ORWELL RECONSIDERED
85
fully that
it
is a necessary truth that one can only ever see the
surface of
things.
Perhaps the greatest difference between the two writers is that
Orwell subscribes to, and is guilty of, the great fallacy of natural–
ism: the belief that the essence of the things in time can be con–
veyed by reference to the transient and the ephemeral. It is easy
enough to believe this. It is easy enough to think that if you
mention the P.A.C, and Worcester sauce and Camera and lounge
lizards, then you have forever conveyed the feel of 1936. It is easy
enough to think this when you write it, and easy enough to go on
thinking it when a few months later you read the proofs of what
you have written. It is only the reader reading it twenty years later
who has his doubts, and twenty years further on those doubts are
confirmed when the book is read either by people with "special
in–
terest"
in
the
period
or by no one at all. Perhaps Orwell would
have thought that this didn't matter: perhaps he would have
thought that he wrote
in
the first place for his own contemporaries,
and that
if
by any chance someone at a later date wanted to read
him,
so much the better, but this wasn't in the calculation. Orwell,
I say, might have thought this, but I doubt if in all honesty he did.
Because I think that ever since the concept of literature was in–
vented, these have not been the thoughts of writers.
The matter may be put like this: Orwell, I suggested, address–
es himself primarily to the eye and the nerves. It is this that marks
him
out as a journalist, and good or honest journalists are distin–
guished from bad or dishonest journalists by the fact that they
would not pretend to be appealing elsewhere. The limitation of the
method is that two areas of the human constitution toward which
literature is traditionally directed are ignored: the head and the
.heart. By contrast
Christ Stopped at Eboli
in its quiet, gentle, un–
pretentious way never leaves either of these two areas untaxed or
unaddressed for long. That is what makes
it
a moving book: while
The
Road to Wigan Pier
is at its best a maddening one: a book to
send one mad with rage and indignation and shame.
And that of course is its
aim.
Orwell
in
writing
The Road to
Wigan
Pier
was writing a polemical book whatever else he was also
