George Orwell, Snobby Truthteller

On aristocratic centrism

Orwell sounds hard put to find £20 in order to stock his shelves, rather than a man who had received £500 a couple of months earlier.

-Jack Common

By 1936, George Orwell was broke. Giving up his job and apartment, he set out across Northern England to the Bryn coal mine for the material that would become his book Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In highlighting the misery of coal mining in England, Orwell’s book was praised for the unflinching descriptions of horrific conditions. For some critics, his descriptions proved too unflinching. Even as a penniless, homeless writer, Orwell’s prose managed to convey a certain sense of superiority over his subjects - at least according to critics such as Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt, who sniffed elitism within the prose of The Road to Wigan Pier:

If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. If on his return from Mandalay he had bought one or two penny pamphlets on socialism and the working-class movement, what fatal experiences he could have saved himself from, Because one never gets to know the movement by slumming.

I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the "smell" of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. Well, pardon me if I say at once, without any working-class snobbery, that it's a lie.

Pollitt, in protesting Orwell’s honest narration of a smelly and dirty population of coal miners, decried the fact Orwell had even described their conditions, sensing hostile and oppressive judgement of an honest working class, explaining:

I am not concerned whether a man wants to drink a lemonade with a straw and in shorts or whether coming out of the docks he calls for a pint of Mann and Crossman's: the thing I am concerned about is: are they concerned to try and build up a new society? If so, what is the best way in which we can help them? And we don't do this by telling them they "smell", or that they are "showing fat bottoms in shorts". It can only be done by patient argument, by careful explanation, and by really trying to understand their particular problems, and show by our understanding that we want to help.

In short, many contemporary readers saw that George Orwell sympathized with the poverty and plight of the working class but occasionally wrote as if a man writing a nature documentary rather than a man looking to mobilize a movement.

It can never be forgotten that Orwell had been on both sides of the Empire since his time as a police officer in Burma, where he once commanded a security force with a scope of more than 200,000 people and helped guard British refinery operations in Syria for an oil company. He is at once pragmatic and poetic. Or, shall we say, a snobby truthteller.

In the pleasant, essay-like book Orwell’s Flowers (2021) by Rebecca Solnit, we encounter an unlikely starting point to George Orwell’s philosophies: his love of a good garden.

From Author to Adjective

Even his grimmest writings… had moments of beauty.

-Orwell’s Flowers

Eric Arthur Blair, who anointed himself George Orwell at age 27, was born in India in 1903. His father worked as a sub-deputy opium agent at the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service for roughly four decades. The house where Orwell spent the first year of his life was known as a “Miscourt.” As one source puts it:

The house where Orwell was born did not have a name 115 years ago. However, in those days locals called the area ‘Miscourt’: a strictly British enclave where no kala aadmi or black man was allowed, other than servants or maids. Now known as Teliapatti, ‘Miscourt’ probably derives from the words Mess and Court, for there used to be an army mess and a tennis court nearby. The British Raj had established its opium post here way back in 1815, well before Blair’s appointment.

George Orwell, rebel against tyranny, began a life nourished by the sins of the Empire (a reverse life story of the punk movement). As Orwell’s Flowers takes pains to explain, Orwell is from a stock of sinful aristocrats. His father’s salary was made possible by the Opium Wars. His grandfather was an absentee landlord of Jamaican plantations with more than three hundred slaves. Solnit even takes the time to drag the reader through the upper-echelon of guilt reserved thoughtful readers of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), explaining to modern readers awash with Kardashian culture that none of the high-drama antics of British literature was applicable to the lived reality of the vast majority of humanity and, often, was made possible by a luxury funded directly by worldwide oppression to the cruelest degree.

Orwell himself started his career as a police officer in Burma, where, by his mid-twenties, he had risen in the ranks to command a security force with a scope of more than 200,000 people and helped guard British refinery operations in Syria for an oil company. Then, he decided he hated both the resentful population and the empire and quit to became a loud, proud voice who, contrary to most beliefs, was neither rightwing or leftwing so much as an opponent of any single centralized state or ideology.

In telling the story of Orwell’s life, Orwell’s Flowers illustrates the compromises we all make to maintain a spirit within a system and emphasizes that Orwell believed that you can hate the government, but you should never hate your life, because you must love life in order to find the strength to defend it. He believed that hobbies, as the ultimate individual act, are acts of resistance… even if it meant planting and pruning a garden and ignoring causes, wars, and the masses when necessary.

To clumsily yet effectively draw a parallel to how we all must live with the sin of ignorance, sometimes, Solnit dedicates one chapter to the modern-day rose-industrial complex, a global trade worth nearly $9 billion. Here, the book exposes the commercial flower operations in Colombia, where the high demand for what she points out is admittedly the useless beauty of roses as objects has created a market of perilous labor conditions and massive water and agricultural wastage for a fragile, temporary, and inedible crop. As a review in The Guardian puts it:

Roses have their thorns, and for Solnit that includes the environmentally destructive manner of their modern mass production. She makes the leap from Orwell’s garden to the industrialised rose farms of present-day Colombia, supplying North America with cheap blooms at allegedly heavy cost to their low-paid, non-unionised workforce – the sort of story Orwell himself might once have told.

In studying the roses that Orwell planted around his house in her journey to England, Solnit reflects that Orwell’s gardening was a display of the gratitude that made him fight:

They were roses, and they were saboteurs of my own long acceptance of a conventional version of Orwell and invitations to dig deeper. They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about injustice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.

In Orwell’s Roses, which can at times seem unrelated, never loses sight of a central thesis: Life can be cruel, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.

Want to know more about Orwell? Check your inbox on Tuesday next week! Litverse will be covering why Orwell’s power was based on his removal from any topic, why he would have made a great software engineer, and why Rage Against the Machine got him all wrong.