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Home , George Woodcock, The Moon Under Water

Orwell, Woodcock and St. George1

George Feaver Department of Political Science University of

Paper delivered at a Symposium on The Achievement of George Woodcock, Jointly sponsored by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, , BC. , May, 1994

* and George Woodcock share with me the same given name. I was named George because I was born on the Coronation Day of King George VI, and this meant a celebratory silver spoon, a news entry in the Hamilton Spectator, and in due course, a congratulatory letter from Buckingham Palace: the decision about `George' had been something of a foregone conclusion. At the time, English Canada was still keenly attached to a specifically British inheritance of institutional customs and practices. For me, this cultural given was reinforced when, my father dying young, mother took us to live with my grandfather at his house on Chestnut Avenue. A patriarchal figure with a Lord Kitchener moustache, he had come out from with the family between the Wars and lived his life in central Canada as if he had never left Sheffield. He was especially fond of the `His Master's Voice' wind-up gramophone, complete with the canine `Nipper' trademark on its large wooden horn, that he had brought to Canada, along with an extensive collection of mostly Great-War-era 78 rpm disks, that he played interminably: `Over There', `It's a Long Way to Tipperary', `Another Little Drink', `Land of Hope and Glory': Harry Lauder, Mary Lloyd, and (a concession to modernity) George Formbie.

Most afternoons, as punctually as Immanuel Kant out for a stroll---though I was not then sufficiently cosmopolitan to conjure up such `continental' literary embellishments---grandfather would walk over to the Waverley Hotel for a glass

1 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George of beer and a smoke on his pipe, his unwavering contribution to the perhaps futile project of making the Canadian `beer parlour' into something more like a proper English of the sort admired by George Orwell, and idealized in his short "The Moon Under Water".2 When George Woodcock's English parents, during the reign of George V, had conferred the same first name upon their newborn son at in 1912, it too would have fitted perfectly with the mainstream cultural mores of the day, these resting upon civic foundations more directly traceable than at the time of my own birth to a still-near Victorian age of liberal Anglo-Saxon Empire. It would have seemed, in the public view, a pleasing, even a patriotic gesture: naming the Woodcock child `George' was, well, so quintessentially English, sustaining the connection between this newborn `Canadian' and the predominantly British-derived society around him. In turn, the gesture linked him with the `mother country' whence his parents, like my own, had come, and to the bosom of which, with them, he would again very shortly repair. The world into which George Woodcock was born, though no one could see this in 1912, was to be very much the Great War world evoked by listening to my grandfather's phonograph disks, a cataclysmic world looming ahead, of horrific warfare to be followed by 1920s boom and bust, the Great Depression, World War Two and the Cold War beyond. For as Leonard Woolf was to put it succinctly in After the Deluge (1931): "In August 1914 something happened to the world. This happening lasted only four years, though the ripple of its events continues over the earth's surface."3 Eric Arthur Blair's parents elected to pass over the name `George' when naming their son, Eric, on the occasion of his own natal debut elsewhere in the British Empire nine years earlier still than George Woodcock's, in Bengal, in 1903. Righting this lack of parental initiative would entail the intervention of Eric Blair

2 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George himself, on the eve of publication of his potentially libellous Down and Out in Paris and London. For it was only then that the hitherto missing `George' was substituted, along with the name of an English river the young author knew and liked, the `Orwell', to create a fitting pseudonym for an aspiring social critic, novelist and English patriot. As Bernard Crick aptly suggests, "the whole name had a manly, English, indeed country-sounding, ring to it...".4 Thus, as all the world now knows, was `George Orwell' born, his newly adopted given name `George', like George Woodcock's and my own, that of England's patron saint, slayer of dragons, whose red and white St. George's Cross, entwined in the Union Jack, emblematizes the triumph of good over evil. * I am afraid I will have tried your patience with this digression. It has been intended, not as a species of self-advertisement, but as a reminder that George Woodcock's cultural and intellectual formation, like that of Orwell himself, was British. There is no reason for this simple fact to disappear, in the name of `Canadian content', into some memory hole. Remembering it does not detract in any way from the manner in which Woodcock's full life work might be said to constitute, as a poster advertising this Symposium suggests, "an important thread in the fabric of Canadian life". Nor does it deny the importance of his role as a founder not only of the seminal journal Canadian Literature, but arguably of `Canadian' literature itself, in which role, in a post-colonial age of growing sensitivity in such matters, Woodcock was to encourage in an exemplary fashion the study of aspects of Canadian cultural, as Peter Hughes has nicely expressed it, "without using either a blowtorch or an iron lung".5 The pertinent facts about George Woodcock's birth and upbringing, then, are that he was born in Canada of English parents on the eve of the Great War, that he was to return with them to England within months of his birth, and that for the long

