A Collection of Essays by George Orwell

A Collection of Essays
1954 • Doubleday Anchor Books
320 pages (paperback)


There is a telling letter written by George Orwell during his work on Nineteen Eighty-Four in which he responds to an offer of employment by Richard Usborne, editor of the Strand literary journal. The letter, which appears in an introduction to the Peter Davison-edited George Orwell: A Life in Letters, seems to indicate that the author had not only distrust of communism but misgivings about the socialism that formed a basis for his political thought. Orwell wrote:

I felt [at the time of The Road to Wigan Pier], as I still do, that there are huge deficiencies in the whole conception of Socialism, and I was still wondering whether there was any other way out. After having a fairly good look at British industrialism at its worst, ie. in the mining areas, I came to the conclusion that it is a duty to work for Socialism even if one is not emotionally drawn to it, because the continuance of present conditions is simply not tolerable, and no solution except some kind of collectivism is viable, because that is what the mass of the people want.

These remarks, which hadn't been published until an anonymous source recently came forward with the letter, seem to completely change the angle at which we can look at Orwell and his political commitments. What effect it will have on the interpretation of his life and works only time will tell. Yet it also reinforces the common idea of Orwell as a strong-willed man in the arenas of politics and ethics: though his faith in left wing movements wavered as the early Twentieth Century progressed, he saw his political path as the only one that could be taken and kept to it. Weaker-willed authors might jump ship in the face of adversity or slide into a bog of abstraction and vagueness, a popular decision for many of the artistically comfortable.

In reading doubts like this, we do have to wonder what was going through Orwell's mind as a writer of essays, where ideologies can't hide for a moment behind the characters and events of a novel. Orwell, who wrote for political magazines or was approached by other journals for his ability to write in a political context, always looked at his topics through a socialist lens. His essays, in fact, are never politically inactive or written with sentimentality; all seek to bring out the injustices of an ailing capitalist system and encourage their readers to push for change, regardless of whether he is writing about European militaries, movies, or Charles Dickens.

While Orwell could never have gone to the right, it might be time to examine how much Orwell believed in what he was saying. Did Orwell actually think social revolution in England was possible when it had already failed miserably in Spain, a country where true revolution seemed to be happening? And as a respecter of English traditions - so much that he asked to be buried under the auspices of the Anglican Church - did he really envision England's economic strata to come down in such a rigid society? Questions like these, in light of new sources, make it worth reading Orwell's essays again.

The 1954 paperback release of Orwell's major essays by Doubleday Anchor is a comprehensive set that includes writings from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. There are 14 in all, opening with his memoir à clef 'Such, Such Were the Joys...' on English boarding school life and ending with his equally personal 'Why I Write,' written towards the end of his life in 1947. Also included are his famous essays on Dickens and Kipling, his psuedo-memoir of British policing in Burma 'Shooting an Elephant,' his writing treatise 'Politics and the English Language,' and 'England Your England,' a love-hate evaluation of English life written in the thick of World War II.

Anyone who has read Orwell's novels but not his essays may be surprised by the difference in style. While Orwell continues to use a simple yet eloquent language, his essays do not have the same compactness or liveliness of his books. Most are dry, gradual reads with a unique kind of organization. He will often begin a topic and then introduce other points that seem incongruous, eventually connecting the threads at some point. The reader needs a good deal of patience as his arguments unreel like a tape deck.

Not coincidentally, the most memorable of his essays are first-person narratives with the vivid detail of his novels. In 'Shooting an Elephant,' Orwell brilliantly puts himself in the middle of Burma, flanked on one side by an elephant who has just stomped a villager and on the other by a swarm of people who have come to perhaps watch the animal being rifled. In 'Marrakech,' written after Orwell's visit to Morocco, things are just as gruesome. The essay begins with a group of men carrying a dead person to the town graveyard in a single rag, winning the attention of flies from a restaurant they are passing.

There are other cases like the opening essay, 'Such, Such Were the Joys...,' that pack a similar wallop in describing social injustices of Orwell's time. 'Such' is an essay that was left by Orwell in manuscript upon his death and describes his time as a boarding student at St. Cyprian's in East Sussex. Orwell, who attended on free tuition due to his family's lower income, paints a brutal picture of dirty living conditions, sexual repression, and constant shame from the husband and wife who administered the school. Not mentioning the school or its people by their actual names, he begins with a deadpan first sentence that is typical of Orwell's first-person writing: "Soon after I arrived at Crossgates [i.e., St. Cyprian's]...[ ]...I began wetting my bed."

Perhaps what adds to the draw of Orwell is that he can't straight away be called a genius, or at least a genius in the traditional sense. Orwell's approach to thinking has a sheer practicality about it, even if he's a more emotionally complicated man than first assumed. While broad in perspective and offering a look into both popular culture ('The Art of Donald McGill,' 'Raffles and Miss Blandish') and socioeconomic dilemmas, none of Orwell's writing gives a whiff of stuffy intellectualism.

His thoughts were also considerably flawed at times, which allows us to loosen our collars and stop viewing his work as suspiciously clean. Orwell, for instance, has too much to say on certain topics he doesn't know enough about, one glaring example being American history. His opinions are appropriately inaccurate for a man who has never been to the U.S. (unfortunately, American slaves did experience the breakup of families, unlike what he seems to think in 'Looking Back on the Spanish War').

Orwell argues in 'Why I Write' that no piece of writing is genuinely free from political bias, even works that are decidedly apolitical. Because of this and his commitment to socialism, he will look at film, magazines, education, sports, and other areas of life from within this mindset. His political rhetoric often gets in the way of social observations that would be far more enlightening without it. While written for obvious reasons, even 'Boys' Weeklies,' an informative essay on boys' story magazines, turns into the politics of their publishers.

