The Politics of Literary Reputation.

I HAVE ALWAYS enjoyed reading George Orwell, except for his fiction, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. That book is a great idea, weakly executed, and the popular misunderstanding of it-the assumption that it was a prediction-gave it its popularity. It has sold in the tens of millions, with sales peaking in early 1984 and, Big Brother having failed to materialize, trickling off afterward. (Though one contributor to Horoscope Magazine noted respectfully that Orwell's prophetic track record surpassed those of many professional astrologers.

John Rodden's The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of "ST George" Orwell examines the highbrow department of the Orwell cult, which has had its own fatuities. Intellectuals of diverse persuasions have wrestled bitterly over which side Orwell would be onwhich smelly little orthodoxy he would subscribe to-if he were alive today. The parties to these disputes have shown all the acumen of those Victorian readers who used to write letters to Sherlock Holmes, soliciting his assistance.

Mr. Rodden takes it all much too seriously. To make matters worse, he writes sentences that don't suggest he's alive to Orwell's syntactical vigor "We will return to these conceptual points as we relate the anomalies of Orwell's present-day educational institutionalization and their implications for canonand reputation-formation to the development of his curricular reputation." I'm quoting out of context, but only because I would spare you reading the context too. Four hundred pages of this stuff is a lot of context.

Anyway, Mr. Rodden informs us that Orwell has been variously celebrated as rebel, common man, prophet, and saint. He provides quotations to back this up, and footnotes to back the quotations up. The book is divided into chapters, the chapters into sections, and one of the sections into subsections. Further details upon request.

It's ironic that a writer as lively as Orwell should be honored with so pedantic a piece of work as this. I have a theory that we owe the enormous volume of sludgy prose in our time to the growth of the public sector, especially the subsidized academy. Freed from commercial pressures, scholars nowadays don't have to worry about being readable.

Orwell did. Though a socialist, he wrote for the market, and he knew how to keep the customer satisfied.

Jimmy Cannon once wrote of Howard Cosell: "His real name is Howard Cohen and he wears a toupee and he says he tells it like it is." Orwell's real name was Eric Blair, but he made a reputation for telling it like it was. You can argue that the persona enabled him to be honest "the most honest writer of our time," V.S. Pritchett called "Orwell" in 1949, the year before Blair died. Or does it mean anything to call a fiction "honest"?

"Orwell" is a fiction. Blair created him as Conan Doyle created Holmes, as Raymond Chandler created Philip Marlowe, He's an attitude, not a real human being, and we enjoy seeing the attitude apply itself to real subjects. The attitude may or may not have been Blair's; it doesn't matter. "Orwell" is still interesting, like Holmes and Marlowe, who also confront mundane realities such as we might encounter, and make them romantic by the sheer power of attitude itself

Committed to socialism, atheism, and other progressive pieties, Orwell creates complications for himself by (for instance) attacking his fellow socialists, by espousing patriotism, or by offhandedly remarking that he has never been able to dislike Hitler. He brings the attitude of the romantic loner into a new realm, politics, where the party line usually prevails. His commitments don't involve personal loyalties or preclude human spontaneities. His aesthetic and moral reactions are in tension with his principles. He has no investments he can't shed, no shame about his prejudices; let the chips fall where they may. His blunt sentences, graceful without obvious mannerism, deliver casual shocks to the reader's expectations.

"To accept an orthodoxy," he remarks, "is always to inherit unresolved contradictions." The passage that follows this observation proceeds to debunk Labour Party orthodoxy for espousing incompatible things: dismantling the British Empire while raising the British worker's living standard.

Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't prognosticate. It imagines a world in which people have been conditioned to accept naked contradictions-War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength-because language has been reduced to a tool of power, rendered useless as a medium of critical intelligence. Orwell doesn't present this as a future event on a timetable, but as the concentrated expression of something he sees around him, as described in his most famous essay, "Politics and the English Language." He projects a world in which political power has diminished the sense of irony to the vanishing point: O'Brien triumphantly explains this to Winston Smith, and adds that within a century nobody will even be able to comprehend the explanation. A world without irony is the supreme creation of the master ironist, Orwell, whose deadpan horror Hitchcock might have admired. The book's weakness is that the characters are puppets to begin with, not human enough to be much dehumanized.

"Orwell" himself is a magnetic character. Something about his detachment inspires the kind of hero-worship among intellectuals that the aforementioned detectives inspire in other breeds of readers. He's a tough guy, but at bottom a good guy-"a good man," Lionel Trilling reverently called him. Everyone tries to claim him, as if to invoke his authoritative approval, though it usually means belittling a lot of things he actually says. Orwell-the character, the attitude-never died, but he ceased production when Blair expired, so he can't talk back to his claimants. Mr. Rodden documents all the claims exhaustively, and at least has the good sense not to try to adjudicate them.

Orwell's reputation has had its ups, but no serious downs. The passe controversies he was engaged in become more unreal with time, so that his virtuous posture in itself increasingly seems to put him on the side of tbe angels, regardless of the specific merits of the cases.

If Blair had lived on (he'd be 86 now), new cases might have gotten Orwell into trouble. As things fell out, Orwell stands frozen on the side of the angels, permanently tantalizing speculation.