Numerous books have been written about George Orwell. Since I’m just rediscovering him after reading and not really understanding his two most well known works — 1984 and Animal Farm — way back when, back when I was in high school, I won’t attempt a scholarly dissertation on the man. Others seem to have already done it well enough. It’s Orwell’s gems, the shorter essays such as “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language” that I find particularly compelling. Although I would not urge you to read them — all of us have a limited amount of time and who am I to suggest what you should or should not read? However, you might like them as much as I do, thus this post. The author concisely says what he has to say and then says no more. I recently bought a book from Amazon entitled Why I Write , however the lazy publisher didn’t alert me to the fact that it contained several of Orwell’s essays all strung together back to back. Thank goodness that we have the internet to clear up such misconceptions foisted upon us for unknown reasons. Now, here’s something to reflect upon from Orwell:

I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write. Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. 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. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. 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.

Posted by Buck Batard at January 30, 2006 07:27 PM

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):