Essays by George Orwell, selected and introduced by John Carey and The Penguin Essays of George Orwell
It’s hard to write about Orwell not because he doesn’t invite writing, but because he does. It’s all been said. Everyone thinks they’ve got him, got him nailed down. They have set phrases, too, of which they are all very proud. Everyone likes to say that his style was clear like a windowpane. Everyone likes to say that Orwell hit all those ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ that other men — hypocrites! — did not touch. He got the tyrannies of the twentieth century, in all of their colours, correct. He was a prophet, not honoured in his own time. He was a secular saint.
Or, of course, they go the other way. Orwell was a rat, a traitor to socialism. A man who romanticised his own origins, spreading falsehoods in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ about his prep school education. Who lied about shooting an elephant. A man who fabricated some of the events he claimed to have seen in Paris, in prisons, in workhouses. An embroiderer, who made for himself another man’s name because he invented himself wholesale, a creation of self, all smoke, no brass.
I want to take a slightly different tack. I want to talk about Orwell as, of all things, a working man. As the man who had to earn a living by his pen. How does he stack up, in these expansive, bulging collections? How did he best survive and parse the demands, the maddening demands, of journalism? How it demands that you say things when you have nothing to say, how it rewards lining up cliches that the readers can assimilate like ‘iron filing obeying the magnet’, how it turns every original thought into a million pale copies, how it makes a man shout himself hoarse simply because there is no alternative? How did Orwell do at that?
Quite well, but one must note first that he was as good as any in diagnosing it in others. Of course we have the great essays about politics and the English language — the politics of language and the language of politics. Shrewd diagnoses about the kinds of loan-words that creep in when people start letting other people do their thinking for them. Orwell noticed that some phrases used most often by communist parties, in all their voluminous printed matter, seemed to read oddly in English. It was because so many of communism’s great denunciatory phrases, its hard nouns and adjectives, were fundamentally foreign, fundamentally loan words, loan concepts, alien to the old English lexicon. Orwell noticed this very well. Running dogs, hyenas, interloping jackals. Our modern cultural students, our Darwinists, would call them memes. Orwell spotted them and their ability to rot minds very early.
And he noticed that anti-communist and anti-Nazi writers made the same mistakes. They talk about the iron fist — almost a serviceable image — but then they said that Nazidom, Mussolini’s Black Shirts, all of it was the product of militarism. Militarism and evil dressed, most notably, in jackboots. That’s your image. Jackboots marching around Europe — a terrible vision of the future. Orwell quite reasonably said that this was a dead metaphor. What was a jackboot? Very few people could see it in their minds. Instead it was a zombie simile, an absurd grasping for an image of suitable weight and legibility. It was a failure, an instant cliche, something that ever fell flat. We have addressed the critic. What of the journalist?
On the question of the day to day, how was Orwell’s own work? It was not all imperishable. There were a lot of fairly hacky book reviews, things written at no great length about works that have not lasted. And some authors who were vital in Orwell’s own day but cannot, now, even be conjured in spirit to argue back. Middleton Murry, vital in his day. But who goes to bat for Murray now? Who takes their understanding of sexuality, of society, from Havelock Ellis? Orwell was, in the not-quite-grand view of recent history, somewhat tilting at windmills. Even the great H. G. Wells — known far more now for fiction than any other.
My favourite parts of Orwell’s writing are not the cultural essays — although his pieces on boys’ weeklies, Charles Dickens, George Gissing and others are enjoyable and say much about his subjects and the contents of his own mind. Instead, I most like Orwell’s As I Please columns, written for Tribune, which cover, as the title suggests, quite various things. Orwell on toads and their habits. Orwell on a competition, run by the magazine, on the writing of short stories. (He was not happy with any of the entrants. He thought they spoke quite ill, all of them together, of the state of the fiction being written in his own day.)
All of the little things that Orwell notes because they were real and true and domestic and ordinary. How water pipes tend to burst every winter. They don’t do it any more, so it is a little like learning to hear that once upon a time, they did. This is the grind of daily journalism. Turning up, coming up with something that may as well be true or novel and well put, and then going home to do something that actually matters. The things that paid the bills. That’s where goodness or badness at this game truly lies.
And Orwell was better than most. Sure, people can do well when they have nothing but time and an incredible canvas. A lot of writers of the first half of the twentieth century rank well historically simply because in those days, history was on the march. Chesterton and Eliot and Orwell and Auden simply had better and more interesting times. They were playing an easier game.
But just as Auden’s most low-rent, banal poetry is where one sees his incredible ear, his tremendous prosody, and Chesterton’s pappy short stories show his great verbal dexterity when describing utter tripe, Orwell’s hacky daily work for monthly papers show us something of him. Something the opposite of grandiosity. The opposite of posterity. A man who turned up and did the job. A man who took his work more seriously than most of us take ours. A man who cared about the moment in history in which he lived.