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George Orwell, who was a great English radical in the tradition of Hazlitt, Cobbett and Tom Paine, is now looked upon as an attacker and exposer of the Left. This puzzles a good many people and has never been adequately explained, perhaps bcause the explanation is too painful. What he attacked was not the Left, but the Left establishment, and then principally when it was tending towards totalitarianism. The fact that during the Civil War in Spain, journals such as the New Statesman and the Daily Worker went on reporting week after week and month after month that everything was politically all correct and right and proper inside the Republic, while he knew, as an eye-witness and combatant, that one kind of socialist was putting another sort of socialist up against a wall and shooting him, within the very sound of the real enemy’s guns, did something to his mind and changed the course of his writing.

     To say that this is the best book that has been written about George Orwell since he died eleven years ago is altogether understating the matter. Sir Richard Rees, who was Orwell’s closest and oldest friend, nowhere infringes upon the rights of that friendship, whereas others who have written about him would have greatly surprised the subject of their books concerning the alleged degree of their intimacy. Yet the reason why Sir Richard obviously understands Orwell so well is just because he shares, not only many of his beliefs, but also quite a lot of his temperament and a good deal of his background.

     All the same, Sir Richard is able to state that Animal Farm and 1984 are Orwell’s most famous books, whereas, of course, they are merely his best-known ones qualitatively speaking, another thing altogether. And Fame surely is properly to do with values, not assumptions. John Lehmann once referred, in an editorial, to ‘the great Orwellian lie’, meaning that Orwell having lost faith in humanity, believed that mankind would sell its soul and its freedom for a mess of pottage. Whereas his last two books were in fact a warning not to mistake the pottage for freedom, and anyone who has read Victor Serge’s From Lenin to Stalin will agree that the warning was not unnecessary. Yet Animal Farm misses being a work of art, because there is not the faintest suggestion anywhere in it that the experiment might just possibly have come off. 1984 is, in comparison to what its author achieved elsewhere, just not a very good book. His heart was not in it, even if his head was.

     As Sir Richard has made undeniably clear, not only in this book, but also in his For Love or Money and in his remarkable studies of D. H. Lawrence and Simone Weil, the true greatness of George Orwell lay in the basic decency of the man. And it was definitely a very English sort of decency at that. He was what the very poor call ‘a real gentleman’. He was what real writers call ‘a real writer’. And what Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln would have called a true radical. Therefore, the best of his writing, that part of it that gave him real fame, as far back as the late thirties, lies in his autobiographical books, Down and Out in London and Paris, The Road to Wigan Pier, and, above all, Homage to Catalonia. To these must be added his Essays. I cannot help disagreeing with Sir Richard Rees about Orwell’s achievement as a novelist. And with the statement that had he lived in a less political age he would have devoted himself to the ‘art’ of the novel, as did Flaubert and Henry James. For, in mind and temperament, Orwell was essentially a radical, as Hazlitt was, and throughout the whole course of English literature the only writing of the very highest order that radicals have been able to do has been done in non-fiction prose. Not only is this true about Orwell, but his work is the most important contemporary evidence of the truth of this statement.

     It should go without saying that a civilized man’s deepest desire ought to be to attempt to adjust the inequalities of nature and of society, and not to make an emotional profit out of them. It is because of his realization of this that Sir Richard has been able to catch the truth about a man like Orwell, and state it, as he has done, briefly and tersely, in a subtitle: ‘A Fugitive from the Camp of Victory’. Although one disagrees with some of the author’s opinions and a good deal of his emphasis, his book remains unquestionably the best likeness of its subject yet.