I pose the question because Andrew Ferguson has written a review for The American Spectator on George Orwell: A Life in Letters by Peter Davison. Without giving it much thought (and that's a give away!) I have always reckoned that writing displays much more about you than you would be comfortable with if you realised it! However, Orwell prided himself on the absolute neutrality and pelucid clarity of his chosen words which allows Ferguson some dry amusement:
How much of the real George Orwell can be found in this new collection of
letters is an open question. “Good prose,” he once wrote, “is like a window
pane.” The good writer, he told us, will strive mightily to efface all artifice
from any piece of writing, leaving behind only his gleaming sentences and the
thoughts and images of which they are the direct and flawless expression.
Since it first appeared, in the essay “Why I Write” in 1946, this line of
Orwell’s has been quoted so often we can easily forget that it is false. Even
the truest writing is artificial, as Orwell knew, because writing is unnatural.
Some sentences will be more honest than other sentences, it’s true, and they
will be well-intentioned or not, to one degree or another, but none of them will
be transparent. Head doctors tell us we can’t glance in a mirror without some
adjustment of the facial muscles, or walk onto a stage without a change in
posture or gait, no matter how infinitesimal or sly. Something similar happens
when we take pen in hand or huddle in front of the keyboard. Nobody transfers
himself whole and natural and naked to the page to be gazed upon by friends and
strangers through the glass.
I don't know enough about Orwell to say anything useful except that on the truly great character-defining question of his time he passed with honours where his near contemporaries, the likes of Ralph Miliband (and many others), failed; that is, he recognised true tyranny when its blood-splattered victims were obvious to all, or at least, to some. Thus, today, he is claimed as a 'comrade' by Left and Right:
It’s odd that a writer who respected transparency and clarity of language above
all things should himself be so misunderstood by at least half his admirers.
Among the scribbling classes, Orwell fans seem to me to be equally divided
between right and left. To cite an easy illustration: Norman Podhoretz’s famous
essay from 1983 claimed Orwell as an early incarnation of neoconservatism (a
proto-neo!), owing to his staunch anti-communism and pro-Western sympathies.
Podhoretz’s essay was furiously rebutted by the late Christopher Hitchens, who
later went on to produce a book called Why Orwell Matters, citing his
hero’s emphatic atheism, anti-imperialism, and socialism as evidence of his
undying identity as a man of the left. Somebody here has got Orwell all wrong.
From the little I know of him I would place him in the Pantheon of Heroes despite his soppy socialism which, founded as it was on Christian principles, has the merit of charity and love. It was, I suspect, this very basic decency and goodness which provided him with the litmus paper to test the true nature of Socialism in its National (Hitler) and International (Stalin) forms. Happily, he was also endowed with the courage to tell the truth out loud. Did Ralph Miliband and his ilk ever do that? Nah!