3 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George and eventful period between then and his late-thirties, he would remain in Britain, returning to Canada only in the Spring of 1949, shortly before the London publication in June of that same year of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was during a party in Vancouver the following winter that Woodcock had news of the death at University College Hospital, London, near Orwell's favourite luncheon haunts in and around nearby Charlotte Street, of his friend and fellow . At the time of his death, on January 21, 1950, Orwell was only 46, Woodcock 37. They had only known one other for seven years; but they were important years in the life of both of them, when Woodcock was emerging as a young writer of promise, a , magazine editor of anarchist convictions, biographer of Godwin, and in the course of which, Orwell, a more established figure, would become, with the publication of at war's end and Nineteen Eighty-Four the year before his death, one of the most celebrated English authors this century. As perhaps befits two of the sort that one might call properly call public moralists, Orwell and Woodcock met in print before they met in person, an occasion prompted by a piece Orwell published in early in 1942, indicting pacificists, amongst others on the left and right, as appeasers of Britain's war effort, and citing as evidence "a copy of a little anti-war paper Now", edited, as it happened, by Woodcock. A spirited exchange ensued in which Woodcock gave as good as he got; and by later that year (Orwell had written to say "no malice either side, I hope") a fairly regular connection had begun to be established.6 Thereafter, both personally and as publicly-active intellectuals with The Freedom Defence Committee, founded in 1945 to foster the protection of civil rights in the British Empire, they settled into a steady authorial friendship. I say `authorial' because, though they doubtless grew spiritually close, there seems to have remained a certain British reticence on the part of each about

4 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George intruding unduly into their respective private worlds, a reticence reinforced on Orwell's part by a streak of old school rectitude, and on Woodcock's, by shyness. Though they certainly became good personal friends, what seems to have bound them, above all, was their passion for writing, not as some merely ornamental craft, a tool sufficient unto itself, but as a means with which to expose sham and duplicity and to display one's integrity: a kind of calling, in which one was duty- bound to strive always for the utmost clarity in prose, and having achieved it, to deploy it, in the cause of "Everyman, not Insider",7 in the often thankless task of speaking the truth.

...the thing that I saw in your face No power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst Shatters the crystal spirit. Woodcock was to take the closing words from this poem, "Looking Back on the Spanish War", written by Orwell in the year they met, as the title for his 1966 book The Crystal Spirit.8 In this still appealing study, Woodcock begins with a touching portrait of "The Man Remembered", undertaken to "exorcise the memory of the man" before he could approach with any degree of objectivity an analysis of his friend's actual writings themselves. But his chief concern is to explore as a fellow writer the themes of Orwell's fiction, the nature of his "revolutionary patriotism", as Woodcock terms it, and most importantly, his significance as a critic and stylist. In proceeding thus, he intended to honour to the letter Orwell's request that there be no memorial or biography of him. Besides, the appearance two years after his book of a collected four volume edition of Orwell's Essays, Journalism and Letters, seemed to Woodcock largely to take the place of a biography. One thus detects, in Woodcock's wondering aloud at 's "strange initiative" in going against Orwell's will and choosing

5 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

Bernard Crick---"a political scientist"---to write an `authorized' biography in the run-up to calendar 1984, an unmistakable, if gently-expressed, note of disapproval. These were questions, as he wrote pointedly in prefacing a reissue of The Crystal Spirit, "that puzzled the literary world and particularly those of its denizens who had known Orwell."9 Woodcock's strength of feeling on this issue is a direct reflection of his belief that, with Orwell, the writings count moreso than the life, or better still, the style is the man. It is in his aspiration to write "prose like a window pane", "crystalline prose", as Woodcock says in closing The Crystal Spirit, that there lies "perhaps the greatest and certainly the most durable achievement of a good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive."10 Here, as elsewhere in the book, the reader detects a certain autobiographical presence; and with a somewhat greater emphasis on the good than the angry, perhaps, as much might be said of the achievement of Woodcock himself. * Certainly Orwell was combative. In his autobiography, the philosopher A.J. Ayer was to write of Orwell that "from his talk as well as his writings I gained the impression that for all their philistinism he preferred the administrators and soldiers whom Kipling idealized to the ineffectual hypocrites of what he sometimes called `the pansy left'".11 A more directly political writer than Woodcock, Orwell was paradoxically a man of the left and a leading critic of left intellectuals, "The Left's Loyal Opposition". And his hit list of left offenders was more embracing than "the ineffectual hypocrites" alluded to by Freddy Ayer.

