As I Please: 1943-1945

I hope it's better than his fiction.

As with the first two volumes, a fascinating read but particularly for Orwell fans. For them it's an essential read.

Plow through this one and one appreciates the pamphleteer at his finest.

An insight into the mind of Orwell that you don’t get from his more popular works. Short essays on a variety of topics, written in the midst of the Second World War, give a surreal glimpse of life at that time that I have felt anywhere else.

"While [Orwell] is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, most of his writing derived from his tireless work as a journalist, and thanks to David Godine’s welcome reissue of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, which has been out of print for a decade, readers can find it all in one place. All of the author’s insightful, hard-hitting essays and journalistic pieces are here…the most complete picture of the writer and man possible."
—Eric Liebetrau | Kirkus Reviews

At last I finish the 4-volume collection of Orwell's non-novelistic writings. Well worth the slog, as could be imagined. This volume focuses on Orwell's column "As I Please" he wrote for The Tribune during the war years. There is a vast array of topics covered, the most interesting being his accounts of the everyday life of a Londoner during the war itself, shortages, rations, V-1s and V-2s, etc. Book reviews are at a minimum, there are some great essays on English life and culture (placed at the beginning) and reflections on nationalism, etc. Always great.

This is the third volume of Essays and Journalism by Orwell. The title As I Please comes from a column he wrote for the Tribune. Orwell writes confidently on all sorts of topics during World War II in this column.

This contrasts with Volume II covering the early parts of the war where he makes some very bad predictions based on current conditions. To his credit he addresses in Volume III his shortcomings of reporting/diagnosing the situation on the early years of the war.

Also included are excellent essays on anti-Semitism and Nationalism. The latter being particularly relevant for our days. The last inclusion is a preface that he wrote for the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm. It is an excellent thumbnail biography

I thought this volume and the first are excellent with the second a disappointment.

One of the entertaining things about offering reviews of Orwell’s essays is that I find myself increasingly applying his own method of critique to what he himself says. This is actually a compliment, since it suggests that my own style of reviewing has become influenced by Orwell’s style of reviewing books.

This style is one of looking at the political and social significance of the books, and the views that the authors express, and Orwell uses this method throughout his reviews. In this volume, Orwell offers his judgements on a variety of writers, including Joseph Conrad, Arthur Koestler, P.G. Wodehouse and E.W. Hornung, James Hadley Chase and Oliver Goldsmith.

Naturally, Orwell always finds time to allude to other favourites of his, including Joyce, Dickens and Smollett. He even takes the time to write about Salvador Dali’s autobiography.

One of the most praiseworthy aspects of Orwell’s reviews is that he is able to separate his own political or moral opinions from making judgements about the aesthetics of a writer or (in Dali’s case) artist. In an age where people dismissed works they personally disapproved of as bad art, Orwell has a more nuanced approach, and he can recognise that it is still possible for something to be objectionable in its opinions, and yet still be good art.

One great pity is that Orwell is rather dismissive and uninterested in cinema, the great new art form that was producing many good works at the time. Perhaps one problem is that Orwell did not live in an age of television, let alone DVDs and videos, and so could not sit down and give those works the level of study that they deserve.

This leads to a number of what ifs in my mind. It would have been interesting to see what Orwell would have made of a film like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which both defends and critiques a class of people that Orwell often mentions slightingly.

Orwell’s political views are similarly nuanced. Unlike many left-wing people of his age, he is able to be patriotic about his country, though not nationalistic (he writes about this contrast in one essay here). Similarly he continues to criticise Soviet communism at a time when the left-wing intelligentsia were frequently blinded to what was going on in Russia.

In fact, it’s easy to forget that Orwell struggled to get Animal Farm published during the period of these writings (1943-1945), because it was actually unpopular to post a book that attacked the Russian Revolution. Orwell makes occasional allusions to this in his letters in this volume.

This opposition came from both the right (for whom Russia was a wartime ally) and the left (who were still reluctant to see anything bad in Russia). Orwell was writing Animal Farm in the brief time between two periods of anti-Communist feeling.

After the war, the right reverted to its usual anti-Communist stance as the Cold War began. The disillusionment of the left was to take longer, and perhaps only really took off when Kruschchev began to expose Stalinism for what it was. However, the evidence was there for everyone to see, as Orwell’s writings make clear.

Indeed, if I am to give this volume a title of my own (as I did with the first two volumes), I would be tempted to call it George Orwell Eats His Words, though I am aware that Orwell’s hatred of clichés would not make this a popular choice with him.

At various points in his writings in this volume, Orwell publicly admits that most of his predictions about the war were wrong, and he attributes it to wishful thinking on his part. He at least acknowledges his mistaken judgments, and promises to do better in future (though actually he continues to misjudge the situation, e.g. the likelihood of a Labour victory in 1945).

Orwell makes the perceptive point that people with a political agenda will never confess to being wrong, and that they will somehow find a subtle way of saying that their predictions were right after all. He at least does not do that, though it is fair to say that his errors on the matter mean that we should be wary about accepting all his judgments and analyses.

A large part of this volume is given over to Orwell’s articles for Tribune, called As I Please. Curiously, his style as a newspaper columnist is broadly similar to what we see in newspapers today – a little bit of political or literary analysis, accompanied by something trivial. It is surprising to find that newspaper journalism has changed so little in some respects.

By this time in his career, Orwell is relaxed in his writing style, and can discuss issues very confidently. He is not even above writing with great enthusiasm about rather mundane subjects such as cooking or tea.

As ever, this is suffused with a subtle patriotism, as in his account of the ideal English pub (The Moon Under Water), English cooking, how to make a cup of tea, and the English language, a concern of his that recurs in a few of the writings in this volume.

It may be my imagination, but the tone of Orwell’s writing is more light-hearted here than I have seen in earlier volumes. He may feel some worry with the political scene, but overall the tone is not one of pessimism or despondency, not even when his wife dies during this time.

Overall, this is another accessible volume of George Orwell’s non-fiction. His writings may be sweeping, dismissive, faintly rude and occasionally mundane, but there is always much to interest the reader. Orwell had a voice of his own – a no-nonsense and passionate one – and this comes across strongly in his writings during this period.