Saints and sinners.(Ryan)

I TRY NEVER TO MISS Paul Johnson's weekly column in the English Spectator. The man, now elderly (as he himself sometimes points out) remains a fantastic fountain of words, as he has been for half a century. He was a loud and leading left-wing journalist and then an equally leading and loud right-wing journalist. He has written a shelf-full of substantial histories; now in "retirement" he has become a painter of more than amateur standing, and writes his column for the Spectator, which is called "And Another Thing".

He discusses almost any subject at all, lively with detail from his amazing memory and learning. The pugnacity of youth has by no means evaporated, and he can still draw down on his head the wrath of younger writers, including the equally outspoken Christopher Hitchens. When Johnson grew a fine red beard, Hitchens, in a journal article, wrote that his face resembled an explosion in a pubic hair factory.

Johnson, it seems, feels no urge to be unnecessarily agreeable. The late Bob Santamaria told me that he found him "the rudest man he ever met". As Santamaria knew Australia!s own Bert Evatt, the compliment to Johnson was no small one.

I was led thus to ponder on Johnson by his use in a recent column of a single word to describe the general character of George Orwell: "saintly". It pulled me up sharp--it simply wouldn't do. It puzzled me that Johnson, with an enormous vocabulary under his sensitive command, would have chosen an epithet so inept for this towering writer of the twentieth century.

I recognise the existence of saints, secular or divine, on their lofty pinnacles of virtue. (I suspect that I might, over the years, have met one or two people close to being qualified for their golden crowns.) But from Saint Peter onwards, saints seem to have had also a "down side": self-centred, bossy-boots, prima donnas, querulous, eccentrics, obsessive, demanding. For ordinary humans, a saint would be a pain in the bum to have to live with. And that doesn't at all fit my picture of George Orwell, who rubbed along matter-of-factly with his neighbours, literary and political disputation notwithstanding.

If someone were to put a pistol to my head and command me to produce a Single-word description of George Orwell, I should hesitate between "decent" and "lucid", and plead to be allowed to use both.

The occasional writings of George Orwell--his essays, journalism and letters--have been collected in four superb volumes whose editors justly claim that they present a "completely original story of the political life of the first half of the twentieth century". Lucky to own such a treasured set, I sat down to dip into them here and there--a smut-hound snuffling for evidence which might convict Orwell of "saintliness". I found none.