Books: Guerrilla

SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT (200 pp.]—George Orwell — Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

George Orwell had the gift of honesty as other writers have the gift of the satin phrase. His literary mark was his own: he sniped at all kinds of intellectual cant, loved personal freedom with an irascible passion, felt himself tied to ordinary people by strong memories of plebeian discomfort, and wrote in a style as bare and sharp as a winter tree.

Before he died early this year, Orwell was working on a collection of his essays. Shooting an Elephant, the portion he completed, is a trim little book of autobiographical reminiscence, literary criticism and incidental journalism. It has all the customary Orwell virtues: humor, moderation, intelligence. Though one of his minor works, it reinforces the impression left by Nineteen Eighty-Four—that Orwell was one of the few genuinely important writers of these times.

For the Natives. The best piece in the book is the title essay, a slender recollection of an incident during Orwell’s days as a British constable in Burma. Orwell had been called out to shoot a tame elephant gone rogue. He did not really want to shoot the beast, but behind him stood a crowd of Burmans ready to jeer if the white man faltered. Since “a sahib has got to act like a sahib,” Orwell pumped his bullets in the animal’s hide, reflecting “that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys . . . For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

Two other sketches round out Orwell’s autobiographical reminiscences. A Hanging is a stark glimpse of a Burmese criminal who, as he walks to the gallows, steps aside to avoid a puddle. This instinctive human reaction overwhelms Orwell with “the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” How the Poor Die is a severely underwritten memoir of Orwell’s stay (as a pneumonia patient) in a Paris ward in the ’20s, which leads him to the wry conclusion that “it’s better to die violently and not too old.”

For the Fanatics. Orwell’s purely literary essays are bound by a common thread of dislike for those excesses of thought, even the excesses of such greats as Tolstoy and Swift, which fringe on totalitarian fanaticism. In two brilliant essays he shows how scorn and lack of pity led Swift to portray the ideal Houyhnhnm society as a soulless mechanism, and how Tolstoy’s harsh morality blinded him to the truth of Shakespeare’s tragedies.*

After fanaticism, Orwell attacks intellectual humbug. In Politics and the English Language he excoriates the light-fingered journalists, heavy-handed politicos and potato-mouthed bureaucrats who, through carelessness or snobbery, are maiming the English language. In The Prevention of Literature he baits, hooks and dries the doublethink Communist intellectuals. Unlike most American criticism, which is written in a weird graduate school code, Orwell’s literary essays are directed, without condescension or pedantry, to the non-expert who reads for pleasure.

The last pieces in Shooting an Elephant are short articles that Orwell wrote for the socialist London Tribune. Slight but charming, they flit about a variety of minor subjects, taking a poke at the notion that sports breed good will, pitying the chores of a regular book reviewer, urging Orwell’s fellow socialists to let go and enjoy the spring, speculating on why English murders are not as exciting as they used to be.

All his life, Orwell was a guerrilla fighter against “smelly little orthodoxies.” What he stood for is best expressed in one of his essays: “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life . . .” More than most of his fellows, Orwell lived, worked and died by this creed.

* The 75-year-old Tolstoy particularly objected to King Lear and would have preferred the play to have had a happy ending (such as 17th-Century Poetaster Nahum Tate gave it when he rewrote Act V to kill off the wicked daughters and put Cordelia on the throne to Lear’s vast and righteous satisfaction). Tolstoy also objected to Shakespeare’s exuberant Fools, who frequently give sound advice to their stumbling betters. Orwell’s suspicion: gaunt, old, unhappy Leo Tolstoy may have sensed his own remarkable resemblance to gaunt, old, unhappy Lear.