Cheers, to George

I have a man-crush on George Orwell. There’s something about his cool, distanced presence, his polite English decorum combined with that slow-burning passion for finding the decency in humanity, that draws me to his writing more than most others’. Again and again I find myself amazed by his patiently developed essays, monuments of insight built on sturdy foundations of example, rendered in a style so accessible that his points seem self evident. There are many reasons why George is admirable, but I will outline just a few which may partly explain why I admire him as a writer.George Orwell is the man, but he doesn’t feel the need to make this fact known to his readers. Photos of him make him look somewhat stodgy and awkward; with his prim pencil mustache and oversized herringbone blazers, he looks like the eccentric college professor you felt bad for because he couldn’t control his freshmen. But remember that this man was a cop in Burma and a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War. He got shot in the throat by a fucking sniper and survived, then managed to escape war-torn Spain while he and his wife were being pursued as Trotskyists by Soviet hitmen. He doesn’t write about these experiences to show you how badass he is, but always for a larger point or argument. His brand of self confidence is subtle in the extreme; he writes from a position of authority so understated that you don’t notice it until you find it’s impossible disagree with him. He has the street cred, but he doesn’t exploit it.

Instead, George wins you over with his personality. His sincere brand of ironic humor and self deprecation undermine your defenses. He downplays his own abilities, only to employ them toward complete literary domination. In his influential essay “Politics and the English Language,” he takes on the sinister vagueness of contemporary English prose and dismantles it using language that is its complete opposite, convincingly lambasting “ugly and inaccurate” writing even as he pokes holes in his own writing. But of course he knows how good his writing is, otherwise he wouldn’t be telling us how to write better.

George doesn’t have to be aggressive to be authoritative. In “Inside the Whale,” his defense of Henry Miller’s controversial novels, he states that Miller “is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past,” a bold finale that he earns only through a slow build-up of praise tempered by equal parts empathy for dissenters’ disgust. “When I first opened Tropic of Cancer and saw that it was full of unprintable words,” Orwell says before you realize that he’s about to praise Miller’s novel as the most important book of the mid-1930s, “my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed. Most people’s would be the same, I believe.” He understands your opinion before he politely dismisses it. Even when he’s wrong, you want to believe him.

That’s because George knows you better than you do. His deep understanding of the psychology of politics makes his writing timeless, and the directness of his style makes his insights easy to grasp – two reasons his novels and essays continue to be prescribed to young students across English-speaking nations. His discussions of the irrational power of patriotism and nationalism in “The Lion and the Unicorn” and “Notes on Nationalism,” for example, seem strangely relevant today despite their particular subjects. “One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism,” he wrote in 1941, and so it remains.

Of course, George wasn’t always right, and he did change his mind and spin facts to fit his arguments. “The Lion and the Unicorn” predicted a socialist revolution in England, which we all realize never happened. The Cold War thankfully didn’t end up looking like 1984. Most of what he wrote about India’s independence movement was dead wrong. And his condescension toward American culture seems a strange blind spot in a mind so sensitively attuned to its European counterpart. Louis Menand and Christopher Hitchens, among others, have convincingly dismantled the romantic portrait of George the Truthsayer that has hung over almost every Western political thinker’s mantle for the past sixty years, giving us the more plausible images of George the Misfit, George the Contrarian, George the Persuader.

No, I don’t admire George for some kind of personal perfection, something no writer can claim. I do admire his moralist stance, neither pedantic nor overbearing, always hoping to inspire the best in people, for who can really fault him for his desire to instill decency and reasonableness in the world? I admire his utter dedication to writing and language, and the way he mastered them to bring awareness to the issues he felt were most important. I admire his ability to craft such visually potent prose that you feel like you’re standing next to him as he narrates. The ongoing argument between Menand and Hitchens about his ultimate legacy – was he truly so visionary or simply misguided? – is fascinating, but ultimately irrelevant. All I know is that every time I pick up another piece by George, I find myself swept up in his worldview, almost without realizing it. I want to agree with him.

George’s worldview is a dark one, but one that’s difficult to argue with, and perhaps that’s why we continue to pay special attention to him. Its peculiar universality allows almost anyone to adopt his profound insights. When you read his work, his thought process usurps your own, persuading you that what he writes is what you’ve always believed. This power would be frightening in a writer with more sinister aims, but George harnesses it to expose the evil he sees in the world, without any trace of piousness, pretentiousness or sentimentality. We will always need more of this kind of writing. As long as the world’s situation seems grim, you can usually find some parallel in George’s writing, and since the world often looks grim to those living in it, he will always be one of our most important writers.

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George’s vivid imagination didn’t always result in such doom. He could imagine perfection as well as he could tragedy: “A Nice Cup of Tea” is a solemn manifesto for crafting the perfect cup of tea, and his playful discussion of the “perfect pub,” the fictional Moon Under Water, gave rise to an extremely successful chain of English pubs known as Wetherspoon’s. Had he not died young, he might have lived to make a fortune off his ideas, or at least been able to enjoy a creamy pint of draught stout at a version of his personal pub paradise.

Wetherspoon’s isn’t quite perfect, however. Its pubs use handle-less, transparent mugs, anathema to George, and there are generally no bar games such as darts, an important if not essential trait of George’s perfect pub. It’s not his Moon Under Water, a small picture of personalized perfection which, like the perfect world he fought for in his writing, does not and will not ever exist outside of George Orwell’s mind.

But I can imagine myself sitting in that semi-magical place, surrounded by its moody Victorian majesty and hushed atmosphere, its pewter pots and pink china, discussing the world with old George. Where are we going, George? I’d ask him. Are we going to make it through these tough times? Is there any hope for us Americans, we who have lost our way?

Gloomy George probably wouldn’t have anything positive to say, but I’d still clink my pewter mug with his and propose a toast: to the perfection George Orwell so desperately wanted to see in our world and ourselves. We may never get there, but thanks for trying, George.