Honest Witness

SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS (230 pp.) -- George Orwell--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

The passage of time dulls most literary reputations, but George Orwell's keeps getting brighter. His publishers, in the three years since his death, have been reduced to pasting together scraps of his journalism, yet each collection seems almost as timely as if written yesterday.

Such, Such Were the Joys is a miscellany of pieces written mostly during the 1940s; political essays, autobiography, literary criticism. The title piece, a long memoir of Orwell's early school days, is a masterpiece of narrative. No one has evoked more memorably the brutality young boys can show each other, the elaborate code of honor that prevails among them. "In winter," wrote Orwell, "your nose ran continually, your fingers were too numb to button your shirt . . . and there was the daily nightmare of football --the cold, the mud, the hideous greasy

l that came whizzing at one's face, the gouging knees and trampling boots of the bigger boys."

Cricket, Too. His memoir is not merely a chronicle of a shy boy's woes. Orwell recognized that even in unhappy circumstances boys find ways to be happy, and lis story is brightened with recollections of butterfly hunts and cricket games that read as well as his darker pages.

By comparison, everything else in the book seems minor, though continually interesting. Inside the Whale is a long, over generous celebration of Novelist Henry (Tropic of Cancer) Miller, in which Orwell sees Miller as a last-ditch individualist thumbing his nose at a mechanized world. England Your England is an impressionistic survey of Orwell's native land, in which he uses such unconventional criteria as the difference between the German's strutting goose step and the English parade step ("merely a formalised walk") to score some shrewd points about the strength of democracy.

One Set of Books. Politically, says Orwell, he wrote "against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism." But where such a stand, in the case of another writer, might be trivial or tedious or pompous, Orwell made it into a passionate starting point from which to scourge all varieties of intellectual cant and hypocrisy. He denounced the Blimps who failed to see that Mussolini and Hitler were enemies of freedom, and he denounced the intellectuals who thought Stalin was any better. Much of his energy was devoted to carrying on a guerrilla campaign against the woolheaded fellow travelers who were poisoning English intellectual life.

Most political writers try to tell people what they should think; Orwell was interested in discovering what people actually feel. As a result, he could not settle into any ideological pigeonhole. He was as ready to attack the phonies on his side of the political fence as those on the other. He was a writer who kept only one set of books.

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