Interesting book

i think i have a new favourite writer

Although the essays were published more than 70 years ago, they still feel sharp and relevant. The language is a bit antiquated and old school judged by current style, but it has a special kind of charm. He can't simply be put into buckets of other the leftists or the conservatives, and he occupies a space of his own. He despises all ruling classes, sympathizes with the working classes, ridicules pop culture icons of the time and recognizes the value of literature giants while pointing out their shortcomings. His idea of how to use language effectively as a communication tool is a good reminder for all serious writers.

There are a few authors that you are forced to read in school, or that you know the name of, even if you haven't read them. They are considered 'good' or 'important writers' and after a while they get the stigma of people only reading them because they want to sound impressive. So they can say for example, oh yes I've read Shakespeare, or oh yes The Grapes of Wrath, I've read that. And I always watch myself because I know part of me wants to read books by people like this, simply so I too can say, oh George Orwell yes I've actually read his essays as well as his novels. Or something along those lines.

I've read 1984 but it was more of a skim then a read, and I try not to claim I've read it too often because it feels like a lie in my head. Animal Farm I missed out on at school and the ratty copy I bought second hand is currently still on my bookshelf, unread. I happened across this rather large book of essay's at work one day. It was a brand new book so shelving it, it drew my attention. The size did as well, it was huge. I borrowed it that day, out of a sense of curiosity. I didn't know much about Orwell but I was interested in learning more. I figured I'd flip through it, maybe read one or two essay's and then give up, bored and disappointed in both the author and in myself.

Oddly this did not happen. I've finished the entire book and as you can see by my rating, I very much enjoyed it. Orwell has a writing style that's clever and amusing. It took me a while but I realized he reminded me of Lemony Snicket and later, my History/Political Science teacher. I became very interested in what he thought about things and his writing on politics was fascinating. He called out people and systems when they needed to be called out and managed to do all of this without becoming overly depressive.

I loved the little odd things he'd add in here and there. A fake interview with Johnathon Swift, or a play transcript he made up. I laughed at more then a few moments and you really got the sense of what things were like while he was writing them. His writing has a way of stripping away everything until the truth is the only thing left. I found myself wondering what he would have thought of certain things happening now, or even what his opinion on various books, video games and the like would have been.

I can now say I'm a fan of George Orwell and I want to read more about him and by him. I'll have to get that copy of Animal Farm down from my bookshelf and read it. And I also now want to reread 1984.

All in all, a really interesting book and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about George Orwell or even what England was like during the second world war.

This book is huge, so I will be working on it for a while.
I love Orwell's novels, so this will be fun!

Just finished the first few essays today. This is certainly the best Christmas present of the year.

I'm definitely not going to read the whole thing. It's way too long. I'm just going to skip around and sample a little bit every day or so, until it has to go back to the library.

I just loved this book. I gave it 4.5 stars because I never give 5 stars to any book on a first reading but I intend to buy it and go thru it over again and it could very well earn its last star. Not only do I want to buy this book but I yearn for a whole collection of Orwell’s work even though I already own “1984”, “Animal Farm” and “Down and Out in Paris”.

This volume is a series of essays written by Orwell between 1928 and 1949 on war, economy, literature and day to day living.

Some of the essays that I appreciated the most fall in the latest category such as the longer one called “Such, Such Were the Joys”, one of his last texts, where he tells his life at a boarding school, St Stephen. A harsh environment where boys were thought some the worst behaviours at a very young age: cowardice, class distinction and fascism. His experience feels universal. I could relate to it even though I am a woman, in a different time, in a different country who never went to a boarding school. He’s putting words to some of my own experiences that I could not express. About being punished:

“I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness; of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

George Orwell is well read, an excellent writer, compassionate and true to himself. He never follows the crowd. Orwell’s talent is such that his essays felt contemporary and pertinent even though they were written almost 100 years ago. Whether it is comments on economic disparities, on war or religion, what he had to say then is still valid now. War in the 21st century continues to be old rich men sending poor young men to the battlefield; we are still debating whether or not we should accept refugees.

About pacifism he said that we should not forget that we can be pacifists because someone else is fighting on our behalf. It was true then when we were fighting the Nazis it’s still true now that we are fighting ISIS. As a teenager, I was violently anti-military. Not so much anymore. It’s a mark of old age to have one’s position evolve, to show more grey zone, be subtler in one’s opinion. My younger self would call it “coping out”. I don’t have to ask such question about Orwell whose moral compass always pointed thru North.

Since he lived during two world wars, it’s to be expected that a lot of his essays would touch on that subject. And, because he participated in the Spanish war he knew what he was talking about.

