‘Collected Essays’: Think for Yourself
A review of ‘Collected Essays’, by George Orwell; Penguin, 1970.
Years ago, I argued in City A.M. that Orwell was invoked so often that his name had lost all meaning. This was ironic, I said, because one of Orwell’s rules for writing is that one should never use a metaphor or figure of speech one is used to seeing in print. But there is a good reason why Orwell’s name comes up so often: he was unusually clear-eyed on the questions of his day, many of which are just as relevant now as they were back then. Where would we be without the adjective ‘Orwellian’, or the many neologisms he coined, such as ‘Big Brother’, ‘Thought Police’, ‘Room 101’, ‘Newspeak’, ‘memory hole’, ‘doublethink’, and ‘thoughtcrime’?
As Christopher Hitchens (author of Why Orwell Matters) noted, it is somewhat dull, particularly among writers and journalists, to admit to admiring Orwell because he is so worthy of admiration. It is akin to quoting Churchill, or Wilde. For just the same reason, there are those who rather boringly attack Orwell in a bid to seem interesting or unique. Last year, I was directed to a lengthy, badly written piece that attempted to brush off Orwell; Will Self, known for his sesquipedalian prose style, has dismissed Orwell as a ‘literary mediocrity’.
To each her own. But I maintain that Orwell is a very good writer and, in case you care, the writer who made me see that some prose was worth reading for its style alone. He writes simply; but as Leonardo is supposed to have said, simplicity is ‘the ultimate sophistication’. (Also, per Johann Cruyff: ‘I play football simply; but it is very, very hard to play football simply.’) For this reason, as well as the lucidity of his thought—already mentioned—his essays remain eminently readable. In this, the most sweeping assemblage of his work, we find writing on free speech, Flat Earth theory, P.G. Wodehouse and the perfect pub. And in all of them there is a total absence of pretence.
I maintain that Orwell is a very good writer and, in case you care, the writer who made me see that some prose was worth reading for its style alone.
His earlier work, written in the 1930s, is less assured than his later. His subjects range from poverty in London to British imperialism in Burma, where he served as a colonial policeman. One of my favourite of his essays, the haunting ‘A Hanging’, describes the cursory execution of a man by the British authorities, which is made all the more discomfiting by the fact that those who carry out the killing go right back to cracking jokes in its aftermath. The essay opens with these striking words:
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
This is typical of Orwell’s prose: bold, vivid, exacting. We are plunged into the scene. We find ourselves there in the jail yard with Orwell and his colleagues, about to witness a killing. The mood of the scene is tense and grim; and the way the men condemned are described suggests they are somehow less than human. This is a scene stripped bare of real humanity.
Orwell writes more of his experience in Burma in essays like ‘Shooting an Elephant’, which is marked because of Orwell’s disarming honesty about his own cruel instincts and desire to appease the mob. This is another hallmark of his writing: Orwell is brutally honest about his own shortcomings. In an essay on Dalí, he remarks that one should not trust any autobiographical writing that makes its subject look good. He had a keen understanding of the inborn fallibility of people, including himself, which led him to kill sacred cows—he was decidedly ambivalent about Churchill—but also to defend those who were roundly attacked. In ‘In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse’, he mounts the case that P.G. Wodehouse was silly and naïve to accept the hospitality of the Nazis and but this did not make him a Nazi sympathiser.
In an essay on Dalí, he remarks that one should not trust any autobiographical writing that makes its subject look good.
If one is honest, if one resists taking sides and strives instead to see things as they are, then one will wind up just about everyone at some point. Orwell, a man of the Left and a democratic socialist, lost many of his friends by attacking the Soviet Union, which he saw earlier than others was a violent totalitarian state, not a utopia. His Animal Farm is the great allegory of the Soviet experience and a book so original that T.S. Eliot, then running Faber & Faber, refused to publish it. It is also a book that to some degree attempts to square socialism with its most totalitarian forms: Orwell was something like a libertarian socialism, believing that without individual freedom socialism risked or perhaps was doomed to slide into tyranny. In the brilliant essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, Orwell aims to reconcile English national identity with socialism, but ends up sending a love letter to his country. It is hard for a Brit not to read that essay without feeling a patriotic tingle.
In lesser-known essays—‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, ‘The Spike’, ‘In Defence of English Cooking’—Orwell the man comes more vividly into view. We learn about his childhood, his time spent with tramps in Paris, and his interest in food. But I maintain that the most revealing of his essays, as well as one of his finest, is ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, in which he earnestly describes the behaviour of the toad, the beauty of its eyes, and the joys of spring:
I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.
There are threads that run through all of Orwell’s work: the importance of clarity, common decency, and free expression, as well as the dangers mass conformity. He distrusts rhetoric, whether it issues from the lips of a colonial officer, a Marxist pamphleteer, or a right-wing paper editor turning a blind eye to atrocities. He shows, often with small observations, how the cruelty of the world as absurd. In ‘A Hanging’, a prisoner, about to be killed, steps aside to avoid a puddle.
There are threads that run through all of Orwell’s work: the importance of clarity, common decency, and free expression, as well as the dangers of mass conformity.
If we can group together Orwell’s themes under a single word, then perhaps that word is power. He is deeply interested in the acquisition of power, the motives for seeking it, the dangers of having it, the excuses for using it. He had no illusions about the left or the right. He saw equally the hypocrisy of the British imperialists and the self-deception of the English socialists who, for all their lofty talk, looked down on the working class. He fought for socialism in Spain, getting shot through the neck for his trouble; and despite the descent of almost all socialist movements into totalitarianism, never lost his hope that an honest, democratic, down-to-earth left might arise. He hoped that England might one day give birth to it. ‘England,’ he wrote, ‘is a family with the wrong members in control.’
As I have said and suggested, style for Orwell is not mere window-dressing but key. Good writing, he wrote, should be ‘like a window-pane’, showing everything and obscuring nothing. Bad writing was not just a technical failure but a moral one, for to write clearly is to think clearly, and those who use euphemism, jargon and dead metaphors should be treated with extreme suspicion. Governments will speak of ‘liquidation of elements hostile to the regime’ when what they mean is mass murder. The world would be a better place if we were less forgiving of such ugliness and deceit, in speech and prose. Language shapes thought; and corrupted language corrupts minds. Orwell fought for words that meant what they said, a way of speaking that left no room for untruth.
It is in part because Orwell, though not a cold-hearted man, took care to resist nostalgia and sentimentality that his essays do not seem to age. Politics today remains smothered in the same fog of euphemism and self-serving nonsense that Orwell condemned. Groupthink is alive and well, propaganda is everywhere we look, and intellectual dishonesty, in academia and in the mainstream press, is rife. The solution to this, as Orwell shows, is to think for ourselves and to find the spine to say what we think. We might pay a price for that, of course; but truth, Orwell argues, is far more important than comfort. And of course, he is right. To read Orwell is to receive an education in how to think.
