Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Reserved about his private life and wary of improper publicity, Orwell was reluctant to provide biographical details for his dust jackets and, with a prematurely lined face and idiosyncratic mustache, didn't think his photograph would be a good advertisement for his books. He justly complained about the low standards of book critics and told a fellow novelist, Anthony Powell: “the reviewers are awful, so much so that in a general way I prefer the ones who lose their temper & call one names to the silly asses who mean so well & never bother to discover what you are writing about.” Though Animal Farm was enthusiastically received in 1945, Orwell felt reviewers had missed an essential aspect, compared them to the villains of his book and called them “grudging swine … not one of them said it's a beautiful book.”

  Orwell's primary ambition was to be a writer of fiction, and he carefully studied writers he admired—like Edgar Poe, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce—to learn how they'd achieved their artistic effects. His account of Poe's realistic fantasy suggests how he created his own convincing futuristic world in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): “Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is it, then, that [his] stories … which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it.”

  Writing in July 1933 to one of his girlfriends about Lawrence (who'd died, neglected and reviled, in 1930), Orwell tried to account for his powerful, heroically primitive vision: “there is a quality about L that I can't define, but everywhere in his work one comes on passages of an extraordinary freshness, vividness, so that tho’ I would never, even given the power, have done it quite like that myself, I feel he has seized on an aspect of things that no one else would have noticed…. He reminds me of someone from the Bronze Age.”

  Orwell was passionate about Joyce's Ulysses, which he'd bought when working in Paris and smuggled into England. In a letter to another girlfriend a year later, he confessed that “Joyce interests me so much that I can't stop talking about him once I start.” He was writing his weakest novel, A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), very much under the influence of Joyce. But he went on to make fun of his work in comparison to the Master's: “My novel, instead of going forwards, goes backwards with the most alarming speed. There are whole wads of it that are so awful that I really don't know what to do with them…. When I read [Ulysses] 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 baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.” He knew that he could not be a Joyce or a D. H. Lawrence, but realized that he had to keep trying to find his own narrative style.

  Lawrence was a great travel writer and—like Joyce in Ulysses—had broken through traditional restraints with his vivid sexual descriptions in Lady Chatterley's Lover. (Both novels, suppressed on grounds of obscenity, were only published in England after contentious trials.) But Orwell disliked both travel books and detailed descriptions of sexual acts. Henry Miller's narcissistic account of his life in Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi, for example, “has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the ‘soul’ of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers.” And Orwell felt that in a novel by his friend Humphrey Slater, “the sex stuff was out of place and in poor taste,” disapproved of “this modern habit of describing love-making in detail,” and thought it would one day seem as meaningless as the sentimental gush of Victorian novels. He was surely right about this modern obsession. Depictions of sex in contemporary novels and films have become ever more graphic, ugly and depressing.

  Orwell's illuminating comments on his own work show how desperately he wanted to be a writer and how long he had to struggle to become one. He destroyed his early stories and first novel; and after returning from police duties in Burma, worked as a dishwasher, hop-picker, tutor, teacher and tramp before publishing his first book, the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), at the age of twenty-nine. In his introduction to the French translation the following year, he defended the truthfulness and explained the artistic rearrangement of the incidents in that book: “As for the truth of my story, I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting. I did not feel I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another.”

  Orwell found it difficult to invent fictional incidents and wanted to use the events of his early life in Coming Up for Air (1939), but also saw the technical weakness in telling the story from the hero's point of view. “You are perfectly right,” he told a friend, “about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator. I am not a real novelist anyway, and that particular vice is inherent in writing a novel in the first person, which one [i.e., Orwell] should never do. One difficulty I have never solved is that one has masses of experience which one passionately wants to write about, e.g. the part about fishing in that book, and no way of using them up except by disguising them as a novel.” Orwell felt that he should use every scrap of his experience in his work. If it couldn't be placed in an essay or review, it ought to be “used up” in his fiction.

  Most writers, after struggling for seventeen years to achieve literary success, would have remained in London to be lionized and enjoy their celebrity. But Orwell, immune to the effects of wealth and fame, couldn't endure the success of Animal Farm in 1945. It didn't match his guilt-ridden idea of himself. Success also led to the conflict between accepting endless lucrative offers to write for periodicals and dedicating himself to his more serious books. Nineteen Eighty-Four was beginning to take shape in his mind, and he wanted to rest for two months and allow the idea to germinate. “I am anxious to get out of London,” he wrote a friend, “because I am constantly smothered under journalism—at present I am doing 4 articles every week—and I want to write another book which is impossible unless I can get 6 months quiet.” Quite unexpectedly, the man who'd always hated Scotland took off for the remote island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides.

