Orwell's Roses, page 19
He saw some of this capacity to connect and perceive in individual words, which is why the English of Nineteen Eighty-Four is being shrunk by the authorities into Newspeak. Smith’s colleague at the Ministry of Truth, whose task it is to shrivel the language, declares, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Each word is a set of relationships, direct and indirect, a species in an ecosystem. The death of a word thins out a language and the possibilities of thought. Eventually the system collapses into ruins as thinking becomes impossible, the way an ecosystem collapses when key species become extinct.
In the novel’s appendix about Newspeak, Orwell describes how the word free was shrunk to mean only free from, as in “this dog is free from lice.” “It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.” It’s not only a loss of particular words but of the complexity, nuance, shade, evocation of words. As he’d written elsewhere, in another of his similes drawn from the natural world, “The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,” and Newspeak was a cage for thoughts.
“Politics and the English Language” addresses language that is too loose, blurring, evading, meandering, avoiding. Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts language when it is too tight, too restrictive in vocabulary and connotation, when some words have been murdered and others severed from too many of their associations. Somewhere in between is the possibility of a language that is clear but evocative, in which the speaker or writer’s explorations invite those of the listener or reader, in which there is something a little wild in language, and the wild and the free overlap. That integrity, those honored contracts, those endeavors to reach out and make whole through the use of words that connect, empower, liberate, illuminate are the beauty to which he is most committed and the one he most celebrates, in the writing of others and in his own efforts as a writer.
Such beauty does not necessarily resemble the visual splendor that the word most commonly references. He took all this on in his 1946 essay “Why I Write.” One motive, he said, was “perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.” When he was young, he noted, “I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.” He lost his affection for the color purple: “And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”
The ethical purpose sharpened the aesthetic means, he makes clear, and politics saved him from insignificance. “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” But pamphleteer was neither a bad job nor one without aesthetic demands and pleasures: “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. . . . I write . . . because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
And then comes the cluster of sentences that has long served me as a credo: “But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.” What might be considered irrelevant is a series of pleasures and personal commitments, akin to the roses in “bread and roses.” (The view acquired in childhood might be the broad, untamed interest in many things, notably the love of the surface of the earth in the next sentence.)
Clarity, precision, accuracy, honesty, and truthfulness are aesthetic values to him, and pleasures. In 1937, when he was in Spain fighting for his ideals, Eileen Blair wrote to the publisher of The Road to Wigan Pier, “The word my husband particularly wants changed is in Chapter I, the last paragraph but one. In the manuscript the sentence is: ‘For the first time in my life, in a bare patch beside the line, I saw rooks copulating.’ According to my husband, Gollancz and he altered copulating to courting, but he wishes the phrase to read ‘. . . I saw rooks treading,’ because he has seen rooks courting hundreds of times. Of course if by any chance Gollancz changed his mind and left copulating, that would be better still, but I expect there is no hope of that.” It’s about scrupulousness even in small matters.
Clarity, honesty, accuracy, truth are beautiful because in them representation is true to its subject, knowledge is democratized, people are empowered, doors are open, information moves freely, contracts are honored. That is, such writing is beautiful in itself, and beautiful in what flows from it. There are more conventional kinds of beauty in Orwell’s work—natural landscapes from Burmese forests to British meadows, all those flowers, the golden eye of the toad. But this beauty in which ethics and aesthetics are inseparable, this linguistic beauty of truth and of integrity as a kind of wholeness and connectedness, between language and what it describes, between one person and another, or between members of a community or society, is the crucial beauty for which he strove in his own writing.
VII
The River Orwell
Vernon Richards, Orwell and Son, 1945.
One
An Inventory of Pleasures
In the year 1936, a young writer planted roses. A decade later a wearier, wiser man set out to make another garden on a more ambitious scale, and in the ten years between the small garden in Wallington in southern England and the one that grew into a small farm on the Isle of Jura off the west coast of Scotland, his life had changed many times and he had grown immeasurably as a writer.
He’d become haggard during the war years. Eileen had moved to London for government jobs—first at the Press and Censorship Bureau of the Ministry of Information, then at the Ministry of Food— and he had joined her later. From 1941 to 1943, he worked for the BBC, writing scripts, working with a staff, recruiting writers and others to join in conversations, all for programs to be broadcast in India. The new job meant giving up his garden and much of his time to write; the new salaries made them comparatively affluent for the first time in their married life. They lived in London for most of the war, going back to Wallington for the occasional weekend and lending out the cottage to friends who had been bombed out or wanted a holiday.
