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PARTISAN REVI EW
feeling, dimly so in America but clearly enough in England. The very
writers who celebrate his work and his career find it necessary to do so
in terms that prepare-it isn't a conspiracy, only an impulse-for his
future devaluation. There is something gritty and irascible in Orwell,
perhaps even ill-tempered, which the liberal critic finds unnerving; for
Orwell cannot easily be assimilated to the current notion of what a
well-equipped literary man should be. And if the liberal critic happens
to be ashamed of this response, or too cautious to declare it publicly,
it breaks past his guard to produce a confused, though sometimes amus–
ing, ambivalence of feeling.
By far the fullest and most ambitious study of Orwell yet to appear
is the work of an English critic, John Atkins. Were amiability enough
for writing intellectual biography or literary criticism, Mr. Atkins would
be among the masters. He has worked his way through a great deal of
Orwell's journalism and quotes from it with a pleasing generosity; he
has included a thin but reliable sketch of Orwell's life; he has sum–
marized the contents of his books and gravely fractured them under
subject headings. Many useful things are said by Mr. Atkins, and a
few splendid ones. He writes with an affection for his subject, a good–
natured modesty of spirit, which deserves commendation almost as much
as it is unlikely to arouse enthusiasm.
It
therefore takes a certain
meanness
to add that Mr. Atkins has
written a tepid book, which in its lack of animation and its wintry
devotion to "common sense" tells us a great deal more about the his–
torical moment than about Orwell. The very method Mr. Atkins has
chosen-he arranges Orwell's thought under topical headings, "The
Meaning of Poverty," "The Class System," "Political Commentary,"
"Saints and Sinners"-is itself indicative of a deeply academic outlook,
for it means that problems become transformed into subjects. One some–
times feels that Mr. Atkins is the kind of critic who would write a
study of Moses by working up ten chapters, one for each Commandment.
Not that it is easy to get at a writer like Orwell, whose best work
was often done in fugitive journalism and under the stimulus of politic3.1
dispute. Obviously, the usual method of plowing through a writer's
books in chronological order-that sand-bar on which so many "defini–
tive" studies have sunk-would be disastrous if applied to Orwell, since
not many of his books need or can sustain extended analysis. But there
is, I think, a way out of this difficulty, and that is to conceive of Orwell's
literary career in terms of political and cultural situations to which he
was forced to respond. The idea of pressure is central to Orwell's way