  When he finished Nineteen Eighty-Four, under harsh living conditions and with a terminal illness, Orwell, with his usual honesty, saw the flaws in his work and conceded “the vulgarity of the [torture in] ’Room IOI’ business. I was aware of this while writing it, but I didn't know another way of getting somewhere near the effect I wanted…. I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied. I first thought of it in 1943. I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB.”

  Orwell's description of his ghastly treatment in the tuberculosis sanatorium is very close to his portrayal of Winston Smith after his torture in the novel and reveals Orwell's horrific condition when completing the book: “the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton…. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull…. He was aware of his ugliness.” When Orwell was in the sanatorium, the doctors had to take extreme measures to prevent him from writing. The medical staff, insisting on complete physical and mental rest, confiscated his typewriter. When he kept on writing with a ballpoint pen, they put his right arm in plaster.

  Orwell, usually able to write four serious articles a week (or about 200 articles a year!), was a desperately driven and manically compulsive writer. In one of his most revealing passages (in a notebook of 1949), he confessed, despite his extraordinary output, that he always felt guilty about his work and fearful
that his creative energy would dry up:

  [Since I started publishing in 1928] there has literally not been one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. Even at periods when I was working Io hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling, that I was wasting time. I can never get any sense of achievement out of the work that is actually in progress, because it always goes slower than I intend, & in any case I feel that a book or even an article does not exist until it is finished. But as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there never will be a next one—that my impulse is exhausted for good & all.

  Though guilt made Orwell miserable, it also energized him and drove him to produce his impressive body of work.

  Orwell completed the final draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four in November 1948, but found it too indecipherable to send to a typist. His friends desperately tried to find a London secretary to go to Jura. Despite intensive efforts, no one was willing to help the distinguished author type his extraordinary manuscript—even at two or three times the going rate of pay. He had to sit up in bed typing the final copy of the 150,000-word novel, finally collapsed and went into hospital. Mortally ill when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June 1949, he died seven months later, before he could enjoy his newfound wealth. The creation of the novel virtually killed Orwell, and its vision of the future (by a man who himself had no future) is correspondingly grim. It's not surprising that in “Why I Write” he exclaimed that “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

  II

  Orwell had limited success in creating a credible first-person narrator in his fiction, but the lively persona he created in his nonfiction made essays his most successful genre. His essays on writing fall into three main categories: the writer's life, popular literature and the search for truth. These essays—and three passages from his novels—cover many aspects of writing and reading, or how to deconstruct the meaning and purpose of pieces of writing: the deceptions of advertising, techniques of book reviewing, writers’ income and authors’ motives; the brutality of crime novels, definition of humor, mediocre but enduringly popular books and children's literature; the creation of new words, effects of propaganda, genesis of satire, suppression of literature, purity of language, relation between content and pleasure, political pamphlets, keeping a diary and rewriting history.

  With a keen nose for the bogus, Orwell saw early on the falsity and fraudulence of the newly spawned advertising agencies that serve the corporate economy and would eventually contaminate the media. Orwell, who'd been to school with the advertising innovator David Ogilvy, had amused himself in childhood by answering a fake ad for a weight-reducing course and, by pretending to be an obese lady, had deliberately prolonged the cheeky correspondence. “Do come before ordering your summer frocks,” the weight-reducer insisted, “as after taking my course your figure will have altered out of recognition.” This went on for some time, he recalled, “during which the fee gradually sank from two guineas to half a crown, and then I brought the matter to an end by writing to say that I had been cured of my obesity by a rival agency.”

  In Keep the Aspidistra Flying Orwell's embittered hero and would-be poet Gordon Comstock is forced by poverty to take a humiliating job as a hack writer in a cynical, hard-boiled, Americanized advertising agency. He calls it the dirtiest swindle of capitalism, and (in a homely farm metaphor) “the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.” When the boss discovers that Comstock has published poetry, he promotes him to copy-editor and launches him on a successful career. Fearful that he'll be trapped by “blind worship of the money-god,” Gordon manages to escape. But when his girlfriend Rosemary becomes pregnant during their plein air frolics, he feels obliged to marry her and is trapped once again in his old job.

