Peter Stansky’s very first publication, “The Tragedy of George Orwell: A Biographical Note,” appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine in March 1953. Most remarkably, seventy years later, he has produced The Socialist Patriot, another study of Orwell, written in a crisp and elegant English of which his subject would certainly have approved.

Stansky is an admired veteran of Orwell studies. With William Abrahams, he wrote The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1979), which fired the starting gun, for better or worse, for the Orwell industry. Stansky and Abrahams fell foul of Orwell’s widow Sonia; they were banned from the Orwell Archive at University College London, and were not allowed to quote extensively from the author’s work. Nevertheless, their two books set the agenda for much that was to come, in biographical and critical work, principally with their emphasis on the continuities of their subject’s life (Eric Blair into George Orwell), and on the crucial importance of his experience of the Spanish Civil War, or more accurately of the political history of Catalonia in 1936–37, for the writer he became.

This book is about Orwell’s relation to war and his feelings for his country. Stansky considers the wars of Orwell’s lifetime—First World, Spanish Civil, Second World, and Cold —and how war shaped his life, writings, and thinking. Stansky’s Orwell is a socialist and a patriot, an English radical in the tradition of Blake, Cobbett, and William Morris. All his formal education had been patriotic—“Deeply question it [his schooling] as he would, its values were still an important part of who he was. He was a patriot” (23)—and in September 1940, he wrote in his diary that he would give his life for England readily enough, if he thought it necessary. The war is not mentioned in his later essay remembering his prep school, “Such, Such were the Joys,” but his schooling was wartime, and, in the nursery of the British ruling class, steeped in patriotism. “I am not able,” he explained in “Why I Write,” “nor do I want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood.” (The Complete Works of George Orwell (CW), 20 vols., ed. Peter Davidson [London: Secker and Warburg, 1998], XVIII:319.)

In one paragraph, Stansky hurries over Orwell’s time in Burma, 1922 to 1927—“five boring years within the sound of bugles” (CW XII:272). This may seem fair enough since his subject is Orwell and war, yet those five years in uniform are an essential part of the complex picture of Orwell’s emotional and intellectual development. How to reconcile the patriotism of his education with his involvement, as an officer of the Imperial Police, with the dirty work of empire? A study of Orwell’s patriotism is really incomplete without this piece of the puzzle. It necessitated important and not easy distinctions to be made in answer to the question of what his country meant to him, and you can see him struggling with some of these distinctions in the autobiographical part of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), where he deals with his Burmese experience as well as what he was learning about the home country: “The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear” (CW V:113). (A clue to this intellectual and emotional shift may be found in Orwell’s later use of the words British—usually negative, trailing its invisible partner Empire—and English—usually neutral or positive, indicating a location and history of culture.)

This is not to disagree with Stansky that Spain was “the most decisive experience of [Orwell’s] life” (36). After Spain, his political ideas reached a coherent and firm shape, which would change little thereafter, though their expression became more eloquent in fiction and essays. In Barcelona, he had had a vision of a democratic socialist society that might actually come about but also of the formidable enemies ranged against it.

One more shift was to come. Thoroughly disillusioned, he had returned from Spain a pacifist as well as a socialist. It is in this period, when political action seemed most futile, that his love of country entered its most nostalgic phase, expressed in the English pastoralism of Coming Up for Air (1939). Stansky says he was “an extraordinary combination of a certain degree of sentimentality and hard-headedness” (54–5). When war broke out in 1939 he immediately supported it: “the long drilling in patriotism … had done its work, and once England [sic] was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage” (CW XII: 271). Now he opposed the pacifism he had recently espoused.

It was a position confirmed by the fact that Germany and the Soviet Union, the two powers that he hated most, were now allies. With a sense of relief, his feelings for his country and democratic socialism merged. There followed his extraordinary war work: in the Home Guard, the BBC Eastern Service, Searchlight Books, his writing for Horizon and Partisan Review and Tribune, and Animal Farm. Stansky is particularly good on Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn, a polemic which takes its place in a long tradition of English radicalism. He states bravely that the sort of democratically socialist country Orwell envisaged in the book did to some considerable degree come about (though some may find it hard to recognize it in today’s Britain).

Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky reminds us, is about a country, and a world, permanently at war. He calls the book “a Cold War classic,” just as Orwell was “a Cold War socialist” (104). Nineteen Eighty-Four was recruited, especially in America, in a Cold War framed as a struggle between capitalism and communism. But Orwell didn’t want either of them; he was hoping, and fighting, for something else.