Um, Duh, Obviously Orwell Is One Of The 20th Century's Greatest Writers

Anthony Marigold Has Orwell's Back

Dear Republic,

Gawd, people are awfully touchy when it comes to George Orwell! Since Orwell’s honor has been sullied, Anthony Marigold unsullies it as we continue our exchange in honor of Orwell’s birthday.

Also, for chrissake, would three people like

Micah Cash

’s piece so he can get to 100 likes and collect his $25 bonus.

The Republic of Letters is uncharacteristically taking a couple of days off and will return early next week.

-ROL

UM, DUH, OBVIOUSLY ORWELL IS ONE OF THE 20TH CENTURY’S GREATEST WRITERS

Judging by the frequency with which his name is invoked, or the dominance of his recent book sales, Orwell may have more fans than any other modern writer in the canon. If America keeps deteriorating, soon he may be as famous as the Kardashians, the Paul brothers, and our other great OnlyFans stars.

Many of his enthusiasts have only read his two most mature works: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both are so wonderful that they alone justify his place amongst their favorite writers. Many of my friends, most of whom can’t spell Proust, still remember them as distinct, engrossing experiences. Some, like me, can recall exactly where they were when they finished them. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the only book that has ever made me miss a train stop. For many people, especially more casual readers, these moments represent the peak literary experiences of their lives. It helps them understand what the rest of us are on about—why we give so much of our limited time to literature—just as a hacker comes to understand the golf-crazed man after he hits his first perfect five-iron. “Ah,” he says to himself, “so that’s why you’ve thrown away your marriage.”

Orwell has this effect because of his clean, colloquial, unaffected writing style. His language is akin to concise mathematical proofs in which all excesses are stripped away. With the fewest number of words and details possible, he renders worlds so absorbing and real that the reader loses his sense of self—he isn’t even aware of the world around him anymore—like a teenage boy scoring his first, real look at boobs. Orwell is able to accomplish this because he can stretch and release dramatic tension as masterfully as Dostoevsky: on every page of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the stakes are high and the conflict is clear; the novel reads like a thriller. Within these constraints a dry British humor shines through. Reminiscent of Maugham, it is laugh-out-loud-funny. I could give countless examples from each of his books, but my favorite is when Winston Smith’s love interest, Julia, asks him the classic question: “What did you first think of me?” He responds: “I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone.”

Every writing style has trade-offs. By focusing on simplicity, objectivity, and clarity—to the exclusion of all else—Orwell sacrificed rhythm and passion (i.e. poetry). Such a measured, calm voice could not inspire the fervor of Miller or the delirium of Céline. Limited to uncomplicated words, he could not craft beautifully ornate sentences as Fitzgerald did. Focused on simplifying complex concepts through immersive narratives, it was hard for him to match the spare poeticism of Salter and Carver. Nor could he write voice-driven stories—like Salinger, Roth, and Hemingway—in which the narrator’s presence is keenly felt. Instead, the courtroom, mad and chaotic one minute before, goes silent to give him his quiet, dispassionate, truthful turn.

Of course there are his own limitations to consider too. But one must keep in mind that this style was intentional. It was essential to his goal. It forced him to think and speak honestly so that he could not lie to himself or the reader. He refused to dress up poor ideas in eloquent phrasing. Unlike Banville, who should sell a dictionary with his books, Orwell made his texts readily accessible to as many people as possible. Now they serve as permanent reminders for humanity on the scale that few stories, save for the great religious ones, achieve. Where Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner stress, challenge, and pressure the mind until one begins to sweat, Orwell’s unpretentious prose relaxes it. Languorously, the imagination gives itself to his scenes, many of which the reader sees so vividly that they become part of his memory. I was actually there that spring, in the country, with Julia.

