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In these volumes, it is the nonpolitical pieces, diaries, letters and odd bits on diverse subjects that most hold the mind. Orwell was a classic Englishman, full of quirks. This shines through every line he wrote, whether on the puzzling sex life of the common toad who "salutes the coming of spring [and] after his long fast, has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent," or on the "modern habit of some writers who describe lovemaking in detail. . .It is something that future generations will look back on as we do on things like the death of Little Nell." He discussed hop pickers in Kent; nit pickers in the academic world of Oxbridge; the habits of male prostitutes in Trafalgar Square and intellectual prostitutes in the BBC's Portland Place. Down and Way Out. By all the laws of bloodlines and training, George Orwell should have been a Blimp. Born Eric Blair, into a military-official family, he went on scholarship to a spartan prep school designed to groom likely lads for their destined place in the Establishment. Like any dutiful upper-class English boy, he journeyed East to govern the lesser breeds as an officer in the Burmese police. The experience was decisive. His sketch Shooting an Elephant is a picture in microcosm of two imperial centuries of interracial injustice and violence. Unlike most people, he could take it but he could not dish it out. Back home on leave, he quit to become a writer. This was rougher duty than bashing natives, or the even rougher self-imposed duty of feeling guilty about the bashing. He became a sort of European native—one of the very poor. In a religious age, his eagerness not merely to write for the poor but to be poor would have been acknowledged as a saintly passion.
His first book Down and Out in Paris and London records in an oral-tactile way what it was like to be a dish washer, a tramp and a louse-ridden outsider. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he experienced the squalor of hopelessness while his pink pals were pitying the proletariat. At the end of his life, when he was dying of TB, he characteristically decided to treat it on a fog-swept island off Scotland's west coast. Evelyn Waugh visited him on his deathbed, and the reactionary Catholic gourmet saw a rare quality in the socialist agnostic puritan. To Cyril Connolly, Waugh solemnly said: "He is very near to God." Told of this, Orwell sniffed: "Waugh is about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions."
Whatever his standing with God, Orwell had small status among political men. He stood apart from what he called "the smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls." He had enjoyed the painful honor of being wounded by fascists and hunted for his life by the gunmen of the GPU. He had fought against Franco in Spain, but with the wrong mob—the semi-anarchist POUM instead of the Stalinist-sponsored International Brigade. Back in London, he had found himself nudged into near oblivion by the fellow-traveling leftist press. Such experiences toughened his mind and help to explain his standing with today's young left. He was untainted either by success or by the envy and rancor that marks the "liberal" who is merely a power worshiper out of power.