Jeff VanderMeer

This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.

Why I Write
by George Orwell

Memorable Line
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

The Skinny
A collection of Orwell’s timeless, pragmatic, and uncompromising essays, including the title essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” “A Hanging,” and “Politics and the English Language.”

Relevance? Argument?
George Orwell was able to bring transparency to the language of deception because he learned to be transparent and straightforward in both his prose and his opinions. There is little deceit in Orwell, as is evident in the wise, self-effacing “Why I Write.” According to Orwell, writers write for one of or a combination of four reasons:

1. Sheer egoism.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm.
3. Historical impulse.
4. Political purpose.

It is with historical impulse and political purpose that Orwell betrays the unique motivators on much of his writing, using “political” in “the widest possible sense,” “to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” …And yet the more interesting discussion is of egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm, which the casual reader might not as easily discern from his writing.

Unlike many, Orwell doesn’t squirm while discussing egoism, or try to pass judgment on this driving force. Instead, he regards it as largely inherent to “the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end,” as opposed to some who “abandon the sense of being individuals at all” by the age of thirty or “are simply smothered by drudgery.” (Here, then, are shades of Seneca, with whom we started, in this, the last of the first set of Penguin Great Ideas books.)

Aesthetic enthusiasm, especially Orwell’s acknowledgment of its influence on his own drive to write, surprised me because of the nature of his fiction, but if by “perception of beauty in the external world” he means also an appreciation of it through its negation, it makes sense–as does his avowed interest in the “pleasure in the impact of one sound on another…in words and their right arrangement,” given the precision of his prose. I like also his recognition that “in a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books,” because it conjures up an Orwell as sublime as Proust or Nabokov–and an alternate history that tantalizes with possibility.

But Orwell lived in the times he lived in and had his particular political passions, and thus is famous for a certain kind of book. “Good prose is like a window pane,” he writes, even as there is a kind of longing for another kind, and even as he admits that “where I lacked a political purpose…I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

It will appear that I mean to quote his entire essay, but the writer in me cannot leave off without reproducing this wonderful, strangely generous description: “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

Reading twenty books in twenty days is a little like an illness, too–not as long as writing one, but just as strange and exhausting at times. Thankfully, Orwell’s essays had the opposite effect.*

* Although for me it was ample meat, “Why I Write” is skillfully positioned by Penguin’s editors as a mere springboard into the main course of the book–“The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.” This essay is exhaustive in its witty cataloguing of the qualities and non-qualities of the English, and it employs more descriptive language. Orwell’s “Why I Write” revealed the man behind the prose, so now we’ll have the quality of performance; good prose is a window pane, but sometimes the pane is dirty or cracked, and sometimes it has the reflective qualities of a mirror, or even a hint of soft green fungus growing in the gutter between glass and wood. Thus we get the “clatter of clogs in Lancashire mill towns,” the “to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road,” and the “rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs.” As if apologizing for all the rattling and clatter, Orwell admits that the English “have a horror of abstract thought.” Later, this horror will lead to the statement that the English love flowers, which will not seem silly because Orwell then demonstrates how this relates to an English fondness for privacy. ..although the reader may begin to question just how much detail about the “gentleness” of English civilization s/he can take with that big brute of a British Empire breathing at our elbow. (Never fear–Orwell soon relents and addresses the contradiction.)

Conclusion
Orwell suffered from little in the way of self-delusion.

Question for Readers
Is good prose like a mirror? Is it possible it is more like a trombone?

Next up, after the shortest of breaks for the rejuvenation of this correspondent’s mental health, the second set of 20 books in Penguin’s three-set, 60-book series, Great Ideas…