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Hay Festival, 2002.
Very nice of you all to come ladies and gentlemen.
Should you not be in church in point of fact at this hour? I’m aware also that it’s very plucky of you to come to Hay at all at a time when there are the rival attractions of a royal fiesta and a World Cup.
Now, on all three of the things I’ve just mentioned as possible other things you could be doing, George Orwell was very useful. He had a great contempt for the supernatural and for the superstitious and for people who overvalued it.
But he had a great fondness for the English Bible, the King James Version, I mean, not the homogenized garbage now authorized to be read in churches. He had a fondness for a crownless prebble, a certain fondness for liturgy in other words and it shows in his command of our language.
But you wouldn’t catch him inside a church.
He once pointed out that international sporting exchanges are an unfailing source of global ill will. He was writing this in 1948 as the British mandate in Palestine was expiring and said, “Perhaps you’d like to imagine now a friendly match in Haifa between a Palestinian and an Israeli team.” And left people to imagine what the consequences of that might be.
And on the monarchy, writing just towards the close of his life, he said that he had been gravely discredited by the ’30s by the collusion with fascism, especially by the abdication. Had recovered some of its standing during the Second World War and he felt, he was around this in 1949, 1950, that what it really needed and if it could get this, it would recover, would be a really nice long reign.
So only a really good long reign can possibly bring the royal family back into credit.
George Orwell: The Man Behind the Words
Now, I mentioned these three examples simply because they form part of my case for his continuing relevance but also for the sense that he had of the importance for someone deciding to be a self-employed writer or intellectual, of not estranging themselves too much from what we might call the common culture of the people he was writing about.
His instincts for that reason were very good and of course the long reign that some of you are conceivably celebrating began, as we’re continually being reminded, just after George Orwell died in January of 1950. And that date in itself, I think, prompts us to some reflection.
In other words, by dying in January 1950, Orwell barely made it into the second half of the last century. It makes him almost an antique figure in some ways. He didn’t manage to attain quite the age of 47. Yet his many enemies continue to find him very directly and very distinctly relevant to the ways in which we are today and also to the subjects which we are doomed to debate.
A Literary Reflection: Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Now I’ve just written a short book which seeks to defend Orwell against his enemies past and present and also against some of his admirers and against the rather sickly tendency to over praise him and make him into a plaster Saint. And in both instances I’ve sought to ask and to answer the question which I’ve already attempted in answer to, which is that of why his name is still so resonant.
And while you ponder that, as I hope you will, I’d like to just read you a stave or two from an essay he wrote for Tribune in 1946, May 1946 actually. It’s called Confessions of a Book Reviewer. It starts like this.
In a cold but stuffy bed sitting room, littered with cigarette ends and half empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table trying to find room for his typewriter, among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the waste paper basket is already overflowing. And besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills, it is possible that there is a check for two guineas, which he’s nearly certainly forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered into his address book. He’s lost his address book and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses. He is a man of 35 but looks 50.
His ball has varicose veins and wear spectacles, or wood-wear them, if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition. But if he’s recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present, in his house past 11 in the morning, and according to his schedule, perhaps I should say schedule, he should have started work two hours ago. But even if he had made any serious effort to start, he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out of the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs.
The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, ah, those were the names, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say, this person is a writer.
He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features.
For all, literary people are very much alike. But let us say he is a book reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent, with a note suggesting that they ought to go well together. They arrived four days ago, but for 48 hours the review was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel.
Yesterday, in a resolute moment, he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Crossroads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy, this one is 680 pages and weighs four pounds, Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down, probably included by an estate. Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant that he will have to read at least 50 pages if he is to avoid making some howler, which will betray him not merely to the author, who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers, but a telling phrase, even to the general reader. Now just because I’m in hay, I’ll prolong, because you seem to like it, I just have one more paragraph I thought I might give you in any case, actually two, short.
The Ordinary Life of a Writer
When he finally snaps into it, as you have to do because the clock ticks on, all the stale old phrases, a book that no one should miss, something memorable on every page, of special value are the chapters dealing with, will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet and the review will end up with exactly the right length and with just three minutes to go.
Meanwhile, another ward of ill-assorted, unappetizing books will have arrived by post, and so it goes on, and yet, with what high hopes, this downtrodden, nerve-wracked creature started his career only a few years ago.
This is the hay bit. The great majority of reviewers, given inadequate, because you never know who’s listening, okay, the great majority of reviewers, given inadequate or misleading account of the book that’s dealt with. Since the war, publishers have been less able than before to twist the tails of literary editors and evoke a peon of praise for every book that they produce.
But on the other hand, the standard of reviewing has gone down, owing to lack of space and other inconveniences. Seeing the results, some people sometimes suggest that the solution lies in getting book reviewing out of the hands of hacks.
Well, that was just a glimpse of utopia for you in case you fancied it.
And I give it also as an instance of something relatively rare in the writing of George Orwell, in fact extremely rare, which is a deliberate attempt, and actually it was a successful one, to try and be funny. Upon the whole, his prose was extremely gloomy, gritty, realistic. Some people thought too much depressing.
He could be funny when he needed to be.
Orwell’s Humorous Touch
And of course, the evocation that he gives us in that piece is of what we used to know as grub street. And the disease from which he died at the age of 47, a perfectly curable version of tuberculosis that could have been cured by drugs already available but too expensive and too rare, make us think with their associations of consumption of the Victorian writer, of the man coughing up blood and starving in a garret. Though probably Orwell’s preferred epoch was the Edwardian one of pre-1914. If it had not ended, that’s to say, in a global war.
As it happened, he was condemned to live in the decades of war and of slump and of ideological confrontation. And that’s of course a part of the reason for his enduring renown. But just stay with the chain-smoking decrepit figure in the dressing gown for a moment. One must never forget how ordinary in many ways George Orwell was.
The Struggles of a Writer
Most of his work was written against the clock by a man in ill health, very poorly remunerated at best, with no literary or journalistic success to speak of in his own lifetime.
A great deal of what he wrote was no better really than very good, fairly average journalism.
Though I wouldn’t have described the room as littered with half-empty cups of tea, for example, if it had been me.
I sometimes feel that on a very good day I could have written a piece not too much inferior to that myself. And the great American critic Lionel Trilling made a very suggestive point, I think, when he chose precisely to stress this very modest and quotidian and everyday element in the
work of George Orwell. And if you will allow me, I’ll just quickly quote you
from it. Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading further Lionel Trilling’s excellent essay on Orwell, you can get it.
It’s Trilling’s
introduction to the American edition of Homage to Catalonia, and it’s
significant in itself that Homage to Catalonia didn’t find an American publisher until about five years after Orwell had died and was, in fact, almost unknown in England as well and barely published during his lifetime.
Roughly speaking, what Trilling begins by saying is this, that Orwell was a modest man because in many ways he had a lot to be modest about. If we ask what it is that he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one simple, direct, undeceived intelligence and respect for the powers one does have and for the work one undertakes to do.
He is not a genius. What a relief, Trilling has one of his few exclamation marks here. What an encouragement, for he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do. I think this perception, by the way, is very important in explaining the sheer hatred of Orwell that’s still to be found in some quarters.
By living and writing in the way that he did, he discredited in advance and at the time the excuse of historical context that was made by so many people. The shady alibi that in the circumstances, say of the menace of fascism, there was nothing else that people could have done, no other line they could have taken, no other party they could have belonged to, no other view they could have held. He destroyed that view, that excuse, that alibi in practice and at the time with great skill.
And in turn, I think, that will license Professor Trilling’s subsequent point, very beautifully stated I think, where he speculates on the nature of personal integrity. Orwell clung, writes Trilling, with a kind of rhyme and grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order.
He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues. I wanted to call my book, it’s one of the many arguments I’ve lost to publishers in my time, I wanted to call the book a power of facing, because when Orwell, in the same year as he wrote Confessions of a Book Reviewer, was reflecting on his early youth and his decision to become a writer, he said, “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.”
You notice it’s not the power to face or any other formulation somehow, and I think it’s extraordinarily and oddly well put, a power of facing.
Now, again you might say that’s a fairly ordinary virtue, and if you’re a commissar in a Stalinist people’s democracy and you realize that your five-year plan isn’t working out, not only isn’t going to be done in four years, incidentally five equals two plus two, the claim that the Soviet Union had completed its five-year plan in four years is the origin of the idea in 1984.
I’m sure that two plus two makes four. Don’t make four, excuse me, can be made to make five. Harder to die hard. I digress. If you’re that commissar, you realize the plan isn’t going to be actually finished in eight years and the peasants are laughing at you, you realize you’ve confronted an unpleasant fact, but
your reaction to it will be evasive. It will tend to be to tell the peasants to work harder and live on less. It’s not quite acknowledging or accepting the unpleasant fact.
If you’re a priest who wakes up one morning and realizes you’ve been talking absolute poppycock to your congregation all this time, simply living off their fears and perhaps their hopes even worse, or deceiving them and you develop doubts, it may very well be that you’ll redouble your efforts and seek for more faith in order to carry on performing the same racket in the same way. In other words, your reaction to the confrontation with an unpleasant fact is not a self-critical one.
It doesn’t have, it doesn’t contain the power of facing.
The unpleasant facts that Orwell chose to face were usually the ones that put his own position or his own preference to the test. And so I want to just sketch, and by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I’m assuming that people like yourselves come to events like this as much to talk as to listen. So I’ll try and keep myself to 30, 35 minutes or so and give us time for a conversation.
