PETER HITCHENS: Are the Left’s thought police about to cancel George Orwell? Socialists have long loathed the 1984 author because he ruthlessly exposed their absurdity. Now a book claims he was vile to his wife, homophobic and a sadist
Is George Orwell about to be cancelled? This gaunt, scruffy Old Etonian has been a grave nuisance to the Left now for more than 80 years.
A revolutionary, an anti-imperialist, actually wounded in battle against the dictator Franco in the Spanish Civil War, he is over-qualified for socialist sainthood.
Having worked as a colonial policeman in Burma, Orwell renounced and condemned his actions in that post. He lived as a tramp, worked for starvation wages in Paris, personally experienced the squalor and poverty of the Great Depression. He cannot be dismissed as a public school elitist.
Yet he has also been one of the most effective and merciless critics of the failings of the Left. In two mighty classics, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four he imperishably exposed and lampooned the Left’s abiding tendency to intolerance, repression and the creation of police states.
He knew what he was talking about. The Communists tried to murder him in Spain for being the wrong sort of socialist, and very nearly succeeded. He also mocked his comrades for their ridiculous fads, jeering at them: ‘We have reached a stage when the very word “Socialism” calls up . . . a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers.’
George Orwell has been one of the most effective and merciless critics of the failings of the Left, exposed in two mighty classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four
Eileen O’Shaughnessy, first wife of writer George Orwell, had to put up with his grim scrimping life, living in great discomfort in more or less squalid dwellings
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Imagine how his pen would have shredded Extinction Rebellion, veganism, ‘taking the knee’ and Sir Keir Starmer. It is a matter of mystery that the BBC has erected a statue of Orwell outside their headquarters. I can only conclude that nobody there has actually read what he wrote.
But I have, and confess here that for many years of my life he was more important than anything else I read, or was taught, or experienced. Like any educated person I had read the two great anti-totalitarian works in my early teens, but I was 17 when I first opened his Collected Essays, Journalism And Letters. I still have my tattered 1960s paperbacks, priced in shillings.
This treasure-house of brilliance, written with the simplicity of utter honesty, would one day help me find the exit from the Trotskyist dogma in which I had imprisoned myself. Along with his friend Arthur Koestler, he provided a way for me and many others to change my mind without surrendering my spirit.
This is why the Left are so suspicious of him. He was undoubtedly on the side of justice and liberty. He had taken a true and brave part in the Spanish Civil War which was the first and last crusade of the idealistic Left, and which still has the power to move 90 years later.
Ultimately he remained a British patriot who greatly loved this country, its people, its culture, its liberty from state power and its literature. Many on the Left much dislike this aspect of him but know it cannot be denied. The power of his books and thoughts is a nuisance to them. But what can they do? He is just too good to be torn down.
Well, now I sense that they are limbering up for an attack which may yet see that statue pulled from its pedestal. For Orwell, you see, was a man, and a man very much of his time. He had prejudices against Jews, against Scotsmen (I have the personal word of one of his former secretaries for this) and against homosexuals.
He denounced other Leftists to the British government in the opening years of the Cold War. And his attitudes towards women were about as bad as they could get. He stands accused of having tried to rape an early girlfriend, Jacintha Buddicom.
Dystopic vision: Orwell’s famous creation Big Brother in the film of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
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As Kathryn Hughes described the wretched event in The Guardian in 2007: ‘Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip’.
Such an action by any young man in these times would no doubt have led to serious trouble, if not to prison. And, of course, we are now in these times, so it is deeply damaging and who can or would defend it?
But is it enough to cancel Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm, or the collected works, or Spain? Leo Tolstoy was an absolute beast to his wife. So was Charles Dickens. But they are purely literary superstars. Orwell’s standing is partly political. If he can be discredited among the modern Left, he may well totter and fall. I sense that it may become enough.
For a new and menacing front has just opened up in Orwell studies. After an avalanche of largely friendly biographies of Orwell (one academic has written two) we now have a biography of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whom he married in a Hertfordshire village church in 1936.
Poor Eileen had to put up with Orwell’s grim scrimping life, living in great discomfort in more or less squalid dwellings, cleaning out the filthy lavatory, a job Orwell disdained to do. She followed him into deadly danger in Spain (and then, by quick-witted inspiration, helped to get him out of it) and died, tragically young at 39, during a hysterectomy in 1945.
Orwell had often treated her in an offhand way, perhaps not unusual among Englishmen of his age and class.
But in 2023 this now matters hugely.
My heart sank when I read that this work’s author, Anna Funder, believes: ‘Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view.’
She has entitled her book Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life, in case readers and buyers are in any doubt of its chilly theme. The clever cover shows only part of Eileen’s face.
The rest has slipped out of the frame. Eileen is the Cultural Left’s perfect weapon against Orwell, for she was a modern woman before her time and he treated her miserably. She had a good degree from Oxford (something her husband never achieved) and Ms Funder speculates that she may have contributed greatly to her husband’s successful books, without credit. Who can now say?
However, it is easy to suspect that Ms Funder has it in for Orwell. She recently told a literary festival he was ‘enormously homophobic but deeply attracted to men and I think not particularly interested in women sexually’. Talk about the worst of both worlds, that of 1943 and that of 2023.
Her vituperation is slightly moderated by thin praise for his writing ability: ‘So he’s a very complicated man. He’s sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, violent sometimes and also brilliant. And I think that he desperately wants to be decent.’ Wants to be? But was he? Perhaps not.
Does it matter? Yes, whether we like it or not. Patriotic conservatives used to be able to deploy Orwell against the old Left because he was one of them, who saw through them.
But now he is an alleged rapist, misogynist, homophobe, etc, the modern Left can and will retort that he is not in fact theirs at all, and if conservatives like him that only shows that they are all rapists and misogynists too. I think the BBC should be making quiet plans to shift that statue.
It doesn’t belong there anyway.
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