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

if so, why not pass it on to your readers? It’s possible that the offence was so vile that Orwell suppressed it lest readers conclude that there might, after all, be something to be said for capital punishment. Or he might have suppressed it as irrelevant, given his belief that any execution anywhere was ‘an unspeakable wrongness’. Or, as Crick suspected, he might have been describing a typical execution rather than a specific one.
    When Dirk Bogarde or Ronald Reagan exaggerate (or invent) their war service, we think them mildly (or seriously) deluded. We might, if sympathetic, imagine them stretching the truth once or twice, and then finding themselves stuck with the story they had concocted. Why judge Orwell differently? Because he’s Orwell. We could argue, as David Lodge has done with ‘A Hanging’, that the value of the two Burmese pieces does not rest on their being factually true. But this is a very literary defence, and possibly a case of cutting the writer more slack because we admire him anyway. Yet we are hardly dealing with someone like Ford Madox Ford, who believed in the greater truth of impressions over that of mere grubby facts; and if the neglected Ford is sometimes classified as a ‘writer’s writer’, the sanctified Orwell was the very opposite – a kind of non-writer’s writer. Sometimes the naive reaction is the correct one. Many of those who admire him might lose respect or faith if he turned out not to have shot a fucking elephant, or not to have attended this specific fucking execution, because he, George Orwell, said he had, and if he hadn’t, then was he not mirroring those political truth-twisters whomhe denounced? If ‘all art is to some extent propaganda’, then are we not to suppose that the laws of propaganda apply even if you are on the side of truth, justice and the angels?
    One of the effects of reading Orwell’s essays en masse is to realise how very dogmatic – in the non-ideological sense – he is. This is another aspect of his Johnsonian Englishness. From the quotidian matter of how to make a cup of tea to the socio-economic analysis of the restaurant (an entirely unnecessary luxury, to Orwell’s puritanical mind), he is a lawgiver, and his laws are often founded in disapproval. He is a great writer
against
. So his ‘Bookshop Memories’ – a subject others might turn into a gentle colour piece with a few amusing anecdotes – scorns lightness. The work, he declares, is drudgery, quite unrewarding, and makes you hate books; while the customers tend to be thieves, paranoiacs, dimwits or, at best – when buying sets of Dickens in the improbable hope of reading them – mere self-deceivers. In ‘England Your England’ he denounces the left-wing English intelligentsia for being ‘generally negative’ and ‘querulous’: adjectives which, from this distance, seem to fit Orwell pretty aptly. Given that he died at the age of forty-six, it’s scary to imagine the crustiness that might have set in had he reached pensionable age.
    Nowhere is he more dogmatic than in his attitude to writing: what it is for, how it should be done, and who does it badly. Auden is ‘pure scoutmaster’; Carlyle ‘with all his cleverness … had not even the wit to write plain, straightforward English’; Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’ is ‘accumulated vomit’. Even those he approves of have major faults: Dickens is really ‘rather ignorant’ about how life works; H. G. Wells is ‘too sane to understand the modern world’; while Orwell’s ‘defence’ of Kipling is oddly patronising. There are huge generalisations about how writers develop and age; and for all his moral clarity about totalitarian language, his own prescriptiveness is sometimes severe, sometimes woolly. ‘All art is to some extent propaganda’ looks striking, but is greatlyweakened by the ‘to some extent’, and what, finally, does it mean? Only that all art is ‘about’ something, even if it is only