Reliable Essays (2 page)

And though we could leave it to Professor Dryasdust, I don’t think we should. He’ll have his say in one or other of the literary pages. No, this should be an inside job, by one who also lives by pen not stipend. You are, in your own phrase, a metropolitan critic; a Grubstreeter, a passionate amateur, a full-time dilettante. Academe and Grub Street frequently affect to despise one another, and sometimes actually do. You yourself have been spectacularly rude about dons (‘There are professors in Cambridge who call the AA to help them park their cars’), but you also revere true, intense, honourable scholarship. You also know – not least because you are married to an Italian scholar – that academe and Grub Street need one another: like teeth, they work best when in nutritious opposition. The republic of letters is no different from any other republic, and thrives best on the separation of powers. The House of Grub Street is currently more under threat than the House of Academe. The pay is poor, the freelance life as precarious as in Gissing’s day, and academe contains some grim-eyed abolitionists. A character in a novel some years ago described academics as merely ‘reviewers delivering their copy a hundred years late’. This is no longer the case: nowadays they’re jostling the freelancers out of the weekly literary pages.

You’ve always been a key player in our team, not least because your own jostle is pretty muscular. In the late 1970s I worked on the
New Statesman
books pages, to which you were a regular and valued contributor. Normally, the week’s lead review would be more or less decided at the point of commissioning: the big book went to the top reviewer with the most generous wordage. One week, the editorial team made a last-minute switch and decided to promote your article to the lead slot. You happened to call by shortly afterwards. On being told the news you did not, as some self-effacing Englishman might, reply, ‘Gosh, what a surprise, are you sure?’ You said, ‘What happened? The other guy didn’t make the weight?’

But then you are, as may not need pointing out, Australian. This fact, oddly, seems to cause more problems in your country than in mine. Every eighteen months or so some patriotic, home-based Australian academic takes it upon himself to analyse – i.e. denounce – the careers of successful artistic expatriates. The culprits ritually include yourself, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes; sometimes Peter Porter gets the executioner’s nod as well. Such books would normally pass unnoticed in Britain, except for the fact that you and Peter always seem to review them (allowing literary editors to reach brightly for that original headline ‘The Wizards of Oz’). According to the Ocker Acker, you stand charged with ambition, lack of a proper insularity or cringefulness, and with displaying certain degenerate or cosmopolitan tendencies. You are accused of not being sufficiently Australian, and at the same time of being a ‘professional Australian’. You would be sentenced to transportation back to the Old Country if you had not got in first and done that yourself.

Over here, your presence in the literary community is as uncontested as anyone else’s. The Australian counter-invasion is seen as benign and catalytic. We don’t think of you as a professional Australian but as a professional writer. An occasional grouch murmurs ‘Autodidact’, imagining it a slur while failing to understand that what writers teach themselves is the richest part of their entire education. But most of us soap-dodgers associate your Australianness with your literary virtues: energy, appetite, boldness, demotic attack, a revisionist attitude to the canon, a Europhilia which doesn’t entail Eurocentricity. It was in an essay of yours that I first came across the word ‘panoptic’, and it is still the adjective I tacitly apply to you. Panopticism implies generosity, cultural liberalism and a staunchless curiosity. You are, happily, well capable of being both robust and dismissive, of giving the full shoulder-charge to phoney and know-nothing; but you are essentially an enthusiast. Most people enjoy a destructive review (not least because it lets us off reading the book), but few are improved as readers by it. And that is the point of a literary essay: to help us read better – more deeply, more keenly, more widely. To make us, in short, better autodidacts. If you sometimes like putting on the dog (as our friend Terence Kilmartin used to phrase it), then few have more right to such dog than you. If you make us disagree and argue back, so much the better.