John Morris, who worked with him at the BBC, thought he resembled “one of those figures on the front of Chartres Cathedral; there was a sort of pinched Gothic quality about his tall thin frame. He laughed often, but in repose his lined face suggested the gray asceticism of a medieval saint carved in stone and very weathered. . . . His most striking features were his luxuriant and unruly hair and the strange expression in his eyes, a combination of benevolence and fanaticism; it was as though he saw more (as indeed he did) than the ordinary mortal.” Others talk about his wheezing and fatigue from even minor exertion. He was running down. Or his body was.
His literary work was ramping up, and the fable published in August 1945 as Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was his first commercial success. He’d written it during the war with Eileen’s encouragement and input. They were away from home when their top-floor flat in London was smashed up by a German bomb on June 28, 1944, but the manuscript of the book was among the belongings that were scattered and coated with dust. “This Ms. has been blitzed which accounts for my delay in delivering it & its slightly crumpled condition, but it is not damaged in any way,” he wrote to T. S. Eliot at the publishing house Faber and Faber, one of the many editors to reject the book.
A few weeks before the bombing, they had adopted a baby to realize his longtime desire for children—she was more ambivalent, and her own poor health might have been a factor. Christened Richard Horatio Blair, the child was sweet-natured and thriving, and they were soon both devoted to and delighted by him. But it was she who stopped everything to tend to the child (he was devoted when present but often absent). Less than a year later, while he was in Germany reporting on the end of the war, Eileen died. She had been ill for some time. Perhaps the wartime rationing and meager diet took a toll on her; Orwell also blamed her years of long hours of office work. They both smoked prodigiously (at one point she said if they smoked less they could afford a larger flat).
Her main trouble appears to have been uterine fibroids or something of that kind that caused chronic blood loss and anemia and sometimes acute pain. (Her uterine bleeding, his pulmonary hemorrhages: they were a bloodily unhealthy couple, and she had delayed seeing doctors lest she get a diagnosis she needed to report when they were questioned about their fitness to adopt the baby.) She went in for surgery and wrote poignantly loving, self-effacing letters to her husband, worrying about the expense rather than herself. Midprocedure, she died on the operating table, on March 29, 1945, apparently due to the anesthesia. She was thirty-nine.
The Orwell of 1946 is an astonishment. Eileen’s death was preceded by that of his widowed mother in March 1943 and followed by that of his older sister in May 1946. His own health was declining, and with every justification to sink into grief and exhaustion, he was instead prolific and full of plans, including for an ambitious novel—at that point titled The Last Man in Europe—and for a new life in one of the remoter parts of the British Isles, the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides, which he had visited briefly in the summer of 1944. While complaining that in order to make a living he was “smothered under journalism,” he produced essays and reviews at a heroic rate, often four a week that winter and spring.
Among them is a cluster of essays celebrating familiar comforts and pleasures. They were written between late 1945 and May 1946, when he set aside journalism and moved to Jura to begin the novel that would eventually be titled Nineteen Eighty-Four. There’s a practical explanation for those essays: these domestic and idyllic subjects were, for an overworked writer, the ones that required little or no reading or other research, only reverie. They could be dismissed as lightweight, but there are traces of them in the heavyweight novel he was working toward, and just as pleasure in “the surface of the earth” and “solid objects and scraps of useless information” shows up in his most scathing political work, so politics shows up in many of these essays. The choice of widely accessible, low-cost, and free pleasures and the savoring of everyday life in postwar Britain was itself political, as was the focus on the natural world as a major source of meaning and value. (The same season he wrote an essay making the case that books were not unaffordable luxuries for ordinary people, in part by comparing the cost of books and cigarettes.) Political and moral: he may have been endeavoring to cheer up others—and himself—by turning toward these things he relished.
At the start of this run he wrote “In Defence of English Cooking,” published in the Evening Standard in mid-December. He takes extravagant pleasure in the recollections and the names: “First of all, kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets. Then a list of puddings that would be interminable if I gave it in full: I will pick out for special mention Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings. Then an almost equally long list of cakes: for instance, dark plum cake (such as you used to get at Buzzard’s before the war), short-bread and saffron buns.” He praises marmalade, haggis, and suet pudding, and “bread sauce, horse-radish sauce, mint sauce and apple sauce; not to mention redcurrant jelly, which is excellent with mutton as well as with hare.”