Readers of The Road to Wigan Pier will recollect the well-known passage where Orwell complains that "We have reached the stage where the very word `' calls up...a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards...Bolshevik

6 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George commissars (half gangster, half gramophone) or earnest ladies in sandals, shock- headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers."12 Earlier in the book, there occurs a variation on the same theme: "One sometimes gets the impression", Orwell opined, "that the very words `Socialism' and `' draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, `Nature cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." In laid-back Vancouver in 1994, his indictment might elicit an amused shrug of the shoulders, a passable description, say, of Denman Street on a late summer evening. But at the time Orwell wrote them, such passages as these perplexed many who felt one might expect that sort of thing from someone like Evelyn Waugh, but not from a declared friend of socialism; and George Woodcock was prominent amongst those who protested what they believed to be the irresponsibility of Orwell's rhetorical stereotyping. In his Orwell and the Left, Alex Zwerdling argues that Orwell's socialism at every stage "combined an extraordinary reluctance with an extraordinary persistence", and that in some fundamental way, he was in the end what Zwerdling calls "an unwilling socialist".13 His heart was in the cause, perhaps, but not his head (or the other way around). It is this, Zwerdling reasons, that makes Orwell's political ideas towards the close of his life "so heterodox and accounts for their odd tangle of conservative and radical strands."14 Certainly, on the larger, international view, the pessimism evidenced in Orwell's sickly later years, during which George Woodcock befriended him, entailed a view of human nature less hopeful than that he had adopted during the , and continued to hold until around the time of the appearance of The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941. By war's end, in an emergent age of totalitarian drift and `Cold War', he had come to feel that left intellectuals were the last to see that there are

7 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George evil men abroad whose lust for power no scheme of social and political reformation, however radical and conceptually well-intentioned, no utopian scheme of government, was ever likely to change. Convinced of this, he complained that "The thing which frightens me about the modern intelligentsia is their inability to see that human society must be based on common decency, whatever the political and economic forms may be."15 He thus appealed figuratively over the heads of fellow intellectuals in the fictional work of the years in which Woodcock knew him, undertaking to expose the manner in which the promise of ambitious doctrines so morally appealing to his generation of left political intellectuals were proving themselves in practice susceptible to totalitarian outcomes. And a somewhat similar concern entered into Woodcock's eventual abandonment as the 1940s wore on of as a political movement. What loomed ahead as a spreading and poisonous legacy from the first half-century to the second was a drab and menacing despotism pentrating men's minds and invading their souls. Political problems once regarded as amenable to resolution through reasoned acts of concerted common sense were now disturbingly perceived, in the concurring mid-century judgement of Isaiah Berlin, as "dislocations which the expert can set right", such that the day was not far off when political life might be rendered a form of manipulative technique construed exclusively in therapeutic terms, as if we were all "inmates of a prison or a reformatory or a school or a hospital."16 These beliefs Orwell advertised through his postwar prose to a large, transatlantic audience of ordinary, middle-class people, people upon whose offended sense of common decency rather than the discredited nostrums of politician saviours or left intellectuals, the future of liberty in a disagreeable and treacherous age depended. In Orwell's outlook in the years in which Woodcock knew him, then, one might almost detect a strain of anarchism of the universalist, moral sort.17

