George Orwell: Pre-dating the Future
by Joel Savishinsky

Change your name.
Change your country
Change your politics
              … and your clothes.
And change both the past and the future.

Born in Bengal, raised in England, Orwell
grew up an unsettled man, travelling widely to
find his truths and his place in the world.
A scholarship student at prep school, both
ill-fed and abused, he was also literally
outclassed. Later, a policeman in Burma,
he saw “the dirty work of Empire at
close quarters,” and learned to hate imperialists
because he had become one of them. Those years
were the elephant in the room of his imagination,
a humiliation, a replay of schoolboy servility
and sadism, a spectacle of the self-conscious
weakness worn by the uniformed and powerful.

Returning home to London, he moved
to the other extreme, put on mufti and,
as a writer, exchanged his birthname Eric Blair
for George Orwell, borrowing a literary identity
from titled kings and a local river.
In one admirer’s clear-eyed judgment,
he now “went native in his own country.”
Tramping to purge his Etonian pride of
prejudice, he found that “going down and out”
– in a gritty coal town near Manchester,
in the damp and dust of mines and mills, in
a hostel in London’s East End, the poor ward
of a French hospital, and a Parisian hotel basement
scrubbing pots – was as heart-breaking,
as clarifying, as laboring to become a writer.

Fighting with the Loyalists in civil war Spain,
he suffered both bodily and moral wounds.
Operating in no-man’s land, he was bringing back
food for his own troops when his tall body,
framed by the sky above the parapets, took a shot
in the neck. Recovering in Barcelona, he learned
how Russian agents of the Comintern had executed
his dissident Marxist and anarchist comrades.
Home from the war, unarmed but armored, he proved
to be the least reticent of that conflict’s casualties,
writing the saddest of homages to Catalonia, an account
that stands unmatched as eulogy for the dreams
of his generation and the hopes of its prophets.

Appalled by his words of witness to Soviet betrayal,
the British Left quickly left him to his own
rhetorical devices, while the Right took
what he got right and corrupted, re-wrote and
owned it as their own, leaving him to find
his own center, a voice crying in the wilderness
of reason, a broadcaster, journalist, and novelist
fighting fascists and autocrats, Nazis, Stalinists and
despots, with both the spoken and written word.

Student and victim of a half-century’s wars,
Orwell became the poet of dystopias, of revolutions
that re-created the old oppressions. He imagined them
in a four-footed, sure-footed upside-down farm, and
as the disembodied face that screamed hate from
a screen in two-minute bursts. Describing himself as
a “Tory anarchist” and “revolutionary patriot,”
he once said he wanted “to make political writing
into an art,” and expose “the smelly little orthodoxies”
of the intellectuals. Struggling in poverty to finish
his last books, his lungs weak since childhood from
recurrent bronchitis, he developed a final, fatal
tuberculosis, which no retreat to a rural village
or Hebrides cottage could exile or excise.

The images and words that survive him are indelible –
“Cold War,” “Newspeak,” “doublethink,” “Big Brother” –
each embedded in the English language, whose purity he had
long sought to defend. Perhaps almost as enduring is
the type of literary immortality he shares with only
a few others, those who have had their name adjectivized …
or demonized. Whereas Shakespearean, Kafkaesque,
and Dickensian are clear, Orwellian may be
the ultimate irony: a pseudonym for both the slave’s
adoption of his master’s voice, and the freedom
bestowed by a fierce clarity with impolitic words.
They are the legacy of Eric Blair’s nomme de plume,
his nomme de guerre, now a double-thought honor pinned
to his last uniform, the well-worn, woolen sweater of his craft.



 

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