A Collection of Essays

Numerous inadequate volumes of Orwell’s superlative essays are available from legit presses and bootleggers, bundled together under thematic pretences or skinnied down to the longer more ‘essential’ writings. This monolithic hardback includes the famous and forever pleasurable classics ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (best thing written on Burma ever), ‘Charles Dickens’ (best criticism of Dickens ever), ‘Bookshop Memories’ (best thing written on bookshops ever), and so on. Included here are the ‘As I Please’ columns (all 80), presenting the more relaxed and conversational side of George, along with the magnificent book reviews (George’s fondness for Henry Miller and Joyce on show). The longer essays include, to name some more, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (perhaps the finest encapsulation of Orwell’s politics and outlook), ‘Books v. Cigarettes’ (the greatest guilt-trip about not buying books ever), ‘Politics and the English Language’ (the finest handbook for journalists ever). And so on. No bookshelf is complete without a volume of these essays. (Preferably this one).

Interesting but probably just a bit too much George Orwell in one serving.
This is a collection of 41 essays or journalistic pieces. I’ve enjoyed all his novels over the years; his journalistic preWW2 stories (e.g. Down and Out in London and Paris, Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia) and his post war warnings against totalitarianism (Animal Farm, 1984). So I thought it a good idea to get a bit more information on his broader views from these shorter pieces covering a wide range of topics. Quite a few are literary critiques, from Dickens to Yeats, some poetry, as he clearly had a broad literary knowledge; some political and journalistic pieces; and some brief extracts from one or two of his books.

There were some on topics that just didn’t interest me, and being written in the 1930’s to 1940’s they are very much of their time, with the perspective of that era which isn’t always so clear to us now. About halfway through I did become more selective and jumped to the pieces whose titles seemed more appealing to me.

Regarding what they tell me of the man I conclude that it’s less likely I would have enjoyed that pub conversation I’ve imagined having with him. I had thought myself as being somewhat likeminded, but I now see probably not in some areas. He comes across as opinionated in the way where you see that counter arguments would have made little impact on him, particularly in his opinions on literature. He makes surprisingly sweeping statements for someone who’d seen quite a bit of life. For example, ‘Of course the English believe that…’, ‘the French would do this…’, ‘the Americans think the other…’, etc. He might nuance this with their social background but nonetheless I found it strange to see him make such generalisations. I thought it over judgemental and unnecessary to say “there are 5000 books published in England each year and 4900 are tripe”, which sums up his harsh views on many books and authors he discusses. I would have had a tough time accepting views like this in my imagined pub conversations with him.

However, there’s also the side I admire still very clear to see. From his early experiences in the Imperial Police force in British controlled Burma he developed his lifelong anti-imperialism. There are a couple of essays on his Burma days. Further essays from his time experiencing poverty (a deliberate choice by him) in London and Paris, his exploration of life down 1930’s deep coal mines, etc. where he developed his socialist sympathies, peaking with his involvement in the Spanish Civil War where he finally identified fully as a socialist. But unlike many of his time on the left he detested what he saw in Soviet Russia, and the twists and turns of western communist parties to accommodate whatever Stalin decided was good or bad at the time. And that features in his essays repeatedly. His own personal view of a socialism had a patriotic English flavour (he had a sentimentality for ordinary English life), hostility to the British class system and an abhorrence of totalitarianism whichever political flavour it came in. And he repeatedly condemns the left for their reluctance to offer viable alternatives to the things they criticise.

One thing that comes across is his poor predictive capabilities. I’m sure that’s tough for anyone, even with the best political knowledge, but several essays written during events (the Spanish Civil War, WW2, its aftermath) make predictions for how events then progressing are likely to go, and he usually turns out to be wrong! Or at least someway off the mark. Even before he wrote 1984 he sees capitalism fading away, not to be replaced by another ideological system but by a corporate totalitarianism, centred in several world blocks (e.g. a 1984 vision). Maybe we can see some aspects of that today but it’s not as severe as Orwell saw happening so quickly after WW2.

Some highlights: rather mean but interesting critiques of Dickens and Twain. Although he likes both, and the thrust of much of their writing, he criticises them for only showing what’s wrong but not what to do about that. Taking an easy way out after making the telling revelations. In particular he hammers into Dickens for not seeing ‘the system’ is at fault but as something that could be corrected if only people in positions of power were nicer. Orwell persuaded me that seems to be the case for Dickens but I don’t believe I was expecting someone giving some social commentary in a story to also come up with all the answers - the political solution, if there is one, is never easy to find as I thought Orwell would have understood. To make you think is surely good enough in novels with social commentary?

