Robert Colls
Subject: Appreciating George Orwell
Bio: Author of George Orwell: Life and Legacy
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is Appreciating George Orwell.
Our speaker is Robert Colls who is the author of the Orwell biography entitled George Orwell: Life and Legacy.
You know his novels 1984 and Animal Farm but there is so much more to enjoy. I look forward to discussing with Robert about Orwell’s other major novels as well as his essays like Shooting an Elephant and a Hanging.
Robert, please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Robert Colls:
Why are we always getting Orwell wrong? Who said, in a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act? It wasn’t George Orwell, although many people, including UNESCO, seemed to think so. It was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
Who said, it’s not a matter of whether the war is real; it’s not meant to be won; it’s meant to be continuous? It was Michael Moore in 2004, trying to sound like George Orwell. Raoul Peck’s recent movie Two + Two = Five, has quotes from Orwell hanging everywhere, but most are not in context.
No one is more quoted than George Orwell. We get the Orwell quotes we deserve. Looking for a snappy start? Read Orwell on Charles Dickens. Looking for a decisive knockout blow? Read Orwell on Tolstoy. Looking for a lazy endorsement? Go to Google and have anything you like. Orwell never had a better advocate than Christopher Hitchens, but even Hitch got him wrong. His central argument, that Orwell was essentially right about the three great issues of the 20th century is flawed. It’s true that Orwell hated the British Empire, but he hated other empires more, and to do that was to hate British imperialism less. Hitchens was right to say Orwell was anti-fascist to the core, but he hardly said a word about fascism other than to say the term was meaningless. And it’s true that anti-communism was Orwell’s driving force, but he defended the Soviet alliance for the duration of the war.
Orwell didn’t always get Orwell right. Sometimes he made things up. At other times he simply misremembered. He said he’d spent months living with mining families in the north of England when in fact he was only a fortnight living with a working miner family.
We get him wrong because don’t look hard enough. He often pleaded poverty, and his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris, was about sleeping rough. But how down was he? He left the Imperial Police in 1927 after five years on a good salary. While he was tramping in England, the family home was only a train ride away. His books were getting published one a year with good reviews and decent advances. He wasn’t broke, but he did give lectures on being broke. With Animal Farm in 1945, he was in the money.
Probably the most common way of getting Orwell wrong is to rip him out of context. Playing What Would Orwell Say is a dangerous game with such an original and contrarian writer.
Finally, we get Orwell wrong when we look to him for comfort. Will Lloyd in the Times called him England’s most celebrated performance artist. But allowing that to take us to a 1930s England that doesn’t endure is not a good idea. Poverty, useless governments, royal scandals and upcoming wars are not new in the 1930s, and they’re not new now. Dead these 76 years, he is part of our everyday life, we might reckon he has become memeified by the media he warned against.
Larry Bernstein:
Why do you think people get him so wrong? He changes his mind about the Spanish Civil War, how socialism would work, about the Tories, about the working class. One of the joys of reading Orwell is to watch him progress in his thinking.
Robert Colls:
He’s a work in progress. I see him as a human being, evolving. He’s not a philosopher trying to come up with eternal truths. He’s a journalist. He wants to see what’s in front of his nose. Such things change.
Larry Bernstein:
Why did you dedicate such a large portion of your life to writing biographies of a novelist?
Robert Colls:
I first bought The Road to Wigan Pier in 1969, when I was 19, at the University of Sussex. I spent the price of 10 cigarettes, a rash act. He was writing about the north of England and coal mining communities, which I come from. I took to Orwell, who was praising my people.
After that I bought four volumes of essays, and I can remember lying in bed with my girlfriend in wintry London in 1972, reading these essays out to each other. We made a friend for life. He was on my side, and I loved his clarity. I was doing history in the 70s and 80s when there was a lot of capital-T theory going around, unreadable and unintelligible, and there was Orwell writing profound things in the clearest way. In 2012 I wrote George Orwell: English Rebel, and it came easily. This little book I’ve written now, he might have written it himself. It’s dead cheeky. It’s a lifetime friendship.
Larry Bernstein:
In Politics and the English Language, Orwell blasts the political class for speaking gibberish, disguising intent, and being lazy with language. You complained about academic theory. If Orwell were here today; he would rewrite that essay as a condemnation of the academy. Tell us about Orwell’s use of language.