8 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

At home in England, his friend Julian Symons was of the opinion that, while Orwell remained a `socialist', his late-in-life point of view was one more sympathetic to "the personalities of unpractical Anarchists" than to "the slide-rule Socialists who made up the bulk of the British Parliamentary Labour Party."18 Earlier, like his anarchist friend George Woodcock, Orwell, though neither was ever strictly-speaking a party man, seems to have pinned his hopes on the Labour left, on figures like Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee and Michael Foot; but, according to Woodcock's retrospective tesimony, "after Labour came to power in 1945, and began to impose its programme of Crippsian austerity, a rather squalid foretaste of Nineteen Eighty-Four, his enthusiasm cooled perceptively and rapidly."19 Doubtless, whatever enthusiasm either of them had once had for Labour, it was gone by the final year of Orwell's life. "The left-wing movement", he wrote in a manuscript notebook in April, 1949, around the time George Woodcock left for Canada, "having to build itself up out of nothing...has to create a following by telling lies. For a left-wing party in power, its most serious antagonist is always its own past propaganda."20 In the controversy over Orwell's apparently wavering commitment to socialism that erupted in the course of calendar 1984, George Woodcock was to write in a reissue of The Crystal Spirit that "dissident and idiosyncratic as his socialism may have been, Orwell's claim to have remained a man of the Left must be respected, and the previsions regarding the dangers of totalitarian rule which he may share with intelligent conservatives should not be interpreted in such a way as to suggest that he would have sympathized with their vision of a revived free enterprise capitalist society. He was a free spirit, but he had made his choice of where to stand, and that was considerably left of center."21 Now, Woodcock's views on Orwell's intellectual pedigree had already been succinctly stated some years before, in the full title as well as the detailed

9 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George argument of his 1946 Politics article, "George Orwell: Nineteenth Century Liberal".22 There, Woodcock takes as his point of departure Orwell's admiring 1939 essay on Charles Dickens, arguing that what Orwell says of Dickens could well be said of Orwell himself, that he was a man "who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened...a man who is generously angry...a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."23 Orwell is explicit that the achievement of Dickens, with whom he clearly identifies his own radicalism, is that of "a nineteenth century liberal, a free intelligence", an example Orwell believed deserving of emulation in his own time, since, as he contended, "this age differs from those immediately preceeding it in that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking". Orwell's English doctrinal pedigree, then, as I think Woodcock rightly infers,24 draws directly upon that of an historically rich intellectual persona, the dissenting liberal left, a free intelligence derived historically from nineteenth century liberalism and situate in the politics of his own day halfway between what he once characterized as the "Strachey-Blimp extremes". There is an interesting passage near the close of this early Woodcock article on Orwell that warrants our closer attention. For in it, having suggested that Orwell is "essentially the iconoclast", the young anarchist critic goes on to say of him that:

"he seems to have no clear conception of a Socialist society, beyond a rather vague idea that brotherhood is the essential basis of Socialism. This is, indeed, an important fact which many Socialists seem to have forgotten, but it belongs less to an era of State Socialism than to the Liberalism of the past or the anarchism of the future. And indeed, while Orwell is by no means an anarchist---although he often joins them in attacking specific injustices---he is very much nearer to the old-style Liberal than to the corporate-state Socialists who at present lead the Labour Party. This distinguishes him from most of his contemporaries, for the Liberal is a rare survivor in the atomic age, and a Liberal like

10 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

Orwell who has developed the necessary vigour of attack is even less common. His old-fashioned pragmatism, his nineteenth-century radical honesty and frankness, his respect for such excellent bourgeois mottoes as `Fair Play' and `Don't kick a man when he's down', which have been too much vitiated by the sneers of Marxist amoralism, his consideration for the freedom of speech and writing, are all essentially Liberal virtues."25 But if, as Woodcock contends, Orwell's literary portrait of Dickens "might not inappropriately be applied to Orwell himself", a good and angry man whose `socialism' turns out to be a species of liberalism, much the same might be said of what is revealed about Woodcock's own socialist anarchism in this passage: its pragmatism, its radical honesty and frankness, respect for bourgeois common decency, and consideration for freedom of speech and writing. The main difference in the two, according to Woodcock's youthful assessment, appears to be that, while Orwell's `socialism' looked back, to nineteenth-century liberalism, his own looked forward, to anarchism. "From conversations with him", Woodcock thus assured his readers of Orwell's socialist intent in the mid-1940s, "I gather that he conceives...very vaguely, something more like a syndicalist federation than a real State in the traditional Socialist model."26 Clearly, in the case of both these public moralists, what is on offer is a moral, as much as a directly political, doctrine. Woodcock's self-taught `anarchism' might be caricatured, in its insistence on voluntarism and its defiance of the coercive sovereign state, as a sort of political variant of early twentieth-century English liberal pluralism, with a dash of the aesthetic post-Bloomsbury avant garde by way of , the of Waugh and further embellished by the addition of his sometimes slightly posturing recourse to the `foreign' philosophical authority of Tolstoy, Proudon and Kropotkin. There is a revealing passage in Woodcock's eventual study of Herbert Read, whom he regarded as his anarchist mentor, that while his liberal contemporaries believed in progress, including notions of material advancement they shared with Puritans and