Enduring Themes in Orwell’s Work
But I want to just sketch the other apparently obvious but still worth interrogating aspects of Orwell’s work that may contribute to his claim to be among the imperishables.
Of the century that’s just ended, of which he only, as we’ve seen, survived the first half, the three great tests, the three great issues, if you will, were imperialism, empire, fascism, Nazism, national socialism and fascism, and Stalinism. And we certainly have not reached a point where we could say that we’ve evolved beyond those arguments or what can be learned from them. In fact, we live really in the wreckage of those three great experiments, all three of which incidentally basically involve powerful people in using other human beings as objects for experimental purposes.
The Challenges of Imperialism
Of these three, the first one to be confronted by Orwell directly was imperialism, was the idea that there were a few millions of people in the northern hemisphere in Europe who had the right to govern and make laws and borders and trading rules for the non-white, for people in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And Orwell’s early experience was he didn’t go to university. He was sent off as many sons of not very rich middle-class families, were to be a colonial civil servant.
Was there an imperial policeman, colonial policeman in Burma? I don’t know exactly because he never wrote or at least he never published any personal confessional about why he decided to give up that job.
But it’s very possible to speculate that the ordinary brutality with which a colonial policeman was forced to behave had a great deal to do with it.
And it’s certainly true that the first thing he ever published, which was written in French for a leftist magazine in Paris, was a very careful study of the means by which colonial trading relations underdeveloped Burma and kept it from joining the modern economy, made it instead a place of reservoir of human and other resources for its colonial owners. I myself believe that there was something in the sexual relationship between the governed and the rulers, what Nietzsche calls the master-slave relationship, that had a very powerful and horrifying effect upon Orwell. For example, the best way I can think of illustrating this is the following.
No Indian or Burmese man, however qualified, however sophisticated, however educated, could hope to join the membership of the English club in Rangoon. But any Burmese woman of any degree or status of any kind could certainly hope to be admitted to the Englishman’s bungalow if only by the back door and for pay. And in fact, the girlfriend of Florie, the desperate, sweaty, grim, green-like, sweltering, guilt-stricken civil servant who anticipates most of Greene’s writing in my view in Orwell’s novel The Burmese Days, it turns out you learn in just one line, has bought his girlfriend who also is his house servant from her impoverished family.
I think there was something in this that repelled Orwell powerfully and made him decide to become an UN-critical and – excuse me – an unequivocal, unconditional critic of imperialism for the rest of his life. But I also believe that he learned something about the cruel and sadistic underlay of all power relations from this experience and was able later to make very profound literary use of it.
At any rate, even in the middle of the Second World War when he was broadcasting to India for the BBC, he insisted that wartime conditions not inhibit the demand for Indian independence, that it made Indian independence more desirable rather than less, that the British government’s view that independence couldn’t be discussed.
Well, the war was going on, was the reverse of the case. He defended the right of Indians even to take the Japanese side if they chose to because it was their country and they could pick their own allies, though he counseled his Indian friends not to do anything.
And he also, in the course of this – this is a slight digression on my part – was the first person to foresee through reading the work of Mulk, Anand and others that very soon there would be a specifically Indo-Anglian, as Salman Rushdie calls it, or Anglo-Indian universe for fiction, that there would be so many speakers of English who were of Indian descent that they would constitute a separate audience and would start to introduce their own fiction writers.
And of course this prophecy of his has been triumphantly vindicated, as you can see by looking at the fiction shelf of any English bookstore now. So I think it could be said, as it could be said of no other English writer of the time, that he was unequivocally right, first in predicting that imperialism would not last for long because forcible means of production are less efficient as well as less justifiable than any others, and that it was right to be on the side of those, especially in India and Burma, but he also wrote very eloquently about Africa, the Middle East, to take their side and to foresee a world of self-government. If this now seems to us to be obvious, it wasn’t obvious at the time, it was an extremely difficult position to hold at the very time. About fascism and national socialism, it’s quite interesting, Orwell hardly wrote anything at all.
He didn’t seem to think it required any special condemnation.
He did immediately go off and carry a rifle and a pack, fighting against it in Spain. He was one of the first volunteers to make a physical force challenge to the spread of fascist ideas in Europe, but his writings are always very skimpy. He appears to have taken it for granted that anybody could see that he was every kind of evil you could imagine, double distilled and, so to speak, catalyzed into one horrible form.
Everything he hadn’t liked about classroom and exploitation, everything he detested about racial prejudice, everything that he found revolting, both as a policeman giving it out and as a schoolboy receiving it, about cruelty and sadism, all of these things, everything that’s horrible about militarism and the cult of the jackboot and the medal and the epaulette and the regiment, all of that summarized and over done and reheated and synthesized into absolute horror in fascism.
Fascism and Its Implications
But as I say, he didn’t really waste any time analyzing it and perhaps it didn’t need that much of an analysis.
Its horrific nature was self-evident. But it was in the course of that struggle that he became aware of the third great challenge and the one that actually took up and wasted most of the time of writers and intellectuals in the 20s, 30s and 40s. And that was the idea that to the east in the Soviet Union, the foundations of a new utopia had been laid and that it was the duty of all those who believed in a humanist and a progressive and a Democratic future to sympathize with this project, which was, when you think about it, it’s incredible not more people noticed this at the time, was described as the great Soviet experiment.
Think about that for a second because Orwell’s point was always to look to the language, always to see what traps are lurking for you in the apparently obvious or the self-evident. Experiments are things that we don’t conduct on humans when we can avoid it or if we do do that, we find ourselves denying it. In fact, so squeamish do we feel about experiments that we reserve them to be practiced on what? On animals. That’s the point of Animal Farm and that’s the whole point actually also about empire.
You may not use other human beings as objects to see what happens, to see how it comes out, not if you have to profit from it in any way. And in Spain, particularly in Barcelona, in the May days of 1936, Orwell was able to discover that there was something potentially quite vastly being prepared by Stalin and the parties and people under his control and that so far from this not being a utopia, so far from it not being, in other words, a good prospectus, a true prospectus for a radiant future, it was worse than a false prospectus.
It threatened to produce an absolute negation in which the whole idea of objective truth, of human solidarity, of pluralism, of intellectual experiment, of everything really worth valuing would be destroyed and possibly any record of any opposition to it would be destroyed as well.
Discovering the Truth About Totalitarianism
And from that appalling discovery and from what he saw it doing to people who he knew in Spain, the people who were killed, the people who disappeared, the people who were grotesquely slandered after they disappeared, the appalling circulation of lies that went on about it.
In other words, right in the crucible of the battle against Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, he made the discovery that was to last him for the next 14 years of his life, the struggle against, the need for a struggle against intellectual dishonesty on the left. And his odyssey at that point begins with the failure of a new statesman to even consider publishing his dispatches from Spain and it goes right through to the failure of Victor Gollancz to publish Animal Farm, the later failure of T.S. Eliot to publish Animal Farm on the grounds that the British establishment didn’t want to offend Joseph Stalin at that point. And the, I think, conclusive failure from the literary point of view of the Dial Press in New York to publish Animal Farm on the grounds, as they said in their rejection letter to the author, that it was impossible to sell animal stories in the United States.
This was at a time when Disney was already fairly culturally re-regnant. That, I think, is the favorite rejection slip. I have a copy of it pinned above my typewriter. It’s the best rejection slip of all time.
I feel I’m getting near the limit of the time I love it to myself or at least what I’m going to do all the talking instead of some of it.
The best way I can think of summarizing this is the following.
Orwell’s Literary Legacy
Orwell died, as I’ve said, in January of 1950. In 1951, a very intelligent Polish diplomat and cultural attaché named Czewasz Milosz, you should say Miłosz if you’re Polish, actually, in New York, defected from Poland and moved to Europe and wrote the first of a series of marvelous books and poems by which he’s now celebrated. He’s become certainly the national laureate of Poland in every sense but of many others too.
A book called The Captive Mind. The book was about the internal party mentality of the Stalinized states of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and particularly important to a half-Pol, half-Lithuanian citizen of Vilnius like Miłosz, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia too. And he reported a curious fact.
He says there’s a book called 1984 that is in circulation in secret editions read only by members of the inner party, clandestinely.
And he said, I’ve read it and I’ve had discussions with other of the comrades who’ve read it too. And they’re all extraordinarily impressed by it. This is one year after Orwell’s death.
They’re all very impressed by it and they’re all very surprised to find that its author never visited the Soviet Union because they cannot understand how an Englishman who had not had this experience could have summarized the texture, the feeling, the quality of everyday life in a closed society and a totalitarian state.
Now, I don’t know of any greater compliment paid by any writer to another than the short observation of Miłosz’s written in 1951, I think published in 1952. In other words, let me try and put it like this. 1984 is about the circulation of a secret book within an inner party and the appalling disclosures that it contains to those who will take the risk of complete annihilation, that is to say, by reading it. Within a year of its publication and two years of its author’s death, this book is itself a secret, Sam-as-dank book operating and circulating within the confines of an inner party society. And those who read it cannot believe that its author did not personally experience it.
To which my comment, and I think I might close on that, would be this.
Or close on this, would be that. Actually Orwell had, in a way, lived within imaginatively and in some ways practically too within the confines of a closed system. He managed to distill everything that had happened to him. He lives completely up to Lionel Trilling’s analysis of an intelligent person, no more than who wrote the average ability on whom nothing is wasted, for whom everything does possess a latent significance, from whom something can be learned at every stage.
