As he is writing The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s contempt for those who think reaches summits. He exposes for example that after the slaughter of 1914-18 young people display, what he admits very well, pacifist ideas. But his pen quickly slips towards amalgam and insult: young people mock the world unnecessarily, it is fashionable to appear as “bolcho” and, generally speaking, England is submerged by “antinomian” and “pre-digested” ideas such as pacifism, internationalism, humanism, feminism, free love, divorce, atheism, birth control (Wigan, p. 121). This pruritus of snobs believing themselves revolutionary does not last because the young iconoclasts of Eton age and sow their wild oats. Only one of them, in the twenties, enlists in the Burmese imperial police, without us knowing exactly if, for him, this commitment represents real life. All the others gather in the intellectual circles of the beautiful districts of London.
For Orwell, the twenties were dominated by a kind of artists with no real grip on society. It was the era of « intellectual rentiers, an era of irresponsibility such as the world had never known before » since writers such as Pound, Eliot or Huxley, dominated above all pursuing « moral, religious and cultural » goals. So, at the moment when Orwell becomes politically-minded, he reproaches the intelligentsia for breaking free from the ideology. However, during the last ten years of his life, he devoted much of his energy to explain that there is good literature only far from the immediate constraints of politics. But, for the time being, he observes that English intellectuals who contemplate their plexus or who look to Byzantium or Moscow make the mistake of ignoring what matters on the European continent, such as the rise of fascism in Italy. But, Orwell notes, « everything changes around 1930-35 ». The representative man of letters is no longer a cultivated and devout expatriate, like T.S. Eliot, « the last of the true right-wing intellectuals », but the young bourgeois prone to communism (“ Inside the Whale ”). Henceforth Orwell reproaches the intelligentsia for being too politicized, i.e. to embrace ideologies without the necessary hindsight that the artistic perspective can provide. He rebukes every error, thoughtless enthusiasm :
Who would have foretold just after the general strike that ten years later Winston Churchill would be the darling of the Daily Worker ? [...] On the whole, the intellectuals of the Left defended the Russo-German Pact. It was ‘realistic’, like Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and with similar consequences (CEJL, II, p. 367).
Orwell takes the bite: he criticizes (privately) the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, « this dark idiot for whom the war resembles a cricket match » (CEJL, I, p. 395). He makes no difference between the fellow-traveller writers who « fuck Stalin’s ass » and those who swoon before Mussolini: all worship power, strength and cruelty (“ Inside the Whale ”). And then, in spite of their propensity for workerism, they remained snobs: their vest is not buttoned down (Wigan, p. 119). And when they realize that the worker despises them and risks, if he revolts, to endanger their material and intellectual comfort, they are again tempted by fascism, namely the most authentic order (22).
In 1940, in “ The Lion and the Unicorn ”, Orwell argues that the weakening of imperialism in the 1930s was largely caused by the left intelligentsia, this intelligentsia having strengthened itself through the stagnation of the Empire. He believed that an objective alliance had been forged between the retired colonels (the Blimps) for whom an overly intelligent individual could not be a patriot, and the intellectuals for whom a patriot could clearly not be an intelligent (23). This paradox cannot surprise because it comes up at the end of a chain after other equally astonishing considerations on intellectuals. Orwell first poses that from pessimism to a reactionary view of things there is only one step quickly crossed by a significant fraction of the ruling class (CEJL, I, p. 558). He also believed that it would have been possible to create a genuinely popular pacifist movement in England, far from the salons of the effeminate left (CEJL, I, p. 368). But in the thirties, the intelligentsia was discredited in unspeakable activities, in the field of the mind as in that of politics. It has cut itself off from the rest of society by systematically denigrating Western civilization and cultivating a negative sense of « disillusionment » (CEJL, I, p. 564). The real question, Orwell wonders, is not why bourgeois people became Stalinists, but why they turned to the left. At first glance, it is because the Axis powers threatening the British Empire, antifascism and imperialism have joined in the same fight. For Orwell, there was no fundamental difference between an anti-communist blimp and a « silver antifascist » : « The Left intelligentsia made their swing-over from ‘War is Hell’ to ‘War is glorious’ not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage » (CEJL, II, p. 288).
Faced with this refocusing, the role of the antifascist Conservatives was to serve as liaison officers. The basic left man is now, Orwell notes, a good imperialist while « theoretically hostile to the ruling class » (CEJL, I, pp. 381-3).
What could a coherent and responsible writer do in the midst of this maelstrom ? Orwell, who in the autumn of 1938 failed to publish a small pacifist book (CEJL, I, p. 395), was terrified that a belligerent England would gag writers. And he despairs to see his colleagues share his fears: « Richard Rees was talking as though even war was not worse than the present conditions, but I think what this really means is that he doesn’t see any peace-time activity for which he feels to be useful » (CEJL, I, p. 564). Thus, Orwell reproaches left-wing intellectuals for being, even more than the bureaucrats and magnates of the popular press, responsible for the « weakening of the desire for freedom » because of their blindness to the « nauseating » Stalinist myth. They read too much Freud or Dostoyevsky while Hitler took power and Stalin starved the Ukrainian peasants. The laissez-faire, the « sabotage » of intellectuals, the decay of the psyche of an entire people (at the time of Munich) encouraged totalitarian regimes to consider England as a decadent country despite « the good moral health of the ruling classes » (24).
