Christopher Hitchens - Why Orwell Matters

Table of Contents

Acclaim for Christopher Hitchens and Why Orwell Matters

Hitchens on Orwell is a fine salute from one very lively writer to another formidably clear-eyed one.

The Globe and Mail

I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delphino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.

Gore Vidal

Hitchens comes, in this short, gracefully written and admirably ... literate book, not only to praise Orwell but also to set right certain persistent misunderstandings about him.

George Scialabba, The Washington Post Book World

A vigorous and comprehensive attack on the traducers of the Left, the false claimants on the Right, hostile feminists, and postmodernists who deny the existence of objective truth and spurn the value of linguistic clarity.

Philip French, The Times Literary Supplement

A good, forcefully argued introduction.... Existing devotees should thank Mr. Hitchens for stripping off layers of ideological over-paint.

The Economist

Why Orwell Matters makes a strong cumulative case. In an age when most novelists would scorn the notion that their work serves any utilitarian or didactic purpose, Hitchens argues that George Orwell not only fought against the tyranny of his own time but bequeathed works that continue to inspire.

Jim Barloon, Houston Chronicle

In possession of, [and] possessed by, the spirit of George Orwell.

Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

Not only a fine defence of Orwells politics, but also the most stimulating introduction available to almost every other aspect of his work.

Noel Malcolm, The Sunday Telegraph

Also by Christopher Hitchens

A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family
The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice
For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
The Monarchy
Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Cyprus

Copyright 2002 by Christopher Hitchens

Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group

The author and publisher would like to thank Harcourt for permission to quote from the works of George Orwell; Random House Inc for permission to quote from W. H. Audens September 1, 1939; Curtis Brown Ltd for permission to quote from W H. Audens Spain; and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for permission to quote from Philip Larkins Going, Going.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

Designed by Trish Wilkinson

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Hitchens, Christopher.

Why Orwell matters / by Christopher Hitchens.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-465-03049-1 (alk. paper)

1. Orwell, George, 1903-1950 Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PR6029.R8 Z664 2002

828.91209 dc21 2002008035

Paperback ISBN 0-465-03050-5

03 04 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated by permission:

To Robert Conquest premature anti-fascist,
premature anti-Stalinist, poet and mentor, and
founder of the united front against bullshit.

But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refinement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transforming and transposing them. To heat a liquid with an electric lamp requires not the strongest lamp possible, but one of which the current can cease to illuminate, can be diverted so as to give heat instead of light. To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earths surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into lifting power. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or their culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is reflected by it, genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected.

MARCEL PROUST: Within a Budding Grove

Acknowledgements

My thanks are due first to the Reverend Peter Collingwood, my old English master, who first set me Animal Farm as a text and who allowed me to show him my work, late, as an off-the-subject comparison with Darkness at Noon : the first decent essay I ever wrote.

The late Claud Cockburn, one of the most generous and charming men I have ever encountered, exposed me to the anti-Orwellian view of the Spanish War and other matters when I was twenty years old, and very patiently taught me more than he probably suspected about how to argue dialectically. These pages are a considered abuse of his unfailing hospitality.

The late Peter Sedgwick whose name is still a talisman on the noble remnant of the libertarian Left helped me to develop the puny sinews with which I combated the Cockburn school. He also helped me to recognize a certain Orwellianism as a thread of Ariadne in the writing of our time.

Stephen Schwartz and Ronald Radosh both showed me work in progress from their study of the Soviet archives on Orwell, and I am boundlessly grateful to them as well as to their colleagues and co-authors Victor Alba and Mary Habeck. Magna est veritas, et prevaelabit.

Finally, the achievement of Professor Peter Davison, in erecting his majestic edifice of Orwells entire and un-Bowdlerized life-work, is something more than a Herculean editing or a Boswellian tribute. It is a project of commingled objectivity and love, and thus a great monument to its subject. My own little book is one of the first to be composed in its fully measured shadow, as all the successor and superior theses will now have to be.

Christopher Hitchens
Washington D. C., 4 February 2002

Introduction: The Figure