Facing Unpleasant Facts (2 page)

A career like Orwell's would be difficult to undertake today. There is too much specialization in writing, too little genuine independence, and not much room in the major newspapers and magazines for strongly individual essays. It was hard enough to make a living as an essay writer when Orwell was alive—in 1944, one of his most prolific years as an essayist, he earned less than six hundred pounds for his one hundred thousand words—and much harder now. Yet for any young writer willing to try, these essays don't merely survive as historical artifacts and literary masterpieces. In his openness to the world and his insistence on being true to himself, Orwell's essays show readers and writers of any era what it means to live by the vocation.

—G
EORGE
P
ACKER

O
RWELL'S
writing began with essays, and his essays began with experience. Before
Burmese Days
there was "A Hanging," and before "A Hanging" there were "five boring years within the sound of bugles" as a colonial policeman in Burma. Before
Down and Out in Paris and London
there was "The Spike," and before "The Spike" there were months spent incognito as a dishwasher and tramp. In "Why I Write" Orwell reports that he wanted to be a writer from "perhaps the age of five or six," but it was only in the hard, self-inflicted experiences of his twenties and thirties—imperialism, poverty, coal mines and miners, the Spanish civil war—that his power as a writer was forged. Even after these years were behind him, and he became famous as a novelist and critic, and readers forgot or never knew his beginnings, the authority of his voice and the conviction of his vision depended on his being able to say:
I was there—I saw it—I know.

Orwell's insistence on seeing, feeling, even—perhaps especially—smelling his subjects led him to judge harshly others who wrote from abstraction or orthodoxy or sheer wishfulness. Once, in 1937, when a left-wing review asked him to answer a list of questions for a volume to be published under the self-congratulatory title
Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War,
Orwell shot back a reply that was brutal even by his standards: "Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and
Spender. I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet-hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody." Similarly, after Auden published his poem "Spain," which included the lines, "Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder," Orwell delivered a scathing review in his essay "Inside the Whale": "It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a
word.
Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men—I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means—the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided." Whether or not because of this crushing rebuke, Auden later disowned "Spain," refusing to permit its publication in any of his collections. Orwell wasn't merely getting even with more famous writers by pulling rank based on his own tendency to seek out difficult experiences; it was a matter of literary principle. He was something of an empirical absolutist. He distrusted words that didn't immediately call to mind a fresh concrete image and issued a ban on them in "Politics and the English Language." He summed up his credo in "Why I Write": "Good prose is like a window pane."

Every writer is limited by his strengths, and Orwell's belief in the supremacy of sensory evidence restricted him as a novelist and a critic. His imaginative writing always stood on shaky legs (the poet William Empson called Orwell "the eagle eye with the flat feet"); he was unable to create persuasive female characters (his pigs are more convincing); in his critical essays he disparaged Yeats and despised Woolf. But he was also able to see through the heroic posing of writers "to whom murder is at most a
word,
" and who "can swallow totalitarianism
because
they have no experience of
anything except liberalism." The soundness of Orwell's political judgment is of a piece with the clarity of his sentences, and both were hammered out on the unyielding anvil of the life he chose to live. In a rare tribute to himself that gave away one key to his literary greatness, Orwell once wrote that he had "a power of facing unpleasant facts." They were, first and most important, facts on the ground where he stood.

The first essays in this collection were written before there was a George Orwell, and they aren't really even essays. "The Spike" was published under Orwell's real name, Eric A. Blair, and "Clink," an account of an attempt to get thrown in jail, was never published at all. These are pieces from his down-and-out period in the late twenties and early thirties, after his return to England from Burma, when, driven by some inner necessity born of guilt and rage, Orwell went "native in his own country," in V. S. Pritchett's phrase. Unlike the often awkward and overwritten fiction that Orwell was composing at the same time, these descriptions of the submerged life of shelters and prisons show early signs of the frank, colloquial exactness that became Orwell's stylistic trademark: "It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes held together by dirt." But these sketches have no purpose other than to record. The conclusions they reach are no larger than the confines of the experiences that produced them.

Something new happens in "A Hanging." It was also published under his real name, in August 1931, in a pacifist English monthly called
Adelphi.
The twenty-seven-year-old, entirely unknown Eric Blair, upon arriving at the magazine's offices, described himself to its editor, Richard Rees, as a "Tory anarchist" and admitted to using copies of
Adelphi,
which he had once
considered a "damned rag," for target practice in his garden outside Rangoon when he was a colonial policeman. Though Orwell remained a democratic Socialist until his death, his sympathies and manners were complex and provocative from the start.

"It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains": "A Hanging" begins abruptly, like "The Spike," without explanation or context, in precise but unreflective description. Who is telling this story? Why is he one of "a party of men walking together" through a prison courtyard in Burma during the rainy season? What does he think of the deed they're about to do? Is the account based in fact, or is it made up? Brief and open ended, "A Hanging" also seems more a story than an essay—until its midpoint, when the Burmese prisoner being led to the gallows steps aside to avoid a puddle. Prompted by this apparently trivial detail, the narrator says: "It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man."

