Orwell (9 page)

Though Orwell had never seen these impoverished northern industrial slums before, he knew them well from books. Engels'
The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844
(1845), especially the chapter on “The Mines,” Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851) and Charles Booth's
Life and Labour of the People in London
(1889–1903) were his sociological models; Dickens'
Hard Times
(1854), Zola's
Germinal
(1885) and Lawrence's Midlands novels were his literary ones. Orwell is obviously drawn to Dickens because of their similar social attitudes, and he repeatedly describes Dickens in a way that forcefully applies to himself as well:

In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root.

From the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of
laissez faire
capitalism.

His whole “message” is … if men would behave decently the world would be decent.
²⁸

The strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.

Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it.

[He is a] man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened … who is
generously angry.

Orwell's grim vision of Wigan, quoted earlier, is very close to Dickens' famous description of the unnatural ugliness and mechanical uniformity of Coketown, and to Lawrence's portrayal of the insentient corruption of Wiggiston, the mining village that is contrasted to Ursula's hopeful vision of the rainbow. The very extinction of organic life, of vital sources being choked off,
terrifies all three novelists, and the heart of this problem exists in the crucial social issue of whether the poor should marry and have children. In
Hard Times
, the “hateful” Bounderby tells the worker Stephen Blackpool, “You had better have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married”;
²⁹
and the ironic conversation of Bitzer and Mrs. Sparsit expresses the selfish and moribund attitude of the middle classes: “‘I am quite sure we are constantly hearing, ma'am, till it becomes quite nauseous, concerning their wives and families,' said Bitzer. ‘Why look at me, ma'am!
I
don't want a wife and family. Why should they?' ‘Because they are improvident,' said Mrs. Sparsit.”
³⁰

It is precisely this view, so hostile to life, which Orwell attacks in both
Keep the Aspidistra
and
Wigan Pier.
In the former, Gordon (who violently, and unfairly, objects to Rosemary's wish for contraceptives) says, “Hats off to the factory lad who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in a family way! At least he's got blood and not money in his veins” (49); and Orwell writes in the latter, alluding to Walter Greenwood's popular play of 1933, “getting married on the dole annoys old ladies in Brighton, but it is a proof of their essential good sense; they realize that losing your job does not mean that you cease to be a human being” (78). In
The Rainbow
, the colliery manager Tom Brangwen, who exploits the miners, marries the lesbian schoolmistress Winifred Inger, a strange union of perversion, sterility and corruption. And in
Women in Love
, the ugliness, poverty and suffering that Gerald Crich inflicts on the miners is symptomatic of his radical failure as a human being. In Dickens, Lawrence and Orwell the emotional sterility of the mine owners, who impose a deathly ugliness on both landscape and people, is contrasted to the inextinguishable warmth and vitality of the oppressed working classes.

In the 1930's, coal “was by far the largest single industry, the only one employing more than a million workers. It had always been the symbol of class struggle.”
³¹
Orwell's immersion in the reality of this struggle was his very deliberate attempt to overcome what he considered “the tragic failure of theoretical Socialism, to make contact with the normal working classes.”
³²
Orwell believes it is both his duty and responsibility to have first-hand experience in the slums and mines, and he cannot see the value of the more objective intellectual inquiry of Beatrice Webb, whom he calls a “high-minded Socialist slum visitor” (157). As he wrote to Richard Rees from Wigan, “Have you ever been down a mine? I don't think I shall ever feel quite the same about coal again.” Neither will his readers, for Orwell's acute observations on coal mining leave a vivid impression: “you have a tolerable sized mountain on top of you; hundreds of yards of solid rock,
bones of extinct beasts, subsoil, flints, roots of growing things, green grass and cows grazing on it—all this suspended over your head and held back only by wooden props as thick as the calf of your leg” (22). His account of the miners crawling to work underground for two or three hours each day (without pay) is a powerful and disturbing revelation.

Orwell's approach is documentary, empirical and pragmatic, filled with statistics, essential information and useful suggestions, and his view is, as far as possible, an “insider's” view.
³³
In praising people's patience with him, Orwell humorously describes his methods and their response: “If any unauthorized person walked into
my
house and began asking me whether the roof leaked and whether I was much troubled by bugs and what I thought of my landlord, I should probably tell him to go to hell. This only happened to me once, and in that case the woman was slightly deaf and took me for a Means Test nark; but even she relented after a while and gave me the information I wanted” (65). Orwell constantly refers to his own practical knowledge (“you can wring forty cups of tea out of a quarter-pound packet”) with phrases like “I have had just enough experience …” and “From my own observation …” and “Once when I was ….” The result of this approach is twofold: as in
Down and Out
, he questions common assumptions, discredits the illusion and shows the reality; and he also describes the most serious injustices he has lived through himself. He has a deep loathing of the ugliness, emptiness and cruelty of what he sees, but is not merely content to describe it—he wants to transform it radically.
³⁴

The main effect of shattering illusions and enforcing reality is to convince the reader that he is profoundly ill-informed and must change his wrong-headed attitude about the working classes. Contrary to popular belief, Orwell finds that miners wash when they can; eat astonishingly little; are poorly paid; have impoverished landlords who cannot afford repairs;
do
mind dirtiness; favor slum clearance; dislike crowded areas; want to work and do not like unemployment; are sensitive and serious; do not smell; and lead an extremely hard life. In short, they are much like other people (“the interests of the exploited are the same” [203]), only worse off because of the inequity and iniquity of the capitalist system. By making readers understand the workers, Orwell alleviates their fears and engages their sympathy; by making them care about their countrymen, he pricks their social conscience and awakens their sense of justice.