11 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

Marxists, "Read's concept, though he was in no ordinary sense a religious believer and claimed no mystical experience, was that of the spiritual man and also that of the anarchist who looks, not forward to some Utopia at the end of progress, but round a curve of intention that will lead men out of corruption into simplicity."27 Elsewhere in the same book he says of Read's `anarchism' what might be said of Woodcock's as well, that "His anarchist writings in fact attract one and project most light when they are seen in the context of his entire achievement...then one sees his world-view complete, with the love of freedom its inspiring spirit."28 Already one can detect a not dissimilar intergrating spirit in the English-period Woodcock poems, with their evocation of "voices...to burn the myth of the state":

And here where my friends talk, and the green leaves spurt Quietly from waterlogged earth, and the dry leaves bud, I see a world may rise as golden as Blake Knew in his winged dreams, and the leaves of good Burst out on branches dead from winter's hurt. Then the lame may rise and the silent voices speak.29 And just as the word `socialism' has in the decades since Orwell's demise fallen on hard times,30 even though many remain drawn to the spirit of the ideals associated with it, so Woodcock would come eventually to complain of the inadequacy of the term `', which has been given a bad name in popular culture, to describe what he has all along envisioned as a better way forward in moral terms. "I think perhaps the word is unfortunate", he has recently acknowledged. "I tend now to talk more about dissolving of power, dissolution of power, of power, all this kind of thing, because the crucial thing is what you do with power. You can't destroy power, it's there: its there inherent in people themselves, and then they wish to do what is best for their

12 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George lives. You cannot destroy it. What you can do is diminish it, fragment it, to prevent it from taking over the whole of one's existence."31 So, if Orwell remained to the end firmly attached to `socialism' as the aim of his continuing moral quest, and if Woodcock has held fast to the idea of `anarchism' as the animating spirit of his own moral outlook, each would do so in a lineage of indigenous English socialism reflecting the radical philosophical outlook of leading lights of Victorian political theory, such as, for instance, John Stuart Mill. Had not Mill, in his Autobiography, described his brand of liberal radicalism in respect of the "ideal of ultimate improvement" as falling "decidedly under the general description of Socialists"?32 Like Mill, Orwell and Woodcock are in primary formation liberal English moralists who see the theoretical appeal of ideal socialism, and the actual flaws of contemporary free enterprise. Like Mill, each holds to the view that he was "too ignorant, either of what individual agency in its best form, or Socialism in its best form, can accomplish, to be qualified to decide which of the two will be the ultimate form of society." Like Mill, both believe that the question must be decided by one consideration: "which of the two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human liberty and spontaneity".33 And like Mill, they came politically to reject revolutionary `socialism', and revolutionary `anarchism', with increasing vigour as antithetical to liberty. The values, then, over which Bernard Crick waxes eloquent in his biography of Orwell as George Orwell's own---"liberty, fraternity, social justice, love of literature, love of plain-speaking and clear writing, belief in a natural moral decency among ordinary people, love of nature, enjoyment of human oddity, and patriotism"34---are the values of a British, non-Marxian

`socialist' tradition understood in this larger sense, values which, with perhaps one exception, might as readily appear on a list of the values most important to George Woodcock.

13 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

For, self-identified left libertarians alike, it was over the last of these `socialist' values listed by Crick, patriotism---the "My Country, Right or Left"35 with which Orwell would take his stand in the darkest days of World War Two-- -that Orwell and Woodcock would ultimately disagree. In his well-known essay "", composed in 1946, Orwell claimed that "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it." His aim had been "to make political writing into an art," and where he had failed, it had been "where I lacked a political purpose".36 As it happens, this essy is the source of the Orwell aside that "Good prose is like a window pane", an expression, and a sentiment, so much admired by George Woodcock in The Crystal Spirit. But in the sense in which Orwell reasons in this essay, Woodcock is not a political writer at all, his initial pacificism leading on an anarchism conceived as a personal code of conduct, posited on the premise that "The relations among men are moral in nature, and politics can never entirely embrace them", and so, entailing "The Rejection of Politics".37 Both libertarian socialists, then, Woodcock, agreeing with Orwell's wartime depiction of England as "A family with the wrong members in control",38 thought the point was to get rid of the controllers, whereas Orwell continued to believe, with William Blake, that what was needed was to work to change them,

Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant Land. * George Orwell did not live to see his socialist hopes realised. George