Three years before the publication of 1984, Orwell points out, in “ The Prevention of Literature ” (CEJL, IV, p. 81 sqq.), the paradox that many people would find it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook but do not take offence at a distorted historical fact. But it is when literature meets politics that, according to Orwell, « totalitarianism exerts its strongest pressure on intellectuals ». Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official. And as soon as the spirit of chapel prevails, art, but also reflection, suffer. Among Stalinists as well as Catholics. This is evidenced by the case of Chesterton who chose to put under the bushel his « sensitivity and intellectual honesty» for the benefit of the Catholic cause. During the last twenty years of his life, Orwell says, Chesterton has only repeated the same thing. « Every book, every paragraph, every sentence [...] had to demonstrate, beyond any possibility of error, the superiority of Catholics over Protestants and pagans ». But this superiority could not simply be intellectual or spiritual. It had to be translated – and this is where Chesterton became evil, « in terms of national prestige and military power, thereby leading to the idealization of the Latin countries, France in the first place » (CEJL, III, pp. 414-5).
No to intellectual officials, yes to rebels, yes to heretics in the Protestant tradition, yes to those who know how to remain masters of their conscience. But once these great principles are established, Orwell generalizes and institutes particularly captive trials against the thoughts and motivations of left-wing intellectuals. In the resignation, he amalgamates them with the owners of the great means of communication and makes them accomplices in the weakening of the desire for freedom (CEJL, III, p. 414). Moreover, Orwell does not believe the truly socialist left-wing intellectuals. Every believing and practicing socialist, he postulates, thinks himself alien to the exploitation of classes. Similarly, he questions their anti-imperialism (« deep down, they do not want the Empire to disappear »). Moreover, if the Stalinist system fascinates them, it is because they know its impossible advent in England. The left-wing intellectual displays his progressivism in a way that is all the more violent because he secretly wants nothing to change.
In conclusion, Orwell’s discourse on the intelligentsia was often characterized by irritation and violence. As the cause of the writer’s outbursts, we will not forget the love/hate relationship he had had for a long time with the English university, a personal bias pushing him to point out the most marginal elements of the London scene, and especially the bitterness of ideological struggles. For the Orwell’s turnarounds, his anathemas, his analyses, sometimes contradictory and without nuances, must be evaluated in the light of the concerns, the malaise, the vicissitudes of the intellectual world itself. Until 1935, Orwell did not hide his aversion to the omnipotent literary coteries and dynasties. This feeling prevented him from admitting that these intellectuals, often brilliant, were the initiators of experiments, of significant renewals. He rebelled against the pro-communist « political poets » of the thirties (but said nothing of their disengagement at the beginning of the forties) without bothering to link the sometimes subtle Manichaeism of this poetry to the demands of a very unstable political situation within the country (so, when a Labour leader chooses national union against his base, what to do and where to go ?), very precarious in the world and difficult to assess objectively. Moreover, it does not take into account, for example, the fact that the majority of progressive intellectuals sincerely imagined themselves as the Prometheus of a new society (25), firmly believing that history was on their side or that they were on the side of history. « The certainty of a new life must be your starting point,” Lewis wrote in his “Letter to a Young Revolutionary » (26). Orwell would quickly dismiss the reasoned optimism of all those who believed, before great disillusionment, that the 1930s would see a new order beneficial to man: At the beginning of the Thirties it was a tenet of faith...that reason was slowly replacing force in the conduct of human affairs. Orwell, for his part, would see his hopes in society soar on the occasion of the Spanish War.
But the important thing is that his thinking has led to an impasse. In his period of socialist maturation, he rejected intellectuals because bourgeois, harmful and parasitic. Later, in his “national union” period, he doubted joining the people. As for the birth of a proletarian culture, he pushed it back indefinitely. Thankful to the merit of writers of working class origin in providing English literature with new themes for observation and reflection, which emboldens some bourgeois writers to finally address problems that were “ under their noses ” (CEJL, II, p. 54 sq.), Orwell observed that these authors wrote as bourgeois, «in the language of the bourgeois», without creating a new mode of cultural expression.
In 1984, the Proles produce nothing. They reproduce...
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Notes
22 Wigan, p. 148. There were very few English artists or intellectuals who were openly fascists or who expressed an interest in fascism. Orwell explained very well that the Wellian utopia of the “World State” and the Mussolinian or Hitlerian order were objectively of the same nature. But Orwell absolved the author of The Sleeper Awakes on the grounds that he was a 19th-century man (“Wells, Hitler and the World State”, CEJL, II, p. 166 sq.). Jean-Marc Riaume recalled that Yeats and Shaw were of Irish origin, that Pound was American, that Wyndham Lewis or T.S. Eliot were of American origin, while Belloc was of French origin. Riaume explained in these terms the blindness of Eliot: « return to tradition and classicism », « dream of a new Renaissance realized in the twentieth century by Italy of Mussolini », fright before « an apocalyptic vision of the European future ». Keeping his distance from fascism « while supporting it », he wanted « the perpetuation of civilization » (“ Stephen Spender and the British intellectuals in the face of the rise of external perils ”, Les Années Trente, No. 3, February 1985). Concerning the pacifism/fascism convergence in England in the 1930s, we can refer to Claude Jolicœur: “ Les Intellectuels Britannique et le fascism ”, Les Cahiers du C.E.R.F., n°1, March 1983 and Jean-Paul Révauger: “Nazi Rather than Dead, British Pacifists and Fascism”, Les Années Trente, No. 3, February 1985.
23 Dans Education and the Social Order (Londres: Allen and Unwin, 1932), Bertrand Russell developed the thesis that the most conformist young people of the ruling class died on the battlefield in wars they would not understand.
24 In “ The Lion and the Unicorn ”, Orwell justifies this good health by the fact that several dukes and counts fought – and died, during the Flanders campaign.
25 Cf. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), chap. 12.
26 In New Country, Michael Roberts ed. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1933).
27 Julian Symons, The Thirties : A Dream Revolved (Londres: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 21.
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