NEW YORK TIMES
BOOK REVIEW By BARRY GEWEN
Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to George Orwell’s “Diaries,” among the last things he wrote before his death, is meant as a tribute to one of the writers he most admired, but it can also be taken as a warning. “Read with care, these diaries . . . can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmitted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” Read with care? What is Hitchens trying to tell us with that phrase? A few sentences later we have: “This diary is not by any means a ‘straight’ guide or a trove of clues and cross-references.” About the creative process that went into constructing one of the novels, Hitchens says Orwell “gives us little or no insight.” Most tellingly, he refers to the entries as “meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings.” Read with care, Hitchens’s introduction alerts Orwell devotees that they should not expect the same pleasures from this book that they get from other of his writings.
Illustration by Rodrigo Corral; photograph by Associated Press
DIARIES
By George Orwell
Edited by Peter Davison
597 pp. Liveright Publishing. $39.95.
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Associated Press
Get-on-with-it imperturbability: Middle Temple Lane in London in May, 1941.
This collection contains all 11 of the diaries available to us, along with entries from two of Orwell’s notebooks. Additional diaries may exist. Peter Davison, who has scrupulously prepared these documents and was the lead editor of Orwell’s 20-volume “Complete Works,” says that “it is as certain as things can be that a 12th, and possibly a 13th diary” — seized by authorities during the Spanish Civil War — “are secreted away in the N.K.V.D. Archive in Moscow.” Orwell may also have kept a journal at the start of his professional life in the 1920s, when he was an imperial official in Burma, but that is almost certainly lost.
Much of the material here can be found in other sources. “Hop-Picking Diary,” describing Orwell’s experiences as a migrant farm laborer in 1931, appeared in the popular four-volume anthology “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.” The diary from a journey to grimy northern England in the mid-’30s, with its notes on slag heaps, dirt trains, blackened houses and half-naked miners kneeling at the coal face, was worked up into Orwell’s book “The Road to Wigan Pier”; the entry that starts “In the early morning the mill girls clumping down the cobbled street, all in clogs, make a curiously formidable sound” is polished for the book into the attention-grabbing opening line, “The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.”
The most substantive of Orwell’s diaries are two that he kept during the early years of World War II, against a backdrop of momentous events like the Dunkirk retreat, the fall of France and the London blitz (Orwell’s apartment building was damaged by a German bomb). Orwell was serving in the Home Guard and working for the BBC, all the while complaining to himself about the disorganization and inefficiencies he had to endure. Yet he describes a people determined to keep to their daily routines despite the German attacks. Almost metaphorically, Orwell’s barber continued shaving his customers even in the middle of the air raids, leading a disconcerted Orwell to muse: “One day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody’s face off.” Mainly, Londoners tried to avoid any talk of current events: when he went to his pub one evening, Orwell found the radio silent, because, as the owner told him, “they’ve got the piano playing in the other bar, and they won’t turn it off just for the news.” The common-man side of Orwell was encouraged by his countrymen’s get-on-with-it imperturbability, the puritanical side of him exasperated.
At some point, Orwell hatched a plan to turn his wartime diaries into a book, but his longtime publisher, Victor Gollancz, concerned about giving offense, quashed the idea. Gollancz was right to worry. Though Orwell patriotically writes that he would rather die for England than become a refugee or expatriate, a great many of the entries display what, in another context, he called “my natural hatred of authority.” Britain’s rulers were treacherous, its generals imbeciles. “If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly.” Even Churchill should be removed from the scene, possibly by means of a German torpedo or mine during his travels. This wasn’t exactly the kind of stuff to lift people’s spirits, and the British public never did get the chance to react to Orwell’s sneers and crotchets. Not then, anyway. But apart from some minor omissions, the wartime diaries have long been available in “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters,” and a few years ago George Packer reprinted a good portion of one of them in his Orwell collection, “Facing Unpleasant Facts.” The surprises this new book contains lie elsewhere.
What will not be familiar to Orwell readers are the “domestic” diaries, kept largely during a sojourn in Morocco in the 1930s and on the Scottish island of Jura near the end of his life. These constitute about half the book and are surely what caused Hitchens to reach for the adjective “laborious.” Orwell once said: “Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening.” It’s true. These pages bloom with flowers — dahlias, sunflowers, nasturtiums, marigolds; also vegetables — lettuce, radishes, carrots, spinach, turnips, cabbage. Animals, too, got his attention: goats, donkeys, rabbits, lobsters. Orwell recorded the first lizard he saw in Morocco, and the habits of the geese he kept on Jura (they were “not grazing much”). With his acute eye for detail and his remarkable reserves of patience, it’s clear he would have made an outstanding naturalist. But reading page after page of these undigested observations is rather like watching a star athlete perform two hours of calisthenics: you are impressed with the demonstration of the man’s ability, but would prefer to hear about it, not experience it.
