Facing Unpleasant Facts (3 page)

Like Antaeus, Orwell drew his strength from having his feet planted on the ground. "I have a sort of belly-to-earth attitude," he confessed in a letter to Henry Miller a few months after writing "Shooting an Elephant," "and always feel uneasy when I get away from the ordinary world where grass is green, stones hard, etc." In "Why I Write," the closest thing to an Orwell literary manifesto, he declared, "When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention." At the risk of unsophistication, it's better to take Orwell at his word and hold him to his own standard.

"Shooting an Elephant" established Orwell as a great essayist. In it he found a voice that was flexible and forceful: sensitive without being sentimental, sad but never surprised, matter-of-factly rendering devastating judgments, as hard on himself as on the world. It's a voice that commands trust.

Orwell tells the stories in these essays because they are good stories. He tells them, in the words of "Why I Write," with "aesthetic
enthusiasm" and "[p]leasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story." The sheer vitality of language in his descriptions of a Moroccan funeral or a Parisian charity hospital is part of what makes one return to the essays again and again. Orwell had an ability to create single images that somehow capture the moral atmosphere of a world and make it unforgettable: the cupping of patients' backs to raise blisters in "How the Poor Die," the store mannequins lying like corpses on Oxford Street in the "War-time Diary," the old woman bent double under her load of firewood in "Marrakech," the bone handle of the headmaster's riding crop breaking across Orwell's backside in "Such, Such Were the Joys," the "four sodden, debauched, loathely cigarette ends" placed in his hand at the end of "The Spike," the dead flies collecting on the tops of bookshop volumes, the dying elephant's blood flowing like "red velvet," the puddle in the prisoner's path. They are usually images of cruelty, squalor, or injustice (dirt and bad smells were among his fixations), but their power lies in their specificity, their objectivity. "I am not commenting," he says in "Marrakech," "merely pointing to a fact."

The truth is that Orwell is always commenting, whether indirectly through these revelatory details, or else directly and, indeed, unambiguously. Few writers today care to show their hand (or could if they tried) as Orwell does when he writes, for example, "People with brown skins are next door to invisible," "the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work," or "A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase." Propositions as blunt as these are dangerous for the writer because they invite resistance and contestation, ultimately risking the loss of that essential assent he needs from his reader. But they give Orwell's essays their tremendous intellectual liveliness, and over the course of his work they occur more and
more thickly as he became surer of his views and bolder in his expression of them. He is emphatic, but he is rarely didactic; a characteristic tone of the Orwell essay is its lack of expressed outrage. Again, he is saying: "This is how things are—like it or not." Occasionally, the political purpose that animates an essay overwhelms its literary control, producing outbursts like this in the middle of an indignant passage in "Looking Back on the Spanish War": "The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his 'materialism'!" The exclamation mark is usually a bad sign in Orwellian punctuation. But if he didn't always live up to his own injunctions about good writing (as he was quick to admit in "Politics in the English Language"), his faults were often linked to his insistence on saying exactly what he meant as forcefully as he could, which is no fault at all.

The essays in this volume could not be farther from the kind of autobiographical writing that has been fashionable over the past ten or fifteen years, in which a writer puts the reader under the spell of pure novelistic storytelling, all emotional vibration without an insight anywhere. The narrator of this type of memoir drifts helplessly on the surface of events in an eternal present tense, which takes away the power and the responsibility of retrospection: It just happened—don't ask me what it means. Orwell's essays are the opposite—transparent and accountable. He is both character and narrator, and in the distance that comes with looking
back
at his own experience in the past tense he manages to raise it out of the narrow circle of private confession and into the sphere of universal revelation—even when the subject is bedwetting.

These essays don't invite elaborate feats of interpretation or philosophical subtlety or clever subversions of ostensible meaning. They have a puritanical bias toward clarity. This doesn't mean that
they moralize under the assumption that the world is open to simple judgments. What they demand of the reader is a sort of grownupness about life—that you accept its complexities, its refusal to provide happy endings, without losing or surrendering the ability to judge. Orwell asks that you understand how he could sympathize with the oppressed Burmese and also want to drive a bayonet through the stomach of a Buddhist monk; why it was necessary to fight fascism and yet impossible to shoot a fascist who was holding up his trousers as he ran along a trench; why revenge is sour, even in occupied Germany.

