Portia Podsnap

I’ve been trying to figure out how George Orwell fits into that 1950s literary phenomenon, or cult, called the Angry Young Men. The Angries, as a movement, were partly an invention of the popular press of 1956-58. Some writers who are included among them, notably Kingsley Amis, rejected the label and got counted in only because they were new young writers with an irksome attitude. Others, e.g., Colin Wilson, treated the whole concept whimsically or dismissively but used it as a publicity tool.

The “Angry Young Men” expression first arose in 1956 when a 26-year-old playwright named John Osborne staged his controversial (but successful) play called Look Back in Anger, and 24-year-old Colin Wilson published his controversial (and also successful) book of essays on philosophy and literary criticism, called The Outsider. Osborne and Wilson had little in common otherwise, but they both made good copy, with their attractive looks and tumultuous personal lives. So they got grouped together with other newsworthy young writers, mostly male, and got called Outsiders or the Angry Young Men. Of course, the latter handle won out. Others counted among the Angries include Wilson’s friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, and novelists John Wain, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and sometimes Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.[1]

The connection between Orwell and the Angries seems intuitively obvious today, at least to me. They have many points in common, so that some of the Angries—in public persona if not in writing—might be considered School of Orwell. However, these Fifties writer seldom commented on Orwell at the time. He had only been dead a few years, after all. The big Orwell industry, with its fat biographies and criticism, didn’t get underway until the 1980s, mainly due to copyright restrictions imposed by Orwell’s widow Sonia.

So here is my list of parallels:

The scruffy-autodidact affectation. This was sort of a fetish for Orwell when he devoted himself to writing in his 20s. To get source material, he pretended to be down and out in Paris (where his mother’s sister lived in bohemian comfort) and London (where he put on rags so he could review the various “spikes” or doss houses where hobos spent the night). He went hop-picking amongst tramps in Kent and hung out with nighttime derelicts in Trafalgar Square (all background for A Clergyman’s Daughter). Otherwise he dressed in worn tweed coats and flannel bags, and smoked rollups of cheap shag tobacco. Even after he published a few novels, this look continued to be the Orwell brand. The grey, oppressive atmosphere of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (out of cigarettes; out of razorblades; landlady is watching you) was transferred almost intact to the setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moving on to the post-Orwell 1950s, we get Colin Wilson sleeping rough in Hampstead Heath while spending his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum. He shares scruffy houses in Notting Hill with Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, and even after he’s famous for The Outsider, he and his second wife Joy occupy a cramped bedsit, which they show off to visiting news photographers: a single table-cum-desk, cluttered with books, typewriter, papers, teacups, remnants of old meals. Joy’s parents barge in one evening and horsewhip Colin with an umbrella and a…horsewhip. They have found his notebooks among Joy’s things and imagine that Colin’s notes for a perverse novel are his own sexual confessions. (The newspapers just lapped that story up!)

Perhaps the most dismal and Orwellian passage in Tom Maschler’s Declaration anthology is Lindsay Anderson’s opening to his own contribution, “Get Out and Push!”:

Let’s face it, coming back to Britain is always something of an ordeal. And you don’t have to be a snob to feel it. It isn’t just the food, the sauce bottles on the café tables, and the chips with everything.[2]

Orwellian, except Orwell himself much approved of having the sauce bottles on the dinner table. Not only that, I seem to recall he reprimanded his first wife for removing the outer paper wrapping to Worcestershire sauce; it should remain on the bottle, as in a working-class café.

No Uni Education. This is not true of all the Angries. Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Lindsay Anderson were all at Oxford, Amis became a fellow at Cambridge and visiting fellow at Princeton. But quite true of John Osborne and maybe his alter-ego Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger; and of Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, Sillitoe, Braine and others. Not going to university had been less of a class marker for George Orwell because he’d been through Eton, though he nevertheless felt barred from the quality-lit circles because he’d gone into the Indian Police instead of Oxbridge. But for the Angries without much formal education, it tended to cause them to be portrayed as novelty acts, rosebushes growing upon a dungheap. In The Angry Decade[3], one of at least three good books about the Angries (Colin Wilson himself wrote another) Kenneth Allsop makes the opening argument that for all the noise they made at the time, the Angries left little movement or imitators behind them. They were a fad that came and went. This was very different from the Satire Boom crowd of the early 1960s (Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye, etc.), where the principals went on and on for decades, in entertainment and publishing, and spawned endless imitators. But the Satire Boom people were Oxbridge, many of them from public schools before that. The Angries, for the most part, were not.

Victor Gollancz. Gollancz published Orwell for a while in the 1930s, but they fell out over Orwell’s anti-Stalinist Homage to Catalonia. In the 1950s Gollancz published Colin Wilson’s and Kingsley Amis’s early books. Gollancz was an Oxford graduate, of Polish Jewish background, a sometime teacher and editor who prospered in the book trade in the 1930s, first with his own publishing imprint, then with something called the Left Book Club. For a subscription fee, Left Book Club members agreed to buy, at deep discount, Gollancz’s book-of-the-month. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was an LBC offering in 1937. Victor Gollancz books were readily recognizable by their yellow covers with stark, unadorned type. After the War, Gollancz turned away from Leftist politics. He’d lost out, after all, on Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gollancz continued as a successful mainstream publisher, with titles by Daphne du Maurier, J. G Ballard and John Updike, as well as Wilson and Amis.

The Fascist Taint. From the 1940s onward, it was a commonplace among those of the far-Left that George Orwell was some kind of “Fascist Trotskyite,” and was not to be trusted. (I don’t have a citation for you; I heard people of a certain background say things like this when I was young, because they themselves had heard it while growing up in the Forties and Fifties.) This was Stalinist cant, basically, but it had the effect of normalizing such expressions when thrown at dissident or liberal writers in the 1950s and 60s. Only in recent years, with the resurgence of Antifa groups, has it become common to see “Fascist” used unironically as a slur. But in the 1950s, when Colin Wilson and friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd were accused of having Fascist sympathies, it was easy to dismiss it all as a joke. This was so, even though Wilson and company were known to be friendly to Sir Oswald Mosley and his revived Union Movement—a public association George Orwell most certainly would have avoided!

Notes

[1] A “definitive” list of the Angries is sometimes considered to be the list of contributors to Declaration, a 1957 anthology of essay manifestoes by: Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, and John Wain. Seeking at least one female contributor, the publisher sought out Iris Murdoch, who declined but suggested Doris Lessing.

[2] From Lindsay Anderson, “Get Out and Push!,” in Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957.

[3] Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade, revised edition. (London: Peter Owen, Ltd.) 1964.

When did Eric A. Blair, a/k/a George Orwell, lose his virginity? Most biographers haven’t wrestled much with this particular issue. But then came along John Sutherland, a retired academic who published an entertaining book called Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, back in 2016. (I briefly described this cute volume in a 2019 end-of-year Favorite Books wrap-up.)

John Sutherland, bless his soul, spends about half his book reconstructing the carnal history of E. A. Blair. He dredges up hints and testimony from various friends and unrequited loves. But some of the best clues come from from Orwell’s novels and autobiographical passages. One of them is a painful memory recalled in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell is thinking of the time when he was in the Imperial Police in Burma, and one of his sub-inspectors was beating a suspect. An American missionary was nearby, looking on.

The American watched it, and then turning to me, said thoughtfully, “I shouldn’t care to have your job.” It made me horribly ashamed. So that was the kind of job I had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me!

“A teetotal cock-virgin from the Middle West”! That’s such a wonderful, Orwellian, sneer. Full of anger at the hick holy-joe missionary, who by rights should be a couple of rungs down the status ladder from Orwell…and yet he deigns to pity him. After all, Eric Blair, Old Etonian and young officer of the Imperial police, has good reason to believe himself a man of the world. He can hold his liquor and almost certainly is no cock-virgin.

Orwell doesn’t give us a date for this encounter with the missionary but we can be certain he was in his early twenties. The timeline of his Burma career is pretty clear. He sailed out there when he was 19, passing from Rangoon to Mandalay for training; then returning to the Rangoon area two years later at the end of 1924, when he was twenty-one. In early 1928, not quite twenty-five, Orwell returned to England on leave and decided to “chuck” his awful job in Burma.

Writes John Sutherland in Orwell’s Nose,

[Orwell] confided to his Eton friend Harold Action in later life that in Burma he had got all the sex he didn’t get in England: from the “Jewish whores with crocodile faces” in Rangoon, one supposes, to exquisitely aromatic doll-like live-in concubines in remove up-country stations. [1]

Where does this “Jewish whores with crocodile faces” actually come from? Sutherland is imputing it from Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days. An imputation I find credible. The protagonist stand-in for Orwell here in the novel is Mister Flory, an employee of a timber firm. Orwell’s mother’s family, as it happens, were teak merchants in Burma. And Flory, like Orwell, sailed to Burma when not quite twenty:

His first six months in Burma he had spent in Rangoon, where he was supposed to be learning the other side of his business. He had lived in a “chummery” with four other youths who devoted their entire energies to debauchery. And what debauchery! They swilled whisky which they privately hated, they stood round the piano bawling songs of insane filthiness and silliness, they squandered rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of crocodiles. [2]

Therefore we might conclude that Superintendent E. A. Blair of the Imperial Police may have first “read the book” (as the old expression went) with an “aged Jewish whore” in Rangoon.

Granted, age perception is variable and subjective. And a wench of thirty-seven with a thickly painted face might look pretty old when up close to a lad of twenty. Regardless, this story from Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, seems to explain a mysterious and intrusive episode that suddenly appears in his last, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

There we find thirty-nine-year old Winston Smith, writing in his diary and remembering a whore he once picked up n the street. Supposedly this was just a few years before. But it seems more like an callow young man’s early adventure than the idle wandering of a married man in his mid-thirties.

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I —

He drew his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She —

…He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so… In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication…

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt…I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light —

…What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask… She had no teeth at all…

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

Here Orwell offers us the eroticism of bad smells and insalubrious surroundings, which I am reliably informed have a mysterious appeal for certain people. The toothlessness of the harlot doesn’t seem to jibe with my mental picture of Rangoon crocodile ladies, who I naturally imagine shoud have had big sharp teeth. But maybe one of Orwell’s early good-time girls had “taken her teeth out”? Or crocodilian appearance meant something more to him beyond sharp, protuberant dentition? Bony jaw, leathery skin, maybe?

It doesn’t matter. This pairing of the whores in Orwell’s first and last novels, Burmese Days and Nineteen Eighty-Four, would be no more than an idle whimsy if Orwell’s writings regularly dealt with ladies of the pavement. But his writings do not. Neither do the known facts of his life. In his last fifteen years he was married to two attractive, genteel and educated women (Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a graduate of Oxford and London University, who died of a botched hysterectomy in 1945; and afterwards Sonia Brownell, a subeditor at Cyril Connolly’s Horizon). In his bachelor days he’d been known to make the occasional furtive pass at a female acquaintance, but there are no reports of him consorting with prostitutes, after his early days in Burma, with the crocodile ladies. Therefore I conclude that the ancient prostitute in his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is no more than reincarnation of the one, or ones he recalled in his first novel, Burmese Days.

Notes

[1] John Sutherland, Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 2016.

[2] George Orwell, Burmese Days. First published 1934. Online here.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. It is called “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” and is written by Norman Podhoretz, of all people. Poddy, I guess, is stealing him for the cause of Commentary-style Neoconservatism.

High comedy, but an irresistible bit of self-puffery. Many have succumbed to the idea that “Orwell was a lot like me!” Some of these claims on Orwell are baffling, others are repulsive. A bit over 20 years ago Christopher Hitchens did a book called Why Orwell Matters (or, Orwell’s Victory, in England). [1] It’s nice, light reading, a rhapsody over twice-told tales about the youth and career of Orwell, but shoddy with the facts. In the introduction we have Hitchens lamenting that “Orwell died early and impoverished before the age of austerity gave rise to the age of celebrity and mass media.”

Well actually, Orwell/Blair—he signed his cheques Eric Blair to the end—died a paper millionaire, or a paper dollar-millionaire at least, having produced two bestsellers in four years, and selling them both to the Book-of-the-Month Club (with a 400,000 initial press run for Nineteen Eighty-Four). Furthermore he was hoping to take a trip to America in a year or so, at least to visit his colleague and soulmate Dwight Macdonald, formerly of Partisan Review and now of Politics. We can trust that any public talks Orwell might have given in the early 1950s would be standing-room-only, rather like Mark Twain in 1900, doubling or tripling his wealth and fame. The fact that he suddenly died in January 1950, in a London hospital room, with no staff looking in—and this was just two or three days before he was booked to fly on a chartered plane to a Swiss sanitarium—is unfortunate. Also suspicious. [2]

Much more impossibly, a few years ago someone packaged a book of excepts from letters, diaries, and journalism, titled Orwell on Truth.[3] And the introductory essay by Adam Hochschild is thoroughly crass and wrongheaded. You may recall Hochschild as the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, in which he revived the canard that Leopold II, King of the Belgians, maintained a profitable rubber business in the Belgian Congo by means of cutting off the hands and feet of his Congolese employees when they underperformed. (The truth of the matter is that the Congolese amputated dead and live extremities of their tribal enemies on a regular basis. But let’s not ruin a good story.)

