It was the British political journalist Jason Cowley, writing in London’s Sunday Times a month or two back, who posed a query calculated to strike terror into the heart of any self-respecting Orwell-fancier. Were we, Cowley wondered, with the air of one who tosses a Sèvres vase into the air to watch it descend into heap of fragments, approaching peak Orwell? Was the man in whose voluminous output so much of modern political and sociocultural malaise has been refracted losing his sheen?
Some Orwellians – myself included – on hearing this would probably respond with a rather handy Latin phrase: si monumentem requiris, circumspice, which loosely translates as, “If you want evidence, buster, then take a look around.” Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 has just opened in cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic; Andy Serkis’s animated version of Animal Farm is due on the big screen in early May.
On the other hand, it could be argued that each of these artefacts is in some degree a symptom of peak Orwell, redolent of an industry that has got calamitously out of hand. The Peck documentary, for example, is politically charged and wears its anti-Trump credentials like a Miami Dolphins hoodie. The Serkis film, which is narrated by a cadre of leading American actors (Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Steve Buscemi) is an Animal Farm refitted to suit modern mores, which is to say that it has acquired several extra characters; seen Snowball, the boar usually associated with Trotsky, transformed into a sow; and is being marketed as a “coming-of-age” drama featuring an ideologically conflicted piglet named Lucky.
To move on to the world of the modern-day ideologue (that raptly contested space in which Orwell would doubtless have taken a keen interest): what garment did Elon Musk happen to be wearing when he addressed the crowd, via video link, at a far-right London protest last September? A T-shirt bearing the slogan “What would Orwell think?” Anti-Trump documentaries, feel-good reimaginings of totalitarian satires, Musk invoking the spirit of a man who spent his life attacking… well, people like Musk – this is what life on Planet Orwell currently consists of.
Cowley’s question turns out to be one in which the abundant crop of Orwell books can hardly fail to engage. A representative specimen might be George Orwell: Life and Legacy by the British academic Robert Colls. Professor Colls, it should immediately be said, is an Orwell-junkie. And yet, as Colls and everyone else working on Orwell would probably concede, there is such a thing as saturation. In fact, a bibliography of contributions to the lumbering juggernaut known as “Orwell studies” over the past three years would probably run to half a dozen closely typed pages.
There have been new biographies (I plead guilty) pioneering studies of Orwell’s reception beyond the Iron Curtain, stark reminders of his contemporary relevance – see Laura Beers’s excellent Orwell’s Ghosts – companions, compendia, reader’s guides, forensic analyses of his exploits in late 1920s Paris or the remote Scottish island where he spent the period 1946-8, so many chips tumbling from the workbench that the synthesist can sometimes despair of arranging them in a coherent shape.
All of which can be variously interpreted as a vote in Orwell’s favor or hard evidence of an enterprise which has become seriously overproductive and in doing so harbors the seeds of its own destruction – like those fruit trees which power into overdrive for a couple of seasons only to wither and die once peak production has ceased. As for the saturation, one of the consequences of large-scale tunneling into the life of anyone commonly regarded as a secular saint is that you start to turn up evidence for the prosecution. Sure enough, much of the work done on Orwell in the past half-decade has brought out some of the – shall we say – more equivocal sides of his personality.
One might note here Anna Funder’s Wifedom – a spirited, tendentious and (at times) highly inaccurate study of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen Blair, which convicts Orwell of such failings as misogyny, indifference, infidelity and plagiarism while almost singlehandedly creating the myth that Animal Farm, published shortly after Eileen’s death on the operating table in March 1945, really ought to have had her name on the title page alongside her husband’s. Mud has also been flung due to “Orwell’s list,” a file of prominent figures Orwell suspected of being affiliated with the Communist party. He provided it to a branch of the UK Foreign Office shortly before his death; the list’s existence is a prod to constant online traffic about “Orwell the snitch.”
