Sixty years ago, this obituary appeared in the London
press:
Eric
Arthur Blair died suddenly in London on 21 January 1950 at the
age of forty-six, succumbing to the tuberculosis that
had plagued him for the last three years of his life.
Blair was, of course, better known by his pen name, George
Orwell. He was one of the most indispensable twentieth-century writers. Only
Koestler understood the dangers of totalitarian ideology as well. But Orwell
was a champion of clarity and high standards in writing, too, and he remains
one of our finest critics. The following is a description of Dickens in an essay he
wrote on the great Victorian, but it is as good a self-description as we ever got:
"...When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing,
one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page....in the
case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's
photographs, though it resembles
it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high
colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph,
no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something,
but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is
generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free
intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies
which are now contending for our souls."
Orwell's long gone, but the smelly little orthodoxies are still with us.
