Orwell, Muggeridge and Me

O thorny, glowing, twisted heart, that walked the London streets a while … So wrote a friend of the great John Donne—priest, poet, amorist—whose lifetime (1572 to 1631) bridged that uncomfortably lively period between the Tudor and the Stuart monarchies. The same fine flourish fits George Orwell pretty well, in his equally interesting period (1903 to 1950) beneath the shadows of two world wars.

I “met” George Orwell during the Second World War, in my tiny thatched camp, deeply concealed in the New Guinea jungles, behind the Japanese lines. (A detailed account of this experience appeared in Quadrant of May, 2007.) My friend John Sherlock, also a cadet patrol officer, made a hair-raisingly dangerous walk of several days through enemy territory, simply to bring me a copy of a Penguin book he had “fluked” in a mail packet from home. He stayed only one night, had breakfast, and then presented his gift: “Here you are, mate. I found it bloody marvellous! And I know it’ll be right up your alley!” He was right. It was Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. I was hooked in the instant, and hooked I remain, an Orwell fan for the rest of a long life.

The book itself was shabbily produced, under Britain’s then wartime “austerity” rules, but it ought to be my most treasured literary relic. Alas, the Japanese jumped my camp and burnt everything on May 15, 1943.

Even while Orwell’s oeuvre remained quite small, it was clear that a body of support—a “public”—was forming for him, as it seemed, spontaneously. It was then very far indeed from a “cult”, or an “in” group of precious devotees. There was no
“theory” nor defining philosophy. Supporters were plain persons whose boots were firmly planted on the foothold of facts from ordinary life; nothing “twee”, no “bullshit”. Yet, for all this downrightness, Orwell’s steadily growing support did spring from a “transcendence”: in Housman’s words, from the “the heart within, that tells the truth, and tells it twice as plain”.

And the mark it made spread wide and burned deep. Tom Fitzgerald was our remarkable and genial journalist who for years performed a daily double bill of singular agility. First, as financial editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, he was the most respected of all the regular commentators on the doings of the City. Second (with his partner George Munster) he was proprietor and editor of the independent, free-swinging, have-a-crack-at-anybody fortnightly journal Nation, which ran from 1958 to 1972. One day, as Tom and I discoursed over coffee at Vadim’s, near King’s Cross, Tom fell silent. Then: “Peter! Excuse me! I drifted! I just happened to think of George Orwell. You know, the day he died, I felt the loss, just as if he had been my father.”

Now, sixty-odd years after Orwell’s untimely death, things are not so simple, and “Orwell studies” have increased like rabbits in a good paddock. These efforts vary in worth and interest, from deeply thoughtful to idle and footling.

Now Oxford University Press has published its full-scale “scholarly-with-all-the-trimmings” George Orwell: English Rebel, by Robert Colls, Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University in Leicester. It is the most detailed compilation of actual facts about Orwell, and of all the opinions, speculations, compliments and criticisms about him that have ever been made by every Tom, Dick and Harry in the world. All this mass has passed through the alert, fair-minded and intensely well-stocked brain of Colls, who states with candour his assessment and evaluation. It is indeed a virtuoso performance by a one-man band. For a reader with my particular interests, it won’t be many months before this becomes the best-thumbed volume in my library.

Not that it is faultless. For example, the important character Flory, from Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, is extensively and helpfully discussed in the text, but has wholly eluded the indexer under “F”. (So has the novel as a whole.) All I can say is, “Don’t crow! Next time round it may be you! Or, worse still, me!”

But, thank whatever gods may be for the scholarly assiduity of Robert Colls which brings us this remarkable compilation, a compilation it remains. It is not a Life, and brings one no closer to the inwardness of the great soul of George Orwell.

That English multi-media wunderkind Malcolm Muggeridge was born, like Orwell, in 1903, and the two men later mutually acknowledged each other as “bosom friends”. (Expressly confirmed, as it is by Colls, that must be right.) The British public read, saw and heard this prodigy in the leading papers, as editor of London Punch, and via radio and television. He was one of that group of courageous British journalists who, after visiting Russia, published the truth about the monstrous evil of Stalin’s regime, just as Britain’s leaders of the literary Left were blocking the publication of Orwell’s truths about communist interventions in the Spanish Civil War.

Muggeridge made a tour of Australia, for most of which he was escorted by the boisterous Max Newton, lively editor for the then youthful Rupert Murdoch. It was not a visit which Muggeridge was likely to forget. Far from the “limousines-all-the-way” usually accorded celebrities, Max drove them both in his Volkswagen, up into the stupendous and precipitate country of the then developing Snowy Mountains project, and rolled the car. Merciful result: shock, bruises, embarrassment and “Well, it could have been worse”.

Max very kindly arranged a quiet evening in Canberra, in the Northbourne Avenue flat of Gerry Gutman, where Muggeridge and I could talk our heads off, mostly about Orwell. (Gerry himself was a richly eccentric character: a Jewish lad deported here from England during the war in the troopship Dunera of ill-repute, and later (as a rising government servant) unjustly smeared in the proceedings over the Russian spy Petrov.)

Muggeridge was amused by my story of the Japanese mini-auto-da-fe with my treasured copy of Down and Out, and the curious coincidence that Orwell and I shared experience of police work in the colonies. (I had been a Sub-Inspector in the Royal Papua New Guinea Police Force.) And we talked of all the finer-drawn, more subtle aspects of Orwell’s mind which saw little display in much of his writings. He was, for example, far from being the blunt and surly atheist, and had no difficulty relating to the ever-spiritual and religious mindset of his bosom friend.

Was life in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s really more crowded with exciting personalities who adventured and achieved? Were challenge, colour and strangeness there ready for anyone to embrace who dared to step just a little off the convention-ruled beaten path?

I think so. But perhaps I myself have just become sedate, and content nowadays to drift in more tranquil waters.