Orwell's Diaries

There's a thing about being an admirer of George Orwell that it's hard to acknowledge that admiration without instantly getting lumped in with the conspiracy mongers. You know, the ones who tout Nineteen Eighty-Four not as the forewarning it was intended to be, but as a threatened, point-for-point prediction of the future. Admittedly, I was one of those at one time in my life. We all have a right to be fifteen once, don't we?

The problem is that Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are required reading in many schools (and rightfully so) and so the name "Orwell" has a distinctively grim and paranoid ring for many people. There are few words so sinister as "Orwellian," a fact that might not do Orwell proud if he knew that his successors would be as powerless to halt the cynical obliteration of the English language as he was; that's the paradox of dystopic writers who remain relevant. Meanwhile, without seeking them out, few ever read Orwell's essays, many of which I would count among his best writing--some even surpassing his better novels. Here are a bunch of the essays; go nuts. They're also worth buying.

Reading Orwell's Diaries--recently published for the first time in the States--is not quite so pleasurable as reading those essays. The "Domestic Diaries" that make up large chunks of the collected works and catalog his agricultural activities near Kent and then in Hertfordshire held little interest and most entries seem to ask to be skipped.

The collection picks up during his account of the lead-up to the War, in which everyone around him seems oblivious to the oncoming crisis, even as the pub radio reports on Germany's designs on Poland in the summer of 1939. This ignorance-fueled-by-indifference flummoxes Orwell but doesn't stun him. Blindness to the inevitable--even from the sitting government--is something he's seen before. As he writes,

[Friend and writer] Stephen Spender said to me recently, "Don't you feel that any time during the past ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?' I had to agree to this. Partly it is a question of not being blinded by class interests etc... but where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in... I could not say exactly what wars and revolutions would happen, but they never surprised me when I came. Since 1934 I have know war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty.

It's this ability (elaborated upon in a rare moment of hubris) that lends some credibility to the aforementioned conspiracists, though not as much as they'll take. As a traveling journalist--the '30s saw him in the Spanish Civil War and North Africa--he was not so uniquely suited to see the world in ways his more disinterested contemporaries never would have. Combined with his journalist's understanding of human nature and his writer's imagination, it was only a matter of some effort that he was able to extrapolate the elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four from the world around him. Indeed, many of that book's most haunting moments are foreshadowed in the Diaries: the vague, sparse, and unreliable information regarding the War (irony of ironies: his first wife, Eileen, worked for the Censorship Department); the rampant reversing of loyalties at a moment's notice (Russia's shifting allegiances and English pols' corresponding stances deserve special attention); right down to the number of rats living in Britain (estimated at four to five million, he says).

After the War, it's back to domestic record-keeping, this time on the Scottish island of Jura. And minus a few brief, worthwhile observations from the hospital during Orwell's final illness, the Diaries return to their earlier lackluster form. It's a helpful reminder that these diaries were for Orwell's purposes--not ours (what can we do with the knowledge of how many eggs Orwell collected from his chickens?). There are a few mildly amusing anecdotes about censored acquaintances and observations on the living conditions of the rural working class (especially early in the book) in here. But they remain mostly filler, items to be skipped past on the way to Orwell's account of the war and the Blitz, which are mostly worthwhile.

As with any collected diary (as opposed to a memoir), this collection is only really recommendable if one already admires the diarist. Which, looking back, is the reason I purchased the thing.

Grade: B-