Orwell (33 page)

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 necessarily 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.

In 1942 Orwell wrote that “Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.” But in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell also invented many vivid phrases: “Big Brother Is Watching You,” “Two Minutes Hate,” “Thought Police,” “Thoughtcrime,” “Facecrime.” “Doublethink,” “Memory Hole,” “Vaporized” and “Unperson.” These words, which uncannily expressed the ideas and emotions of people living under totalitarian oppression, read like advertising catchwords. They became political shorthand during the Cold War, and remain so today.

In “New Words” Orwell ventures into the realm of dreams and psychology, argues for the expansion of language and boldly but impractically suggests that “it would be quite feasible to invent a vocabulary, perhaps amounting to several thousands of words, which would deal with parts of our experience now practically unamenable to language.” Just as the French Academy was created in the seventeenth century to preserve the purity of language, so, Orwell argues, “several thousands of people with the necessary time, talents and money” could, by dedicating themselves to this noble task, create new words “for the now unnamed things [intuitions, fantasies, dreams] that exist in the mind.” Through this unrealistic project Orwell hoped to increase understanding through language and reduce “the star-like isolation in which human beings live.”

“The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda” considers the influence of history on literature and explains why English writers have shifted from an interest in form over content in the 1920s to the reverse in the 1930s. Minimizing the military, political and social effects of the Great War, which shattered a century of relative peace in Europe and killed ten million men, Orwell argues that it was the Depression and the Second World War that forced writers into “a world in which not only one's life but one's whole scheme of values is constantly menaced.” Detachment is no longer possible and “literature had to become political because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty.” Propaganda has crept into art and aesthetic judgments are now influenced by the author's prejudices and beliefs.

Orwell's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of
Animal Farm
describes the genesis of his most humorous and wickedly satiric book. As in “Why I Write,” he describes his background—including his five years with the police in Burma, association with the criminal class in Paris and warfare in Spain—to explain his political beliefs. His experience in Spain taught him about the great dangers to clear style and free thought: “how easily totalitarian
propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries” and “the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.” His duty, he felt, was to expose the illusions created by such propaganda, make people “see the Soviet régime for what it really was” and destroy the Soviet myth in order to revive the real Socialist movement. Inspired by seeing a little boy whip a huge farm horse, Orwell imagined a revolution of oppressed beasts and analyzed “Marx's theory from the animals' point of view.”

Orwell's lucid, witty and ironic style is perfectly suited to his political allegory of the Russian Revolution. In
Animal Farm
the actual writing of political slogans takes place after the revolution. The pigs, Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky), become literate, reduce the principles of Animalism to seven commandments, and use writing to manipulate the animals and consolidate their political power. As the revolution is gradually betrayed and the pigs replace the oppressive farmer they have overthrown, each of these sacred rules is broken. Finally, the horse Clover realizes that the last and most important commandment—“All animals are equal”—has also been changed to “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.” The most famous phrase in his fable, rewritten by the shrewd, self-serving pigs, combines Thomas Jefferson's fundamental concept in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” with Eve's command to the serpent in Milton's
Paradise Lost:
“render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior.” The defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish War taught him that “history is written by the winners.” His own minimal achievement, while working as a talks producer at the wartime BBC, was to keep “our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been.”

Several of Orwell's essays explore the conditions that allow or prevent the freedom of expression (and freedom from self-censorship) that's essential for good writing to exist. The polemical “Prevention of Literature” considers the more insidious factors, apart from totalitarianism, that mitigate against the creation of great, or even honest literature. It also anticipates Orwell's portrayal of Winston Smith's job in
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
rewriting and perverting history in order to adhere to the ever-changing party line. In England, he argues, “the immediate enemies of truthfulness and hence freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats, but on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all.” All literature is political in an age like his own, when fears, hatreds and loyalties affect everyone's beliefs. In one of his most striking sentences, he insists that a writer must have freedom of thought and oppose the prevailing doctrines in order to
create serious work: “to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox…. Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.” The assumption that the act of writing is in itself a political act runs through all Orwell's work.

In a 1946 review of a book by the novelist Georges Bernanos, Orwell, always ready to expose poor style, noted: “a tendency towards rhetoric—that is, a tendency to say everything at enormous length and at once forcibly and vaguely—seems to be a common failing with present-day French writers.” His classic essay “Politics and the English Language” opposes this trend and forcefully advocates clear language. Orwell's ideas were foreshadowed by
Leviathan
(1651), the major work of the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, who had also attacked the abuse of words, argued that a sane, stable society must have a clear, stable language and believed that pure style was not only good in itself but also a civil duty. Writing during the English civil war, in an elegant and balanced style, Hobbes insisted that clear words benefited society while confused and confusing style could lead to seditious disruption:

The light of human minds is perspicuous words, but by exact definition first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; reason is the pace; increase of science, the way; and the benefit of mankind, the end. And, on the contrary, metaphors, and senseless and ambiguous words, are like
ignes fatui
[delusions]; and reasoning upon them is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities; and their ends, contention and sedition, or contempt.

Hobbes also observed that the misuse of words and creation of meaningless speech—also the subject of Orwell's essay—were intended to deceive rather than enlighten readers:

There is yet another fault in the discourses of some men; which may also be numbered amongst the sorts of madness; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before … by the name of absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others from intention to deceive by obscurity.

E. M. Forster, himself a notable stylist and, in A
Passage to India
, a major influence on
Burmese Days
(1934), wrote that in “Politics and the English Language” Orwell “was passionate over the purity of prose, and … tears to bits some passages of contemporary writing. It is a dangerous game … but it ought to be played, for if prose decays, thought decays and all the
finer roads of communication are broken. Liberty, he argues, is connected with prose.”

Orwell begins his practical advice to writers by giving five examples of bad contemporary prose, characterized by stale imagery and lack of precise meaning. He then lists (with convincing examples) four common faults, “a catalogue of swindles and perversions” that conceal and prevent rather than express clear thought: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs (including the use of passive rather than active voice and awkward noun constructions rather than gerunds), pretentious diction and meaningless words. He insists that a careful, thoughtful writer will always ask six essential questions about everything he writes:

—What am I trying to say?

—What words will express it?

—What image or idiom will make it clearer?

—Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

—Could I put it more shortly?

—Have I said anything that is unavoidably ugly?

It's worth noting, as Orwell would say, that he enlivens his essay on the evils of bad writing with a number of striking satirical similes. He compares dead language to tea-leaves blocking a sink, to soft snow blurring sharp outlines, to cuttlefish spurting out ink and to cavalry horses mechanically answering the call of a bugle.

Orwell's six stylistic rules (he seems fond of the number six) are worth repeating and should be carved in stone above every writer's desk:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

As we all know from the speeches we hear every day, it is possible to obey all these rules and write persuasively, with all the appearance of clarity and strength, yet still be an outrageous liar. In his rules for writing Orwell assumes that the author wants to tell the truth. He believed that the consistent and courageous attempt to find the simplest and most direct way
of communicating an idea would keep a person honest. In an observation that equally describes government propaganda today, he concludes that in his time “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Perhaps the most appealing quality of this essay is Orwell's daring to suggest that politics doesn't have to be dirty, and that the language we use can be a powerful force for order and understanding, for choosing the right thing to do.