Free Orwell by Jeffrey Meyers Page B

person,” and the sense of human waste, shame and debasement that he conveys is overwhelming. As Orwell wrote during the War, “I hate to see England either humiliated or humiliating anybody else…. I wanted to think that the class distinctions and imperialist exploitation of which I am ashamed would not return.”
    Though Orwell writes “I have seen just enough of the working class to avoid idealizing them” (102–103) and dissociates himself from a belief in the superiority of the proletariat, he too idealizes the manners, temperament, stoicism, family life 36 and democracy of the working class. 37 This is partly because he is intensely dissatisfied with his own middle-class origins and wants to transcend them. But more importantly, he feels, like Sartre and other French writers of the Thirties, that the working “class incarnates some deeply meaningful myth of suffering, and that in its emancipation lies the general ‘salvation of mankind.’” 38 Victor Brombert's perceptive analysis of the basic attitude of French intellectuals toward Marxist beliefs applies with equal force to Orwell: “1. a characteristic, nearly pathological
humility
in the face of the Proletariat…. 2. the belief that the bourgeois intellectualcan save his soul only by sharing the suffering of the working class and by imitating its ‘Passion’…. 3. the conviction that any present sacrifices, even self-destruction, will be eschatologically justified; that the intellectual's duty is to prepare the future…. 4. the concomitant quest for holiness by means of martyrdom.” 39 (The fourth point is implicit in the imitation of the “Passion” and the sacrificial self-destruction.)
    Orwell is quite explicit about his humility: “if there is one type of man to whom I feel myself inferior, it is a coal miner” (102); and he exhibits an almost Lawrencean admiration for their earthiness and physical power: “underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel” (31). He is equally clear on the notion of penitential sacrifice among the “symbolic victims”: “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants…. Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and … part of my guilt would drop from me” (130–131).
    The third point is twofold: the duty to prepare for the future and the idea of self-punishment. The whole force of Orwell's argument for “the ideal of Socialism, justice and liberty” (189) testifies to his compulsive desire to prepare for the future, “to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” And Orwell's entire life, a series of personal sacrifices for a higher cause, in Burma, France, Spain and England, testifies to his need for self-punishment. The words that provide the theoretical basis of these sacrifices were inscribed by Orwell in his diary during the grim days of June 1940, and they express, perhaps more than anything else he wrote, his personal courage and high moral principle: “Both E and G insistent that I should go to Canada if the worst comes to the worst, in order to stay alive and keep up propaganda. I will go if I have some function, e.g. if the government were transferred to Canada and I had some kind of a job, but not as a refugee, not as an expatriate journalist squealing from a safe distance. There are too many of these exiled ‘anti-Fascists’ already. Better to die if necessary, and maybe even as propaganda one's death might achieve more than going abroad and living more or less unwanted on other people's charity.” 40

FIVE
O RWELL AND
THE E XPERIENCE OF F RANCE
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    Orwell's austere