Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books

During his years as literary editor and columnist on the left-wing weekly Tribune George Orwell wrote, in addition to his journalism, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Tribune suited him very well, letting him do as he pleased, offering a measure of political agreement but also a background against which his boldness and oddity stood out very clearly.

The bold and odd Orwell is in the news at present: a memoir has been published describing his friendship with a young girl back in 1914, when he was eleven and she thirteen. They met when Jacintha, wandering around her father's estate, came upon Eric Blair (to give him his true name) standing on his head in a field. Asked why he was doing so, he explained that it was a good way to get noticed. So it proved, and a close friendship developed. Whenever Eric was home from school (Eton) they would take long walks, or go fishing, or discuss poetry and the occult. He gave her a copy of Dracula, a crucifix, and a clove of garlic. Happy days, in an idyllic setting that will recur in the "Golden Country" of Nineteen Eighty-Four!

Orwell's biographers knew about this youthful affair, but it now appears that Jacintha broke it off when Eric, aged eighteen, tried to rape her. When he went off to be an imperial policeman in Burma she did not reply to his sad letters, and on his return in 1927 she still did not relent. Years later, in 1949, when he was desperately ill, a widower with a young adopted son, he appealed to her to come and see him. Apparently Nineteen Eighty-Four had so shocked her that she decided against it, but she attended his funeral in 1950. Orwell never mentions her in his published work.

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The sexual manners of eighteen-year-old boys are rarely polished, and it may be that Eric was a rough rather than a criminal suitor, but Orwell's biographer Gordon Bowker thinks otherwise: "The sudden pounce...remained his preferred mode of seduction."[1] Either way the entire episode is suggestive. By all accounts Orwell's normal demeanor was perfectly civil, just what could be expected of a man of his class and education, but there were occasions when it must have seemed, not least to other members of that class, to be as odd as standing on one's head to attract attention.

As to the allegation of violence, it is true that it had inevitably been part of his job in Burma; and in later life this quiet man did express violent political opinions and spoke of his own "intellectual brutality." He condemned the English public (i.e., private boarding) school system, but not the almost universal practice in such schools of corporal punishment, which he thought a useful preparation for adult life. He defended the bombing of civilian populations. And so on. Yet he had unusually strong sympathy with the destitute and the suffering and could imagine extremes of desolation, as in the famous essay on a hanging, where he remembers how the condemned man stepped aside to avoid a puddle on his way to the gallows; in that act Orwell "saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide."

Leonard Woolf describes how, as a young colonial administrator in Ceylon, he supervised the hanging of four men. The event itself was more horrible than the one Orwell witnessed, and Woolf was sickened by it, but the account we remember is Orwell's, because of its imaginative participation in the victim's humanity. A lesser-known instance of this imaginative power can be found in an essay of 1940, in which he says that nothing in the First World War moved him as deeply as the sinking of the Titanic had done: the ship suddenly up-ended and sank bow-foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than three hundred feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel.

(He was ten years old when the Titanic sank.)

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Orwell's experiences as a police officer in Burma had much to do with his revulsion from imperial rule and the exploitation of colonial populations. He was himself born in India into a ruling-class family, but he was soon committed politically to the left; the evolution of his political beliefs is still a matter of argument, but it was obviously related to his unillusioned sympathy with the poor and the outcast, and to his need to break free of his own class and speak his own mind. A believer in socialist democracy, he found little evidence of a desire for it on the British left.

Except for a brief spell in the Independent Labour Party (a dwindling minority party, usually at odds with the Labour Party, the main hope of the left), he preferred independence, his freedom to criticize all parties. For example, the trade unions, the main financial supporters of Labour, naturally saw it as their first duty to better the condition of their members. But Orwell reminded them that simply by doing so they inadvertently helped increase the poverty of vast colonial populations. He was the enemy of all forms of privilege, oppression, racism, and totalitarianism.

As Britain and France refused to intervene in the Spanish civil war (which in the opinion of many made them pro-Franco and pro-Hitler), Orwell, along with two thousand other British volunteers, fought on the Republican side, believing that the inevitable struggle with fascism should take place then and there, in Spain. He was wounded in support of the working-class cause, but his Spanish experiences reinforced his dislike of communism. He wanted his own brand of revolutionary war, and in 1939 hoped that the one which was obviously just about to begin might be it. Meanwhile the palpable danger of that moment stimulated his own patriotic feelings. He ceased to oppose the war but without ceasing to detest the British ruling class. He wanted it to be recognized that capitalism didn't work; that capitalists were indeed as odious as Nazis; that in his admittedly beloved country gross disparities of income between the callous rich and the near destitute made a joke of the precious idea of equality. There had been a moment in revolutionary Barcelona when that idea seemed to have become thrillingly real, but almost at once the gap between rich and poor widened again.

Born a member of a highly privileged class, Orwell had lived with the poorest of the poor in London and Paris. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) gave an account of the period during which he experienced the poverty of the depressed industrial north. It was published by Victor Gollancz, a fellow traveler whose Left Book Club had attracted astonishing numbers of subscribers. Orwell's book sold 40,000 copies, but Gollancz, always nervous, insisted on adding a foreword to reduce its political force. Later on, fearing the reaction of the Russians, he refused to publish Homage to Catalonia, and later still turned down Animal Farm for similar reasons. Since Orwell was bound to him by contract Gollancz was able to hinder its publication by anyone else.[2]

The manuscript survived the German flying bomb and rocket attacks on London in the summer of 1944, and appeared after a year of delay, just as the war ended. Britain had a "Russophile" period when the Soviet armies were beating the Germans in the East, and Stalin was for a while thought rather lovable. Failing to agree, Orwell, who had joined a foreign republican army and got himself shot, was again standing on his head, concerning himself more with the terrible destruction of working-class homes in London's East End than with the advances of the Allied armies in Europe.

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By this time he was writing his Tribune column, "As I Please," normally produced weekly. He was known to be a remarkably productive writer, much admired for the vigor and clarity of his prose. He reviewed a great many books, including novels and poetry, but probably most of his energy went into political journalism. Though surely to be counted as one of them himself, he had a certain prejudice against other left-wing intellectuals, "fashionable pansies" whose education had cut them off from the real world of work. "The left-wing opinions of the average 'intellectual' are mainly spurious," he asserted, calling the poet Stephen Spender "a parlor Bolshevik"; though he admitted that when he met Spender he quite liked him, and confessed himself liable to these episodes of "intellectual brutality."

His relationship with W.H. Auden is more interesting. This "gutless Kipling" wrote in his poem "Spain" ("one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war") of a need for "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder." To Orwell this is a good example of what is to be expected from the "utterly irresponsible intelligentsia." Speaking as a man who has seen murder done, and who thinks it ought to be avoided, he scorns "a brand of amoralism" that "is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled." Auden changed the line ("the deliberate acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder") but thought Orwell's comment "densely unjust"; for unless you are a pacifist this is indeed what you must consciously accept when fighting a war.

Although he wanted on principle to dislike Auden, Orwell (who had once known A.E. Housman's poems by heart) found some of his verse hard to resist. He quotes with approval the concluding lines of "Spain" –

History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon

– lines Auden himself came to regard as a blatant lie, a lapse into a false rhetoric. Elsewhere he quotes a stanza from "September 1, 1939," again without mentioning that Auden had disowned that poem. He also picked up more innocent lines that may have stuck in his memory like Housman's: in "A Hanging" the guards hold the prisoner in "careful caressing grip," an expression that echoes Auden –

Now through night's caressing grip
Earth and all her oceans slip...

– though it isn't clear whether, in this case, Auden was not the borrower.

What should not be overlooked is the fact that this political journalist took an informed though tough and idiosyncratic interest in literature. He defended Kipling and praised Jack London. He wrote well about Dickens when that writer was out of fashion. He took on Tolstoy in a perverse and stimulating essay about King Lear. He thought T.S. Eliot a once-good poet who had fatally ceased to write memorable lines, perhaps because he had accepted a religion that forced him "to believe the incredible." He wrote about No Orchids for Miss Blandish and Vogue magazine, about boys' school stories; about the vulgar seaside cartoonist Donald McGill and the Surrealist Salvador Dalì. He made something of a hero out of Henry Miller. His great exemplar was Jonathan Swift, though he did not agree with Swift that happiness was impossible to human beings. He would spend much time deciding what was right and what was not in the theories of James Burnham, which left a mark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

One of his most enduring interests was in the cultivation of pure and direct English, where his concern almost matched the intensity of Swift's. Sixty years later I remember resolving that the essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946) should be a kind of touchstone (allowing for some Orwellian quirks) for my own writing, a memory clouded by the necessary admission that I have not used it often enough.

