DECENCY AND DEATH
515
broke and starving. But the tone is substantially the same as that of
the article on boys' weeklies in
Dickens, Dali
&
Others.
The Eton
graduate and former Burma policeman accepts dish-washers and tramps
as his fellow men without condescension and with only a little squeamish–
ness at the filth of his surroundings. He makes no effort to bend his
prose to the sounding of lower depths, and he was to feel no need to
make a special adjustment to the language and problems of political
journalism when he returned to England to gain some recognition as a
writer. Detached yet close observation, dryness, a stamping out of
whatever may once have been the snob in him (yet never at the expense
of the Englishman) and the correlated stubborn attachment to common
sense, to which h e sometimes sacrificed his insight-this made up his
basic journalistic style, unchanged through the years.
In
Burmese Days,
first published a year later in 1934, there is
considerable bitterness as Orwell expresses his disgust with the Indian
Civil Service. This is hardly the same man writing. For once he is
full of contempt, especially toward his hero, John Flory, though the
latter happens to be the only "decent" character in the novel-he is
not bigoted as the rest of the whites, he does not have the Imperial
attitude, he is humane toward the natives. Yet he is a weakling, he
gives way to alcoholism and the unrelieved colonial ennui, and he is
in–
capable of withstanding the corrupt moral pressure of his colleagues;
Orwell cannot forgive him this. His attitude toward this character-in
whom there must have been a good deal of himself-is neither com–
pletely personal nor detached, and here Orwell betrays a fault which,
until 1984, was to remain his greatest as a novelist, a fault of imagina–
tion, in not knowing what to do with a character, once the main traits
and the setting have been provided. (The Burmese jungle, the char–
acter of the natives, their attitude toward the swinish pukka sahibs,
the dances and festivals, the pidgin and official English were all ex–
cellently reported.) Flory, for all the significance a socialist writer might
have given such a characterization, falls into the useless, unimagina–
tive category of the weak liberal-anybody's whipping boy. The only
interesting thing in his treatment of him is that it is so thoroughly
bad-mannered; the mild Orwell makes not the slightest effort to spare
his contempt for the man and ends by having him commit suicide, and
the masochistic suggestion which this carries links Flory, however vague–
ly, with the ultimate characterization of the political hero (Winston
Smith) as he who undergoes infinite degradation. Otherwise one is
still unprepared for 1984.
Coming
Up
for Air,
written in 1938, reverts to the journalistic
