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A review by btecbobdylan
A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
4.0
There were quite a few essays in this collection (I did skip a couple) which, on the face of them, seemed uninteresting or irrelevant to the modern reader but turned out to be quite illuminating in their own way. I never would have read a thirty-page critical appraisal of Dickens, for example, unless it was sandwiched between stuff like Shooting an Elephant and The Lion and the Unicorn. But Orwell's commentary on Dickens, Thirties boys' weekly magazines, Arthur Koestler, the Raffles novels, and P.G. Wodehouse—stuff I don't intend to read and would probably rather pick up Fifty Shades if forced to choose between them on a long-haul flight—is often very very entertaining.
Even the duller critical pieces are really interesting as glimpses into the political landscape of the time: the chronological ordering in this volume takes us from the early Thirties right through WWII to its aftermath. We get a firsthand perspective on the history and politics nobody talks about any more: the people from all the British political factions who supported Fascism, for example, right up until Dunkirk. It's so interesting to see Orwell speculating about the outcome of the war, just as interesting as it is to compare his famous totalitarian predictions with what actually happened in 1984.
When I read [b:Homage to Catalonia|9646|Homage to Catalonia|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394868278l/9646._SY75_.jpg|2566499], the only other Orwell under my belt, I was struck most of all by Eric Blair's sense of fairness: his ability to recognise, in the midst of trench warfare, that the men on the opposing side were much the same as him: they either believed in what they were fighting for, or had ended up there by sheer bad luck—and in either case, if one of them shot Orwell, he had this 'Fair play, old chap' attitude. People who were willing to fight and die for their beliefs had his respect, no matter what their political stripe. Similarly, in these essays he never (or very rarely) attacks someone's politics or writing from an ethical standpoint; instead, he focuses on hypocrisy; he analyses why someone writes or thinks the way they do, and then points out the logical flaws and contradictions in that worldview.
Some of my favourites, with a few choice quotes:
> In Why I Write, Orwell explains that he never had any particular desire to be a political writer: it was a matter of necessity. As a writer, he had to say something about the frightening times in which he lived. I feel the same way about climate change—in a perfect world, no way in hell would I be writing about the apocalypse, but somebody has to, even if nobody reads it.
> The 50-page behemoth The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, written on the eve of war, is really interesting, and despite being spot on in a lot of its analysis (about the changing-and-yet-unchanging character of England, about WWII as a crucible for change), it's also quite heartbreaking.
Such wishful thinking, Eric! Although he was definitely right about the first part. We had our chance, we came painfully close to revelation, if not a revolution, with the Attlee government and the creation of the welfare state, and we blew it. Damn us all to hell, we blew it up!! Spot on, too, about the peculiarly nebulous identity of England, always morphing but never changing its essential 'whatness'. I relate a lot to Orwell's love-hate relationship with this country.
> From Arthur Koestler:
Yup, sounds about right in 2021.
> Ditto: ‘All revolutions are failures, but they are not the same failure.’
> From Antisemitism in Britain:
> Three gems from Politics and the English Language:
> Some Thoughts on the Common Toad might be just about one of my favourite things ever written!
(This line is even more hilarious with the context: Orwell wrote the essay after another lovely piece about nature, A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray, provoked hundreds of letters from angry leftists telling him off for being 'bourgeois' enough to care about 'irrelevancies' like the natural world. The atmosphere of Twitter has always been with us, it seems, or at least since the Forties.)
> Benefit of Clergy: Notes on Salvador Dalí deals with a familiar dilemma: what do you do when an artist you admire turns out to be a shitty person? I had no idea what a disgusting sociopath Dalí was; I sort of imagined him as a Thirties sort of 'omg i'm so random xd' situation, the sort of person who walks an anteater down a city street just to freak people out—
—let the poor creature go, you fucking wanker—but some of the anecdotes from his autobiography(!!), which Orwell was reviewing here, are genuinely sickening. Anyway, our Eric contends that when a terrible human being produces great art, people get too distracted by one quality or the other, and are unable to see both at once.
> I know the first one in particular is a little bit exaggerated, but Such, Such Were the Joys and How the Poor Die were haunting, horrifying, and read like very good short stories. Damn I feel bad for young Orwell.
> Books v Cigarettes is a superb little piece, although I was gobsmacked when Orwell said he smoked six ounces of tobacco a week! Six fucking ounces! That's almost a 30g baccy-pouch a day. The only time he wasn't smoking was when he was asleep, and even then he probably had one drooping out of his gob. And this from a man who had chronic bronchitis and emphysema from a very young age. Good lord.
> I was a little bit disappointed that The Moon Under Water, an ode to the unattainable Perfect Boozer and one of my favourite short pieces of writing ever, wasn't included in this collection, but it's online so I read it alongside.
> Finally, Bernard Crick's introduction is a pretty interesting essay in itself. I read it at the end as a bit of extra commentary and I'm glad. One of the things Crick talks about a lot is Orwell's preoccupation with 'plain style', specifically his claim that it is impossible to deceive yourself or others in plain English. And yet, as Crick points out, Orwell used his trademark prose style to build a certain rhetorical character: salt-of-the-earth conversationalist George Orwell, as distinct from the shabby, posh, awkward Eric Blair. Not to mention the fact that the fascists nowadays tend to use as plain a vocab as possible, in order to hide the flimsiness of their working-class affectations.
Anyway, [b:Down and Out in Paris and London|393199|Down and Out in Paris and London|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347697665l/393199._SY75_.jpg|2374970] is definitely next on my Orwell list.
