THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Fascism by travelling to embattled Britain rather than withdrawing as a refugee to neutral America. Thieves in the
Night is set in Palestine as the British mandate draws to an end and as the battle lines between Jew and Arab are
established. It lets a plague fall on both houses while offering a carefully observed picture of the tensions within a
secular, but essentially alien and intrusive kibbutz. Koestler returned to the problem of what he saw as the inherent
contradictions within Soviet Communism in the volume of essays The Yogi and the Commissar of 1945 but the
concerns of much of his later prose owe more to the mysticism of the Yogi than to the over-defined ideology of
Marxism-Leninism. His The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (1959) ambitiously
and provocatively attempts to draw together scientific and philosophical theories and to insist that ‘our hypnotic
enslave-
[p. 569]
ment to the numerical aspects of reality has dulled our perception of non-quantitative moral values’. Koestler’s latterday
speculations about parapsychology and the paranormal, outlined in The Ghost in the Machine (1967) and The
Roots of Consciousness (1972), suggest that even as an old man he still rejoiced in the precarious role of an
intellectual tightrope walker.
George Orwell shared with Koestler a profound disillusion with Soviet Communism. Both recognized, as many of
their blinkered liberal colleagues refused to do, that Stalin had betrayed a human ideal and had in the process of his
betrayal exposed a fallacy at the heart of that ideal. In an essay of 1947 entitled ‘Why I Write’ Orwell insisted that
every line he had written since 1936 had been written ‘directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for
democratic socialism’ and that where he lacked ‘political purpose’ he wrote lifeless books and ‘humbug generally’.
His early novels, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936),
offer little more than fictional analyses of the narrownesses and idiocies of the British at home and abroad, as smug
imperialists and even smugger domestic tyrants. It was as an investigative social journalist that Orwell’s true
distinctiveness as a writer emerged. He is an acute observer and a generalizer, an open-eyed crosser of class
boundaries and a delineator of essentially English fudges and compromises (compromises which sometimes infuriate
him, sometimes amuse him, sometimes rejoice his heart). Even in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), his
account of eking out a dire life in ill-paid jobs and common lodging-houses, he manages to delight in an England of
‘bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, [and] beer made with
hops’. The main subject of both Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is not,
however, a comfortable and familiar England but a singularly uncomfortable and unfamiliar one. Orwell does more
than puncture assumptions by exploiting easy contrasts between the rich and the poor; he attempts to describe the
slums by slumming it and to write about the disinherited by disinheriting himself. The clothes he dons in order to
learn about London tramps have ‘a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness’, and
after an excruciating night in a lodging-house in the Waterloo Road he ruefully, but somewhat unscientifically, notes
that ‘bugs are much commoner in south than north London’. When he goes north in search of details of an urban life
scarred by unemployment and poverty, he is repelled by the untidy ugliness of industrialism ‘so frightful and so
arresting that you are obliged, as it were, to come to terms with it’, and yet he adulates the ‘easy completeness, the
perfect symmetry ... of a working-class interior’ with mother and father on each side of the fire and the children and
the dog in the middle. It is, he adds tellingly, ‘a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but
sufficiently of it to be taken for granted’.
At the close of 1936 Orwell left for Spain to fight for the Republican cause. His account of his experiences in
Homage to Catalonia (1938) and the essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (1943) reveal that what he chiefly
discovered in Spain
[p. 570]
was personal discomfort and political disillusionment. Homage to Catalonia ends with his escape not from victorious
Fascists but from persecution at the hands of one of the warring factions into which the Spanish Left had split.
Orwell’s book has always provoked those who insist on a rigid division of history into right causes defended by heroes
and wrong causes supported by villains. ‘I have the most evil memories of Spain’, he wrote in 1938, ‘but I have very
few bad memories of Spaniards.’ Looking back in 1943, he criticizes both those intellectual pacifists who hold to a
theory that ‘war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result’ and those who would dismiss as
sentimental his contention that ‘a man holding up his trousers isn’t a „Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar
to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him’. Animal Farm (1945), Orwell’s satire on the manifest failure of
Communist ideals in Russia, vexed its targets sufficiently to bring about a ban on its publication in the Soviet Union
and its satellites until after the revolutions of the late 1980s. The fable may sentimentalize working-class strength and
good nature (as characterized by the carthorse, Boxer) but there was a fine appositeness in Orwell’s choice of pigs as