Patriotism and Poultry: George Orwell’s ‘Diaries’
Christopher Hitchens’s introduction to George Orwell’s “Diaries,” among the last things he wrote before his death, is meant as a tribute to one of the writers he most admired, but it can also be taken as a warning. “Read with care, these diaries . . . can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmitted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.” Read with care? What is Hitchens trying to tell us with that phrase? A few sentences later we have: “This diary is not by any means a ‘straight’ guide or a trove of clues and cross-references.” About the creative process that went into constructing one of the novels, Hitchens says Orwell “gives us little or no insight.” Most tellingly, he refers to the entries as “meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings.” Read with care, Hitchens’s introduction alerts Orwell devotees that they should not expect the same pleasures from this book that they get from other of his writings.
This collection contains all 11 of the diaries available to us, along with entries from two of Orwell’s notebooks. Additional diaries may exist. Peter Davison, who has scrupulously prepared these documents and was the lead editor of Orwell’s 20-volume “Complete Works,” says that “it is as certain as things can be that a 12th, and possibly a 13th diary” — seized by authorities during the Spanish Civil War — “are secreted away in the N.K.V.D. Archive in Moscow.” Orwell may also have kept a journal at the start of his professional life in the 1920s, when he was an imperial official in Burma, but that is almost certainly lost.
Much of the material here can be found in other sources. “Hop-Picking Diary,” describing Orwell’s experiences as a migrant farm laborer in 1931, appeared in the popular four-volume anthology “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.” The diary from a journey to grimy northern England in the mid-’30s, with its notes on slag heaps, dirt trains, blackened houses and half-naked miners kneeling at the coal face, was worked up into Orwell’s book “The Road to Wigan Pier”; the entry that starts “In the early morning the mill girls clumping down the cobbled street, all in clogs, make a curiously formidable sound” is polished for the book into the attention-grabbing opening line, “The first sound in the mornings was the clumping of the mill-girls’ clogs down the cobbled street.”
The most substantive of Orwell’s diaries are two that he kept during the early years of World War II, against a backdrop of momentous events like the Dunkirk retreat, the fall of France and the London blitz (Orwell’s apartment building was damaged by a German bomb). Orwell was serving in the Home Guard and working for the BBC, all the while complaining to himself about the disorganization and inefficiencies he had to endure. Yet he describes a people determined to keep to their daily routines despite the German attacks. Almost metaphorically, Orwell’s barber continued shaving his customers even in the middle of the air raids, leading a disconcerted Orwell to muse: “One day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody’s face off.” Mainly, Londoners tried to avoid any talk of current events: when he went to his pub one evening, Orwell found the radio silent, because, as the owner told him, “they’ve got the piano playing in the other bar, and they won’t turn it off just for the news.” The common-man side of Orwell was encouraged by his countrymen’s get-on-with-it imperturbability, the puritanical side of him exasperated.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/books/review/george-orwells-diaries.html?pagewanted=all
