Orwell's Roses, page 1
Also by Rebecca Solnit
Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West
A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (with Susan Schwartzenberg)
As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers (with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe)
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
The Faraway Nearby
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (with Rebecca Snedeker)
Men Explain Things to Me
The Encylopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro)
The Mother of All Questions
Drowned River (with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe)
Call Them by Their True Names
Cinderella Liberator
Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters
Recollections of My Nonexistence
VIKING
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Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Solnit
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Solnit, Rebecca, author.
Title: Orwell’s roses / Rebecca Solnit.
Description: New York : Viking, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021003710 (print) | LCCN 2021003711 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593083369 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593083383 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Orwell, George, 1903–1950. | Authors, English—20th century—Biography. | Orwell, George, 1903–1950—Homes and haunts. | Orwell, George, 1903–1950—Knowledge. | Roses. | Gardening. | Nature. | LCGFT: Biographies
Classification: LCC PR6029.R8 Z7895 2021 (print) | LCC PR6029.R8 (ebook) | DDC 828/.91209—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003710
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003711
Cover design: gray318
Designed by Cassandra Garruzzo, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0
CONTENTS
I
The Prophet and the Hedgehog
ONE
Day of the Dead
TWO
Flower Power
THREE
Lilacs and Nazis
II
Going Underground
ONE
Smoke, Shale, Ice, Mud, Ashes
TWO
Carboniferous
THREE
In Darkness
III
Bread and Roses
ONE
Roses and Revolution
TWO
We Fight for Roses Too
THREE
In Praise Of
FOUR
Buttered Toast
FIVE
The Last Rose of Yesterday
IV
Stalin’s Lemons
ONE
The Flint Path
TWO
Empire of Lies
THREE
Forcing Lemons
V
Retreats and Attacks
ONE
Enclosures
TWO
Gentility
THREE
Sugar, Poppies, Teak
FOUR
Old Blush
FIVE
Flowers of Evil
VI
The Price of Roses
ONE
Beauty Problems
TWO
In the Rose Factory
THREE
The Crystal Spirit
FOUR
The Ugliness of Roses
FIVE
Snow and Ink
VII
The River Orwell
ONE
An Inventory of Pleasures
TWO
“As the Rose-Hip to the Rose”
THREE
The River Orwell
GRATITUDE
NOTES
IMAGE CREDITS
INDEX
The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.
octavia butler
I
The Prophet and the Hedgehog
D. Collings, Muriel the Goat, 1939. (Portrait of Orwell at Wallington.)
One
Day of the Dead
In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. I had known this for more than three decades and never thought enough about what that meant until a November day a few years ago, when I was under doctor’s orders to recuperate at home in San Francisco and was also on a train from London to Cambridge to talk with another writer about a book I’d written. It was November 2, and where I’m from that’s celebrated as Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Back home, my neighbors had built altars to those who had died in the past year, decorated with candles, food, marigolds, photographs of and letters to those they’d lost, and in the evening people were going to promenade and fill the streets to pay their respects at the open-air altars and eat pan de muerto, bread of the dead, some of their faces painted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican tradition that finds life in death and death in life. In a lot of Catholic places, it’s a day to visit cemeteries, clean family graves, and adorn them with flowers. Like the older versions of Halloween, it’s a time when the borders between life and death become porous.
But I was on a morning train rolling north from King’s Cross in London, gazing out the window as London’s density dissipated into lower and lower buildings spread farther and farther apart. And then the train was rolling through farmland, with grazing sheep and cows and wheat fields and clusters of bare trees, beautiful even under a wintry white sky. I had an errand or perhaps a quest to carry out. I was looking for some trees—perhaps a Cox’s orange pippin apple tree and some other fruit trees—for Sam Green, who’s a documentary filmmaker and one of my closest friends. He and I had been talking about trees, and more often emailing about them, for several years. We shared a love for them and the sense that someday he might be making a documentary about them, or we might join forces to make some kind of art about them.
Sam had found solace and joy in trees in the hard year after his younger brother died in 2009, and I think we both loved the sense of steadfast continuity a tree can represent. I had grown up in a rolling California landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees along with bays and buckeyes. Many individual trees that I knew as a child are still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I have changed so much. At the other end of the county was Muir Woods, the famous redwood forest of old-growth trees left uncut when the rest of the area was logged, trees a couple hundred feet tall with needles that condense moisture out of the air on foggy days and drip it onto the soil as a sort of summer rain that only falls under the canopy and not in the open air.
Slices of redwood trees a dozen or more feet across, with their annual rings used as history charts, were popular in my youth, and the arrival of Columbus in the Americas or the signing of the Magna Carta and sometimes the birth and death of Jesus would be marked on the huge disks in museums and parks. The oldest redwood in Muir Woods is 1,200 years old, so more than half its time on Earth had passed before the first Europeans showed up in what they would name California. A tree planted tomorrow that lived as long would be standing in the thirty-third century ad, and it would be short-lived compared to the bristlecones a few hundred miles east, which can live five thousand years. Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.
If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens. The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940 and spent the next decade in California. During the Second World War, he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote of these trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: “Their silence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, than the reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the bursting of bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias, one hundred yards above one’s head, are too far away to be heard. I recalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first months of the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that had probably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing I could be transformed into a tree until peace came again.”
