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It was no wonder that even in the limited circulation of British "little magazines," Orwell attracted an international following—and a roster of rabid enemies. For though he thought of himself as a thoroughgoing leftist, he was in fact an enemy of all political movements. When other Etonians sought upward mobility, Orwell literally immersed himself in dirty water and coal dust to investigate the lives of the dishwasher and the miner. When his peers went up to London to seek careers, he went to Spain as a correspondent and stayed to fight against Franco's troops. When many fellow leftists sang the praises of the Cominform, he was rude enough to point out that "the thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure it never happened."
During World War II he called pacifists "fascifists"; yet later he pleaded for clemency toward German war criminals. When half the Western world referred warmly to Joseph Stalin as "Uncle Joe," Orwell in 1946 produced his Swiftian satire Animal Farm, with its caricature of a U.S.S.R. where leaders are pigs and their motto is "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."
At the time, much of this seemed sheer perversity, a quixotic desire to be history's odd man out. But the truth of Orwell's observations slowly vindicated him. The writer was first characterized as a crank, then as an apostle of common sense, and at last, in V.S. Pritchett's phrase, "as the wintry conscience of a whole generation."
Still, that generation has long since passed in review. By now, Orwell's perceptions have been duly noted, even by the obtuse. The world no longer needs English journalists to inform it of the obscenities of the Stalin years; the news comes out of Russia itself. The dangers of secrecy and invasions of privacy are piously trumpeted even in Congress. By now, Orwell should be no more than a footnote to a bad time. Instead, he is more readable and more germane than the writers who once overshadowed him.
In part, Orwell's durability is due to his central obsession. It was not politics or personalities that concerned him so much as language itself. In the '30s he saw words bent; in the '40s he chronicled the result: whole governments twisted out of shape. His best work was an attempt to restore the meaning to words, to prove that "good prose is like a window pane." "One ought to recognize," he wrote, "that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."
For most of his professional life Orwell sought to bring about that improvement. His weapons were not formidable. As Lionel Trilling observes, Orwell's pieces excel "by reason of the very plainness of his mind, his simple ability to look at things in a downright undeceived way ... he is not a genius—what a relief! What an encouragement. For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done, any one of us could do."