BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS46 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020One of his main influences was James
Burnham, the Communist-turned-
conservative who would become a
senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW:
Burnham’s 1941 book The Managerial
Revolutionhelped Orwell conceive of
Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, the three
superpowers at war in the world of 1984.
Perhaps these complexities and contra-
dictions make Orwell sound like a vivid
character in a compelling novel. “George
Orwell,” in fact, was not a real person but
rather the invention of Eric Blair, a young
man who adopted a pen name so that his
writings wouldn’t embarrass his parents.
(“George” paid tribute to St. George, the
patron saint of England; “Orwell” was
the name of a favorite river.) “This incar-
nated nom de plume,” writes Rodden,
was “the only fully rounded, three-
dimensional character that the novelist
ever created.” This refers to a traditional
knock on Orwell’s fiction: His characters
lack the richness of those found in a story
by the likes of Charles Dickens. As it
happens, Orwell admired Dickens, and a1939 description of the Victorian author
might serve as a self-portrait: “I see...
the face of a man who is generously
angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-
century liberal, a free intelligence, a type
hated with equal hatred by all the smelly
little orthodoxies which are now con-
tending for our souls.”
Perhaps it’s enough to stop the smelly
little orthodoxies of our time from trying
to reshape Orwell in their own image.
(The next time someone claims that
Orwell would have favored Brexit, roll
your eyes.) As Rodden notes, Orwell
was “an intellectual who wrote for the
age,” i.e., the one in which he lived and
not ours. What happened, though, is that
his words transcended their moment
and Orwell rose to the status of “a
world-historical figure.” And so rather
than study him with Rodden’s care and
diligence, we fight over him, confident
in the truth of a line from 1984 : “‘Who
controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan,
‘controls the future: who controls the
present controls the past.’”Catholics have responded to his ideas,
and more. The chapters can stand on
their own or, taken together, form an
idiosyncratic biography of a consequen-
tial life. To read them is to sit in the pres-
ence of a veteran scholar at the peak of
his powers.
Orwell was a political writer, but the
exact nature of his politics is disputed.
He started out on the left but grew dis-
mayed at its refusal to break with
Soviet tyranny: “The sin of nearly all
left wingers from 1933 onwards is that
they wanted to be anti-Fascist without
being anti-totalitarian,” he wrote in- The question is how far he drift-
ed from his roots. In the years after
Communist killers failed to get him in
Spain, did he ever become an actual
conservative? Or would he have
become one if he had lived longer?
What would he have thought about,
say, Brexit? (My own guess is that he
would have voted Leave.) Rodden, for
his part, avoids speculating: “I have
sought to clarify with scholarly accuracy
his legacy and not to indulge in the prac-
tice of robbing his grave or moving his
coffin to the left or to the right for my
own political purposes.”
Yet readers will wonder. Orwell has
been called every conservative’s favorite
liberal and every liberal’s favorite
conservative—a category that sounds
impossible amid today’s divisiveness.
Part of Orwell’s accomplishment is sim-
ply a matter of timing. By dying on
January 21, 1950—the same day as the
perjury conviction of the Soviet spy
Alger Hiss—Orwell didn’t have to take a
side in a series of bitter controversies. If
he had lived beyond his 46 years, he
probably would have annoyed conserva-
tives or liberals or both by announcing
his views on McCarthyism in the 1950s,
the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and per-
haps even the policies of Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.
Nobody can say for sure what he
would have written about any of this.
The trouble for conservatives is that
Orwell never quit calling himself asocialist. He seems not to have appreci-
ated the link between political and eco-
nomic freedom that animates so many on
the free-market right. Plenty of conserv-
atives nevertheless have tried to claim
him. Norman Podhoretz once argued
that a long-lived Orwell would have
joined his tribe of neoconservatives.
Before that, the proto-alt-righters of the
John Birch Society also tried to appro-
priate him: As Rodden discovered by
scouring old phone books at the Library
of Congress, the Birchers used 1-9-8-4 in
the phone number for their Washington
office in the 1950s.
Progressives want Orwell on their
side, too. In 2007, George Soros and the
Open Society Institute published What
Orwell Didn’t Know, a book that savages
the supposed “far-right-wing political
agenda of the George W. Bush adminis-
tration and the Christian Right.” More
recently, liberals delighted in the fact
that sales of 1984 had boomed following
the inauguration of President Trump and
the unfortunate introduction of the term“alternative facts” into political par-
lance. Yet they couldn’t limit them-
selves to a few reasonable comments. A
headline in The Nationblared: “Trump’s
America Is Worse Than Orwell’s
‘1984.’” It’s one thing for Orwell to
instruct and inspire, and quite another to
turn him into a boot for stamping on par-
tisan rivals.
Orwell once called himself a “Tory
anarchist,” a term that clarifies nothing
because it confuses just about every-
body. Lots of other potential and con-
flicting labels present themselves. Here
are a few that Rodden deploys, citing his
own views or the views of others: Orwell
was “a heterodox socialist,” a “leftist yet
anti-Stalinist,” and a “left-wing patriot.”
He was “an unrelenting critic of his fel-
low socialists.” He was an “adamant
atheist” but also possibly a “crypto-
Christian” who had “a dislike of femi-
nism” and “opposed abortion.” He was a
“utopian skeptic” who displayed a “con-
servative streak” and became “a cult
hero among American conservatives.”Orwell has been called every conservative’s favorite liberal
and every liberal’s favorite conservative—a category that
sounds impossible amid today’s divisiveness.
books_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/3/2020 8:11 PM Page 46
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws