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MY ORWELL, RIGHT OR LEFT Canadian Journal of Histoiy/Annales canadiennes d'histoire XXIV, April 1989, pp. 1-15. ISSN 0008-4107 Canadian Journal ofHistoiy lohn Rodden To an extent probably imequalled by any otber modern writer, George Orwell bas induced botb admirers and detractors to propbesy about bis likely opinions on events since bis deatb in 1950. It is common to ask, for example, upon tbe centennial of a writer's birtb, wbat be would tbink about tbe present-day world or about an issue close to his beart. But readers bave done tbis witb Orwell near-continuously since bis deatb and on a spectrum of issues, witb eacb new edition of bis works or book about bim serving as an occasion for critics to wonder anew about Orwell Redivivus. During tbe 198O's, tbe practice even entered tbe pages of daily newspapers. Remarkably, readers bave not advanced tbeir predictions only in general terms or merely as asides; some conjectmes have been elaborated in great detail, have concerned not only general political positions but specific issues and even party affiliations, and have led partisans to wrangle with one anotber as to "wbere Orwell would have stood." Orwell's own speculations about tbe future in 1984 bave provoked many of tbe forecasts about bim. But tbe tendency to ruminate about tbe "would-bave-been OrweU" derives also from tbe ongoing topicality of Orwell's journalism and bis enduring bold upon tbe imaginations of Anglo-American writers as an intellectual model. Wbat's in a name? Tbe question is one which historians of reputationmaking might fruitfully ponder. Intellectual polemicists on both the Left and Right have fi-eely conjured with Orwell's name, sometimes treating him virtually as an object of political necromancy. Tbis essay traces tbe bistory and range of speculation about Orwell's posthumous politics. It offers insight into not only how a controversial figure can serve posthumously as a barometer of attitudes toward issues of the day, but also into the process of establishing intellectual genealogies. It is, tberefore, a case study in literary reception as cultural bistory: it proposes to enricb intellectual history by treating a writer's "reception history" as a bridge connecting cultural history and literary biography. Indeed the prophecies about Orwell also raise the issue of the relationship of rhetoric to history.' Tbey constitute a signal instance of wbat migbt be called tbe rbetoric of reception, tbat is, rhetorica utens, illustrating bow tbe act of bistorical reception may also be an act of donation, appropriation, rejection, restitution, reprisal, or reconciliation - reception as gratitude, confiscation, bomage, contempt, etc. Reputations are used and abused, and Orwell's reception bistory is a particularly illuminating instance of tbe politics of literary reputation.^ For tbe practice of "extending" bis work and "predicting" bis For other aspects of this complex relationship, see Savoie Lottinville, Tite Rhetoric of History (Norman, Ok., 1976). ^Cf. my "Literary Studies and the Repression of Reputation," Philosophy and Literature 10 (1988), 261-71. A useful overview of German reception theory and reception history is Robert Holub, Reception Theory: An Introduction (Berkeley, 1984). 2 JOHN RODDEN posthumous stands has not been an innocent pursuit; it represents one of the main instances of the "claiming" - or literary grave-robbing - of a major writer, largely conducted via selective quotation from his corpus. Inevitably a writer's reception history is, to a degree, a personalizing of thc historical and a historicizing of the personal. Just as Orwell was a witness to his time, I have used him as a far-seeing witness to events since his death, aiming through him to lend public events a more personal voice and to make public a history newly visible through the eyes of his ghostly presence. One critic fittingly dubbed Orwell in 1984: "The Political Secretary of the Zeitgeist." Indeed, given that Orwell's extraordinary posthumous reception history has registered responses to almost every pressing issue facing Anglo-American intellectuals since 1950, from McCarthyism to Vietnam to Nicaragua, he appears from the standpoint of the 198O's very much like a Sartrean "singular universal," an individual through whom the "universal" spirit of an age finds expression and from whose "singular" experience the character of the age is formed. Or as Picture Post once declared: "The face of Orwell is the face of the mid-Twentieth Century. . . ." Viewed both from the Right and from the Left, Orwell's politicized afterlife constitutes a sprawling, still-imfolding, intellectual biography of the postwar period.