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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. When Tribune got started in 1937 Orwell was in Spain. He returned wounded and sick and in a bad time. Homage to Catalonia, his book about the Spanish civil war, failed; the Spanish Republic was defeated, and the Hitler-Stalin Pact was the immediate cause of his abandoning his antiwar position. Rejected for military service on medical grounds, he celebrated his restored patriotism in the great essay "England Your England," written in February 1941: "As I write," it begins, "highly civilized beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." In this essay he celebrates what he always insisted on, often against the evidence – a certain gentleness and decency (a favorite word) in the texture of English life. Only a month earlier he had, as it were, stood on his head in praise of Henry Miller's complete indifference to conventional morality and nationalist sentiment. His interests were fascinatingly various.

He had been writing occasionally for Tribune, along with other papers, as well as working in the Indian service of the BBC – trying to project a favorable image of Britain and keep the Indians happy with their standing in the Empire, which German propaganda was trying to undermine. It was when he grew tired of what seemed to him a futile job in a disagreeably bureaucratic organization that he joined Tribune.

The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book. Tribune was more important than its circulation (at its peak around 40,000) might suggest. In his new job Orwell was dealing with persons of present and potential power. The paper was partly financed by Stafford Cripps, who had been Churchill's ambassador to Moscow; after the landslide election of 1945, he was close to the center of the Labour government and virtual controller of the austere postwar economy. Aneurin Bevan, who as minister of health in the postwar Labour administration was to be the godfather of the National Health Service, was for a time editor of Tribune. When Orwell left to work as a war correspondent in Europe his Tribune column was taken over by Bevan's wife, Jennie Lee, who was elected to Parliament in 1945 and was later famous for her generosity and charm when serving as arts minister under Harold Wilson. And Orwell would have had everyday encounters with other important left-wingers like Michael Foot, later the leader, and now the grand old man, of the modern Labour Party.

He still disapproved of much that orthodox Labour stood for, and in certain respects he also disagreed with Tribune, not least in his unrelenting opposition to Stalinist Russia. But he could work and be valued there simply because, as Foot has said, he was the sharpest thorn in the side of editorial complacency, the greatest of modern iconoclasts, a new and much more humane Swift with a deadly lash for all hypocrisies, including socialist hypocrisies.

He could write things in Tribune that would have had difficulty achieving print elsewhere; and sometimes he even agreed with the policy of the paper, as when it attacked Churchill (something Bevan was always willing to do) or, in 1943, demanded a second front in Europe. He also agreed with Tribune's opposition to the notion that a defeated Germany must be punished and dismembered, and on the need or duty of Britain to liberate India with all possible speed. "Tribune is not perfect," he wrote,

but I do think it is the only existing 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.

Such was the atmosphere at Tribune when he joined it. The paper survives, but its greatest years probably coincided roughly with Orwell's tenure.

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In the column "As I Please" he could, as the title indicates, say whatever he liked, whether political or not. He contributed eighty columns, starting in 1943, breaking off early in 1945, and resuming at the end of that year. The last "As I Please" appeared in April 1947. During the four years when he was, with intervals, writing his column, the world of which he was to take such note as he pleased changed considerably: the war in Europe ended, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, India and Pakistan were liberated. The American armies went home and the British settled in for several years of economic crisis, discomfort, and rationing in excess of what they had suffered in the six years of war. The cold war began.

Orwell was busy. Besides writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four he contributed his "London Letters" to Partisan Review, and occasionally wrote for Dwight Macdonald's Politics. The column must almost have seemed a way of relaxing. To read through the eighty items as they are now presented is to get some insight into a writer of restless, unclassifiable intellect. Some pages vividly recall wartime London. The first column describes the behavior of two drunken GIs in a London tobacconist's shop.

Their conduct was not exceptional. Even if you steer clear of Piccadilly with its seething swarms of drunks and whores, it is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes. On the other hand the Americans have their own justifiable complaints— in particular, they complain of the children who follow them night and day, cadging sweets.

Trivia, but such encounters really mattered because Anglo-American relations mattered. These issues were rarely discussed in print. Most people in Britain, says Orwell, don't even know that American servicemen are not liable in the British courts for offenses against British citizens; and most are also quite unaware of the extent of anti-British feeling in the US. He also notes, correctly, that British soldiers resented the fact that American soldiers were paid five times as much as they were, and suggests remedies for this dangerous imbalance. (They didn't work.) White American soldiers, he discovered, were horrified to discover that white English girls danced with their black comrades, and succeeded in getting a dancehall proprietor to start a "whites only" policy.

Injustices large and small attracted his attention. An Indian journalist living in England needs support when he protests against being drafted into the British army. The iron railings that had protected the communal gardens of well-to-do London squares until requisitioned and torn down for munitions were now being replaced by wooden palings; so bits of London that had been liberated for the use of all were, as the war progressed, ominously returning to private use.
He would comment on the quality of radio programs, on price rises, on the inadequacy of British houses, on the rudeness of shop assistants who seem to enjoy having nothing to sell, on the mysterious shortage of clocks and watches. But it's not all complaining: a rosebush from Woolworth's that years before cost sixpence, the price of ten cigarettes, still blooms abundantly; a Regency church in North London is worth getting off the bus for another look.

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Much of the charm of these columns obviously depends on their variety and their nearness to home. The writer finds a good book in a pile outside a bookseller's shop, or describes his own pamphlet collection, or wanders off in another direction and thinks about London's Victorian sewage system.

Some of his reactions are unpredictable. As one would expect, he detests anti-Semitism and Sir Oswald Mosley, whose fascist movement was strongly anti-Semitic. Mosley was interned in 1940 but let out in 1943. Orwell thought it right that he should have been locked up when there was a threat of invasion – and shot if the Germans actually landed – but he defended Mosley's release in 1943, for he could no longer do any harm, and anti-Mosley demonstrations had become protests against habeas corpus.

He pays some attention to complaining letters to the editor. Two subjects guarantee indignant responses from readers: any hostile comment on the Catholic Church (much disliked by Orwell), and any expression of friendliness to Jews. Readers write to complain that his attitudes are generally too negative, that he is always running things down. He replies that in the England of 1944 there's not much around to praise, Woolworth roses apart. Or he will give his views, always simple and intelligible, on some current argument – the case of Ezra Pound, for instance – before describing how he tested a barmaid's theory that dipping your mustache in your beer makes the beer go flat.

One week he reports that he's reading a life of Tolstoy, a book on Dickens, Harry Levin's on Joyce, and the autobiography of Dalì. As the months pass and the Normandy landings are more obviously about to occur, he says very little about the fighting but comments on the uselessness of flimsy surface air-raid shelters. Never a man to complain of austerity, he explains that he would like clothes rationing to continue long after the war, indeed "till the moths have devoured the last dinner-jacket."

In one contentious column he refuses to condemn civilian casualties in mass air raids on German cities:

Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers are usually the first to be evacuated, and some of the young men will be away in the army. Probably a disproportionately large number of bomb victims will be middle-aged. (Up to date, German bombs have killed between six and seven thousand children in this country. This is, I believe, less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period).

On the other hand, "normal" or "legitimate" warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. ...Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

It took Orwell to say such things in May 1944, and a journal as tough as Tribune to publish them.

In lighter moments he identifies herbs on London bomb-sites or inquires whether melons were grown in seventeenth-century England. Now and again he sets his readers a "brain-tickler." Spot three errors in this passage from Timon of Athens:

Come not to me again, but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.

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Not being obsessed by the war, he had time and space for other topics. The invasion of June 6 is not mentioned in the issue of June 9, which was probably written before the news broke, though that hardly applies to the column for June 16, which is mostly about a radio program called The Brains Trust, along with a plug for Dwight Macdonald's Politics. June 23 has a long piece on the centennial of the birth of Anatole France, a complaint about the work of two detested Catholic humorists, plus a bit about a book on the voting record of members of Parliament.

