As He Pleased
I’ve been reading a little Orwell lately – prompted partly by my offhand comment in an email to Norm that Orwell was good but Hitchens is better – which itself was prompted by Philip Dodd’s introduction of Hitchens on ‘Night Waves’ in which he quoted someone (someone unnamed, I think) as writing in a review that Hitchens is as good as Orwell, or almost as good as Orwell, or some such. That annoyed me. It is my considered opinion – despite the offhandedness of the comment alluded to above – that Orwell is over-rated as a writer. Really quite seriously over-rated. That his language is very often decidedly tired and uninspired, even banal, and that there is a lot of commonplace thought in it. Phrases like ‘dirty little scoundrel’ come to mind.
But when Harry at Crooked Timber did a post about Fascinating Hitchens in which he quoted Norm quoting me there was a lot of disagreement (along with some agreement) with my relative estimation of the two – which is why I got Orwell off the shelf to check my impression again. And – I still agree with myself. He’s good, he’s interesting, he’s definitely worth reading, but he is not a great writer or stylist or thinker. He’s not as good as Dwight Macdonald, for instance.
That’s just a flat assertion, obviously. It would take extensive quotation to make my case – because he is good, so I can’t just quote a terrible sentence and leave it at that. But if you read a good chunk of him, the flatness and uninspiredness become increasingly noticeable.
But! As I say – he is good. I’m just saying he’s not the best; but he is good. On religion, for example…
It also appears from my correspondent’s letter that even the most central doctrines of the Christian religion don’t have to be accepted in a literal sense. It doesn’t matter, for instance, whether Jesus Christ ever existed…So we arrive at this position: Tribune must not poke fun at the Christian religion, but the existence of Christ, which innumberable people have been burnt for denying, is a matter of indifference.
Now, is this orthodox Catholic doctrine? My impression is that it is not. I can think of passages in the writings of popular Catholic apologists such as Father Woodlock and Father Ronald Knox in which it is stated in the clearest terms that Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, and is not to be accepted in some wishy-washy metaphorical sense.
There. So yaboosucks. Exactly what I’m always saying – when people start with that ‘Oh but religion doesn’t mean, you know, literally believing in [trailing off vaguely] – it just means a way of feeling, a way of looking at the world, a framework.’ No it doesn’t! A feeling, a way of looking at the world, a framework, is not a religion, it’s something else. Christian doctrine means what it appears to mean, it doesn’t just mean a fondness for daffodils and clouds. Religions do make truth claims about the real world, so don’t tell me they don’t. It ain’t honest.
If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally. These doctrines have, you are told, a quite other meaning which you are too crude to understand…Thus the Catholic intellectual is able, for controversial purposes, to play a sort of handy-pandy game, repeating the articles of the Creed in exactly the same terms as his forefathers, while defending himself from the charge of superstition by explaining that he is speaking in parables.
Bingo. Exactly. A handy-pandy game for controversial purposes. Parable, nothing. If it’s all just a parable, then what is all the fuss about? If it’s all a parable, atheists and theists are the same thing and can stop arguing – and all those people rioting at theatres, and threatening MPs and writers and BBC producers, and sticking knives in people – they’re all just confused, they’re taking literally what everyone else means metaphorically. Yeah right.
So – I still say Orwell is way down the list of best essayists I know of, but he’s nowhere near the bottom.
That by the way was an As I Please, from 3 March 1944.
Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote the most concise explanation I have ever seen of why Orwell matters:
“Intellectuals are probably not more dishonest than other people; their resources for self-deception are of course much greater, but then so is their compulsion to self-criticism: greater forces committed on both sides, and the result equally uncertain. But one characteristic which the intellectual must have, or he ceases to be an intellectual at all, is the ability to see when a real point has been made in debate. It was impossible for anyone with that ability not to notice that Orwell kept scoring direct hits. You knew that certain things he said were true, because you winced when you heard them.”
Incidentally, O’Brien reviewed some of Orwell’s work during his lifetime. Orwell was not pleased. According to one of O’Brien’s admirers, that is why, when Orwell wanted a name for a particularly unpleasant fictional character….
Really?! O’Brien is named after Conor Cruise? I never knew that! Or if I did I forgot it. That’s a great little nugget of information.
Good quotation, too.
Emm…but didn’t parables come straight from the horse’s mouth? Isn’t it a fault of religious people, if they fail to recognize that?
