On George Orwell and His Essays

My favorite author, since I really "discovered" him six years ago, has been Kafka. K.'s search for the auto-bizarre really struck a note in me. My second favorite, after some hemming haw, has been solidly Steinbeck (although two major works I have yet to read--"Grapes of Wrath" and "East of Eden"), since I have read much of his smaller stuff. I find Steinbeck's simple language, with more concrete meaning than Hemingway could ever achieve, and because they are very brief, some of the best examples of Amglish writing. For three years I had equivocated between Hemingway and Dostoyevski as my third, the losing one falling to fourth, and then changing back and forth due to whim and mood. Orwell was perhaps in fifth; he was high, but I stopped thinking it mattered after 3.

I am reading the collected essays of Orwell. They are a mix of reviews, essays, and other journalism. The volume is 1300 pages and I am on page 127, having started it yesterday afternoon. The writing is simple extraordinary. I have read all but I think 3 of Orwell's novels--"Animal Farm" being one most other people have read but I have not. The other books are of the more obscure titles: "Keep the Aspidistra Flying," "Burmese Days," "Down and Out in Paris and London," "The Clergyman's Daughter," and, of course, "Nineteen-Eighty-four." The essays have meaning and style, substance and art, which I am finding out are an essential piece to understanding Orwell's (Eric Blair's) writing. While I disagree with Blair/Orwell's Social Fabianism, he may have displaced Dostoyevski on my heirarchy of favorites. Orwell may be the best user of modern Brit-glish, the language that comes directly from Shakespeare tongue.

Beside having read “Nineteen Eighty-four,” not until three years after graduating from university, I had read my sophomore year for my advanced college writing class Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” I remember only bits and parts of the essay now. I am not sure if we had to read the whole thing (it seems to have been fairly short) or only parts. I look forward to reading it again. I do distinctly remember some of the conversation we had in class about politics. The word I heard and actually understood for the first still governs all of my political writing–“obfuscation”–something writers on political subjects need to avoid.

As far as a political writing, do we have a better example, in fiction, of an influential writer than George Orwell? I remember in 1999 reading a newspaper article on a survey of the top 10 books of the 20th Century. Orwell was the only author to have 2 books listed, #1 was “Nineteen Eighty-four” and at #3 was “Animal Farm.” I think the other 8 books were relatively unimportant and caught by trendy opinion in the popular survey.

It is perhaps a sign of Orwell’s greatness that we use “Orwellian” to describe a whole lot of shadowy, oppressive government acts. Yet, there is so much more, as I am continually finding out these last four years through the less popular writings, to Orwell–thinker, critic, entertainer, provoker, radical, instigator. He at least forces us to think of great possibilities.