1985 by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online

a good Socialist was to the woman struggling with the wastepipe, not to the big men of the Party. And yethow could you help her without putting the Party in power? The Party’s in power, but the waste-pipe remains clogged. It’s the disparity between the reality of life and the abstraction of Party doctrine – that’s what sickened Orwell
.
    That’s part of it. But put it another way. One of the troubles with political commitment is that no political party can tell the whole truth about man’s needs in society. If it could, it wouldn’t be a political party. And yet the honest man who wants to work for the improvement of his country has to belong to a party, which means – somewhat hopelessly – accepting what amounts to a merely partial truth. Only the vicious or stupid can accord total loyalty to a party. Orwell was a Socialist because he could see no future in a continuance of traditional
laissez faire
. But it’s very difficult to sustain a kind of wobbly liberal idiosyncratic socialism of your own in the face of the
real
Socialists – those who want to push Socialism, with impeccable logic, to the utter limit.
    You mean Orwell’s Socialism was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire?
    Look at it this way. When he worked for the left-wing paper
Tribune
, he had to withstand the rebukes of more orthodox readers who didn’t like his writing about literature that seemed to hinder rather than help the ‘cause’ – the poems of the Royalist Anglican Tory T. S. Eliot, for instance, or the in-grown verbal experiments of James Joyce. He almost had to apologize for bidding his readers go and look at the first daffodils in the park instead of spending yet another Saturday distributing leftwing pamphlets. He knew what Marxism was about. He’d fought alongside Marxists in Spain, but he wasn’t, like the redder British Socialists, prepared to blind himself to what Russia was doing in the name of Marxism. His radicalism was of a nineteenth-century kind, with a strong tinge of something older – the dissenting spirit of Defoe and the humane anger of Swift. Swift he declared to be the writer he admired with least reserve, and that Swift was Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin didn’t offend his agnosticism. There’s a bad but touching poem Orwell wrote – he sees himself in an earlier incarnation as a country rector, meditating in his garden, watching his walnuts grow.
    There was more English than Socialism in his English Socialism
.
    Very neat, and there’s some truth in it. He loved his country more than his party. He didn’t like the tendency in more orthodox Socialists to inhabit a world of pure doctrine and ignore the realities of an inherited national tradition. Orwell prized his English inheritance – the language, the wild flowers, church architecture, Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, theinnocent obscenity of seaside picture postcards, Anglican hymns, bitter beer, a good strong cup of tea. His tastes were bourgeois, and they veered towards the working class.
    But he couldn’t identify himself with the workers. It’s horrible that he should seem to blame the workers for his inability to join them. I mean, that total condemnation of the proles in
Nineteen Eighty-Four. . . .
    He was sick, remember, and hopeless. He tried to love the workers but couldn’t. After all, he was born on the fringe of the ruling class, he went to Eton, he spoke with a patrician accent. When he called on his fellow middle-class intellectuals to take a step downward and embrace the culture of miners and factory workers, he said: ‘You have nothing to lose but your aitches.’ But those were just what he could not lose. He had at heart the cause of working-class justice, but he couldn’t really accept the workers as real people. They were animals – noble and powerful, like Boxer the horse in
Animal Farm
, but essentially of a different