When the first comment on the progress of the war comes on June 30, it concerns the flying bombs launched by the Germans soon after the Normandy landings – a nasty business, but relatively domestic in scale. Orwell does note the absurdity of complaints that they were "an indiscriminate attack on civilians," considering what the Allied air forces were doing in Germany.

However, he also records his personal reactions: the flying bombs were exceptionally disquieting because unlike other projectiles, they gave you time to think before their bombs went off. When you heard the drone of the approaching bomb your first reaction was to want it not to stop, but to pass over you before the motor cut out. "You are hoping that it will fall on somebody else." This is "the bottomless selfishness of the human being."

The V2 rockets which replaced the flying bombs were also interestingly eerie, but in a different way: you heard them coming after they had struck. These relatively local issues concerned Orwell, while the Battle of the Bulge, the desperate German offensive of the last winter of the war, escaped notice. His silence on the liberation of the camps is also rather puzzling. There are references to the campaigns in Burma, a war zone that had special interest for him. In February 1945 he does speculate about the fate of Japan when the European war is over, though of course he did not foresee the atomic bombs. "There will be a peace of exhaustion," he conjectures, "with only minor and unofficial wars raging all over the place." In October he does consider the Bomb, pointing out that since its manufacture calls for so huge a technological effort only large states will be able to make it, and they will balance each other's threat, so prolonging a "peace that is no peace."

In the opinion of his present editor, the most controversial column was about the Warsaw Rising of 1944. Orwell attacks the British press and intellectuals for saying that when the Russians, instead of moving to support the rebels, held back, they were right to do so:

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw.

His solicitude about the English language is a recurring topic. He admires Samuel Butler's style, of which Butler said he never thought about it, and believed that to do so would be a loss to himself and his readers. Orwell thought the best style would be as transparent as a windowpane. Then the thought could be unambiguously conveyed. The cliché smears the pane and is the enemy of truth. Secondhand language was dishonest, and honesty, he believed, was the best policy. "The advantage of a lie is always short-lived."

At his most combative, even when you think him wrong, he is honest. He hates hearing that something must not be said because to say it would "play into the hands" of some supposedly sinister influence or opponent. Propagandists might try to browbeat critics into silence by calling them "objectively reactionary," and "it is a tempting maneuver...but it is dishonest," and "the speaker loses touch with reality." The Germans and Japanese lost the war because they avoided reality, could not admit what was plain to the dispassionate eye.

Many of the problems Orwell wrote about are still unsolved: immigration, the low birthrate, Scottish separatism, inequitable arrangements for the selection of juries, and so on. In 1946 Orwell could say, in a particular powerful and gloomy column, that "when one considers how things have gone since 1930 or thereabouts, it is not easy to believe in the survival of civilisation." It seems no easier now, and for the reasons he gives. But this excellent series of columns doesn't end quite so solemnly. With a strange propriety it ends with a quiet chat about pidgin English in the South Pacific.

He went to Jura, a remote Scottish refuge, and began Nineteen Eighty-Four. The appendix on Newspeak, which resembles Swift's painful collections of "polite conversation," is the culmination of his distress at the loss of meaning in language; the book as a whole was called "terrible" (i.e., terrifying) by Orwell's friend William Empson. Nevertheless on the World Book Day just past in the UK, it made the top ten in a list of "books the nation cannot live without," putting Orwell after Austen, Tolkien, Charlotte Brontë, J.K. Rowling, Harper Lee, and Emily Brontë but ahead of Philip Pullman and Dickens. The Da Vinci Code came in forty-second. The domestication of such a book as Nineteen Eighty-Four would be a worthy topic for another "As I Please."

Notes
[1] Gordon Bowker, "Blair Pounces," Times Literary Supplement, February 23, 2007.
[2] Orwell's death in 1950 did not end the political opposition. In a recent book, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm (Penn State University Press, 2007), Daniel J. Leab writes about the part of the CIA in the making of the animated film version of Animal Farm, released in 1954. The CIA, then embarking on its cultural campaign against Soviet communism, partly financed the film, exerting constant pressure on its makers, so that the film became cold war propaganda. They imposed an entirely new ending on the story. Leab gives a full account of the matter, explaining how interference with the script affected the actual making of the film. With the techniques of animation then available the slightest change called for endless redrawing, and the changes to the end were an expensive nightmare.

Nick Cohen, Democratiya, Summer 2007

In 1946, George Orwell described a man who is

…thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income-tax demand printed in red.

Needless to say, this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book reviewer. Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent with a note suggesting that they 'ought to go well together'. They arrived four days ago, but for forty-eight hours the reviewer was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a resolute moment he ripped the string off it and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Cross Roads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (this one 680 pages and weighs four pounds), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It's Nicer Lying Down, probably included by mistake. His review — 800 words, say — has got to be 'in' by midday tomorrow.

This was self-portrait, but only a partial one. Orwell could invoke the wretchedness of the jobbing writer because he was churning out an astonishing amount of journalism for poor-paying magazines in the forties. But, and to an equally astonishingly degree, he wasn't producing hack work but essays on a vast range of subjects at a literary and intellectual level so consistently high no one who writes for a living can look on them without a spasm of envy. Peter Davison's The Complete Works of George Orwell runs to 20 volumes. While Orwell was writing his pieces for Tribune, he was also finishing Animal Farm, starting to think about Nineteen Eighty-Four, handing in arguments and reviews for British and American papers – and coping with a dying wife, an adopted son and his own TB while he was about it. [1]

Printing a writer's every word isn't always a kindness, and not all Orwell pieces stand the test of time – or even the test of his own time. But 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. The Canadian anarchist George Woodcock, an occasional adversary but firm friend, said that 'he could always find a subject on which there is something fresh to say in a prose that, for all its ease and apparent casualness, was penetrating and direct.' Anderson adds that 'it is difficult to think of a writer before or since' who could move from toads spawning in spring to lonely hearts ads via the decline of English murder from the days of Crippen.

Yet Orwell's talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers. Little magazines usually appear and vanish without anyone beyond their unpaid contributors caring. The few whose names still reverberate captured a spirit of their time and stood for something bigger than their tiny circulations. 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. (I say 'Tribune was' as if it were dead. The paper survives, but only in the sense that a geriatric in a coma survives.) Along with far more leftists than sympathetic historians like to remember, it went along with the Nazi-Soviet pact. When the second world war began, it was effectively on Germany's side and endorsed Communist Party line that the real enemies were Winston Churchill and the Labour Party rather than Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The board purged the fellow travellers in 1940, and for the rest of the decade Tribune was free to discuss the radical ideas that would make up a part of the programme of the 1945 Labour government, while, unusually for mid-20th century socialists, retaining a well-warranted suspicion of Stalin and his apologists. Orwell had a natural home.

Conservative-minded readers attracted to this book by Orwell's celebrations of Englishness or attacks on communism will learn that, despite everything, he was a man of the left, who believed that British socialism was desirable and inevitable. The idea that the world would turn against central planning and nationalisation was as beyond him as the idea that it would turn back to them is beyond us. The only definition of a great writer that makes sense is that readers of all temperaments can appreciate his or her work, so the admiration of conservatives is a compliment to Orwell. But however many multitudes he contained, and however loudly the Tribune circulation manager protested about the left-wing readers who cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, Orwell remained close to his audience. He shared their broad principles and they understood his references.

The common bonds of a small world helped Orwell. Writers and broadcasters in the mass media can never match his fluency, even if they had his talent, because they have to write at the pace of the slowest reader and break up their arguments with clunking explanations. (I fully expect to one day have an editor tell me that I can't say 'Shakespeare' but must add in parenthesis 'the famous 16th and 17th century playwright and poet for Stratford-upon-Avon near Coventry in Warwickshire' in case someone somewhere doesn't grasp the reference.) By contrast, writers tied to a small group of readers are like old friends, or at least old acquaintances, and can dispense with the formalities and get down to business, as Orwell did with relish.

The Tribune columns show that 'St George,' the patron saint of English decency, was nowhere near as saintly as John Major and Simon Schama like to imagine. He conducted a running row with the readers about their humanitarian objections to the RAF killing women and children in bombing campaign against German cities. 'Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?' he asked.

Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words 'civilian bombing' will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as 'We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic'. Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

After receiving a 'number of letters, some of them quite violent ones' he continued:

Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air raids, either ours or the enemy's. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument while squealing against this or that individual weapon, or of denouncing war while wanting to preserve the kind of society that makes war inevitable.

To which the only response is that different societies and ethical systems have usually held the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. They may be hypocritical, there may be no moral difference between killing a conscripted solider and defenceless woman, but the alternative is war without limit, which the 20th century saw enough of to know that it is worth 'squealing against'.

Even when you instinctively know Orwell is wrong, you cannot deny his strengths, the chief of which is intellectual honesty. No English writer is less concerned about giving offence, as the above passages demonstrate. Not in the showy and superficial manner of bourgeois baiting modern hack – who merely bends the knee to the new establishment when he spatters his copy with obscenities – but in the way of all true radicals who think it their job to tackle comfortable illusions, and are faintly surprised when their readers complain rather than thank them. (In his biography, DJ Taylor describes how Orwell could never understand why authors whose books he had criticised resented him thereafter.) It's not what you think but how you think, as they say, and dissidents facing systems and oppressions that Orwell never conceived have always admired his willingness to confront what he called the 'smelly little orthodoxies' of his day. If a believer in human freedom wants to make an argument that may send him to prison in a dictatorship, Orwell is on his side. If, in a democracy, a writer has an idea he knows his editors will hate, his colleagues will hate and his readers will hate, the ghost of Orwell will never urge caution.

Simultaneously opposing fascism, communism and colonialism required nerve, and although this isn't a political collection in the main there's one political essay on the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, which I've never seen reprinted, that shows him at his anti-totalitarian best and speaking to our time.

Whenever you protest today about the willingness of modern liberals to excuse, go along with or turn a blind eye to the Islamist far right, you are told, in outraged tones, by the BBC, Prospect and all the rest of them that it's only a handful of Trotskyists around the Socialist Workers Party and Livingstone who have flipped across the political spectrum. Liberal politicians and intellectuals – such as themselves – remain as virtuous as always, and to say otherwise is a gross calumny. Much the same was said in the thirties and forties, only then the apologists for the liberal mainstream declared that treacheries of the age were the sole responsibility of the Communist Party.

Orwell would have none of that. When the Poles rose up on the orders of the exiled government in London to throw the Germans out and stop the Soviet Union taking the city he protested 'against the mean and cowardly attitude' of the liberal press, which urged that they should be left to die.

What I am concerned with is the attitude of the British intelligentsia, who cannot raise between them one single voice to question what they believe to be Russian policy, no matter what turn it takes, and in this case have had the unheard-of meanness to hint that our bombers ought not to be sent to the aid of our comrades fighting in Warsaw. The enormous majority of left-wingers who swallow the policy put out by the News Chronicle, etc., know no more about Poland than I do. All they know is that the Russians object to the London Government and have set up a rival organization, and so far as they are concerned that settles the matter. If tomorrow Stalin were to drop the Committee of Liberation and recognize the London Government, the whole British intelligentsia would flock after him like a troop of parrots. Their attitude towards Russian foreign policy is not 'Is this policy right or wrong?' but 'This is Russian policy: how can we make it appear right?' And this attitude is defended, if at all, solely on grounds of power.

Today, you don't here a single voice raised in protest about what al Qaeda is doing to Iraq or against the Muslim Brotherhood anywhere in the world. If anything the duplicity is worse than during Stalinism. Then, leftish intellectuals could pretend to themselves that the Soviet Union was progressive and at some level shared their values. By contrast, Islamism makes no secret of its contempt for the left and for liberalism or its appropriation of Nazi conspiracy theory. From the Iranian revolution onwards, the first task of radical Islam has been to persecute Muslim socialists, liberals and freethinkers.

History is not repeating itself therefore, but taking a turn for the worse. Nevertheless, Orwell's parting message from 1944 to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals remains as true then as now.

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.'

Notes
[1] In 1981, Gore Vidal began a celebrated attack on New York Jews who went along with homophobic and misogynist conservatives with 'George Orwell remarks somewhere that you cannot say anything for or against the Jews without getting into trouble.' 'What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed,' I felt when I read it, but have never been able to find the quote. (Vidal's 'George Orwell remarks somewhere' was not a help.) However, writing in Tribune in 1944, Orwell said: 'There are two journalistic activities that will always bring you a come-back. One is to attack the Catholics and the other is to defend the Jews,' which is also true and well put, but not a sentiment likely to appeal to Mr Vidal.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator

After leaving the Burmese police, George Orwell held few regular jobs in his too short life. He wanted to serve in uniform when his country went to war; with his health precluding that, he worked for the Indian service of the BBC until he became literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly edited somewhat notionally by Aneurin Bevan. And from December 1943 to April 1947 he wrote a column for the paper, "As I Please".

Although everything he ever wrote has been collected in 20 sumptuous volumes, and although he is one of the few journalists who can sustain such a fate (contemplating our own work, some of us would find that a simply horrific thought), he was by no means a consistent writer, and dedicated Orwellians will know how uneven his journalism was. During the war he also wrote a "London Letter" for Partisan Review, the American political-literary magazine, and some of those letters were tired or silly. He observes in a Tribune column that "I was usually wrong when it was possible to be wrong" earlier in the war, and his insistence in PR that Churchill would soon be swept from power by the irresistible Sir Stafford Cripps is indeed a warning to all of us against confident prognostication in print.

But the Tribune columns were among his best things, personal, quirky, salty. He will write about a sixpenny rose bush he once planted, or about "good bad books". He snorts at the rudeness of shopkeepers and he worries about the appalling loneliness of modern urban life. He complains that the traditional English names of flowers are being replaced by pretentious Latin names, he tells little jokes. He shows, when he spreads himself, that he was one of the best literary critics of his age.

What makes the book eerie as well as readable is how often Orwell might be writing a newspaper column today. At one moment he broods about wafer- thin fashion models, with "the overbred, exhausted, even decadent style of beauty that now seems to be striven after", the very thing the Daily Mail has been lamenting lately, at another he warns against the rising tide of xenophobia caused by an influx of Polish workers — 60 years ago! He even complains about ubiquitous music blaring from loudspeakers, though he didn’t know the half of it, and was spared the complete horror of canned music in shops, pubs and restaurants today.

But Orwell did not ignore the great world and its conflicts: some of his best political obiter dicta are here, along with the wrong-headed assertions ("laissez-faire capitalism is passing away"). While Orwell never became a conservative pessimist, and was sharp about the revival of such pessimism (or the refusal to believe that human society can be fundamentally improved, linking T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Muggeridge and Evelyn Waugh a little harshly with Marshal Pétain in this respect), he concedes that "plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying 'I told you so' than the optimist".

When he joined Tribune he knew that he would be writing against the grain of the paper, or at least of its horrible fellow-travelling public. Often he is at odds with readers who are incensed by any criticism of Stalin at the time of the Warsaw Rising in 1944, or of the Red Army the following year when Tribune — to its great credit — published reports of gang rape by the Russian soldiers "liberating" Vienna. And he warns the left that

dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that you can make yourself the bootlicking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

Over and again one sees the themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four taking shape. Orwell looks back on the Spanish civil war and the insane lies that were told about it, wondering whether truthful history could ever be written again. He writes about Yevgeny Zamyatin’s fantasy novel We, which influenced Brave New World as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four. He dissects language, dismayed by the way that more and more people write and speak in an inherently totalitarian style.

And of course, with his faults, there is that unusually high respect for truth and justice which Waugh admired in him, and which distinguished him from so many other writers then (or now). Orwell is appalled by "this whole business of taking vengeance on traitors and captured enemies", and disgusted by the humiliation of women collaborators in France in 1944.

Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in this attractively presented and well edited collection. The index is useless, but Paul Anderson’s notes are not only copious but informative, the work of someone who knows the subject and the period, although he is apparently unaware that Hermann Rauschning’s I-knew-Hitler revelations have been much discredited.

To this day Orwell’s unpopularity on the sectarian left is notorious and perplexing, but maybe there is a clue here. He was not the crypto-reactionary he is painted by some, but he writes very significantly about Anatole France, who was "not a socialist but a radical", nowadays the rarer of the two, and whose radicalism can be seen in "his passion for liberty and intellectual honesty". Could Orwell more obviously be writing about himself?

