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PARTISAN REVIEW
work was to be." Unfortunately, poverty too has a way of becoming one
of Mr. Atkins' topics, rather than a passionate motif in Orwell's career
that set him apart from almost every other writer of his time.
Worse still, Mr. Atkins accepts the annoying assumption of so
much modern criticism that a writer must be "explained" in terms other
than those he employs. Orwell, writes Mr. Atkins, "had only to think
of something apparently beyond endurance and he could not rest until
he had endured." Both true and well said; but one would suppose that
for certain kinds of men no more need be said, their sense of identifica–
tion with the weak and the humiliated being an experience sufficiently
authentic to require no psychological "translation." Mr. Atkins, how–
ever, cannot refrain from a half-hearted effort to relate Orwell's pas–
sionate interest in poverty to such notions as "mortification" and "maso–
chism." Not many people can embrace the style of life toward which
Orwell strained, but we should at least have sufficient imagination to
honor those who do.
Nor does this have anything to do with "sainthood." All the talk
in England about Orwell having been, as V. S. Pritchett put it, "the
conscience of his generation," or, as Mr. Atkins writes, "a social saint,"
seems to me beside the point. The more one learns about Orwell, the
more one begins to doubt that he was unusually virtuous or good; but
it is only the old maids of criticism, hunting for stray bits of morality
as if they were pieces of tatting left in the parlor, who are likely to
worry about that. Neither the selflessness nor the patience of the saint,
certainly not the indifference to temporal passion that would seem a goal
of sainthood, can be found in Orwell. He himself wrote: "No doubt
alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things a saint must avoid, but saint–
hood is a thing that human beings must avoid."
As a "saint" Orwell would not trouble us, for by now we have
learned how to put up with saints: we canonize them and thus are rid
of them. In fact, one sometimes suspects that behind the persistent
liberal effort to raise Orwell from the mire of polemic to the clear
heavens of sainthood there is an unconscious desire to render him harm–
less. It is as a man and a writer that OrwelI makes his challenge to the
writers who follow him. He stirs us by his example, by his all too human
and truculent example. For he stood in basic opposition to the modes
and assumptions that have since come to dominate American and English
literary life. He was a writer who rejected the middle class pattern–
early in life he had looked into it and found it dead-and could never
bring himself to abide by the rituals of Good Form; he knew how empty,
and often how filled with immoderate aggression, the praise of modera-
