Matthew's Reviews > My Country Right or Left: 1940-1943

If Volume 1 was a portrait of the writer as a young socialist, then part two is when George Orwell goes to war.

It is a little difficult to tell, since the four volumes are misleadingly referred to as Orwell’s collected non-fiction whilst admitting to some editing and omission in the introduction. However, what appears to come across is that Orwell has almost a monomania in his writing about whatever issue is most current in his mind.

At the time of the Spanish Civil War, then this preoccupied him. At this time it is the war. If it was simply a matter of depending on his public works, we could assume that this is all that he found paid work in writing about. However his private letters and diaries reflect the same concerns and preoccupations.

There are perhaps two themes that run through much of Orwell’s writing at this time. The first is patriotism. For Orwell, the fault of many on the Left at this time is their failure to realise the importance of patriotism.

He gives his famous account of his country in The Lion and the Unicorn, including descriptions repeated by conservatives who failed to spot some of the irony in the original text. Orwell is critical and exasperated by his country, but ultimately he will always identify with it, and he deplores the left who oppose it.

This can lead to an occasional narrow-mindedness to other countries and his views on India can seem patronising and contemptuous to us now, though he was better than many of his contemporaries in his attitudes towards the colonies.

There is in fact a streak of conservatism in Orwell’s vision of socialism – he can support his country, the war, the occupation of India and leaving the capitalists in place in a socialist society, albeit as managers of a planned economy rather than free entrepreneurs. Orwell had seen the deadly effects of communism at first hand during the Spanish Civil War and was understandably more moderate in his wish to apply socialism to Britain.

The other running theme is pacificism. Orwell has little time for the pacifists and dismisses them as ‘objectively pro-Fascist’. He believes that their attitudes are naïve and will only allow fascism to triumph for a long time. He is also not too keen on the defeatism that he detects in much of the Left at the time.

There is sadly little time for Orwell’s essays in this volume, and we get many matter-of-fact descriptions of the war in Orwell’s letters to the Partisan Review and his own wartime diary (which takes up about a fifth of this volume).

These provide an interesting insight into what it is like being caught up in the war. Major events can get very little description and minor events can occupy a lot of space, showing that what seems important to us now may not have seemed so then.

Orwell’s predictions about the war are not always correct, less so than he himself sometimes seems to think. His belief that socialism would be necessary to win the war also proved to be mistaken, though it is the nature of socialists to always seek to be optimistic about the triumph of their beliefs.

There is always a danger for anybody who lives by trying to predict the future – economists, political analysts, meteorologists, astrologists etc. If they are wrong when they predict the future, then we may well question how accurate their analysis of contemporary events is. Of course Orwell was willing to admit that his predictions could be wrong, and less complacent than many.

Of course, Orwell can take a break from the war and discuss other matters. There is always time for literature reviews, even if Orwell felt they were irrelevant at this time. A few essays are included in which he has time to criticise Tolstoy’s hostility to Shakespeare, be dismissive of Mark Twain’s courting of public opinion (which Orwell felt had prevented Twain from being as good a writer as he might be) and to analyse the good-bad works of Kipling and the silliness of Yates.

Overall, this is an interesting collection and gives the reader a feel for life during the war and a political age where leading figures really cared about significant political issues.