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ORW LL
English Rebel
ROBERT COLLS
ENGLISH REBEL
ROB RT COLLS
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Robert Colls 2013
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013940846
ISBN 978–0–19–968080–1
Printed in Italy by
L.E.G.O. S.p.A.—Lavis TN
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
I think on the whole you have moved too much away from the
ordinary world into a sort of Mickey Mouse universe where
things and people don’t have to obey the rules of space and
time . . . I have a sort of belly-to-earth attitude and always feel
uneasy when I get away from the ordinary world . . .
(Orwell to Henry Miller, from The Stores,
Wallington, 26 August 1936)
Orwell has had a number of fine biographers. He has also enjoyed the
services of the best editors a writer could hope for, beginning with Ian
Angus and Sonia Orwell in the 1960s and ending magisterially, and
definitively, with Peter Davison’s Complete Works, published by Secker &
Warburg in 1986–7 and 1998. There have been other fine studies of
Orwell that have followed a particular line, or investigated a particular
aspect, or said something special about what sort of man he was or what
sort of reputation he enjoyed. And now that Orwell’s century is begin-
ning to enter the realm of finished past, we can expect works that par-
ody him, or explore him in non-factual and unreal ways.
My book shares a number of these approaches but is offered here as
an intellectual biography that follows his sense of Englishness.
I was encouraged to pursue this theme by two apparently throwaway
remarks by Professor K. O. Morgan. The first came sotto voce at a confer-
ence in Lille in 2004. As I left the podium, Morgan met me by the door.
‘Strange thing that, about Orwell,’ he remarked. ‘You know, putting your
belief in the people.’ I had never thought of Orwell’s commitments in this
way—as something quite strange—and Morgan’s remark came like a bolt
from the blue. It set me thinking. A few years later the Welshman threw
another dart, this time in The Lamb and Flag in Oxford, when he charged
me there and then to go and write The Englishness of George Orwell. I was
told to go forth. Morgan will not remember any of this, but that set me
thinking for the second time. This is the result: George Orwell: English Rebel.
It is always nice to write the Preface at the end (a light at the beginning
of the tunnel) and I want to thank some special people for their part in
helping me write this book. I thank Matthew Cotton, commissioning edi-
tor at Oxford University Press, who never stopped asking about it. He
never stopped asking, it is true, but he was patient as well, and offered sig-
nificant guidance along the way. I thank as well OUP’s anonymous readers
for giving me confidence, and the sort of advice I would never have given
myself. I thank Jeff New, my copy-editor at OUP, for seeing what I wanted
to say—sometimes better than me. I thank Andrew Hawkey, proofreader
for OUP, who helped me make the final cut. I thank Emma Barber, Senior
Production Editor at OUP, who for a time seemed to be everywhere all
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
at once. I thank the Orwell Archive at University College London, which
manages to be friendly, well run, and cramped all at the same time. I thank
my third-year students on the Special Subject at the University of Leicester
who over the years helped me more perhaps than they (or I) knew at the
time. I thank my brother Graham Colls and my friend Albyn Snowdon
for always being on hand to talk about everything and anything in bracing
and stimulating ways. I thank Professor Wolfram Richter and the Gambri-
nus Fellowship for giving me the chance to first air my ideas about Orwell
and Europe in a public lecture at the University of Dortmund. I thank
William Whyte for giving me the opportunity to write an essay in honour
of Ross McKibbin that served as a direct try-out for the Englishness theme
pursued here. I thank De Montfort University for giving me the time to
finish the book, and make good. I thank my colleagues at Leicester and at
De Montfort’s International Centre for Sports History and Culture who
were generous critics: in particular Mike Cronin, Jeremy Crump, Ron
Greenall, and Simon Gunn; and Andrew King, an astrophysicist whose
taste for the truth has led me round more circuits than I care to remember;
and Dick Holt, who felt the full force of the subject. All that said, the book’s
faults are mine. Where would I be without my prejudices?