Even the duller critical pieces are really interesting as glimpses into the political landscape of the time: the chronological ordering in this volume takes us from the early Thirties right through WWII to its aftermath. We get a firsthand perspective on the history and politics nobody talks about any more: the people from all the British political factions who supported Fascism, for example, right up until Dunkirk. It's so interesting to see Orwell speculating about the outcome of the war, just as interesting as it is to compare his famous totalitarian predictions with what actually happened in 1984.
When I read [b:Homage to Catalonia|9646|Homage to Catalonia|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1394868278l/9646._SY75_.jpg|2566499], the only other Orwell under my belt, I was struck most of all by Eric Blair's sense of fairness: his ability to recognise, in the midst of trench warfare, that the men on the opposing side were much the same as him: they either believed in what they were fighting for, or had ended up there by sheer bad luck—and in either case, if one of them shot Orwell, he had this 'Fair play, old chap' attitude. People who were willing to fight and die for their beliefs had his respect, no matter what their political stripe. Similarly, in these essays he never (or very rarely) attacks someone's politics or writing from an ethical standpoint; instead, he focuses on hypocrisy; he analyses why someone writes or thinks the way they do, and then points out the logical flaws and contradictions in that worldview.
Some of my favourites, with a few choice quotes:
> In Why I Write, Orwell explains that he never had any particular desire to be a political writer: it was a matter of necessity. As a writer, he had to say something about the frightening times in which he lived. I feel the same way about climate change—in a perfect world, no way in hell would I be writing about the apocalypse, but somebody has to, even if nobody reads it.
> The 50-page behemoth The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, written on the eve of war, is really interesting, and despite being spot on in a lot of its analysis (about the changing-and-yet-unchanging character of England, about WWII as a crucible for change), it's also quite heartbreaking.
‘Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out ... when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England i was taught to love so long ago and for such different reasons is somehow persisting.'
Such wishful thinking, Eric! Although he was definitely right about the first part. We had our chance, we came painfully close to revelation, if not a revolution, with the Attlee government and the creation of the welfare state, and we blew it. Damn us all to hell, we blew it up!! Spot on, too, about the peculiarly nebulous identity of England, always morphing but never changing its essential 'whatness'. I relate a lot to Orwell's love-hate relationship with this country.
> From Arthur Koestler:
There is nothing for it except to be a “short-term pessimist”, i.e. to keep out of politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can remain sane, and hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred years.
Yup, sounds about right in 2021.
> Ditto: ‘All revolutions are failures, but they are not the same failure.’
> From Antisemitism in Britain:
Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea-urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income.
> Three gems from Politics and the English Language:
Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.
A mass of Latin words fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity ... when the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer ... every such phrase [cliches and obscuring language] anaesthetises a portion of one’s brain.
Exhibitionism and self-pity are the bane of the novelist, and yet if he is too frightened of them his gift may suffer.
> Some Thoughts on the Common Toad might be just about one of my favourite things ever written!
There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four mile radius [central London], and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.
How many times have I watched the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could.
(This line is even more hilarious with the context: Orwell wrote the essay after another lovely piece about nature, A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray, provoked hundreds of letters from angry leftists telling him off for being 'bourgeois' enough to care about 'irrelevancies' like the natural world. The atmosphere of Twitter has always been with us, it seems, or at least since the Forties.)
> Benefit of Clergy: Notes on Salvador Dalí deals with a familiar dilemma: what do you do when an artist you admire turns out to be a shitty person? I had no idea what a disgusting sociopath Dalí was; I sort of imagined him as a Thirties sort of 'omg i'm so random xd' situation, the sort of person who walks an anteater down a city street just to freak people out—
—let the poor creature go, you fucking wanker—but some of the anecdotes from his autobiography(!!), which Orwell was reviewing here, are genuinely sickening. Anyway, our Eric contends that when a terrible human being produces great art, people get too distracted by one quality or the other, and are unable to see both at once.> I know the first one in particular is a little bit exaggerated, but Such, Such Were the Joys and How the Poor Die were haunting, horrifying, and read like very good short stories. Damn I feel bad for young Orwell.
> Books v Cigarettes is a superb little piece, although I was gobsmacked when Orwell said he smoked six ounces of tobacco a week! Six fucking ounces! That's almost a 30g baccy-pouch a day. The only time he wasn't smoking was when he was asleep, and even then he probably had one drooping out of his gob. And this from a man who had chronic bronchitis and emphysema from a very young age. Good lord.
> I was a little bit disappointed that The Moon Under Water, an ode to the unattainable Perfect Boozer and one of my favourite short pieces of writing ever, wasn't included in this collection, but it's online so I read it alongside.
> Finally, Bernard Crick's introduction is a pretty interesting essay in itself. I read it at the end as a bit of extra commentary and I'm glad. One of the things Crick talks about a lot is Orwell's preoccupation with 'plain style', specifically his claim that it is impossible to deceive yourself or others in plain English. And yet, as Crick points out, Orwell used his trademark prose style to build a certain rhetorical character: salt-of-the-earth conversationalist George Orwell, as distinct from the shabby, posh, awkward Eric Blair. Not to mention the fact that the fascists nowadays tend to use as plain a vocab as possible, in order to hide the flimsiness of their working-class affectations.
Anyway, [b:Down and Out in Paris and London|393199|Down and Out in Paris and London|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347697665l/393199._SY75_.jpg|2374970] is definitely next on my Orwell list.