The great strength of
Wigan Pier
(and
Down and Out)
is that the economic injustices are always described in human terms. Orwell's vision of Wigan is like Blake's of London:

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

For both writers a slum implies warped lives and ailing children. Orwell's moving theme is a fervent plea for human dignity and compassion, and against “the frightful doom of a decent working man suddenly thrown on the streets after a lifetime of steady work, his agonized struggles against economic laws, which he does not understand, the disintegration of families, the corroding sense of shame” (131). He attacks Corporation housing because it is soulless and inhumane, and erodes both family and communal life; he criticizes the Means Test because it cruelly breaks up families; and he exposes the deadening effect of unemployment. His images of human degradation are the most powerful: the desolate drudgery of the exhausted young woman kneeling beside the blocked waste-pipe; the blank and aged grandmother with the yellow cretinous countenance; the worn skull-like face of the slum mother; and the dumpy shawled women crawling in the cindery mud in search of coal chips. (Orwell's contrasting image of human affirmation is the pavement-artist Bozo in
Down and Out
who gazes at the stars and is a free man in his own mind: “rich or poor, you can still keep on with your books and your ideas.”)
³⁵
Orwell's emphasis throughout the book is on the “ordinary decent person,” and the sense of human waste, shame and debasement that he conveys is overwhelming. As Orwell wrote during the War, “I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anybody else…. I wanted to think that the class distinctions and imperialist exploitation of which I am ashamed would not return.”

Though Orwell writes “I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them” (102–103) and dissociates himself from a belief in the superiority of the proletariat, he too idealizes the manners, temperament, stoicism, family life
³⁶
and democracy of the working class.
³⁷
This is partly because he is intensely dissatisfied with his own middle-class origins and wants to transcend them. But more importantly, he feels, like Sartre and other French writers of the Thirties, that the working “class incarnates some deeply meaningful myth of suffering, and that in its emancipation lies the general ‘salvation of mankind.'”
³⁸
Victor Brombert's perceptive analysis of the basic attitude of French intellectuals toward Marxist beliefs applies with equal force to Orwell: “1. a characteristic, nearly pathological
humility
in the face of the Proletariat…. 2. the belief that the bourgeois intellectual
can save his soul only by sharing the suffering of the working class and by imitating its ‘Passion'…. 3. the conviction that any present sacrifices, even self-destruction, will be eschatologically justified; that the intellectual's duty is to prepare the future…. 4. the concomitant quest for holiness by means of martyrdom.”
³⁹
(The fourth point is implicit in the imitation of the “Passion” and the sacrificial self-destruction.)

Orwell is quite explicit about his humility: “if there is one type of man to whom I feel myself inferior, it is a coal miner” (102); and he exhibits an almost Lawrencean admiration for their earthiness and physical power: “underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel” (31). He is equally clear on the notion of penitential sacrifice among the “symbolic victims”: “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants…. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and … part of my guilt would drop from me” (130–131).

The third point is twofold: the duty to prepare for the future and the idea of self-punishment. The whole force of Orwell's argument for “the ideal of Socialism, justice and liberty” (189) testifies to his compulsive desire to prepare for the future, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” And Orwell's entire life, a series of personal sacrifices for a higher cause, in Burma, France, Spain and England, testifies to his need for self-punishment. The words that provide the theoretical basis of these sacrifices were inscribed by Orwell in his diary during the grim days of June 1940, and they express, perhaps more than anything else he wrote, his personal courage and high moral principle: “Both E and G insistent that I should go to Canada if the worst comes to the worst, in order to stay alive and keep up propaganda. I will go if I have some function, e.g. if the government were transferred to Canada and I had some kind of a job, but not as a refugee, not as an expatriate journalist squealing from a safe distance. There are too many of these exiled ‘anti-Fascists' already. Better to die if necessary, and maybe even as propaganda one's death might achieve more than going abroad and living more or less unwanted on other people's charity.”
⁴⁰

 

 

Orwell's austere existence in Paris provided a striking contrast to the glittering bohemian life of American expatriates in the 1920s. This essay described how the quintessentially English Orwell had extensive personal and professional connections with France, which inspired his first book. Paris made him even more English and gave him a new angle of vision.

The now extinct
World and I,
a high-paying hodge-podge of a magazine, let me write about many different subjects: graduate school in Berkeley in the 1960s, my work in an English auction house, the Greek idea of madness and art, my biography of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, the pony express, my mother's physical and mental collapse, the attempt to murder my father, the futility of the war in Iraq (September 1998) and the impossibility of military victory in Afghanistan (January 2002). While the fact-checkers were sleeping at the switch, the editor published a misleading photo to accompany Berkeley in the '60s, which was clearly taken in the '50s. In this essay on Orwell he included a photo of “Henry Miller”—a thin grey man dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, wearing a goatee and looking like one of the Smith Bros. cough drop men. When I pointed out that this was
not
the notorious pornographer (whom he'd never heard of), the editor insisted that it
was
a man called Henry Miller and that no one would ever notice the difference.