GEORGE ORWELL AS AN ESSAYIST

 GEORGE ORWELL AS AN ESSAYIST

While his novels stand as a lasting and brilliant contribution to 20th century literature, the essay was the form by which Orwell honed his fictionally expressed ideas. As compiler George Packer states in the introduction to the narrative essay volume, "Orwell's writing began with essays, and his essays began with experience." He cites the example of Burmese Days (1934), Orwell's novel of colonial Burma; it was preceded by his essay "A Hanging" (1931), an account of an execution in Burma which Orwell, at the time a member of the Indian Imperial Police, was required to attend. His experience in Burma was to contribute to his disillusionment and antipathy toward imperialism, an attitude evident in both works. Thus, for those whose introduction to Orwell has been through his novels, some of the essays may feel a bit like nonfictional prequels, and are all the more fascinating for that.

His two volumes of essays are noteworthy. The two volumes are divided broadly into narrative essays (Facing Unpleasant Facts, 2009) and critical essays (All Art Is Propaganda, 2009). It's quite an eclectic mix. Among the narrative essays: Orwell deliberately getting arrested for public drunkenness (apparently so he could write about it); memories of serving with anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War; a description of the ideal pub. Among the critical essays: an in-depth analysis of boys' weekly magazines (it sounds boring, but it's not); the question of whether socialists can be happy; the trials and tribulations of being an impoverished book reviewer.

In the narrative essay volume, of particular interest to enthusiasts of World War II history will be Orwell's "War-time Diary" of his life in London, covering May to December 1940. Britain was regularly under attack from German air raids, France was under Nazi occupation, and America had not yet entered the war. As philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb has noted about William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary (1941), we can get a special insight into history by reading accounts that were written not in hindsight, but as events were unfolding.

Perhaps the most fascinating of the critical essays are those describing Orwell's views of other artists, mainly his fellow authors. He expresses a brutally honest combination of tremendous praise and scathing criticism of Charles Dickens, Henry Miller, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, and Jonathan Swift; a devastating critique of Leo Tolstoy's opinions on Shakespeare; and a mixture of supreme artistic praise and absolute moral condemnation of Salvador Dali. He assesses Edgar Allan Poe's state of mind as "at best a wild romanticism and at worst not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense." In his critique of T.S. Eliot, Orwell suggests that Eliot's conversion to Anglicanism negatively affected his work, arguing that the writings of the orthodoxly religious "usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree." The man pulls no punches.