  Orwell's family in Southwold and Leeds, and visitors to his London flat and house on the Scottish island of Jura, emphasized how hard he worked and how he constantly pounded away at the typewriter. The endless clacking sound became part of his legend. But no one ever mentioned him sitting quietly (if not comfortably, for he thrived on hardship) in a chair and actually reading the books he was reviewing. The chief bore (he felt) was having to read at least fifty pages of each book to avoid making a howler, but he eventually learned to skip expertly through these useless volumes.

  He begins the autobiographical “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” like a short story—with himself as the satiric victim. Looking (like Orwell) much older than his age and plagued by unpaid bills, predatory creditors and tax demands, the literary hack tries in vain to write his way out of poverty as a book reviewer. Since most books are worthless yet somehow have to be praised, Orwell calls book reviewing “a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job.” To alleviate this tedium, he advocates fewer but longer reviews; and claims that the book reviewer is, at least, better off than the film critic (who has to praise a greater proportion of trash). Since there's an endless supply of amateurs eager to break into print, there will always be desperate men willing to have a shot at the disparate books that, the editor falsely claims, “ought to go well together.”

  Most of Orwell's fictional heroes are impoverished and (like Charles Dickens and George Gissing) he puts a great deal of emphasis on money, or the lack of it. In August 1941, when he took a job at the BBC and earned a salary of £640 a year, for the first time since 1925 he made more money than he had as a policeman in Burma. A writer like Gordon Comstock usually has to have another job. In “The Cost of Letters” Orwell, always the Socialist, states that a writer should ideally have £1,000 a year, which would enable him to live in reasonable comfort without joining the privileged class. He concedes that it's almost impossible to earn this income solely by writing books; and that a second occupation, useful for putting the author in touch with the real world, should be non-literary. He'd been strongly discouraged by his conventional family, who were horrified by his resignation from his secure job in the Burmese police, and recalls that “I had to struggle desperately at the beginning, and if I had listened to what people said to me I would never have been a writer.”

  Orwell's instinctive approach to literary topics was moral. He analyzed crime novels in “Raffles and Miss Blandish” to reveal the social and political dimensions of popular art. In a classic contrast he argues that there was an “immense difference in moral atmosphere” between the two works of fiction (the Raffles stories by E. W. Hornung, beginning in 1899, and No Orchids for Miss Blandish, by James Hadley Chase, in 1939) and discusses the “change in the popular attitude that this probably implies.” The first had an almost schoolboy atmosphere; the second, full of cruelty and corruption, was “a header into the cesspool.” There are, however, perverse elements in Orwell's condemnation. He loathed Chase's fictional character, “whose sole pleasure in life consists in driving knives into other people's bellies” but, as he himself sadistically wrote in “Shooting an Elephant,” as a young policeman in Burma he thought the “greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.” He blames the horrors of James Hadley Chase on the American obsession with violence—though the author was in fact English. Connecting his thesis to wartime politics, Orwell argues that Chase's obsession with the struggle for power and the triumph of the strong over the weak reveals “the interconnection between sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism.”

  Just as “Raffles and Miss Blandish” explains the moral and stylistic decline of crime novels, “Funny, But Not Vulgar” defines comedy and describes the decline of English humorous writing from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Humor, Orwell observes with many lively examples, must “show a willingness to attack the beliefs and the virtues on which society ne
cessarily rests” and dare to upset the established order. All comedy attacks social evils, and in order to be funny you have to be serious and include an element of vulgarity.

  “Good Bad Books” reveals Orwell's nostalgia for the idyllic prewar era of his youth as well as his keen interest in popular “escape” literature. Like his previous essays, it also attempts to explain the decline of the contemporary novel. Good bad books (a term he borrowed from G. K. Chesterton) show that “one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously,” and that “art is not the same thing as cerebration.” Despite Orwell's valiant attempt to revive interest in out-ofdate popular fiction, only Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rider Haggard's She and perhaps Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin—all of which have been made into films—are still in print and read today.

  “Riding Down from Bangor,” closely related to “Good Bad Books,” describes Orwell's strong attraction to works like Helen's Babies and Little Women that formed his childhood vision of America. The characters in these books, though slightly ridiculous, have “integrity, or good morale, founded partly on an unthinking piety … a native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling, which was the product, presumably, of the unheard-of freedom and security” of nineteenth-century America. He's nostalgic about the lost world of these books that have no hint “of the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man”: unemployment and State interference. When Orwell, a new boy at his preparatory school, had to stand on a table in the dormitory and sing a song, he sang “Riding Down from Bangor,” the American folksong he quotes in the essay.