The subjects most writers turn to for autobiographical material were almost off-limits to Orwell. He was the product of a middle-class, early-twentieth-century English upbringing and tight-lipped about his feelings, but his reserve was more than merely cultural. Family, love, sex, marriage, friendship, parenthood, loss—Orwell never wrote about any of these, perhaps because they had no obvious connection to his abiding political themes. Even his late and long essay on the misery of his early schooling, "Such, Such Were the Joys," is a study of the English class system just before it began to break down. He never seems to have felt an impulse to record what it was like, for example, to adopt a son, or lose his wife to a botched hysterectomy. He wasn't interested in portraits of individuals, especially those close to him. His characters are walk-ons and types: the Arab-looking militia boy in "Looking Back on the Spanish War"; Flip and Sambo, the headmistress and headmaster of his grammar school; his fellow tramps. He lavishes more descriptive attention on an elephant, a toad, and England than on any single person. His abiding subject is human society, not isolated human beings.

This is true even when he was writing about his one constant character—himself. Reflecting on one's own life is an astringent endeavor that requires the opposite of self-indulgence. This most
autobiographical of writers believed that "one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality." And yet Orwell is felt everywhere in these essays. The facts they record are registering on a particular storyteller: an independent-minded one, who is usually writing
against
something. The pressure of subjectivity—Orwell's biases, concerns, obsessions, turns of mind—is what gives the prose its vividness.

After Orwell entered his forties in the 1940s, autobiography dwindled from his writing. It didn't disappear: Two of his greatest essays, "How the Poor Die" and "Such, Such Were the Joys," were written in his last years. But by then his major experiences were behind him, and he suffered the fate of any serious writer, which was to spend most of his time alone in a room—a subject that Virginia Woolf could transform into literature but Orwell could not. Even as he began to produce his great critical essays and his output of narrative essays declined, he didn't stop writing this type altogether. It took on different forms. There were his lengthy wartime studies of his own country, such as "England Your England," which appeared in a small 1941 volume called
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,
a call for an egalitarian revolution at home as part of the fight against fascism abroad. There were his shorter, lighter, but always pointed pieces on quotidian subjects ranging from coal fires to the return of spring. There were the weekly columns that he published under the headline "As I Please" in the left-wing paper
Tribune,
beginning in late 1943 and continuing for three and a half years, covering miscellaneous topics, two or three per column, that often drew on daily observations of wartime London (a sort of print prototype of blogging). And there was his "War-time Diary," a remarkable journal that he kept intermittently from the evacuation of Dunkirk in May 1940 until the victory in Egypt in November
1942, containing some of his best descriptive writing and filling a strange gap in Orwell's work—for he never wrote a novel or nonfiction book about the most historically important event of his life ( his tubercular lungs kept him out of uniform; instead, he spent "two wasted years" as a producer in the Eastern Service of the BBC). The entries from 1940 are included here almost in their entirety, for the picture they give of history unfolding day by day, and of Orwell taking it all in without blinking.

These are not narrative essays in the conventional sense, as "Shooting an Elephant" is. Several essays in this volume, such as "In Front of Your Nose," are here only because they come under no obvious categorical heading but are too good to omit. Still, diary entries, newspaper columns, and occasional pieces show Orwell using his descriptive powers in new ways. On the whole, even as the world picture grows ever darker, he becomes a lonely widower, and his health declines, there is more pleasure taken in these pieces—in nature, in common rituals, solid objects, bits of trivia, and old cultural artifacts. These small attachments become, in
1984,
essential pillars of Winston Smith's rebellion against the regime of Big Brother. No longer a struggling young writer afflicted by resentments and a chronic sense of failure, Orwell grew more fully into himself and his essay writing relaxed. He could accept and set down his loves as well as his horrors.

The first-person protagonist, with his dramatic situations and emotional resonance, is largely missing from these late essays. But in his place there is a second Orwell—not the subject, but the writer—who has learned to cut straight to the heart of everything he sees and hears with a diamond precision. The world of action has shrunk, but the world of his mind keeps growing until nothing, neither the global battlefield nor a cup of tea, seems to escape it. Observation and thought have become perfectly inextricable, without a wasted word, and there's a kind of expository poetry in
sentences such as this: "The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke." Or this: "[t]he earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it." Or these: "The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life."

This last is from the conclusion of "Such, Such Were the Joys," Orwell's final narrative essay, written while he was dying of tuberculosis and struggling to finish
1984,
and published after his death. Near the end of his foreshortened life he returned to childhood, and he rendered it with all the intelligence and ruthlessness and compassion in his power. The prose has the wintry wisdom of late work. In this essay Orwell shows, again and for the last time, that a great work of art can emerge from the simple act of seeing oneself and the world clearly, honestly, without fear.

It was late afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were covered with blossom, and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.

What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil, everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back answer. When you came to be searched he fair held you upside down and shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was hell to pay, and if you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.

I had eightpence on me. "For the love of Christ, mate," the old hands advised me, "don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into the spike with eightpence!"

So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes, and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We
hid them in our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But it is an unwritten law that even the sternest tramp majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong moment, and was impounded.

At six the gates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, lime-washed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining room and about a hundred narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty, who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself, he looked hard at me, and said: