Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes Page A

the Orwell who writes to the publisher Frederic Warburg in October 1948, ‘I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a big boot.’ It is the Orwell of straight thinking, plain writing, moral clarity and truth-telling. Yet things are never quite so simple, not even in the truth-telling, and Orwell’s own line – ‘All art is to some extent propaganda’ – should make us cautious (and reflect that the dictum applies a fortiori to journalism). Take Orwell’s denunciation of St Cyprian’s. Despite being written three decades after young Eric Blair’s grim experiences, it is much harsher than that of anyone else who wrote about the school. If Orwell had lived to show up at Flip’s funeral, the revenge of the golf correspondents might have been worthy of St Cyprian’s itself. But was Orwell’s account so unremitting because he saw more truth than all the others, because time had not sentimentalised him, because with hindsight he could see exactly how that kind of education system perverted young minds and spirits to the wider purposes of the British Establishment and Empire? And/or was his thumb propagandistically on the scale?
    One small moment of literary history at which many Orwellians would like to have been present was an encounter in Bertorelli’s restaurant between Orwell’s biographer, Bernard Crick, and Orwell’s widow, Sonia. Crick dared to doubt theutter truthfulness of one of Orwell’s most celebrated pieces of reportage, ‘Shooting an Elephant’. Sonia, ‘to the delight of other clients’, according to Crick, ‘screamed’ at him across the table, ‘Of course he shot a fucking elephant. He said he did. Why do you always doubt his fucking word!’ The widow, you feel, was screaming for England. Because what England wants to believe about Orwell is that, having seen through the dogma and false words of political ideologies, he refuted the notion that facts are relative, flexible, or purpose-serving; further, he taught us that even if 100 per cent truth is unobtainable, then 67 per cent is and always will be better than 66 per cent, and that such a small percentage point is a morally non-negotiable unit.
    But the unpatriotic doubter must persist, and Crick did. And in the afterword to the paperback edition of his biography he quotes a tape recording of an old Burma hand’s memories of the incident Orwell recounted. According to the elderly witness, Orwell did indeed shoot ‘a fucking elephant’. However, the elephant had not, as Orwell claimed, rampagingly killed a man (whose corpse he described in detail); further, since the beast had been valuable company property, not to be so lightly destroyed, its owners complained to the government, whereupon Blair was packed off to a distant province, and a certain Colonel Welbourne called him ‘a disgrace to Eton College’. Such external doubting might corroborate the internal doubts of literary genre. As Crick argues, twelve of the fourteen pieces in the issue of
Penguin New Writing
where ‘Shooting an Elephant’ first appeared were ‘similarly of a then fashionable genre that blurred the line between fact and fiction – the documentary “authentic style” ’.
    The same scepticism – or critical research – may be, and has been, applied to Orwell’s equally celebrated anti-Empire piece, ‘A Hanging’. Crick, while admiring its six pages as having ‘the terror of Goya coupled with the precise, mundane observation of Sickert’, was not convinced that Orwell hadever attended a hanging; or even if he had, whether it was
this
one – the hanging of the essay being by implication something confected. Whether or not this is the case, there is one interesting omission from Orwell’s account: any stated reason why the man was being hanged. If, as a young journalist, you attended an execution, and afterwards drank whisky with those in charge, you would surely have found out what crime the poor devil had supposedly committed. And