51b
PARTISAN REVIEW
style of ease and understatement, the disquietude of
Burmese Days
worked out of it. But this does not do the novel much good, as it
fail s to catch the anxiety of the pre-war days. The hero, George Bowling,
running out on his job and family for a breather before the war which
he knows is coming, refers to himself as a typical middleaged suburban
bloke, and Orwell, for the greater part of the book, is satisfied to treat
him
at this level. But his concern with politics h ad apparently been
getting ahead of his style. Where Orwell's sense of politics in
Burmese
Days
was of little more than incidental value, in C
oming
Up
for Air
it has become the source of the whole book. This, together with the
continuing weakness of the novelist's imagina tion, accounts for such
passages as the one in which Bowling, inspecting the shot motor of his
car, compares it to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover, Orwell's
politics suddenly appears to be out of joint. (A pity that it h ad not been
more so. It is sometimes an advantage for a political writer to lose
his grasp of politics, for the unrea lity of his observations brings him so
much nearer to experience. But this, too, had to wait till 1984.) Bowling's
holiday consists in a reurn to his boyhood village, which he finds un–
recognizably overgrown with fac tories and ugly housing developments.
The values of his youth, Bowling realizes, have vanished for good.
But this feeling is presented in such strength, it subver ts the politics to
a conservative tone. T he decency which Orwell had linked, at one
level, with the Socialist movement, in which he saw its only chance
of surviving, now seems to belong entirely to the laissez-fai re days
preceeding the first World War with their unshaken social traditions,
the slower pace, the less highly developed technology. T his again may
be merely a failure of imagination, Orwell a t as great a loss to know
wha t to do with a theme as with a character; but it also suggests that
the failure came of a division deep in him. H e was a radical in
politics and a conservative in feeling.
.
Though h e continued to write his political articles and casual pieces
in the same informal and di sarming style, as though nothing were
happening, his fee lings were getting the better of him. This, though I
have no evidence for it, I must suppose to be the case on the strength
of the fact that he was for many years a sick, and during the writing
of 1984, a dying, man. His style, the character of the man, did not
allow conflicts to appear at the surface, which had to remain undis–
turbed. H e kept on writing in the easy manner that disarmed the
reader of any suspicion of conflict, remaining empirical and optimistic
all the time that he was turning over a metaphysics of evil.
A dying man, one may expect, will find consistency his last eon-
