I've written many times about my views on the practice of shunning certain art or entertainment based on the morals or habits of the creator. In short, I don't do it. I want to experience all the creativity the world has to offer. I only wish I could experience more of it. I don't filter my likes and dislikes through a screen of moral judgement.
Of course there are actions so heinous that knowledge of them could spoil any potential enjoyment, especially if the art isn't all that interesting in the first place. I'm not interested in oil paintings by Herr Hitler. I seldom enjoy stand-up comedy, so if a comedian's work is racist or sexist, it's incredibly easy for me to avoid it. But how Picasso or Woody Allen treated the women in their lives is irrelevant to me. Art and artist are not the same thing.
Imagine how this attitude was put to the test when I discovered that one of my writing heroes was antisemitic!
George Orwell and antisemitism
One of my life goals is to read everything published by my top three writing heroes: Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell. Steinbeck: done. Dickens: three or four novels to go. Orwell is the easiest, since he died young, and didn't produce 1,000-page tomes.
Recently I decided to move this project forward a bit. In Powell's, I found the three Orwells I had left to read: Down and Out in Paris and London, Coming Up For Air, and A Clergyman's Daughter. I started with Down and Out, the literary and political godparent of Barbara Ehrenreich's brilliant exposé of labour and poverty, Nickel and Dimed.
Imagine my surprise in finding the book laden with antisemitism! Yikes! Hideous caricatures, disgusting descriptions, all completely gratuitous. DAOIPAL was published in 1933. In those times, it was very common to identify people by their ethnicity. "A little Hindu man was...," "the Pole was...". Today, that reads as lazy and shallow, but those types of references in DAOIPAL are not especially offensive. Except for Jews. And wow, is it ever a big exception.
As far as I know, this is found only in DAOIPAL, Orwell's first book, written when he was 30. Later in life, he had many close friends who were Jewish, he worked with Jewish editors and publishers, and more importantly, pressed the British government to give refuge to all Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. He was vocally opposed to the Third Reich's antisemitic policies, long before revelations of the death camps. So that's all good.
However, I've read that Orwell's letters -- which I plan to read -- are also laced with his private antisemitism. Ian Bloom, writing in The Jewish Chronicle considers "The Ever-Present Antisemitism of George Orwell":
Admirers of Orwell (among whom I count myself) have long been troubled by the strain of casual and perhaps not-so-casual antisemitism found in his published work, diary entries and private letters, especially in the 1930s. The almost schizophrenic contrast between his authorial hostility to these anonymous, nameless “Jews”, identified only by their religion, and his long friendships with individual Jewish publishers (Victor Gollancz and Fred Warburg) and writers (Arthur Koestler, T.R. (Tosco) Fyvel, Julian Symons, Jon Kimche, Evelyn Anderson and others) remains puzzling.
Bloom offers some cultural and literary perspective, reminding readers that antisemitism was rampant in British culture and common among its writers.
Literary antisemitism was the norm in England until relatively recently. If they mention Jews at all, most major 19th-century English novelists described unattractive stereotypes. Perhaps George Eliot is the shining exception, as is EM Forster in the next century. But Graham Greene, JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell are all “guilty”, while HG Wells, Saki, GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are positively odious. As for the poets, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound are simply vile. This then was the context, the prevailing milieu, when Orwell was serving both his literary and political apprenticeship in the 1930s. There was a prevailing hostility towards Jews in both spheres. If, like me, you expected better, even then, from the young Orwell, you’d be disappointed.
Unfortunately, on Bloom's list of examples, he includes Orwell's views on Zionism: that it is nationalist and colonialist, and that Zionists are the equivalent of white settler colonists. In other words, Orwell understood Zionism for what it is. If Bloom considers this view antisemitic, then I'm not sure how much I trust his thoughts on this topic. Was Orwell's antisemitism "ever present", or did he outgrow it?
Orwell: antisemitism as an irrational neurosis
Researching this post, I discovered that Orwell was actually concerned with antisemitism as a social evil, and tried to understand its ubiquity and its causes.
