THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL. Edited by Sonia Orwell and fan Angus. Four volumes (2,041 pages), Harcourt, Brace & World. $34.80 the set
By all odds, George Orwell is the most unlikely culture hero to emerge in the '60s. The ideological passions that rent the Red '30s, strewing literary corpses and real bodies over the Marxist battlefield, leave the current generation cold. Yet this minor English novelist (Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter) is now accepted generally in England and the U.S. as a major prophet for his political journalism, for his anti-Stalinist fable Animal Farm (1945), and for the political-science-fiction shocker 1984.
His posthumous honor is a tribute to his passion for truth; as the current cant goes, he told it like it was. Almost alone among the discredited (figures of the '30s, Orwell, with his clarity, charity and honesty, is undiscredited. He can be read today by the young without boredom or nausea—despite the fact that he was in most ways as square as an unsoaked sugar cube. Reading him today is like taking a guided tour through the seven circles of the political hell that Western Europe built for itself on the bases of the Depression, (the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the cold war. There is no trace here of the characteristic vices of the political intelligentsia of his day ("The ching that frightens me about the modern intelligentsia is their inability to see that human society must be based on common decency, whatever the political and economic forms may be"). NOT is there rhetoric, or the striking of attitudes; for these pleasurable vices, he substituted his own spare prose, and instead of striking an attitude, he took action.
Whales, Dogs and Windbags. Orwell died in 1950 at 46. He asked in his will that no biography be written of him. It may now not be necessary. The four volumes of his journalism, critical pieces and letters, collected by his widow and meticulously edited, annotated and indexed, are biography enough. They testify to the fact of Orwell's acknowledged eminence, and will give him semiofficial status as the Great Survivor of the '30s, as the man who knew what it was like to live Inside the Whale (the title of his famous essay on Henry Miller) and to resist absorption by the corrosive digestive juices of the British imperial leviathan.
This Jonah was no theoretician. He was, wrote old School Friend Cyril Connolly recently, "a political animal [who] could not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry." Though Orwell was a socialist, the metaphysical system underlying Marxian socialism meant nothing to him, and he had an empirical Englishman's distrust of other philosophical abstractions; to him, the existentialist Sartre was a windbag. But he also held an immense advantage over English intellectuals in politics who, by comparison, seem like dishonest children.