Francis Beckett, Guardian

How many newspaper columnists will be worth disinterring in 60 years' time? How many will have anything of contemporary relevance to say? How many will even throw light on the way we live in 2006?

In 1943 George Orwell told Tribune readers not to use insulting nicknames for people of different races. "The word 'native' is flung about all over the place. 'Negro' is habitually printed with a small n, a thing most Negroes resent. One's information about these matters needs to be kept up to date. I have recently been going through the proofs of a reprinted book of mine, cutting out the word 'Chinaman' wherever it appears and substituting 'Chinese'. Even 'Mohamedan' is now beginning to be resented; one should say 'Muslim' ... After all, we ourselves do not actually like being called 'Limeys'." The next time some complacent oaf guffaws about being "politically incorrect", show him the passage.

The best writers know the value of small details. A tailor hailed the easing of wartime rationing restrictions which allowed trousers with turnups once again as "the return of the freedoms we are fighting for". If this was the freedom we were fighting for, wrote Orwell, he would be inclined to support the axis powers. Turnups collected dust, and their only benefit was the discovery of the odd forgotten sixpence inside them.

Tribune may be the only publication to have outlived by several decades the purpose for which it was founded. It was started in January 1937 to support Stafford Cripps's Unity Campaign for a united front between Labour, the communists and the Labour left. The Unity Campaign imploded two months later, but Tribune still appears every week. It has found different causes to front, from the Bevanites during and after the second world war to the Bennites in the 1980s.

The year Tribune began, Orwell was in Spain, fighting alongside the POUM (the non-communists on the left) and discovering that a united front on the left was a hideous fraud. The POUM were relentlessly hunted down by the communists, who called them "Trotskyist fascists".

He started writing occasionally for Tribune in 1940. In late 1943, Tribune, after four editors, two radical changes of editorial direction and three life-threatening financial crises, began to publish his weekly column called "As I Please". This book is a collection of all the columns he produced between 1943 and 1947, when he stopped writing it, partly to finish his last book, 1984, and partly because of the tuberculosis which was to kill him in 1950. It comes with a lucid and thoughtful account of Tribune and Orwell by former Tribune editor Paul Anderson.

It displays some of Orwell's obsessions. His anti-communism, which gained him no friends on the left in 1943, is uncompromising, and no reader of this book could be surprised at the revelation that he supplied British Intelligence with a list of those he suspected of being undercover communists.

But it shows Orwell to have been the best sort of newspaper columnist. He writes clearly and simply on subjects on which he had something new and interesting to say, rather than just pumping out a line with self-righteous gusto, which is the curse of our less discursive age. He plays fair. If he attacks someone, he attacks what they actually said, and quotes it, rather than using the privilege of a columnist to distort their view, a courtesy which many of today's columnists have forgotten. There is nothing easier than to ascribe a foolish view to your opponent, and then show it to be foolish.

D. J. Taylor, Independent on Sunday

Books of the year feature

The year’s work in Orwell studies produced two terrific books: Peter Davison’s The Lost Orwell (Timewell Press), which brings together all the material discovered since his monumental 20-volume George Orwell: The Complete Works (1998), and Orwell in Tribune (Politico’s), edited by the magazine’s former editor Paul Anderson. My favourite homegrown novel was Will Self’s The Book of Dave (Viking), a London dystopia whose roots curl all the way back to Richard Jeffferies.

D. J. Taylor, Sunday Times

Fifty years ago, the use of the word hack to describe anyone who made a living as a journalist was practically actionable: Winston Churchill's son Randolph once took damages from a Sunday newspaper on exactly these grounds. But some of the greatest writers in the English language have been harassed penny-a-liners, goaded to the desk by the rap of a creditor's boots on the cheerless stair. Thackeray was a hack. Evelyn Waugh was a hack. Dickens began his career as a parliamentary reporter.

Orwell, of course, was the hack to end all hacks. Except at the very end of his life, when he decamped to the island of Jura to work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, scarcely a week of his adult life went by without three or four deadlines and a working routine smothered under books.

The wonder of the pieces collected in Orwell in Tribune (Politico's £19.99), his mid-1940s contributions to the left-wing literary weekly, is the conditions in which they written: composed straight onto the typewriter, in most cases, to the accompaniment of buzz-bombs and falling masonry. Like Thackeray. Orwell used journalism to rehearse ideas that would later underpin his fiction. Several of the essays and “As I Please” columns included here have a direct bearing on Nineteen Eighty-Four: reflections on artificial languages and realpolitik euphemisms such as "friendly fire", in which can be glimpsed the origins of Newspeak, or "In Front of Your Nose", written in 1946 but clearly foreshadowing the concept of Doublethink. 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.

If not quite in the Orwell category of neurotic freelancers, Graham Greene ran him pretty close: a biographer once calculated that in the 1930s he reviewed more than 1,000 books, an average of two a week and a feat of drudgery well-nigh unparalleled in British letters. Naturally, much of Articles of Faith (Signal £12.99), lan Thomson's collection of Greene's work for the Catholic weekly The Tablet, is aimed at the religious market: Greene's doubts, Greene's views on Pope John Paul II, Greene wondering whether the Roman Curia doesn't remind him of the Politburo and so on. Its incidental effect, though, is to remind you what a brilliant critic of fiction Greene was, capable of using the most mundane novel to pronounce some general truth about how-books get written.

With WF Deedes, the hackery was an end in itself: the books came later, so late, in fact, that the former Daily Telegraph editor's hard-cover debut had to wait until his 84th year. Words and Deedes (Macmillan £25) — a terrible title, but never mind — goes back three quarters of a century to its author's installation as cub reporter on the famously right-wing Morning Post. As for the contents, readers of his autobiography Dear Bill, or the account of his war-corresponding days in Abyssinia with Evelyn Waugh. may note a slight air of repetition. Deedes does tend to return, like some ancient homing pigeon, to such topics as the abdication of Edward VIII, the Tory leadership stitch-up of 1963 and his admiration for the people of Tyneside. On the other hand, his trademark shrewdness is always bracing.

David Remnick (who edits The New Yorker) would, you fancy, take a Churchillian line on being called a hack. As his pieces in Reporting (Picador £ 18.99) show, he specialises in something that British magazines rarely have the space, budget or inclination to print — the long, sedulous and immensely well-researched profile, in which the reader sometimes feels that a bit too much time has been spent in the subject's company and that there are advantages in the impressionist snapshot.

Al Gore, Don DeLillo, Solzhenitsyn, Lennox Lewis (the sports pieces are especially good) come and go, the touch always unobtrusive, the cumulative effect unexpectedly pointed. Having read the account of Gore in action could see exactly why so many Americans opted for George WBush. As for the climate in which this quartet of exemplars operates, the wider point remains: some of the finest things in literature have been written against time, with the baby yelling in the next room, the gas bill staring up from the study desk, and the printer's boy — or his modem electronic equivalent — kicking his heels in the hall.

Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post

The wheels of the George Orwell industry never stop turning. It is like witnessing a kind of literary perpetual motion. Whether it is another critical assessment, a new biography or just a stray newspaper article – usually a guess at what Orwell's view of this or that would have been – there's always something being published about him.

There's an obvious danger of over-stocking the market and creating Orwell fatigue. But Paul Anderson's Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings 1943-47, is indisputably the most important and valuable addition to the Orwellian library since DJ Taylor's exemplary life of the author came out three years ago. Buy, beg or borrow it. Whatever you do, read it now. It is the essential Orwell, and his good sense and wisdom glitters on every page.

The book gathers together all the pieces Orwell wrote for Tribune, which were previously scattered through Ian Angus's four-volumes of the writer's essays, journalism and letters and the last 11 of Peter Davison's meticulous and indispensable 20-volume Complete Works.
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 – hardly necessary, after all – and his eclectic, capacious mind.
It demonstrates Orwell's virtuousness; how strongly he cared for, and about, the things which motivated him, his deep passion for the English language and England.

A newspaper column usually has the longevity of fish on the slab; it rots quickly. Orwell's columns have survived more than 60 years because of his immense readability and the relevance of his arguments.

The strength of his unadorned, stripped down prose makes the writing appear effortless. The subject matter, although naturally of his time, contains themes that overlap into our own. This healthy combination makes it seem as if the presses have just rolled on his thoughts and the ink hasn't quite dried.