Colls devotes several pages to the list, which, as he insists, can’t be understood without heaps of context being brought into play. (The same point could be made of Orwell’s trampling by the feminists for his alleged treatment of Eileen.) In the late 1940s, the Foreign Office’s International Research Department (IRD) was bent on proclaiming the merits of parliamentary democracy to a series of Central and Eastern European republics on which the Soviet Union had its colonizing eye. If pamphlets were going to be written and distributed in the Balkans and beyond, presumably, they ought to be written by democrats. The difficulty facing anybody commissioning them in the Britain of the postwar era lay in separating the well-wishers from the communist stooges.
And communist stooges were everywhere. At least a dozen of them sat in the House of Commons masquerading as Labour party MPs. The man occupying the desk next to Orwell’s friend at the IRD was Guy Burgess, who defected to Moscow in May 1951. If some of Orwell’s selections seem prejudicial and misinformed then, as Colls puts it, “many of the names on the list were not only what Orwell said they were, they were what they said they were.” Significantly, one of them was the notorious Peter Smollett, who in his capacity as a Russian agent at the war-time Ministry of Information, was instrumental in the turning down of Animal Farm by the publisher Jonathan Cape on the grounds that its mockery of Stalin would jeopardize the war effort.
Orwell knew nothing of Smollett’s role in blocking Animal Farm when he set to work on the list: he simply had a weather eye for a rat (“very slimy…almost certainly an agent of some kind.”) And to maintain, as “Orwell the snitch” conspiracists continue to do, that all this amounts to “cancel culture,” witch-hunting and so on, is to miss the point. No one, as Colls points out, had their hotel room searched by British Intelligence in the small hours or were put up against a wall at the Ministry of Defence and shot; they were simply not considered as potential pamphleteers by the IRD. Elsewhere, Colls is good on the Eileen controversy, deciding that she “influenced his writing, but in ways that cannot be shown,” and adding that – a maxim which ought to be nailed to the aspiring biographer’s desk – “It is impossible to accurately gauge the impact of any one thing on any other thing, let alone the impact of any one person on any other person, let alone a writer.”
He predicted that his books would be used by the American right as sticks with which to beat the European left
We know that Eileen was the person closest to Orwell in the three months he spent writing Animal Farm; we know that she discussed the book with him, had extracts read to her each evening when she came back from work and talked to her friends about it (all this was established by Sylvia Topp in her excellent Eileen: The Making of George Orwell.) Beyond that, there is no hard evidence for anything.
If we can safely assume that peak Orwell has not yet been reached and that his uncanny ability to predict the future shape of the world continues to startle – certainly Donald Trump’s saber-rattling about Greenland seemed an intensely Orwellian moment – then where will the Orwell Industry look next? One direction is Eastern Europe, as advertised by Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia and Krystyna Wieszczek’s George Orwell and Communist Poland, but another is the US.
From his deathbed at University College Hospital, London, Orwell predicted – all too accurately, as it turned out – that Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four would be used by the American right as sticks with which to beat the European left. At the same time, there remains a school of American thought which regards him as insufficiently pro-capitalist – or, as Bart Simpson memorably put it, “Grampa said he was a Commie.” If the CIA’s propagandizing of Orwell’s work has been well covered in recent years, then less attention has been paid to some of his views on “freedom” and their almost Whitmanesque grounding in the mid-19th century pioneer age.
We know that Orwell was deeply influenced by the “log cabin to White House” view of early American life that he took from its fiction: among other aborted projects, he once planned to write a biography of Mark Twain, and he seems to have believed that the pre-machine-age US offered the prospect of a kind of personal liberty that was more or less unprecedented in modern history.
After that came the capitalist robber barons of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) – itself an important influence on Nineteen Eighty-Four – and the “zones of influence” whose consequences we are still dealing with in the pulsating Trumposphere of 2026. There will be more T-shirts and more films like Orwell: 2+2=5. It’s a tribute to Orwell’s significance that, three-quarters of a century after his death, we should sit here discussing the world in a context that he created.
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