Tag Archives: Essays

Book review

Anti-semitism in Britain, by George Orwell, 1945

George Orwell was a boyhood hero of mine. Here was someone prepared to say unpopular things, to go against the flow of public opinion and to speak truth to power. The major novels, 1984 and Animal Farm led me to his earlier work including Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air, and then on to his journalism and essays, all written in that distinctive, clear, very personal voice that seemed to know the answers to all of the important questions. If Orwell thought something was wrong, it probably was, and adopting his position on an issue was a useful guide to being on the right side of the argument. So his thoughts on anti-Semitism in this article, written early in 1945, must surely be worth reading?

It’s not clear what research, if any, Orwell did before writing this essay, nor indeed what specifically prompted him to write it in the first place. He starts his article by reporting a series of anti-Semitic comments overheard on the tube and in shops. Perhaps one of these comments was the trigger? The issue of anti-Semitism itself was unavoidable given the ongoing Holocaust in Europe. The essay was written in February and published in April 1945, just as the war in Europe was ending. It conceivable that this was before the full horror of the Holocaust was widely understood, although Hitler’s determination to exterminate the Jewish people from Europe was hardly a secret (see here for example  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/allied-declaration-on-persecution-of-the-jews.)

The overall tone of the essay is almost conversational, along the lines of Orwell saying ‘here are a few interesting thoughts I would like to share about a topic that has caught my attention’. Rather than simply condemning anti-Semitism, Orwell claims to attempt to understand it, and even goes so far as to acknowledge some anti-Semitic ideas and beliefs within himself. He tentatively identifies the origins of the prejudice in nationalism:

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Antisemitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form.

And concludes that to defeat anti-Semitism we will have to defeat nationalism. For an author famed for the clarity of his expression, the point where Orwell concludes his article on the issue is convoluted to say the least:

“…antisemitism will be definitively cured, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.”

What he doesn’t do is identify any specific features of anti-Jewish prejudice that makes it so insidious and harmful. Equally there is little research in the article, and personal anecdotes only go so far to explore the topic. Much as it pains me to accept it, throughout his previous writings Orwell occasionally expressed anti-Semitic ideas and used anti-Semitic tropes. I am not going to repeat them here – the internet will help you find them easily enough if you are interested. They make painful reading, much like his homophobic comments – casually dismissive and hurtful towards people who are different from him. But while many people go through their lives holding on to their prejudices, Orwell at least had the willingness to confront his own. He recognises his anti-Semitism, and tries to understand its origins and place it in context:

Thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and – though superior in intelligence – slightly deficient in ‘character’. In theory a Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was debarred from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a ‘smart’ regiment in the army. A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time. He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible. About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a taxi with a friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and began a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on a ship and wanting money to get back. His manner and appearance were difficult to ‘place’, and I said to him:

‘You speak very good English. What nationality are you?’

He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: ‘I am a Joo, sir!’

And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly in joke, ‘He admits it openly.’

Later he poses the question this way:

(We should not ask) Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?’ but ‘Why does antisemitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?’ If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s own rationalizations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them. 

It’s an interesting starting point – asking people with anti-Semitic ideas and values to help with understanding the origins of those ideas and values. I’m not convinced Orwell was able to complete the exploration he proposes here – while he retained many Jewish friends for the remainder of his short life, he never acknowledged the pain and harm his thoughtless comments caused, and allowed his diaries to survive for publication with the comments intact (I recognise that may not have been a deliberate plan of course). I accept that he was hardly unique among British writers and intellectuals of the period in having these views, but that is only very partial mitigation. It’s hard to imagine someone writing this piece today when I think we have a better understanding of the causes of racial prejudice in all its forms. Orwell was a product of his time and class as we all are, and passing historical judgment on his views really only takes us so far. It’s also ridiculous to consider his views as monolithic and unchanging over time, when he went to such extraordinary lengths to challenge the ideas and prejudices that he was brought up with. Christopher Hitchens’ fantastic and highly readable essay on Orwell’s progression from bigoted public schoolboy to class-ally is in this context a must-read.

It is sad and hard to process each time one of our childhood heroes is shown to be less than heroic, but there’s no point in trying to ignore their failings either. That doesn’t make Orwell a bad writer, or his ideas less interesting, but the process of seeing him and others as flawed, fallible human beings can be painful.