The apt title of Orwell's weekly column was “As I Please”. He was able to pass judgment on whatever took his fancy politically, socially or culturally. "It is difficult to think of anyone before or since who could write about so many different things," observes Anderson. Among the subjects Orwell tackled were Hitler and the war ("I note the surprise with which many people seem to discover that war is not crime"), fascism, the birthrate, correspondence courses, juries, the atomic bomb, science, religion, rationing, housing and – in one of the best essays he ever wrote – Books v cigarettes ("It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them.")

Orwell does get misty-eyed about England. But his ideas and convictions aren't misty. Each is firmly expressed and definite. On Russia, he writes: "The avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else..."

On the BBC, he says: "What most people appear to demand is simply a better version of the programmes they are getting already. They want better music, funnier jokes, more intelligent discussions, more truthful news." And on propaganda, he is unequivocal: "The whole argument that one mustn't speak plainly because it 'plays into the hands of' this or that sinister influence is dishonest... "

A kind heart made him a lousy literary editor insofar as he found it impossible to turn down articles, however bad. When his successor opened his desk, he found it jammed with heaps of unpublishable material. Having experienced rejection on so many occasions himself, Orwell didn't want to inflict it on anyone else. He went as far as paying for copy that he knew was unusable. But the philanthropic gene in Orwell is yet another reason to like him.

He was an intensely hard-working man. The cover photograph of the book – taken in 1945 in Orwell's Canonbury Square flat – reveals a long, gaunt and grey face, which is slightly bowed over his typewriter. You can see how much writing and the pursuit of truth drained out of him over many wearing years. About this time, he complained of being "smothered in journalism". He pressed on regardless of worsening ill health not just to pay the bills (Animal Farm did that for him) but because he thought it crucial to be heard. Well, George, we're still
listening.

Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

Of all radical and left-wing publications in Britain, daily newspapers, weekly magazines or monthly journals, I doubt if any of them can seriously match the extraordinary 70-year history of the weekly Tribune – which, God knows how, still rattles on.

In all that time it has contained pretty well everything that socialists and most radicals wanted to read, admire, even worship, while of course in the same breath friendly critics would never hesitate to castigate the paper, with careful fury, for failing to match their still higher objectives of a left-wing ‘New Jerusalem’.

At the other end of the political spectrum Tribune tended to be regarded with the derision and odium reserved for what was seen as revolutionary naivete or even worse, downright political teachery.

Yet despite these predictable political reactions most reasoned judges would always salute the journal’s remarkable ability to attract an astonishing range of exceptionally talented writers – most of them paid in buttons.

No writer stands taller in that special salon than George Orwell – who indeed worked for Tribune while he was also writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four.

Orwell started writing his regular weekly column in the paper “As I Please” on December 3 1943 and continued, with a short break through till April 1947.

During the whole of that time he was also busily working on his two masterpieces. That point alone surely establishes the case about the special nature of the Tribune-Orwell relationship.
Yet it is still only part of a remarkable story which this book brings to life as perhaps no other, so far, has been able to do. 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.

A word then about the birth years of this unique weekly agitational journal. The paper emerged during the critical years of the 1930s – a period when Hitler and Mussolini stalked Europe, when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists invaded the streets of London and other major British cities with racialist incitement and when Orwell went off to Spain to fight with the International Brigade against Franco.

It was also the period when Neville Chamberlain had taken over from Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister, and the Labour Party and trade unions were divided and confused about how to tackle the growing crisis of poverty and unemployment at home and fascism across the channel.

That is when Tribune was born – January 1 1937. It was financed by two Labour MPs – the Christian socialist Sir Stafford Cripps, probably the country’s most renowned (and wealthiest) radical barrister who was effectively leader of the Labour left and MP for Bristol, and George Strauss, a wealthy businessman who was Labour MP for Lambeth.

Together they provided £18,000 (nearly a £1 million in current money) as a launch fund for Tribune along with an additional annual subsidy of £5,000 from Cripps. Around them were the names of virtually all the most prominent socialists of the time – Aneurin Bevan (who became editor of Tribune and a close friend of Orwell) and his wife Jennie Lee, Victor Gollancz, Harold Laski, a young Michael Foot, Raymond Postgate etc.

It was this band of left-wing intellectuals that attracted George Orwell on his return from the Spanish Civil war. He began writing articles for the paper in 1939 on the outbreak of World War II but didn’t begin his regular column until 1943 by which time Nye Bevan had made him literary editor of Tribune.

An inspired appointment for which Orwell was given the then majestic salary of £500 a year – effectively paid for by Cripps. Orwell always fought for the opportunity to write as he chose which is why he was never at ease working for the BBC before he joined Tribune where Nye Bevan encouraged him to write with complete independence by providing him a platform – his “As I Please”column.

It would be invidious and even misleading to snatch, at random, an example from the 80 columns that Orwell wrote before his last in April 1947 when he left Tribune, less than three years before he died, to concentrate on his historic novels.

The Orwell columns covered everything – music, literature, poetry, wartime behaviour, social mannerisms, the weather, the absurdity of the press (especially its ownership) – indeed the entire human comedy (as Balzac might have suggested) and, of course politics.

If I have to select one – just for the hell of it – then I will, querulously, pick No 78 published on March 21 1947. Why? Because I sense that he was already well into his remarkable Nineteen Eighty Four by then and I can sense a foretaste of what is to come in Column No 78. I will say no more; just read it – and, of course, the rest as well.

Michael Foot, Observer

Books of the year feature

Since Tribune may be reticent in blowing its own trumpet and since the Observer has strangely suggested that George Orwell was adept at blowing his own, all such contradictions may be swept away for ever by the new comprehensive volume, Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 (Politico's £19.99). It 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.

Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

This volume of George Orwell's writings for Tribune marks the seventieth anniversary of the left-wing weekly. Orwell left the BBC (describing it as "halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum") in 1943, becoming Tribune's literary editor and beginning his “As I Please” column that would run until 1947. In an introduction that renders the nuances of political rivalries on the Left positively pellucid, Paul Anderson, himself an erstwhile Tribune editor, explains that Stafford Cripps launched the paper in 1937 to support his popular front campaign: by Orwell's time, the nominal editorship had passed to Aneurin Bevan.

Tribune editors and readers often disagreed with Orwell (letters attacked him both for being too lowbrow and too highbrow, obsessed with politics and indifferent to them), but Orwell, who knew already that a society which permitted differences of opinion was the only kind worth living in, found this only civilized. Assembling pieces spread across six-volumes of Peter Davison's Complete Works. 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.

Orwell's biographer, Bernard Crick, counted 232 topics in the eighty “As I Please”s. Typically combining subjects such as historiography and turned-up trouser-ends. the columns have a quirky, commonplace-book feel. Their author comes across as temperate, meticulous, preachy, humorous, occasionally (as when considering the use of "infer" for "imply") splenetic: a decent. Dickens-reading, trivia-appreciating, hobby-horse-riding, very English old buffer. When he wrote the last of them, Orwell was forty-four.

Gordon Bowker, Observer

Leaving the BBC to join the left-wing Tribune as literary editor in 1943 was a turning point for George Orwell. At the BBC, he was employed as Eric Blair; at Tribune as the pseudonymous Orwell. In his famous “As I Please” column, his subjects ranged from the Warsaw uprising and doodlebugs to Basic English and the solar topi, allowing readers to tap into a brilliant if occasionally rambling mind. These and other essays, now collected together by Paul Anderson, show how from 1943 he was accumulating the ideas that underlie Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Here, he floats the ideas of mutually hostile power blocs permanently at war, the rewriting of history and the impossibility of private life under totalitarianism, significant ingredients of his terrifying last novel. 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.

These essays show Orwell switching easily from the sublime to the ridiculous – from anti-Semitism to what makes beer go flat. Not only was he engrossed in the political and social issues of his day (the execution of war criminals, postwar juvenile delinquency), but he could indulge his fascination with popular culture (women's magazines, American horror comics). It's clear that he considered judging high and low culture equally rendered aesthetic language meaningless.

