Orwell’s rebellious patriotism

Orwell's rebellious patriotism

CALUM MECHIE

Robert Colls

GEORGE ORWELL

English rebel
356pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $34.95).
978 0 19 968080 1

George Orwell loved things. He had "a sort of belly-to-earth attitude" and believed in "the surface of the earth". He loved tools. From the old .44 Winchester with which he shot the elephant, to the bayonet issued him by the Home Guard and the spade with which he dug his potatoes, Orwell was always putting things to use. He also loved his country. "I am a patriot after all"; "I believe in England". These are facts about Orwell (he loved facts too) and they are related: Englishness, Robert Colls writes at the start of George Orwell: English rebel, "was something that he thought with". After decades of what John Rodden has called "the making and claiming of Saint George Orwell", Colls's intervention – where Orwell's Englishness is an activity, a process – is welcome.

Orwell has become a stable symbol of a certain type of Englishness. In 1992, John Major declared himself Prime Minister of a nation of "long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist". But Orwell's England was never stable. His "old maid" appears in The Lion and the Unicorn as "a characteristic fragment of the English scene" alongside, for example, "the queues outside the Labour Exchanges". The essay, a patriotic paean to Socialism and the English Genius, ends with the declaration that "patriotism has nothing to do with Conservativism. It is actually the opposite of Conservativism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same". Major kept quiet about that. His stable national identity has no room for Orwell's fluidity; Colls, who wants to understand Orwell through "Englishness" rather than define England through "Orwell", embraces it. Colls's Orwell is not a saint; he is "the best and worst political commentator on the scene".

Colls argues that Orwell's employment of "the dialectics of England-changed and England-still-the-same" is typically English, a critical practice rooted in Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867). The identification of this convention and its nineteenth-century origin is canny. Orwell identifies England by its past, and by its people. He thinks that a nation's history happens at different rates for its different people. "The common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism", he wrote in "Charles Dickens": England has changed, and stayed the same. Orwell's essay on Dickens is, with its amateurish tone, evidence of his nineteenth-century sensibility. Orwell reads Dickens like his first readers did, compelled by his personality. He insists that he, too, is part of that mental world. He is with the common people and, since he is "a degenerate modern semi-intellectual", this is a form of rebellion – English rebellion.

Some of Colls's conclusions are suspect. His claim that "Orwell found an England to believe in" while "down the mine" in Wigan seems too neat. The suggestion that, after "converting" to his country, Orwell learned "to take things as he found them – the good and the bad, the past and the present, the left and the right" seems too generous. This account is perhaps over-influenced by the Orwell/Blair dichotomy, a convention of Orwell criticism made orthodox by Raymond Williams. All public intellectuals create their identities, just as they create their publics, or their nations.

Insisting on the interrelation of Englishness and rebelliousness within the Orwell persona, however, Colls is spot on. Rebelliousness was a mark of authenticity for Orwell. It suggested honesty; it often signified style. It even meant Englishness. "My Country Right or Left", the essay in which he first declared for England, is also a call for armed revolution: "when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting". Orwell thought the war could be won by bloody revolution. "Preposterous", Robert Colls rightly remarks; but patriotic, too. In a time where, under a lion and a unicorn of its own, the Daily Mail can accuse a man of hating Britain because he once called "the Englishman" a nationalist, an elegant and eloquent reminder that George Orwell loved his country rebelliously is both timely and necessary.