ORWELL RECONSIDERED
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seems designed to tum one against it. It may make people-at any
rate those with strong enough defenses--kinder, gentler, nicer, but
only in the way in which being adrift on a raft is supposed to bring
out the best in people: because of its awfulness. Just before the pas–
sage I have quoted, Orwell attempts some sort of eulogy of working–
class family life, but in doing so it is noticeable that he falls into the
crudest kind of sentimentality:
Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the
open range and dances mirrored
in
the steel fender, when Father, in
shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair on one side of the fire reading
the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and
the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog
lolls roasting himself on the rag mat-it is a good place to
be
in...
And when Orwell pulls himself out of sentimentality, it is only to
take refuge in a preciosity that is no less disagreeable: the scene de–
scribed above he praises as exemplifying "the perfect symmetry as
it
were of a working class family at its best."
The other point about Orwell's championship of proletarian
culture is the difficulty of reconciling it with his socialism. For if
working class culture is all that superior, it is hard to see why it
ought not to be retained: yet, equally, it is hard to see how it can
be retained, if one abolishes the material conditions on which it
must to some extent at least depend. Orwell- who was never a man
to pass over situations that were awkward for his views, though he
did not always see their full implications--deals with this problem
when he considers the rehousing of some of the slum inhabitants of
Wigan. The rehousing Orwell regarded as a monstrosity: it was
"ruthless and soulless." The new inhabitants had been taken out
of their old homes, removed from their friends, their shops, their
pub, and put down in a bleak inhospitable estate, miles from where
they worked, with no centre of social life, where they weren't even
allowed to do many of the things they most wanted to, such as
keeping pigeons. Of course Orwell admits in the end that the
change
is
a change for the better, but by now it is obscure to see
how it can be so on his view of the matter. Nowadays, as I men–
tioned earlier, there is a school of thought that tries to combine
