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Orwell did not view Nineteen Eighty-Four as his last will and testament, a Swiftian condemnation of humanity, as some, including Connolly, have claimed ("He was a dying man and he knew it"). Muggeridge remembers his last conversation with Orwell: "He said, 'I have some more books to write.' " Soon afterward, he married Sonia Brownell, a beautiful woman 15 years his junior, in his hospital room. T.O. Fyvel, another friend, recalls Orwell's saying, "When one is married, one has more reason to live." He died three months later, on Jan. 21, 1950.
Where did he stand, finally? He called himself "a man of the left," realizing that most of his allies shied away from or repudiated his maverick views. In fact, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have long been embraced by the right as anti-revolutionary tracts. Yet such terms shift with time; what was left 20 years ago could be mainstream now and reactionary by 2001, or vice versa. Orwell's work has proved itself, with some exceptions, grounded on bedrock.
His four published novels before Animal Farm are readable but minor performances. His women characters are particularly stiff and lifeless. He was not an imposing political theorist; his strength lay in recognizing problems, not in propounding detailed solutions.
His greatest accomplishment was to remind people that they could think for themselves, at a time in this century when humanity seemed to prefer taking marching orders. He steadfastly valued ideals over ideology. He tried to strike a correct socialist attitude toward Dickens, and could not quite pull it off: "His whole 'message' is one that looks at first glance like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent." But the sentiment, he concluded, "is not such a platitude as it sounds." Indeed, for all the pessimism attributed to him posthumously, Orwell had an abiding, almost pious faith in the ability of that fragile, querulous species, humankind, to correct its deficiencies by the most radical process of all: thinking. In The Road to Wigan Pier he expressed the belief that "economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters." "Political chaos," he continued to stress, "is connected with the decay of language . . . one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end." To that end, Orwell devoted his life. His work endures, as lucid and vigorous as the day it was written. The proper way to remember George Orwell, finally, is not as a man of numbers—1984 will pass, not Nineteen Eighty-Four—but as a man of letters, who wanted to change the world by changing the word. A word that surely requires alteration today has been misused since the '50s. The author's name is not a synonym for totalitarianism. It is in fact the spirit that fights the worst tendencies in politics and society by using a fundamental sense of decency—Orwellian, in the best sense of the word.
—By Paul Gray.
Reported by Anne Hopkins/New York and John Saar/London