^ I "[I]f one imagines him as living into our own day," wrote Orwell about Jack London in 1945, "it is very hard to be sure where Ids political allegiance would have lain. One can imagine him in the Communist Party, one can imagine him falling victim to Nazi racial theory, and one can imagine him the quixotic champion of some Trotskyist or Anarchist set.""* The would-be political legatees of the quixotic Orwell sometimes go by different names in this postwar era, but they have advanced a plethora of claims to him even more extraordinary than London's. Pacifist, militarist, liberal, neoconservative, militant socialist, Vatican II Catholic^ - the list could go on. Indeed Grade Fields' vaudeville refrain from the 193O's, "He's dead but he won't lie down" — which Orwell chose as the epigraph for his novel Coming Up For Air (1939) - might well serve as his own epitaph. "Today [1971], reading his reactions to events," wrote W.H. Auden, once a victim of Orwell's attacks on "the pansy Left," "my first thought is: Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events." Auden, after pronouncing Orwell a "true Christian," ran through his list: drugs, trade unions, birth control, nationalization, student demonstrations. "What he would have Sciid I have no idea. I am only certain he would be worth listening ^W. Warren Wagar, "George Orwell as Political Secretary of the Zeitgeist," in The Future of Nineteen Eigluy-Four, ed. Ejner J. Jensen (Ann Arbor, 1984), 177-200. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for A Method (New York, 1968). Kenneth Allsop, "He Became a Legend in His Own Lifetime," Picture Post, 8 January 1955, 39, 41. •"See T/ie Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 volumes (New York, 1968). Vol. 4, 29. All further references are to CEJL in the Harcourt edition. ^On Orwell's reception in Catholic intellectual circles, see my "Orwell on Religion: Tlie Catholic and Jewish Questions," College Literature 11 (1984): 35-49; and "The Religious Fellow- Traveller: George Orwell and British Catholicism," Renascence (forthcoming). MY ORWELL, RIGHT OR LEFT 3 to."' Many readers bave sbared Auden's sentiments. Usually tbey bave been less besitant witb their predictions. McCarthyism, the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Himgary, Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Vatican II, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, Watergate, Afghanistan and Poland, the 1983 British miners' strike, tbe Falkland Islands invasion, tbe nuclear "freeze" campaign, tbe Grenada invasion: scarcely a major Anglo-American issue bas gone by since 1950 tbat bas not moved someone to muse on "If OrweU Were Alive Today." Tbe persisting radiance of Orwell as a literary figure is perbaps best exemplified by tbe insistent recurrence of tbis conditional beadline, variously voiced as lament, wisb, cballenge, and tactic. It needs empbasis tbat it is tbe subject of OrweU bimself and bis wouldbe verdicts - and not only tbe bistorical accuracy of 1984 set against tbe mucbpublicized "countdown" to Ms "doomsdate" - that has occasioned widespread discussion. For until tbe 198O's, tbe speculations as to "where OrweU would have stood" were advanced exclusively by inteUectuals engaged with "tbe man" and familiar witb not just 1984 but bis oeuvre. Wbat would OrweU bave said about tbis crisis? readers asked. Wbat would bis politics be today? Numerous "old friends" implied tbat OrweU would bave gone tbe way that tbey did. In Britain, witbin a few years of Orwell's deatb, as Raymond Williams bas remarked, "Fatber Knew George OrweU" bad become a tired joke.' Of course, in at least one sense, questions about a man's postbumous politics are manifestly absurd. Tbe fact is tbat Orwell bas been dead for more