One subject, apparently, engaged Orwell more than any other. On Oct. 12, 1938, he acquired 12 Moroccan hens and started waiting for them to lay. A week later he was still waiting. On Oct. 27 he reports the first egg, then another, and another. Five consecutive diary entries read in their entirety: “11.16.38: One egg. 11.17.38: One egg. 11.19.38: Two eggs. 11.21.38: Two eggs. 11.22.38: One egg.” Other eggs follow. In Jura it was the same: “4 eggs,” “5 eggs,” though now with Orwell’s running tabulation of the total, and with the ever-attentive Davison on hand to tell us when he added incorrectly. At orwelldiaries.wordpress.com, Davison has launched a pre-emptive strike to protect the diaries and the eggs: “I was very conscious of the opportunity it would give to reviewers of a certain ilk to pour scorn on a major edition. Imagine the headlines! ‘A One-Egg Wonder’?” But whatever one’s ilk, even in the case of George Orwell sometimes an egg is just an egg.
Still, scorn must not be poured. The eggs may not make for pleasurable reading, but they, and the marigolds and the lobsters, are a window into the way Orwell’s mind worked. More than one commentator has observed that he was an empiricist’s empiricist, consumed by the thinginess of life. “He taught us what the actual meant,” Robert Conquest said. Lionel Trilling applauded “his simple ability to look at things in a downright, undeceived way.” His “pleasure in solid objects,” as Orwell himself put it, provided the grounding for his politics and morality.
No piece of writing better defined Orwell than the first part of his book “The Lion and the Unicorn,” entitled “England Your England.” Written at the same time as the first wartime diary, it began with the memorable sentence, “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” The war represented an intellectual crisis for him. He had been an antimilitary socialist in the late ’30s, convinced that only a revolution could set Britain right. Now, with those German bombers above, he realized he was a patriot after all. But what kind of patriot? He continued to hate the upper classes and the injustices of capitalism, continued to believe in the necessity of revolution. Insofar as patriotism was equated with God, King and Country or, worse, the preservation of the British Empire, he was against it.
What patriotism meant to Orwell was the ordinary things of his English life — heavy coins, stamp collecting, dart games, an irrational spelling system. In the essay “Notes on Nationalism,” a companion piece to “England Your England,” he said: “By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life.” It was around this same time that he wrote essays in praise of pubs, cricket, even (outlandishly) English cooking. He would lay down his life not for the grandiose abstractions preached by politicians and the clergy but for gardening and warm beer.
Orwell was against abstractions of every kind: fascism, Communism, especially nationalism; “Americanism,” he once said, was a term that could easily be used for totalitarian ends. His socialism was pragmatic, anti-utopian, perhaps little more than an expression of his hope that the conditions of the poor and the powerless could be improved.
Abstractions, he knew, were the enemy of the powerless. They destroyed the diverse particulars of everyday life and necessarily culminated in some type of inhumanity, killing people for the sake of an idea. And because intellectuals were especially susceptible to those “smelly little orthodoxies,” Orwell repeatedly disdained the group to which he so evidently belonged. He placed his faith in common people, who went about their lives without the need for Big Ideas, practicing what he saw as the common people’s singular virtue — decency. Decency didn’t require an idea, let alone an ideology, for validation. It was the morality of the here and now, available to everybody. “One has the right to expect ordinary decency even of a poet,” he said.
Orwell was a populist of sorts, and like any populist he had his dark side. His occasional rants against homosexuals and feminists are anachronisms today. His caustic remark that “a humanitarian is always a hypocrite” sounds a note too sour. But he was a populist with an abiding commitment to openness, which meant, as he conceded, that sometimes one had to fight against the beliefs one was raised with. His larger point, the one he always held on to, was that morality had to begin from the sense of who one actually was, if only to avoid the abstractions that killed. Orwell knew who he was and he told us again and again. He was a friend of the common man who also had an appreciation of James Joyce. He was a socialist with little hope for real change unless decency could somehow prevail. And he was a man who enjoyed gardening and counting his eggs.
Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.
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