The essays of George Orwell
Orwell arms us against the onslaughts of modernity. We should read him in full.
"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."
This is how George Orwell opens his famous essay, Why I Write. Over seven pages he unpicks his motivations for writing in the first place. As Christopher Hitchens remarked about his own unique talent, Orwell tells us that writing was something he was born to do: it was an inescapable and compulsive part of his nature. He tried to evade it, but in the end the potent critical intelligence, the unrelenting powers of observation and truth-facing, and the awareness, held since childhood, of a budding and abnormal literary talent all caught up with him.
This is the first of forty-one works in Penguin's Great Orwell edition of his collected essays. It is a small but surprisingly dense book of nearly 500 pages, and it contains some of the most important writing of the 20th century. Why I Write is the only place to start. The story of his literary development reveals the man, his intellectual prejudices, his honesty, and his deep reverence for the English language. He tells us of discovering "the joy of mere words" aged sixteen whilst reading Paradise Lost, whose stanzas sent shivers down his backbone. This respect for language was the touchstone to a writer whose talent lay in expressing difficult, often disturbing, ideas with complete honesty, simplicity and unpretentious clarity.
Politics and language: two sides of a coin
We learn later in The Prevention of Literature that, for Orwell, clear and lucid language can be born only of clear and honest thought. He tells us that:
"[to] write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox."
He returns to this motif repeatedly: precise and clear language is the only means of expressing the Truth. And he writes contemptuously of Marxist intellectuals who use stock phrases, technical jargon and foreign expressions. Such politicised language not only fails to connect with the vernacular of its reader — it is deliberately vague and obfuscating.
“Not only our political discourse, but the culture at large, is brimming with euphemistic, meaningless jargon that disguises the brute facts of its subject.”
Orwell despised nothing in his own time more than the use of the terms “pacification” or “transfer of population” to describe the de facto murder and pillaging of innocent peoples in Soviet Russia. In particular, he hated the way in which established and supposedly respectable people would use technical and cloudy jargon to justify evil in the service of the Marxist ideology. He writes in one of his greatest achievements, Politics and the English Language:
“Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you get good results by doing so’…[Instead,] a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
How familiar this all is to us. Not only our political discourse but the culture at large is brimming with euphemistic, meaningless jargon that disguises the brute facts of all manner of subjects. Rejecting the principle of merit is “diversity and inclusion”. The profound and widespread harm from Covid vaccines can be dismissed as “extremely rare side-effects”. The destruction of entire postcodes in American cities by hard-left rioters is “largely peaceful protest”. And “healthcare” is the appropriate term for a baby being torn from her mother’s womb twenty-four weeks into a pregnancy. Such language is designed to dull our senses and to insulate discourse from reality. It is how narratives are moulded and inconveniences are assuaged.
And this point operates in reverse, too. We see around us the use of deliberately inflated, hyperbolic language to describe things that, although nuanced or even genuinely justifiable, are described with resolute language in order to satisfy some political end. “Fascism”, “dictatorship”, “murder”, “pandemic”, “dangerous”, “violence”, “racist” — these words, and many more besides, have been traduced to the point of meaninglessness. The words mean whatever the leftists want them to mean. This is that same blurring of the edges that Orwell describes above; but this time in the service of ballooning the shape of the facts to fit swollen, obvious propaganda.
Orwell shows us that the acceptance and use of such warped language is the adjunct of intellectual pacification. These “ready-made phrases” relieve us of the trouble of thinking for ourselves or facing inconvenient facts:
“They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
To fall prey to obfuscated phraseology is to act only as a machine. It is the natural prerequisite of political conformity. Hence, some of the dramatic climaxes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are moments in which extraordinary power is exerted via absurd and contradictory sloganism: “Four legs good, two legs bad”; “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” and so forth.
Vitally, the effect on the characters is one of moral and intellectual paralysis. Both novels contain scenes in which indoctrinated groups recite insane mantras in a chorused lather of pseudo-religious conformism. It is through these mechanical, vapid slogans that some new enemy is allocated or fresh fears and persecutions are stoked. They function as chants that squash some impossible meaning into the speaker’s mind.
The only solution, Orwell argues, is to reject stock mantras and speak for oneself in the clearest and simplest language:
“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Churchill and Orwell
We should consider Orwell in reference to another great prophet of the totalitarian menace that was threatening to engulf European civilisation: Winston Churchill. Both men endured exile from their nominal political allies and were regarded as traitors of their class. Both had led lives of abnormal adventure in the age of dwindling imperialism, had experienced the savagery of combat, and stared death in the face. Orwell was shot through the throat in a trench during the Spanish Civil War. Churchill brushed with death continually throughout his young life — in India, in the Sudan and in the Boer War.
“Churchill once told his physician, Lord Moran, of a remarkable book he had read and intended to reread. That book was Nineteen Eighty-Four.”
