Content area
Full Text
ICON AND ICONOCLAST
John Newsinger: Orwell's Politics. (New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. 178. $21.95.)
Christopher Hitchens: Why Orwell Matters. (New York: Basic Books, 2002. Pp. 211. $24.00.)
George Orwell once said, "No decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity" ("As I Please"). He might well have added, had he been a bit more impish, that neither does posterity care tuppence for the opinion of decent people. Lady Fame is fickle. She distributes her favors willy-nilly, corrupting young and old alike with her wiles, never concerning herself with merit or desert. But, perhaps not ironically, Orwell also consistently maintained that "there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion" ("Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool"). Reputations are built on the shifting sands of posterity. And though it appears that George Orwell tried to keep his pact against posterity-he left instructions that no biography of him be written and did what he could to keep his private life private-his writings have survived nonetheless and, for better or worse, they have built for him a firm reputation in politics and literature.
Indeed, Orwell remains a popular writer. Longevity, however, is no assurance of integrity. Since his death in 1950, shortly after the publication of his most celebrated work, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell has been the object of constant attention from all quarters, from Hollywood to the Sunday papers to college curricula. As 1984 approached, and then long after that fateful year, the writer's reputation grew exponentially. He was the focus of a deluge of criticism and scholarship, including Bernard Crick's lengthy biography in 1981. And in this process of reputation building following his death, Orwell was made and re-made into the image and likeness of his admirers and detractors. The upshot of this "ambiguous afterlife" of Orwell, as John Rodden (George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation, 1989) has painstakingly analyzed, is a much-conflicted legacy.
While Orwell's reputation as a literary figure may be waning some, as John Newsinger's and Christopher Hitchens's books attest, there is still a lot of life left in the Orwell corpus. In fact as both...