Moving on to Orwell, Hochschild says in his Introduction:

Could we have a better guide to Donald Trump’s America? When a senior aide to President Trump talked about ”alternative facts” at a time when the real ones (a low turnout for his inauguration, starkly visible in photographs) were embarrassing, what is that but the twisting of truth into propaganda that Orwell described so chillingly in Nineteen Eighty-Four and elsewhere? In a 1943 essay excerpted in this book he wrote, “Nazi theory…specifically denies that such a thing a ’the truth’ exists… if the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospects frightens me much more than bombs.” Is this not the universe that President Trump, surrounded by embarrassing facts on all sides, would like to live in?

Too much to unpack here, but let me digress into some factual detail. First, President Trump’s inauguration was heavily barricaded on January 20, 2017. You couldn’t drive into Washington, DC. Streets were blocked because of Antifa threats to bomb the Inauguration. (Antifa rioters did in fact wreck a few storefronts and automobiles.) DC Metro stations near the Capitol and Mall were closed. If you rode into the city on the Metro, you had to walk about two miles just to find a place at the Mall. Unlike the Obama inaugurations, which made a special effort to bus in thousands of extras from hither and yon, the Trump inauguration was prevented from letting most of its supporters show up. With all these obstacles, it’s really a wonder the Mall was half-full.

Hochschild gives an extra twist to his knife by suggesting that Nineteen Eighty-Four and the “alternative facts” remark (it was actually Kellyanne Conway’s) describe “Nazi theory.” Actually the passage quoted above comes from a 1943 Orwell essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in which the real culprits were not Nazis or “Fascists” whom the Leftists were all ostensibly fighting, but rather the Reds, who were far more concerned with killing and imprisoning Orwell’s POUM colleagues and other non-Stalinist militia groups on the Left.

When people like Hitchens and Hochschild try to enshrine Orwell as an all-wise guru, or use him as a cheap and available club to beat their political bogeymen with, I sense that they’re basically tone-deaf to the sort of writer Orwell really was. As a political writer he was first and foremost a most subtle and seductive propagandist. As an example I’m going to take another essay that he wrote about the Spanish war, shortly after he and his wife Eileen escaped from the Communists in Barcelona.

It’s called “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” and it is a masterpiece of weasely propaganda. Published in two parts, in the New English Weekly in July and September 1937, it may be regarded as a sort of “teaser” for the Homage to Catalonia memoir he was working on. Orwell often begins essays with digressive, conversational observations and then circles down to his main point. In “Spilling the Spanish Beans” he opens with a bad, tasteless joke, but one intended get a smile and a nod from the reader. He is mocking Right-wing press reports of Leftist atrocities, dismissing them as propaganda:

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of “Daily Mail” reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm.

This is a nugget tossed out to entice the Leftist, anti-Nationalist crowd, and to assure them that the writer is of sympathetic mien. But he’s also setting us up for some serious swipes at the Left, beginning with the next sentence:

It is the left-wing papers, the “News Chronicle” and the “Daily Worker,” with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

And now Orwell, master propagandist, proceeds to lay into the Left-wing press and politicians for having deep-sixed the Loyalist cause in Spain. The war isn’t over yet, not by a long shot, but he advises us that the Leftist side in the conflict—also sometimes called the Republicans, or the Popular Front—hasn’t a chance of winning. The best outcome, as he sees it, is that “the war will end with some sort of compromise,” which suggest that perhaps Catalonia and central Spain (including Madrid) will continue on with their Popular Front “social democracy” regime, while the rest of the country will be ruled by the assorted nationalist factions united under Generalissimo Franco. Orwell isn’t prognosticating here, he’s just offering tepid conventional wisdom from mid-1937. Perhaps he really expects all of Spain to go up the Fascist spout in a year or so, but doesn’t dare say it.