* * *
That summer before my trip to England, when Sam was in town, we had gone to admire the trees planted in San Francisco by Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who had become a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist, as well as a player in the elite money politics of San Francisco. She had died more than a hundred years before that day we stood under her eucalyptus trees, which felt as though they were the living witnesses of a past otherwise beyond our reach. They had outlived the wooden mansion in which some of the dramas of her life had played out. They were so broad they had buckled the sidewalk, and they reached up higher than most of the buildings around them. Their peeling gray and tan bark spiraled around their trunks, their sickle-shaped leaves lay scattered on the sidewalk, and the wind murmured in their crowns. The trees made the past seem within reach in a way nothing else could: here were living things that had been planted and tended by a living being who was gone, but the trees that had been alive in her lifetime were in ours and might be after we were gone. They changed the shape of time.
There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.
In Moscow there are trees planted during the Czarist era that grew, shed their leaves in fall, stood steadfast through the winters, bloomed in springs through the Russian Revolution, shaded visitors in summers in the Stalinist era, through the purges, the show trials, the famines, the Cold War and glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union, dropped their leaves during the autumns of the rise of that admirer of Stalin, Vladimir Putin, and that will outlive Putin and Sam and me and everyone on that train with me that November morning. The trees were reminders of both our own ephemerality and their endurance long beyond ours, and in their uprightness they stood in the landscape like guardians and witnesses.
Also that summer, when we were hanging out at my home talking about trees, I had mentioned an essay by George Orwell I had loved for a long time, a brief, casual, lyrical piece he dashed off in the spring of 1946 for Tribune, the socialist weekly where he published about eighty pieces from 1943 to 1947. The essay that appeared on April 26, 1946, is titled “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” and it’s a triumph of meandering that begins by describing a yew tree in a Berkshire churchyard said to have been planted by a vicar who was a famously fickle political player, switching sides repeatedly in the religious wars of the time. That fickleness let him survive and stay in place, like a tree, while many fell or fled.
Orwell writes of the vicar, “Yet, after this lapse of time, all that is left of him is a comic song and a beautiful tree, which has rested the eyes of generation after generation and must surely have outweighed any bad effects which he produced by his political quislingism.” From there Orwell leapt to the last king of Burma, whose supposed misdeeds he mentioned, along with the trees that king planted in Mandalay, “tamarind trees which cast a pleasant shade until the Japanese incendiary bombs burned them down in 1942.” Orwell had been a policeman in the British imperial service in Burma, so he would have seen those trees for himself in the 1920s, as well as the huge yew he described in the church cemetery in Bray, a small town west of London.*
He proposes that “the planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.” And then he mentioned the inexpensive roses and fruit trees he had planted himself, ten years earlier, and how he had revisited them recently and in them beheld his own modest botanical contribution to posterity. “One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence.* These plants have not entailed much work, and have had nothing spent on them beyond the original amount. They never even received any manure, except what I occasionally collected in a bucket when one of the farm horses happened to have halted outside the gate.”
I’d derived from that last line a picture of the author with a bucket and a gate beyond which horses passed, but I hadn’t thought more about where and how he lived at the time and why he planted roses. Nevertheless, I had found the essay memorable and moving from the time I first encountered it. I thought it was a fugitive trace of an Orwell that remained embryonic, undeveloped, of who he might have been in less turbulent times, but I was wrong about that.
His life was shot through with wars. He was born on June 25, 1903, right after the Boer War, reached adolescence during the First World War (a patriotic poem, written when he was eleven, was his first published work), with the Russian Revolution and the Irish war of independence raging into the 1920s and the beginning of his adulthood, been among those who saw all through the 1930s the conflagrations of the Second World War being set up, who fought in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, had lived in London during the Blitz and been bombed out himself, and coined the term cold war in 1945 and saw that cold war and its nuclear arsenals grow more fearsome in the last years before his death on January 21, 1950. Those conflicts and menaces consumed a lot of his attention—but not all of it.
I had first read his essay on tree planting in a big, ugly, dog-eared paperback titled The Orwell Reader, which I bought cheap from a used bookstore when I was about twenty and wandered through for years, getting to know his style and tone as an essayist, his opinions about other writers, about politics, about language and writing, a book I had absorbed when I was young enough for it to be a foundational influence on my own meander toward becoming an essayist. I had come across his 1945 fable Animal Farm as a child, so that I first read it as a story about animals and mourned the faithful horse Boxer’s death and not known that it was an allegory for the corruption of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism.
I’d read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time as a teenager, and then gotten to know Homage to Catalonia, his firsthand account of the Spanish Civil War, in my twenties. That latter book had been a major influence on my second book, Savage Dreams, for its example of honesty about the shortcomings of one’s own side and loyalty to it anyway and of how to incorporate into a political narrative personal experience all the way down to doubts and discomforts—that is, how to make room for the small and subjective inside something big and historic. He had been one of my principal literary influences, but I had not gotten to know more about him than what he revealed in the books and whatever set of assumptions was ambient.
That essay of his I shared with Sam was in praise of the arboreal saeculum, and it was hopeful in that it looked to the future as something we could contribute to and, more than that, in that year after the first atom bombs had been detonated, as something we could have some degree of faith in: “Even an apple tree is liable to live for about 100 years, so that the Cox I planted in 1936 may still be bearing fruit well into the twenty-first century. An oak or a beech may live for hundreds of years and be a pleasure to thousands or tens of thousands of people before it is finally sawn up into timber. I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.” The essay took a tone common in his work, traveling nonchalantly from particulars to generalities, and from the minor to the major—in this case from one particular apple tree to universal questions of redemption and legacies.