Woodcock, in further pursuit of his personal ideals, like other Diaspora Englishmen in the twilight of Empire, would abandon Britain to return to the country of his birth, drawn there by an ambition to achieve a real-life realization

14 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George of "the enormous myth" of Canada that had been fostered in his English childhood by his father's "nostalgic elegies", focused on his own brief but transfixing years in the Canadian West.39 And living close to nature on Canada's West Coast, Woodcock did come to feel, after hesitant beginnings, as he wrote in the mid-sixties, "more freedom, more space to move my mind...than in most of the other places I have known." But that was before the loss of Canadian innocence occasioned by the 1970 October Crisis, the centralizing federalism and the dramatic growth of government set in train in the Trudeau years, trends that the libertarian Woodcock would decry in his acerbic calendar 1984 book Orwell's Message: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Present.40 In his Canadian years, Woodcock has proved himself an intrepid traveller with a passion for the exploration of unfamiliar worlds second only to his overriding commitment to the vocation of writing itself. And by calendar 1984, he seems to have discovered in his wanderings a renewed respect for the manner in which the British abroad, whatever the immorality for Woodcock of imperialism in principle, had displayed in their ecumenical style of imperial rule an adroit capacity for holding the whole together loosely, allowing local communities to continue to flourish. This is a barely subsumed theme of the poignantly-entitled The Greeks in , one of the many travel books written in Woodcock's mature years. Morally, the example suggests libertarian possibilities beyond both the authoritarian proclivities of the traditional European nation- state, and the oppressive nationalisms of the less developed world that have been the successors of the decayed empires of our age, including the British Empire. Might not these give way to some future scheme of things in which, sustained by living myths of loosely-structured global loyalties, humans joined figurative hands across the particularisms of their locale in the celebration of shared ideals already intimated in the prominence accorded human rights and environmental

15 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George concerns in recent years? Certainly, such theoretical possibilities appeared to dovetail with the edifying mood of Woodcock's longstanding moral anarchism, which, "far from being democracy carried to its logical end", had always been, in his account of it, an outlook "much nearer to aristocracy universalized and purified."41 It has also paralleled Woodcock's admiration for the traditionally loosely- knit Canadian political community. For, at the root of Woodcock's impatience with manufactured Canadian nationalisms reliant on the growth of the Canadian state in recent decades, there lies a firm conviction that it is Canada's historic achievement of loose confederation, now threatened, that has something important to teach the world about desirable futures. There is, in short, a clear fit between the vision implicit in his travel writings of a sort of moral confederation of the free in which a universal or global loyalty subsumes local attachments, and Canada understood as consisting of an "essential confederationism" kept in equipoise by the concomitant and convergent vitality of its regions. In personal terms, one might say of Woodcock, this birthright Canadian and self-described "adoptive British Columbian"42, that he has come over the years to feel at home in Canada, strongly attached, on his own account, to his particular patria chica in a larger Canadian whole; while as a world traveller, full of a pilgrim's curiositas, he has retained not a little of his inherited cultural Englishness.43 "If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?", Orwell once asked. His answer was that "Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part... is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin."44 Woodcock, in The Crystal Spirit, cites this passage, suggesting that, with Orwell, the balance was more in the direction of Quixote than Panza, "the voice of the belly protesting against the soul." One way in

16 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George which Orwell was very much like Quixote, says Woodcock, was that, if he found himself on occasion in "uneasy and temporary alliance with others", he was, in the end, an isolated figure. He adds, in words which might have been autobiographical, that "[Orwell's] was the isolation of every man who seeks the truth diligently, no matter how unpleasant its implications may be to others or to himself."45 Of these two compelling, and somehow very English, moralists and writers---each a product of British Empire, champions alike of truth-seeking and common decency---one of them, George Orwell, returning to England in childhood to remain there, passed from the scene at mid-century as a literary figure of stature whose short life emblematized that of an English patriot of the old school. George Woodcock, also raised in England from early childhood, would eventually leave to return to the land of his birth, where he would become, in the course of a very long life, a Canadian patriot "of my own kind", seeking the truth diligently, and gaining some measure of literary fame along the way. There are, to be sure, important differences in the respective achievements of the two. But reflecting on the similarities, a better candidate for comparison than either Quixote or Panza comes to mind. The figure I refer to is St. George.