It wasn’t lost on him. The way that little boys in English boarding schools would become very, very servile in the presence of the master and would betray their own friends in the hope of a little extra favor wasn’t lost on him. It remained the relationship between power and massacres and remained in his mind all his life. Nor was it lost on him the way in which a very small number of people could manage to govern, exploit, sexually exploit, as well as physically exploit and economically exploit, whole subject populations of a different color from themselves by keeping the monopoly of violence and by retaining a self-conscious ideology of superiority.
Nor was it lost on him what a nightmare it is to be faced with secret trials, secret police, disappeared persons, and mass production of lying propaganda of the sort that he experienced in Catalonia.
Conclusion: The Orwellian Legacy
And so by benefiting from all of this and also briefly by working in room 101 during a time of censorship in the Indian service at the BBC, another thing that wasn’t completely lost on him either, he managed to create something that was is the only thing in English that will stand comparison with Solzhenitsyn, with Ignacio Soloni, with Arthur Custer, with the other great classics of what was called when we were undergoing it the midnight of the 20th century.
And all this was done and synthesized and brought to the level that it was by somebody whose favorite quotation was a simple one from Milton, which goes “by the known rules of ancient Liberty” and thus makes the assumption that while we do have the instinct to obey and we do have sometimes the instinct to command and we do have the instinct to conform and we do have the instinct to make others conform, we also have an innate instinct for freedom and for Liberty and thus we arrive at the point, again I think this applies to no other writer, where the word Orwellian, if used quite clearly, means one of two things.
Either a nightmare dystopian society where human beings are treated as objects or as ciphers. If we describe a situation as Orwellian, we’re describing that. If we should describe a person or a literary work as Orwellian, we are saying that there will always be people and there will always be efforts of resistance that will keep that dystopia forever at bay and I think that that is a signal achievement for a lifetime of under 47 years and I commend it to you and I’m very grateful for your kind attention and I’m willing to defend it further. All yours, thank you.
[Applause]
Question and Answer Session
Questioner
I’m Robin Soko. You noted that Orwell only made it through the first half of the 20th century. I was wondering whether if Orwell had been alive today, which of our issues would he be writing about and in what terms?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, it’s an excellent question and it’s much debated and I try and argue about it in my book. Of the things that we still argue about, that he wrote about, there are some surprising examples. He was a very strong advocate of the European Union because he believed that otherwise there would always be a problem of a bipolar world dominated by the United States and Russia. He was very strong advocate of the European Union.
He was very one of the only people writing at the time who saw the potential importance of regional nationalism in Britain, especially in Scotland. So it’s a mistake to think that this won’t revive a good reason for thinking the Scottish people don’t fully accept the union. He wrote very presciently indeed about nuclear weaponry. He thought that there were two terrible threats involved in it.
This was at the time, by the way, when most of the real news about places like Hiroshima and the Manhattan experiment were classified. He said, obviously, there’s the possibility of universal annihilation, as it was, suicide and genocide at the same time. But he said there’s an equally frightening possibility, not equally frightening, but there’s another possibility which it hugely increases the power of the state because nuclearism demands a very closely held, not the scientific but political and military elite.
And so it could very well be that nuclearism will lead to states that are really impervious to the wishes of their of their populations.
Let me think, there are a number of other subjects on which he, clearly the ones with which I started, were relatively small ones, on which he he does remain remarkably contemporary.
Sorry, I’m supposed to choose him. Sir, on the aisle.
Questioner
My name is Digak Tistrande. I wanted to ask you something about a curious thing that I’ve always wondered about. Is Down and Out in London and Paris a book about freedom?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, yes, it is, I think. It’s a book about how much dignity there is to be found in the lower depths and how people who from the outside might appear to have no life at all are, in fact, having quite an interesting one. And it’s about surviving, which he was always a tremendous materialist, quite rightly. I mean, he did believe that we you know, we lived on a material substratum and that underlay everything in existence and these things really mattered. He wouldn’t have made the mistake of saying people care more about, say, a full barrier than they do about Liberty, which is a maybe what, maybe the false counterposition you had in mind when you asked me.
You sometimes still hear this, people saying, well, you can’t expect those who are starving to care about abstract things like political Liberty. Of course, the whole lesson of history is that they do, partly because a very small difference in political Liberty can make a very large difference to the amount of bread you’re going to get for that empty stomach of yours. As has often been shown, there are many regimes, of course, that say, well, we will have to treat people very harshly for a bit, but at least we’ll be fulfilling their material needs. Usually these regimes turn out to produce famine and pollution and not much else.
But it’s funny, I still come across this argument around intellectuals, the belief that the certain amount of coercion will at least get the feeding job done. I think, during London and Paris and his other reports from the road in England and from the, what condescendingly called the distressed areas in those days, the areas of slump and neglect and mass unemployment, argue for the same point, that people become then very, very preoccupied indeed with maybe spending their last couple of pennies on a worthwhile piece of reading and discussing it very earnestly with their fellows and with their families, because it’s exactly that point that these arguments count. That’s where the shoe pinch is.
Sir.
Questioner
Hi, Ivan Mulcahy. I’m struck by a passage in Saul Bellows and Mr. Sandler’s Planet, where a disenchanted contrarian is giving a lecture to a group of 60s radicals and he’s not gaining their support, but the remark that completely isolates them and causes them to rage is when he quotes from Orwell saying something on the lines of the freedom of the British left is in the first case dependent on the British Navy.
And I was wondering if it was that sense of militarism underlying our freedoms that leads you to support American military activity against the Al-Qaeda.
Christopher Hitchens
Well, may I thank you first for having, for asking that question in the, so far for me anyway, the most ravishingly seductive way.
Well, it’s no secret that Orwell was a great admirer of Kipling and wrote extremely well about Kipling, although he ridiculed his views about race and empire and so on, thought that he had a real pulse and also that he, Kipling, did have a feeling for India and for Indians, which, which indeed he did. And there is a line in one of Kipling’s poems, it’s the one that begins, “when you’ve shouted ‘L’Oubertagne!’ when your son God saves the Queen, when you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth, when you kindly drop a shilling in my little town, we’re in for a gentleman in Kaki, ordered south.” It’s that one. It’s about the the rankers, Tommy Atkins for the Cold War. And in that poem, if I’m not wrong, is the line, “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.”
And I think it was in writing about Kipling, I’m doing this from memory, but I think it’s in writing about Kipling that Orwell said, in other words, it was Kipling who pointed out the uncomfortable truth to us that the British left was defended by the British fleet. Yeah. And that was no more than an observation that was as true of the British right or the British center as anybody else. He wanted to point out to people that even as they were having their elevated discussions, that it was all made possible first by people down the bottom of coal mines digging dawn till dusk, and second by an empire of coolies. And while we ignore these facts, all our discussions are in effect, prettified and hypocritical.
And on the whole, he tried to apply this to himself as well when he could, tried to be consistent about it. The decision to, on my part, much simpler to say that there’s a very clear choice between the members of Al-Qaeda and their patrons in the Pakistani secret police and the Saudi royal family and American and British civil society.
I don’t think these are morally equivalent, right? I’m sorry, but I don’t. I know there are people who do, and I disagree with them, and I would have challenged, say what those disagreements were, but I’m going to assume for now that people would guess what they were.
Doesn’t raise this question at all, in my opinion. I mean, because it isn’t the imperial dimension that’s being attacked by the Al-Qaeda forces. The Al-Qaeda forces are attacking western civil society not for the things about it that make one queasy or make one critical or even hostile. I mean, and I have spent the last two years trying to put Henry Kissinger in jail, for example, and I could tell quite a lot of the British left things about American imperialism that they don’t know that would make their head cut if I chose to.
But the attack is rather upon the spirit of scientific inquiry, the spirit of religious and cultural pluralism, the emancipation of women. So these are the virtues, by the way, rather than the vices. And so it seems to me that there isn’t a lot of wiggle room, and I’m rather glad that there isn’t, because I don’t want to compromise with these people.
Sir.
Questioner
Chris Agee, what do you think Orwell, especially his experience in the Spanish civil war, brings to an understanding of Bosnia, especially the western response to Bosnia?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, there were people in Sarajevo of whom I found I wasn’t the only one who found during the siege and during the battle against Serbian and Croatian irredentism that they were, we were talking about homage to Catalonia, that, you know, in some way, not that the book had brought us there, that would be too romantic, and I think it wouldn’t be in the spirits of the book either, but it was a book you were forced to think about.
And many, many times I found people saying, making references to it, and finding that oddly confirming in a way, because here was not just a kind of people’s republic, a town where really it was self-governing, because all authority had either collapsed or fled, people were having to govern themselves, and not making idiotic discriminations between whether they were Croatian or Serbian or Jewish or Bosnian Muslim, but also that the its enemies were so obviously self-defined by a horrible form of ethnotheocratic nationalism.
I’m trying just not to use the word fascism too often, that’s all, but I don’t think it would be too much of exaggeration to say ethnotheocratic nationalism is one of the main constituents of fascism, and that a huge number of lies were being published about the Salievo resistance. So those three things here one did find, we’re making one thing of all will, and that would have been the bones, that would have been the skeleton of the argument, and it wouldn’t be the only time that I’ve found foreign correspondence in spots like that, reaching for or remembering that they’ve read Homage to Catalonia either.
I omitted, I’m sorry, a step in my answer to the last question.
I said that Orwell got the three great subjects of the century right, and I say in my book that there was one he got wrong or didn’t get right, the fourth great subject of the 20th century was this, the emergence of the United States as the paradigm society, and but to that he was not terribly responsive until the very end of his life when he thought of going, was urged to go by his friends from partisan review which then included Sordello.
