Orwell: Still Reading

When I finished Homage to Catalonia, I continued reading Orwell's essays and diaries, then I started Inside the Whale, his most extended work of literary criticism, other than his essay on Dickens. As a literary critic, Orwell is somewhat idiosyncratic in that he tends to focus most of his attention on politics and social and economic issues, although he is certainly not a Marxist. Inside the Whale is a rather extended explanation of the appeal of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which had been published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, but was not widely or legally available in England or the U.S. Orwell acknowledges that many readers are offended and turned off by Miller's obscenity, but insists that there is much more to his writing than his famous obsession with sex. What attracts Orwell most to Henry Miller, whom he had met in Paris on his way to the Spanish Civil War, which Miller had no interest in other than perhaps curiosity, was Miller's ability to record the truth of ordinary human existence, somewhat in the manner of Joyce's Ulysses, but with far less art and affectation. Orwell was under no illusion regarding Miller's quality as an author, but admired his honesty in the face of his helplessness and political impotence. Miller told Orwell that it was pointless to try to improve the situation in Spain, that failure was inevitable there and elsewhere. Of course, Orwell felt differently, but he recognized the arguments in Miller's favor, and described his attitude as somewhat akin to Jonah swallowed by a whale, and rather liking the passive and also womb-like comforts of such a predicament. Orwell wondered if we  haven't all been swallowed, but only Miller has recognized that acceptance is our only rational alternative. Miller, Orwell observes, is neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but nevertheless a happy man.

But the attraction of Inside the Whale, is not so much Orwell's insights into Henry Miller, which Karl Shapiro points to as being among the earliest and most perceptive, but his characterization of the literary establishments of the 1920s and 1930s in England. But there is even more than that: such as a wonderful chapter explaining the appeal of A.E. Housman's "hard cheese" school of poetry. When I read Martin Green's Children of the Sun, I knew that Green had earlier been a serious student of Orwell, but I had not appreciated the extent to which Green's views on that same period of English literary history had been formed and influenced by Orwell. Certainly, Green goes much deeper into the roles of decadence and aestheticism and dandyism, but Orwell points the way to the importance of the public schools, the revulsion amongst the young towards the First World War and the older generation, and the flight from seriousness and politics. Orwell also notes the turn toward politics and engagement in the next generation, that of Auden and Macneice.

As I have continued reading Orwell's essays and non-fiction prose, I have come to recognize the enormous gap in my education created by my earlier neglect. There is something so straightforward in Orwell's observations, not only of politics and economics, but of literary and social history. More than anything, he was a keen observer and an honest recorder of his time, and while he is free with his own opinions and interpretations, many of which I tend to share, he is also open to other views and to correction of his own. He often points out where his earlier views or attitudes have either changed or been altered by later experiences or more considered thought or analysis. Reading Orwell turns out to be the best way to get back to that earlier time I find myself interested in. I shall stick with him for a while longer and see where I come out. I feel decidedly that if I am indeed stuck inside a whale, it is, as Orwell suggested of Henry Miller's, a whale through which I am catching a glimpse of the world outside, a world that hasn't really changed all that much since Orwell observed and described it.