Orwell Avenue, a Street We Visit in Our Mind (Or So We’d Like to Think)

While recently performing deep-dish research on that alleged movement to rename a portion of Houston’s Hillcroft Avenue after Mahatma Gandhi—we’d be surprised if we hear of this proposal again, but we’re usually wrong about these things—we had occasion to re-read Orwell’s “Reflections on Gandhi.” Orwell viewed Gandhi with some ambivalence: While he admired his political skills and shared his hatred of the Raj—has there been another Westerner who wrote with such a cold eye of the soul rot of imperialism?—he was baldly contemptuous of the old boy’s “otherworldliness”—his sandals (Orwell really, really disliked such unmanly footwear), his vegetarianism, his pacifism, and, mostly, his attachment to “non-attachment” (we know folks who would say Orwell misunderstood the concept; we know others who would say he understood it too well). We had forgotten this choice bit, regarding Gandhi’s, and others’, pacifism:

Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: "What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?" I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the "you're another" type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer, Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which "would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's violence." After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

In other words, Orwell recognized that Gandhi seemed to have the courage of his convictions, and was willing to see others die for them, even if those particular convictions were, to Orwell’s mind, abhorrent.

Orwell was writing in 1949, just two years after Indian independence and the outbreak of the still-simmering Hindu-Muslim hostilities, and in the end was moved to voice his admiration for Gandhi’s particular genius:

One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the misguided effort to rename part of a well-traveled Houston thoroughfare after Gandhi, but we're feeling lethargic today, and Orwell is always timely.

Two-Egg Man

As a non-card carrying member of the Orwell cult (a loose-knit, lower-case affiliation whose numbers include everyone from Thomas Pynchon down to, we're proud to say, our 19 year old), we were excited---interested is probably a better word---when an associate informed us last summer that the Orwell Prize Web site was to begin running entries from the great man's personal diary, each one posted online 70 years to the day after he first committed it to the long-outdated medium of paper. Since then we have peeked in occasionally at the Orwell Diaries to see what the old boy was up to back in 19-and-38, and we can report that his daily not-for-publication jottings fully reveal him to be the proto-hippie/survivalist/localist (who semi-famously despised proto-hippies) we had always pegged him for. They also confirm what is evident from even a cursory scan of The Road to Wigan Pier: that Orwell, the author who wrestled with the Big Issues of the 20th Century with greater honesty and equanimity than any of his English-speaking contemporaries, had more than a touch of the accountant in him.

At present the diaries find him in Morocco, where he went to recuperate after being shot in the throat while lighting a cigarette during the Spanish Civil War, and there he seems to be consumed with the minutiae of nature, machinery and social and agricultural custom. He records in detail, and diagrams, the local farmers' method of irrigation. He estimates the price of wheat he has purchased in "English dollars." The entry for Nov. 14, 1938 (or "14.11.38") reads, in its entirety, "Planted out nasturtiums." The previous day he reported seeing a "dead dog by the roadside. I am afraid the same one that came asking for food a few days back ... "

But what Orwell really found worthy of recording was the output of the hen, or hens, on the farm outside of Marrakesh where he was billeted. His Dec. 1 entry read:

Two eggs.

The Nov. 30 entry read:

Two eggs.

On Nov. 29:

One egg.

Nov. 28:

Two eggs.

Nov. 27:

One egg.

Nov. 25:

Two eggs.

Etc.

As you might imagine, this dedicated daily accounting of egg production (while storm clouds massed over Europe, as we think we heard on a PBS documentary) has occasioned great hilarity among online commentators, whose postings are laced with the kind of late-modern snarkiness (some are too damn funny) we'd like to think Orwell would eschew, were he alive today and forced to take his smoke breaks on the sidewalk outside an office building.

Of course, these days Orwell probably would be diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive depressive and coaxed into a regimen of medication and daily exercise after consulting with his primary care physician. But his diary entries---while far from scintillating reading---show a man who while publicly confronting imperialism, totalitarianism and the rampant phoniness of the Modern World remained privately engaged with the everyday, the ordinary, the basic. A remarkably sane man, in other words.