Mere magazine submissions trying to make their way in the world

George Orwell is, to me, a constantly fresh author, always full of surprises. From Looking Through Orwell by Andrew Ferguson. Ferguson offers an explanation for Orwell's freshness - he had multiple unreconciled dimensions to his personality.

It’s odd that a writer who respected transparency and clarity of language above all things should himself be so misunderstood by at least half his admirers. Among the scribbling classes, Orwell fans seem to me to be equally divided between right and left. To cite an easy illustration: Norman Podhoretz’s famous essay from 1983 claimed Orwell as an early incarnation of neoconservatism (a proto-neo!), owing to his staunch anti-communism and pro-Western sympathies. Podhoretz’s essay was furiously rebutted by the late Christopher Hitchens, who later went on to produce a book called Why Orwell Matters, citing his hero’s emphatic atheism, anti-imperialism, and socialism as evidence of his undying identity as a man of the left. Somebody here has got Orwell all wrong.

Maybe both sides do, or, just as likely, it may simply be a fool’s errand to try to cut a writer as expansive and free-ranging as Orwell into categories easily understood today, more than 60 years after his death. His friends didn’t quite get him either. “It was difficult to know what he felt about anything personal,” Malcolm Muggeridge wrote. In his helpful introduction to this volume, editor Peter Davison writes that “Orwell had within his deepest self an unresolved conflict that made him so contradictory a character.” He was frail and sickly for most of his life but possessed enormous physical courage and took pleasure in arduous outdoor labor. At his death, he was an internationally successful author but had never abandoned his belief that he was a miserable failure. He took every opportunity to slag Christianity but consecrated both of his marriages in a church, made sure to baptize his adopted son, and provided for his burial in an Anglican graveyard accompanied by the Book of Common Prayer. He was a professional controversialist and attention-getter who hated to have a fuss made over him by friends.

I liked this observation from the essay.

The letters remind us that works we have come to understand as masterpieces of literary journalism were, once upon a time, mere magazine submissions trying to make their way in the world, blocked at most every turn by the stupidity, tastelessness, and present-mindedness that all editors, except mine, habitually succumb to. “It doesn’t matter about the Tolstoy article,” Orwell wrote to an American editor who temporized about publishing the towering essay “Tolstoy, Lear, and the Fool.” He asks the editor to pass the manuscript on to his American agents. “It’s possible they might be able to do something with it, though as they failed with another…article (one on Swift), perhaps this one is no good for the American market either.” That “(one on Swift)” was “Politics vs. Literature,” a staple of essay collections for two generations and an undoubted masterpiece.