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.

March 10, 2014 Issue

There are two excellent political pieces in this week’s issue – Peter Hessler’s “Revolution On Trial” and Jon Lee Anderson’s “The Comandante’s Canal.” What makes them excellent is their high quotient of personal experience.

Hessler’s piece, a report on the current Egyptian situation, is drenched in experienced reality: his visit to the tense Police Academy courtroom, where members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including former President Mohamed Morsi, are on trial (“I was sitting next to the cage, and after a while Mohamed el-Beltagy, one of the accused, began gesturing to me through the bars”); his escape from gunfire at a protest rally in Mohandiseen (“I was running on a bad foot – I had injured a ligament a few weeks before – and I slowed to a walk once I though we were out of range. But then I heard bird shot ripping through the leaves of a tree overhead, so I started running again”).

Anderson’s “The Comandante’s Canal,” about Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s plan to build a transoceanic canal, also features vivid experiential moments. Though not as existentially edgy as Hessler’s brush with gunfire, they make their point. For example, in a passage that serves to illustrate the vast economic gap between many impoverished Nicaraguans and the wily canal planners, Anderson writes,

In December, driving with a Nicaraguan companion along a dirt road in the backcountry, I stopped to offer a lift to an elderly woman, whose burnished skin suggested indigenous blood. She was wearing a long traditional dress, and she was moving slowly, with the help of a walking stick. When I asked if she wanted a ride, she thanked me, and said, “Some alms would be better, son.” I dug into my pocket for a hundred-cordoba note, worth about four American dollars. She looked at it bemusedly, and asked, “What is it?” Shocked, my companion tried to explain what paper money was. She looked quizzical, and kept on walking.

Passages like these, the basic stuff of reality, are what kept me reading Anderson’s and Hessler’s pieces. They stick to specifics and avoid abstractions. In this they're exceptional because, as Orwell pointed out, the whole tendency of political writing is “away from concreteness” (“Politics and the English Language”).

Postscript: A special shout-out to Richard Brody, editor of “Goings On About Town” ’s “Movies” department, for his inclusion of Pauline Kael’s Grand Hotel capsule review in this week’s issue. Kael is one of the all-time New Yorker greats. It’s a pleasure to see her work still appearing in the magazine.

On Gandhi: Mishra v. Desai

What interests me is the structure of the book review. I want to compare two reviews of Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India: Pankaj Mishra’s “The Inner Voice” (The New Yorker, May 2, 2011) and Anita Desai’s “A Different Gandhi” (The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011). I want to explore the way they’re written. Mishra begins his piece with a shocking question:

Mohandas Gandhi was the twentieth century’s most famous advocate of nonviolent politics. But was he also its most spectacular political failure?

Desai’s opener is more equable:

Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi has grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him.

Both writers establish their themes in their opening paragraphs. Mishra’s focus is on Gandhi’s failure; Desai’s is on the man behind the legend. In choosing to dwell on failure, Mishra takes the low road. He makes sweeping accusations against Gandhi, such as “And yet the Indian leader failed to achieve his most important aims and was widely disliked and resented during his lifetime.” It’s difficult to square such charges with Desai’s observation that,

He would start to fast in prison and the nation would hold its breath till he agreed to suspend it. As his body dwindled, Lelyveld observes, his political and spiritual power increased. The fast joined the spinning wheel as a distinctly Gandhian symbol of protest. In 1930 his genius for the inspired and inspiring gesture made him lead a march of two hundred miles from his ashram to Dandi on the Arabian Sea, crowds lining the road to cheer him. With “the beauty and simplicity of a fresh artistic vision,” Lelyveld writes, he bent to pick a handful of salt on the beach in defiance of British taxation of even so lowly and indispensable commodity.

You’ll not find much reference to Gandhi’s “genius for the inspired and inspiring gesture” in Mishra’s piece, so intent is he in making his case of failure. Note, in the above quote, the way Desai inserts “Lelyveld observes” and “Lelyveld writes.” Mishra doesn’t credit Lelyveld this way. Except for a couple of brief snippets of quotation, he hardly mentions Lelyveld at all, even though it’s Lelyveld’s book, along with The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi, that’s supposedly under review. The lack of quotation in Mishra’s piece is a major flaw. As Martin Amis said in the foreword to his brilliant book review collection The War Against Cliché, “You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Or semi-hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue.”

Another off-putting aspect of Mishra’s piece is its repeated use of that slippery, open-textured word “moral”: “moral persuasion,” “higher morality,” “moral and psychological effects,” “moral cover,” “moral self-knowledge,” “moral sanction,” “moral superiority,” “moral choices,” “moral authority,” “moral or normative demands,” “the difficulty of being moral men and women.” That’s a lot of "moral" to stomach in one piece. What’s it all about? We are in the presence of a moralist, obviously. I’m referring to Mishra, not Gandhi. Mishra even defines Gandhi’s satyagraha principle in terms of morality. He says it’s “a mode of political activism based on moral persuasion.” Interestingly, Desai, in her review, says satyagraha translates literally as “truth force” or “firmness in truth.” What if the first act of morality is to acknowledge that, as Osgood memorably says, in Some Like It Hot, “Nobody’s perfect”? George Orwell, in his great essay, “Reflections on Gandhi,” says:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

The judging of a human being, any human being, as a failure is a rotten business. Yet, Mishra appears to have no qualms engaging in it. He might counter that, in his focus on Gandhi’s "many failures,” he’s merely reflecting Lelyveld’s findings in Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. But if you look at Desai’s piece, you’ll see a much more balanced interpretation of Lelyveld’s book. Desai says,

One might think that Gandhi’s legacy on the whole has been depicted negatively and yet there is no denying Lelyveld’s deep sympathy with the man. The picture that emerges is of someone intensely human, with all the defects and weaknesses that suggests, but also a visionary with a profound social conscience and courage who gave the world a model for nonviolent revolution that is still inspiring.

I much prefer Desai’s humanistic approach. Mishra, in his piece, can’t even credit Gandhi for his advocacy of non-violent politics without, in the same breath, mentioning his “many failures” (“It is what young Egyptians and Tunisians feel today, and their Yemeni counterparts may experience tomorrow: the ever renewable power of cooperative action, which is a truer measure of Gandhi’s legacy than his many failures”).

In conclusion, I submit that Pankaj Mishra’s New Yorker review is flawed in three respects: (1) it lacks quotation; (2) it lacks balance; (3) it’s too moralistic.