He never bothered to make the trip, he wasn’t very curious about America, he was slightly inclined as middle-class people of his age were to look with disdain on mass culture, Americanization as it was called, the radio waves and of publishing and so forth.
He took a good interest in its literature, but and he was anti-anti-American, he didn’t like people who just disliked America as he thought they were snobbish or worse, but he never quite got the point of the United States. I regard his failure to write about it enough or study it enough as his greatest failing as, you know, our 20th century guide, I should have said that too.
If I don’t get a ma’am, I will be accused of having had no women to talk to. Oh!
And the new statesmen will say that I had a completely male chauvinist meeting.
Questioner
Mr. Hitchens, this is a retrospective question now. In 1945, I was exultant at the results of the British general election, how did George Orwell react?
Christopher Hitchens
Oh, well, he was just as pleased as you were. He wrote a lot about it.
He wrote particularly good on his letters to partisan review. He wrote a London letter to partisan review in New York throughout the Second World War and carried on till about 1946. And he was to the American intellectuals about what London and British society were like during that period, rather what Ed Murrow was to the mass audience, a sort of lifeline living witness to it.
And he wasn’t as sure as most people were that Labour was going to win such a crushing victory. He suspected it at times and he was surprised by how overwhelming the 1945 victory was. And at the time, he was working for Tribune and was quite close to an iron bevin and he said more than once that his only temptation to power he’d ever had was wishing that he could be an iron bevin’s political advisor because then he thought they really could transform the country.
And I suppose if you call that power worship, it would deserve to be said that bevin — I remember this clearly — once defined socialism as the only movement in history that wants to get power in order to give it away.
That’s not how everybody remembers it and it’s not what every socialist would have said but I think it was — I think bevin meant it and I think that’s what Orwell liked better.
Ma’am. That’s the last one and I don’t need any more after this.
Can you show the microphone?
Thank you.
Questioner
Charlotte Jones.
Orwell foresaw what was happening in the Soviet Union extremely well and quite surprisingly. Did he have an inkling of what would go wrong in liberated countries in Africa such as the Mugabe phenomenon which has happened again and again in Africa?
Christopher Hitchens
He wasn’t at all romantic about what might happen if imperialism collapsed or was replaced, if that’s what you mean. No. He just thought it was their right to, as it were, make their own — commit their own crimes, their own blunders. Africa wasn’t his field.
He wrote an introduction to a wartime pamphlet by Joyce Carey called African Freedom which urged post-war independence in Africa.
But yes, the idea that there could be just as much misgovernment under independence as under colonialism was very available to him.
That’s why he wrote that he — I’m just trying to remember the name of the man involved.
It doesn’t — Subhas Chandra Bose, a very famous distinguished Bengali political
leader who decided that it would be strategically correct for the Indians to
support the Japanese empires in means of getting rid of the British, almost said,
“Well, it’s your right to do that.” He didn’t approve of it himself.
He was very shocked to find that one of the people he worked with very closely, a Muslim fellow at the Indian BBC service, was a secret supporter of a Pakistan, of a partition. He was very appalled to find that he had a colleague who would be in favor of a state based on religion.
I mean, he was also very skeptical about Zionism.
He thought that he could see perfectly well why Jews wanted a state of their own.
But he couldn’t see how they could get one, especially with Ernest Bevin as foreign minister, that would not lead to an injustice being done to the Palestinian Arabs. So he could see the post-war — excuse me, the post-colonial future was not going to be utopian one.
Questioner
Which of his books collects up the partisan review letters?
Christopher Hitchens
Ah, well, we now have — thanks to Peter Davison, Professor Lester, we now have for the first time ever, just published two years ago, the complete works of George Orwell. We have everything he ever wrote, every letter, every surviving document, which for a long, long time we did not have. And these contain all the letters to partisan review.
Unfortunately, it’s 20 volumes and it costs quite a lot of money. I made Peter Florence give it to me instead of anything else as a reward for giving the Raymond Williams lecture and abusing the hospitality of Raymond Williams’ fans from this podium a couple of years ago. But you can get it and it’s a wonderful investment. There’s also — there’s still — extant a fabulous just four-volume paperback collected Orwell, edited partly by his widow, Sonia, and by Ian Angus, which came out in ’68.
And that’s got most of the partisan review letters.
It would be nice, I’ve often thought, to have a book just of his letters to America. And I don’t know what copyright would inhibit that, but it would be great to have.
Sir.
Questioner
Chris, my name is Mike Metcalf. You said that Orwell is not perceived as a genius. I suspect this is because of the quality of his prose, rather than the content of his writing.
Don’t you think that somebody who can see profound truths before anybody else is actually the stamp of a genius? That’s all Newton did.
Christopher Hitchens
Well, I see the force of the question and I think it’s Pasteur, since you mentioned Newton. Pasteur says that coincidence tends to occur to the prepared mind.
And that’s true, of course. I mean my agreeing with Trilling, two things. One, when I’m reading Orwell, I never get bored with rereading him, but I don’t get the sense that I do when reading, say, George Eliot, that I’m wasting my time, you know, or Marcel Proust.
It doesn’t impress me in that horrifying way. And of course, that is deceptive because he said that prose ought to be like a window pane. It ought to be translucent. And so the plainness of it is sometimes very deceptive. It also took a lot of work to comb out what is superfluous from it.
And he had a very good puritanism about that. But no, I agree. I think the constituent is much more in the moral element, is in deciding that, well, he was unfortunately too good an illustration of this, but life is very short. And none of it should be squandered on euphemism, or on self-deception, or on Bertrand Russell’s favorite biblical quotation, which was from his grandmother, which was, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”
That you don’t want either to be a toady or just a member of the of the mob. Again, but you see, these are ideas I don’t believe are inaccessible to anyone here at all. They can be self-taught. They don’t require priesthood. They don’t require a party, you know, probably of that kind of discipline. That’s what also makes them attractive. And they come from a very long tradition of English literary descent, of which Milton, of course, is part, and other people who all admired, like Thomas Paine.
By the way, I feel it, if I don’t say this now, I might not get another chance until tomorrow. All of this great literary tradition of ours is in the main republican and has much more of historical continuity and patentry to it and honor and grandeur and dignity than the Electress of Hanover or any of her marauding descendants. Good.
But the great thing about it is that, in a sense, these are things that anyone can do. Now, we don’t know what Orwell would have done if he was himself. Put to the test, in other words, if his neighbors were being taken away in the lorry. He never had, we don’t know. I think he would have probably shaped up reasonably well.
We don’t know what would have happened if he’d been, he was captured and managed to escape in Spain and was, if they’d held him, we now know this because we have the Moscow documents on it. I have them in my book.
We know what the, what Stalin was going to do if he caught Orwell and his wife. We have a show trial in Spain. They tried to have one as it was, which would have been the successor to the Moscow trial.
Not many people in the Moscow trials managed to avoid making a confession.
Andres Nin, the leader of the PUM, the left opposition in Spain, did die without giving away anyone among his comrades or making a confession.
That’s the only one we know. So, in a sense, we can’t be certain.
But those are the tests, all right.
Please. There is supposed to be a light somewhere that tells me when I’m out of time, but I can’t see it. It’s now, is it? Well, I do have a good internal plug anyway. Yours will have to be the last question, I’m afraid.
Questioner
Vadim Nikitin. Today, in many ways, if you will agree, we’re living in a society with distinct echoes of 1984, maybe doublethink or, in Bush’s case, maybe nothink. What was Orwell’s critique of the deficiencies of the Democratic system? Did he foresee the homogenization, if you will, of Democratic politics into the kind of two-party Hobbes’ choice that we find in contemporary British and American politics?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, yes, he did. I think if he would pick up, which is in most of the easily found anthologies, one of his best essays was Politics and the English Language. It would show to you that he was very alert very early to the manipulation, especially of the mass media, for purposes of propaganda and of control. A great deal of 1984, for example, this is where Winston Smith meets his girlfriend, Julia.
She works in the fiction department, as it’s called, of the party, which involves producing cheap, voluminous, propagandistic — excuse me — cheap, voluminous, pornographic propaganda for the pros.
Orwell’s experience of that as a tactic, as it were, keeping people stultified, was limited, but he saw what a danger it was, yes.
And he also thought — I mean, he predates the age of TV, really, but he understood quite a lot about how things like radio and the wireless could be abused and could, instead of becoming — of being something that’s mutual, but forming an exchange, is a one-way system whereby stuff is just pumped out to the masses, yes.
So you may not think — one may not say it was very prescient, but it predates the work on cultural studies that was done after the war by people who are now better known about the possible — not just the uses, but the abuses of literacy, for example.
And in fact, I think that Orwell’s investigations of the commonplace in mass culture — he studied — he wrote a wonderful, famous article about the sort of magazines that working-class boys would read, the kind of comics they would read, and what they’d spend their limited pennies on, and what illusions they were given, as it was, after that. And he wrote a piece that was destroyed in the Blitz, unfortunately.
We haven’t got it, about women’s magazines and what they do or can do to shape
popular culture. And he investigated seaside postcards and things like that. He’s the ancestor of cultural studies in that way, and of the idea that there’s a difference anyway, which may be the one you intended to make, between democracy and populism.
Because what we can say now is that all politicians are populists, and never more so than when they are members of the elite. And that’s something that I think he would have helped any of his readers to see coming, yes.
I’m sorry. It’s not by my wish.
I would have happily stayed, but thank you for coming.
[applause]
Hay Festival, 2002.
Very nice of you all to come ladies and gentlemen.
