CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, ORWELL AND THE ORWELL PRIZE
The shortlist of the Orwell prize has been released with Christopher Hitchens name excised from the list. I cannot find any particular reason for his exclusion though it would not have bothered The Hitch, for as Robert McCrum has observed in The Guardian:
Really, it's a shame Hitchens is no longer around to make hay with the
ideas that: a) he was troubled by prizes; b) he had somehow always hankered
after the Orwell trophy; and c) there can be any meaning whatever in handing
out posthumous awards to books whose authors are beyond the reach of lunch,
dinner, and especially critics.[1]
However it is interesting that both Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen have both been ignored by the panel. Given the absence of transparency one can only speculate.
Some have stated that the panel was only interested in previously unpublished material and as Christopher’s book Arguably consisted of a collection of essays going back several decades it lay outside their concern. Well on that criteria Orwell himself would have struggled to be short listed, since his finest work consists of just such collections as The Lion and the Unicorn and The decline of the English Murder; leaving aside the contributions he made in Tribune over an extended period of time, under the heading, As I Please, or his London Letters to Partisan review.[2]
Orwell’s finest writing lay in his journalism and works of documentary reportage such as Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. Animal Farm is an almost perfectly written fable, however the rest of his fiction is all, at a variety of different levels flawed and Orwell recognised this and he would for example happily have seen A Clergyman’s Daughter pulped. Of his pre-war novels only the much neglected Coming Up For Air comes close to being fully realised. Indeed it contains the most vivid description of what Orwell perceived to be an Edwardian idyll; this ‘golden age’ haunts much of Orwell’s writing and goes some way to explaining his small c conservatism. He believed that there was a time when the air was both metaphorically and one suspects literally cleaner. Emerging out of the catastrophe of the First World War Europe descended into a new dark age of anti-rationalism, represented by the ideologies of Fascism and Communism, ideologies, that threatened not just free thought and objective history but the very concepts themselves. Faced with these threats Orwell produced writing that still represents the gold standard.
1984 of course is the book by which he is best known and it is a book that changed the English language itself, after its publication the chilling phrase, Orwellian entered the lexicon.[3] However 1984 as a work of literature is flawed, Orwell himself admitted that the device of room 101 was crude and that the book lacked the polish he would have liked.[4] It is moreover difficult to find a motivation, other than pure undiluted sadism and the love of power for its own sake for the rulers of Orwell’s dystopian state; though it is important not to underestimate the attraction of sadism or sheer love of power, as Stalin or Saddam Hussein could testify, though sadism will only take you so far. Even totalitarian oligarchs require further incentives[5] and yet it does not appear on the surface that O’Brian enjoys significantly greater privileges or a better quality of life than Winston Smith. Would 1984 therefore make Orwell a candidate for the Orwell prize? Given recent recipients possibly not.
Would Orwell have cared, I cannot recall him every opining on literary prizes, I think there were less then and those that did exist had far less razzmatazz about them. What might have interested him was the degree to which such competitions have become something of a literary racket, overblown publicity fests or mutual appreciation societies where the worthy can applaud the worthy and unspoken stitch ups can occur.
Hitchens on the other hand, at a early age, discovered that he was not cut out to write fiction, his talent lay in writing razor sharp prose that attacked the same fearsome enemies that Orwell had identified, in a style that anyone who has ever admired Orwell can truly appreciate. His output as impressive as Orwell’s containing such precisely honed missiles as The Trial of Henry Kissinger and The Missionary Position, as well as the great house- brick of a weapon that is God Is Not Great. He composed brilliant essay collections such as Prepared for the Worst and Unacknowledged Legislation, as well as thoughtful and forensic writing, Letters to a Young Contrarian and of course Why Orwell Matters. In between he produced prodigious quantities of brilliant and incisive journalism, exposing fraud, folly and mendacity, making him indisputably, overwhelmingly, the glaringly obvious choice for The Orwell Prize. The panel were having none of it.
So Orwell possibly excluded from his own prize, Christopher Hitchens definitely excluded.
One possible, rather sinister, reason can be found in the creeping presence at such affairs of, what has been called, political correctness. This is a term I dislike;[6] probably a better description would be ensuring that all nominees are in tune with a prevailing orthodoxy. Key words to watch out for are relevant i.e. deals with material of which we approve, committed, i.e. deals with material of which we approve, representative, i.e. either completely unrepresentative or simply not white male and public school educated, all of which of course again rules out Orwell, and Hitchens. Though as they have previously given the prize to Christopher’s brother Peter, a much poorer writer than Christopher, the latter factor may not have played a role. Leaving open the possibility that the Hitch may have been neither ‘committed’ in ways of which the panel approved and sufficiently relevant, the fact that he was not also appropriately representative ensuring his excision.
As I say does any of this really matter? Certainly the exclusion of Christopher Hitchens from the short list of The Orwell Prize would not have bothered him, but I think what made him so angry is that of all prizes The Orwell should have become contaminated by this kind of poison; it feel as if Orwell himself, no secular saint but an honest man, is having his grave pissed on.
Perhaps we should institute a real Orwell prize, with honours going to the most cliché ridden and hackneyed prose, with separate awards for the most grotesque power worship, brown nosing, and downright lying in the name of a political cause. I already have a list of nominees.
[2] All contained in The
Collected Essays Letters and Journalism published 1968. My copies have alas
all but fallen apart.
[3] Am I the only one who
finds something rather disturbing about concepts like Big Brother and Room 101
being hijacked by light entertainment!
[4] Hardly surprising as when
he was writing the book he was dying of TB on the remote Scottish island
of Jura
[5] The Iraqi dictator lived
in considerably luxury. Stalin lived a far more Spartan existence, though he
does seem to have had some belief in an ideology he called communism. I must
admit that the motivation for those ruling North Korea seem much closer to
Orwell’s vision, as Christopher Hitchens noted this state was created in the
year before Orwell’s death and they seem rather to have taken his novel as a
template.
[6] The most glaring example
of this being the disute last year respecting the awarding of the man Booker
Prize to Philip Roth, Roth astonishingly
finding himself like a character
in one of his own novels http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/philip-roth-wins-man-booker-international-prize-in-disputed-decision/