* * *

1. Remarks prepared for a `George Woodcock, Man of Letters' Symposium, SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, May 6-7, 1994. 2. Evening Standard, 9 February 1945, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, London, 1983, Volume 3, pp. 63-5. 3. London, 1931, p. 19. 4. Bernard Crick, George Orwell, A Life, London, 1980, p. 234. 5. Peter Hughes, George Woodcock, Toronto, 1974 [Canadian Writers No 13, New Canadian Library], p. 52. 6. See Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 2, pp. 205-14, 254-65, 306-7. 7. Bernard Crick, op. cit., p. 447. 8. Ibid, p. 306, and George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit, A Study of George Orwell, New York, 1984 (first published 1966), pp. xxi-xxii.

17 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

9. Ibid, p. vii. More rudely, Nigel Dennis, reviewing Crick's Orwell biography in The Sunday Telegraph, 23 November 1980, opined that Orwell "may have envisaged falling into the hands of a writer like Professor Crick [as] a fate worse than death." In fact, Crick's Orwell biography, his perambulating style notwithstanding, was generally well received. For the record, Crick's view of both Orwell and Woodcock is that they are "proud and prickly men". Bernard Crick, op. cit., p. 418. He refers to Woodcock as "the Canadian writer and anarchist", adding that, initially at least, Orwell must have thought him "a bit sanctimonious". 10. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 355. 11. A.J. Ayer, A Part of My Life: The Memoirs of a Philosopher, London 1977, p. 282, and Bernard Crick, op. cit., p. 471. On the `pansy left' allusion, see Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 1, pp. 366-8. Woodcock's anarchic seems more tolerant or inclusive than Orwell's own radicalism of what Woodcock has recently referred to as "variant visions and experiences" of sexuality. See, for instance, his "From the Impenetrable to the Lewd", B.C. Bookworld, Spring, 1994, p. 35. 12. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, London 1962 (first published 1937), pp. 173-4. 13. Alex Zwerdling, Orwell and the Left, New Haven, Conn., 1974, p. 62. 14. Ibid, p. 113. 15. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 1, p. 582. 16. Isaiah Berlin, "Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century", in his Four Essays on Liberty, London, 1969, p. 35. 17. Indeed, in The Crystal Spirit, Woodcock argues that "Conservatism and socialism form the two poles of Orwell's political thought. What holds them together is the never wholly abandoned strain of anarchism." (p. 234) 18. Julian Symons, "George Orwell: A Reminiscence", London Magazine, 3, 1963. 19. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 27. The remark occurs in the original 1966 printing of The Crystal Spirit. But Cripps himself, as disenchanted former supporters of the Labour left tend to gloss over (and as this passage does as well), was very much a figure of the Labour left. From his quite recent recollections, musing about the reasons for his decision to leave England at the close of the 1940s, one might infer that Woodcock shared Orwell's distaste for `Crippsian austerity' in postwar Britain. See Martin Dunphy's useful interview, "An Anarchist Among Us", The Georgia Straight, May 6-13, 1994, pp. 7-9, and Chris Dafoe, "A Man of Letters, From A to W", The Globe and Mail, 7 May, 1994, pp. C1-2. 20. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 4, pp. 578-9. 21. George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit, "Introduction" to the 1984 reprint, p. xiii. 22. Reprinted as "George Orwell" in George Woodcock, The Writer and Politics, London, 1948. pp. 111-24. 23. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, op. cit., Volume 1, pp. 454-504 (504). 24. But compare this with Bernard Crick's rather differing emphasis, op. cit., pp. 570, 26, where he claims that, as least as far as Nineteen Eighty-Four is concerned, Orwell's achievement was to have written "a masterpiece of political speculation" that is "to the twentieth century what Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was to the seventeenth." Hobbes, of course, is generally regarded as more a philosopher of civil authority than of liberty. 25. George Woodcock, "George Orwell", op. cit., pp. 123-4. 26. Ibid, p. 27. George Woodcock, Herbert Read: The Stream and the Source, London, 1972, p. 1972, p. 16. 28. Ibid, p. 269. 29. George Woodcock, Notes on Visitations, Poems, 1936-1975, Toronto, 1975, "Sunday on Hampstead Heath", pp. 3-4. 30. "Oh! Socialism!...I haven't used the word for years..." John Mortimer, "Roy Jenkins: The Elusive Social Democrat", in his In Character, London, 1984, p.146. A former Labour Party

