John Wain on George Orwell

“He was a novelist who never wrote a satisfactory novel, a literary critic who never bothered to learn his trade properly, a social historian whose history was full of gaps. Yet he matters. For as polemic his work is never anything less than magnificent; and the virtues which the polemic kind demands—urgency, incisiveness, clarity and humour—he possessed in exactly the right combination.”

“His political ideas were of the simplest. They were, in character, undisguisedly ethical; he believed in the necessity of being frank and honest, and he believed in freedom for everyone, with no authoritarian rule and no tyrannising, economic or otherwise. These were the twin pillars on which all his ideas rested.”

“Anyone who talked or wrote in vague, woolly language, for instance—language which tended to veil the issues it claimed to be discussing—he denounced as an enemy. The language of free men must, he held, be vivid, candid, truthful. Those who took refuge in vagueness did so because they had something to hide.”

“This is the sort of thing we should remember when we make use of Orwell as an ally in the cold war. Of he course he hated Soviet totalitarianism; of course he wrote a poignant animal-fable to express the tragic plight of the Russian people, caught in its grasp; but that does not mean that every smooth-talking window-dresser of his works, Conservative in politics, Roman Catholic in religion, can claim him as a supporter. Next time you read one of the books or essays put out by these gentlemen, remember Orwell's contemptuous remark about "all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls". In his nostrils, every orthodoxy smelt bad—and he gave his reasons clearly and openly.”

“He was not a revolutionary. He had no hatred of the past, and no confidence that a golden millennium could be created by abrupt political action... Worse still—and this is where Orwell parts company not only with the doctrinaire Left-wing systems of the Continent, but with the New Statesman-reading progressives of N.W.3—he was anti-modern. He aligned himself with Socialism, which naturally tends to see the past as an evil, to be broken away from—naturally, since human history is, undeniably, largely a tale of cruelty, exploitation and injustice. But where the average Socialist cannot wait to throw the past on the dung-heap, Orwell loved it, hankered for it, longingly re-created it in his mind. As an artist, his best passages—indeed, his only passages which gave the genuine, unforced glow of imagination—flower from pure nostalgia. As a political thinker, he is at his most useful, and most zestful, when he is warning us of the hell we could so easily make for ourselves. Orwell's distrust of the steel-and-concrete, streamlined, collectivised future is well known to everyone... It is this distrust, more than anything else, that explains the hatred felt for him by "progressives" with their money on the future and their heads full of Revolution.”