"Most of the time he violently disagrees with the people beside whom he is fighting."
George Orwell in Vogue
In a rare exception, today’s newsletter features not Orwell’s own words, but words about him: we thought readers might be interested to see how Orwell and his work were viewed during his lifetime. The profile below was first published in American Vogue on 15 September 1946.
Peter Davidson—who we have to thank for the transcription—notes that the original piece was accompanied by a “good illustration of Orwell in his London flat’” Its author, Allene Talmey, delivered a profile almost as lively as its subject.
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“George Orwell”
Although George Orwell is famous in England now—a new fame incidentally—he is comparatively unknown in this country. Back in 1939 he had some reputation among the avant-gardists but no popular following. But with the publication of Animal Farm a year ago in England after two years of difficulty in finding any publisher at all, and its subsequent translation into French, German and even Portuguese, Orwell has become a literary mark. Undoubtedly much of its success came from the fortunate choice of a subject—dictatorship, on Communist lines, at the very moment when the policies and philosophies of Soviet Russia are the worry of the capitalist world. In Animal Farm, a lucid satire, pointed as a pin, Orwell takes a group of farmyard animals led into a revolution and so to a circle of subjection by some mighty smart pigs. Orwell is a plain speaker, a direct writer whose true brilliant is set off far better in his Dickens, Dali and Others, a series of critical essays, than in Animal Farm.
Nowadays, Orwell lives in a top-floor flat in London, with his twenty-odd-months-old son. The stuff around his rooms—a Burmese sword, a Spanish peasant lamp, the Staffordshire figures, show something of his foreign life, his strong English solidity. Educated at Eton, Orwell has since then had the kind of picaresque life that is so superb in English autobiographies—life as a young officer in the Indian police in Burma, a militia man with a Socialist column in the Spanish Civil War (his Homage to Catalonia is an account of his impressions) and during World War II, as a war correspondent during the invasion of Germany. Fairly much a leftist, George Orwell is a defender of freedom, even though most of the time he violently disagrees with the people beside whom he is fighting.
Allene Talmey for American Vogue
The title of this post was well-chosen. It sums up so much of Orwell and is generally a good way to live. In some ways, the idea reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” The possibility of getting lost — or deluded — within a group who agrees with you is important to recognize. Orwell was anything but a follower.
I think that the American writer missed a key point, and that is Orwell learned from his experiences and changed his mind and views along the way, sadly too few people are prepared to do that these days.