Comment

George Orwell: journalist and proto-blogger

Richard Keeble

Orwell scholarship has tended to focus on his novels, essays and works of reportage such as Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia. In many respects this reflects the overall problematic position of journalism within academe and the dominant culture. Reportage has achieved some literary respectability, being perceived as 'literary journalism'. But otherwise, in comparison with the novel and the literary essay (often associated with 'high art'), straight journalism (news and feature/column writing) is too often perceived as ephemeral, dashed off at speed for money, unreflective and with no lasting value. As a result 'journalistic' in academe is usually a term of abuse meaning superficial, sensational and rhetorical.

Paradoxically, Orwell shared this same prejudice. Throughout his career he constantly downgraded his own writing as mere journalism or pamphleteering and looked up to Literature with a Capital 'L', which he thought of as a higher form. In his celebrated, Why I write of 1946, he confessed: 'In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer'. In other words, reluctantly he took up journalism as a way of confronting the crucial political dilemmas of his age.

But take a look at his, As I Please columns, which he bashed out while literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly, between November 1943 and April 4th 1947 (with an interlude between February 1945 and November 1946 when he was on a war reporting assignment for the Observer and Manchester Evening News and then engaged on other projects). I've read all eighty columns (that's roughly 100,000 words - the equivalent of a PhD) and enjoyed every single one of them. Journalism is often dismissed as a superficial, transient genre: these columns though written sixty years ago, are full of riches that can be relished still today.

After his unhappy two years as talks producer at the BBC, where he was increasingly annoyed by the censorship and bureaucracy, Orwell clearly loved the new freedoms at Tribune, all the more so because it was a journal with which he could totally identify. In one of his As I Please columns on January 31st 1947, he wrote: 'It is the only existing weekly paper that makes a genuine effort to be both progressive and humane - that is, to combine a radical Socialist policy with a respect for freedom of speech and a civilised attitude towards literature and the arts'.

Yet again there is no academic study of the whole eighty columns. Journalism it seems is worth a passing comment but it rarely receives the attention it deserves in academe. So what makes these columns so great?

In a chapter in a book I edited last year, entitled, Print Journalism: A Critical Introduction, Tim Holmes identifies five categories in a practical taxonomy of comment: community building, commercial advantage, elite reinforcement of preferred message, oppositional viewpoint and unofficial extension of predominant ideology. Most writers fulfil one of these categories. In a way, Orwell managed to achieve all of them in his columns. He promoted socialism and yet challenged some of its central shibboleths. For instance, on January 21st 1944 he wrote in praise of the Woolworth rose. The following week a reader accused Orwell of bourgeois nostalgia. Michael Foot later wrote that Bevan 'was the only editor who, in those days before Orwell's reputation was sure, would have given him complete freedom to offend all readers and lash all hypocrisies, including Socialist hypocrisies'.

And as for extending the predominant ideology, Orwell often spoke approvingly of Marx's theories. On February 25th 1944, for instance, discussing Chesterton's comment 'There are no new ideas' in his introduction to Hard Times, he writes: 'Where your treasure is there will be your heart. But before Marx developed it what force had that saying? Who had paid attention to it? Who had inferred from it - what it certainly implies - that laws, religions, and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text but it was Marx who brought it to life'.

Let's look at Holmes' first category, community building, in more detail. Orwell stressed in his famous essay Why I Write, published in the totally obscure journal Gangrel in the summer of 1946: 'Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'.

Whilst Orwell's pronouncements often tended to be part of a process of myth making and thus have always to be viewed critically, Orwell's As I please column demonstrates his enormous commitment to building up the community of the Left. Not only did he promote Socialist arguments. One of the most extraordinary and surprising elements is his constant inter-action with his readers. In many ways, Orwell was a proto-blogger, responding to letters sent to him directly or sent to Tribune, inviting letters, asking readers to answer queries or to point him towards a book, pamphlet or quotation he's looking for, running a competition for a short story or giving them a brain teaser to answer.

Not only did Orwell respond to letters but also as Peter Davison's Collected Works show his columns often provoked many letters, both critical and supportive, from readers. For instance, following his criticisms of newspapers carrying pictures of French Nazi collaborators on September 8th 1944 a reader wrote: 'How much longer must your readers be affronted by the quite patently pro-Fascist, neo-Jesuit posturing of George Orwell. He writes in the wrong periodical'.