His column also reveals his passions (nature, literature, politics, good food, 'good bad books' and English customs) and pet hates (snobbery, racial prejudice and the degradation of language). On the language question, he advocates simplification of expression and the coining of fresh metaphors. One of his most memorable coinages is 'cold war', first used in the Manchester Evening News in 1943, a fact still undiscovered by Anderson or the OED.

In an age when 'opinion pieces' crowd our daily papers, it is timely to have this anthology of work by one of the masters of the genre whose declared ambition was to turn political writing into an art. But he also excelled at the close-focused essay, writing stylishly about Woolworth's roses, the common toad, washing up – small matters that could set his pen racing. This collection contains some amusing ironies. In March 1944, just 18 months before Animal Farm made him rich, and five years before Nineteen Eighty-Four made him even richer, he wrote that only trivial books make big money.

However, the book also torpedoes several myths – that he was anti-Semitic (not by 1943 he wasn't), that he rarely referred to Hitler and the Nazis (though his many references here go unmentioned in the index) and that he was sadistic (he opposed taking revenge on the Germans and loathed the execution of Nazis and their collaborators). This is an excellent book to steam through or dip into as the inclination takes one.

Martin Rowson, Tribune

As an utterly unworthy subsequent tenant (albeit on a time-share basis) of George Orwell's old Tribune column “As I Please”, I read his second lead for March 3 1944 with some interest. It's typical of the tone of most of his articles, now gathered together for the first time in Orwell in Tribune: wide-ranging, often conversational, frequently not directly political and always rather strangely playful.

On this occasion, he notes with pleasure the reappearance of the Cornhill Magazine after a four-year absence, presumably as a consequence of the Second World War, and uses this as a starting point to make the following observation:

There are some interesting notes by the editor on the earlier history of the Cornhill.

One fact that these bring out is the size and wealth of the Victorian reading public, and the vast sums earned by literary men in those days.... It paid Trollope £2,000 for a serial – he had demanded £3,000 – and commissioned another from George Eliot at £10,000.

Except for the tiny few that manage to crash into the film world, these sums would be quite unthinkable nowadays.... A novel nowadays is considered to have done very well if it brings its author £500 – a sum a lawyer can earn in a single day.

I noticed this particular entry because earlier, in his masterful and highly informative introduction, Paul Anderson had written that Orwell was hired as literary editor by Tribune (then only seven years old, now pushing 70) on an annual income of £500.

Even factoring in inflation, this is still infinitely more than I get paid to write the same column. This is literally true, as I get nothing. Nor, I suspect, even when he was Tribune's editor, has Anderson made a significant wedge from this magazine, the sole reward for his labours often being nothing more than the floods of outraged letters his own occasional columns incite. (Anderson's privations get worse – all the royalties from this book are going to Tribune.)

Now you might just think I'm moaning here – you might think the same about Orwell – but several things are worth remembering. First, 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.

There are few duller things in life than anthologies of most columnists' stale old columns, and I can only think of three other professional journalists – James Cameron, Myles na Gopaleen and Hunter S. Thompson – whose old copy manages, like Orwell's, to achieve the apotheosis from hackery into literature.

The next thing you need to remember is that Tribune has always been a financial basket case. Again, Anderson's introduction guides the reader through Tribune's early years, as an organ for Sir Stafford Cripps, a front for the Communist Party in its popular front phase, then under the nominal editorship of Aneurin Bevan. All the time – and ever since – the paper tiptoed and teetered on the very brink of bankruptcy.

Perversely, that apparent weakness is Tribune's greatest strength, because it means that no one has ever written a word for Tribune that they didn't want to write, because it's not for the money.

This point is gloriously proven in this collection. Orwell writes about anything and everything that comes into his head. If you think of him merely as a sickly “prophet” of gloomy dystopia, or a savage satirist, or a chronicler of human misery and degradation, then his “As I Please” pieces are a marvellous correction.

As I've said, they're surprisingly playful, but also bitchy, sarcastic, wise, appalled, venomous and often very funny, whether he's writing about the rudeness of GIs or shopkeepers, or the apparently infinite possible definitions of the word "fascist" as used across the political spectrum, as he ranges from the ugliness of contemporary politicians to notes on curing hangovers in dogs, from how much he spends, comparatively, on books and tobacco to “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”.

The final thing, which you don't really need reminding of, is that Orwell is one of Tribune's three patron saints, along with Nye Bevan and Michael Foot (who years ago pulled off the predictable trick of achieving pre-mortem secular canonisation). As far as I'm aware, his stapler has now been auctioned off to raise funds for Tribune more times than there are claimed to be pieces of the True Cross.

This is as it should be, for while his association with Tribune has certainly enhanced this magazine, it, in its turn, enhanced Orwell by giving him space to write about just what he pleased. Buy this book for all the right reasons – it helps Tribune and it's a good read. Meanwhile, it must be said that Paul Anderson deserves at least beatification for collecting this trove together.

Sean French, Independent

George Orwell's schoolfriend, Cyril Connolly, wrote that the duty of a writer was to produce a masterpiece. He famously identified one of the main obstacles as "the pram in the hall". TS Eliot said the worst job for a creative writer was journalism, especially literary journalism. At the end of the 1930s, Orwell had been planning a masterpiece, an "epic saga" to be called "The Quick and the Dead".

He was prevented from writing it by almost every imaginable obstacle. Above all, there was the war, with its upheavals and privations, though he only played a marginal military role as Sergeant Blair of the Home Guard. He was married to Eileen and duly acquired the pram in the hall, in the form of their adopted son, Richard. He was already suffering from the disabling respiratory illness that would kill him, while continuing to smoke a heroic quantity of cigarettes. At the same time he was producing an awesome quantity of journalism, but he defied Eliot's injunction by writing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: not just masterpieces but cultural icons, on a level with Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver's Travels.

And the journalism was great as well. This revelatory collection shows how the different sides of Orwell's imagination interacted. Shortly after Orwell finished Animal Farm, he accepted the job as literary editor and columnist on the left-wing weekly, Tribune. His first “As I Please” column appeared on 3 December 1943. He continued until February 1945, when he took an eight-month break, during which he visited the continent as a reporter for the Observer (he met Hemingway in Paris).

Orwell enthusiasts will already have read much of this book in other collections. 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.

But above all, there were these columns. From week to week, he wrote on anything that came into his head: the unpopularity of American soldiers in Britain, the absurdity of bomb shelters, the ugliness of the photographs in the New Year honours list. He attacks anti-Semitism and trouser turn-ups, English railways and the BBC Brains Trust. He asks readers to identify quotations. He laments the replacement of railings in London squares.

Week by week, column by column, his inspirations take shape. He develops the ideas about euphemistic, pretentious and hackneyed prose that would result in his classic essay "Politics and the English Language" (in Cyril Connolly's Horizon, not Tribune). 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.

For a writer so apparently personal, it is noteworthy what isn't there. He is fascinated by the minutiae of literary history, but there is no mention of movies, theatre or classical music. And a reading of the book alongside one of the biographies shows how selectively he draws on his life. In one of his most famous columns, he mounts a semi-defence of the German flying bombs, admitting that his first reaction when he heard the droning was to hope it fell on someone else. But he doesn't mention that just a few days earlier one such bomb had destroyed his own home (almost taking with it the unique typescript of Animal Farm).

During his 1945 break, the war ended and two important things happened in his life. After being turned down by various publishers (including TS Eliot), Animal Farm was published and achieved instant success. And his wife, Eileen, suddenly died. When Orwell began writing for Tribune again, something had been released. The columns had been good enough before. But now, one after another, come "Books v Cigarettes", "Decline of the English Murder", "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad", "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray", "Confessions of a Book Reviewer". These are some of the greatest essays in the English language, and they seem all the more startling when succeeded by a mundane moan about the postwar shortage of clocks.

On 4 April 1947, Orwell wrote about the possibility of growing tobacco in England (the problem was not the sun, he said implausibly, but "some deficiency in the soil") and signed off for good. Three years later he was dead, aged 46. For a number of years, I also wrote a column impudently titled "“As I Please”" (for the New Statesman). Reading this book made me feel once more that I was, in the words of Wayne, not worthy.

Robert McCrum, blogs.guardian.co.uk

Now that the book blog has arrived, it's time to take a longer view. Whom, for instance, might we call upon as contributors, from the English canon?

