the woman who has decided to leave her husband must be the very same woman we have known before. We may well predict that she will soon be laughing and chattering again and eating her macaroons in peace, telling her friends — she is going back to her hometown — what a stick Helmer turned out to be. Otherwise her freedom is worth nothing. Nora’s liberation is not a transformation, but an acknowledgment of error, of having married the wrong man. Her real problem is money — at the beginning and at the end. What will she live on? What kind of work will she do? Will she get her children back? Who will be her next husband? When the curtain goes down it is only the end of Volume One.