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.

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.

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.