18 George Feaver Orwell, Woodcock and St. George

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Jenkins had contributed the article on "Equality" to New Fabian Essays in Socialism, which appeared only two years after the death of Orwell. 31. Martin Dunphy, op. cit., p. 9. 32. J.S. Mill, Autobiography, Volume 1, p. 239, in J.M. Robson (ed), Collected Works of J.S.Mill, Toronto, 1981. 33. J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Volume 2, p. 208, in J.M. Robson (ed), Collected Works of J.S. Mill, Toronto, 1965. 34. Bernard Crick, op. cit., p. 570. 34. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 1, pp. 587-92. 36. Ibid, pp. 23-30 (28, 30). 37. The title of a 1944 Woodcock essay. See his Anarchism and Anarchists, Kingston, Ont., 1992, pp. 52, 78-87. 38. In The Lion and the Unicorn (1940), in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 2, pp. 88, 99. 39. See, for instance, the Preface to Woodcock's Canada and the , London, 1970, pp. 13-20. The book is dedicated "To the memory of my Father who never came back". But a more recent, octogenarian rendering adds an element of common sense to the reasoning that lay behind his decision to leave England for Canada. "Why did I come, I often used to be asked before I was accepted as part of the local fauna. "Why did I stay?" His answer to the first question is that "I had such a sense of the need to complete my father's life that it swayed me when we began to choose a new home. That, and the fact that I could get a Canadian passport." As for the second question, Woodcock has acknowledged of his early years in Canada that, living in an isolated state of "culture shock" at then remote Sooke on Vancouver Island, he and Ingebord "had had enough", and had resolved, by 1953, to return to England. This plan was deflected when the artist Jack Shadbolt (himself English-born) arranged for the Woodcock's to move to a small cottage in Vancouver. Then, the following year, Woodcock was invited to teach at the University of Washington in Seattle, and accepted for a trail year. Offered a permanent position, he was on the point of moving to the United States when, according to Woodcock, the American consul in Vancouver denied him a visa to do so on grounds of his left-wing politics. With that, writes Woodcock, "The die was cast; my future would lie in Vancouver and Canada...From that point, my life and the literary work I call my career have centred in this eyrie between mountain and sea. I became my own kind of Canadian patriot..." There is otherwise no clear evidence here, nor elsewhere in Woodcock's extensive ruminations on Canada, of the usual Canadian preoccupation with an ever-present danger of cultural absorption into a looming American continental presence. See "By George", Western Living, May 1994, pp. 60e-62. For a time, Woodcock taught in the English Department at the University of British Columbia, as an ongoing literary practitioner rather than a professional academic in any narrower sense; but otherwise, his routine in the Canadian years settled into one of frequent trips abroad in search of materials for his numerous travel books, usually during the West Coast's rainy winter months, with summers spent writing at the Woodcock's Vancouver home in Kerrisdale. 40. Though Woodcock's hostility to Trudeau's influence is much in evidence in this book and others of his writings on Canadian political life, he has come to a grudging admiration for certain of Trudeau's positions, especially those relating to "the Quebec attitude towards the English language", which Woodcock regards with "a certain amount of shame and abhorrence". Accepting that groups have identities (he was a strong supporter in his early years in British Columbia of the Doukhobor struggle for the recognition of their collective identity) is not the same thing as accepting that they have rights: "So I think in Canada in general, we have to re- examine our attitudes towards group liberties---or rather, not group liberties, group rights, because they're claiming them as rights really not as liberties. And we have to make this distinction between rights and liberties: that there are certain rights, if they are extended too far,

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that destroy liberty." Martin Dunphy, op. cit., p. 9. All of which is consistent with his notion of Canada's "essential confederationism", and with his libertarian anarchist ideal of live and let live. 41. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, New York, 1962, p. 34. 42. Woodcock has made much of his attachment to British Columbia, but he has deposited his manuscript papers at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. 43. "I could never conceive of writing a book on Australia", he confessed in a recent interview, providing an inadvertent reminder of his English formation. "...they start off very cordial, and then you begin to realize that your Limey accent---even though it may be modified by living in Canada---is getting under their skin. And they soon turn---and almost everyone has this experience with Australia---they will turn a bit nasty, and it's a difficult country to get along in." Martin Dunphy, op. cit., p. 9. Elsewhere in the same interview, Woodcock ventures the opinion that "my travel writings, whatever other people may think, are the centre of my work." And travel writing, of course, has had an especially strong and continuing presence in the English literary canon. On this, see, for instance, Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, New York, 1980. 44. In his essay on comic postcards, "The Art of Donald McGill", reproduced in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds), op. cit., Volume 2, pp. 183-94 (192). 45. George Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit, op. cit., p. 4.

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