In "Orwell and Antisemitism: Towards 1984," Melvyn New writes:
In 1943 Orwell was deeply concerned with antisemitism as a social problem in England; in 1944-45 he seems as much concerned with its abstract nature. An "As I Please" column (11 February 1944), for example, begins with the statement that his review of two books on the persecution of the Jews had brought the "usual wad of antisemitic letters," which, he says, "left me thinking for the thousandth time that this problem is being evaded even by the people whom it concerns most directly". Orwell begins with his earlier insight into the problem: that the objective existence of "disagreeable Jews" is hardly the true cause of the prejudice.
Obviously the charges made against Jews are not true. They cannot be true, partly because they cancel out, partly because no one people could have such a monopoly of wickedness. . . . The official left-wing view of antisemitism is that it is some thing "got up" by the ruling classes in order to divert attention away from the real evils of society. The Jews, in fact, are scapegoats.
The problem is, however, that pointing out this fact does not do away with the problem, "one does not dispose of a belief by showing that it is irrational." To argue in this way or to remind people of Nazi persecutions is to no avail: "If a man has the slightest disposition towards antisemitism, such things bounce off his consciousness like peas off a steel helmet."
Orwell, the pragmatic observer, calls for a "detailed enquiry into the causes of antisemitism," why Jews rather than another minority are "picked on," and what Jews are the scapegoat for. Significantly, he denies an economic cause, or that "sensible" people are immune, and concludes: "Clearly the neurosis lies very deep, and just what it is that people hate when they say that they hate a non-existent entity called 'the Jews' is still uncertain. And it is partly the fear of finding out how widespread antisemitism is that prevents it from being seriously investigated". In a very real sense, Orwell is raising the question he will raise again in 1984: "I understand how; I do not understand why?" [Quotes are from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell.]
Although it pained me to see the antisemitism in DAOIPAL, I appreciated seeing this even more. Every human, every one of us, has bigotry. Not everyone admits it, examines it, and rejects it.
The little matter of the list
Discovering antisemitism in DAOIPAL wasn't the first time I had to grapple with some disturbing facts about George Orwell. In 2003, The Guardian published what is now referred to as "Orwell's List". Orwell "named names": he cooperated with British authorities by producing a list of people that he felt were security risks because of their ties to the Soviet state.
This news elicited a wide spectrum of reaction among progressive thinkers and writers, from Alexander Cockburn denouncing Orwell as despicable and no longer worth reading, to Christopher Hitchens brushing it off as trivial. The Wikipedia article "Orwell's list" includes a round-up of reaction.
It must be noted that the people whose names Orwell supplied to the British secret intelligence force weren't blacklisted. They weren't fired from positions, their careers ruined. The list comprised people deemed unsuitable to be part of a counterintelligence operation because of their close ties to the Soviet state. That's an important distinction.
The writer Bernard Crick writes that Orwell "did it because he thought the Communist Party was a totalitarian menace. He wasn't denouncing these people as subversives. He was denouncing them as unsuitable for a counter-intelligence operation."
Historian John Newsinger called Orwell's List "a terrible mistake on his part, deriving in equal measure from his hostility to Stalinism and his illusions in the Labour government. What it certainly does not amount to, however, is an abandonment of the socialist cause or transformation into a footsoldier in the Cold War. Indeed, Orwell made clear on a number of occasions his opposition to any British McCarthyism, to any bans and proscriptions on Communist Party members (they certainly did not reciprocate this) and any notion of a preventive war. If he had lived long enough to realise what the IRD was actually about there can be no doubt that he would have broken with it." (Given that the IRD produced propaganda, Newsinger's assumption is undoubtedly correct.)
I tend to agree with Crick and Newsinger. How much of that is rationalization, I cannot say. One could say I'm rationalizing all of it. Orwell was once antisemitic, but later repudiated it. Orwell named names, but he thought he was doing the right thing at the time, and the people on his list weren't blacklisted or ruined. It's rationalization -- and it's also true.
Why I read
So, knowing this, how could Orwell still be one of my greatest writing heroes? The answer is simple. I deeply love his work, and he was human.
George Orwell used his writing to fight totalitarianism, to denounce the hypocrisy of the ruling class, to champion workers, to champion socialism, to make us think more critically about capitalism. He cared deeply about justice. Like Woody Guthrie's guitar, Orwell's typewriter killed fascists. His writing is elegant, evocative, sparse, vivid. For me, his writing style is perfection. He was one of history's greatest essayists. 1984 is one of the greatest and most enduring books in the English language. The man who wrote that book was not perfect. He was human.