All in all, if you appreciate Orwell’s novels then this collection of essays is NOT a must read! It covers too wide a range of subjects for anyone to be interested in, unless you really are determined to analyse Orwell to his very roots. There’s some interesting stuff in there which has rounded out his personality for me to some degree, and not always for the better.
Although Orwell remains a 5* novelist for me, this collection of essays is only a 3* read for me.
This Kindle edition has lots of silly typos (my/by; here/her, etc.), enough to be an annoyance.

Absolutely incredible. Easily my favorite was "Politics and the English Language". Much of this essay's focus is on how to write clearly and why it is important. However, the lessons of how politicians use unclear language to confuse and mislead their electorate was my most valuable take-away, as it speaks directly to the political climate I find the US in today. Here is one such passage:

The word Facism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy , not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally feld that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and the fear they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaing. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows hi shearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost alwasy made with intent to deceive. Other words used in varialbe meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, porogressive, reactionary, burgeois, equality.

We should place lessons like this at the top of the syllabus for any high school civics class. I would also include explanations of some of the recent innovations in propaganda, such as this one explained by Vox. This essay alone was worth the price of admission, and is absolutely worth reading on its own.

"Shooting an Elephant" is a heartbreaking description of one day during Blair's time as a colony police officer in Malaya when he shot a partially-domesticated elephant that had run wild and killed some people. Blair finds the elephant calmed down, but with two thousand eager and excited villagers at his back, sulkily shoots the beast anyway.

And suddenly I realized that I had I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd - seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis has tog to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

"Ghandi" and "Marrakesh" were wonderful extensions of his critique of colonialism that "Shooting and Elephant" inaugurated.

"The Art of Donald McGill" was a fascinating defense of a certain kind of pornography. In England at the time of writing, bawdy single frame comics were common across rural England, to be found in pubs and newsagents and the like. Orwell found these to be "obscene but not immoral", saying they were "not intended as pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot figures of the women as caricatures of the Englishman's secret ideal, not portraits of it. When one examines McGill's post cards more closely, one notices that his brand of humour only has meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like Esquire, for instance, or La Vie Parisienne, the imaginary background of the jokes is always promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the McGill post card is marriage." He grew this point into an observation that humor like this has always and should always exist, as it is the natural byproduct of a certain kind of "noble folly and base wisdom" dualism that exists in everyone.

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which alwasy centre round cowardice, laziness, disonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings thatn it will get in practice.

Where would Orwell land on humor today? That essay was written in 1941, and I'm sure was somewhat a response to Facism and state-sponsored (mandated?) morality.

1984 was undoubtedly Orwell’s masterpiece, this much we all know. However, if you’ll permit me to use a tired metaphor unlikely to meet with the approval of the great man himself (see writer’s rule number 1: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print”), I will say this: 1984 may well be the cherry on the top of the Orwellian cake, but it is his essays that make up the body of that cake. Reading through them, you think to yourself that the real detail of his thought — its core, its crux, its meat — was probably more fully explored within their immediate and earnest pages than it was anywhere else in his output, 1984 included. I found the writing in this book so consistently engaging, in fact, that I quickly fell into the trap of feverishly highlighting unwieldy, multiple-page-spanning swathes of its text (so much so that I soon had to severely ration my use of the Kindle highlight function). Indeed, when it comes to Orwell’s most prescient essays (Notes on Nationalism, The Prevention of Literature, Politics and the English Language…), you could easily justify highlighting every single word, because they may well be some of the most essential writings of the 20th century. Carve them onto a plinth and put it in Parliament Square! (Or outside whatever the main government building in your country of residence happens to be.)

With the exception of the 1946 essay, Why I Write, which is placed at the front (for obvious reasons), the contents of this Penguin edition have been ordered chronologically. As you read through it, therefore, you also read through the years of Orwell’s life. This gives his thinking processes a narrative shape, and you see his big ideas slowly gestating and coalescing inevitably towards his culminating end-of-life works: Animal Farm (1946) and 1984 (1949). As an illustration of this trajectory, take this passage from The Lion and the Unicorn (1941):

n  “One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh. Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.”n

The above all seems entirely proto-1984 to me. Indeed, who remembers the following famously chilling quote from the latter book?:

n  “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”n

Similarly, here’s another very powerful proto-1984 extract from Looking Back on the Spanish War (1943). I can’t help but share it in its entirety — it’s just too good:

n  “I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost anyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be a body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science,” “Jewish Science,” etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement.”n

Of course, there is much more to Orwell than his preoccupation with totalitarianism, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t make a point of the broad and seemingly random range of these essays. Orwell’s writing on Dickens, Tolstoy, and Yeats, for instance, is some of the best literary criticism you’re likely to read anywhere — the long 1939 Dickens essay is a particularly spectacular piece of structuralist critical thought (and definitely not just a piece of writing for Dickens fans).