Not Shakespeare (too busy), not Milton (too grand), probably not Pope (too classical). But Daniel Defoe was a great journalist as well as a pioneering novelist - and he'd be blogging for certain. Dr Johnson, I think, would not, though he'd be a natural (he'd want to get paid for it).

After that, it gets easier: Coleridge (yes), (Keats, no) Dickens (yes), Austen (no - couldn't cope with the technology), Thackeray (yes), Trollope (yes - once he'd done his fiction for the day). In fact almost any Victorian you care to think of - they would all have been enthusiastic bloggers.

Thinking of the last century, there's one name who jumps out as the supreme blogger before his time. George Orwell's 'As I Please' column in the Tribune (1943-45) is a bravura display of casual essay writing on anything from the common toad to why beer goes flat to good bad novels to Soviet Russian foreign policy. He did this column every fortnight (when he wasn't writing Animal Farm) and it has recently been collected in a single volume (Politico's, edited by Paul Anderson). The book is a joy to dip into - and a good reminder that though the form of what we write can change, the essence remains the same.

Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

Retrospectively, all that people remember are the novels, but one of the more troublesome aspects of a novelist’s life is the sheer hassle of physically earning enough money to buy yourself time to write.

Unless huge financial success comes along, a novelist has to duck and dive between journalistic or other projects to create that space.

You might think that when he was about to complete a novel that would become as world famous as Animal Farm, George Orwell might have felt comfortable enough to devote himself full time to fiction, but the reality was different.

Although Animal Farm was finished in March 1944, the manuscript was rejected by successive British publishers who felt that a thinly veiled attack on Stalin was politically inappropriate at a time when Churchill and Stalin presented a united front in appearing to stride together towards victory. Orwell had to wait until two days after the war against Japan ended before the book finally appeared.

For much of the intervening period he supported himself as the slightly erratic literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune. However, it was not the annual salary of £500 that drew him to Tribune in 1943, because in taking the job he was leaving a far better paid post as a BBC talks producer.

Orwell felt that his time in the BBC was wasted and this was a chance to work for a leftwing publication with political views broadly in line with his own. He was given a level of editorial freedom denied him in the BBC, would have more free time to finish Animal Farm and would write a weekly column entitled “As I Please”, which would be an informed, if idiosyncratic, forum for Orwell’s myriad interests and observations.

A poet once complained to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon: ‘‘You accepted my poem, but never published it.” ‘‘That’s correct,” Connolly countered, ‘‘your poem was good enough to accept, it just wasn’t good enough to publish.”

As literary editor of Tribune, Orwell took a similar tack. With memories of how difficult it was to survive as a freelance writer, his chaotic desk was crammed with submissions that he hadn’t the heart to return, despite the fact they were not good enough to publish.

He tried to revive the English short story form, but struggled in the face of ghastly submissions. Despite a psychical inability to answer letters, he did manage to create a stable of reviewers such as Arthur Koestler, Stevie Smith, Alex Comfort and Stephen Spender.

However, his time at Tribune (which was interrupted by a spell as a war correspondent, then continued until he was too ill to work) is noted primarily for his opinion pieces. These already exist in print, scattered among the mammoth 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davidson, but Paul Anderson brings them together for the first time here.

Written quickly to a deadline, they make for fascinating and lively reading. At one level they were meant to provide some light relief to the polemic and analysis in the rest of the magazine, and therefore range from a humorous comparison between his own expenditure on tobacco and books to a piece about spring entitled “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”.

”The Sporting Spirit” examines the ill-feeling stirred during a supposedly morale boosting visit to England by the Dynamo Moscow football team, which insisted on regarding their match against Arsenal as a full international by proxy; 1945 being perhaps the last time Arsenal lined up with a team of 11 Englishmen. The columns remain highly political at heart, especially in warning against the unthinking consensus among many left-wing writers that Stalin could do no wrong.

Orwell had already suffered for his criticism of the Soviet regime, with Victor Gollancz rejecting, sight unseen, Homage to Catalonia, and the New Statesman spiking his accounts of the Spanish civil war.

It was possibly the New Statesman he had in mind when writing in his column in 1944 (when much of the British left unquestioningly accepted Soviet propaganda about the Warsaw uprising): ‘‘A message to left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally . . . dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to normal decency. Once a whore always a whore.”

In 1944, that was brave, unpopular writing by a genuine socialist unafraid to think for himself.

This book is littered with examples of how to write superb original pieces on the run, as it vividly captures the intellectual landscape of Britain in the years between 1943 and 1947. To misquote Pound, his journalism is news that stays news.

COLUMNIST OF THE CENTURY

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 22 September 2006


No British writer of the past 100 years has a greater reputation as a journalist than George Orwell. His three great books of reportage, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia — although not perhaps as ubiquitous as his two best known novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four — are the only examples of British journalism from the 1930s now in print in popular editions. Every other journalist I meet, from foreign correspondents to sub-editors, says that Orwell was a major inspiration.

Yet Orwell’s journalism, or at rather his everyday journalism, is not as widely read as it deserves to be. Unless you have worked your way through the final ten volumes of Peter Davison’s magisterial 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, published in the late 1990s, you are unlikely to have taken in more than a tiny sample of the journalistic writing Orwell did in the last 20 years of his life.

Everything is in Davison, of course, but it is spread through more than 5,000 pages, interspersed with letters and fascinating ephemera. There was a generous selection of Orwell’s journalism published in four volumes in the 1960s as Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Ian Angus and Orwell’s widow Sonia, but Sonia kept out a lot because it was too political for her tastes. In the 1980s, the New Statesman produced a slim pamphlet of Orwell’s contributions to its pages and the writer W. J. West edited two volumes of Orwell’s broadcast scripts for the BBC in 1941-43. And a couple of years ago came a collection of his reviews and reportage in the Observer.

Until this week, however, there was a glaring gap. The routine journalism on which Orwell’s reputation is primarily based is not his work for the BBC or the Observer, let alone his half-dozen reviews for the New Statesman, whose editor, Kingsley Martin, he hated. Rather it is his columns for Tribune, 80 of which appeared under the rubric “As I Please” between 1943 and 1947. And now, thanks to Politico’s Publishing, they are all available in a single volume, Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings, with a foreword by Michael Foot and an introduction by me.

I first realised they would make a fantastic book 20 years ago, when I started working as Tribune’s reviews editor. I was already a big Orwell fan — one of the main reasons I went for the job was that Orwell did it from 1943 to 1945 — and my office at the paper contained the bound volumes of back issues. I spent hours poring over the yellowing pages, admiring Orwell’s direct demotic writing style and his extraordinary range of subject matter.

But simply to transcribe all the columns would have taken money Tribune didn’t have or time I didn’t have, and I never got further than dreaming. Ten years ago, after the New Statesman sacked me, I suddenly found myself with time on my hands and even got a proposal together — but then another job turned up. It was only last year I decided to try to get a publisher. Chris McLaughlin, the Tribune editor, mentioned the project to Politico’s, and all of a sudden I had a contract and a deadline.

I underestimated how much time the book would take even with accurate optical character recognition software: I spent the heatwave in July proofreading rather than sitting by a pool. But now it’s out, all the effort feels worth it.

Despite the diversity of their subject matter, Orwell’s Tribune columns form a single coherent body of work. In the words of the critic D. J. Taylor in his recent Orwell biography: “One of the most engaging features of the column, read sequentially, is the sense of dialogue, points taken up, conceded or refuted, continuity rather than a trail of pronouncements which the reader could take or leave as he or she chose.”

The columns are also still remarkably relevant. If there is a single theme that runs all the way through them, it is that the left needs a more nuanced conception of politics. And this emphasis on the things the left habitually ignored — books, sport, popular racism, the sensationalism of the popular press, the slipperiness of political language, religious intolerance — rather than the programmatic core of 1940s democratic socialism or the week-by-week flow of events, makes Orwell’s Tribune columns more accessible than anything written by his contemporaries.

I’m also hoping that the book will make a bit of cash for Tribune. The paper holds copyright on the Orwell it published but has never made a penny from it, giving away permissions to republish whenever asked. Now, with a bit of luck, it should at long last benefit materially from its greatest contribution to the world of letters.

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings, compiled and introduced by Paul Anderson with a foreword by Michael Foot, is published by Politico’s at £19.99. You can buy it here.