5 December 2024

The case against George Orwell

As with DH Lawrence, Orwell’s private life has imperilled his reputation. Is there a way back?

Illustration by Ralph Steadman

“The hardest thing in the world is to act on one’s impulses.”

Alan Bates as Birkin in Women in Love

I did Sons and Lovers for A-level, but DH Lawrence only came alive at university. I remember us bouncing out of the cinema after Ken Russell’s Women in Love feeling free from all that dowdy old sex business. This was being young in 1969. Doing English at Cambridge, Lawrence was the highest you could go. At super-cool Sussex, for our generation, Lawrence was the numinous future.

But just a year after that memorable trip to the Regent cinema, an American doctoral student at Columbia called Kate Millett assassinated the great Nottingham panjandrum with quick sharp strokes to his worst works. Millett cut at the misogyny which, quite bizarrely, we had not noticed. In her view, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a “quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman (the rest are irredeemably ‘plastic’ and ‘celluloid’) through the offices of the author’s personal cult, ‘the mystery of the phallus’”. And when Lawrence said “phallus” he meant it. Women must stand in awe of the great mound and accept its will. Mellors tells Connie to lie quiet. “‘Lie down!’ he said. ‘Lie down!’ ‘Let me come!’ He was in a hurry now.”

If this wasn’t the Priest of Love talking, it would be hilarious. Millett’s Sexual Politics became a key text of the women’s movement.

In 1960, if an Old Bailey jury did not rule Lawrence to be in the public good, exactly, their not-guilty verdict on Lady Chatterley left the liberal elite in no doubt that the Crown’s prosecution of Penguin Books for obscenity was hopelessly reactionary. For Kenneth Tynan, in the Guardian, Lawrence stood for the new England over the old, but now, in little more than ten years, between the Chatterley trial and Sexual Politics, here was a radical young American feminist lining up with Mr Griffith-Jones QC (Eton, Trinity, Guards), counsel for the prosecution, to say that Lawrence was not only obscene but pornographic. In less time than it took us to graduate, the tide had turned. The man Richard Hoggart described in court as a puritan had been caught with his pants down.

At first, his greatest works – The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) – had been banned and burned. Then, in the 1950s, Lawrence came again. For FR Leavis at Cambridge, he was “the great genius of our time”, pinnacle of the great tradition in English letters. For Raymond Williams, he was all that and a bit of a class warrior as well, and with the expansion of books and television and higher education in the 1960s, the genius of Lawrence seemed established. Now, he isn’t even on the curriculum.

The other hero for our generation was George Orwell. If Lawrence stood for love without shame, Orwell stood for truth and decency. He still does. For many commentators and journalists, he is the rock upon which we build. However, all is not what it seems here either. In 1984, Daphne Patai’s The Orwell Mystique started the feminist critique in earnest – a few boulders here and there picking up speed – until suddenly, last year, the Australian writer-lawyer Anna Funder detonated Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life and may have started a landslide rolling.

Funder combs the published works, but the main thrust of her criticism lies not in Orwell’s failure to recognise women in general but his failure to honour his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, in particular.

Eileen married Orwell in 1936 and from the very beginning Funder reveals to us a woman used by a man who cheated on her at every opportunity. And if she shows us a husband who, like Iago, was not what he is, she shows us a woman, Eileen, who was exactly that, loving and gifted and resourceful. One of Orwell’s favourite Lawrence stories was “The Fox” (1923): “… always under-water… And she, being a woman, must be like that… He wanted her to commit herself to him, and to put her independent spirit to sleep.”

Born into very different circumstances – Lawrence’s father was a coal miner, Orwell’s an imperial civil servant – both men had things in common. They were both famous beyond their writing. They were both mostly outsiders, both flourished in time of war, and both died of TB, Lawrence aged 45, Orwell 47. Neither man was political in any simple sense. When Lawrence went looking for the politics, he was as likely to go to the solar plexus. Orwell went to boys’ comics or seaside postcards. Comparability is uneven, but the all-important difference was that the two men wrote in very different idioms about very different things. Lawrence made sexual relations the essence (he called it the “carbon”) of his work and Orwell wrote about politics. And if the later Lawrence chose to write about incomprehensible things in incomprehensible ways, Orwell made a point of being clear about things in front of his nose. This is unfair, but one gets the impression that Lawrence, who was not having any sex, talked incessantly about it, and Orwell, who was, rarely talked about it at all.