Should you not be in church in point of fact at this hour? I’m aware also that it’s very plucky of you to come to Hay at all at a time when there are the rival attractions of a royal fiesta and a World Cup.
Now, on all three of the things I’ve just mentioned as possible other things you could be doing, George Orwell was very useful. He had a great contempt for the supernatural and for the superstitious and for people who overvalued it.
But he had a great fondness for the English Bible, the King James Version, I mean, not the homogenized garbage now authorized to be read in churches. He had a fondness for a crownless prebble, a certain fondness for liturgy in other words and it shows in his command of our language.
But you wouldn’t catch him inside a church.
He once pointed out that international sporting exchanges are an unfailing source of global ill will. He was writing this in 1948 as the British mandate in Palestine was expiring and said, “Perhaps you’d like to imagine now a friendly match in Haifa between a Palestinian and an Israeli team.” And left people to imagine what the consequences of that might be.
And on the monarchy, writing just towards the close of his life, he said that he had been gravely discredited by the ’30s by the collusion with fascism, especially by the abdication. Had recovered some of its standing during the Second World War and he felt, he was around this in 1949, 1950, that what it really needed and if it could get this, it would recover, would be a really nice long reign.
So only a really good long reign can possibly bring the royal family back into credit.
George Orwell: The Man Behind the Words
Now, I mentioned these three examples simply because they form part of my case for his continuing relevance but also for the sense that he had of the importance for someone deciding to be a self-employed writer or intellectual, of not estranging themselves too much from what we might call the common culture of the people he was writing about.
His instincts for that reason were very good and of course the long reign that some of you are conceivably celebrating began, as we’re continually being reminded, just after George Orwell died in January of 1950. And that date in itself, I think, prompts us to some reflection.
In other words, by dying in January 1950, Orwell barely made it into the second half of the last century. It makes him almost an antique figure in some ways. He didn’t manage to attain quite the age of 47. Yet his many enemies continue to find him very directly and very distinctly relevant to the ways in which we are today and also to the subjects which we are doomed to debate.
A Literary Reflection: Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Now I’ve just written a short book which seeks to defend Orwell against his enemies past and present and also against some of his admirers and against the rather sickly tendency to over praise him and make him into a plaster Saint. And in both instances I’ve sought to ask and to answer the question which I’ve already attempted in answer to, which is that of why his name is still so resonant.
And while you ponder that, as I hope you will, I’d like to just read you a stave or two from an essay he wrote for Tribune in 1946, May 1946 actually. It’s called Confessions of a Book Reviewer. It starts like this.
In a cold but stuffy bed sitting room, littered with cigarette ends and half empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing gown sits at a rickety table trying to find room for his typewriter, among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the waste paper basket is already overflowing. And besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills, it is possible that there is a check for two guineas, which he’s nearly certainly forgot to pay into the bank. There are also letters with addresses which ought to be entered into his address book. He’s lost his address book and the thought of looking for it, or indeed of looking for anything, afflicts him with acute suicidal impulses. He is a man of 35 but looks 50.
His ball has varicose veins and wear spectacles, or wood-wear them, if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition. But if he’s recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present, in his house past 11 in the morning, and according to his schedule, perhaps I should say schedule, he should have started work two hours ago. But even if he had made any serious effort to start, he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out of the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs.
The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, ah, those were the names, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say, this person is a writer.
He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features.
For all, literary people are very much alike. But let us say he is a book reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent, with a note suggesting that they ought to go well together. They arrived four days ago, but for 48 hours the review was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel.
Yesterday, in a resolute moment, he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Crossroads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy, this one is 680 pages and weighs four pounds, Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down, probably included by an estate. Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant that he will have to read at least 50 pages if he is to avoid making some howler, which will betray him not merely to the author, who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers, but a telling phrase, even to the general reader. Now just because I’m in hay, I’ll prolong, because you seem to like it, I just have one more paragraph I thought I might give you in any case, actually two, short.
The Ordinary Life of a Writer
When he finally snaps into it, as you have to do because the clock ticks on, all the stale old phrases, a book that no one should miss, something memorable on every page, of special value are the chapters dealing with, will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet and the review will end up with exactly the right length and with just three minutes to go.
Meanwhile, another ward of ill-assorted, unappetizing books will have arrived by post, and so it goes on, and yet, with what high hopes, this downtrodden, nerve-wracked creature started his career only a few years ago.
This is the hay bit. The great majority of reviewers, given inadequate, because you never know who’s listening, okay, the great majority of reviewers, given inadequate or misleading account of the book that’s dealt with. Since the war, publishers have been less able than before to twist the tails of literary editors and evoke a peon of praise for every book that they produce.
But on the other hand, the standard of reviewing has gone down, owing to lack of space and other inconveniences. Seeing the results, some people sometimes suggest that the solution lies in getting book reviewing out of the hands of hacks.
Well, that was just a glimpse of utopia for you in case you fancied it.
And I give it also as an instance of something relatively rare in the writing of George Orwell, in fact extremely rare, which is a deliberate attempt, and actually it was a successful one, to try and be funny. Upon the whole, his prose was extremely gloomy, gritty, realistic. Some people thought too much depressing.
He could be funny when he needed to be.
Orwell’s Humorous Touch
And of course, the evocation that he gives us in that piece is of what we used to know as grub street. And the disease from which he died at the age of 47, a perfectly curable version of tuberculosis that could have been cured by drugs already available but too expensive and too rare, make us think with their associations of consumption of the Victorian writer, of the man coughing up blood and starving in a garret. Though probably Orwell’s preferred epoch was the Edwardian one of pre-1914. If it had not ended, that’s to say, in a global war.
As it happened, he was condemned to live in the decades of war and of slump and of ideological confrontation. And that’s of course a part of the reason for his enduring renown. But just stay with the chain-smoking decrepit figure in the dressing gown for a moment. One must never forget how ordinary in many ways George Orwell was.
The Struggles of a Writer
Most of his work was written against the clock by a man in ill health, very poorly remunerated at best, with no literary or journalistic success to speak of in his own lifetime.
A great deal of what he wrote was no better really than very good, fairly average journalism.
Though I wouldn’t have described the room as littered with half-empty cups of tea, for example, if it had been me.
I sometimes feel that on a very good day I could have written a piece not too much inferior to that myself. And the great American critic Lionel Trilling made a very suggestive point, I think, when he chose precisely to stress this very modest and quotidian and everyday element in the
work of George Orwell. And if you will allow me, I’ll just quickly quote you
from it. Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading further Lionel Trilling’s excellent essay on Orwell, you can get it.
It’s Trilling’s
introduction to the American edition of Homage to Catalonia, and it’s
significant in itself that Homage to Catalonia didn’t find an American publisher until about five years after Orwell had died and was, in fact, almost unknown in England as well and barely published during his lifetime.
Roughly speaking, what Trilling begins by saying is this, that Orwell was a modest man because in many ways he had a lot to be modest about. If we ask what it is that he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one simple, direct, undeceived intelligence and respect for the powers one does have and for the work one undertakes to do.
He is not a genius. What a relief, Trilling has one of his few exclamation marks here. What an encouragement, for he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do. I think this perception, by the way, is very important in explaining the sheer hatred of Orwell that’s still to be found in some quarters.
By living and writing in the way that he did, he discredited in advance and at the time the excuse of historical context that was made by so many people. The shady alibi that in the circumstances, say of the menace of fascism, there was nothing else that people could have done, no other line they could have taken, no other party they could have belonged to, no other view they could have held. He destroyed that view, that excuse, that alibi in practice and at the time with great skill.
And in turn, I think, that will license Professor Trilling’s subsequent point, very beautifully stated I think, where he speculates on the nature of personal integrity. Orwell clung, writes Trilling, with a kind of rhyme and grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order.
He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues. I wanted to call my book, it’s one of the many arguments I’ve lost to publishers in my time, I wanted to call the book a power of facing, because when Orwell, in the same year as he wrote Confessions of a Book Reviewer, was reflecting on his early youth and his decision to become a writer, he said, “I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.”
You notice it’s not the power to face or any other formulation somehow, and I think it’s extraordinarily and oddly well put, a power of facing.
Now, again you might say that’s a fairly ordinary virtue, and if you’re a commissar in a Stalinist people’s democracy and you realize that your five-year plan isn’t working out, not only isn’t going to be done in four years, incidentally five equals two plus two, the claim that the Soviet Union had completed its five-year plan in four years is the origin of the idea in 1984.
I’m sure that two plus two makes four. Don’t make four, excuse me, can be made to make five. Harder to die hard. I digress. If you’re that commissar, you realize the plan isn’t going to be actually finished in eight years and the peasants are laughing at you, you realize you’ve confronted an unpleasant fact, but
your reaction to it will be evasive. It will tend to be to tell the peasants to work harder and live on less. It’s not quite acknowledging or accepting the unpleasant fact.
If you’re a priest who wakes up one morning and realizes you’ve been talking absolute poppycock to your congregation all this time, simply living off their fears and perhaps their hopes even worse, or deceiving them and you develop doubts, it may very well be that you’ll redouble your efforts and seek for more faith in order to carry on performing the same racket in the same way. In other words, your reaction to the confrontation with an unpleasant fact is not a self-critical one.
It doesn’t have, it doesn’t contain the power of facing.
The unpleasant facts that Orwell chose to face were usually the ones that put his own position or his own preference to the test. And so I want to just sketch, and by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I’m assuming that people like yourselves come to events like this as much to talk as to listen. So I’ll try and keep myself to 30, 35 minutes or so and give us time for a conversation.
