Inspired by Top Ten Tuesday, I’m writing this week on my all-time-favorite authors. My first post, on Ernest Hemingway, is here.
George Orwell
George Orwell in 1941
Orwell is better known—at least in my experience—for his fiction than for his non-fiction, which is a shame, since his fiction is not his best work. He is certainly a competent fiction writer: I would not include either 1984 or Animal Farm among my favorite books, but they are striking and provocative and deservedly read as classics. But he is a brilliant essayist. His “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946, is one of the very few things I would consider required reading for aspiring writers—not because it is a how-to list for good writing, in the vein of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, but because Orwell gets at the root of why it is important to write well.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
George Orwell, Essays (London: Penguin Modern Classics), 349.
As a socialist, of course, Orwell’s particular concern is “political regeneration,” but the underlying point remains the same regardless of ideology: vague language (Orwell attacks the use of cliched metaphors and pretentious “inflated” words specifically) reflects vague thinking and leads to more vague thinking.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought….[the] invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundation, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.
Essays, 357.
Another of my favorites among Orwell’s essays is “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”:
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘art,’ and everything is OK. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are OK; kicking little girls on the head is OK; even a film like L’Age d’Or is OK. It is also OK that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like a rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to the pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover the ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth tomorrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear. And, after all, the worse crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate, or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.
Essays, 252-3.
My absolute favorite of Orwell’s works, though, is his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, which reads more poignantly than any of his fiction, and is at times as tense as a thriller. It does an excellent job explaining the war and the political infighting in layman’s terms, but it’s not a “war story” in the strictest sense. It is a human tragedy told humbly and perceptively, in graceful prose.
And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Orlando, FL: Harcourt), 231-2.
