Essays Read online

  Orwell could even reflect on the nature of humour without being pretentious, for he saw comedy and tragedy as always close in human life. In his essay ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, plumbing the moral depths of popular vulgar, comic picture postcards, he says that we all have in our minds inseparably both Don Quixote, hero and saint, and Sancho Panza, the ‘unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul’.

  A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty, or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want to wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of Fuehrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, Papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time … It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

  To revert for a moment to the question of the fictive ‘I’: would it really matter if that same large chorus of common men were to cry, ‘Come off it, Governor, you’ve never read proclamations and whatnot of generals before battle in your life.’ For this passage is a good example of Orwell using the comic to be profound, and being profound about the nature of the comic. He makes an important theoretical point in plain language, just as in the previously quoted passage, when discussing the difficulties of crossing class barriers, he avoids theoretical discourse and just makes the seemingly casual but profound and morally disturbing observation that the classes actually meet as equals only in ‘summer schools’. When I have read that passage to mixed audiences it goes down a treat, provoking the laughter of recognition; but academic audiences resist it, finding it patronizing, patriotic, romantic and ‘untheorized’.

  Orwell’s use of the plain style also reveals something surprising about the commonsensical writer: an almost metaphysical intensity about the value of ordinary things, a kind of secular pietism. Agnostic though he was, his language is soaked in Protestant imagery, the sense of everything in the world being part of God’s own deliberate creation and his ‘wonder-working providence’. Consider George Bowling, the fat and sweaty commercial traveller of his immediate pre-war novel, Coming Up for Air. Bowling, a lower-middle-class common man if ever there was, is bored stiff with his boring wife, his boring job, his nasty children, and he is nostalgic, almost rotten with nostalgia; so he vanishes for a couple of days – not chasing another woman, as Hilda suspects, but to revisit scenes of childhood and wallow in memory. He ruminates:

  I’ve always had that peculiar feeling for fishing. You’ll think it damned silly, no doubt, but I’ve actually half a wish to go fishing even now, when I’m fat and forty-five and got two kids and a house in the suburbs. Why? Because in a manner of speaking I am sentimental about my childhood – not my own particular childhood, but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now, I suppose, just about at its last kick. And fishing is somehow typical of that civilisation. As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool – and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside – belongs to the time before the war, before the radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler. There’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.

  Does anyone go fishing nowadays, I wonder? Anywhere within a hundred miles of London there are no fish left to catch … who fishes in mill-streams or moats or cow ponds any longer? Where are the English coarse fish now? When I was a kid every pond and stream had fish in it. Now all the ponds are drained, and when the streams aren’t poisoned with chemicals from factories they’re full of rusty tins and motor-bike tyres.9

  Notice how close this is to ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’. And, leaving aside the characteristic comic, sardonic exaggeration of the last paragraph, think of the invocation and litany of ‘solid’ names, and recall the passage from ‘Why I Write’ where he speaks of his love of ‘the surface of the earth’ and of ‘pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information’. Secularist though he was, it is as if all things in nature and even unlikely artefacts have spiritual value and should be loved, respected; he implies a proper, almost sacred order between man and nature that the factories, aspirins and bombs threaten, and can destroy if not controlled Proto-ecologist?

  A strikingly similar passage occurs in the work of another British secular writer H. G. Wells. It is not easy to escape from Protestantism, certainly not just by ceasing to believe in God. Wells turns pietistic not even over fish but over beer bottles. In The History of Mr Polly, poor old Polly has run away from his nagging wife and his boring shop, burned it down in fact (neither writer is a model for feminists or free-marketeers), and has gone tramping – a ‘Quest’, of course.

  The nearer he came to the place the more he liked it. The windows on the ground floor were long and low, and they had pleasing red blinds. The green tables outside were agreeably ringed with memories of former drinks … Against the wall was a broken oar, two boat hooks and the stained and faded red cushions of a pleasure boat. One went up three steps to the glass steps to the glass-panelled door and peeped into a broad, low room with a bar and a beer-engine, behind which there were many bright and helpful-looking bottles against mirrors, and great and little pewter measures, and bottles fastened in brass wire upside down, with their corks replaced by taps, and a white china cask labelled ‘Shrub’, and cigar boxes and boxes of cigarettes, and a couple of Toby jugs and a beautifully coloured hunting scene framed and glazed, showing the most elegant people taking Piper’s Cherry Brandy, and … satirical verses against swearing and asking for credit, and three very bright, red-cheeked apples and a round-shaped clock.

  But these were the mere background to the really pleasant thing in the spectacle, which was quite the plumpest woman Mr Polly had ever seen …10

  But these things are certainly not ‘mere background’; for Wells they were as much part of ‘the rich tapestry of life’ as the plump woman. And remember that, for Orwell, ‘the proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside.’ To them what mattered, Winston Smith realized, were not the great questions raised by the Party, but ‘individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself – just like the piece of coral from a bygone era that Winston finds in the junk shop. Does one call all this a kind of commonsensical mysticism, or the mysticism of common sense? Life is all right, good even, if one looks at it with the simple wonder of a child exploring everything as new, or with the heightened delight in ordinary things of a stoical person who knows that he or she is soon to die.

  Orwell’s plain style and his great skill in using the essay as a mode of expression are part of his cult of th
e ordinary, his faith in common sense and the common man. I find this very attractive. Of course, one does rather have to pick and choose what one praises or accepts as ordinary. But an account of how that is done could only be a treatise on phenomenology in the German or French manner, not an English essay.

  When considering what seems ordinary or important to Orwell, it should be remembered that the evidence for his priorities at any given time is necessarily incomplete. Only after the success of Animal Farm could he pick his shots, turn down some offers of work, and accept others or determine to write without having to consider too closely, like any relatively unknown writer, what journals there were and what their editors favoured, and without having to adapt the writing to the form, if not the colour, of a particular periodical. Like Aristotle’s good rhetorician, the essayist must know not just a subject and have something to say about it, but must know an audience and how to reach it. Unlike a modern columnist-essayist such as Neal Ascherson, Sean French, Christopher Hitchens, Bernard Levin or Hugo Young (all obviously influenced by him), Orwell cannot be found pontificating or puzzling on every major issue of his day, despite his political commitment, despite the fact that his best writing was, in the broadest sense, on political topics. Partly he lacked opportunity (for about two years his only regular column was in Tribune – which had a slightly wider circulation then) and partly he wished to convey, in his books as well as his essays, a general set of humanistic and democratic attitudes and beliefs far more than to provide a commentary on events: the precise subject matter was almost immaterial. In any case, the essayist who is a writer still making his way has a great deal more freedom than opportunity. Perhaps this is why so many of the finest English essayists have come from obscurity, even poverty, which has made them, when reflecting on ordinary life, so much more attractive and interesting to most of us today than the elegant, Augustan mannerisms of Addison, Steele and the old Spectator essayists.

  Bernard Crick

  1. Why I Write

  From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

  I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort-of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious – i.e. seriously intended – writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ – a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war of 1914–18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also, about twice, attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.

  However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d’occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems to me astonishing speed – at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week – and helped to edit school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a matchbox, half open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf,’ etc. etc. This habit continued till I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

  When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost,

  So hee with difficulty and labour hard

  Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee,

  which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first complete novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

  I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

  1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But the
re is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

  2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact or one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or a writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

  3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

  4. Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.