Orwell the Rebel, Orwell the Critic, Orwell the Common Man, Orwell the Prophet, Orwell the Moralist. Saint George. In these 2,041 pages of his collected essays, journalism, and letters we meet them all--each with that long, thin, strong, bony face, each a man of immense intellectual and personal honor whose burning clarity of thought, intellectual fervor, unswerving courage, and bottom line decency make his one of the twentieth century's genuinely heroic lives.
More than a great writer--the finest journalist of his time and most
accomplished English essayist since Hazlitt
--Orwell was a great man who scrupulously refused to allow ideology (he
was a committed socialist) or personal/political loyalties to deny what
his senses told him was the truth. Again and again in these volumes--in
flat-out declarations--Orwell attacks his countrymen, his close friends,
even his own past opinions and illusions when he thought them wrong. His
refusal to be any party's lap dog and his resolution to stand apart from
what he called "the smelly little orthodoxies contending for our souls"
made him, in the words of the grand old man of English letters, V.S. Pritchett,
nothing less than "the conscience of his generation."
In today's cultural cant, he told it like it was.
These four volumes (co-edited by his wife, Sonia, and Ian Angus) span what could be called the Orwell Era: the three decades from 1920 up to his death, at age 46, in 1950. To read--no, not to read, but to plunge into them and swim around for long periods of time carried along by their pleasurable currents--is to explore the inner world of one of this century's great thinkers. Unfortunately, any attempt to reconstruct that world within the several thousand words of a review is as hopeless as trying to capture the essence of a beautiful and diverse landscape by sketching it in pencil on the back of a grocery bag. You have to read these books yourself. And, if your experience with them parallels this writer's, block out about six weeks and plan to do little else but read, underline, and re-read.
Intensely personal in point of view, but always revealing of larger truths--many of which seem so obvious after Orwell states them--The Collected Essays constitute not only the moral and intellectual history of an entire age, but a dazzling one-man course in the art of writing. Orwell's prose is wonderfully straightforward and clear, without windy rhetoric or evasiveness, and always--always--clean, economical, and graceful regardless of whether he is writing personal reminiscences, literary criticism, or social commentary.
Because Orwell sought to "make political writing into an art," it is politics that he often addresses in this collection. Mainly, he raises his voice against German and Soviet totalitarianism, the various responses to these regimes in England (and in Europe generally) throughout the '30s and '40s, and mourning the betrayal and death of the socialist dream in Spain. Of the four books, Volume II, My Country Right or Left (which includes Orwell's personal War-time Diary and his essays "Literature and Totalitarianism" and "The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda") and Volume III, As I Please (whose title comes from the name of the column he wrote for the English socialist Tribune from 1943 to 1947 that fill much of this book) are the most politically focused--although both are balanced by pieces both serious and light-hearted on various aspects of English life.
Volume IV, In Front of Your Nose showcases several of Orwell's most familiar long essays, including "Politics and the English Language" (in which he discusses the six rules for writing, the last being "break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") and "Such, Such Were the Joys", both a boyhood memoir and searing condemnation of the crippling tyranny of mind and soul, humiliation, and beatings that passed for education in elite English prep schools--painful experiences that would become the roots of his own social and literary consciousness, his detestation of money and privilege, and his unsentimental sympathy for the weak.
While all four books resonate in your brain long after you put them down, Volume I, An Age Like This is the most eclectic and holds many of the series' strongest pieces, including "Why I Write" ("...because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing...(but) I could not do the work of writing if it were not also an aesthetic experience."); Orwell's diary that became the basis of his popular and critically praised The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), his first hand, in-the-trenches expose of the squalid pits that were prewar English mining and factory towns; and a gutsy review of Henry Miller's then almost universally reviled Tropic of Cancer which Orwell alone commended for reminding us all that "Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time", along with "Inside the Whale", a longer appraisal of Miller he uses as a pretext to lament the impoverished English literary scene of the '30s.
A sack stuffed full of literary gems, An Age Like This also offers his long, fascinating assessment of Charles Dickens whom Orwell contends "can be defined only by what he was not" and criticizes for the "utter lack of constructive suggestion anywhere in his work"--all the while granting Dickens (as well as Tolstoy, whom he similarly rakes in Volume III) a special kind of genius.
Additionally, this volume contains two of Orwell's most engaging personal essays: "Bookshop Memories" and "Marrakech", the former laying to rest the myth of quaintness surrounding English second-hand bookshops:
...so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios...(but instead)...the thing that really struck me was a rarity of really bookish people...I doubt whether ten percent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all...
