Why I Write / Books v. Cigarettes

Why I Write

Books v. Cigarettes

George Orwell    

        

         I thought I might do something a little different for the new year so instead of a work of fiction the first two books I’m going to review are both collections of essays by George Orwell, the absolute, unchallenged master of the political novel. So this entry is both a change of pace and a double whammy. Two shocking surprise blows to the gut. I never really plan these things out in advance so I don’t know if this is going to work very well but I’m down for a ride if you are.

         Both of these books are part of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, wherein they’ve collected short works into slim volumes with attractive covers. There’s your old Freud, your Marcus Aurelius, your Marx, your Voltaire, your Sun Tzu, etc. They’re actually pretty nice. I wouldn’t mind owning more of them. They'd look nice on a shelf. I’d owned Why I Write for some time and have actually read it before, but when I picked the previously unread Books v. Cigarettes off the shelf I felt as though I needed to tackle the pair in tandem. My parents bought this book for me when they were on vacation in Paris about a year ago, at that famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore that Hemingway loved. On the title page is a little stamp that reads “Shakespeare and Company” and “Kilometer Zero, Paris”. Now I don’t know what “Kilometer Zero” refers to but I think it has a nice Orwellian, post-historical ring to it. This book may be the only worthwhile thing my parents brought back from France. They aren’t intelligent, thoughtful people so they didn’t have much to say about a different country besides that the food was good. No matter! Books are my real mother and father. I remember that while they were gone my mother’s sister came to spend the night before she got on a plane. She was there and I was trying to ignore her, a feat which really strained my abilities to their maximum, and that while I was eating my dinner she posed a very loaded and very racist question. It was an ugly and stupid proposition and a better man than I would have slapped her; instead I confronted her ignorance and bigotry with great maturity, tried to reason with her as an equal, etc. A valiant effort on my part, no doubt, but ultimately a futile one: her brain was (and likely still is, though I hope against hope to never revisit the DMZ of my relations’ internal lives) steeped in and saturated by the sort of disinformation, groupthink, and racist, capitalistic dog whistling jargon that Orwell railed against. I can only hope I did alright by Orwell.

         My own personal interaction with George Orwell began at a young age. In the sixth grade I had an overwhelmed and thoughtless teacher (looking back on it it was probably her first year teaching) who, for a book report type assignment instructed us to choose an “animal story”. She meant something like Black Beauty but I wasn’t having any of that. What eleven-year-old boy wants to read that? I, of course, and forgive my bragging but this is probably the only time where the intelligence and intellectual courage I like to pretend I possess has ever come close to revealing itself, chose Animal Farm, and was promptly told I couldn’t read that book. My first experience with censorship! Of course I read it. I didn’t understand it but I read it. Nowadays if someone told me I couldn’t read a book I’d probably punch them. I’d die for literature.

         The essays collected in these books span from 1931-52, and since they were written by George Orwell mostly have to do with politics, reading, information, government, the Empire, and World War Two. He has his pet themes and is very consistent. Some of the essays are less important than others: “Books v. Cigarettes”, “Bookshop Memories”, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”, and “My Country Right or Left” (all from Books v. Cigarettes) are all pretty forgettable, though they are never atrocious. Just slightly more frivolous than the real weighty essays that Orwell wrote. The essays collected here generally fall into one of three categories: personal reflections, the state of letters, or political tracts, though none of these divisions is hard and fast.

         Of the personal reflections, the two that stand out are “How the Poor Die” and “Such, Such Were the Joys”, both from Books v. Cigarettes. “How the Poor Die” is about a brief period where Orwell was a non-paying patient in a French hospital. The conditions, Orwell relates, were miserable, unsanitary, and cramped and the medical care (if that’s what you want to call it) was indifferent at best and sadistic at worse. Orwell also relates a sort of historical Proletarian fear of hospitals as a gruesome butcher shop and concludes that these fears may not be entirely unfounded. In “Such, Such Were the Days” Orwell recounts his childhood at a boarding school. Once again a miserable experience, school, as he tells it, was a routine of beatings, emotional manipulation, disgust, distrust, isolation, and abandonment designed to turn blank slates into fearful and obedient subjects. Exterior suck-ups surrounding an inner core of hatred. The wealthy students, were, of course, favored and not beaten. The world isn’t exactly a fair or attractive place, so it stands to reason that a school would be generally the same. The rules are presented as infallible and being arbitrary and cruel are impossible to follow, and the lesson for the weak is to “break the rules or perish”, a dilemma which has haunted all boys who, for whatever reason, can’t or don’t fit in. One thread that connects these two essays is the notion that people just sort of accept their situations because they don’t know that things can be any different. The semi-ambulatory cadavers in the repulsive ward resign themselves to death because they don’t have a notion that a hospital could be a place where you go to get healthy and not to die sick and miserable. The students submit to the beatings because they are administered by an authority figure (a tyrant) who has amassed his power by making his subjects believe that they deserve to be beaten. A brutal pill is easier to prescribe if you can make someone swallow it on their own.