tban tbree decades, and it is impossible to extrapolate from a man's writings wbat be would say about events after bis deatb. But wbat is futile can nevertbeless sometimes be enligbtening, at least for sociological purposes — and sometimes precisely because of its obvious futUity. Many observers continue to pose questions about OrweU into tbe late 198O's. Tbat tbey do so - even wbile frequently admitting straigbt off tbat tbeir conjectures are frivolous - testifies to tbe durable appeal of tbe Orwell persona and tbe ongoing relevance of OrweU's work. Tbe recurrence of tbe question bas belped keep Orwell's reputation "alive" and controversial — and illustrates, more generaUy, tbe rbetorical advantages of claiming a sizable figure's mantle and tbe crucial influence of news events on a reputation's sbape and size. From tbe Cold War to tbe peace movement of tbe 198O's, OrweU bas proven a writer, as be once remarked of Dickens, "weU wortb stealing."* II In tbe early 195O's, some former radicals wondered what OrweU would have had to say about the course which Tbe Cold War — and tbey - bad taken. To Granville Hicks, Communist Party member until tbe Nazi-Soviet pact and one of Orwell's main American cbampions in tbe 195O's, Orwell was bis "Generation's Conscience." In tbe 1953 New York Post Hicks beld up OrweU as tbe exemplary "tougb-minded" intellectual wbo would bave "come out into tbe *W.H. Auden, "George Orwell," Spectator, 16 January 1917, 86. ''Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London, 1979), 134. ^CEJL, Vol. 1, 413. 4 JOHN RODDEN Open" and opposed both Stalin and Joseph McCarthy. As an ex-Commnnist, I have a particular respect for [Orwell], for he saw through Communism when I didn't and should have. Yet he has none of the self-righteousness of so mjiny anti-Stalinists. I wonder what Orwell would make of anti-Communism in America today. As I have said, he was tough-minded, and he would recognize that, in order to protect ourselves, we have to do many things that we don't like to do. But he would also see through the people who, in pretending to fight anti-Communism, are fighting something else. And it would not matter to him whether what they were really fighting was good or bad. The great evil for him would be their refusal to come out into the open, their willingness to hide their personal views behind a worthy and popular cause, their contempt for truth. . . . And he would have little patience with the prevailing mood of fear . . .' With Orwell's reputation sharply on the rise in the early 195O's, many intellectuals concluded that History was proving Animal Farm and 1984 prophetic. Hicks' reception reflects the desire to be on the side of a perceived "wiimer," a frequent feature of the politics of reputation. (Even ex-Communists like to stay on the "right side" of History.) A cold war liberal during the 195O's, Hicks imagined that Orwell would have stood with him, and against passionate anti-Stalinists like Sidney Hook, whom Hicks suspected of promoting conservative ideas in the guise of attacking Communism. What Left-liberals and socialists of the 195O's would have thought of Orwell's private list of eighty-six people whom he suspected of Communist affiliations or sympathies - compiled in 1949 and found among his papers though still unpublished - is hard to say. The list, which includes some unlikely names, has served as ammunition for some radicals (and neoconservatives) to predict that Orwell would have turned into a fiercely anti-Communist liberal or neoconservative.'" While Orwell's generation was still wondering about his Cold War stand, a younger generation began asking "where Orwell would have stood" on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). "We would debate about Orwell's stand in the early '6O's, but we couldn't really make up our minds," recalled Jenni Calder about herself and her socialist friends at Cambridge University. "Some of us, including me, would cite Orwell's 'decency' and 'pragmatism,' convinced that the whole tendency of his being would have been to oppose those weapons as nonsensical." And yet, Calder concedes, in essays like "You and the Atom Bomb" (1945) the "tough-minded" Orwell seemed to support deterrence. Moreover, Orwell's