Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

continues until there exists a whole song or ballad which has no

  identifiable author.

  In prose, this kind of intimate collaboration is quite impossible.

  Serious prose, in any case, has to be composed in solitude, whereas the

  excitement of being part of a group is actually an aid to certain kinds

  of versification. Verse--and perhaps good verse of its own kind, though

  it would not be the highest kind--might survive under even the most

  inquisitorial r�gime. Even in a society where liberty and individuality

  had been extinguished, there would still be a need either for patriotic

  songs and heroic ballads celebrating victories, or for elaborate

  exercises in flattery; and these are the kinds of poems that can be

  written to order, or composed communally, without necessarily lacking

  artistic value. Prose is a different matter, since the prose writer

  cannot narrow the range of his thoughts without killing his

  inventiveness. But the history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of

  people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of

  liberty is inimical to all forms of literature. German literature almost

  disappeared during the Hitler r�gime, and the case was not much better in

  Italy. Russian literature, so far as one can judge by translations, has

  deteriorated markedly since the early days of the revolution, though some

  of the verse appears to be better than the prose. Few if any Russian

  novels that it is possible to take seriously have been translated for

  about fifteen years. In western Europe and America large sections of the

  literary intelligentsia have either passed through the Communist Party or

  have been warmly sympathetic to it, but this whole leftward movement has

  produced extraordinarily few books worth reading. Orthodox Catholicism,

  again, seems to have a crushing effect upon certain literary forms,

  especially the novel. During a period of three hundred years, how many

  people have been at once good novelists and good Catholics? The fact is

  that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of

  them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition. Poetry

  might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such

  as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer

  would have no choice between silence or death. Prose literature as we

  know it is the product of rationalism, of the Protestant centuries, of

  the autonomous individual. And the destruction of intellectual liberty

  cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the

  novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order. In the future it is

  possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling

  or truthful observation, may arise, but no such thing is at present

  imaginable. It seems much likelier that if the liberal culture that we

  have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art

  will perish with it.

  Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to

  speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly

  totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until

  television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it

  is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the

  industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They

  are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading

  matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and

  stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or

  perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced

  by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the

  minimum.

  It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by

  machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work

  in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower

  reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by

  what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly

  mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their

  individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to

  whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand:

  even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped

  into shape by producers and censors. So also with the innumerable books

  and pamphlets commissioned by government departments. Even more

  machine-like is the production of short stories, serials, and poems for

  the very cheap magazines. Papers such as the WRITER abound with

  advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made

  plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the

  opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a

  sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots

  for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and

  situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce

  ingenious stories automatically. It is probably in some such way that the

  literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature

  were still felt to be necessary. Imagination--even consciousness, so far

  as possible--would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books

  would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass

  through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an

  individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It

  goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but

  anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state.

  As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be

  suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.

  Meanwhile, totalitarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere. Our own

  society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of

  free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against

  strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret

  police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are

  willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I

  said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of

  liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do

  not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of

  persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend

  him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian

  outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from

  the intellectuals themselves.

  It is possible that the Russophile intelligentsia, if they had not

  succumbed to that particular myth, would have succumbed to another of

  much the same kind. But at any rate the Russian myth is there, and the

  corruption it causes stinks. When one sees highly educated men looking on

  indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise

  more, their c
ynicism or their shortsightedness. Many scientists, for

  example, are the uncritical admirers of the U.S.S.R. They appear to think

  that the destruction of liberty is of no importance so long as their own

  line of work is for the moment unaffected. The U.S.S.R. is a large,

  rapidly developing country which has an acute need of scientific workers

  and, consequently, treats them generously. Provided that they steer clear

  of dangerous subjects such as psychology, scientists are privileged

  persons. Writers, on the other hand, are viciously persecuted. It is true

  that literary prostitutes like Ilya Ehrenburg or Alexei Tolstoy are paid

  huge sums of money, but the only thing which is of any value to the

  writer as such--his freedom of expression--is taken away from him.

  Some, at least, of the English scientists who speak so enthusiastically

  of the opportunities to be enjoyed by scientists in Russia are capable of

  understanding this. But their reflection appears to be: "Writers are

  persecuted in Russia. So what? I am not a writer." They do not see that

  any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective

  truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought.

  For the moment the totalitarian state tolerates the scientist because it

  needs him. Even in Nazi Germany, scientists, other than Jews, were

  relatively well treated and the German scientific community, as a whole,

  offered no resistance to Hitler. At this stage of history, even the most

  autocratic ruler is forced to take account of physical reality, partly

  because of the lingering-on of liberal habits of thought, partly because

  of the need to prepare for war. So long as physical reality cannot

  altogether be ignored, so long as two and two have to make four when you

  are, for example, drawing the blueprint of an aeroplane, the scientist

  has his function, and can even be allowed a measure of liberty. His

  awakening will come later, when the totalitarian state is firmly

  established. Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard the integrity of

  science, it is his job to develop some kind of solidarity with his

  literary colleagues and not disregard it as a matter of indifference when

  writers are silenced or driven to suicide, and newspapers systematically

  falsified.

  But however it may be with the physical sciences, or with music, painting

  and architecture, it is--as I have tried to show--certain that

  literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it

  doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any

  writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for

  persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as

  a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against "individualism"

  and the "ivory tower", no pious platitudes to the effect that "true

  individuality is only attained through identification with the

  community", can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind.

  Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is

  impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from

  what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from

  intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like

  certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity. Any writer or

  journalist who denies that fact--and nearly all the current praise of

  the Soviet Union contains or implies such a denial--is, in effect,

  demanding his own destruction.

  WHY I WRITE (1946)

  From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I

  grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and

  twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the

  consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or

  later I should have to settle down and write books.

  I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on

  either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and

  other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable

  mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the

  lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with

  imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions

  were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew

  that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts,

  and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get

  my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of

  serious--i.e. seriously intended--writing which I produced all through

  my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote

  my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to

  dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a

  tiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth'--a good enough phrase, but I

  fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger'. At eleven,

  when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was

  printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the

  death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote

  bad and usually unfinished 'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I also

  attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total

  of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all

  those years.

  However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary

  activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I

  produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from

  school work, I wrote VERS D'OCCASION, semi-comic poems which I could turn

  out at what now seems to me astonishing speed--at fourteen I wrote a

  whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week--and

  helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These

  magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine,

  and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest

  journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I

  was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was

  the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary

  existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children

  and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say,

  Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but

  quite soon my 'story' ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became

  more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I

  saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my

  head: 'He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of

  sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table,

  where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand

  in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a

  tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf', etc. etc. This habit

  con
tinued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary

  years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I

  seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under

  a kind of compulsion from outside. The 'story' must, I suppose, have

  reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages,

  but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive

  quality.

  When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words,

  i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from PARADISE LOST,

  So hee with difficulty and labour hard

  Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

  which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my

  backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As for

  the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear

  what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to

  want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic

  novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting

  similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly

  for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel,

  BURMESE DAYS, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier,

  is rather that kind of book.

  I give all this background information because I do not think one can

  assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early

  development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives

  in--at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our

  own--but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an

  emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his

  job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at

  some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his

  early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

  Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great

  motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in

  different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions

  will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is

  living. They are:

  (i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be

  remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed

  you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a

  motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with

  scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful

  businessmen--in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great

  mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about

  thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all--and

  live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But

  there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined

  to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

  Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and

  self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

  (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world,

  or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in

  the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the

  rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is

  valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble

  in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will

  have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian

  reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc.

  Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic

  considerations.

  (iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out