George Orwell: Seeing Things As They Are (Harvill Secker)

Harvill Secker, £25

Reviewer: Alan Taylor

Not the least of George Orwell's virtues is that he gave hackery a good name. Writing about another George, namely Gissing, Orwell remarked that the theme of his best novels could be summed up in three words: "not enough money". In New Grub Street, Gissing's greatest novel, money - or rather the lack of it - is what causes most distress. Its two principle characters - the idealist novelist Reardon and the cynical journalist Milvain - are conditioned by their contrasting attitudes to making a living. Together, one might argue, they add up to the kind of writer Orwell was, writing novels he expected few people to read and journalism to keep a roof over his head. Unlike Milvain, however, Orwell wanted to raise the pieces he wrote for a variety of magazines to an art form which, at his best, for example in his As I Please column for Tribune, he achieved.

In his introduction to Seeing Things As They Are, Peter Davison does not explain how he made his selection. Here, therefore, you will not find classic essays such as In Defence Of English Cooking, A Nice Cup Of Tea, The Moon Under Water - his paean to the English pub - The Art Of Donald McGill, Tolstoy and Shakespeare and many more. On the other hand, there is an opportunity to become reacquainted with Orwell's defence of PG Wodehouse, his review of Mein Kampf, Books v. Cigarettes, and his thoughts on detective stories, overindulgence at Christmas and why so many foreign words are appropriated by us.

By 'us' I mean the British. When Orwell referred to us, however, he invariably meant the English. In his mind, England and Britain were synonymous and the constituent parts of these islands rarely entered his orbit. It was England that would be invaded and perhaps conquered by Germany, and Englishmen who carried the fight to Franco and Mussolini and Hitler. Like Charles Dickens and HG Wells, Ethel M Dell and Enoch Powell, Orwell was quintessentially English, hence his animadversions on tea and beer, saucy seaside postcards and the class system.

In common with his public school-educated contemporaries, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, he had a dislike, even loathing, of Scots, which may be traced to his unhappy formative years and his time in Burma when he encountered brutal empire builders from these parts. In this volume, however, the only mention of Scotland is towards its end when, in 1947, he considered the rise of Scottish nationalism.

Back then, it was less a movement than a stirring of malcontents. Having watched fascism grow in Spain, Italy and Germany, Orwell was acutely aware that from little acorns spreading oak trees sometimes grow. Scotland, he acknowledged, might have a case against England. In the past it had been plundered and misused. But whether this was still true was debatable.

What was not, as far as Orwell was concerned, was that Scotland was "almost an occupied country": "You have an English or Anglicised upper-class, and a Scottish working-class which speaks with a markedly different accent, or even, part of the time, in a different language." Typically, though, Orwell sought to demonise by association, referring - without offering a shred of evidence - in his final paragraph to "the small but violent separatist movements which exist within our island", the Communist Manifesto, the Nazis and Hitler.

It is the kind of reprehensible behaviour to which, at the end of this tumultuous year, we have become accustomed. When not invoking the Fuhrer in the same sentence as Alex Salmond, anti-nationalist commentators went out of their way to mention Nigel Farage or Robert Mugabe in the hope that mud, however ineptly thrown, will stick. Had Orwell been around he'd have been in his element. He was never afraid of a fight and was always eager to stick his oar in.

For instance, he berated those such as 'Cassandra', the Daily Mirror columnist, for unjustly denouncing PG Wodehouse - another public school scion - as a Nazi collaborator, after he made a few ill-advised radio broadcasts at the request of the Nazis. But Orwell's defence of his fellow writer - that he was stupid rather than culpable - was, at the time it was written, based less on proven fact than an interpretation of Wodehouse's fiction. As a successful and relatively rich man, "Wodehouse," remarked Orwell, "made an ideal whipping-boy." That seems to me bluster. No doubt Wodehouse allowed himself to be used but ignorance is a poor defence.

The Second World War dominates these pages. In June 1940, Orwell told readers of Time And Tide that "it is almost certain that England will be invaded within the next few days or weeks". To counter the German threat, he recommended arming the populace with hand grenades, shotguns and radios. Place-names, meanwhile, should be painted out, including "the brewers' names on public houses". A few months earlier, he reviewed Mein Kampf, from which its author got off rather lightly. "I should like to put on record," wrote Orwell priggishly, "that I have never been able to dislike Hitler." Having said that, he added, he would certainly try to kill him if he came within reach. As for the book itself, it was clumsily written by a man with a joyless mind. He made no mention of "the Jewish peril" or anti-semitism.

Orwell, as Davison intimates, was a man in a hurry who abominated time-wasting. When not reading he was writing, which did not pay at all well. Some of the best and most enduring pieces in this book concern the business of being a writer and the literary world. While flaying JB Priestley ("It is not that he writes ineptly, or is lumpishly dull... it is simply that his writing does not touch the level at which memorable fiction begins"), Stephen Spender and WH Auden ("your fashionable pansies"), he praises Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer for its "fine passages", insists everyone should get hold of a copy of Robert Tressell's The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and admires Thomas Hardy's neglected play, The Dynasts.

Writing well matters and you can only aspire to that if you're honest and sincere. Orwell's antipathy to cant is transparent on every page. He is not a flashy writer but his sentences ring true. Like a Roman road, they're straight and well-defined. And they have the momentum of a bestseller.

For Orwell, reading good literature is essential to becoming a good writer. As a means of making a living, however, it leaves much to be desired. Reviewing a book on authorship, he remarks that if a writer made as much as the average country doctor he would be doing very well. Even in the 1930s, it seems, the literary novel was on its uppers. "The novel is visibly deteriorating," he wrote in 1936, "and it would deteriorate much faster if most novelists had any idea who reads their books."

The outlook was depressing in the extreme. Utter tripe was praised as if it were the work of a genius. No one seemed to know the difference between good and bad books. Orwell predicted a future for it that was as grim as that depicted in his fiction. All of which simply goes to show how hit and miss he could be when it came to foreseeing the future.