Why Orwell Endures
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
New York Times, Published: February 12, 2010

In Sutton Courtenay churchyard about 10 miles south of Oxford, near the imposing tomb of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister 100 years ago, a much simpler gravestone reads “Eric Arthur Blair.” It was to that grave a friend and I recently made a pilgrimage for a sad anniversary. Blair died of tuberculosis on Jan. 21, 1950, at the age of 46, just when he had found fame and fortune under the name by which the world knows him,
George Orwell.

An early death was a kind of secular martyrdom for this latter-day St. George of England, and the heroic aura hasn’t faded. Sixty years on, Orwell towers above not only the apologists for tyranny whom he loathed but also other anti­totalitarian writers. Recent biographies of Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone haven’t done much to enhance the reputation of either man. Both believed that, as Silone said, “the last battle” would be between Communists and former Communists, like themselves, and such men too often evinced in their anti-Bolshevik guise the dogmatism or even fanaticism that had made them Bolsheviks in the first place. That kind of zealotry was alien to Orwell.

He has worn well for other reasons, of course. His deathbed fortune came with “1984,” which has been plausibly described by Robert Harris (another notable political novelist) as the most influential novel ever written. No other can have so enriched the language. Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or doublethink — the expressions, that is: a glance at the political pages or op-ed columns provides plenty of examples of what those brilliant coinings describe.

And yet for all his fame and stature, Orwell remains elusive. For one thing, he is impossible to categorize. He was a great something — but a great what? Scarcely a great novelist: the prewar novels are good but not very good, and even “Animal Farm” and “1984” aren’t great in the sense of “Madame Bovary.” To call him a great journalist, as many have done, means overlooking plenty of mundane (and inaccurate) political commentary. It’s when he turns to such unlikely matters as boys’ comics and vulgar postcards, as well as to his central subject of politics and language, that he enters the realm of deathless literature.

His politics were likewise sui generis. Although he called himself a democratic socialist, and served with a revolutionary-Marxist militia in Spain, he was in many ways an emotional and cultural conservative. The least doctrinaire of political writers, he had the gift of being able to transmute the Tory virtues of skepticism and pragmatism into a distinctive kind of radicalism.

Even his personality is elusive. It’s most striking that although he worked for BBC Radio and lived in the heyday of newsreels, we don’t have a single recording of his voice or moving image of him, or indeed any photograph at all of Orwell smiling. That too somehow seems appropriate. There were dark sides to his personality, and it’s not hard to understand what his friend Malcolm Muggeridge meant when he said that Orwell was an easier man to love than to like.

Sad as Orwell’s death was, one can’t escape a sense that in some way it was providential. Koestler and Silone were sullied by the bruising battles of the cold war, while Orwell’s early death, as Harris says, bestowed an “aura of unassailable posthumous integrity” on his life and work. That explains why so many years later he has survived his notorious fate, appropriated by a militant right he abhorred, yet vilified by much of the left to which he felt he belonged.
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