All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction By Keith Gessen
Charles Dickens
Boys' Weeklies
Inside the Whale
Drama Reviews
Film Review
Wells, Hitler and the World State
The Art of Donald McGill
No, Not One
Rudyard Kipling1
T. S. Eliot
Can Socialists Be Happy?1
Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali
Propaganda and Demotic Speech
Raffles and Miss Blandish
Good Bad Books
The Prevention of Literature
Politics and the English Language
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
Writers and Leviathan
Review of The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Reflections on Gandhi
Notes
Footnotes
First Mariner Books edition 2009
Compilation copyright (c) 2008 by The Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell
Foreword copyright (c) 2008 by George Packer
Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by Keith Gessen
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Essays collected from The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, OBE, published in Great Britain in 1998 by Secker & Warburg. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Peter Davison for permission to draw from his notes.
Excerpts from "The Dry Salvages" in Four Quartets, copyright 1941 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Excerpts from "East Coker" in Four Quartets, copyright 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Excerpt from "Spain" from Selected Poems, Expanded Edition by W. H. Auden, edited by Edward Mendelsohn. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Orwell, George, 1903-1950.
All art is propaganda: critical essays/by George Orwell; compiled by George Packer;
with an introduction by Keith Gessen.--1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Packer, George, 1960-II. Title.
PR6029.R8A626 2008
824'.912--dc22 2008012356
ISBN 978-0-15-101355-5
ISBN 978-0-15-603307-7 (pbk.)
Text set in Garamond MT
Designed by Cathy Riggs
Printed in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
BEFORE anything else, George Orwell was an essayist. His earliest published pieces were essays; so were his last deathbed writings. In between, he never stopped working at the essay's essential task of articulating thoughts out of the stuff of life and art in a compressed space with a distinctly individual voice that speaks directly to the reader. The essay perfectly suited Orwell's idiosyncratic talents. It takes precedence even in his best-known fiction: During long passages of 1984, the novelistic surface cracks and splits open under the pressure of the essayist's concerns. His more obscure novels of social realism from the 1930s are marked, and to some extent marred, by an essayist's explaining; and his great nonfiction books, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia, continually slip between particular and general, concrete and abstract, narration and exposition, in a way that would be alien to a storytelling purist and that defines Orwell's core purpose as a writer. As soon as he began to write something, it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge--in short, to think--as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent. In his best work, Orwell's arguments are mostly with himself.
Part of the essay's congeniality for Orwell is its flexibility. All a reader asks is that the essayist mean what he says and say something interesting, in a voice that's recognizably his; beyond that, subject matter, length, structure, and occasion are extremely variable. Orwell, who produced a staggering amount of prose over the course of a career cut short at forty-six by tuberculosis, was a working journalist, and in the two volumes of this new selection of his essays you will find book, film, and theater reviews, newspaper columns, and war reporting, as well as cultural commentary, literary criticism, political argument, autobiographical fragments, and longer personal narratives. In Orwell's hands, they are all essays. He is always pointing to larger concerns beyond the immediate scope of his subject.
Orwell had the advantage of tradition: He worked in the lineage of the English essay dating back to the eighteenth century, whose earlier masters were Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, and whose last great representative was Orwell himself. Within this tradition it was entirely natural for a writer to move between fiction and nonfiction, journalism and autobiography, the daily newspaper, the weekly or monthly magazine, and the quarterly review; and between the subjects of art, literature, culture, politics, and himself. This tradition hasn't thrived in the United States. Our national literature was born with the anxieties and ambitions of New World arrivistes, and Americans have always regarded the novel as the highest form of literary art; if we recognize essays at all, it's as the minor work of novelists and poets (and yet some of the greatest modern essayists--James Baldwin and Edmund Wilson, to name two--have been Americans). As for journalism of the kind that Orwell routinely turned out, the word itself has suggested something like the opposite of literature to an American reader. The English essay comes out of a more workmanlike view of what it means to be a writer: This view locates the writer squarely within the struggles of his historical time and social place, which is where the essayist has to live.
A tradition in which the line between writer and journalist is hard to draw allows plenty of room for the characteristic qualities of the Orwell essay: his informal, direct prose style; his interest in sociological criticism that takes in both high and popular culture; his penchant for overstatement and attack; his talent for memorable sentences, especially his openings, which a journalist would call the lede: "In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people--the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me"; "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent"; "There is very little in Eliot's later work that makes any deep impression on me"; "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing." The American critic Irving Howe wrote in his autobiography A Margin of Hope that when he set out to learn to write essays in the 1940s, he turned to Orwell: "How do you begin a literary piece so as to hold attention? George Orwell was masterful at this, probably because he had none of the American literary snobbism about doing 'mere journalism.'"
Orwell lived in and wrote about interesting times: war, ideological extremism, intellectual combat, dilemmas over the role of the writer in a period of partisanship and upheaval. "In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties," he speculates in "Why I Write." "As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer." If it's true, th
en we can be grateful for the timing of Orwell's birth, since his talent was never going to lie in updating the nineteenth-century naturalistic novel. The work Orwell started doing to pay the bills while he wrote fiction--his reviews, sketches, polemics, columns--turned out to be the purest expression of his originality. "Pamphleteer" might suggest a kind of hack, but in Orwell's case it's an essayist with a cause.
Our times are interesting in similar ways and have opened up a space for writers who are similarly capable of thinking clearly about history as it's unfolding without surrendering their grip on permanent standards of artistic judgment, political idealism, and moral decency. In other words, our age demands essayists. So it's an odd fact that even readers who know 1984 well and have read one or two of Orwell's other books are likely to be unfamiliar with the most essential Orwell. Aside from "Politics and the English Language" and perhaps "Shooting an Elephant," none of his essays are widely read, and some of the best remain almost unknown. Those American readers who have read the essays are likely to have encountered only the single-volume A Collection of Essays, which includes just fourteen wonderful but somewhat randomly chosen pieces--not enough to give a sense of Orwell's growth as a writer, the range and evolution of his interests.
How should one conceive a more generous edition of Orwell's essays? A strictly chronological version would function as a kind of autobiography; a division by subject matter--socialism, the Spanish civil war, England--would offer a historical primer. But for contemporary readers, the particular content of Orwell's life and times can sometimes seem dated and remote, whereas the drama of a great writer mastering a form in countless variations is always current. The two volumes of this new edition are organized to illuminate Orwell as an essayist--to show readers how he made the essay his own. In them, you'll find Orwell engaged in two different modes of writing: The essays in Facing Unpleasant Facts build meaning from telling a story; the essays in All Art Is Propaganda hold something up to critical scrutiny. The first is based on narrative, the second on analysis, and Orwell was equally brilliant at both. He wrote more narrative essays early in his career, in the 1930s, when he was drawing on his personal encounters with imperialism, poverty, and war; and more critical essays later on, in the 1940s, when his most important experiences were behind him. But he never stopped writing either kind; one of his last essays was the posthumously published account of his schooldays, "Such, Such Were the Joys." The literary problems raised and the demands imposed by these two types of essay are sufficiently different that they distinguish the essays written across Orwell's career in a more fundamental way than subject, period, or publication.
This division shows the technical difficulties of the essay in especially sharp relief. Essays seem to offer almost limitless room to improvise and experiment, and yet their very freedom makes them unforgiving of literary faults: sloppiness, vagueness, pretension, structural misshapenness, an immature voice, insular material, and the nearly universal plague of bad thinking are all mercilessly exposed under the spotlight in which the essayist stands alone onstage. There are no props, no sets, no other actors; the essayist is the existentialist of literature, and a mediocre talent will wear out his audience within a couple of paragraphs. Orwell was a technical master whose essays are so clear and coherent that they act as guides to how they were put together. You can learn most of what you need to know about the steps by which a narrative essay arrives at a larger truth out of personal experience from "Shooting an Elephant," and about the way close reading in a critical essay can open up literary and philosophical commentary from "T. S. Eliot." Orwell's essays demonstrate how to be interesting line after line. The emphasis in these collections on the two kinds of essay he wrote is directed not just at readers who want to discover or rediscover his work, but at writers who want to learn from it.
Certain essays don't fit my scheme, such as the "As I Please" columns, which appeared in the weekly Tribune, and Orwell's short commentaries on English cooking, sports, toads, and coal fires. I've included these partly for the sake of their obscurity, to satisfy the aficionado along with the amateur, and partly because they show how much of life interested him. He could savor and mine the trivial and become partisan about things that have nothing to do with politics. On every subject he took up, Orwell quickly hit the target of something essential, making an insight that would occur to no other writer and would still resonate over half a century later. And it's often a short step from these slighter works to the themes of his most famous books. For example, "As I Please, 16," which sentences to death certain overused political terms, is the germ of the great essay "Politics and the English Language," which in turn crystallizes much of the intellectual content behind the nightmare vision of 1984. Seeing the development of a writer's obsessions through his work is just one reason to read these two volumes of essays together.
