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PARTISAN REVIEW
an almost unbroken string of humiliating defeats, in Africa, Malaya and
now the English Channel itself, the reins of power are still firmly
in
the
hands of Churchill, ·the former admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, the chief
organizer of armed intervention against the infant Russian revolution, the
leader of the British ruling class in smashing the 1926 general strike.
(Orwell has plenty to say about poor old Chamberlain, but is silent on
Churchill.) This great democrat has been able since Dunkirk, further·
more, to turn the government back to the old Tory gang and to emasculate
-true enough with their enthusiastic cooperation-the Labor Party leader–
ship. There has been a gradualist revolution, all right, but in reverse.
Perhaps the clue to this odd combination of acuteness as an observer
and infantilism as a theorist may be found in Orwell's general intellectual
orientation. He reacts so violently against the admittedly great defects
of the leftwing intellectual tradition of the last two decades as to deny
himself as an intellectual. Like Messers Brooks, Mumford, MacLeish and
Chamberlain over here, Orwell is bitterly hostile to both internationalism
and intellectualism, preaching the virtues of patriotism and denouncing
"Europeanized intellectuals." He echoes the Brooks-MacLeish Thesis when
he criticizes the intellectuals for being "negative," "carping" and "irre–
sponsible," and when he writes,
"If
the English people suffered for several
years a real weakening of IJlOrale, so that Fascist nations judged they were
'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage
from the Left was partly responsible." Now it is true that the postwar
Marxist tradition was over-schematic and timidly 'orthodox,' that it under·
estimated psychological and cultural factors and tried to apply a mechani–
cal-materialistic yardstick to everything, and that it was purist to the
point of sterility. But a reaction to the opposite pole is not the solution,
either. A retreat to the kind of common-sense Philistinism which Orwell
embraces in matters of theory seems to me even less calculated to pre·
serve the values we both want to preserve than the sectarian Marxism it
rejects. There are, of course, as I tried to show in my article on Van
Wyck Brooks, deep historical reasons for the rise of this attitude today.
There is a dangerous tendency, shown in several of the comments on the
issue printed in the last number, to assume that it is mostly a matter of
the personal stupidity of Brooks and Co. I would be the last to deny Mr.
Brooks' mental incompetence, but the roots of the matter unfortunately
go much deeper, as we can see when a man of the intelligence and good–
will of Orwell joins the parade.
I'd like to add a few words, finally, on the format of Orwell's book.
Why are British books so much more physically attractive than our own?
And why do short, cheap books-really long pamphlets-apparently "go"
so much better in England than here? First published in February 1941,
this is the first of the "Searchlight Books,'' a series of inexpensive little
pocket books on war issues. It is printed on the pleasantly lightweight
book paper the English use, has a light binding of unbleached cloth,
fits