And are these kinds of weaknesses damaging to a major author's reputation? Not really, since those who appear right all of the time are more likely standing behind a veneer: they simply look too neat.

Orwell is more often talked about than read nowadays despite his work not being hard at all to read. Hopefully, there will be enough open minds left to revisit Orwell, which is essential after how much we already owe him for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the touchstone novels on western totalitarianism. Even if his political image looks different in the future, his contributions to human freedom and decency will not.

Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems

Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems
1963 • Vintage Books
128 pages / 0394702956 (paperback)

I can vaguely recall my first brush with Robinson Jeffers on the liberal arts floor of our college's library. While browsing shelves of twentieth-century American authors, 'Jeffers' leaped out at me after hearing his name mentioned in passing by my English teachers. Yet, his work never appeared in class or on our syllabi. What was the big secret?

That is a question to be asked for university professors who rarely teach Jeffers and book publishers such as W.W. Norton, who went as far as to omit his work from editions of their American literature anthology. Although his reputation took a substantial beating after the end of World War II, there was a point during the 1920s when critics such as T.S. Eliot and Mark Van Doren regarded Jeffers as the best living American poet of any age group. So great was the reception to poems such as Tamar and Roan Stallion that comparisons were made to the Greek epics and Shakespeare.

Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to a Presbyterian theologian in 1887. His experience with languages and letters dated practically from birth, as he mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at an early age and attended boarding schools in Europe where he learned French and German. Jeffers is what would now be classified as an absolute genius, studying extensively in literature, biology, medicine, and forest science. His legacy rests in several collections of verse, which still remain in obscurity compared to fellow American writers like Eliot, Pound, Moore, and Stevens.

The legacy of Jeffers was damaged by unorthodox political views that availed themselves in the 1940s, when he published The Double Axe and Other Poems through Random House. Jeffers cemented his position as an isolationist who was against U.S. intervention in either of the two World Wars. Until recently, the survival of his work was ensured not by universities but an intense readership who have admired his philosophy and style. Environmentalists have also hitched their wagon to Jeffers's overarching awareness of the natural world, which has somehow converted his esteem to one as an eco-poet. His reputation has mended to a degree: his image reached a U.S. postage stamp in 1973 and he is now receiving increased attention from literary bloggers. Jeffers's work, however, is still far from gaining the respect it deserves.

Jeffers's canon is extensive; his work dates from the 1910s to the 60s, features poems of epic length (such as Cawdor and The Women at Point Sur), and has extraordinary breadth of thought and meaning. He began as a generalizer of the human condition through his philosophy of Inhumanism - an admiration for the natural world combined with Schopenhauerian pessimism that looks to curtail the follies of human passion. As war and international politics escalated through the century, his verse took on a more contemporary stance, even bringing world leaders such as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Churchill to task. The Selected Poems first released by Vintage Books in 1963 - one year after Jeffers's death - looks to simplify the reading experience by offering several of his best-known, shorter works from key points in American history.

The Vintage edition includes such groundbreakers as 'Shine, Perishing Republic,' 'Hurt Hawks,' 'The Purse-Seine,' 'Contemplation of the Sword,' and his elegy 'The Deer Lay Down Their Bones.' One of Jeffers's longer poems, Roan Stallion, is also included to profile his frequently epic scope. Most of the poems chosen are defined by his long, sweeping lines that were certainly influenced by writings such as the Odyssey and Aeneid. Their raw pronouncements have a flow and motion not unlike the Pacific tide that constantly struck cliffs outside his home in the Carmel Valley.

Jeffers's verse is technically solid. His only apparent weaknesses are using rhyme loosely in the few cases where he chooses to do so and occasionally lax language in his more introspective poems, which try to capture actual thought processes. When in top form, Jeffers's extensive lines, which intentionally diffuse the artificialities of meter, show an enormous control and precision. His statements are also free of ambiguity and made with an authority that leaves little room for dispute.

While Jeffers deserves a much larger readership, the brute force of his subject matter will probably make it impossible for him to be fully accepted by the literary community. Criticisms of the American mindset are still repellant to many in this country (writers such as Stanley Kunitz and Babette Deutsch expressed deep misgivings over Jeffers's politics) and his poems on nature and epic themes are laced with blood and agony: animal violence (in works like 'Orca'), incest (in Tamar), and religious hysteria (The Women at Point Sur) are just three of his topics that yet lend to artistic brilliance.

Even with this unpleasantness, Jeffers's verse offers a window to the natural world, a view that we could perhaps have made for ourselves but were too busy or not resolute enough to find. His portrayals of California and travel places such as the British Isles are breathtaking and expansive. He accounts for these surroundings with a marvelous acuity and scenes come alive on the page. Though it would leave him far more one-dimensional, Jeffers's reputation could have been secured as a poet of nature alone.

Jeffers, at any rate, wrote quite begrudgingly for an audience. He admitted his verse as more of a solitary liniment for his being than an open pronunciation. While he attempted to influence others with his concept of Inhumanism, his writings indicate an overwhelming skepticism towards the improvement of mankind. By the late 1940s, he began to consider humanity as a complete disaster, hell-bent on its own destruction. He was unable to reconcile our existence with the havoc we've created for other forms of life on Earth, nor saw a long-term answer to these problems with mankind consumed by its self-absorption.

After tearing through a few more wars and political masquerades since his death in 1962 ("They are warming up the old horrors," he wrote in 'The Soul's Desert'), his social implications seem to ring true more than ever. The same can be said about his commitment to the ecosphere, which he pondered at a time when environmental issues were barely a topic of discussion. In an odd sense, Jeffers's trains of thought, while condemned as antihuman, quasi-fascist, and pretentious, were about fifty years ahead of their time. Thoughtful people have a tendency to do these things.