I. A File in Valencia

In the middle of July 1937, a police document travelled from Barcelona to the Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason in Valencia. It concerned two English subjects, Eric Blair and his wife Eileen, and it described them, in the flat idiom of a security service that has decided in advance what it will find, as pronounced Trotskyists engaged in clandestine work for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. Some of its material appears to have come from papers seized in the couple’s hotel room; some from the general suspicion attaching to anyone who had carried an introduction from the British Independent Labour Party. The charge was serious enough that comrades of theirs who remained in Spain went to prison, and one of them, a twenty-year-old Scot named Bob Smillie, died in a Valencian cell. The Blairs themselves had crossed into France on 23 June, three weeks before the document was written, sitting in a dining car in respectable clothes and hoping to look like tourists. They never knew the file existed. It surfaced decades later in the Spanish archives and was printed, with commentary, in Peter Davison’s edition of the complete works.¹

Consider what that piece of paper is. It is not a lie about a particular event. It is a sentence of a kind that cannot be corrected by evidence, because it was produced by a system in which the conclusion precedes the investigation and the investigation exists to supply paperwork. Orwell had spent the previous spring in a trench above Huesca with lice in the seams of his trousers, a rifle older than he was, and no meaningful quantity of ammunition; he had been shot through the throat on 20 May; he had then watched the party whose uniform he wore be declared a nest of fascist agents by people who knew perfectly well that it was not. And while he was hiding in the ruins of a church, sleeping rough in Barcelona because to sleep in a hotel was to invite arrest, newspapers in Paris and London were explaining to their readers that the Barcelona street fighting of early May had been a fascist putsch organised by the very militias being liquidated. The gap between the two accounts — the one he could smell and the one available in print — became the intellectual event of his life.

Almost everything that is now claimed for him, and a good deal that is claimed against him, grows from that gap. It is tempting to describe the man who emerged as a prophet, which is the laziest available reading and the one he would have despised most, partly because prophecy is a way of not having to check anything. Something more specific was happening. Eric Blair, born into the servant class of an empire, educated at its most expensive school and employed as one of its policemen, developed over twenty years a peculiar discipline: he would not accept a description of the world that he had not put his own body inside. He went to the spikes and the casual wards. He washed dishes in a Paris basement for ten weeks. He crawled along a coal seam until his thighs cramped. He joined the militia that happened to be at hand rather than the one with the best press office. He kept lists of prices, weights, smells, rents, and daily rations, and he trusted them more than he trusted political vocabulary. This method gave him an authority that no other English writer of his generation could match, and it also gave him his blind spots, because a man who believes his own senses are less corruptible than other people’s descriptions will sometimes mistake his prejudices for observations.

That is the argument of this essay, and it is worth stating the contradictions plainly rather than reconciling them. The uniformed servant of imperial power wrote the two most durable short pieces in English about what imperial power does to the man in the uniform. The Old Etonian spent years contriving to be mistaken for a tramp, and never quite stopped noticing that the contrivance was available to him and not to the tramps. The socialist did more damage to the international reputation of the Soviet Union than any conservative of his century, and remained a socialist while doing it. The enemy of propaganda took a wartime salary from a broadcasting service whose output was checked by censors, and told his diary what he thought of the arrangement. The apostle of plain English composed his plainness with the finicky care of a man arranging a shop window. The scourge of orthodoxy kept a private notebook of people he suspected of being Communist sympathisers, and in 1949, from a sanatorium, sent thirty-eight of the names to a propaganda unit of the Foreign Office. The writer who mocked the manufacture of secular saints has been embalmed as one, and his embalmers have included very nearly every political tendency in the English-speaking world, several of which he spent his working life attacking.

None of these tensions dissolves on inspection. They were the working parts of a method rather than lapses from a creed, and the method had a cost, which he sometimes paid and sometimes passed on to other people. What follows is an attempt to describe the writer inside the contradictions, and to distinguish between what he understood with ...