Enduring Themes in Orwell’s Work
But I want to just sketch the other apparently obvious but still worth interrogating aspects of Orwell’s work that may contribute to his claim to be among the imperishables.
Of the century that’s just ended, of which he only, as we’ve seen, survived the first half, the three great tests, the three great issues, if you will, were imperialism, empire, fascism, Nazism, national socialism and fascism, and Stalinism. And we certainly have not reached a point where we could say that we’ve evolved beyond those arguments or what can be learned from them. In fact, we live really in the wreckage of those three great experiments, all three of which incidentally basically involve powerful people in using other human beings as objects for experimental purposes.
The Challenges of Imperialism
Of these three, the first one to be confronted by Orwell directly was imperialism, was the idea that there were a few millions of people in the northern hemisphere in Europe who had the right to govern and make laws and borders and trading rules for the non-white, for people in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. And Orwell’s early experience was he didn’t go to university. He was sent off as many sons of not very rich middle-class families, were to be a colonial civil servant.
Was there an imperial policeman, colonial policeman in Burma? I don’t know exactly because he never wrote or at least he never published any personal confessional about why he decided to give up that job.
But it’s very possible to speculate that the ordinary brutality with which a colonial policeman was forced to behave had a great deal to do with it.
And it’s certainly true that the first thing he ever published, which was written in French for a leftist magazine in Paris, was a very careful study of the means by which colonial trading relations underdeveloped Burma and kept it from joining the modern economy, made it instead a place of reservoir of human and other resources for its colonial owners. I myself believe that there was something in the sexual relationship between the governed and the rulers, what Nietzsche calls the master-slave relationship, that had a very powerful and horrifying effect upon Orwell. For example, the best way I can think of illustrating this is the following.
No Indian or Burmese man, however qualified, however sophisticated, however educated, could hope to join the membership of the English club in Rangoon. But any Burmese woman of any degree or status of any kind could certainly hope to be admitted to the Englishman’s bungalow if only by the back door and for pay. And in fact, the girlfriend of Florie, the desperate, sweaty, grim, green-like, sweltering, guilt-stricken civil servant who anticipates most of Greene’s writing in my view in Orwell’s novel The Burmese Days, it turns out you learn in just one line, has bought his girlfriend who also is his house servant from her impoverished family.
I think there was something in this that repelled Orwell powerfully and made him decide to become an UN-critical and – excuse me – an unequivocal, unconditional critic of imperialism for the rest of his life. But I also believe that he learned something about the cruel and sadistic underlay of all power relations from this experience and was able later to make very profound literary use of it.
At any rate, even in the middle of the Second World War when he was broadcasting to India for the BBC, he insisted that wartime conditions not inhibit the demand for Indian independence, that it made Indian independence more desirable rather than less, that the British government’s view that independence couldn’t be discussed.
Well, the war was going on, was the reverse of the case. He defended the right of Indians even to take the Japanese side if they chose to because it was their country and they could pick their own allies, though he counseled his Indian friends not to do anything.
And he also, in the course of this – this is a slight digression on my part – was the first person to foresee through reading the work of Mulk, Anand and others that very soon there would be a specifically Indo-Anglian, as Salman Rushdie calls it, or Anglo-Indian universe for fiction, that there would be so many speakers of English who were of Indian descent that they would constitute a separate audience and would start to introduce their own fiction writers.
And of course this prophecy of his has been triumphantly vindicated, as you can see by looking at the fiction shelf of any English bookstore now. So I think it could be said, as it could be said of no other English writer of the time, that he was unequivocally right, first in predicting that imperialism would not last for long because forcible means of production are less efficient as well as less justifiable than any others, and that it was right to be on the side of those, especially in India and Burma, but he also wrote very eloquently about Africa, the Middle East, to take their side and to foresee a world of self-government. If this now seems to us to be obvious, it wasn’t obvious at the time, it was an extremely difficult position to hold at the very time. About fascism and national socialism, it’s quite interesting, Orwell hardly wrote anything at all.
He didn’t seem to think it required any special condemnation.
He did immediately go off and carry a rifle and a pack, fighting against it in Spain. He was one of the first volunteers to make a physical force challenge to the spread of fascist ideas in Europe, but his writings are always very skimpy. He appears to have taken it for granted that anybody could see that he was every kind of evil you could imagine, double distilled and, so to speak, catalyzed into one horrible form.
Everything he hadn’t liked about classroom and exploitation, everything he detested about racial prejudice, everything that he found revolting, both as a policeman giving it out and as a schoolboy receiving it, about cruelty and sadism, all of these things, everything that’s horrible about militarism and the cult of the jackboot and the medal and the epaulette and the regiment, all of that summarized and over done and reheated and synthesized into absolute horror in fascism.
Fascism and Its Implications
But as I say, he didn’t really waste any time analyzing it and perhaps it didn’t need that much of an analysis.
Its horrific nature was self-evident. But it was in the course of that struggle that he became aware of the third great challenge and the one that actually took up and wasted most of the time of writers and intellectuals in the 20s, 30s and 40s. And that was the idea that to the east in the Soviet Union, the foundations of a new utopia had been laid and that it was the duty of all those who believed in a humanist and a progressive and a Democratic future to sympathize with this project, which was, when you think about it, it’s incredible not more people noticed this at the time, was described as the great Soviet experiment.
Think about that for a second because Orwell’s point was always to look to the language, always to see what traps are lurking for you in the apparently obvious or the self-evident. Experiments are things that we don’t conduct on humans when we can avoid it or if we do do that, we find ourselves denying it. In fact, so squeamish do we feel about experiments that we reserve them to be practiced on what? On animals. That’s the point of Animal Farm and that’s the whole point actually also about empire.
You may not use other human beings as objects to see what happens, to see how it comes out, not if you have to profit from it in any way. And in Spain, particularly in Barcelona, in the May days of 1936, Orwell was able to discover that there was something potentially quite vastly being prepared by Stalin and the parties and people under his control and that so far from this not being a utopia, so far from it not being, in other words, a good prospectus, a true prospectus for a radiant future, it was worse than a false prospectus.
It threatened to produce an absolute negation in which the whole idea of objective truth, of human solidarity, of pluralism, of intellectual experiment, of everything really worth valuing would be destroyed and possibly any record of any opposition to it would be destroyed as well.
Discovering the Truth About Totalitarianism
And from that appalling discovery and from what he saw it doing to people who he knew in Spain, the people who were killed, the people who disappeared, the people who were grotesquely slandered after they disappeared, the appalling circulation of lies that went on about it.
In other words, right in the crucible of the battle against Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, he made the discovery that was to last him for the next 14 years of his life, the struggle against, the need for a struggle against intellectual dishonesty on the left. And his odyssey at that point begins with the failure of a new statesman to even consider publishing his dispatches from Spain and it goes right through to the failure of Victor Gollancz to publish Animal Farm, the later failure of T.S. Eliot to publish Animal Farm on the grounds that the British establishment didn’t want to offend Joseph Stalin at that point. And the, I think, conclusive failure from the literary point of view of the Dial Press in New York to publish Animal Farm on the grounds, as they said in their rejection letter to the author, that it was impossible to sell animal stories in the United States.
This was at a time when Disney was already fairly culturally re-regnant. That, I think, is the favorite rejection slip. I have a copy of it pinned above my typewriter. It’s the best rejection slip of all time.
I feel I’m getting near the limit of the time I love it to myself or at least what I’m going to do all the talking instead of some of it.
The best way I can think of summarizing this is the following.
Orwell’s Literary Legacy
Orwell died, as I’ve said, in January of 1950. In 1951, a very intelligent Polish diplomat and cultural attaché named Czewasz Milosz, you should say Miłosz if you’re Polish, actually, in New York, defected from Poland and moved to Europe and wrote the first of a series of marvelous books and poems by which he’s now celebrated. He’s become certainly the national laureate of Poland in every sense but of many others too.
A book called The Captive Mind. The book was about the internal party mentality of the Stalinized states of Eastern Europe and the Baltic. Of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and particularly important to a half-Pol, half-Lithuanian citizen of Vilnius like Miłosz, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia too. And he reported a curious fact.
He says there’s a book called 1984 that is in circulation in secret editions read only by members of the inner party, clandestinely.
And he said, I’ve read it and I’ve had discussions with other of the comrades who’ve read it too. And they’re all extraordinarily impressed by it. This is one year after Orwell’s death.
They’re all very impressed by it and they’re all very surprised to find that its author never visited the Soviet Union because they cannot understand how an Englishman who had not had this experience could have summarized the texture, the feeling, the quality of everyday life in a closed society and a totalitarian state.
Now, I don’t know of any greater compliment paid by any writer to another than the short observation of Miłosz’s written in 1951, I think published in 1952. In other words, let me try and put it like this. 1984 is about the circulation of a secret book within an inner party and the appalling disclosures that it contains to those who will take the risk of complete annihilation, that is to say, by reading it. Within a year of its publication and two years of its author’s death, this book is itself a secret, Sam-as-dank book operating and circulating within the confines of an inner party society. And those who read it cannot believe that its author did not personally experience it.
To which my comment, and I think I might close on that, would be this.
Or close on this, would be that. Actually Orwell had, in a way, lived within imaginatively and in some ways practically too within the confines of a closed system. He managed to distill everything that had happened to him. He lives completely up to Lionel Trilling’s analysis of an intelligent person, no more than who wrote the average ability on whom nothing is wasted, for whom everything does possess a latent significance, from whom something can be learned at every stage.
