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PARTISAN REVIEW
out of the question, Blair chose to follow the path pursued by his father
(and other family members) and go out to the distant Empire. His mo–
tives in this undertaking were characteristically mixed, contradictory and
conflicted. On the one side, he was identifying with his family, the
Anglo-Indian imperial tradition, the class system, and the idea of a "safe"
and relatively well-paid adventure (he became an imperial police officer
in Burma); on the other, he was sending himself into exile, loneliness,
and relative hardship, isolating himself in one of the least pleasant out–
posts of British rule, and joining up with an oppressive and despotic sys–
tem that he had consciously ceased to believe in before he ever volun–
teered to serve it.
He remained in Burma for five years, regarding himself inwardly as a
general failure and outcast among other ne'er-do-wells and reprobates.
He continued to be gloomy and morose, and part of his depressive
mood was connected to his awareness that he was actively part of a
tyrannical social order that he both represented and despised. He came,
at least in part, to identify himself as well with the coerced and oppressed
Burmese, while feeling impotent rage against them for their resentful and
teasing behavior towards him and other whites, and virtually equal fury
against himself for occupying an official position that was rightfully
bound to incur such hostility and aggression. In a short time, the land–
scape of Burma and what it represented took on for him, he later
wrote, "the qualities of a nightmare."
Mter five years he found a way, via sick leave, to return to Europe.
He had decided to quit the police and become a writer. He now re–
jected the world of Empire and privilege and chose to embrace the poor
and outcast of England and Europe. These projects were simultaneously
put in motion; Blair/Orwell disguised himself as a tramp and vagrant in
England, and as a penniless foreigner in Paris, where he worked as a
dishwasher. Partly as a matter of penance, reparation, and self-punish–
ment, and partly in search of material to write about, he pursued an
existence of penury and hardship during the years of the Depression.
These experiences, mostly in England, helped to lead him to a belief in
socialism, and this belief led in turn to his volunteering to fight in Spain,
where he was dangerously wounded. He turned all of these events (as
well as virtually everything else that happened to him) into writing al–
most at once. Spain led directly to disillusionment with the Communist
Party, Stalin and Stalinism, even as Orwell remained a loyal but critical–
and idiosyncratic - adherent to the Socialist left. In time, this commit–
ment devolved into an identification with the cause of the Western (and
capitalist) democracies against fascism - although Orwell always remained
a self-confessed socialist of sorts - and to temporary reidentification with
the cause of Empire, during a period of employment as a propagandist