A generation of students has gone to school on the banal truth that all literature is "constructed," and learned to scoff at the notion that words on the page might express something essentially authentic about the writer. The usefulness of this insight runs up against its limits when you pick up Orwell's essays. Open these books anywhere and you encounter the same voice. Orwell always sounds like Orwell: readier to fight than most writers, toughened but also deepened by hard, largely self-inflicted experience, able to zero in on what's essential about a poem or a politician or a memory, unsurprised without being cynical, principled without being priggish, direct and yet slightly reserved. It is not a clever or inventive voice, and occasionally it can sound a bit pedestrian. It doesn't seduce and exhaust you with literary dazzle; it persuades you with the strength of its prose and the soundness of its judgment. Exactly what relation this voice has to the private individual born with the name Eric Arthur Blair is unknowable. Within the confines of these pages, its integrity is consistent and enduring.
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.
--GEORGE PACKER
Introduction By Keith Gessen
ORWELL published the essays collected here in the 1940s--and though he was just thirty-seven in 1940, this would be the last decade of his life. He had behind him four conventional "social" novels and, more significantly, three books of documentary reportage, each one better than the last, culminating in his classic account of the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia. Gradually in the others but culminating in Homage, Orwell perfected his signature "plain" style, which so resembles someone speaking honestly and without pretense directly to you, and he had more or less settled on his political opinions: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it." So he said in 1946.
But while this may have been settled, there were other matters Orwell was still working out in his mind. The subjects of these critical essays are almost all, in one way or another, things Orwell doesn't like. The essays are incessantly self-contradicting. First, Orwell declares that no great novel could now be written from a Catholic (or Communist) perspective; later he allows that a novel could be written from such a perspective, in a pinch; and then in his essay on Graham Greene he comes very near to suggesting that only Catholics can now write novels. At one point ("The Art of Donald McGill") he praises dirty postcards; at another he suggests that a different sort of dirty postcard ("that used to b
e sold in Mediterranean seaport towns") ought to be censored. In the essay on T. S. Eliot he writes that it is "fashionable to say that in verse only the words count and the 'meaning' is irrelevant, but in fact every poem contains a prose-meaning, and when the poem is any good it is a meaning which the poet urgently wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda." Several years later, in "The Prevention of Literature," in arguing for the idea that poetry might survive totalitarianism while prose would not, he writes that "what the poet is saying--that is, what his poem 'means' if translated into prose--is relatively unimportant even to himself." Early in the volume, which also means early in the war, he repeatedly points out that the insight of the great totalitarian ideologies (at another point, however, "smelly little orthodoxies") is that mankind needs more than simply a bit of pleasure to make life worth living. The scientific rationalist H. G. Wells, who insisted on belittling Hitler, "was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them." Later in the volume, after the war, Orwell will repeatedly plead for a much more humdrum view of human life. What's particularly frustrating about these contradictions is that at each successive moment Orwell presents them in his great style, his wonderful sharp-edged plainspoken style, which makes you feel that there is no way on earth you could possibly disagree with him, unless you're part of the pansy left, or a sandal wearer and fruit-juice drinker, or maybe just a crank.
In a way I'm exaggerating, because the rightness of Orwell on a number of topics has been an albatross around his neck for sixty years. In truth, Orwell was wrong about all sorts of things. He is wrong in these essays about Eliot's "Four Quartets," a poem of more profound despair than he admits. He is howlingly wrong when he says that Uncle Tom's Cabin will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf. These are minor things. A major thing he was wrong about was the inner logic of totalitarianism: He thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to overthrow it. This was the nightmare vision of 1984. In fact, as it turned out in Russia, even the ruling elite was not willing to maintain mature totalitarianism after Stalin's death. Other totalitarian regimes have repeated the pattern. Orwell was wrong and Orwell contradicted himself. He was more insightful about the distant dangers of Communist thought-control, in the Soviet Union, than the more pressing and durable thought-control of Western consumerism. Nor did he see the sexual revolution coming, not by a long shot; one wonders what the too-frequent taunter of the "pansy left" would have made of the fact that the gay movement was one of the most successful, because most militant, of the post-1960s liberation struggles.