“All wars are the same. The essential horror of army life (whoever has been a soldier will know what I mean by the essential horror of army life) is barely affected by the nature of the war you happen to be fighting in. Discipline, for instance, is ultimately the same in all armies. Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship of the officer and their soldiers has to be the relationship of superior and inferior. The picture of war set forth in books like “All Quiet on the Western Front” is substantially true. Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers… (People forget that a soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war.) …a louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, although the cause you are fighting for happens to be just. As far as the mass of people go, the extraordinary swings of opinions which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned off and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis. In the intelligentsia I should say they result rather from money and mere physical safety. At a given moment they may be pro-war or anti-war but in either case they have no realistic picture of war in their minds…We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases. “

The soldiers often have more in common between them than with the civil back home. “…I had come here to shoot at “Fascists”; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a “Fascist”, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.”

His literary criticism of books I have not read, made me want to discover new authors (new to me) or rediscover authors I already know. The question, “Should a good book also be a moral book," is one I’ve been asking myself. For example, I hesitate to read Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” because I’m afraid that it’s an anti-Muslim pamphlet, even though it’s one of the 100 notable books of the New-York Time for 2015. Orwell answer to this question is “Yes, we can appreciate the literary quality of a book, even give the author a literary prize, but we should not sweep under the rug the author’s political and moral position."

Even when he writes about authors I have never heard of – and there are many of those – he’s still interesting.

Some of his essays have a more philosophical bent:

“…conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on “despairing of life” into a ripe old age.” About T.S. Elliot
“Can Socialist be happy?” (1943)

“All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures, from earliest history onwards. Utopia…has been common in the literature of the past three of four hundred years, but the “favourable” ones are invariably unappetizing, and usually lacking in vitality as well.”
“As I Please 14” (1944)

“I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. Reared for thousands of years on the notion that the individual survives, man has got to make a considerable psychological effort to get used to the notion that the individual perishes. He is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell…when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence.”

In a long essay, “Politics and the English Language”, written in 1945, he denounces meaningless words, or words that hide the truth which he called “Newspeak” in “1984”. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. The debased language…is in some ways very convenient.”

In this essay, his own language is far from debased. He uses great images “…his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”

While I was reading his essays, he was my friend. I found myself talking to him; explaining what had happened since he died; how the world had changed sometime for the best, sometimes for the worse. For example, he would have been happy to hear of the invention of the dishwasher which came as a result of the war and women’s liberation and, also, because technology allowed it. Here is what he wrote on the subject of dishes in 1945 in “As I Please”, his chronicle in the “Tribune” a British left-wing paper:

“Every time I wash up a batch of crockery I marvel at the unimaginativeness of human beings who can travel under the sea and fly through the clouds, and yet have not known how to eliminate this sordid time-wasting drudgery from their daily lives.”

I tried to look at current events with his eyes wondering what he would have thought. When I finished the book on December 2, I felt as if a friend had died. Of course I knew that he had died in 1950 – too soon – but reading his essays, I had the impression that he was alive and that he had been my companion for the last few months – it’s a big book. A companion that was wise, compassionate, and humorous; a companion who wrote well.

Reading this book was, without a doubt the bookish effort which engaged me for longer than any other in my life– 11 months and a day, exactly. This was not because the book was bad, or because it was was boring; rather, this slow progress was the product of the fact that the nature of the book (a collection of essays) allowed the reader to take brakes without compromising their comprehension.

Not all of the hundreds of essays are worth reading beyond a scholarly sense, hindsight has proven some of his fears to be cynical and reactionary, and not all of the ideas or essays have aged well (ex.: there are many, many essays pertaining to driving down the heat of coal, peat, etc. in London, which is not an issue of pressing concern to the modern reader). However, as a whole, Orwell's essays remain remarkably insightful, humanistic, nuanced, charming, and– all in all– readable. Their readability is largely thanks to Orwell's insights into the dark sides human psychology, his uncanny ability to foresee political developments (ex.:who else, I wonder, would have predicted in the early 1940s– while China was an unindustrialized country under the yoke of the Japanese Empire– that China would become one of the worlds three most dominant powers), his ability to appreciate the small pleasures of life, his honesty, his range of subject (Orwell delvers in essays with topics a varied as the rise of totalitarianism, the common toad, the notion of subjective reality, the best way to brew tea, politics and economics, english cooking, literary criticism, linguistics and propaganda, children's psychology, and the planting of roses and yew trees), and his remarkably vigorous and powerful prose.

Orwell, I believe, is one of (if not the) greatest minds of the 20th century; and reading his essays gave me the same sort of profound pleasure that Salieri is said to have gotten from Mozart's music (minus the murderous envy). The book was a gift to me and I can say, with confidence, that it was a very good one– as I can hardly recall receiving any other gift which brought me so many hours of such deep thought and immense enjoyment. I would recommend it to all.

Update - this just like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get next. As the dark war-torn year of 1940 begins, what does Orwell begin the year with? Why, a 50 page dissection of the work of Charles Dickens... and expressed with such breathtaking authority too :

in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel. It is usual to claim him as a "popular" writer, a champion of the "oppressed masses"... but there are two things that condition his attitude. In the first place, he is a south-of-England man, a Cockney at that, and therefore out of touch with the bulk of the real oppressed masses, the industrial and agricultural labourers. It is interesting to see how Chesterton, another Cockney, always presents Dickens as a spokesman of "the poor", without showing much awareness of who "the poor" really are. To Chesterton, "the poor" means small shopkeepers and servants. ... The other point is that Dickens's early experiences have given him a horror of proletarian roughness...

