What would you say if someone who knew nothing of George Orwell, beyond his name, were to ask you to recommend one of his books?
You might suggest Animal Farm. It’s his most famous work: a witty satire on the Russian Revolution but with much wider application, written in Orwell’s distinctive plain, vivid style, full of active verbs and concrete nouns. A pleasure to read though it undoubtedly is, however, it’s a slight work – modestly described by Orwell himself as a fairy story, it is barely 30,000 words long and does not exhibit the full range of his talent or ideas.
Or you might say Nineteen Eighty-four. His last novel is a brilliant dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain, drawing on the dictatorships of mid-twentieth-century Europe as well as Orwell’s contemporary experience of post-war austerity Britain; it’s bleak, it’s grim and it’s bitterly funny. It bestowed two new phrases upon the English language – ‘Room 101’ and ‘Big Brother’ (both of which became the titles of television programmes: can any other writer rival that?). Yet one feels it is not fully developed as a novel: the characters, except for the protagonist Winston, are lightly sketched in, and it’s as much a vehicle for ideas as it is a work of art.
We can rule out his earlier novels. They are all very well worth reading; but they are all flawed in various ways. No, the book we should direct our enquirer towards is a collection of George Orwell’s essays. That is where the reader will discover the quintessential Orwell. Bernard Crick, who edited the definitive Penguin collection, makes the point neatly in his intro
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Subscribe now or Sign inWhat would you say if someone who knew nothing of George Orwell, beyond his name, were to ask you to recommend one of his books?
You might suggest Animal Farm. It’s his most famous work: a witty satire on the Russian Revolution but with much wider application, written in Orwell’s distinctive plain, vivid style, full of active verbs and concrete nouns. A pleasure to read though it undoubtedly is, however, it’s a slight work – modestly described by Orwell himself as a fairy story, it is barely 30,000 words long and does not exhibit the full range of his talent or ideas. Or you might say Nineteen Eighty-four. His last novel is a brilliant dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain, drawing on the dictatorships of mid-twentieth-century Europe as well as Orwell’s contemporary experience of post-war austerity Britain; it’s bleak, it’s grim and it’s bitterly funny. It bestowed two new phrases upon the English language – ‘Room 101’ and ‘Big Brother’ (both of which became the titles of television programmes: can any other writer rival that?). Yet one feels it is not fully developed as a novel: the characters, except for the protagonist Winston, are lightly sketched in, and it’s as much a vehicle for ideas as it is a work of art. We can rule out his earlier novels. They are all very well worth reading; but they are all flawed in various ways. No, the book we should direct our enquirer towards is a collection of George Orwell’s essays. That is where the reader will discover the quintessential Orwell. Bernard Crick, who edited the definitive Penguin collection, makes the point neatly in his introduction: giving the essays top billing clears up the puzzlement of those ‘who believe that Orwell is a great figure but cannot honestly say that any one of his books measures up to his fame’. The Orwell of the essays has a pungent literary personality. He’s dauntingly knowledgeable, decided in his views and trenchant in their expression, a non-sufferer of fools, an enemy of pretension and hypocrisy; yet withal humane, reasonable, decent. He writes as if he’s just an ordinary bloke – yet not an ordinary ordinary bloke, but an exceptionally well-read, politically aware, sensitive and intelligent ordinary bloke with wide-ranging interests and a view on everything. Just skimming through the titles of his essays gives one a sense of his range: ‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’, ‘Anti-Semitism in Britain’, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, ‘Good Bad Books’, ‘In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse’, ‘The Decline of the English Murder’. Some of the essays are unabashedly highbrow; he’s at his ease writing about James Joyce, or T. S. Eliot, or Salvador Dalí, or reviewing the latest book by Bertrand Russell. At the same time he loves to delve into the stuff of everyday life and report on its social, cultural or political significance: there are essays on seaside postcards, on boys’ comics, on music-hall comedy. It has subsequently become common practice to subject everyday activities and events to intellectual analysis: semioticians do it, cultural studies dons do it, brainy journalists with English degrees do it. But it was Orwell who began the trend and to this day no one does it quite as searchingly, as wittily and as readably as he did it. For Orwell, writing was never far removed from life. He brings the same energy, the same physicality to his prose as he would to making a table or digging a garden. One can recognize Orwell from a single sentence; his style is as distinctive as a hallmark:Orwell set out his own views on prose style in his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, written in 1946. He begins with one of his trademark sweeping (but convincing) generalizations: ‘Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.’ He then offers five samples of recently published, cringe-inducingly bad English prose, which amply bear out his contention that ‘prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house’. Bad writing of this kind has its attractions, as Orwell points out. It is easier; the phrases are already there, at one’s elbow. Moreover they allow one to shroud ugly ideas in drifts of verbiage. Orwell imagines[T]he toad, unlike the skylark or the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. All art is propaganda. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. I grew up in an atmosphere of militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly-rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