At the close of the last millennium, I watched a TV show you presented which had probably taken up several months of your writing time. From a vast stage, you introduced numerous celebrities to an unflaggingly enthusiastic audience. After a while – the case of the dog that barked all the time – a suspicion began to develop into a question. Why weren’t there any shots of the audience? Perhaps because its density did not quite match its seemingly thunderous output? Perhaps because in fact it did not exist in the first place? I was told recently of a well-known TV host – let’s call him, for the sake of argument, Bob Monkhouse – who can sustain a whole show this way, nudging, teasing and cajoling an increasingly orgasmic audience which is entirely the construct of a back-stage knob-twiddler. With a slide of the thumb and a flick of the switch the technician creates the rippling appreciation, the sudden hysteria, and even that studio standby (and gift to the host) The Guy Who Gets The Joke After Everybody Else. This seems to me to epitomize the difference between the worlds of television and literature, which over the past twenty years have competed for your attention. In television everyone applauds but there’s no one really there. In literature your latest article on that underrated Slovenian satirist may draw only a green-ink letter from Haywards Heath referring to convict ancestry and a polite aerogram from Professor Dryasdustovic addressing the question of folk influence on the satirist’s style. But these will be true responses. Oh yes, you’ll probably get a third one, from me. ‘You know, Clive,’ I’ll say irritatingly, ‘I really do think your literary essays are your best work.’

So the recent news that you are to stop being what the tabloids call ‘TV’s Clive’ has brought joy to the Grub Street team. We need your fully concentrated jostle. A laugh that bursts from a reader nose-down in the
TLS
is worth the acclaim of a hundred warmed-up studio audiences. It was time to give up the day-job. Welcome back, ‘Literature’s Clive’.

J
ULIAN
B
ARNES
2001

Who wrote this? ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ But you guessed straight away: George Orwell. The subject stated up front, the sudden acceleration from the scope-widening parenthesis into the piercing argument that follows, the way the obvious opposition between ‘lies’ and ‘truthful’ leads into the shockingly abrupt coupling of ‘murder’ and ‘respectable’, the elegant, reverse-written coda clinched with a dirt-common epithet, the whole easy-seeming poise and compact drive of it, a world view compressed to the size of a motto from a fortune cookie, demanding to be read out and sayable in a single breath – it’s the Orwell style. But you can’t call it Orwellian, because that means Big Brother, Newspeak, The Ministry of Love, Room 101, the Lubyanka, Vorkuta, the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB, KZ Dachau, KZ Buchenwald, the
Reichsschrifftumskammer
, Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse,
Arbeit macht frei, Giovinezza, Je suis partout
, the compound at Drancy, the Kempei Tai, Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom,
The Red Detachment of Women
, the Stasi, the Securitate, cromagnon Latino death squad goons decked out in Ray-bans after dark, that Khmer Rouge torture factory whose inmates were forbidden to scream, Idi Amin’s Committee of Instant Happiness or whatever his secret police were called, and any other totalitarian obscenity that has ever reared its head or ever will.

The word ‘Orwellian’ is a daunting example of the fate that a distinguished writer can suffer at the hands of journalists. When, as almost invariably happens, a totalitarian set-up, whether in fact or in fantasy – in Brazil or in
Brazil
– is called Orwellian, it is as if George Orwell had conceived the nightmare instead of analysed it, helped to create it instead of helping to dispell its euphemistic thrall. (Similarly Kafka, through the word Kafkaesque, gets the dubious credit for having somehow wished into existence the same sort of bureaucratic labyrinth that convulsed him to the heart.) Such distortions would be enough to make us give up on journalism altogether if we happened to forget that Orwell himself was a journalist. Here, to help us remember, are the twenty volumes of the new complete edition, cared for with awe-inspiring industry, dedication and judgement by Peter Davison, a scholar based in Leicester, who has spent the last two decades chasing down every single piece of paper his subject ever wrote on and then battling with publishers to persuade them that the accumulated result would supply a demand. The All of Orwell arrives in a cardboard box the size of a piece of check-in luggage: a man in a suitcase. As I write, the books are stacked on my desk, on a chair, on a side table, on the floor. A full, fat eleven of the twenty volumes consist largely of his collected journalism, reproduced in strict chronology along with his broadcasts, letters, memos, diaries, jottings,
et
exhaustively and fascinatingly
al
. The nine other volumes, over there near the stereo, were issued previously, in 1986–87, and comprise the individual works he published during his lifetime, including at least two books that directly and undeniably affected history. But, lest we run away with the idea that
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
are the core of his achievement, here, finally, is all the incidental writing, to remind us that they were only the outer layer, and could not have existed without what lay inside. Those famous, world-changing novels are just the bark. The journalism is the tree.