A word on the notes. Although the book is intended for the general
reader as well as those with an academic interest in Orwell, for the ben-
efit of the latter group there are quite a few of these. My advice to both
parties is to suit yourself. If you want to follow the scholarly trail, look to
the notes at the back. If you would rather just get on with it, don’t
bother. The story should carry you through. One of my main reasons
for writing the book was a belief that scholars of literature and politics
had had a good go at Orwell and now it was another historian’s turn.
The notes rather support that belief—as does the bibliographical essay,
which sets Orwell’s reputation in context.
Finally I dedicate this book with all my heart to my father, Bob, who
showed me what decency in an English working man looked like long
before I read George Orwell; to the women in my life, Amy, Becky, and
Rosie, best friends; and to my mother, Margaret, who was giving me my
life just as Orwell was losing his.
R.C.
Clarendon Park
Leicester
1 May 2013
Contents
List of Plates xi
Introduction 1
1. Angry Old Etonian 8
2. North Road 46
3. Eye Witness in Barcelona 1937 72
4. Mr Bowling Sees It Through 109
5. England the Whale 130
6. Not Quite Tory 172
7. Last of England 197
8. Death in the Family 217
Life after Death: A Bibliographical Essay 220
Notes 237
Text Acknowledgements 305
Picture Acknowledgements 307
Index 309
This page intentionally left blank
List of Plates
George Orwell was what they used to call a ‘Socialist’. He shared also
some of the attitudes to life that used to be called ‘Tory’. Right from first
principles, therefore, he was not as simple and straightforward as he
made out or, indeed, as others made out for him. A deep-seated contra-
riness marked his writing and contributed to the wide and conflicting
range of his appeal. Any attempt to understand his thinking must attend
to life as he lived it, a step at a time, in and out of argument, right up to
the end.
A step at a time
Born in India in 1903, Eric Blair (George Orwell) was brought up and
educated in the south of England. His family was comfortable in a
‘lower upper middle-class’ sort of way—a way he defined as upper
middle class without the money. He attended the country’s top public
school on a scholarship.
After Eton he joined the Imperial Police and went to Burma. Like
many things in his life he did it because he chose to do it. It was not a
happy time, however, and he returned to England five years later eager
to cross the line. What line? Many lines, as we shall see. His first pub-
lished works are on the side of the poor and dispossessed and we find
him writing, or trying to write, from their point of view. Although England
and the British Empire is usually his subject, so is poverty, opposition,
and rebellion. He shows no apparent sign of any affiliation to his coun-
try or its traditions.1
Then, in 1936, he went north and for the first time in his life found an
England he could believe in. He saw how the miners kept the country
going. He pondered why their labour was the most valuable, but not the
most valued. He noted how the working class did not ask for much, and
2 George Orwell: English Rebel
not much was gladly given. But from this point on he knew he belonged.
Theirs was another England to believe in and, as time went on, he even
came to believe in his own.
Not that Orwell came to England just by thinking about it. Your prose
finds you out, he warned. So how he lived mattered to how he wrote,
and because he wanted to live and write in certain ways, he took pains
to do so. He kept his journal in a neat, purposeful hand. He tried to see
situations exactly as they were. He took things in. He took things on. He
changed his mind. He wanted to be exact and exacting at the same
time. He carefully weighed his experience and tried to turn it into litera-
ture. Above all, he fell in line with his country at a critical time in its
history. When he died in 1950 his reputation was growing and it has
never stopped growing. The literary scholar John Rodden has made
Orwell dead almost as interesting as Orwell alive.2
Who influenced him? Whom did he influence? How do we read him
now? Scan just a single page of the Modern Literary Association’s Inter-
national Bibliography and you will come across studies of Orwell and Som-
erset Maugham, Orwell and Samuel Beckett, Orwell and Søren
Kierkegaard, Orwell and Salvador Dali, Orwell and Salman Rushdie,
Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Orwell and William Morris, Orwell and
Walker Evans (and James Agee), Orwell and Thomas Carlyle, Orwell
and Albert Camus, Orwell and Michel Foucault, Orwell and Thomas
Pynchon, Orwell and Benedict Anderson, Orwell and Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, and Orwell and Virginia Woolf.3 No one, in the Anglo-
American literary world at least, seems to doubt his importance. Rod-
den cites him as ‘more quoted and referenced than any other modern
writer’.4
And yet, when it comes to the more general question of what he
believed, or how we should see him, this most quoted and referenced of
writers is almost impossible to pin down. Scholarly papers on what he
is said to have been against (from Nazis to Jews) are no guide to what he is
said to have been for (from Protestants to puddings). He did not appear
to believe, for instance, in the existence of God, but he did believe in the
importance of continuing to believe in the existence of God. He did not
like capitalism, but he believed in the importance of the culture that
capitalism produced. That he was both an iconoclast and a traditional-
ist is beyond doubt—just about everybody agrees on that—but it is as
difficult to decide whether he was a conservative iconoclast or a socialist
Introduction 3
His Englishness
Orwell belonged to a generation who took their Englishness for granted.
