THE WORLD OF GEORGE ORWELL edited by MIRIAM GROSS
182 pages. Simon & Schuster. $12.95.
Coming Up for Air, George Orwell's fictional elegy for a vanished England, includes a celebration of boyhood fishing. The catch is lowly tench and carp, but the thrill comes from sitting by a green pool ringed with beech trees and watching a huge pike "that was basking in the reeds turn and plunge." Pike were beyond the boy's reach: "They'd have broken any tackle I possessed."
Orwell himself was just such an elusive creature. He was a great political journalist, the disquieting conscience of socialism during the '30s and '40s, and finally, a marvelous sort of intellectual Aesop (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four). A description he wrote of Dickens fits Orwell just as well: "A free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."
When he was dying in 1950 of tuberculosis, Orwell asked that his biography not be written, and so far no full-scale life has appeared. Meanwhile, there is this heavily illustrated but rather thin collection of essays and recollections by British friends and critics. It must be said that the big fish sails easily past all 18 contributors, but by now Orwell's admirers are willing to settle for discussions of tackle. Novelist-Critic John Wain and Journalist Ian Hamilton write knowledgeably about Orwell's extraordinary intellectual independence and social concern in the '30s. Critics William Empson and Malcolm Muggeridge provide more personal touches about the last decade of his life. Almost a quarter of the book is pictures. The best, of the saucy boy and the sepulchrally thin young Etonian, are new and fascinating; thereafter the material tends to decline toward portraits of miners, soldiers and literary friends of the author.
Wain is particularly acute on Orwell's impact on his contemporaries. Orwell saw through leftist cant and he saw through Stalin — which tended to make him unpopular with his natural allies.
In 1935 the late leftist publisher Vic tor Gollancz subsidized The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell's classic report on wretched British mining conditions. It turned out to be a hot coal indeed. In a pusillanimous preface, Gollancz deplored Orwell's "general dislike of Russia" and added with evident shock: "He even commits the curious indiscretion of referring to Russian commissars as 'half-gramophones, half-gangsters.' "
In "Arguments Against Orwell" D.A.N. Jones, a longtime contributor to the New Statesman, presents the only openly anti-Orwell opinion. Jones' arguments boil down to the complaint that Orwell was a spoiler who despised committees and wrote "unhelpful articles."
No doubt he did enrage manifesto writers and other sincere activists. In his passion to clarify, he could see both sides of almost every question. If he were alive today, according to Jones, he would be reminding antiwar demonstrators about Viet Cong atrocities.