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Book review

Inside the Whale and other essays, by George Orwell

Inside the Whale and other essays was first published in this format in 1957, but the individuals essays are drawn from across Orwell’s most productive journalistic years, 1936 to 1947. There are nine essays in this collection – first date of publication shown in brackets:

Inside the Whale (1940) starts as a discussion of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, but uses this topic as a springboard to roam far and wide across the literature of the first half of the twentieth century;

Down the Mine (1937) originally formed a chapter in The Road to Wigan Pier and is what is says it is, a description of the physical hardships involved in working down a coal mine;

England Your England (1941) is a discussion of nationalism in the context of the early years of the second World War;

Shooting an Elephant (1936) – in this well-known essay Orwell describes the possibly fictional experience of shooting an elephant while serving in Burma in the Indian Imperial Police, where he went immediately after Eton instead of the more traditional route of university;

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947) is a discussion of Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare;

Politics in Literature (1946) is an extended review of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels;

Politics and the English Language (1946) is a surprisingly conservative discussion of how debased the English language has become due to the declining political situation;

The Prevention of Literature (1945) works well as a companion piece to the previous essay as it discusses the impact of totalitarianism on literature;

Boys’ Weeklies (1940) which is a more light-hearted review of the comics published for boys in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Each essay had previously been published elsewhere and had also been collected in different formats. They work well together in this collection, completing one another and giving a examples of some of Orwell’s best journalism of this his defining period.

Taking these essays as a whole, my first impression was how incredibly interesting Orwell must have been as a person to speak to. His mind jumps across so many different topics and he always has a contentious, well-framed position. He never sits on the fence. Some of the positions he sets out here, such as his arguments about the use of plain English in political writing, have stayed with me since I first read them in the 1970’s. You might not agree with what he says – and sometimes I think he is just adopting a position to be controversial for its own sake – but it’s always interesting. It’s also possible to open a page at random and find dozens of thoughtful comments on an important issues. Here are some examples – but the book is absolutely full of them, and choosing some representative examples was incredibly difficult:

It was an age of eagles and of crumpets, facile despairs, backyard Hamlets, cheap return tickets to the end of the night. Inside the Whale

“He (Henry Miller) is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, is fiddling with his face towards the flames“. Inside the Whale

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.” England Your England

(On the impact of imperialism on the ‘white man with his gun’) “He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it” Shooting an Elephant.

These essays are very specific to the time and place from which they were published – the end of Empire and the outbreak of the second World War; the rise of the dictators and for a while what looked like it might be the end of civilisation as we knew it. They are dominated by the oppressive political climate in which internationally things looked very bleak, the war loomed and then broke, and progressive ideas struggled to survive.

“While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out. It will either last several years and tear Western civilisation to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all.” Inside the Whale.

It is interesting how little Orwell seemed to have celebrated or been inspired by the election of the radical Labour Government at the end of the war. Although he obviously wrote about these events none of his great journalism touches upon the creation of the NHS, the nationalisation of swathes of British industry, and the introduction of the modern welfare state, even though these steps were an attempt to address many of the social injustices he had written about in, for example, The Road to Wigan Pier. His focus by then was the international situation, and in particular the spread of Soviet Communism. The extent to which Orwell was rehearsing themes that would come to dominate his last two great novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1950) comes across very strongly in these essays. For example in The Prevention of Literature he speculates on what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. “Perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum? It would not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.” This theme was brought more vividly to life in 1984 with the creation of the ‘ficdep’ and ‘pornosec’ departments. That’s one of the great strengths of these two masterpieces – they bring together complex political ideas that Orwell had been writing about for some time, and express them in a wonderfully clear way.

I think it’s appropriate that the collection ends with Boys’ Weeklies. This is a class based analysis of boys’ comics, with particular reference to the Billy Bunter Greyfriars stories. It was originally published in the monthly literary magazine Horizon, and argues that the rigid structure these stories employ was needed because “a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week. Consequently they have to be written in a style that is easily imitated — an extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style, quite different from anything else now existing in English literature.” While Orwell was unquestionably right about the repetitive style the stories used, he was completely wrong in his speculation that the author – Frank Richards – was a pseudonym used by a series of writers. The following month Horizon published one of the most devastating ripostes to an essay I have ever seen which includes a line by line reply to virtually every point made, plus this magnificently understated take down:

“Mr Orwell finds it difficult to believe that a series running for thirty years can possibly have been written by one and the same person. In the presence of such authority I speak with diffidence: and can only say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am only one person, and have never been two or three people”

I highly recommend reading Richards’ reply in full (to be fair it was included in Orwell’s collected essays letters and journalism when they published by Penguin in four volumes a few years/decades back) as an example of how to write a dignified demolition of what to be fair was just an attempt to write something interesting about a light-hearted subject.

Finally, I wanted to close on Down a Mine. Orwell has rightly been condemned in recent times for his casual homophobia – he often used homophobic language to describe gay men in particular. But even he was not immune to the attractions of the male form:

“It is only when you see miners down the mine and naked that you realize what splendid men, they are. Most of them are small (big men are at a disadvantage in that job) but nearly all of them have the most noble bodies; wide shoulders tapering to slender supple waists, and small pronounced buttocks and sinewy thighs, with not an ounce of waste flesh anywhere. In the hotter mines they wear only a pair of thin drawers, clogs and knee-pads; in the hottest mines of all, only the clogs and knee-pads.” Down a Mine.

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