BOOKS
DECENCY AND DEATH
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON . By George Orwell. Hor–
co,urt. Br.ace. $2.75.
COMING UP FOR AIR. By George Orwell. Harcourt. Brace. $3.00.
BU RMESE DAYS. By George Orwell. Harcourt. Brace. $3.00.
In an article on Arthur Koestler, written in 1944, George
Orwell complained that no Englishman had as yet published a worth–
while novel on the theme of totalitarian politics-nothing to equal
Darkness At N oon-"Because
there is almost no English writer to whom
it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside." Five years
later, with the publication of
1984,
he had become the one exception.
He had not
in
the interval gained any more intimate an acquaintance
with the subject; the year he spent fighting with the POUM
in
the
Spanish Civil War was his closest approach to it. The success of
1984
must therefore be attributed to his imagination. But this is precisely
the quality in which all his previous work had been weakest.
Orwell was fair, honest, unassuming and reliable in everything
he wrote. These qualities, though desirable in every writer, are specifically
the virtues of journalism; and Orwell, it seems to me, had always
been at his best, not in the novels or political articles, but in casual
pieces of the kind he wrote for the
London Tribune
in his column, "As
I Please." He was a writer in a small way-a different matter from the
minor writer, to whose virtuosity and finesse he never aspired. This
lack of literary manner enabled him to give himself directly, if some–
times feebly, to the reader; he held back his feelings (even in his account
of the Stalinists' responsibility for the Barcelona street fighting in
Homage to Catalonia,
his anger does not rise above the note of "You
don't do such things!") but only in the manner of restraint, and there
was nothing hypocritical or false about him. He had all the traditional
English virtues, of which he made the traditional compression into one:
decency. When he died, I felt as many of his readers who never knew
him must have done, that this was a friend gone.
Down and Out in Paris and London,
one of his earlier books, is
the steady Orwell who underwent no apparent development. Recorded
here are some of the worst days of his life when he was unemployed,