Robert Colls:
My God, if he was around now writing about academic speak. Mind you, it’s on the way out, because professors have woken up to the fact that students have got to understand them. Otherwise. there’s no bloody point. In Politics and the English Language, Orwell’s range of enemies was narrow. He’s firing his gun at the Communist Party and its fellow travelers. He says their language is like a hen house - all bits and pieces nailed together from other pieces of writing. This is in 1946. he would make a very easy slip over to the theory of the 70s and 80s.
I remember going to conferences and listening to these guys, and their favorite phrase was, “it is necessary that.” None of us had the nerve to say, “Why is it necessary?” We’re academics. We can be free.
Larry Bernstein:
Orwell feels out of place wherever he is. He wrote an essay about his time as a boarding school student at St Cyprian’s, as a small child before Eton. He feels alone, beaten up, harassed, and misunderstood. I looked the boarding school up on Wikipedia, and its famous graduates went on and on, like 25 people, of which Orwell was just one, with comments about how much they loved the school. In every situation there are some people who don’t fit and are unhappy, and others who think it’s the greatest thing of all time. He’s the guy who’s alone and thinks everything is terrible. Is that true of Orwell, and why does being an outcast make him a better observer?
Robert Colls:
There are two Orwells. There’s Eric Arthur Blair, who’s a man, and a decent chap: confident, probably with an Old Etonian drawl, probably good fun. There’s lots of pictures of Orwell having a good time, particularly when he’s got a rifle over his shoulder in the Spanish militia and in the British Home Guard. His friends at the BBC said he was good company and would enjoy an evening with him.
Then there was George Orwell, who was somebody else -- a writer and an observer who wanted to write politics as art. He takes a subject and it’s dramatized. Take his time at school. He went there from 8 to 14 years old, writing letters back to his mother saying what awful fun, played football, dancing, and had great jokes.
Larry Bernstein:
Inconsistent with the essay that he writes later.
Robert Colls:
He writes the essay where he’s lonely, sad, nobody likes me. He says at the end, I smelt. Between the two we have a gap of about 30 years. He’s dramatizing that he grew up to hate boarding school. After St Cyprian’s, he won a scholarship to the greatest public school in the empire, Eton College. Once he was there, unlike a tight little prep school full of anxieties. At Eton he was a gentlemen with freedom that he relished.
Larry Bernstein:
Orwell is a very bright young man with serious academic interests even as a child. He makes the decision not to go to university, but instead join the Indian Imperial Police. Tell us about that decision and how it shapes his life.
Robert Colls:
He left Eton, went to live with his parents in a little seaside town in Suffolk called Southwold, and there he crammed for the Indian Imperial Police exam. He came seventh in languages and 28th in horse riding. He got in and he went to Burma. His girlfriend said his parents wanted him to go to university; others say they couldn’t afford it on £600 a year without a scholarship. But I don’t think he wanted to go because he was fed up with school. He wanted to see some real life. There were connections: his mother’s father was a teak exporter in Burma, and Orwell’s father had worked in India all his life.
Larry Bernstein:
He writes a very important essay called Shooting an Elephant about his time in Burma.
Robert Colls:
We don’t even know he did shoot the elephant. He was dramatizing experiences. He wrote it in England in retrospect. For me, Orwell is a better essayist than novelist, and his best essays are A Hanging in 1931 and Shooting an Elephant in 1936.
He’s on station, an officer of the Raj, and he gets called to the marketplace to deal with an elephant that had gone musth (in heat) and flattened an Indian man. When he got there, the elephant was passively eating. Orwell didn’t quite know what to do, because an elephant was not just an animal, it was a piece of capital. He did what he had to do. Orwell sent for an elephant gun, lay flat on the ground, huge crowd egging him on, and took the elephant down in three rounds.
We have a masterpiece of choreography. A huge animal is dying before our eyes. The animal starts to tremble once the shot goes home. The elephant climbs up with its trunk in the air and comes down with a great crash. It tries to get up again. Orwell shoots again. Another great climb, down with a crash, and he finishes it off. It’s an exercise in death, and Orwell performed that which the empire is meant to perform - the white man doing what the white man should do, even if he doesn’t want to do it. Sometimes empires are not so strong as they make out.
Larry Bernstein:
I felt this was a reflection on the British Empire. It wasn’t about the elephant at all. Millions of Indians and a few hundred British policemen doing what the locals want. He self-admits that if he were in charge, he would let the elephant go home to its owner because that is the right answer. A crowd develops with demands to kill the elephant, and he feels an expectation to do the right Burmese thing. That is the reflection of the British Empire that distinguishes it from other empires. He’s doing the locals’ bidding.