In a sense, the whole of Orwell's nonfiction is contained in "that moment" and the paragraph that follows. This move recurs in essays throughout this volume, and it always signals, in Orwell's deceptively casual style ("It is curious"), that what follows will be essential—his reason for telling the story. Something very similar appears at the climax of his other, more famous Burma essay, "Shooting an Elephant": "I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys." A version of it precedes an anecdote from "Looking Back on the Spanish War," about the unexpected aftermath of a false accusation: "I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time." And another version follows the scene of bedwetting and punishment that opens his memoir of his schooldays, "Such, Such Were the Joys":

I had fallen into a chair, weakly snivelling. I remember that this was the only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame seemed to have anaesthetised me. I was crying partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.

In these moments, Orwell takes a step that's as short, as apparently easy, and yet as significant as that of the prisoner who evades the puddle and establishes his humanity. He moves from observation to thought, from a painful detail to some broader, redemptive understanding. It's the most important journey an essay can make, and the hardest. It requires the essayist to be equally good at rendering experience and interpreting it—to be a character and a narrator, a sensitive consciousness and a dispassionate philosopher. "A Hanging" sets the precedent: Out of the smallest incidents come the deepest recognitions, whether "that moment" occurs on the path to the gallows or years later at the writer's desk. So the ideas that form the core of Orwell's essays are not the product of abstract thinking; there is no disembodied mind working through its material. They come directly out of recollected experience, and between the act and the idea there's always the connective tissue of emotion.

***

Five years after "A Hanging," in 1936, Orwell was asked to contribute to a magazine of antifascist writing. He replied, with the defensive aggression that was habitual in his struggling early years, that he was thinking of writing "a sketch (it would be abt 2000–3000 words), describing the shooting of an elephant. It all came back to me very vividly the other day & I would like to write it, but it may be that it is quite out of your line. I mean it might be too low brow for your paper & I doubt whether there is anything antiFascist in the shooting of an elephant!" As it turned out, there was. "Shooting an Elephant" is probably Orwell's most perfect essay, and a crucial advance beyond "A Hanging." This time, the narrative and reflective elements are woven together, and the "I" is no longer a camera eye but a character, with a past, prejudices, feelings, judgments, self-judgments. This is no opaque fragment or sketch: Its structure is transparent and entirely built around the passage through experience to understanding and self-knowledge.

"One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening," Orwell (now publishing under his pseudonym) writes after two pages of prelude. "It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism—the real motives for which despotic governments act." If Orwell presented "Shooting an Elephant" in a writing workshop today, his teacher and classmates, followers of the rigid ideology known as "show, don't tell," would have him cut these sentences and the two pages that precede them as unnecessary and start the piece with the next sentence: "Early one morning the sub-inspector..." But Orwell, by showing and telling—often, showing
then
telling—gives this tale a personal and historical context that makes it more than just vivid. Telling deepens its emotional effect and widens its intellectual reach. And because Orwell's self-exposure, though not at all exhibitionistic, is merciless, it wins the reader over. As he later wrote in criticizing
Salvador Dalí's memoirs, "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful."

Here's a troubling thought: There's no way of knowing whether the events in the essay ever happened. Orwell's biographers haven't been able to prove them either factual or false, although Emma Larkin, in her book
Finding George Orwell in Burma,
comes close to establishing the existence of something like this incident. Does it matter? Would the essay be any less powerful if Orwell never actually shot an elephant? If you're a literary sophisticate, the correct answer is obvious: of course not. All we have are Orwell's words; they are what they are regardless of his life story, and only a naive reader demands that they reflect factual truth. If anything, an invented incident would show that Orwell's imaginative writing is underrated.

But I think in this case the naive reaction is the right one. Writers always use their imaginations in reconstructing the past, but if central incidents are going to be invented out of nothing, an essayist's authority to say that this is how the world is (and that it's not the way you think) will diminish, perhaps fatally. An Orwell essay—like all his nonfiction—establishes a sort of contract with the reader. This is the writer Orwell presents himself to be:
I was there—I saw it—I know.
With another writer it would matter less to learn that an incident was made up in the name of another kind of truth than fact. If Virginia Woolf never watched a moth die on her windowpane, "The Death of the Moth" would still be a lyrical meditation on the nature of existence and death. But part of the power of an epigrammatic statement such as "When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys" comes from its having been hard-won out there in the world of German elephant rifles and Burmese rice paddies. "Accounts of actual happenings cast a particular kind of narrative spell," the critic Gordon Harvey says about this essay; "they give a particular pleasure that
fiction doesn't give and that won't withstand the suspicion of fictiveness, depending as the pleasure does on our perception of an effort being made to preserve the integrity of past experience, from both the assaults of subsequent experience and the temptations of art." It's essential to one's sense of how Orwell thinks and writes that he
doesn't
rig the facts to fit a predigested idea or an elegant conceit. The end of that road is dishonest propaganda or art for art's sake—both of which he rejected. It would be perverse to assume that Orwell subscribed to the postmodern literary doctrine of the constructedness of reality and the unknowability of truth. A fear that facts could materialize or vanish on command lay at the heart of the totalitarian nightmare that preoccupied the last decade of his life.