RICHARD WOLLHEIM
that
if
one doesn't know them directly, by acquaintance, one is
never going to obtain knowledge of them by description.
And yet I think there is something in Orwell's style or manner
that does exacerbate this problem for him, and it is what I have
called his journalism. To see what I mean, you have only to com–
pare
The Road to Wigan Pier
with another book about modem
poverty: Carlo Levi's
Christ Stopped at Eboli.
Levi also has taken
for his subject people who simply by virtue of the physical condi–
tions of their existence have placed themselves beyond the under–
standing of the eclucated. Indeed of the two those about whom
Levi writes are poorer, more backward, more isolated from and
ignorant of modern concerns and interests, and yet I think that at
the end of his book one knows-I don't just mean that one has the
feeling
or
sensation
of knowing, but that one actually
knows-more
about the half-starved superstitious peasants of Lucania than one
does after reading Orwell about the unemployed of Wigan. And
the reason for this is, quite simply, that whereas one book is a work
of journalism, the other is a work of literature: not high literature
perhaps, but literature.
From the very beginning the difference is evident. Levi starts
from a position that is somewhat back from his subject, and it is
only slowly, gradually that he works his way towards, and then
into, it: all the while bringing his reader with
him,
neither drag–
ging behind him nor rushing ahead. Where Orwell is knowing,
Levi is informative. He takes nothing for granted: he even tells one
on the first page of the book what the word
"christiano"
means in
the usage of the uneducated, which is something that an alert
tourist to Italy can pick up for himself. But when he explains some–
thing, he does so as, one feels, the peasants he is writing about
would if they could: when, for instance, he recounts the strange
beliefs that the peasants hold about wolves and gnomes, it is only
external evidence that tells one that these beliefs aren't also his. On
the other hand, when Orwell tells one something about what his
working-class people think or feel-and it is amazing how rarely
he refers to anything except the physical terms of their life-he
does so in a way that is striking but
external:
he reminds one force-
