Orwell at Work
On the essays, journalism, and letters of an author whose time has come, and stayed.
In an irony that would be ruefully relished by the author himself, the adjective “Orwellian” signifies the opposite of the values George Orwell espoused. Informed by his anti-Stalinist allegory, Animal Farm, and his powerful imagining of a totalitarian future in 1984, the adjective has come to stand for oppressive surveillance, the corruption of language for political purposes, and the ruthless redefinition of civic norms and historical facts in service of authoritarian ends. Orwell’s enduring influence as a figure of conscience, of course, rests on his eloquent resistance to all the dangers “Orwellian” now calls to mind. Importantly, his own stances were neither rigid nor unequivocal, for he understood that the power of conscience was based not on conclusions but rather on constant questioning; he knew a moral compass is not a set of step-by-step directions, but a tool to judge direction relative to present context and, yes, permanent coordinates. As a result, he is that rare writer whose working journalism remains as edifying as his most celebrated masterpieces.
Thus the special interest of his Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, a four-volume set that has just been reissued in paperback by the Boston publisher David R. Godine. The books — An Age Like This, 1920–1940; My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943; As I Please, 1943–1945; and In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950 — span the entirety of Orwell’s writing life.
His sense of vocation came to him as a boy. “From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer,” is the opening of his famous 1946 essay, “Why I Write,” which appears as a kind of preface to the otherwise chronological presentation of material in the quartet of Collected volumes, which was prepared after the author’s death by his wife, Sonia Orwell, and Ian Angus. In her introduction to the assemblage, Sonia Orwell writes that in the pages that follow, which mix political and literary matters, “what we really hear is the sound of a personal voice, an individual talking at random of the things that concern him on many different levels.” He argued out his ideas as he went along, she continues, as if he were “examining his thoughts in conversation.”
The result for us as readers, as we move from letter to review to essay to weekly newspaper column, is one of the most fascinating engagements with a working writer we’re likely to discover. Among the correspondence with publishers and commissioning editors, replete with bracing alertness to the need to pay the bills, there are marvelous musings on a wide variety of subjects, from the vagaries of book reviewing:
It not only involves praising trash — though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment — but constantly inventing reactions toward books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.
. . . to how to make a proper cup of tea:
When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial.
There are also expositions of political realities, advocacy of (largely left-wing) causes, and reflections on crises from the Spanish Civil War to the Battle of Britain. On literary themes, we find analyses ephemeral and enduring on subjects as diverse as Dickens, Kipling, Henry Miller, and P. G. Wodehouse.
Last, but by no means least, these volumes contain some of the most memorable essays in English literature, including “Shooting an Elephant,” “My Country Right or Left,” “Reflections on Gandhi,” “Such, Such Were the Joys,” and “Politics and the English Language,” the last of which makes especially timely reading in our current season of inarticulate distress:
One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
The different forms of prose and the different angles of vision they describe make the four volumes of Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters rewarding to read straight through and even more of a pleasure to pick up and browse at whim. They are a lifetime’s library of rumination, with much to say about writing, politics, and the quandaries of conscience in modern society.
“At 50,” Orwell wrote with some finality in the manuscript notebook he kept in the last year of his life, “everyone has the face he deserves.” These are the last of his words to appear in this noble legacy to his career as a writer; he died at forty-six.
