I haven’t always taken kindly to Orwell. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four excepted, his novels appear two-dimensional and lightweight, in addition to being humorlessly bleak. Many of his essays are classics, though, and his political writing is never uninteresting. But these diaries, published by Penguin in an edition superbly edited by Peter Davison, are quite exceptionally readable. Maybe, despite the possibly inflated claims currently being made for this author, these diaries are the really classic Orwell.
Their texts have already been published in The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 volumes), but not with the detailed notes Davison provides here. Furthermore, when put together in one book like this, they constitute, though with gaps, the beginning of an autobiography for the years they cover, 1931 to 1949.
Not everything is discussed, though. Most disappointingly of all, there’s no reference to the writing of his books. There’s very little that throws light on his personal relationships either. Instead, there’s a huge amount about gardening — growing his own food was one of Orwell’s passions, and almost a necessity when he moved to the windswept Scottish island of Jura in 1946. There’s also a good deal of the kind of social commentary on the lives of the extremely poor found in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, plus political analysis (there’s one section, Diary of the Events Leading Up to the War, covering July to September 1939). But above all there’s endless observation — of nature, of people and of events.
Orwell can be considered as the ultimate realist. He wasn’t, of course, because the worlds of myth, aesthetics and even music, so important to many people, were closed books to him. But from his practical, no-nonsense, down-to-earth point of view, largely excluding the realm of the imagination, he was the ultimate stickler for a record of what had actually happened. These diaries are full of the prices of things, how many eggs his hens laid, how much people earned (in the UK and in Morocco, where he spent the winter of 1938-1939 for the benefit of his lungs), and whether the birds he saw on Jura were this species or that, and how they differed.
Deviation from this limited kind of truth was intolerable to Orwell. A committed socialist, he later became the hammer of the left because he saw for himself the suppression of other left-wing groups by the Communists in Spain in the 1930s, learned about the cynical rewriting of history in the Soviet Union, and became appalled by the willingness of the British left to turn a blind eye to such things. He was an enemy of fascism (he offered his services in the war effort in September 1939, eventually working for the BBC on its broadcasts to Asia), but his two most famous books were attacks on the left and on the dishonesty he believed Marxist societies routinely indulged in (“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” and so on).
These diaries are nevertheless extraordinarily dissimilar. At the BBC he’s chatting about Churchill or Duff Cooper and considering the propaganda value of suggesting that Japan was planning to invade Russia, whereas when picking hops in Kent and researching the poor in Lancashire he’s staying in filthy lodging houses smelling of rancid margarine and sleeping four to a room, and then on Jura trying to make cress and raspberries grow in the most hideously rainy, windy, cold conditions, without electricity, phone or a car.
It’s impossible not to see a kind of masochism in Orwell’s character. He won a scholarship to Eton, even though his middle-class family was far from rich, and couldn’t afford to send him to any university. Yet he stubbornly dedicated himself to investigating the British underclass, assuming a cockney (East London working-class) accent in order to disguise his origins, walking in the rain between towns in the North of England on blistered feet when it would have cost him very little to take a bus, running a neighborhood store selling, among other things, his own garden produce, and then living for two years on Jura, a Hebridean island 45km long and 13km wide with a population in 1946 of 250.
Very few other people, in other words, were willing to try living there, but Orwell, despite suffering from tuberculosis, thought he could do it. His wife Eileen had died on the operating table the previous year, and Orwell was accompanied in his desolate hidey-hole by his adopted son and his sister. He thought he was escaping the modern world in all its forms, but the bleak reality he opted for was something even he couldn’t manage, and he died in a London hospital of a hemorrhage of the lungs on Jan. 21, 1950.
Even that date seems symbolic. Orwell’s is a winter world, both in the cold endured by the people he spent months living with, in the austerity he endured along with the rest of the British during and after World War II, and in the horror and sorrow he forced himself to confront in the USSR. Furthermore, there’s something bleak about his unimaginative realism. He tried smoking marijuana in Morocco, as he relates here, but it didn’t have any effect. He’s occasionally hostile to women — one Manchester woman here had “adopted her husband’s views as a wife ought to.” He wouldn’t, you feel, have had much time for the swinging 1960s had he lived to see them.
But depression, though an inescapable feature of Orwell’s books, features rarely in these marvelous diaries. Instead there’s endless observation and hope. “Turnips want thinning ... Put up place for ducklings ... Spinach germinating ... One egg.”
A selection of Orwell’s diary entries can be read at orwelldiaries.wordpress.com.
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