OB: the “little nugget” is just a theory, but if memory serves it is expounded in Ideas Matter: Essays in Honour of Conor Cruise O’Brien. Actually the background is interesting in relation to Orwell’s views about religion and repression. When O’Brien wrote the offending review he was employed by the Irish civil service, so in accordance with regulations he wrote under an alias (probably Donat O’Donnell). That was a formality; in a small town like Dublin the cover wouldn’t have been hard to penetrate. The review itself wasn’t especially harsh; all I remember from it is a remark along the lines that Orwell is bound to be interesting, if only as a psychological case-study – you don’t often meet an Old Etonian, post-Marxist ex-policeman. Anyway, the theory is that Orwell was instinctively suspicious of someone who was (1) an intellectual, (2) concealing his identity, (3) employed by a government, (4) the government in question being highly responsive to Vatican thinking. With some justification, Orwell saw the Vatican as the kind of institution we now call Orwellian. So it probably wasn’t too hard for him to picture O’Brien as the Senior Party man.
If the story is true, CCOB’s detractors would say Orwell showed great prescience. CCOB was a government minister in the 1970s and his Memoirs relate how he turned a blind eye to a brutal Special Branch interrogation which he learned about. As he puts it: “I refrained from telling this story to Garret [Fitzgerald] or Justin [Keating], because I thought it would worry them. It didn’t worry me.”
I have immense respect for O’Brien, but some of the things he writes are unsettling. That last little sentence is the most unsettling of the lot.
“You are told… you are too crude to understand” — that’s not the kind of treatment I would expect from a “thoughtful” person. Anyone can play at claims of specialized knowledge, a scientist or politician or whomever.
You and Orwell seem gleeful when you find a particularly silly religious person from whom you can generalize.
Do you always use terms like “metaphor” and “parable” as pejoratives?
“You and Orwell seem gleeful when you find a particularly silly religious
person from whom you can generalize.
“Do you always use terms like “metaphor” and “parable” as pejoratives?”
Yes, yes, one becomes delirious with the explanatory reach; not the puerile
‘faulty observation and hasty inference’
of the nativists and Skinnerians but the ‘symbolism and semantic blunder’ of those with a more critical mind.
“Between Man and Nature Humanity must be placed” Comte
“The common mind is intensely literal” Bergen Evans
“Pass it on and what a parody comes out at the end” Phyllis Graham
Adam Tjaavk
It seems to me that part of your evaluation of Orwell could be more contextually kind: Your denigration of him as an essayist based on the surpassing qualities of later writers has to take into account the fact that Orwell is not responsible for his imitators who turned some of his work into what now seems like tired cliches, nor can he fairly be held to the standard of later writers who gained by his example but who have the advantage of speaking to you in a more familiar contemporary voice.
Interesting. I just picked up a hefty book of Orwells essays (My country right or left) as I’ve never read anything other than his fiction, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve never really read any essays at all (unless you count modern essays in sunday supplements). So could you do us (being those of us who don’t know much about it) a public service by listing a few superior essayists, with a few lines about what makes them great and who they might appeal to? For example, I’ve never heard of Dwight McDonald, which I might need to be embarrassed about after I’ve read him – but what would persuade me to read him?
‘You and Orwell seem gleeful when you find a particularly silly religious person from whom you can generalize.’
A silly religious person? surely you jest?
I was thinking that in my “religion is a framework” comment, I wasn’t leaning on any claims about divine revelation but on critical theory. Looking around the site, I now see critical theory isn’t held in any higher esteem than spirituality is. I may just be hanging out in the wrong neighborhood.
Alex Fradera–
Dwight Macdonald “Against the American Grain”
“nor can he fairly be held to the standard of later writers who gained by his example but who have the advantage of speaking to you in a more familiar contemporary voice.”
Hmm. I don’t think that’s it – I’m pretty sure it’s not. I love writers who speak to me in a non-contemporary voice – particularly essayists. Hazlitt, Bacon (I’ve just been reading Bacon today, for a book group I run – he’s a brilliant stylist, and such a phrasemaker), odd people like Sir Thomas Browne and Nashe. Gibbon – Mill – Arnold – Coleridge – no, it’s not that I prefer contempo prose. Orwell, despite what he said in ‘Politics and the English Language,’ was just much too at home with the stale word and phrase. And by cliches I really don’t mean ideas that are familiar via his imitators, I mean ideas but especially language that were and was cliched even then.
Alex – yes, what wmr says, Against the American Grain – or any other collection of Macdonald’s you can find, but I know that one is around. (Though how easy to find he is in the UK, I don’t know.)
Other essayists – Hazlitt, Hazlitt, and Hazlitt.
Bacon, Hume, George Eliot, Macaulay, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf. To name a few.
John J – cackle. Well, if your two favourite things are spirituality and critical theory (unless you mean the Frankfurt school variety), you could be right about the neighbourhood! Unless you like a good rousing argument, that is.
Thanks folks. Just ordered …Grain from Abebooks’ UK branch, under a tenner all told. Hazlitt can wait a little.
And a new life of essay-reading begins. Have fun, Alex.
(Gore Vidal. I forgot to mention him because I already had – but his essays are brilliant.)
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