A Visit to Mr. Orwell

Why do people visit authors’ graves? What do they expect to find? The writer George Orwell had no special connection to Sutton Courtenay. He died in London and was interred in that part of the English countryside almost by chance. Visitors making the pilgrimage from Oxford ten miles out to All Saint’s Church in the little town of Sutton Courtenay don’t seem to mind; most tend to arrive, as I did, with a simple attitude of appreciation, that near mystical sense of being in the physical proximity of a great writer and decent man. And yet, in Orwell’s case, the visit isn’t arbitrary at all—were he here, he would still have much to say.

Dead 60 years this January, Orwell is today claimed by all political stripes. The familiar phrases he’s bequeathed us—one adjective (Orwellian), one year (1984), at least a few nouns (Big Brother, doublespeak, Ministry of Love)—are culled entirely from his two dystopias, “1984” and “Animal Farm”. But though those books may have earned Orwell admission into the high school canon, they are perhaps least representative of his work overall. Orwell was against fascism, but his keen sense of social injustice also led him to support emphatically a kind of democratic socialism.

Much of Orwell’s writing is unabashedly “realistic,” from his autobiographical first novel about life as a tramp in “Down and Out in Paris in London”, to his exposé of coal mining conditions in The Road to Wigan Pier, to his wartime journalism. (“Keep the Apsidistra Flying” is one of my favorites, but the moment Gordon Comstock bellows “Money, money, all is money!” is about as subtle as a lead-gloved uppercut.) He introduced to literature the lower middle classes: the ones “boozed up” on tea, enamored of tinned foods, wavering between envy of the rich and affinity with the poor.

The social divisions he spoke of persist. Modern Britain may no longer be split along extreme class lines—though several have told me they nearly didn’t come to university for fear of “not being posh enough”—and it’s often held up as more “communitarian” than the U.S. But income inequality is at record highs; the Gini coefficient last year in Britain was 0.36, nearing America’s 0.408. “Poverty for working-age adults without dependent children is now at its highest level since the start of our comparable time series in 1961,” reports the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Few may be starving, but many are simply abiding.

And so Orwell remains startlingly relevant, because—not in spite of—his polemics. “All art is propaganda,” said Orwell unapologetically to critics who thought injecting “journalism” and statistics into Wigan Pier marred the book. As he explains in his essay “Inside the Whale,” that’s what the period called for. Surprising, thought-provoking ideas are spooned up richly everywhere in his prose. The “calculated hypocrisy” in “A Clergyman’s Daughter”, when Dorothy suggests that “perhaps it’s better—less selfish—to pretend one believes even when one doesn’t, than to say openly that one’s an unbeliever and perhaps help turn other people into unbelievers too.” The challenge to Marxist (and capitalist) convictions that machines should replace labor: “Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness.” The value of nationalism: Orwell loved England’s bad home-cooked food, its eccentric hobby culture, its aversion to French and German-style philosophical system building and yet (hence?) its solid moral core.

Turning left at a roundabout and walking down Abingdon Road toward Cullem, a thin strip of mountain stretches out behind a flat expanse of meadow; solid farmhouses rest behind name placards, and horses stand rigid in mock pastoral tableau. At a gas station, an elderly fellow with a broad pinkish face offered me a lift the last few miles. The inside of his van gave out a stove-warm heat; outside, meadows spun by greenly. “Just past Oxford, but a whole different world,” he nodded. “I try and get out here whenever I can.” He was, it emerged, a plumber driving far out of his route for part: “not the best gig, just trying to keep out of the recession.” An alright job though, he said. At last we found the vicarage on Tullis Close; just down the road was the church.

If you’ve missed the sheet of paper tacked on the door coming in, it takes a few minutes of wandering to find the gravesite. Orwell’s tomb is in the southeast corner of the churchyard, behind a line of yew trees, much more obscure than ex-prime minister H.H. Asquith’s table tomb some dozen meters behind the chancel. The simple headstone uses his birth name: “Here lies ERIC ARTHUR BLAIR. Born June 25, 1903. Died January 21, 1950.” People are still buried here, so many of the other graves have fresh cut flowers; in front of Orwell’s are only two large, thorny rose bushes, completely bare this time of year. No one else was around. I stayed for a while, then caught the next bus back, reading some columnist’s arcane policy chatter on the way home. I don’t remember what it said; it could have been right, or wrong. Anyway, it seemed to miss the point.

Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House currently studying abroad at the University of Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.