It is just possible that a boy like him could have grown up free of it, or
even against it, but only by chance and only by finding something else
to put in its place. Most boys of his class (and not only them) came of
age against the gigantic moral backdrop of British global interests and
responsibilities. Brought up in a distinctly old-colonial family, he believed
in Englishness like he believed in the world. It existed. It existed like
ships in the Channel, the king in his castle, money in the bank. It existed
as a sort of public poetry to be intoned insistently, regularly, nationally,
all one’s life through, like the shipping forecast or the football results, to
remind you of who you were and where you lived. His was a country,
moreover, where a very small group of politicians and other significant
figures of state and civil society were trusted, more or less, to stand for
4 George Orwell: English Rebel
the nation and speak on its behalf. In other words, being English was
not open to question. It could not be avoided, and, whether one was for
it or against it, one was never less than conscious of it. When Orwell
thought of other people, he thought of national types. He could see at
bottom that such attitudes were probably irrational, yet he never trav-
elled far without them. Down and Out in Paris and London, his first book, is
rife with foreigners (English types just across the water).6
Orwell’s first attempt to write self-consciously about such things was
probably ‘The Tale of John Flory (1890–1927)’, written on Burma-police
notepaper sometime during the late 1920s. He sketches the story of ‘the
degeneration and ruin, through his native faults, of a gifted man’.
A second attempt at Englishness followed sometime in 1939, just after
his very south-of-England novel, Coming Up for Air. ‘The Quick and the
Dead’ is a collection of notes (the book itself was never written) towards
another tale of degeneration, this time in a middle-class family. Living
without ‘colour, pleasure, interest or sense of purpose’, their ‘guiding
principle was to save trouble’. If they do not know how to die, this is a
family that has forgotten how to live. ‘Steady the Buffs’ if you eat too
much. ‘I hope nobody wants a second helping’ if you eat too little.
‘Don’t dirty a clean plate’ before you start.7
It was an American who first drew Orwell’s attention to the stifling
effects of his English upbringing. Writing from Paris in 1936, Henry
Miller warned him of his guilt, his ‘false respectability’, his ‘inadequacy’,
and his ‘bloody English education’. In a couple of smarting but affec-
tionate rebukes, the American tried to liberate the Englishman from his
sense of responsibility for everything that happened in the world. ‘Stop
thinking . . . !’ ‘Do nothing . . . !’ ‘Fuck your capitalistic society!’ Thirteen
years later, in 1949, alongside some very English advertisements for
Rose’s Lime Juice and Rudge Bicycles, Lionel Trilling in the New Yorker
recognized that same ‘peculiarly English’ idiom in Orwell. But this time
the American found strength in his Englishness, not impotence.8 A lot
had happened to Orwell since 1936. Not least, he had found his
country.
When he died in 1950, World Review’s distinguished contributors made
nothing of Orwell’s Englishness. Tom Hopkinson too missed it in 1953,
but John Atkins was quick to spot it (‘stronger than class’) in 1954, and
got somewhere with it in his idea of a national ‘persona’.9 Raymond
Williams in 1958, George Woodcock in 1967, and Jenni Calder in 1968
Introduction 5
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