Thoughts On George Orwell

Before George Orwell there was Eric Arthur Blair, an Eton schoolboy who signed his letters to friends 'Eric Blair, FAMOUS AUTHOR.'
His descent into writing was no accident. As a 'scholarship boy' at Eton he grew to hate the wealthy, understanding all too well the relationship between money and power.
It was Eric Blair that went off to civilise Empire in the twenties, serving in the Imperial Police Service in Burma, before delving deep into the underclass of Britain and France. The experiences that informed his first books and essays.
Equally, he despaired of the 'keeping up of appearances' inherent in the shabby genteel English middle class.
His knowledge of power informed his attitude to class - that defining structure of English life - roughly if passionately expressed in books like Coming Up For Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. But equally he saw the flaws of the working class for what they were, and he understood them far better than many of his middle and upper class 'friends' on the left in the thirties.
Orwell's wartime essays and classic The Road To Wigan Pier reveal his experiences amongst the invisible people that kept England functioning. He rightly predicted that the protesting English working class of the thirties would turn out to be patriots when the crunch came. He understood the paradoxes that made ordinary people in a way that few writers have before or since.
In many ways he was a misanthrope, never more happier than in his garden or around animals, although paradoxically imbued with a tolerance for his fellow human beings that eclipsed his acerbic writing.
He was no backscratcher, savaging friends and foes alike with his typewriter. In one famous incident he referred to Stephen Spender as a 'useless Nancy poet', then invited him out to dinner. He has the same relationship with H.G. Wells, that lead to Wells cutting off their friendship after an Orwell essay ripped Wells' utopian visions of future technology to shreds.
It was the sort of intellectual rigour that railed against the black and white vision of the cult of Russia Communists in the world of letters. He had a strong aversion to hubris.
But in the end the man who fought with the Trotskyites in the Spanish Civil war has his grand work, Nineteen Eighty Four, appropriated by the Right. His political legacy bastardised by bastards.
Orwell, of course, was criticising from the left. He realised how power worked and this book is an indictment of the language used today by the free market - the Market Totalitarianism that tells us that food is 'light but filling', that McDonalds has 'healthy choices', or that going into debt through easy credit is 'freedom'.
Newspeak is Advertising 101, and the world of telescreens and constant surveillance has been brought to us by marketing corporations as much as by government.
Orwell was a socialist who understood that freedom was something to be acted by control of your life, not being controlled by employers, landlords and debtors.
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four are books that started on the Road To Wigan Pier and were honed by the duplicity of his experiences on the Aragon front in Catalonia and, later, in Barcelona.
Although his writing was hijacked by the Right during the cold war (a term he invented in the thirties to describe the relationship between liberal democracy and totalitarian states such as Russia and Germany) the humanism of his writing lives through.
Despite Orwell's warnings freedom in the west is more undermined than ever in our permanent war against an adjective (terrorist), when the real threat to our lifestyle comes from insatiable consumer culture.
A man who himself possessed a keen sense of irony and a black humour I have no doubt he would chuckle at the thought of his greatest invention - Big Brother - being used to sell cosmetics to pre-teens and immature western adults. He was a man that understood that colonisation started from the mind before it enslaved the body and he foresaw an age when XBox, McDonalds and Coca-Cola would define freedom over the right to a dissenting lifestyle and the right to air grievances.
As a member of the ordinary poor I find Eric "George Orwell" Blair an inspiration in these days of having to believe five contradictory ideas before breakfast in order to function in this society. Nineteen Eighty Four (he always insisted on spelling it out) and Animal Farm are as removed from the solopsistic hubris of our times as barbed-wire is removed from comfort.
In the end Eric Blair died and George Orwell lived. And Eric Arthur Blair was buried by a millionaire, Lord Astor, with a fresh wife, Sonia Brownell, who had been installed there by his publisher Frederic Warburg to ensure his literary estate was in pliable hands.
His funeral was organised by a mate of Malcolm Muggeridge - himself a temporary class traitor who returned to his roots before too long.
Orwell's most recent Biography, Orwell, A Life by D.J. Taylor (Henry Holt and Company), points to Warburg's CIA connections, and it is hardly a state secret that the CIA saw in Orwell an opportunity to win their hearts and minds battle in Europe.
His widow spent a lot of time keeping his for more left-wing essay writing from the public eye until hounded into publishing his essays in the early seventies by a combination of dwindling finances and estrangement from the people (like Warburg) who had put her where she was. Orwell was no saint - being a bit of a pants man - but then again who of worth is.
He liked a drink and smoked like a chimney. Enjoyed Opium in Burma and a few friends wives.
In his essay on Dali he pointed out a shocking fact to the modernists and classicists of his age; an artist could be a good artist and a lousy human being. It's probably the first post-modernist essay in English.
He pretty much invented the socio-political essay as an artform, and gave us an insight into 'ordinary things' that are too often ignored by our visionary betters in academia.
His legacy is profound, if a little misunderstood.
I still know lefties of a certain age who hate him because he attacked Mother Russia; but who on the left really just wants to join a cult that replaces one boss with another boss?
Maybe he was, as he described himself, a Tory Anarchist. After all, he had little love of bureaucracy and a was a withering critic of power for power's sake.
I don't think we should worship him, but I do think we should listen to him, and watch how his ideas about power and language assault us every day from supermarket shelves, televisions and press statements.
He is a valuable voice, but the greatest appropriation of his work in our time is a bizarre game show.
Eric Arthur Blair FAMOUS AUTHOR, lived briefly and died young (he was only 46 when the TB got him), but George Orwell found immortality, escaping Eton, the Left, and now even the Right, to become a spectre, haunting those who seek to manipulate words to dubious ends. For that alone he is to be thanked.