But whichever, he has a very convoluted explanation of how certain fake-revolutionary Leftists conspired to do Spain in. He paints a picture of the conflict as mainly one between “true revolutionaries” (e.g., his POUM militia) and the Communists. And he says the bad guys are not just the Communists, but the Liberal bourgeoisie and the Right-wing press, who he claims are in league with them. They’re all working together conspiring to stifle the “true revolutionary” innovations that sprang up at the outbreak of war in 1936:

[I]n the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers … took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made the mistake, however… of leaving the Republican Government in nominal control.

Is this naïvete or casuistry? Maybe a bit of both? The whole purpose of the war, from the Leftist or Popular Front point of view, was to preserve that “democratically elected” government of the Republic, and prevent a takeover by the Francoite Nationalists. Orwell himself signed up to fight in Spain to defend that government. (He initially tried to join a Communist brigade in England, but got rejected as politically suspect.) But now here he’s telling us that the proper custodians of Spain’s future should have been workers’ militias and local committees. It’s a very delicate balancing act that Orwell is pulling here. He wants to denounce the Communists and bourgeois politicians (who were guilty of asking the Soviets for aid, thereby leaving the door open for a complete Stalinist takeover of the Left), but needs to show us a better alternative, so he tells us about the lost opportunity Spain had, with all those ragtag bands of ineffectual workers’ clubs. With this far-fetched hypothesis, Orwell gets to pass himself off as an honest socialist, maybe a True Revolutionary, a Man of the Left in full—albeit a very impractical one. Alas, he tells us, no one in England understands him, or “the real nature of the struggle”:

It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them.

A “grotesque spectacle”? Rightist opposition to the Popular Front governments in Spain and France, 1935-39, was hardly opportunist. It was constant and consistent. The Popular Front was an initiative by Stalin and the Comintern to find common cause with the various social-democratic parties, whether they styled themselves as moderate or revolutionary. Part of their “sell” was depicting the Popular Front as a, well, people’s front against “fascism.” Bolshevists wisely chose to call conservatives and nationalists “fascists” rather than “national socialists” because the latter sounded too damned attractive. National Socialists were building Autobahnen and giving everyone a job, with paid vacations: the very sort of sparkly promises that Popular Front socialists liked to offer their voters. “Fascists” sounded vaguer and sinister: generic bogeymen, oppressive and mean.

Conversely the policies and goals thrown up by the various Leftist factions were hopelessly inconsistent. For the most part these factions began as social democrats, sometimes Marxist but officially anti-Bolshevist. Then most of them aligned with the Reds because during the Popular Front days of the mid-1930s the Reds were promising to play nice. But during the Spanish war the Reds ceased to play nice, and damned all those anti-Stalinist socialists and anarcho-syndicalists and Marxist deviationists as “Trotskyists” or “Trotskyites.”

Orwell, the Man of the Left, may have been oblivious to the scam of the Popular Front. There were blind spots in his judgment and vast lacunae in his knowledge. Regardless he had to cheer on the mainstream social-democratic Left to preserve his literary viability. His main book publisher at this time had been Victor Gollancz, an erudite Polish Jew who’d been to St. Paul’s School and Oxford, and founded the Left Book Club. Unfortunately the post-Spain Orwell, with his complaints about how the Reds wanted to murder him in Barcelona, wasn’t simon-pure enough for Gollancz, who needed to keep the Comrades happy. Orwell moved on to a different publisher.

But to the end of his life, he continued to be slippery and evasive when writing on political matters. Animal Farm, for example, is based upon a most deceitful premise: that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Good Thing to begin with; but it was defeated, tragically, by corrupt Capitalists and Fascists. (The Revolution Betrayed! No wonder the Reds called him a Trotskyite.) With Nineteen Eighty-Four he never really came clean and admitted that the dystopic setting was a Stalinistic regime of terror and brutality. Instead he took refuge in that evasive Partisan Review term, “totalitarianism,” a word that originally described Mussolini’s corporativist government, but by the 1940s had no precise meaning beyond “powerful, cruel, slave state.” Orwell and his publisher even put out a press release in June 1949, denying that Nineteen Eighty-Four was about Communism and Stalinism. The Commies weren’t fooled.

Notes

[1] Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

[2] See my conspiracy-minded essay, “Who Killed George Orwell?”

[3] George Orwell, Orwell on Truth. Introduction by Adam Hochschild. New York and Boston: Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin), 2019.

Shaggy notes on previously saved draft!