And both men possessed an immense natural literary power that illuminated their times. Crucially, Churchill, like Orwell, despised the use of complex words over simple ones. In his wartime speeches, only a handful of words cannot be traced back to Anglo-Saxon origins. He refused to cloud his language with euphemism or false promise. Language, according to Churchill, must connect with the vernacular of the people.
What both men possessed above all was the ability to face hard truths against the prevailing gales of political orthodoxy. Not only could both men intuit the truth before almost anyone else, but they could tell it with a courage and steadfastness that set an example for all time. Orwell, although ostensibly a political opponent of Churchill's, expressed admiration, even affection, for the great war leader and acknowledged his literary powers.
And Churchill once told his physician, Lord Moran, of a remarkable book he had read and intended to reread. The book was Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is of course no accident that one great, prophetic mind was fascinated by the nightmarish political commentary of another great oracle of his day. It was at this juncture — state-imposed tyranny and its capacity to extinguish human freedom — that both men found their abiding political purpose.
But it was with his powerful critical intelligence that Orwell, like Churchill, was able to cut through the most complex of matters, identify their moral kernels, and lay them bare in unrelentingly clear prose. No other writer of Orwell's day saw the world with such acuity. And the key lay in his ability to present his analyses with a clarity and straightforwardness that belied the difficulty of his subject.
False idols: the lion and the unicorn
But he was not always right. In The Lion and the Unicorn and several other essays he argues for a socialist revolution that he believed wrongly to be on the horizon. He grossly overestimated the merits of socialism. And he misapprehended entirely the appetite among the British working-class to enact a cultural and economic upheaval. He claims in My Country Right or Left — an otherwise magnificent and timeless defence of patriotism against the snobbish, effete instincts of leftists — that "only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years".
“Such, Such Were the Joys is a brilliant and moving memoir of his childhood at the boarding school he attended prior to Eton. It is perhaps the single most engaging piece of writing I have ever read.”
Indeed, it is odd that he should have advocated for a mass upheaval in this country at all. He had either witnessed or critiqued the revolutionary disasters in Russia, Spain and Nazi Germany. Animal Farm, perhaps his finest work, reveals the terror and injustice that befalls the post-revolutionary society if its eyes are not open. That he actively sought a radical tearing of the social fabric in the country he loved is strange. But contradictions and double-think exist inevitably in even the greatest intellects.
Nonetheless, his essays reveal again and again a mind of immense learning, humour (there are many passages that I find genuinely hilarious), sensitivity, and observation. Orwell writes about everything from cigarettes, to toads in spring, to Shakespeare, to art, to bookshops, to battling his own comical procrastination. He is fascinating and entirely engrossing on every subject. And, throughout, the masterful strightforwardness of his writing sublimates these essays into art.
On childhood
Such, Such Were the Joys is a brilliant and moving memoir of his childhood at the boarding school he attended prior to Eton. It is perhaps the single most engaging piece of writing I have ever read. He writes of being beaten with stunning ferocity by the headmaster for wetting the bed, of being unpopular and irritating his peers, of being a poor boy in a school filled with rich boys — and of having that fact quite deliberately rubbed in his face by snobbish, malicious tutors.
Strange and sad details persist in the memory long after reading this essay. For example, each boy at the school was given a large cake with candles on for his birthday each year. This was shared out between the whole school at afternoon tea. Because his parents were not rich, Orwell never received a cake on his birthday despite always hoping for one. Such were the routine and trivial means by which his small-minded tutors stopped him from getting above his station in a pre-war world still governed by a depressingly turgid social hierarchy.
Such, Such Were the Joys not only reveals the intellectual and moral seeds of the man he would later become — including his powerful capacity for facing the truth, his penetrating intelligence, and his deep distaste for abuses of power — but also captures the essence of childhood:
“It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things that were in fact of no importance…Look back on your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer.”
Aside from its poignancy, it is also, like so much of Orwell’s writing, very, very funny. It is worth buying this book if only to read Such, Such Were the Joys.
The man in full
Orwell's essays are a pillar of 20th century literature. Not only is each essay brilliant in its own right, but together they reveal the spirit and the seeds of thought that would eventually bloom in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. In all of it, we see the imperishable regard for the individual human in his struggle for liberty, and we see a mind with the power to reduce dogma and ideology to timeless moral truths.
We owe it to ourselves to read Orwell in full, not only because of the immense enjoyment his work brings, but for the way in which he arms and encourages us against the endless onslaughts of the modern world.
Thanks, Fathom, for this essay. (Apologies for only now getting around to reading it!) I used to assign Orwell’s English language as retribution to bombastic students; eventually, I took to assigning it to the whole of classes as the first assignment of the semester. There was (and is, I suspect) something in the brain of a post-grad that compels him to write such avoidably bad codswallop. It needed to be ripped up by the roots as soon as possible!
In retrospect, I suppose I should have also assigned Nineteen Eighty-Four — if not for my sake, then for the sake of the future of western civilization.