STEVEN MARCUS
47
terrible war; and finally, isolation and virtual self-mortification on the
primitive island of Jura in the Hebrides after World War Two - all of
these preoccupations were connected to tendencies in Orwell's psyche,
whose expression was partly unconscious and at least equally in part
neurotic and self-destructive. Yet it is how Orwell managed to create
historical, literary, and political significance out of such overdetermined
choices that is of more genuine interest - and how, especially in his non–
fictional and autobiographical prose, he was able to enlist his deepest
conflicts to at least in some degree momentarily transcend them, as he
also largely does in
Animal Farm
and 1984. It is this quasi-conscious cre–
ative use of his neurosis that makes Orwell recognizable not merely as a
writer but distinctly recognizable as a modern as well.
As an illustration of what might be needed for a full-scale literary
and cultural analysis of Orwell as a modern writer of sustained historical
importance, we may regard very briefly one set of impulses in him and
how, embedded in a specific group of biographical and cultural circum–
stances, they were worked out and transmuted into writing that is of
permanent interest. As I have already noted, Orwell's five years as a
colonial police officer and administrator had left him with a burden of
guilt, confusion, self-loathing, and undischarged anger and aggressiveness.
It
had also brought closer to the surface his desire to become a writer, a
lifelong ambition that he had consciously frustrated and displaced during
his years in Burma. When he returned to England and Europe, these in–
ner circumstances began to express themselves in a series of decisions and
actions. In order to apprentice himself as a writer, he abandoned for
temporary periods his identity as a member of the genteel middle classes.
He masqueraded as a vagrant and a tramp and lived for periods on the
road, in casual, workhouse wards and other temporary shelters for the
homeless and destitute that English government and voluntary charitable
institutions had evolved over the previous century. He undertook these
"adventures" both as a form of self-laceration and penitence and as a way
of appropriating material to write about. He consorted with the home–
less, painfully disabled his hands by picking hops, and then promptly
wrote about the experiences. In a similar manner in Paris, he passed him–
self off as penniless, more or less voluntarily chose to starve for days at a
time, and slaved at the lowest and most self-punishing labor he could
find. About the only part of these experiences (apart from the unexam–
ined urges that compelled him to seek them in the first place) that was
involuntary was his hospitalization with bronchitis and pneumonia - an
occurrence that he also turned to capital use in his unforgettable essay,
"How the Poor Die."
The chief result of these strategies of behavior was his first book,