It wasn’t lost on him. The way that little boys in English boarding schools would become very, very servile in the presence of the master and would betray their own friends in the hope of a little extra favor wasn’t lost on him. It remained the relationship between power and massacres and remained in his mind all his life. Nor was it lost on him the way in which a very small number of people could manage to govern, exploit, sexually exploit, as well as physically exploit and economically exploit, whole subject populations of a different color from themselves by keeping the monopoly of violence and by retaining a self-conscious ideology of superiority.
Nor was it lost on him what a nightmare it is to be faced with secret trials, secret police, disappeared persons, and mass production of lying propaganda of the sort that he experienced in Catalonia.
Conclusion: The Orwellian Legacy
And so by benefiting from all of this and also briefly by working in room 101 during a time of censorship in the Indian service at the BBC, another thing that wasn’t completely lost on him either, he managed to create something that was is the only thing in English that will stand comparison with Solzhenitsyn, with Ignacio Soloni, with Arthur Custer, with the other great classics of what was called when we were undergoing it the midnight of the 20th century.
And all this was done and synthesized and brought to the level that it was by somebody whose favorite quotation was a simple one from Milton, which goes “by the known rules of ancient Liberty” and thus makes the assumption that while we do have the instinct to obey and we do have sometimes the instinct to command and we do have the instinct to conform and we do have the instinct to make others conform, we also have an innate instinct for freedom and for Liberty and thus we arrive at the point, again I think this applies to no other writer, where the word Orwellian, if used quite clearly, means one of two things.
Either a nightmare dystopian society where human beings are treated as objects or as ciphers. If we describe a situation as Orwellian, we’re describing that. If we should describe a person or a literary work as Orwellian, we are saying that there will always be people and there will always be efforts of resistance that will keep that dystopia forever at bay and I think that that is a signal achievement for a lifetime of under 47 years and I commend it to you and I’m very grateful for your kind attention and I’m willing to defend it further. All yours, thank you.
[Applause]
Question and Answer Session
Questioner
I’m Robin Soko. You noted that Orwell only made it through the first half of the 20th century. I was wondering whether if Orwell had been alive today, which of our issues would he be writing about and in what terms?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, it’s an excellent question and it’s much debated and I try and argue about it in my book. Of the things that we still argue about, that he wrote about, there are some surprising examples. He was a very strong advocate of the European Union because he believed that otherwise there would always be a problem of a bipolar world dominated by the United States and Russia. He was very strong advocate of the European Union.
He was very one of the only people writing at the time who saw the potential importance of regional nationalism in Britain, especially in Scotland. So it’s a mistake to think that this won’t revive a good reason for thinking the Scottish people don’t fully accept the union. He wrote very presciently indeed about nuclear weaponry. He thought that there were two terrible threats involved in it.
This was at the time, by the way, when most of the real news about places like Hiroshima and the Manhattan experiment were classified. He said, obviously, there’s the possibility of universal annihilation, as it was, suicide and genocide at the same time. But he said there’s an equally frightening possibility, not equally frightening, but there’s another possibility which it hugely increases the power of the state because nuclearism demands a very closely held, not the scientific but political and military elite.
And so it could very well be that nuclearism will lead to states that are really impervious to the wishes of their of their populations.
Let me think, there are a number of other subjects on which he, clearly the ones with which I started, were relatively small ones, on which he he does remain remarkably contemporary.
Sorry, I’m supposed to choose him. Sir, on the aisle.
Questioner
My name is Digak Tistrande. I wanted to ask you something about a curious thing that I’ve always wondered about. Is Down and Out in London and Paris a book about freedom?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, yes, it is, I think. It’s a book about how much dignity there is to be found in the lower depths and how people who from the outside might appear to have no life at all are, in fact, having quite an interesting one. And it’s about surviving, which he was always a tremendous materialist, quite rightly. I mean, he did believe that we you know, we lived on a material substratum and that underlay everything in existence and these things really mattered. He wouldn’t have made the mistake of saying people care more about, say, a full barrier than they do about Liberty, which is a maybe what, maybe the false counterposition you had in mind when you asked me.
You sometimes still hear this, people saying, well, you can’t expect those who are starving to care about abstract things like political Liberty. Of course, the whole lesson of history is that they do, partly because a very small difference in political Liberty can make a very large difference to the amount of bread you’re going to get for that empty stomach of yours. As has often been shown, there are many regimes, of course, that say, well, we will have to treat people very harshly for a bit, but at least we’ll be fulfilling their material needs. Usually these regimes turn out to produce famine and pollution and not much else.
But it’s funny, I still come across this argument around intellectuals, the belief that the certain amount of coercion will at least get the feeding job done. I think, during London and Paris and his other reports from the road in England and from the, what condescendingly called the distressed areas in those days, the areas of slump and neglect and mass unemployment, argue for the same point, that people become then very, very preoccupied indeed with maybe spending their last couple of pennies on a worthwhile piece of reading and discussing it very earnestly with their fellows and with their families, because it’s exactly that point that these arguments count. That’s where the shoe pinch is.
Sir.
Questioner
Hi, Ivan Mulcahy. I’m struck by a passage in Saul Bellows and Mr. Sandler’s Planet, where a disenchanted contrarian is giving a lecture to a group of 60s radicals and he’s not gaining their support, but the remark that completely isolates them and causes them to rage is when he quotes from Orwell saying something on the lines of the freedom of the British left is in the first case dependent on the British Navy.
And I was wondering if it was that sense of militarism underlying our freedoms that leads you to support American military activity against the Al-Qaeda.
Christopher Hitchens
Well, may I thank you first for having, for asking that question in the, so far for me anyway, the most ravishingly seductive way.
Well, it’s no secret that Orwell was a great admirer of Kipling and wrote extremely well about Kipling, although he ridiculed his views about race and empire and so on, thought that he had a real pulse and also that he, Kipling, did have a feeling for India and for Indians, which, which indeed he did. And there is a line in one of Kipling’s poems, it’s the one that begins, “when you’ve shouted ‘L’Oubertagne!’ when your son God saves the Queen, when you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth, when you kindly drop a shilling in my little town, we’re in for a gentleman in Kaki, ordered south.” It’s that one. It’s about the the rankers, Tommy Atkins for the Cold War. And in that poem, if I’m not wrong, is the line, “making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep.”
And I think it was in writing about Kipling, I’m doing this from memory, but I think it’s in writing about Kipling that Orwell said, in other words, it was Kipling who pointed out the uncomfortable truth to us that the British left was defended by the British fleet. Yeah. And that was no more than an observation that was as true of the British right or the British center as anybody else. He wanted to point out to people that even as they were having their elevated discussions, that it was all made possible first by people down the bottom of coal mines digging dawn till dusk, and second by an empire of coolies. And while we ignore these facts, all our discussions are in effect, prettified and hypocritical.
And on the whole, he tried to apply this to himself as well when he could, tried to be consistent about it. The decision to, on my part, much simpler to say that there’s a very clear choice between the members of Al-Qaeda and their patrons in the Pakistani secret police and the Saudi royal family and American and British civil society.
I don’t think these are morally equivalent, right? I’m sorry, but I don’t. I know there are people who do, and I disagree with them, and I would have challenged, say what those disagreements were, but I’m going to assume for now that people would guess what they were.
Doesn’t raise this question at all, in my opinion. I mean, because it isn’t the imperial dimension that’s being attacked by the Al-Qaeda forces. The Al-Qaeda forces are attacking western civil society not for the things about it that make one queasy or make one critical or even hostile. I mean, and I have spent the last two years trying to put Henry Kissinger in jail, for example, and I could tell quite a lot of the British left things about American imperialism that they don’t know that would make their head cut if I chose to.
But the attack is rather upon the spirit of scientific inquiry, the spirit of religious and cultural pluralism, the emancipation of women. So these are the virtues, by the way, rather than the vices. And so it seems to me that there isn’t a lot of wiggle room, and I’m rather glad that there isn’t, because I don’t want to compromise with these people.
Sir.
Questioner
Chris Agee, what do you think Orwell, especially his experience in the Spanish civil war, brings to an understanding of Bosnia, especially the western response to Bosnia?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, there were people in Sarajevo of whom I found I wasn’t the only one who found during the siege and during the battle against Serbian and Croatian irredentism that they were, we were talking about homage to Catalonia, that, you know, in some way, not that the book had brought us there, that would be too romantic, and I think it wouldn’t be in the spirits of the book either, but it was a book you were forced to think about.
And many, many times I found people saying, making references to it, and finding that oddly confirming in a way, because here was not just a kind of people’s republic, a town where really it was self-governing, because all authority had either collapsed or fled, people were having to govern themselves, and not making idiotic discriminations between whether they were Croatian or Serbian or Jewish or Bosnian Muslim, but also that the its enemies were so obviously self-defined by a horrible form of ethnotheocratic nationalism.
I’m trying just not to use the word fascism too often, that’s all, but I don’t think it would be too much of exaggeration to say ethnotheocratic nationalism is one of the main constituents of fascism, and that a huge number of lies were being published about the Salievo resistance. So those three things here one did find, we’re making one thing of all will, and that would have been the bones, that would have been the skeleton of the argument, and it wouldn’t be the only time that I’ve found foreign correspondence in spots like that, reaching for or remembering that they’ve read Homage to Catalonia either.
I omitted, I’m sorry, a step in my answer to the last question.
I said that Orwell got the three great subjects of the century right, and I say in my book that there was one he got wrong or didn’t get right, the fourth great subject of the 20th century was this, the emergence of the United States as the paradigm society, and but to that he was not terribly responsive until the very end of his life when he thought of going, was urged to go by his friends from partisan review which then included Sordello.
