The All of Orwell | Clive James #essay

_{Who wrote this? ‘Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ But you guessed straight away: George Orwell. The subject stated up front, the sudden acceleration from the scope-widening parenthesis into the piercing argument that follows, the way the obvious opposition between ‘lies’ and ‘truthful’ leads into the shockingly abrupt coupling of ‘murder’ and ‘respectable’, the elegant, reverse-written coda clinched with a dirt-common epithet, the whole easy-seeming poise and compact drive of it, a world view compressed to the size of a motto from a fortune cookie, demanding to be read out and sayable in a single breath — it’s the Orwell style.}

A little while ago, Karen @Kaggsy’s Book Ramblings reviewed a book of essays by Clive James. One of the essays was about reading George Orwell, which immediately piqued my interest. Karen’s choice of word to describe the essay was ‘trenchant’ and she also found an external link for it here – The All of Orwell. It was originally published in The New Yorker 18 January 1999, then included in Even As We Speak: New Essays 1993–2001 (2001) by Pan Macmillan.

It would be very easy to simply quote the entire James essay back at you, for the pure pleasure of it all. But for once, I will keep this brief and simply urge you to read it for yourself. Or you could be like Clive James and (re)read the entire twenty volume ‘The Complete Works of George Orwell’ set compiled by Peter Davison in 1998 before responding!

Perhaps by the end of this year and my #ReadingOrwell project, I too, will be able to put together my thoughts on Orwell’s writing style and political nous as eloquently as James did here.

For now I will say that I totally agree with Karen; James’ essay was indeed penetrating, vigorous and articulate. What I found particularly heartening or illuminating, though, was how his critique of Orwell leaned a little, at times, towards criticism. I say this because as I have been reading Orwell’s non-fiction this year, I have had an occasional twinge of disquiet. Mostly I am in awe of his clear-cut insight into the socio-political events of his time, but every now and again I feel like he hasn’t quite got it right when he bangs on about capitalism and socialism. And there are times when his tone or choice of language is clearly ‘of his time’. He may have seen the evils of Empire and fascism for what they were but it didn’t always stop him from stereotyping or disparaging those from other cultures.

James also struggled to get his thoughts around this niggle. He found it necessary to include a 2001 afterword to his 1999 essay to try an address it, but could only come up with “Orwell said what mattered, and will always matter, about totalitarianism. But he never got far with saying what mattered about democracy. He thought it was a capitalist trick. It’s a lot trickier than that.” James also believed that Orwell had got the wrong end of the stick about Empire.

James was a little critical of Davison, saying that he “should have found room to say, in a footnote, that his hero was notoriously more enthusiastic than competent,” in reference to some less-than-flattering incidents that occurred in Burma and in Spain that never made it into any of Orwell’s essays or memoirs, or into any of the official biographies.

All of his essay was littered with typical Jamesian humour and words like ‘boondoggle’, so it was entertaining as well as insightful. He spent some time discussing Orwell’s particular and unique writing style which at times felt like a back-handed way for him to say but, hey, look at my seductive writing style! But, hey, that’s Clive James for you.

I will leave you with a couple of my favourite quotes:

_{The word ‘Orwellian’ is a daunting example of the fate that a distinguished writer can suffer at the hands of journalists. When, as almost invariably happens, a totalitarian set-up, whether in fact or in fantasy — in Brazil or in Brazil — is called Orwellian, it is as if George Orwell had conceived the nightmare instead of analysed it, helped to create it instead of helping to dispel its euphemistic thrall. (Similarly Kafka, through the word Kafkaesque, gets the dubious credit for having somehow wished into existence the same sort of bureaucratic labyrinth that convulsed him to the heart.)} 

_{Orwell had spent a lot of time before the war saying that class interests were indeed predominant — especially the interest of the ruling class in sacrificing the interests of every other class in order to stay on top — but now he had discovered his own patriotism…even before the war, he had been impressed by how the English people in general had managed to preserve and develop civilized values despite the cynicism of their rulers. Now he became less inclined to argue that all those things had happened merely because the sweated labour of colonial coolies had paid for them, and were invalidated as a result….From the early war years until the end of his life, Orwell wrote more and more about British civilization. He wrote less and less about the irredeemable obsolescence of bourgeois democracy. He had come to suspect that the democratic part might depend on the bourgeois part.}

_{But not even Orwell could resist a resonant statement that fudged the facts — a clarity that is really an opacity. Yes, Orwell did write like an angel, and that’s the very reason we have to watch him like a hawk. Luckily for us, he was pretty good at watching himself. He was blessed with a way of putting things that made anything he said seem so, but that was only a gift. His intellectual honesty was a virtue.}

In 2008 James was awarded a Special Orwell Prize for Writing and Broadcasting after being shortlisted for the Orwell Journalism Prize in 2008. Jean Seaton, chair of the Orwell Prize and professor of media history at the University of Westminster said: “Clive James is a master, in the Orwell tradition, of the essay. Whether written or broadcast his words are sharp but humane.”

• Date Read: 23rd March 2024

_{This post was written in the area we now call the Blue Mountains within the Ngurra [country] of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.}