Whatever the topic, be it Charles Dickens or the common toad, Orwell is always strangely compelling, and his writing invariably hits with dogged and imploring insight. I wonder whether, more than the prescience of the issues he chooses to write about, the thing that’s most compelling about him is that he was always challenging himself. Every one of these essays represents a growth in his thinking. For example, when I wrote my little Goodreads review of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), I called out his thoughtless antisemitism; however, by the time we get to the 1945 essay, Antisemitism in Britain — yet another essay that should be carved onto my increasingly illegible plinth on Parliament Square —, he has changed his outlook entirely. The reason for this change, I believe, is that he has, at some point in the intervening years, sat down and had an argument with himself. He was a man who was constantly examining his inner prejudices, and, rather than straw manning arguments which opposed his confirmed biases, he instead honestly thought about the problems at hand and genuinely considered the views of the “other side”. A dying art.

In any good essay you get to watch someone argue with themselves; I’m not sure anyone argues with themselves in a more engaging way than Orwell.




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I’ve listed the contents of this collection below. I’ve also emboldened the essays I found particularly edifying. It is a mark of the high quality running throughout that I haven’t emboldened essays as great as How the Poor Die, Confessions of a Book Reviewer, or In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse. I’ve had to be strict with myself (“I must not embolden. Emboldening is the mind-killer”). In truth, all of the writing in this book is good and I think it all deserves to be read. As such, it is probably worth noting that the essays which particularly stood out to me were, by and large, the longer ones; and, if I were to attempt to rank them all in order of merit, my rankings would correlate strongly with word count. This is largely because the writing is so consistent you may as well measure its value in terms of length. (If only I could think of a “metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which we’re not used to seeing in print” that I could use to help you visualise what I mean this?)

My favourites (5 star essays):

Why I write
Politics and the English Language
Reflections on Gandhi
Shooting an Elephant
Marrakech

G.Orwell’ın çeşitli denemelerinden oluşan bu kitap adına rağmen edebiyat dışına da çıkarak politik konular özellikle “sol aydın ahlakı” konusunda sözünü esirgemeden yazdığı denemeleri de içeriyor. Edebiyatla ilgili bir kısım yazılar fazla yerel (İngiltere) olduğu için ilgi çekici değil. “Yeni Kelimeler” başlıklı denemesi muhteşem, okurken aklıma hep Bilal Hocam (Bilalante) geldi nedense.

Orwell’in Troçkist olduğunu ve İspanya İç Savaşına onların yanında katılıp yaralandığını biliyoruz. Ancak şu saptaması çok ilginç geldi bana ; “1937’de İspanya’da da, Rusya’da da aynı gerekçeyle -yani faşistlerle işbirliği- büyük bir muhalif temizlik yapıldı, en çok Troçkistler yokedildi”. George Orwell’in Stalin karşıtlığını Sovyetler’deki yönetimin 1917 den çok farklı olduğunu örneklerle belirtmesi keyifle okunuyor
.
Bir yerde okumuştum tam hatırlamıyorum (goodreads olabilir) şöyle deniyordu; “Orwell, Hayvanlar Çiftliği ve 1984 Sovyetler’i ve Stalin’i eleştirmek için değil kendi ülkesindeki, İngiltere’deki baskıcı rejimi anlatmak için yazmıştı”. Keşke bu tezi ileri sürenler, bu kitabı okusalar da aydınlansalar.

Favori yazarlarımdan olan Orwell’i okumak iyi geldi.

I know I’ve said this so many times before but George Orwell was a very brilliant and perceptive author. I have read and loved his best known works (Animal Farm & 1984) but I have to admit that while his novels are good, his essays are definitely WAY better. It took me 3 months but I finally finished this exceptional collection of essays ranging from complex topics like politics, literature and history to simple matters such as writing, nature and scrutiny of everyday life.

With his keen and timely observation, Orwell explores a plethora of subjects, which includes; his personal journey to becoming a writer, reminiscence of his time working in a bookshop, examination of Charles Dickens’ writings and politics, smutty postcards as a sign of rebellion against society, dangers of nationalism, good and bad books, facts and wisdom about toads, spring and capitalism, his experiences in a public hospital, how politicians utilize language to confuse people and his concerns with freedom of thought and expression.

Anyway, this is my top 5 favourites from this collection:

Recomendada lectura para quienes, sean de izquierdas o derechas, prefieren anteponer la búsqueda de la verdad al conformismo ideológico.