He never bothered to make the trip, he wasn’t very curious about America, he was slightly inclined as middle-class people of his age were to look with disdain on mass culture, Americanization as it was called, the radio waves and of publishing and so forth.
He took a good interest in its literature, but and he was anti-anti-American, he didn’t like people who just disliked America as he thought they were snobbish or worse, but he never quite got the point of the United States. I regard his failure to write about it enough or study it enough as his greatest failing as, you know, our 20th century guide, I should have said that too.
If I don’t get a ma’am, I will be accused of having had no women to talk to. Oh!
And the new statesmen will say that I had a completely male chauvinist meeting.
Questioner
Mr. Hitchens, this is a retrospective question now. In 1945, I was exultant at the results of the British general election, how did George Orwell react?
Christopher Hitchens
Oh, well, he was just as pleased as you were. He wrote a lot about it.
He wrote particularly good on his letters to partisan review. He wrote a London letter to partisan review in New York throughout the Second World War and carried on till about 1946. And he was to the American intellectuals about what London and British society were like during that period, rather what Ed Murrow was to the mass audience, a sort of lifeline living witness to it.
And he wasn’t as sure as most people were that Labour was going to win such a crushing victory. He suspected it at times and he was surprised by how overwhelming the 1945 victory was. And at the time, he was working for Tribune and was quite close to an iron bevin and he said more than once that his only temptation to power he’d ever had was wishing that he could be an iron bevin’s political advisor because then he thought they really could transform the country.
And I suppose if you call that power worship, it would deserve to be said that bevin — I remember this clearly — once defined socialism as the only movement in history that wants to get power in order to give it away.
That’s not how everybody remembers it and it’s not what every socialist would have said but I think it was — I think bevin meant it and I think that’s what Orwell liked better.
Ma’am. That’s the last one and I don’t need any more after this.
Can you show the microphone?
Thank you.
Questioner
Charlotte Jones.
Orwell foresaw what was happening in the Soviet Union extremely well and quite surprisingly. Did he have an inkling of what would go wrong in liberated countries in Africa such as the Mugabe phenomenon which has happened again and again in Africa?
Christopher Hitchens
He wasn’t at all romantic about what might happen if imperialism collapsed or was replaced, if that’s what you mean. No. He just thought it was their right to, as it were, make their own — commit their own crimes, their own blunders. Africa wasn’t his field.
He wrote an introduction to a wartime pamphlet by Joyce Carey called African Freedom which urged post-war independence in Africa.
But yes, the idea that there could be just as much misgovernment under independence as under colonialism was very available to him.
That’s why he wrote that he — I’m just trying to remember the name of the man involved.
It doesn’t — Subhas Chandra Bose, a very famous distinguished Bengali political
leader who decided that it would be strategically correct for the Indians to
support the Japanese empires in means of getting rid of the British, almost said,
“Well, it’s your right to do that.” He didn’t approve of it himself.
He was very shocked to find that one of the people he worked with very closely, a Muslim fellow at the Indian BBC service, was a secret supporter of a Pakistan, of a partition. He was very appalled to find that he had a colleague who would be in favor of a state based on religion.
I mean, he was also very skeptical about Zionism.
He thought that he could see perfectly well why Jews wanted a state of their own.
But he couldn’t see how they could get one, especially with Ernest Bevin as foreign minister, that would not lead to an injustice being done to the Palestinian Arabs. So he could see the post-war — excuse me, the post-colonial future was not going to be utopian one.
Questioner
Which of his books collects up the partisan review letters?
Christopher Hitchens
Ah, well, we now have — thanks to Peter Davison, Professor Lester, we now have for the first time ever, just published two years ago, the complete works of George Orwell. We have everything he ever wrote, every letter, every surviving document, which for a long, long time we did not have. And these contain all the letters to partisan review.
Unfortunately, it’s 20 volumes and it costs quite a lot of money. I made Peter Florence give it to me instead of anything else as a reward for giving the Raymond Williams lecture and abusing the hospitality of Raymond Williams’ fans from this podium a couple of years ago. But you can get it and it’s a wonderful investment. There’s also — there’s still — extant a fabulous just four-volume paperback collected Orwell, edited partly by his widow, Sonia, and by Ian Angus, which came out in ’68.
And that’s got most of the partisan review letters.
It would be nice, I’ve often thought, to have a book just of his letters to America. And I don’t know what copyright would inhibit that, but it would be great to have.
Sir.
Questioner
Chris, my name is Mike Metcalf. You said that Orwell is not perceived as a genius. I suspect this is because of the quality of his prose, rather than the content of his writing.
Don’t you think that somebody who can see profound truths before anybody else is actually the stamp of a genius? That’s all Newton did.
Christopher Hitchens
Well, I see the force of the question and I think it’s Pasteur, since you mentioned Newton. Pasteur says that coincidence tends to occur to the prepared mind.
And that’s true, of course. I mean my agreeing with Trilling, two things. One, when I’m reading Orwell, I never get bored with rereading him, but I don’t get the sense that I do when reading, say, George Eliot, that I’m wasting my time, you know, or Marcel Proust.
It doesn’t impress me in that horrifying way. And of course, that is deceptive because he said that prose ought to be like a window pane. It ought to be translucent. And so the plainness of it is sometimes very deceptive. It also took a lot of work to comb out what is superfluous from it.
And he had a very good puritanism about that. But no, I agree. I think the constituent is much more in the moral element, is in deciding that, well, he was unfortunately too good an illustration of this, but life is very short. And none of it should be squandered on euphemism, or on self-deception, or on Bertrand Russell’s favorite biblical quotation, which was from his grandmother, which was, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”
That you don’t want either to be a toady or just a member of the of the mob. Again, but you see, these are ideas I don’t believe are inaccessible to anyone here at all. They can be self-taught. They don’t require priesthood. They don’t require a party, you know, probably of that kind of discipline. That’s what also makes them attractive. And they come from a very long tradition of English literary descent, of which Milton, of course, is part, and other people who all admired, like Thomas Paine.
By the way, I feel it, if I don’t say this now, I might not get another chance until tomorrow. All of this great literary tradition of ours is in the main republican and has much more of historical continuity and patentry to it and honor and grandeur and dignity than the Electress of Hanover or any of her marauding descendants. Good.
But the great thing about it is that, in a sense, these are things that anyone can do. Now, we don’t know what Orwell would have done if he was himself. Put to the test, in other words, if his neighbors were being taken away in the lorry. He never had, we don’t know. I think he would have probably shaped up reasonably well.
We don’t know what would have happened if he’d been, he was captured and managed to escape in Spain and was, if they’d held him, we now know this because we have the Moscow documents on it. I have them in my book.
We know what the, what Stalin was going to do if he caught Orwell and his wife. We have a show trial in Spain. They tried to have one as it was, which would have been the successor to the Moscow trial.
Not many people in the Moscow trials managed to avoid making a confession.
Andres Nin, the leader of the PUM, the left opposition in Spain, did die without giving away anyone among his comrades or making a confession.
That’s the only one we know. So, in a sense, we can’t be certain.
But those are the tests, all right.
Please. There is supposed to be a light somewhere that tells me when I’m out of time, but I can’t see it. It’s now, is it? Well, I do have a good internal plug anyway. Yours will have to be the last question, I’m afraid.
Questioner
Vadim Nikitin. Today, in many ways, if you will agree, we’re living in a society with distinct echoes of 1984, maybe doublethink or, in Bush’s case, maybe nothink. What was Orwell’s critique of the deficiencies of the Democratic system? Did he foresee the homogenization, if you will, of Democratic politics into the kind of two-party Hobbes’ choice that we find in contemporary British and American politics?
Christopher Hitchens
Well, yes, he did. I think if he would pick up, which is in most of the easily found anthologies, one of his best essays was Politics and the English Language. It would show to you that he was very alert very early to the manipulation, especially of the mass media, for purposes of propaganda and of control. A great deal of 1984, for example, this is where Winston Smith meets his girlfriend, Julia.
She works in the fiction department, as it’s called, of the party, which involves producing cheap, voluminous, propagandistic — excuse me — cheap, voluminous, pornographic propaganda for the pros.
Orwell’s experience of that as a tactic, as it were, keeping people stultified, was limited, but he saw what a danger it was, yes.
And he also thought — I mean, he predates the age of TV, really, but he understood quite a lot about how things like radio and the wireless could be abused and could, instead of becoming — of being something that’s mutual, but forming an exchange, is a one-way system whereby stuff is just pumped out to the masses, yes.
So you may not think — one may not say it was very prescient, but it predates the work on cultural studies that was done after the war by people who are now better known about the possible — not just the uses, but the abuses of literacy, for example.
And in fact, I think that Orwell’s investigations of the commonplace in mass culture — he studied — he wrote a wonderful, famous article about the sort of magazines that working-class boys would read, the kind of comics they would read, and what they’d spend their limited pennies on, and what illusions they were given, as it was, after that. And he wrote a piece that was destroyed in the Blitz, unfortunately.
We haven’t got it, about women’s magazines and what they do or can do to shape
popular culture. And he investigated seaside postcards and things like that. He’s the ancestor of cultural studies in that way, and of the idea that there’s a difference anyway, which may be the one you intended to make, between democracy and populism.
Because what we can say now is that all politicians are populists, and never more so than when they are members of the elite. And that’s something that I think he would have helped any of his readers to see coming, yes.
I’m sorry. It’s not by my wish.
I would have happily stayed, but thank you for coming.
[applause]
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