posted on 25 Feb 2025

The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell by George Woodcock

George Woodcock was a Canadian critic, travel writer, biographer and academic. He wrote what for a long time was one of the standard works on anarchism, but to many his reputation rests on The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell, one of the earliest studies of the writer, whom Woodcock knew from about 1942 until Orwell’s death in 1950. It was first published in the UK in 1967, with Penguin Books publishing it in 1970 alongside its then-newly published four-volume collection of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. 

It is the book in which I first read some of the most vivid and lasting descriptions of Orwell the man and even now when I think of Orwell I often find it is Woodcock’s vignettes that I am bringing to my mind. The flat in Canonbury Square, Islington, for instance, in which Orwell had a tall angular wicker armchair in which he sat ‘like a Gothic saint in his niche’. Or Orwell drinking in a huge working class pub where despite his best efforts to blend in he still looked like ‘a rather frayed sahib wearing shabby clothes with all the insouciance an old Etonian displays on such occasions’. Or eating dinner with Woodcock in a Soho restaurant towards the end of the war where the only food on the menu is ‘boiled cod and bitter turnip-tops’, which Woodcock found disgusting but which Orwell ate with relish: ‘I would never have thought they’d go so well together,’ he said.

I find the first section, where Woodcock reminisces about Orwell the man, the most purely enjoyable and the most vivid, but the remaining sections – analyses of the themes of Orwell’s fiction, of his world-view, and of his work as an essayist and critic – I have always found harder going. Not because they aren’t good, they are; but rather because my ability to read literary criticism, even extremely good literary criticism, is limited. But this said, Woodcock’s analysis really is quite brilliant, and perhaps because it is one of the earliest systematic attempts to understand the complex relationship between Orwell’s life, work, politics and – most importantly – the actions he took, it has a freshness and vitality that most such writing lacks. 

What I most enjoy about Woodcock’s writing is that he sometimes approaches Orwell from what seem unusual, even unlikely perspectives, but almost always this produces some startling insights. I’ll give just one example. Writing about Orwell’s descent into the underworld – his attempts to get arrested for vagrancy, his experience of exploited labour and poverty, the periods spent ‘on the tramp’ and workhouse ‘spikes’ – Woodcock notes: ‘It is the self-conscious deliberation of these adventures that is significant; the whole idea of going into the slums has a peculiar fin-de-siécle literary flavour reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes setting off in disguise from his flat in Baker Street to seek in some criminal slum the lost fact that will complete the case he is about to solve. Orwell too was seeking facts for a case, his case against society.’ He also sees a link between Orwell’s attempts to discover his true self and his interest in Oscar Wilde – particularly Wilde’s ‘florid masterpiece’ The Picture of Dorian Gray, which Orwell first read at Eton but continued to enjoy and defend well into the 1940s. Dorian Gray also descended into the lower depths of London society in search of opium – a vivid image ‘which may well have helped to determine Orwell on his course of self-submersion in the slums’.

But the reason I treasure Woodcock’s book, and what I think makes it worth rereading, is his evident admiration and affection for Orwell. Even when acknowledging Orwell’s most glaring faults, his ‘monumental imperfections’, he is still utterly clear about Orwell’s achievement. Orwell, he says, developed a prose style in which ‘language and meaning are so close that one cannot drive the blade of a metaphorical knife between them’; and ‘in that crystalline prose,’ he concludes, ‘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.’ 

This may not be an easy book to read in its entirety, or all in one go, but it is a genuinely remarkable one. Written just a dozen years or so after Orwell’s death, by a man who knew and admired him, it predates by decades the present academic industry in Orwell studies and I think still offers one of the most valuable and astute portraits of the man that we have.

 

Alun Severn

February 2025

 

 

Orwell elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

There are numerous Orwell-related articles on Letterpress and all the links can be found in this digest.