That The Observer published the following obituary written by then world famous Hungarian author and journalist Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983) of similarly famous author George Orwell (1903 - 1950). Read on...
IN MEMORY OF GEORGE ORWELL
The staunchest British Left-wing of the Soviet regime during and after the war was George Orwell. He stood out like a rock in the swamp of the fellow-traveling intelligentsia of varying degrees of muddiness. It was thus almost inevitable that we became first political allies, then friends, however different in character and background. The task of writing his obituary, which the Observer asked me to do, was made all the more painful by by the shortness of the available space.
To meet one's favourite author is mostly a disillusioning experience. George Orwell was one of the few writers who looked and behaved exactly as the reader of his books expected him look and behave. This exceptional concordance between the man and his work was a measure of the exceptional unity and integrity of his character.
An English critic recently called him the most honest writer alive; his uncompromising intellectual honesty was such that it made him appear to be inhuman at times. There was an emanation of austere harshness around him which diminished only in proportion to distance, as it were: he was merciless towards himself, severe upon his friends, unresponsive to admirers, but full of understanding sympathy those in the remote periphery, the 'crowds in the big towns with their knobbly faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners; the queues inside the Labour Exchanges, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning.... '.
Thus the greater the distance from intimacy, and the wider the radius of the circle the more warming became the radiations of this lonely man's great power of love. His ruthlessness towards himself was the key to his personality; it determined his attitude to the enemy within, the disease which had raged in his chest since adolescence.
His life was one constant series of rebellions both against the conditions of society in general and his own particular predicament; against humanity's drift towards 1984 and his own drift towards the final breakdown. Intermittent haemorrhages marked like milestones the rebel's progress as a sergeant in the Burma police, a dishwasher in Paris, a tramp in England, a soldier in Spain. Each should have acted as a warning, and each served as a challenge. answered by works of increasing weight and stature.
The last warning came three years ago. It became obvious that his life-span could only be prolonged by a sheltered existence under constant medical care. He chose to live on a lonely island in the Hebrides, with his adopted son, without even a char woman to look after him.
Under these conditions he wrote his savage vision of 1984. Shortly after the book was completed he became bedridden, and never recovered. Yet had he followed the advice of doctors and friends, and lived in the self indulgent atmosphere of Swiss sanitorium, his masterpiece could not have been written - nor any of his former books. The greatness and tragedy of George Orwell was his total rejection of compromise.
The urge to genius and the promptings of common sense can rarely be reconciled; Orwell's life was a victory of the former over the latter. For now that he is dead, the time has come to recognise that he is the only writer of genius among the litterateurs of social revolt between the two wars. Cyril Connolly's remark, referring to their common prep school days: 'I was a stage rebel Orwell was a true one' is valid for his whole generation.
When he went to fight in Spain he did not join the sham-fraternity of the international brigades but the most wretched of the Spanish Militia units the heretics of the POUM. He was the only one whom his grim integrity kept immune against the spurious mystique of the 'movement', who never became a fellow-traveller and who never believed in Moses the Ravens Sugar-candy Mountain - either in heaven or on earth. Consequently his seven books of that period from 'Down and Out' to 'Coming up for Air' all remain fresh and bursting with life, and will remain so for decades to come, whereas most of the books produced by the 'emotionally shallow Leftism' which Orwell so despised are dead and dated today.
A similar comparison could be drawn from the period of the war. Among all the pamphlets, tracts and exhortations which the war produced, hardly anything bears rereading today - except perhaps E.M. Forster's 'What I believe', a few passages from Churchill's speeches, and above all Orwell's 'The Lion and the Unicorn'. It's opening section 'England your England' is one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character and a minor classic in itself.
Animal Farm and 1984 are Orwell's last works No parable was written since Gulliver's Travels equal in profundity and mordant satire to Animal Farm, no fantasy since Kafka's In the Penal Settlement is equal in logical horror to 1984. I believe that future historians of literature will regard as a kind of missing link between Kafka and Swift. For, to quote Connolly Again it may well be true that 'It is closing time in the West, and from now on an artist will be judged by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair'.
The resonance of Orwell's solitude and the quality of his despair can only be compared to Kafka's - but with difference: that Orwell's despair had a concrete, organised structure, as it were, and was projected from the individual to the social plane. And if 'four legs good two legs' is pure Swift, there is again this difference: that completely lost faith in his knobbly-faced yahoos with their bad teeth. Had he proposed an epitaph for himself, my guess is that he would have chosen these lines from Old Major's revolutionary anthem, to be sung to be sung to a 'stirring tune, something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucaracha'':
Rings shall vanish from our noses
And the harness from our back...
For this we all must labour,
Though we may die before it break
Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,
All must toil for freedom's sake.
Somehow Orwell really believed in this. It was this. It was this quaint belief which guided the rebel's progress, and made him so very lovable though he did not know it.
