Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens, 2002
This extended essay on the continuing significance of Orwell as a writer and thinker is a tour de force of analytical writing by the late, great, Christopher Hitchens. Orwell has been seconded to a wide range of causes over the years, by cold warriors, reactionaries and revolutionaries, but I don’t think anyone has written as clearly nor as intelligently about his work as Hitchens does here.
There’s an immense but loosely worn scholarliness about this analysis. Hitchens has not only read and remembered virtually everything Orwell ever wrote, (and in case I haven’t mentioned it before that was an enormous, prodigious amount), but he seems also to have read everything written about Orwell. What is wonderful is that this isn’t an account bogged down in footnotes and irrelevant detail. Heavyweight critics of Orwell from left and right are batted away with ease. If I found some of the debates about Orwell’s legacy hard to follow at points, due to the arcane academic language used by some critics, (in complete contrast to Orwell’s one writing of course) I nevertheless felt in safe hands in Hitchens company.
A lesser critic would have been tempted to call this text ‘Why Orwell was Right’ but Hitchens is a far subtler writer than that. He appreciates that the idea of Orwell having a fixed set of ideas that never changed throughout his life and which can be tested by later critics as either correct or otherwise is facile – Orwell changed his mind constantly, as any human being will, particularly as he lived through the political turbulence of the 1930’s and 40’s. Orwell was at heart a journalist, and he frequently opened his articles with provocative statements intended to engage the reader rather than as statement of positions he genuinely felt. Orwell’s early anti-Semitism and later attempts to address the issue within himself is charted fairly here, as is his more troubling and apparently life-long homophobia. Orwell the flawed but ultimately heroic author and man emerges more clearly from these pages than from most of his biographies.
Hitchens is very good on Orwell’s novels, and their relationship to the rest of his work. The earlier works before Animal Farm are considered fairly but also I think accurately as a minor contribution to his work. He describes (page 186) Coming Up for Air, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Burmese Days wonderfully thus: “These four pre-war efforts constitute a sort of amateur throat clearing” which is exactly how I have always thought of them – like an orchestra warming up discordantly before the symphony begins. Hitchens writes of Orwell’s final masterpiece (page 190) 1984 “It is the first and only time that his efforts as a novelist rise to the level of his essays”. That might be , in fact almost certainly is, hyperbole, and is totally unfair with regard to Animal Farm, but the essays are much under-appreciated, beyond one or two pieces such as Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging which are still taught in schools.
Despite this very positive reaction I still found something to disagree with on almost every page. That’s going to happen with polemical writing and is part of the fun! Some points of fact were I think missed (for example Hitchens claims Orwell was right to deduce (in his essay, Boys’ Weeklies, published on Horizon) that the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter stories were written by more than one person, whereas Frank Richards’s wonderful response to Orwell’s essay is rightly cherished and to my knowledge never disproven) but equally Hitchens invites disagreement and I suspect would have relished it. Perhaps he was not being deliberately controversial, but it is clear he never backed down from a fight either.
For Orwell enthusiasts this is a must-read. For anyone looking for an introduction to Orwell this might be quite advanced – it assumes a fairly extensive knowledge of Orwell’s life and works – but there are many far worse places to start.
The Reading Bug 