ORWELL IN TRIBUNE: Richard Keeble, Free Press, September-October 2006

Friday, 1 September 2006

Richard Keeble, Free Press, September-October 2006

George Orwell's time as literary editor at Tribune from 1943-45 amounts to a special moment in the history of British journalism. The quality and quantity of the output by any standards are remarkable. Journalism is inherently ephemeral, bashed out at speed, quickly consumed and quickly forgotten. These pieces, in contrast, still sparkle and surprise with their invention, wit, vast range of subject matter and solid thinking.

Orwell took a substantial pay cut when he joined Tribune (by then the leading voice of the left wing of the Labour Party) after two rather glum years at the BBC. But he clearly revelled in the new-found freedoms – all the more so because Tribune was a journal with which he could totally identify. As Orwell later wrote: 'It is the only existing weekly paper that makes a genuine effort to be both progressive and humane – that is, to combine a radical Socialist policy with a respect for freedom of speech and a civilised attitude towards literature and the arts.'

In addition to running the literary pages and providing occasional essays (most famously 'Some thoughts on the common toad' of April 1946), Orwell contributed a weekly “As I Please” column and it was these which confirmed his reputation as a leading, controversial voice of the Left. According to biographer Jeffery Meyers: 'His column transformed a humble genre into significant literary works. He not only promoted Socialist ideas and put contemporary political events in historical perspective but also (gloomy as he was) cheered people up with entertaining subjects and – in an intimate tone of voice – combined public issues with personal feelings.'

Yet above all Orwell in his journalism was determined to build up the community of the Left: firstly through columns focusing on political, cultural, social or literary issues; and, secondly, and most imaginatively, through developing an extraordinarily close relationship with his readers. This relationship was crucial to the flowering of Orwell's journalistic imagination. While he realised mainstream journalism was basically propaganda for wealthy newspaper proprietors, at Tribune he was engaging in the crucial political debate with people who mattered to him. They were an authentic audience.

In the remarkably close relationship he instinctively developed with his readers, Orwell can, in many ways, be seen as a proto-blogger, responding to letters sent to him directly or sent to Tribune, inviting letters, asking readers to answer queries or to point him towards a book, pamphlet or quotation he's looking for, running a competition for a short story or giving them a quirky brain teaser to answer.

Paul Anderson's edited collection is a fitting celebration of Orwell's oeuvre at Tribune (his spell there only broken from February 1945 to November 1946 when he first served as war correspondent for David Astor's Observer and then worked on various other writing projects). In his substantial introduction, Anderson, a former editor of Tribune, provides a fascinating history of the journal, identifying, for instance, the tortuous path it followed after its launch by the Labour MPs Stafford Cripps and George Strauss in 1937. By the time Orwell joined, it was on its fourth editor and had gone through two radical changes in editorial direction and at least three life-threatening financial crises. But Aneurin Bevan proved an outstanding editor from 1941-1945 and gave Orwell all the support he needed.

Anderson's analysis of Orwell's political line at Tribune is extremely perceptive. He writes: 'The columns reverberate with reflections on the relationship between politics and literature and with observations of public opinion and political culture – the unreported rise of popular anti-Americanism, the impact of official pro-Russia propaganda, the effects of rationing and shortage, the influence of the flying bombs on morale, attitudes to the treatment of war criminals.'

In many ways, this text serves as a wonderful supplement to Peter Davison's seminal 20-volume collection of Orwell's writings. In his notes to the articles, Anderson provides many background details missed by Davison – for instance, embedded here are biographies of the personalities and histories of obscure left-wing journals of the period which historians will find invaluable.

Anderson underplays the controversies surrounding the links Orwell and a number of his colleagues may or may not have had with the intelligence services and the many affairs he is known to have had over this period which certainly depressed his wife Eileen enormously. The index is also far too flimsy to be of any use. But these are minor criticisms. This text is a marvel no Orwellian should miss.

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WHAT THEY SAID

This revelatory collection shows how the different sides of Orwell’s imagination interacted… The fascination here is reading Orwell as a working journalist on a single paper. He attended editorial conferences with Nye Bevan (someone should write a play about the encounter), commissioned reviews and made a doomed attempt to publish short stories by organising a competition… Week by week, column by column, his inspirations take shape… His swipes against propaganda, the manipulation of crowds, the squalor of wartime and postwar London life, the absurdities of bureaucracy and the growth of the Great Powers formed the raw material of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Sean French, Independent

This collection is remarkable, not because it contains any of Orwell's greater or more famous essays, but because, 60 years on, his articles are still wonderfully readable… Even when Orwell is using the column to settle one of his many scores with some foe now otherwise totally forgotten, Anderson's thorough footnotes will tell you all you need to know to appreciate Orwell's invective.
Martin Rowson, Tribune

Anderson's informative introduction includes a long digression into the left-wing politics of the period, which some may find heavy going but which supplies the wider context. The footnotes constitute a veritable Who Was Who of British politics and literature in the first half of the last century. Who was Barbara Castle's husband and who her lover? Who were Vernon Bartlett, the Duchess of Atholl, Leonard Merrick? Answers sit conveniently at the foot of the page.
Gordon Bowker, Observer

Anderson's compilation usefully picks out (and edits superbly) a particular thread in Orwell's huge output. Unlike his broadcast commentaries to India, “As I Please” was not concerned with day-to-day events but with broader political thinking: half-inside, half-outside the whale. Warning against the political control of discourse, blanket praise for the Soviet Union and anti-German hysteria, Orwell worked out in plain language the great themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he abandoned his early hopes that the war would effect a socialist revolution, he never doubted that people would act properly if they only understood.
Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 ... is compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, a former Tribune editor whose special insights into Orwell's genius make this particular volume the very best on the subject.
Michael Foot, Observer

It is a tribute to the publishers and to Tribune itself that Paul Anderson has been able to edit such a superb compendium of Orwell’s writings at a crucial stage in his life.
Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

The book gathers together all the pieces Orwell wrote for Tribune... Published as a whole, and in sequence, you can see what Anthony Burgess meant when he wrote of him: "Everything Orwell said had such a stamp of honest sincerity..." As Anderson also points out in his introduction, the collection shows off "one of the greatest practitioners ... of the craft of turning out 800-2,000 words a week". He was Tribune's William Hazlitt, and Orwell in Tribune does much more than re-affirm that fact as well as his genius.
Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post

Neatly edited by Paul Anderson, and good on the contemporary left-wing background, this deserves to sit on the same shelf as Peter Davison's monumental George Orwell: The Complete Works.
D J Taylor, Sunday Times

This book is a collection of all the columns [Orwell] produced between 1943 and 1947... It comes with a lucid and thoughtful account of Tribune and Orwell by former Tribune editor Paul Anderson. It … shows Orwell to have been the best sort of newspaper columnist.
Francis Beckett, Guardian

Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in this attractively presented and well edited collection… Paul Anderson’s notes are not only copious but informative, the work of someone who knows the subject and the period…
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator

To read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local. The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson's intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer… Yet Orwell's talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers... Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life.
Nick Cohen, Democratiya

Evidently Orwell was well equipped, in 1943, to take on the literary editorship of Tribune. He could write interestingly about pretty much anything, and had often appeared in its pages already… The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book.
Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books