For all the humbug, Lawrence will recover. Frances Wilson, for instance, in her magnificent Burning Man (2021), chooses to do justice to this great and contradictory writer (“He is still on trial”), daring to make her stand in the 1920s, the period in his writing Millett so destroyed. And Lawrence was aware of how ridiculous he could be. Once at a dinner party he ranted on against divorce until it was pointed out to him that he was married to a divorced woman. When Birkin in Women in Love tells Ursula that he wants their love to be “a pure balance of two single beings as the stars balance each other”, a mardy East Midlands Ursula says that is all very nice but “why drag in the stars?”.

Lawrence knew that alongside his hubris there was nemesis as well. Frieda Lawrence, for all her putting up, was a true wife who mattered to him and him to her. Whatever we can accuse him of, it’s not dirty secrets. He put it all out in the writing and the shouting, and as for the future, it’s not as if sexual identity and gay love have gone away, or writing about nature as if we are a part of it has ceased to matter – and it’s not as if he didn’t mean it, or suffer for it. TS Eliot said Lawrence was a writer who wrote badly in order that he might write well, and, as a down payment on his recovery, I’ll settle for that.

However, dreaming up laws of the cosmos from under your scrotum is one thing; cheating on your wife is another. One can be corrected in a clever article; the other could be a sentence for life.

But is the case against Orwell fair? Does Eileen need to be saved by an international human rights lawyer? And from what? He went off and she was left. Where he went off to, and why, and how often, and what Eileen made of it, are hard to know because the evidence is thin – and even where it exists in a few letters, Eileen had an unruly sense of humour and doesn’t always mean what she says.

In Sylvia Topp, she has a biographer already. That Topp the journalist keeps to what she sees as the facts and Funder, the lawyer, does not, must be some sort of first. And so, in Wifedom, he asks Eileen for permission to go with a Berber girl. He says he’s been working hard and calls it a treat. We know about the girl but not the treat. Now she is waiting for him to finish, and now he’s by the red curtain, smoking.

We don’t know these things from the evidence for sure. Orwell would have called them lies, but Funder imagines they must have been so and it hardly behoves the great man, now stubbing out his cigarette on the floor (as was his habit), to deny a work of what she calls counter-fiction. There’s a scene. Now he’s in bed, unwashed. There’s nowhere else for Eileen to sleep.

With Lawrence, the question hardly arises. He wrote with his life in his mouth. There’s nothing you can make up better than he can. But with Orwell, who wrote with his buttocks clenched, Funder decided to relax the rules and write half a novel instead. For Will Lloyd in the Times, Orwell’s life was “a depressing mess”. For Alice O’Keeffe in the same paper, he lived by “a vast system of mental cheating”. For Naoise Dolan in the Financial Times, he has become a “dead metaphor”. All this about a man who stands for common decency and personal honesty. Can his writing survive?

In his essay on Charles Dickens (1940), Orwell rejected the idea that a writer’s private infidelities had any bearing on his literary reputation, and Funder agrees. The work and the writer are different, she says. To want them to be the same, “is a new kind of tyranny… from [which] no art comes”.

Now she takes us to a book signing and there he sits, the man in the moustache, signing their books as the queue shuffles forward, friend of the poor, no thought for himself. A young woman takes her turn in the queue to have her book inscribed by the man who may, just may, ask her, with all due regard etc, and of course, blue eyes shining, cough cough, would she like to take a stroll in the woods?

Well? Would she, or wouldn’t she? Would you? Just another dead white male making a pass, or a writer whose art we can’t afford to lose. Someone to open up? Or someone to open up to?

Robert Colls’s “George Orwell. Life and Legacy” will be published by Oxford University Press next year