James Wood's Vile "George Orwell's Very English Revolution"

In previous posts, I’ve discussed a number of my favorite pieces in James Wood’s new collection Serious Noticing. Today, I’m going to comment on an essay in Serious Noticing that I strongly dislike – “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution.” This piece originally appeared in The New Yorker (April 13, 2009) under the title “A Fine Rage.” Wood included it in his 2012 collection The Fun Stuff. Now here it is again in Serious Noticing. Obviously, Wood is proud of it. To me, it’s a dirty hatchet job, using low snark and twisted logic to attack one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. It perversely links Orwell’s socialism with fascism, a form of government that Orwell abhorred. It calls Orwell a “puritan masochist.” It snidely suggests he “heightened” elements of his classic fact piece “Down and Out in Paris and London.” It reeks of snobbery. 

Fascism

In his piece, Wood pounces on an observation about Nazism that Orwell made in his “The Lion and the Unicorn” (“However horrible this system may seem to us, it works”), plucks it out of context (Orwell is comparing two systems – Nazism and British capitalism – in terms of their ability to build a war machine), and spins it thus:

More striking is that Orwell premises the economic viability of his socialistic planned economy on the economic success of the Nazis’ planned economy, and, in turn, premises the viability of the Nazis’ planned economy only on its efficiency in wartime. Nazism worked, to use Orwell’s verb, because it was good at producing tanks and guns in wartime, but how good would it be at building hospitals and universities in peacetime? He doesn’t say. So the example of efficient Fascism is what inspires the hope of efficient socialism! 

Note that gleeful exclamation mark. Wood thinks he’s caught Orwell in an embarrassing contradiction: a fierce anti-Fascist who bases his thinking on Fascism – how crazy is that? But Wood is wrong; Orwell made no such claim. His position was quite the opposite. In “The Lion and the Unicorn,” he wrote,

But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of the Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world.

The equation of a “socialistic planned economy” with a “Nazi planned economy” is in Wood’s mind, not Orwell’s. Orwell clearly held the two systems distinct and unrelated. 

Heightening

Wood suggests, without any proof, that elements of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London are “heightened.” Wood says of one of the persons in the book, 

Bozo, whose collar is always fraying, and who patches it with “bits cut from the tail of his shirt so that the shirt had scarcely any tail left,” is both real and heightened. He is pure Dickens, and Orwell almost certainly worked up his speech like a good novelist. Who’s to say that Orwell did not come up on his own with that simile, “like a kipper on hot coals”?

Orwell almost certainly worked up his speech like a good novelist – come on! This is pure mischievous speculation on Wood’s part, intended to undermine “Down and Out in Paris and London” ’s standing as a documentary classic.

Puritanism

Wood calls Orwell puritanical. He says, “There is a long historical connection between revolution and Puritanism (with both a capital and a lowercase “P”), and Orwell sings in that stainless choir.” I find this impossible to reconcile with Orwell’s love of Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, which brims with sex and obscenity. As Orwell said in his famous review of it, “Nearly all the characters in the book are habitués of the brothel. They act and describe their actions with a callous coarseness which is unparalleled in fiction.” Tropic of Cancer was banned as pornographic in Britain and the U.S. for over thirty years. It drew a puritanical response from many people, but not from Orwell. Quite the opposite; he held it to be a “remarkable book.” On this basis alone, Wood’s characterization of Orwell as a puritan is highly dubious. 

Masochism

Wood calls Orwell a masochist (“The upper-class masochist lived frugally, dressed down, and for most of his life, until Animal Farm and 1984 sold well, earned relatively little”) and – really laying it on – a “puritan masochist” (“The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal—the one that was, ironically enough, inherited—was the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself”). I take it that what constitutes masochism in Wood’s view is Orwell’s refusal to enjoy the privileges of the so-called middle or upper class life he was born into. Wood is uncomprehending of Orwell’s admiration for and identification with proletarian life. But, in my opinion, this is a flaw in Wood’s sensibility, not Orwell’s. “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants,” Orwell writes in “The Road to Wigan Pier.” I think you have to have a strong sense of injustice to feel this way. Orwell has it; Wood doesn’t. 

Snobbery

In “George Orwell’s Very English Revolution,” Wood writes,

“However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.” Orwell means this as a judgment against Dickens. But it is unwittingly comic. Why should Dickens have wanted to resemble the working classes? Why would anyone want to resemble the working classes, least of all the working classes themselves? (Ah, there speaks a true petit bourgeois!). 

Ah, there speaks a true elitist whose critical imagination has totally failed him. Great writers want to live at the centre of their material. They totally identify with their subjects. Think of Ian Frazier returning again and again to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In his extraordinary On the Rez (2009), he says, “Of course I want to be like Indians, I’ve looked up to them all my life.” Orwell would completely understand Frazier’s view; he felt the same way towards the coal miners of Wigan. Wood doesn’t get it. The reason he doesn’t get it is that he’s a snob. 

“George Orwell’s Very English Revolution” contains some excellent critical evaluations of Orwell’s writing style (e.g., “The details that pucker the journalism are rolled flat in the fiction”; “Orwell is famous for his frank and easy style, and for his determination that good prose should be as transparent as a windowpane. But his style, though superbly colloquial, is much more like a lens than like a window. His narrative journalism directs our attention pedagogically”), but they’re lost in all the humbug about the fascist roots of Orwell’s socialism, etc. Wood should skip politics and stick to what he does best – literary criticism.