George Orwell started an imaginary BBC interview with Jonathan Swift in 1942 by describing his 1738 edition of Swift's works. The edition is 'not easy to read,' he said, 'but when I open it... I almost have the feeling that I can hear Swift speaking to me.' Swift interrupted: 'I warn you to beware of all modern editions.' I remember that warning as 20 volumes containing everything Orwell ever wrote barge their way through the front door. I must find a new shelf. I am not going to disturb the one I have filled with Orwelliana over nearly 40 years, ever since I read the first five pages of Homage to Catalonia and got a glimpse of an egalitarian democracy organised from the bottom up. This wonderful new edition gives me the chance to read all those books again, and much more besides, confident that nothing has been cut out or even abridged. Swift's warning, I discover, is almost redundant. Except for a silly shifting of chapters in Homage to Catalonia, there is nothing to beware of in this modern edition.
When Orwell went to Spain in 1936 to fight the Fascists, he was already a confirmed campaigner against racialism and imperialism. His stint as a policeman in Burma made sure of that. 'Even those poor bloody fools at the club might be better company,' muses a character in his first novel, Burmese Days, 'if we weren't all of us living a lie the whole time: the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of rob them.' His research for his book about the northern working class, The Road to Wigan Pier, turned him against capitalism as well. In Barcelona, he realised that he was taking part in a revolution that could put a stop to racialism, imperialism and capitalism once and for all. He had exposed what was wrong with the world. In Spain, he felt for the first time the power to change it. The little book he wrote on his return in my view, his best sparkles with the enthusiasm of that experience.
He learnt two lessons in Spain that stayed with him for the rest of his short life. The first was that the essence of socialism is equality, the second was that the socialist spirit of the Spanish revolution was smashed by the Communist Party; and that the Russian government that organised this counter-revolution was not socialist, as it claimed, but the opposite. Russia under Stalin was a class society; 'a planned state capitalism with the grab motive left intact'; a bureaucratic tyranny that while it broke the spirit of the Spanish revolution was staging the disgusting show trials to wipe out the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution. George Orwell was one of the very first socialists to attack Stalinism.
Not long after Homage to Catalonia was published, he wrote: 'I do not believe that a man with £50,000 a year and a man with 15 shillings a week either can or will co-operate. The nature of their relationship is, quite simply, that one is robbing the other... It would seem, therefore, that if the problems of western capitalism are to be solved, it will have to be through a third alternative, a movement which is generally revolutionary, willing to make drastic changes and to use violence if necessary, but which does not lose touch, as communism and fascism have done, with the essential values of democracy.' For nearly two years, Orwell searched around for this alternative movement. He joined the Independent Labour Party and signed a manifesto pledging resistance to war. As late as January 1939, he was urging the art critic, Herbert Read, that it was 'necessary for those who intend to oppose the coming war to start organising for illegal anti-war activities'. It was no good trying to 'fight fascism in the name of democracy', he told a friend, because 'what we know as democracy in time of difficulty turns immediately to fascism'. The only way to win was 'for the workers to keep the power in their own hands'.
When no recognisable anti-war movement arose, however, and Britain declared war against Hitler's Germany, Orwell did a smart about-turn. He denounced his recent view that fascism could not be fought in the name of capitalist democracy. He offered to sign up, but was refused because of the bullet wound in the throat he got in Spain. He joined the BBC and drafted weekly war reports which favourably, sometimes rather too favourably, measured the Allies' progress.
In The Lion and the Unicorn, an essay he published in 1941, he wrote of 'the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty'. But even while he was peddling 'jingoistic muck' on the radio, he never lost sight of his socialist inspiration. The Lion and the Unicorn ends with the prediction, which he later ruefully admitted was not fulfilled, that the war against Hitler could not be won without a revolution, or at least without 'an irreversible shift of power'.
Nor did he lose sight of the other great lesson from Spain: the reactionary nature of Russian foreign policy and the subservience of all the communist parties to it. After the collapse of the Stalin-Hitler pact, which Orwell denounced mercilessly, Russia became an ally in the war. Criticism of the Stalin regime was universally unpopular, especially on the Left, but Orwell, who in 1943 became literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune, never stopped campaigning against the Russian corruption of British socialist theory and practice. He marvelled at the almost total obeisance to Stalinism among the intelligentsia. Gollancz, Faber& Faber (in the shape of Orwell's friend TS Eliot) and Jonathan Cape all turned down the manuscript of Animal Farm, his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism. Only Tribune (run at the time by Aneurin Bevan MP) and The Observer, edited by David Astor, protected Orwell's right to say what he thought and not just about Russia. Orwell was opposed to the execution of former Nazi traitors and to the Zionist experiment in Palestine, and was allowed to say so.
Once again, however, his opposition to the Stalin regime did not push him to the Right. His articles after the war are full of complaint about the return of class privileges and the failure of the Labour Government to deal with them. He was shocked by the continued appointment of Tories to key diplomatic posts, by the failure to abolish the House of Lords and by the pandering to the Royal Family. He mused again that 'economic inequality makes democracy impossible'.
Throughout 1947, 1948 and 1949, he was almost permanently bedridden with tuberculosis. His writing became increasingly gloomy and pessimistic. The tone of Nineteen Eighty-Four, his famous satire published in 1949, a few months before his death, reflects that pessimism. His illness, his fury with the communists and his disillusionment with the Labour Government help to explain his recently publicised decision to send his glamorous friend Celia Kirwan, who was working for the IRD, an arm of British intelligence, the names of people he thought were 'crypto' communists. The editors of these volumes put up a stout defence of this decision, though there can never be a defence for a writer who sneaks to the State about potential dissidents.
The Kirwan episode gave rise to further charges that Orwell's anti-communism paved the way for the subsequent McCarthyite witch-hunts in the United States. Orwell answered the accusation as early as September 1946, and his response is published in these volumes for the first time. 'In five years' time it may be as dangerous to praise Stalin as it was to attack him two years ago. But I should not regard this as an advance. Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word.' In spite of his unsavoury grassing to the IRD, Orwell's life and work indicates that he would have been as hostile to McCarthyite persecution as he was to communists.
I have tried to trace from this gigantic maze the theme of Orwell's political development which interests me most, but the joys of this literary feast stretch far beyond what I have covered. The 11 volumes of letters, reviews and diaries give full rein to the extraordinary range of Orwell's interests: cooking, tea-making, boys' weeklies, snob schools, dirty postcards, Trotskyist pamphlets. He says somewhere he had 900 books, but he seems to have read seven or eight times that many. His old favourites come up again and again: Dickens, Gissing, Conrad, Trollope, Dostoevsky. They mingle with the contemporary writers who, like Orwell, rejected Stalinism without ever ingratiating themselves with the authorities: CLR James, Richard Wright, Arthur Koestler.
All this is presented in the context of his personal life, the tragic death of his wife and comrade Eileen, his enjoyment of his adopted baby son who survived her, his diffident attempts at seduction by post, his patience with his illness. Above all, the volumes sing with Orwell's irresistible writing style. Prose, he said, should be like a window pane, so you can see right through it. Every letter, every broadcast, even every diary entry is written clearly, sprinkled everywhere with wit, surprise and hope.