A Name We All Know
Non-Fiction by Heidi Greco
“From the totalitarian point of view ...history is something to be created rather than learned.” from “The Prevention of Literature” by George Orwell
Orwellian. He’s even got a word named after him. Although technically that adjective should apply to the river that was the source of his nom-de-plume, it’s come to suggest the dire situations George Orwell cautioned against in his writings, particularly in his most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. And yes, most of us know him best for that tale, whether by having read the novel or by having seen one (or more) of the film versions. Yet that book, even though it epitomizes many of his beliefs about the dangers of totalitarianism, doesn’t reveal much about the personal side of the man who’d been born Eric Blair. Much more revealing are his essays.
Aside from a few poems which he didn’t boast about, most of his earliest works were essays. Some of them were published under the pseudonym P.S. Burton, a name that sounds professional enough, though not, as we know, the one that stuck.
From early on, he sought out the poor and underprivileged as worthy subjects. This sympathy may have sprung at least in part from the low status he held at St Cyprian’s, the expensive boarding school he was sent to when he was only eight years old — a place that apparently terrified him enough that shortly after arriving there he began regularly wetting the bed. Not an easy spot for a small boy to lie in, especially one who’d been placed there solely on the strength of his brain and not his family’s purse. It took several years for the young Master Blair to understand that the reason he’d been accepted at St Cyprian’s (and at reduced tuition) was that his intelligence already marked him as someone who would do well enough on exams to earn scholarships, which in turn would bring honour to the school’s reputation.
At the school he was made further aware of his family’s less-than-wealthy status by the fact of his weekly spending allotment for sweet treats. While it was threepence for most boys (with the very wealthy ones receiving sixpence), he was one of a mere handful of students whose allowance was only twopence. Worst of all, unlike nearly all the other residents who were feted with a cake on their birthday, he never — in all his years at the school — had one in his honour. Little wonder young Eric came to identify with the downtrodden.
As an adult, continuing along this path, he sometimes immersed himself in poverty, taking lodgings in areas where the poor lived. He even tried to get himself put into prison to better learn about conditions there, but his petty crime of disorderly drunkenness resulted in only an overnight stay in a cell at the local police office. Later, while living in France, he did have the misfortune of needing to spend time in hospital, an institution that looked after those in dire need — people too poor to afford personal care in their own home. Conditions there were miserable, so he experienced first-hand how the poor were treated. Over his time there, he watched as a number of those around him (all of whom were known only by numbers, not names) succumbed to their afflictions. Yet even in the midst of such gloom comes the odd spark of humour, as when he recounts the name patients gave to the bedpan, la casserole.
Still, beyond good intentions to reveal the plight of the poor, the man who comes through the words in the essays occasionally reveals himself as somewhat snobbish, an almost two-faced contradiction from the one who so often seems to revile the very wealthy. His earliest idealism becomes, as it does for so many of us over the years, tempered, with some of his political goals doing an almost complete reversal. Yet his revulsion for totalitarianism is the single aspect of his belief system that only grows, and does prove to reveal itself in his fiction, coming to culmination in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
An even stronger personal trait, especially in his youth, is his overwhelming sense of foreboding, with failure always lurking just ahead. Perhaps this gloomy attitude grew out of the taunting atmosphere of those millionaire schoolmates or from the cruelty of superiors — disciplinarians at school or unthinking parents — but whatever its source, doubt was Orwell’s longstanding companion.
The most engaging element revealed in his essays is that of prediction. Even though these thoughts were presented more as observations than foretelling of the future, some of those visions have clearly come true. Unfortunately, these are mostly the negative aspects around us in the world of now. The most obvious of these are his fears of an all-seeing ‘Big Brother’ — an entity that, even without a name, watches nearly all of what we do. Yet although we might whine about losing our privacy, it’s something we’ve mostly given away without much fuss, even paying to have our own personal ‘Alexa’ to do our bidding. This is partly because the invasion of ‘security’ cameras and other devices has been so gradual, and also because they’ve been sold to us in the guise of our own safety and comfort.
Just as it’s easy to envision a Ministry of Privacy in the pages of his great dystopian novel, such an office would be nearly as ironic in our lives today. Consider how long it can take to get documents through FOI channels, or on an even more personal basis, think about how many people have sent their DNA to labs for the thrill of understanding their ancestry — and paid for the right to give away access to their most precious self, the foundation of their genes. Even though we know that some of these companies are unreliable — to the point that identical twins have been told they are not even related to each other — we swab our cheeks and send our scrapings off to them with a credit card number when of course, they should be paying us for these samples which are building up their supplies of valuable human genome.
And oh, the Thought Police. Who ever dreamed we’d be taking on that role, and doing it all on our own? What else can you call it when a politically incorrect remark (or one deemed as such) on a social media platform gets reacted to, sometimes almost violently? This is us policing us. The notion of ‘cancelling’ another person (even via the simplistic notion of ‘un-friending’ them) for what may have been a lapse of judgement is not all that different from the shunning that takes place in some societies, generally close-minded ones. Is this a behaviour we want our world to embody?
Ultimately, the most prescient and perhaps most dire of all his predictions are those regarding truth and how it holds the potential for manipulation. Can you say ‘fake news’ without at least a small inner shriek? Orwell’s ideas on truth (and untruths passed off as truth) form the most basic underlying themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The protagonist Winston Smith is employed as a records editor in the ill-named Ministry of Truth. His job requires him to constantly update history to reflect the current ‘truth’ of the day.
But in today’s reality it’s not just the ‘modern repressive governments’ Orwell spoke of in his essays that are engaged in the practice of revisionism — or at least we don’t call those institutions ‘repressive’ when they’re our own government of the day. Yet taking down statues, erasing historic names, rewriting what’s occurred — how is that so different from what Winston Smith was doing? Will there be anyone left to bear witness to what actually happened in the past, distasteful though it may be? Can you still wrap your tongue around the words Judge Matthew Begbie, or do you dare say the name Sir John A. Macdonald? Who knows, maybe one day the word Orwell or its eponymous derivative Orwellian will be every bit as verboten. After all, he was a man, English at that, and a member of what was once referred to as the white race. These days, a bad combination.
Brilliant though he certainly was, he wasn’t right about everything. He was certainly wrong about publications, especially the survival of books and small bookshops, as he believed their existence was inviolable. Yet his statements on language and clear writing prevail and, hopefully, will endure.
I don’t pretend to be the first person to say it, but the essays certainly reveal more about Orwell the man than any of his novels do. And while it might be expected that one could learn more from his diaries, where more privately personal observations might be assumed, overall these are less enlightening than the more carefully composed essays. For the diaries, besides containing pages that show the development of many of his beliefs about social in-equity, there are many, many completely mundane entries offering reports on the progress of his garden or even brief citations of how many eggs his hens have laid on a particular day — with some notations as brief as simply ‘Three eggs.’ or, the following day, ‘Two eggs.’ or even ‘No eggs.’ Although such comments reveal a certain down-to-earth humanity, they are hardly what we long for when we study such a great author.
We can only know a writer who lived before us by the words they leave for us. And we know those writers by the name they’ve used to publish those words. With the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, we know that he took the name Orwell from a river, partly because he didn’t much like his given name, Eric Blair. And maybe that’s lucky for us. For the word ‘Blairian’ certainly doesn’t convey the same deep ring of foreboding as the bong of thirteen o’clock forever associated with matters Orwellian. »