Robert Colls:
It wasn’t an empire that believed the state should change things. It wanted to leave the system as it was, as long as it paid fealty to the overriding masters. It wanted to let Burmese be Burmese.
He was against it. He didn’t like what it did to him personally, and when he went through the marketplace in his uniform, people would spit all over his back. It was a complicated experience for Orwell. And it is true that the British Empire had notions of rights and liberties.
Larry Bernstein:
Orwell gets tuberculosis before antibiotics, so it’s a death sentence, and to feel better he goes to Marrakesh for fresh air. On the way, he sees a troop of Senegalese soldiers, very tall African men walking with one white officer, and he says, I just don’t understand how long it will take before they’ll turn their guns on the white man and end this.
As an aside, my own family, just a few years later, in June of 1940, my grandmother was an emigre hiding in France. When France fell, she talked her way onto an army-only train to find my grandfather, and it was filled with Senegalese troops. My grandmother thought these men were giants. She described it to me exactly the way that Orwell described it in Marrakesh four years prior. But the French had already lost the war, and the Senegalese were sad, not revolutionary in anyway.
Robert Colls:
He goes to Marrakesh seriously ill, just out of six months in hospital. He and Eileen, his tremendous wife, go courtesy of an anonymous Old Etonian sponsor, L.H. Myers. They’re broke; he’s writing and coughing up blood. It’s a really bad time.
The Senegalese soldiers, and your story adds to it, are another lovely example of the layered nature of Orwell. The essay is provocative, but it’s also telling a fundamental truth -- when it came to a battle of the empires, most colonial peoples weren’t fooled by ideology stuck with those rickety despotisms in Paris and London rather than Berlin and Tokyo. The British Army was seriously supported by the Indian Army - hundreds of thousands of volunteers that were never conscripted. Orwell knew change was coming, and he wanted to fire a shot across the bows of the British and French empires.
The journalist in him when that young Senegalese six-footer marching past, he caught his eye, and from that Orwell riffs on what he thought he saw.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to stick with Marrakesh. In 1941, my family were interned in Casablanca, and my great aunt Greta told me what the Jewish ghetto there was like: unbelievably poor, beggars everywhere, a dense population confined to a few blocks, the saddest thing she’d ever seen. Orwell’s descriptions, unlike the Senegalese and the Burmese, are more caustic towards the Jews, and reflect some latent antisemitism, which he doesn’t deny. Tell us about the Jewish ghetto and how it reflects his views on the Jews.
Robert Colls:
He says they’re incredibly poor and separate. He’s looking at Jews in Africa, and he has said jaw-dropping things about Jews before that. He doesn’t flinch from telling you what he sees. If he sees a Jewish man in Paris looking dangerous or criminal or unpleasant, he’ll just tell you. Nowadays people would say Jewish, whereas Orwell just calls someone a Jew that was common at the time, and I don’t think there’s any way around it. It’s part of the man. But later on, he becomes seriously interested in the subject of antisemitism. Not many antisemites write long articles for the Contemporary Jewish Record on antisemitism. And he doesn’t like left-wing intellectuals very much, but most of his best friends are Jewish left-wing intellectuals. Complex.
Israel had just been founded in 1948 but he did make it clear to his Jewish friends that he was not in favor.
Larry Bernstein:
Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish Civil War, there’s a scene right at the beginning where he meets an Italian soldier representing the Republic. There were many different leftist organizations fighting, and Orwell was a member of the Trotskyist group. Even though they can’t communicate with words, they look each other in the eyes, he feels an immediate kinship, and they embrace as brothers in arms. It’s an important opening - at the beginning he is emotionally involved and becomes disillusioned as the story progresses. Tell us about Homage to Catalonia.
Robert Colls:
He just goes. It’s very typical of him. He’s recently married, but he just declares he’s going to Spain, to fight or to report or both. He visits Henry Miller in Paris. Miller says, you’re mad, you won’t make any difference, but gives him a nice warm jacket. He goes south on the train, and in southern France the peasants know that the train is, straight into Spain on the Republican side, and they look up from the fields with their hands as a fist. He loves that.
