This review of the new edition of George Orwell’s diaries, edited by Peter Davison, appears in the current issue of the Literary Review.
Diaries
By George Orwell
(Edited by Peter Davison)
(Harvill Secker 520pp £20)
When he reviewed Nineteen Eighty-Four for the New Statesman, V S Pritchett identified among the sources of George Orwell’s ‘material’ not just the depredations of Stalinist terror, but also the ‘seediness of London in the worst days of the war’ – the ‘pockets of 19th-century life in decaying England, the bad flats, bad food, the whining streak of domestic sluttishness which have sickened English satirists since Smollett’.
In fact, as these newly published Diaries remind us, Orwell’s fascination with the grime and filth of English life long pre-dated the privations of wartime. Peter Davison’s scrupulously edited and handsomely produced edition, which covers an eighteen-year period ending in 1949, just before Orwell’s death from tuberculosis in January 1950, opens with a ‘Hop-Picking Diary’, which records three months the author spent living as a tramp and itinerant hop-picker in the late summer and autumn of 1931. This journal annotates, with an almost lyrical relish, the ‘warm, faecal stink’ of the workhouse and sundry other discomforts of life on the road – the near-sleepless nights spent in Trafalgar Square or in wet grass by the side of the Maidstone Road, the terrible food. (There is some overlap here, not only with Down and Out in Paris and London but also with one of Orwell’s earliest published pieces, ‘The Spike’, written earlier in 1931 under his real name, Eric Blair.)
The ‘Hop-Picking Diary’ also contains a vivid parade of Rabelaisian grotesques: an elderly, deaf tramp who ‘looked just like a drawing by George Belcher’; a coster and his wife who ‘tack a “fucking” on to every noun’; and a ‘little Liverpool Jew of eighteen, a thorough guttersnipe’, whom Orwell is unable to persuade to wash ‘more of himself than his nose and a small circle round it’. (Orwell’s anti-Semitism may have been, as his biographer Bernard Crick put it, ‘mild and conventional’, and something he’d shed by the 1940s, but it is no less shocking for that.)
Pritchett said that Orwell’s peregrinations were his way of ‘going native in his own country’, though there is a moment here when Orwell recalls allowing his affected cockney accent to slip in order to cadge bigger rations from a stranger who sympathised with what appeared to be his catastrophic loss of social status. And there is certainly more of the anthropologist or ethnologist than the native in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier Diary’ of 1936, on which Orwell based the celebrated book of the same name.
This diary, which traces Orwell’s journeys throughout the north of England, from Liverpool, via Wigan and Manchester, across the Pennines to Barnsley and Sheffield, has the same colloquial plainness and exactness of description as the earlier account – not to mention the same preoccupation with dirt and squalor. Hanley and Burslem in the Potteries are ‘about the most dreadful places’ he has ever seen; in Wigan, the landscape is a ‘frightful’ one of slagheaps and ‘belching chimneys’. In one powerfully concentrated vignette, Orwell describes seeing a young woman in a ‘horrible squalid side-alley’, poking a stick up a drainpipe. The young woman’s expression, Orwell reports, was ‘as desolate as I have ever seen’.
Davison notes that this description was used, only lightly elaborated, in the eventual book. And indeed, this section of the diaries is notable for the intrusion of the kind of writerly memoranda absent from earlier entries: at Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, for instance, Orwell is struck by the noise made by blocks of ice floating on the water, and makes a note to ‘use in novel some time and to have an empty Craven A packet bobbing up and down among the ice’.
But the most significant difference between the diaries of 1931 and those of 1936 is the emergence of a voice that is recognisably Orwell’s – and this has much to do with the solidifying of his political convictions. Orwell’s prose develops a polemical edge, deployed as often against what had become his own side, the political left, as it is against the horrors of unemployment and the complacencies of the class system. In Wigan, he is dismayed to hear a trade union leader speak ‘using all the padding and clichés of the Socialist orator’, and records with dismay the opinions he overhears in a pub, which, with one or two exceptions, are all ‘pro-German’.
It is interesting that those uttering such sentiments are not the suavely defeatist intellectuals who are the targets of Orwell’s most famous political essays of the 1940s; rather, they are commercial travellers and market gardeners. By the time we reach the centrepiece of this volume, however, ‘The War-Time Diaries’ of 1940–2, Orwell is eviscerating, with equal and characteristic vigour, both the ideological contortions of Communists forced to justify the Nazi–Soviet pact and the casual ‘treacherousness of the British ruling class’. ‘Everywhere,’ he writes in July 1940, ‘a feeling of something near despair among thinking people because of the failure to act and the continuance of dead minds and pro-Fascists in positions of command.’
This is the ‘power of facing unpleasant facts’ for which Orwell was posthumously celebrated – not least by Pritchett. And it persists right up to the end. In the final entry, made in April 1949, by which time he was stricken by TB, Orwell calmly enumerates the fixtures and fittings in his room at University College Hospital. The fee was fifteen guineas a week, but did not ‘include telephone or wireless’. There the diary ends.