Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays

  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 Dali'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.

  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 "Wartime 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 particul
ar 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 "Wartime 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.