Orwell The Rebel and Englishness

Abstract

Reviews 79 c:\users\ken\documents\type3501\red\rj 3501 062 red.docx 2015-07-24 10:16 ORWELL THE REBEL AND ENGLISHNESS Patrick Deane English and Cultural Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l9 pdeane@mcmaster.ca Robert Colls. George Orwell: English Rebel. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2013. Pp. xii, 330. isbn: 978-0-19-968080-1. £25.00; us$34.95. eorge Orwell died on 21 January 1950.The following June his unpublished notebooks appeared, collected with several personal appreciations and reminiscences, one of which was by Bertrand Russell. Robert Colls, author of George Orwell:English Rebel, cites this piece by Russell—and in particular Russell ’s view that “Orwell went through Buchenwald imaginatively so that other writers would not have to”1 —to reinforce the sense that no matter what contradictory evidence has accumulated over the years, Orwell remains “Saint” George, a figure many readers still want to have on their side, and whose alli1 P. 221. For Russell, see his “George Orwell” (1950), p. 6. d= 80 Reviews c:\users\ken\documents\type3501\red\rj 3501 062 red.docx 2015-07-24 10:16 ance with the causes of justice, freedom and enlightenment is generally presumed .2 The point is not that “Saint” George is a fiction. Indeed, if Colls’s book tells us anything it is that Orwell’s reputation was well earned precisely because the man was complex and “two-handed” like the rest of us—that he could imbibe unthinkingly the prejudices of his time, act on them, and yet by force of his intellect and his unusual determination to live, not by ideology but simply responding “to the vagaries of an eventful life” (p. 6), arrive at a personal position more ethical and more humane than most. Colls confronts directly the challenge of describing what Orwell believed— “this most quoted and referenced of writers is almost impossible to pin down … [and] held many points of view, some twice over”—with a pragmatic yet convincing hypothesis.The inference to be made is not “that he was fickle, or that he did not believe in anything or that he did not know what he believed”, but rather that he took life (as his life must be taken by us, implicitly) “a step at a time” (p. 3). Being George Orwell was in that sense an unconscious project for Eric Blair, the Orwellian outlook being the sum of Blair’s interactions with his turbulent time and for that reason inconsistent.Thus Colls: “Identities are never ‘built’ or ‘constructed’ so much as lived and breathed, day to day, until they run out of meaning and have to change.” Finding a “trajectory” in Orwell’s life is therefore difficult, because “it is more a series of intense reactions to peoples and places as he came upon them” (p. 9). Elsewhere Colls notes that Orwell tried “to put himself as far away from abstraction and as close to experience as he could.… He challenged the world by burrowing into it” (p. 11). Colls is principally interested in Orwell’s Englishness, not as something that is the key to the man but as “something that he thought with as well as about, and that … stayed with him from first to last” (p. 7). It is the strand in his thinking “which runs through all the others” and which brought him, for example , into alignment with Bertrand Russell in the cause of peace during the thirties, as well as on the necessity for war, beginning at the end of that decade. And although he was of a generation that “took their Englishness for granted” (p. 3), at a certain point in his life “he wanted to identify with his country, understand it, explain it, be convinced by it, and reconnect with it in its current and previous manifestations” (p. 7). And because such hopes as he had for the future relied upon the survival—indeed the perpetuation—of the best of the past, his work as satirist, journalist and political commentator is inseparable from this negotiation with his Englishness. 2 Here see John Rodden in Rodden and Rossi, Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell (2012), p. 110; and in George...