The connection between prose and politics is made clear: puffed-up prose allows one to defend the indefensible by means of euphemism, obfuscation and clichés that glide by without attracting notice. Toeing a party line is always bad for one’s writing; it’s only the rebels, the independent thinkers, whose writing is alive. Thus Orwell’s call for clarity is political as well as aesthetic. But how to ditch bad habits and start writing prose that really does express an individual’s thoughts, rather than pre-established positions? Orwell offers six rules:some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by so doing.’ Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours that the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
Every writer should have those rules on their desk or desktop. Prose was Orwell’s natural medium. In his literary criticism his comments on poetry are both astute and appreciative; but his own attempts at poetry are slightly embarrassing. With prose he is playing at home. For Orwell, prose is the vehicle of free thought and enquiry, and the defining art form of what he calls ‘the Protestant centuries’. Orwell was an atheist, but he located himself within the individualist tradition of Protestantism. In his essay ‘Inside the Whale’, referring to the religious divide in Europe in the seventeenth century, he says: ‘looking back, most modern people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one’. Not that this prevented him from admiring certain Catholic writers. His point is that good writing does not tend to emerge from uniformity of view; you can only write successfully about what you believe in, not what you feel you should believe in. All his essays in their various ways are a protest against bowing to authority – or against ‘the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’, as he put it. The Orwell of the essays is rooted in Englishness. His world view is informed by a deep love of his country, its customs and manners, its history, its literature (he writes perceptively about the great English writers, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens), its scenery and wildlife. This is not to accuse him of insularity. Far from it; he was internationalist in outlook, and his life and work are more closely associated with foreign lands than many other writers’: Burma, where he served in the Military Police for several years, out of which came his first novel, Burmese Days; the Paris of Down and Out in Paris and London; the Spain of Homage to Catalonia. Orwell’s experiences abroad gave him points of comparison the better to understand the country of his birth: he begins his analysis of England in the extended essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ by saying that English civilization is ‘as individual as that of Spain’. The passages that follow have become justly famous for their lyrical evocation of an Englishness that comprehends ‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes’. The essay is now over seventy years old, yet much of the English character Orwell described is still recognizable – our anti-intellectualism, our love of flowers, our fondness for hobbies and love of privacy, our bawdiness and love of drinking, our unarmed police and hatred of militarism, our hypocrisy and respect for the law. John Major quoted from this essay in a speech in the ’90s (that bit about old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of an autumn morning) and it swiftly became the best-known speech Major ever made. No doubt Orwell and Major would have disagreed politically about many things, but they have in common a love of their country. Orwell makes the point in more than one of his essays that patriotism tends to be sneered at by the Left. That’s as true and as regrettable today as it was when he was writing. One can love one’s country without being aggressive towards other countries; and one can love one’s country yet see its faults and want to reform them. Orwell himself is proof of this. One more aspect of Orwell’s essays deserves comment, and that is his sense of humour. Perhaps Orwell isn’t typically thought of as a funny writer, but he is. His combination of irony, indignation and brutal bluntness always brings a smile to my face. His essay ‘The Sporting Spirit’, written in 1945 after a British tour by the Moscow Dynamo football team, exemplifies these qualities. The only possible effect of such a visit, he says, would be to make Anglo-Soviet relations slightly worse than before. ‘Even the newspapers’, he says, ‘have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling.’ (I love the cynicism of ‘Even the newspapers’ – as though it can be taken for granted that the usual business of newspapers is to conceal facts.) Serious sport, Orwell says, has nothing whatsoever to do with fair play: rather, it is ‘bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence’. This is a one-sided, exaggerated view but it’s argued with such brio one finds oneself nodding in appreciation, especially when it comes to Orwell’s brilliant peroration:i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign word, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules rather than say anything outright barbarous.
Most journalism is by its nature ephemeral; but Orwell’s essays leap off the page a lifetime after they were written. The Penguin edition runs to 496 pages: a considerable body of work, especially when one reflects that he was only 46 when he died. Orwell believed in objective truth and hated pretension, double-standards and injustice. It’s tempting to speculate about what he would have made of today’s media, of the postmodernist grip on the humanities, of cultural relativism, of ‘post-truth’ politics. Fortunately, we still have his essays.If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Yugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 56 © Brandon Robshaw 2017
About the contributor
Brandon Robshaw lectures in Creative Writing and Literature for the Open University. His ‘young adult’ novel, The Infinite Powers of Adam Gowers, is published by Unbound.