democratic socialist politics had been close to Labour leader and friend Aneurin Bevan's, who sided with Hugh Gaitskell in a controversial 1957 speech and supported, with qualification, the Labour Party's decision to deploy nuclear weapons. And yet (again). Tribune bitterly 'Granville Hicks, "Orwell — A Generation's Conscience," New York Post, 1 March 1953, 1. See also Hicks's "George Orwell's Prelude in Spain," New York Times Book Review, IS May 1952, 1,30. '*rhe list is in the Orwell Archive, London University. For a radical's response to it, see Daphne Patai, The Orwell Mystique (Amherst, 1984), 8-9, 270-71. Bernard Crick notes in his biography, George Orwell: A Life (New York, i982), that some of the names are not written in Orwell's handwriting (450). MY ORWELL, RIGHT OR LEFT 5 criticized Bevan's decision - perbaps OrweU would bave too." A member of CND's Committee of 100, Calder argues out tbese possibilities, also noting tbat students of tbe 195O's and '6O's, probably imlike observers at tbe time of tbe 1945 Labour government, did not especiaUy link OrweU's name with Bevan's. Young non-Communist leftists like Calder saw Bevan in 1960 as an accommodator to GaitskeU's "gradualism," wbereas they viewed OrweU as a "loner" who "stood outside the traditions that had led the Labour party into a bUnd alley." They linked OrweU witb Camus, seeing botb of them as rebels against Left orthodoxy. "Orthodoxy" meant not only tbe Britisb Communist Party but also GaitskeU and equivocation on CND.'^ Partisans of a different poUtics and from an older generation, bowever, also wondered about OrweU's would-be attitude toward Suez, CND, and tbe New Left. But wbereas Calder expressed doubt about OrweU's views on CND, Raymond Williams, wbo arrived at Cambridge as a don at tbe same time tbat Calder matriculated, felt surer about Orwell's likely opposition to "tbe Bomb" and sympatby for tbe early, cultural pbase of tbe Britisb New Left (1957-63). Tb[e] New Left respected OrweU directly, especiaUy in its early years. The invasion of Suez was an open exercise of the British imperiaUsm be had so insistently attacked. The Hxmgarian revolution, a popular and socialist rising against a bureaucratic and authoritarian commimism, was at once a confirmation of wbat be bad said about Stalinism and a demonstration of tbe autbentic movement to wbicb be bad paid bomage in Catalonia. Tbe danger of tbe Bomb — "eitber we renoimce it or it destroys us" - was as be bad seen it; tbe bomb was not only tbe weapon tbat could destroy civUization but tbe sbadow under wbicb a new autboritarian war economy would grow and extend." As tbe sixties wore on, more readers speculated about and wisbed for tbe pronoimcements of tbe postbumous Orwell, especially after tbe publication of The Collected Essays, Joumalism and Letters of George Orwell (CEJL) in 1968. Sighed the Tribune reviewer: "Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of thee." The Rigbt voiced similar sentiments. Said a reviewer for The Financial Times: "It would be impossible to count the occasions in the eighteen years since his death that I and many others bave asked tbe question, 'Wbat would OrweU tbink about tbat?' He was, in Ufe, and bas remained, part of our conscience as twentietb century citizens, and very especiaUy, part of our consciousness as EngUsbmen."" Witb tbe appearance of CEJL, controversies on tbe Left and Rigbt about Orwell's legacy wbicb bad been simmering since bis deatb finally boUed over. Many inteUectuals wondered aloud. If Orwell were aUve today, wbere would be stand on Vietnam? Radicals and conservatives disagreed not only witb eacb otber but among tbemselves. Tbeir conflicting attitudes make dear tbat not The only publication with which Orwell ever developed close ties was Tribune, on which he served as literary editor (1943-45) and wrote his famous "As I Please" column (1943-47). See Douglas Hill, Tribune 40 (London, 1977). ^^Jenni Calder, interview, 6 May 1984. See also her Chronicles of Conscience (London, 1968). 'Williams, George Onvell (London, 1971), 87. "Anthony Arblaster, "Orwell: The Man Who Was Ahead of His Time," Tribune, 4 October 1968, 2. Philip French, "Bloody, But Alive," Financial Times, 3 October 1968. 6 JOHN RODDEN |