**********************


I never read Orwell! Ok, Animal Farm back in school. That’s all. And he must be one of the most banged-on-about authors in the history of the written word. So it really became incumbent upon one to give him a go. I wasn’t looking forward that much. Wasn’t he just going to be spouting the received centre-left opinion of his day and waxing on about Spain and The Beano and Greta Garbo and the lost ha’penny sherbet dib-dabs of 1938?

Anyway I browbeat myself into giving him a go so I got this big beast, the almost complete non-fiction. 1369 pages. The complete edition includes all known laundry and shopping lists.

Well, I was wrong. Now I get it. And now I’m a fan. He’s so easy to read, and so interesting. He becomes your very slightly know-it-all friend. It will take me a couple of years to chew through this substantial volume but it’s so full of stuff right from the first page that I thought it deserved to be reviewed section by section, starting with the first which is catchily named “1928-37”.

*

The first of several surprising ideas was in essay number one – that in 1928 there were such things as almost-free newspapers. They cost a farthing then, which was a quarter of a penny. The loss they incurred was made up entirely by advertising. So, the same economic model as the online versions of every newspaper now (except those behind a paywall). And of course there are many actual free actual newspapers around. Well, I thought this was a recent-ish phenomenon, just a little bit older than the internet itself. How wrong I was.

Number two – holy crap! In an essay called “Clink” (August 1932) he’s using the f AND the c words to demonstrate the kind of language used by the common criminals of England. Was this essay ever published? Surely not. But it’s a good one… so I’m confused.

Number three – “Bookshop Memories” – ha, remember that popular thing Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops? This is the 1936 version. People were saying pretty much the same things then. In those days some bookshops also ran lending libraries, and here Orwell turns his spotlight on another interesting question :


In a lending library you see people’s real tastes, not their pretended ones, and the one thing that strikes you is how completely the “classical” English novelists have dropped out of favour. It is simply useless to put Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Trollope, etc, into the ordinary lending library; nobody takes them out… Yet it is always fairly easy to sell Dickens

I would say the same thing now, of course – no one reads anything from say before 1950… oh, EXCEPT Jane Austen!

Number four – in a review of a forgotten prison memoir called Walls Have Mouths Orwell reveals the ubiquity of homosexual activity up to and including male rape in a paragraph which must have stunned his readers – we were still getting used to this kind of reality in the work of James Gilligan and in movies like American History X . But hear Orwell :


In a convict prison homosexuality is so general that even the jailors are infected by it, and there are actual cases of jailors and convicts competing for the favours of the same nancy-boy

Well, we may dislike the homophobic terms Orwell uses but still, again, I was amazed at this subject being given any attention in public in 1936.

Number five – reading one of his acknowledged hits “Shooting an Elephant”, and finding out that it was Orwell who shot the elephant! (“I did not want to shoot the elephant”). This was when he was a colonial police officer in Burma. He had a chequered career.
Onward to part two.

man, this book is such a great old friend.
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Orwell is skyrocketing up my list of major 20th century writers with every one of the 255 pages I've thus far read of this 1300+ page behemoth. The man was amazingly prescient, at a deep, detailed level.

This was one of the best collections of essays I've ever read, probably second only to Freeman Dyson's The Scientist as a Rebel. Across 1363 pages of essays from 1928-1949 (the vast majority of them coming from 1938-1946), written for a wide gamut of publications, Orwell manages to repeat himself only a few times (usually clearly-relished zingers) -- a fine show of editing, as each annoying bit of repetition is found within an essay that simply couldn't have been left out due to other unique, interesting points. Having read it, I feel far more conversant with the politics of the pre-war years, the Fabian Society-inspired English breed of socialism, the demise of realpolitik as Fascism's yoke was affixed, battled and finally thrown off...Orwell is one of the most intelligent, aware and just amazingly foresighted authors of the twentieth century, and this book will find itself a place near my mattress for some time.

In fact I read most of these essays in this handsome hardcover some 13 years ago during my gloomy days due to my unsatisfactorily productive academic pursuit at UQ. However I recalled vaguely I had written some ideas, reflections, views, etc. regarding his inspiring essays since I always admire his writing style with good, witty points he has long mentioned and urged the world to have a look or take action as appropriate then and beyond.

Therefore, I have resumed reading those unread as my second round hoping to complete this mission as soon as time and enjoyment are available; it is my delight whenever I see some Goodreads readers reading his scintillating messages to the elite somewhere as well as his readers, I think, to ponder and act wisely in the name of democracy, integrity and scholarship.

orwell is amazing. though, as with all collected works, there is a lot to wade through. you must enjoy the essay form to enjoy this book.