He arrives in Barcelona on Boxing Day, the 26th of December 1936, and joins the POUM, the Trotskyite anarchist breakaway, who were not Stalinist. Welcome to the Spanish Revolution -- an alphabet soup of acronyms. You can always tell it’s him in photographs because he’s a foot taller than anyone else. They march west into Aragon, high in the mountains, facing the Francoist forces, and he does four or five months there. There are a few scraps, but it’s what a lot of soldiers say about war: boring, unhealthy and unpleasant. His wife comes out to work in Barcelona and saves his life in Spain.
In May they’re on rest back in Barcelona, but fighting breaks out between the POUM Trotskyists and the Stalinist-supported main government, who reasonably enough want their telephone exchange back. I don’t know how many serious governments could have an anarchist switchboard.
He goes back to the front, and days into the fighting, he’s hit from 175 yards by a Mauser bullet, high velocity, through the neck, in one end and out the other. It doesn’t hit any arteries, so he survives.
A couple of field hospitals, back to Barcelona where his wife Eileen is staying. She catches him in the foyer and whispers loudly, “Get out, they’re after us.” She had been visited in the night by government secret police, probably Soviet-backed. Orwell and Eileen and a couple of English friends from the POUM make it out of Spain posing as tourists. He goes in as a red revolutionary brother and goes out as a bourgeois war tourist.
Back to London, he is absolutely furious at how wrong the British left-wing press are getting the Spanish Civil War. He doesn’t expect anything else from the right-wing press; he never addresses the right and never says a word about Franco or fascists. He assumes the only side to be on is the left, and they’re getting it wrong. He spends that summer writing furiously against his own side saying, “if you want a revolution in Spain, don’t back the Soviet Union, because they are putting all revolutionaries to the sword.” Spain is the great moment of his life. It’s when he becomes political.
Larry Bernstein:
It was hugely important in his philosophy. When I look at Animal Farm and 1984, Spain is the defining experience that shapes his views. One example, he’s involved in some minor skirmish, and he reads about it in the newspaper, and it is not what happened. Not even close. He realizes that truth isn’t what’s important to the Stalinist writers at all. He views that as a great potential horror of totalitarian regimes, and it becomes central in the Ministry of Truth in 1984.
Robert Colls:
This is pretty much his view. It’s a deliberate manipulation. Orwell was telling you always from his personal experience. He was against people sitting at their typewriters in the posh parts of London, opining about what the Spanish should do, while there were young boys being killed who couldn’t even put their politics into words.
Larry Bernstein:
One of my favorite scenes from Homage to Catalonia is when he has an opportunity to take a shot at an individual who is going to the bathroom. The guy hears them, panics, and gets up holding his pants at his knees, exposing his butt as he runs. And Orwell concludes that he’s not going to shoot a man in that position. It expresses not only the humanity of the situation but his own.
Robert Colls:
I agree. Orwell is on the side of what is right. But if it’s a question of what is human against what is right, he’s on the side of what is human. Not shooting a guy in the backside shows you that. In his wonderful essay A Hanging, the little man who’s about to be hanged is marched down a corridor to the gallows by Indian warders, with Orwell in charge. They’re marching quickly, because they all want it done fast; they’re all upset about it. But suddenly the little man to be hanged takes a little left jump and back again. He was avoiding a puddle. And Orwell said, only then did I realize I was about to hang a perfectly healthy and conscious human being who didn’t want his feet wet. Same thing.
Larry Bernstein:
This moment before an execution has a significant place in Western literature, picked up by the existentialists like Sartre’s The Wall, Camus in The Stranger. There were two major takeaways from A Hanging for me. One was how even in the last moments of life that you’ll dodge the puddle. It’s a reflex. The second was the tremendous indifference of the British officers. They didn’t know him or what crime he had committed. They had a job to do, and they couldn’t wait to finish up and go for a drink. We see this later with British working-class people, what he loves is that they’ve done their job and they go to the pub. Orwell doesn’t oppose the post-work drink. We shouldn’t be in the job of killing people.
Robert Colls:
That little drink scene is superb. They’re all upset, embarrassed, and having a drink. They’re back as brothers - Indian soldiers and British officers together, brothers in empire. Orwell does say one of the good things about the British Empire is it could get things done.
Larry Bernstein:
Orwell was familiar with the leading dystopian works: Brave New World and Zamyatin’s We. 1984 doesn’t come out of nowhere. Tell us about 1984 as the culmination of Orwell’s ideas. He wrote that he was working on some book he thinks is going to be another failure. And here it is, one of the great monuments of Western literature of the 20th century.