"Marrakech" is one of the tightest, most evocative travel essays ever written; its first line alone--a line a writer must fall in love with--conveys a stronger sense of place and culture than entire pieces by lesser talents: "As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later." At this time of his life, Orwell was poor, yet in "Marrakech" he relates sharing his small possessions with a stranger and an animal, and also sympathizing with the humility and hostility imposed on them by their hunger. He then goes on to condemn a British colonialism (as he does in "The Hanging", set in Burma, also in this volume) that dehumanizes oppressors and oppressed alike, all the while plopping the reader down in an uncomfortable, alien landscape where:
The people have brown faces...Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone...
Orwell wrote about what he was interested in. And he was interested, judging from The Collected Essays' diverse subject matter, in everything. Yet, as you read, patterns begin to emerge that connect far-ranging, seemingly unrelated pieces--common themes that transform Orwell from a towering intellectual abstraction into a regular guy. Someone to regard with awe, yes, but also someone to like.
For example, here is a man who has sold over 40 million books in 60 languages whose world view could accommodate not only the lofty issues of global politics and high literary culture, but the mundane details of everyday life as well: a letter analyzing Vacandard's history of the Inquisition contains, in the same paragraph, Orwell's lamentation that "our hedgehog has disappeared." Add to this the charm of discovery provided mainly by his letters and "As I Please" columns--both filled with accounts of his wide reading, fishing in his neighborhood, the progress of his little garden, friends who forge medieval swords, and his unaffected love for trees, animals, and birds, huge Christmas dinners and good tea. He even penned a paean to the common toad whose "puzzling sex life" he likens to certain Anglo-Catholic rituals.
Then, too, a fierce patriotism always pulsed in Orwell. Even while calling for democratic socialism to overthrow the tyranny of the bourgeoisie, he was an English patriot at his core and a lover of traditional values. Orwell's old school chum Cyril Connolly, who later edited the English literary magazine Horizon (the first platform for Orwell's long essays), called him "a revolutionary in love with 1910." True. Only a thoroughgoing Englishman would dare to write "In Defense of English Cooking", meticulously outline his own eleven-step prescription for brewing "A Nice Cup of Tea", create a mythical ideal pub ("The Moon under Water"), or state (in his essay "The English People", Volume III) his conviction that "The world is sick of chaos and it is sick of dictatorship. Of all the peoples the English are likeliest to find a way of avoiding both." Proud portraits all of the English national character.
Among the best of Orwell's qualities was his vision; he looked at everything with detachment, and his determined search for truth included an immaculate honesty about himself. He openly confesses to moral cowardice as a young man (in "Shooting an Elephant") and to egregious errors in judgment as an older, presumably wiser one, including his early belief that England could only win the war under democratic socialism. But his candid self-appraisal of Orwell, the novelist, is even more endearing. "I rather wish I had never read Ulysses," he wrote to a friend in the mid-'30s:
It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or a baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak, same as ever.
Above all, it is Orwell's sincere sense of mission and absolute independence of character that draw us so powerfully to him. He discovers for himself, for instance, what conditions were like in English mines, hop fields, and workhouses before he voices strong opinions--a man totally involved in what he feels he should do. And Orwell the socialist went beyond mere impassioned polemic. He put his body behind his beliefs and was shot in the throat while fighting against Franco in Spain (with the semi-anarchist POUM instead of the Stalinist International Brigade which he viewed as counter-revolutionary), an experience that made him a political man the rest of his life and confirmed his belief in a free and open society of classless men.
Moreover, he had the courage to advance an idea, test it against his own experience, hold it until it was no longer true, then drop it. Fresh back from Spain, a wounded, embittered Orwell wrote of the coming war between Germany and England as a classic Marxist confrontation of two equally undesirable imperialist powers. But as he came to understand the true nature of Fascism, he shifted his position and stated unequivocally his belief that, in spite of its imperfections, the English way of life was worth preserving.
Orwell never backed away from the truth, or what he believed to be the truth--even if it made him, from time to time, a pariah in the country he loved. When, at war's end, Englishmen screamed for malignant revenge, Orwell was branded a Fascist sympathizer for writing in the Tribune:
...there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless; as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing SS officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting.
Like William Lloyd Garrison a century earlier, Orwell never retreated an inch, never equivocated-- even in the face of difficult or unpopular truths. And he was heard.
To too many readers today, George Orwell means Animal Farm and 1984, "Some are More Equal Than Others" and "Big Brother is Watching You." But, as this extraordinary treasury demonstrates, Orwell's true genius lay neither in fable nor prophecy. It resided, instead, in the grace and lean musculature of his prose, in his vigorous and clear-minded commentary on the social, literary, and political atmosphere of his time, and in his relentless integrity.
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