The day before he published this piece about roasts, puddings, and sauces he wrote down “Politics and the English Language” in his payments book. He started the new year with the fierce “The Prevention of Literature” in Polemic and, on January 5, a piece on the pleasures of junk shops, which he differentiated from antique shops for their dusty obscurity, their broken items of no value, and their proprietors, who tended to be enigmatic figures with little interest in sales. He noted that their “finest treasures are never discoverable at first glimpse; they have to be sorted out from among a medley of bamboo cake-stands, Britannia-ware dish-covers, turnip watches, dog-eared books, ostrich eggs, typewriters of extinct makes, spectacles without lenses, decanters without stoppers, stuffed birds, wire fire guards, bunches of keys, boxes of nuts and bolts, conch shells from the Indian Ocean, boot trees, Chinese ginger jars and pictures of Highland cattle.”
Lists are a form of collecting, an inventory of what is available at least to the imagination, and sometimes a reaching for assurance that there is some kind of abundance beyond the privation at hand. In his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, his protagonist muses that “there’s a kind of peacefulness even in the names of English coarse fish. Roach, rudd, dace, bleak, barbel, bream, gudgeon, pike, chub, carp, tench. They’re solid kind of names. The people who made them up hadn’t heard of machine-guns, they didn’t live in terror of the sack or spend their time eating aspirins, going to the pictures, and wondering how to keep out of the concentration camp.”
People in harsh circumstances—war, expeditions, prisons and other institutions—sometimes plunge into daydreams and conversations about what feasts they’d devour or what other everyday pleasures they’d seek; they make lists as a means of feeling a sense of control over the future. Orwell’s essays in the form of inventories, written at the end of a war with rationing still in effect and food still scarce and drab, may have arisen from such conditions. Among junk-shop treasures he listed glass paperweights “that have a piece of coral enclosed in the glass, but these are always fantastically expensive.” Just such a paperweight would be purchased by Winston Smith and become one of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central symbols (and a junk-shop proprietor is a crucial figure in the novel). He described the appeal of these shops to “the jackdaw inside all of us, the instinct that makes a child hoard copper nails, clock springs, and the glass marbles out of lemonade bottles. To get pleasure out of a junk shop you are not obliged to buy anything, nor even to want to buy anything.”
On the twelfth of January he published an essay on the proper way to make a cup of tea, about which he had strong opinions: water straight from a boiling kettle, loose tea in abundance, from India and not China if possible, in a ceramic or china teapot, and most controversially, and adamantly, the tea in the cup first, and not the milk. No sugar. On the nineteenth he published a piece about “Songs We Used to Sing”; in this phase of his writing life, he gave serious attention to nonsense poetry, fairy tales, popular songs, nursery rhymes, gag postcards, “good bad books,” and other elements of popular culture. (He turned “Little Red Riding Hood” into a radio script that the BBC broadcast that summer.) Earlier in the year, his publisher Fredric Warburg—who had published Animal Farm when several others had rejected the allegorical tale—wrote that Orwell had a nursery rhymes project and “plans to throw up his journalism from the beginning of May until November, and to retire to the Hebrides for six months to write a novel.”
Susan Watson, whom he’d hired to help him with Richard, recalled that when Aunt Nellie came to visit, aunt and nephew looked over the latter’s extensive collection of Donald McGill’s cheerfully ribald postcards with delight. His long 1941 essay on the postcards and their variety of lowbrow humor argued that they “give expression to the Sancho Panza view of life,” to the comedy of survival, and then shifts into his own quixotic note: “When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.”
“It is foully cold here and the fuel shortage is just at its worst,” he wrote in a letter that winter, suggesting that his pleasures were all in the imagination. Nevertheless, his next essay was in praise—or defense—of the British climate: “There is a time to sit in the garden in a deck chair, and there is a time to have chilblains and a dripping nose.” It was a list of often small and subtle pleasures, urban and rural, month by month: April’s “smell of the earth after a shower,” May’s “pleasure of not wearing underclothes,” June’s “cloud-bursts. The smell of hay. Going for walks after supper. The back-breaking labour of earthing up potatoes,” and July’s “going to the office in shirt sleeves. The endless pop-pop-pop of cherry stones as one treads the London pavements” all the way to November’s “raging gales” and “smell of rubbish fires.” February, he admitted, “is a particularly detestable month with no virtue except its shortness. But in fairness to our climate one ought to remember that if we did not have this period of damp and cold, the rest of the year would be quite different.” The same kind of vivid detail about the state of being embodied and what is felt, smelled, tasted, seen, heard enlivened his novels, and the same sense of fairness also runs through all his work.