Robert Colls:
He wasn’t happy with it or any of his books. His health was in a terrible condition. He couldn’t even get anyone to come up and type it for him; it was too far to the Hebrides. So, he did it himself. At the end he could hardly walk more than a few yards without breaking into sweat. He thinks the book’s an awful, terrible mess. But it isn’t. Maybe that’s a sign of hope for anyone who’s a writer - you might think it’s bad, but it doesn’t say others do. He sends it to Warburg, whose senior editor says, if we can’t sell 20,000, we ought to be shot. It’s a big success from the word go. And all the tropes of his life are blended into this book, from gangsters in the park to sex in the bushes. It’s all there.
Larry Bernstein:
When my kids were growing up, we had book time -- I’d read a sentence, then my daughter, then my son. We read 1984. We get to the last page, where Winston Smith is enjoying his Victory Gin at the bar, and in a moment of absolute joy when the global war is won, he says, “I love Big Brother,” and he means it. And in that moment, a bullet goes through his head, because O’Brien had foreshadowed, we don’t want to kill you now; we want to persuade you to love Big Brother, and then we’ll kill you. And that’s how 1984 ends. And I turn to my very young Jonathan who says, “Dad, it is a masterpiece.”
Robert Colls:
It is a masterpiece. It’s so good you don’t even have to explain it. Animal Farm is the other masterpiece. Sandra Newman’s book Julia is a really good feminist version of 1984. It’s Julia’s story, and for me, Julia is the hero of 1984. She’s much smarter than Winston and more formidable. It carries the story forward in a useful way.
Larry Bernstein:
The literature curriculum in American schools is radically different for my children than when I was a student. Dickens, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Emerson and Thoreau are out. But Orwell is in. What’s so unusual about Animal Farm is that it is perfectly age appropriate at the junior high level, and there aren’t many great works in English literature that are. It opens up political theory. Tell us why it stands the test of time.
Robert Colls:
Anyone can read it and love it. It’s just perfect; it’s like the cap that fits all round the head. I don’t think there’s a word in it that’s wrong. You don’t have to know anything about the Russian Revolution to enjoy it, though it helps if you do. The animals are so English: gentle, slow, stupid, but loyal. It’s the perfect fable. He said it was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which he loved. It’s his best, because it is so perfect.
Larry Bernstein:
I had a previous podcast on Orwell with Patrick Allitt, a historian at Emory, who asked why both conservatives and liberals embrace Orwell as one of their own. When I was reading his essays, it was clear to me that he was a true socialist. He wanted government to own the means of production. The right embraces him because he talked the truth about Stalin and totalitarianism. Tell us why the right and the left both embrace Orwell.
Robert Colls:
It goes back to where we started - why we get him wrong all the time. There’s an Orwell for everybody. Yes, he’s a socialist who’s not interested in class consciousness, the means of production or dialectics. He’s interested in brotherhood and in defending the things and the people you love.
When somebody’s threatening those things, like Hitler, he stands with the state. When he was writing The Lion and the Unicorn, his wife Eileen writes to a friend saying, George is writing a little book on how to be a socialist though Tory.
He’s a socialist with a capital S, but he doesn’t know that much about the working class. He visits them, but he doesn’t know them. He likes the idea of brotherhood. And when it comes to what you eat, what you wear, and who you choose as your friends, he’s a conservative, small c. He loves the things he loves, and that’s it. He’s both. Liberals can take from him the progressive aspects: the anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Conservatives can take from him the man who in the end defends the things that matter. In 1945 he’s Labor through and through, and he never wavers.
Larry Bernstein:
Our audience has read Animal Farm and 1984. If they get inspired by this discussion, what should they read next?
Robert Colls:
Go to the essays. There are various versions and editions of his essays: A Hanging, The Spike, Shooting an Elephant, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and Politics and the English Language, still used in newsrooms across the world as a guide to good writing.
Larry Bernstein:
I agree. I thought they were fabulous. What are you optimistic about as it relates to Orwell?
Robert Colls:
As long as there’s good writers, good conversations and lots of readers, there’s room for optimism.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Robert for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast was -- Is Nolan’s Movie The Odyssey a Masterpiece?
Our speakers were Scott Turow the author of Presumed Innocent and Darren Schwartz the What Happens Next Culture Critic. We had a total blast reviewing all aspects of the new film and we discussed Nolan’s decisions about changing Odysseus’s character.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Is Nolan’s Odyssey a Masterpiece?, here.