A four-volume edition of the journalism, essays, and letters, which was published in 1968 (co-edited by Ian Angus and Orwell’s widow, Sonia), had already given us a good idea of how the tree grew, but now we get an even better chance to watch its roots suck up the nutrients of contemporary political experience and—But it’s time to abandon that metaphor. Orwell never liked it when the writing drove the meaning. One of his precepts for composition was ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.’ For him, prose style was a matter in which the ethics determined the aesthetics. As a writer, he was his own close reader. Reading others, he was open to persuasion, but he would not be lulled, least of all by mellifluous rhetoric. Anyone’s prose style, even his, sets out to seduce. Orwell’s, superficially the plainest of the plain, was of a rhythm and a shapeliness to seduce the angels. Even at this distance, he needs watching, and would have been the first to admit it.

*

Orwell was born into the impoverished upper class – traditionally, for its brighter children, a potent incubator of awareness about how the social system works. Either they acquire an acute hunger to climb back up the system – often taking the backstairs route through the arts,
à la
Sir John Betjeman – or they go the other way, seeking an exit from the whole fandango and wishing it to damnation. Orwell, by his own later accounts, went the other way from his school days onward. In one of his last great essays, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys,’ he painted his years at prep school (where he nicknamed the headmaster’s gorgon of a wife Flip) as a set of panels by Hieronymus Bosch:

Orwell had a better time at Eton – it sounds as if he would have had a better time in Siberia – but twenty years later, after he left it, reviewing his friend Cyril Connolly’s partly autobiographical
Enemies of Promise
, he poured scorn on Connolly’s fond recollections of the place. When Connolly proclaimed himself fearful that after his climactic years of glory at Eton nothing in the rest of his life could ever be so intense, Orwell reacted as if Flip had just threatened to deliver him to the Sixth Form all over again: ‘ “Cultured” middle-class life has reached a depth of softness at which a public-school education – five years in a luke-warm bath of snobbery – can actually be looked back upon as an eventful period.’

Orwell often reviewed his friends like that. With his enemies, he got tough. But it should be said at the outset that even with his enemies he rarely took an inhuman tone. Even Hitler and Stalin he treated as men rather than as machines, and his famous characterization of the dogma-driven hack as ‘the gramophone mind’ would have lost half its force if he had not believed that there was always a human being within the fanatic. His comprehension, though, did not incline him to be forgiving: quite the reverse. Society might have made the powerful what they were as surely as it had made the powerless what they were, but the mere fact that the powerful were free to express whatever individuality they possessed was all the more reason to hold them personally responsible for crushing the freedom of others. When they beat you, you can join them or you can join the fight on behalf of those they beat. It seems a fair guess that Orwell had already made his choice by the time Flip threatened him with a visit from the Sixth Form.

*

In the early part of his adult life, he was a man of action. He wrote journalism when he could – for him it was more natural than breathing, which, thanks to a lurking tubercular condition, eventually became a strain – but he wanted to be where the action was. Already questioning his own privileged, if penny-pinching, upbringing and education, he went out to Burma at the age of nineteen and for the next five years served as a colonial policeman – an experience from which he reached the conclusion (incorporated later into his novel
Burmese Days
and his essays ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’) that the British Empire was a capitalist mechanism to exploit the subjugated poor. Back in Europe, he found out what it was like to be a proletarian by becoming one himself –
Down and Out in Paris and London
,
The Road to Wigan Pier
– and expanded his belief about the exploitative nature of the Empire to embrace the whole of capitalist society, anywhere. He volunteered for service in Spain in the fight against Franco, and the selfless comradeship of ordinary Spaniards risking their lives to get justice –
Homage to Catalonia
– confirmed his belief that an egalitarian socialist society was the only fair and decent alternative to the capitalist boondoggle, of which Franco’s Fascism, like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s, was merely the brute expression.