         The best of the political tracts is “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, from Why I Write, a long essay wherein Orwell outlines the mess of hypocritical faults and features that make up English life, states that these features indeed worth saving and are vastly preferable to the alternative (a Nazi victory), and outlines his hopes for the future of English politics. Orwell places most of the blame on an aristocracy whose main unique feature as a class is its obsolescence and incompetence, its adherence to outmoded mores, and its inability to adapt to the 20th Century. England, Orwell believed, would have to evolve or be annihilated by the armies of the 20th Century Man, the Fascist. He outlines a plan to turn the War into a revolutionary war that, with victories external and internal, will develop Britain into a socialist society that can deal with the coming century.

         It is within the essays about the state of English letters, however, that Orwell rises to the full height of his powers as a political writer. For my money “Politics and the English Language” is the best out of all these works, and in it Orwell decries the sort of fuzzy writing that leads to fuzzy thoughts, the manipulation of ideas to hide the truth, etc. He is in favor of simple language and clear ideas, and to illustrate this he does what I think might be one of the most effective tricks I’ve ever encountered as a reader. It’s so simple, and so brilliant. He translates a line from Ecclesiastes into “modern English of the worst sort” and thus highlights the deficiencies of a falsely elevated and technocratic language.

         Here is the line, untranslated: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to the men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

         Orwell transmutes this into: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

         The original is sublime, beautiful, and quite clear. The fictional modern writing is weaselly and hideous and reveals no inner depth. Orwell goes on to detail how political writers use euphemisms and vagueness to justify the unjustifiable. It is in this way that slaughter becomes “pacification”, a massacre becomes “action against hostile elements”, and so forth. It’s sort of an outlay of the future of Newspeak only it’s not happening on any fictional Airstrip One, it’s happening right now and we can cut it off by from this point forward thinking clearly and fearlessly and rejecting the cowardice of jargon.

         One thing I really liked about reading these two collections together at once was that they were all very much of a particular time and situation and I felt sort of transported there, which is a mighty achievement for a book of non-fiction. Transported to an England during the Battle of Britain, in a basement pub with a pint of dark beer, leather elbow-patches on my tweed jacket, a jaunty little moustache, overhead the courageous Spitfire and the sturdy Hurricane battle Der Messerschmidt and Zee Focke-Wulf, families trapped in a subterranean bomb shelter with their screaming babies while bombs explode aboveground, air-raid sirens, a Rolls-Royce on fire, battle reports on the radio, war rationing, chin up old boy, toodle-oo, cheerio. I think the 20th Century is just about the most fascinating subject there is, and I welcome any chance to learn more about it. We’re talking about a time when Western Civilization was very close to destroying itself and Orwell perfectly captures that atmosphere. It’s not exactly a tragic loss but there will never be another enemy quite like the Hun and his Hunnish ideals, and it doesn’t take much bravery to say that it’s for the best that the Allies won, but struggle against the Hun is the only possible circumstance where I can see war as justifiable. I also favor “kraut” and “jerry” as shorthand for talking about the evils of fascism. But, despite being very much of his time I still find his writing astonishingly relevant. We live in a world that is without a doubt ruled by cold, cynical technocrats who control systems, information and language in order to make easier the enforcement of their brutal and nauseating political ideologies. I wonder what Orwell would think of our age. He'd probably be sickened half to death.

         I find Orwell an admirable writer and man for many reasons (his courage, his commitment to his ideals, hatred of injustice and authority, his clearheaded thinking, the fact that he is the anti-Ayn Rand)  but probably the number one reason is that Orwell never minces words, he never pussy-foots around anything. He uses clear, strong, forthright prose and doesn’t confuse or occlude anything, but instead exhorts us to abandon turbid language, limp thinking, and latently fascist romanticisms, and to borrow a naval term, to unambiguously nail our colors to the mast for everyone to see.