According to Stephen Glover, founding editor of The Independent and currently media commentator on the same paper, the columnist's skill is 'in writing about matters of which one is ignorant'. Orwell, on the other hand, demonstrates the opposite gliding confidently over a vast range of subjects: shifting tone - from the polemical, the subversively witty, the campaigning, the poetic, the belligerent, the socially compassionate, the intellectually discursive, the analytical, to the personally intimate and revealing. One moment he is generalising provocatively; the next he is examining in precise details the front page of a newspaper or the advertisements in a women's fashion magazine.

Here's an overview of his subjects:

Views on writers and writing (86)
Critiques of the mainstream press (14)
War effort (12)
Language (10)
Personal reminiscence and experiences (10)
Media censorship/promotion of free speech (9)
BBC (8)
Idiosyncratic likes and dislikes (9)
Post war reconstruction (8)
Racism/anti-racism/anti-Semitism (7)
Love of nature (5)
Critiques of left-wing press (5)
Socialism (4) and critiques of socialism (5)
Ruling classes (5)
Social issues (5)
Social observations (4)
Handling of collaborators (3)
Promotion of Tribune competition (3)
Capitalism/anti-capitalism/imperialism (3)
Critique of foreign media (2)
Critiques of pessimists (2)
Nationalism (2)
Women's issues (2)
Training of journalists (2)
Architecture (1)
National anthem (1)
Nature of history (1)
Problems of geography (1)
Definition of fascism (1)
Globalisation (1)
British intelligentsia (1)
Plight of the writer (1)
Jingoistic ballad (1)
Costs of books (1)
The poor (1)
Superstition (1)
Law of libel (1)

Keith Waterhouse, the eminent Mirror columnist, advised: 'Every columnist needs a good half-dozen hobbyhorses. But do not ride them to death'. Well Orwell's hobbyhorse was clearly literature and the range of his reading is staggering, particularly given that at the same time he was writing the column he was acting as literary editor of Tribune, contributing regular columns to the American-based Partisan Review and reviewing for the Observer. His reading is so eclectic: pamphlets, novels, journals, philosophy, newspapers, a book of cartoons, biographies and autobiographies, literary criticism, history, memoirs, children's stories, a preface to play. Seemingly everything from Chronological Tablets, exhibiting every remarkable occurrence from the creation of the world down to the present time (printed by J.D. Dewick of Aldersgate Street in 1801 which pronounced the creation of the world as happening in September 4004 BC) to Old Moore's Almanac.

The writers he comments on in detail are Chesterton, Dickens, Joyce, Anatole France, Jack London, Samuel Butler, Leonard Merrick, Sir Osbert Sitwell, Gide, George and Weedon Grossmith (of Diary of a Nobody fame) and Edgar Wallace. Notice all are male. Christopher Hitchens is one among a large band of critics who highlight Orwell's sexism. He comments: 'Moreover, in neither his fiction nor his journalism is the word "feminist" ever used except with, or as, a sneer. He included it in his famous taxonomy of weird and ludicrous beliefs, along with the fruit juice drinkers, escaped Quakers, sandal wearers and other cranks in the Road to Wigan Pier'. Yet Orwell never ceases to surprise in his column.

For instance, on November 8th 1946 he examines an American women's magazine sent to him, and he goes on to deconstruct its representation of beauty: 'One striking thing when one looks at these pictures is the over bred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty that now seems to be striven after. Nearly all of these women are immensely elongated'. But Orwell doesn't simply stay with what's presented; he highlights what's missing:

'A fairly discreet search through the magazine reveals two discreet allusions to grey hair but if there is anywhere a direct mention of fatness or middle age I have not found it. Birth and death are not mentioned either: not is work except that a few recipes for breakfast dishes are given. The male sex enters directly or indirectly into perhaps one advertisement in twenty and photographs of dogs and kittens appear here and there. On only two pictures out of about three hundred, is a child represented'.

Orwell is often linked with pessimism and defeat and gloom. But in these columns it's his playfulness, optimism and lightness of spirit that so impresses. He even spends time railing at the 'pessimists' such as Petain, Chesterton, Beachcomber and Huxley for their 'refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved'.

He appears to be a man at the peak of his powers, playing with the genre, switching from subject matter and tone so effortlessly; humour is always around the corner. For instance, on January 7th 1944, he writes: 'Looking through the photographs in the New Years Honours List I am struck (as usual) by the quite exceptional ugliness and vulgarity of the faces displayed there. It seems to be almost the rule that the kind of person who earns the right to call himself Lord Percy de Falcontowers should look at best like an overfed publican and at worst a tax-collector with a duodenal ulcer'.

Orwell's writing is always bursting with original ideas and yet never obscured by tedious abstraction and endless referencing. Indeed, it could be argued that Orwell's greatness is largely due to his having never endured a university education.