BOO KS
105
of living and writing, and only a
critic
who understands this can achieve
a fruitful relation to
him.
This would mean to trace his career not
in
conventional biographical terms, but as a series of moral and intel–
lectual crises, the painful confrontations of a man who was driven to
plunge
into
every vortex of misery or injustice that he saw, yet had an
obvious distaste for the trumpery of modern politics.
For such an approach, however, the critic would have to be less
moderate in mind and temper than Mr. Atkins; his imagination would
have to be a bit more fiery and perhaps a little less liberal. He would
have to take very seriously, even if only during the act of composition,
the ideas and problems that Orwell himself took seriously; and he
could not keep hinting, as Mr. Atkins all too often does, though prob–
ably without quite realizing it himself, that when all is said and done
Orwell was the product of a fanatic age upon which we can now afford
to look back and look down. Mr. Atkins is too cozy with the spirit of
the times, too much a decent Englishman who seems, half the time, to
be wondering how George-who did, after all, go to Eton-got himself
mixed up with the messy fanaticisms of Europe.
The Orwell who emerges from Mr. Atkins' pages is a mildly intel–
ligent, mildly gifted and quite unimportant writer, notable, most of all,
for a gray quality called "decency." Decency, explains Mr. Atkins, "is
based on respect for the other person, and respect derives from love–
not sexual passion, of course, but the quieter passion, or conviction that
all men are brothers and that unless we keep this in mind we will slip
into a belief that all men are enemies, with the inevitable results."
One would not like to seem opposed to so wholesome a quality as de–
cency, but it needs to be said that the Orwell who is being created
here-the decent man, the good man-was not the one, he could not
have been the one, who wrote 1984. Mr. Atkins' description, which is
typical of both his thought and his style, transforms Orwell into a
down-at-the-heels Boy Scout who voted Labor. In its limpness of thought
and phrasing, it is exactly the sort of lukewarm praise that is calculated
to make Orwell unread in the next ten years. (The limp phrase often
seems to have become the last defense of British culture.)
Still, there are good things in the book. Mr. Atkins appreciates Or–
well's "personal conviction that failure was the only virtue." (Hardly
a belief, however, that is characteristic of the merely "decent" man!)
And he can write, with unusual vigor, that Orwell "embraced poverty
as other writers have embraced a woman and with the same result: his
spirit was fired and he was no longer in any doubt about what his true