Obviously his relevance also owes to the strength of his political material. America, thankfully, has never reached a state close to Oceania. But that may be, to some small extent, because Nineteen Eighty-Four has functioned effectively as a warning system. The story is an instrument that sets alarm bells off when it detects nascent political dangers. In recent years, as the United States has become more and more authoritarian, one continuously returns to the concepts that buttress his magnum opus. By focusing on ideas instead of particulars, the novel highlights authoritarianism in any party where it occurs.

Big Brother is the Trump administration’s “Catch and Revoke” program, which uses A.I. to scan social media so that the Party can deport dissidents. Doublethink has become a permanent fixture in the last decade: Science is Holy but I’ll kill you if you reference biology and/or medical research during trans “debates.” Elections are rigged—except when we win. Even Newspeak was big, for a couple of years, when they changed the definition of “woman” and “racist,” and the American Medical Association put out that insane language guide which they, for some reason, haven’t yet taken down. And of course there was the boom of historical revisionism when the founding fathers were out, as was the word "fat."

Today Animal Farm is not mentioned as frequently as Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is also packed with vital political ideas—essential reading for savages like me. Before I read it I hardly knew anything about failed revolutions, Trotsky, or Stalin. I still don’t know enough. But Orwell showed me how rebellions can commence, corrode, and, finally, cement into shapes more hideous than the Brutalist buildings some of them spawn. Animal Farm explains that open lies and show trials are the point: They make the population fearful and helpless until they submit to complete obedience. Most of all it shows how incomprehensibly intoxicating power is, and how psychopathic psychopaths become when they try to hold onto it.

We haven’t even got to the deep cuts yet.

Every twenty-nine year-old with a typewriter has written a novel set in France, but Down and Out in Paris and London is distinct in its focus on a milieu rarely deeply explored in great literature. Functioning as an objective journalist, Orwell recounts his experience of starving with vagrants, scheming with tramps, and sharing cold floors with paupers. Though technically a work of fiction, nearly everything in the story happened; it is as valuable a social experiment as Thoreau’s Walden. Down and Out permanently changes one’s perspective of wealth inequality and poverty. After finishing the book, the reader feels he too has lived amongst the less fortunate; it is impossible to see the homeless from the same distance as before.

Five years later, Orwell went to Barcelona to fight in the Spanish Civil War. At night, while sleeping in freezing trenches, on top of defecation, rats chewed at his toes. During the day he engaged fascists in firefights, killing at least one with a grenade. In the dawn, while telling his friends about whoring in Paris, a sniper shot him through the neck. These experiences culminated in Homage to Catalonia, a novel similar to Down and Out in its truthfulness and lack of traditional story elements. Full of unforgettable scenes (e.g. soldiers shooting at him, as a joke, while he took their photo) and uproarious humor (e.g. continuously chasing and missing a man with a bayonet in the darkness), Homage is an invaluable document of war that showcases the never-ending development of his skill.

Orwell was no fraud. He was no phony. He wasn’t living in Williamsburg complaining about gentrification; he spent years in an austere cottage without plumbing or electricity. He wasn’t waxing poetic about communism while working at Google; he believed his vocation would always lead to a “hand to mouth” existence. He wasn’t theorizing about the poor; he walked in their shoes. He wasn’t posting TikToks about fascists; he fought them. To him, murder was more than an Instagram post.

Lastly, there are his essays. “Politics and the English Language” is a superhuman analysis that exposes how confabulators, politicians above all, distort their meanings in prose. At the end it provides a set of timeless linguistic rules that are used by wonderful publications, like The Economist, to this day. “A Hanging” documents his experience of watching the police kill a Hindu in Burma; it reads as well as any literary short story. “Shooting an Elephant” describes, in terrific honesty, his hatred for both his fellow British oppressors and those they oppressed; how he shoots an elephant that he knew he shouldn’t have shot “solely to avoid looking a fool.” Don’t even get me started on “Inside the Whale.”

Orwell was not born with this skill but developed it through ferocious work. His first stories were so poor that they sent his audience into laughing fits. Though his early novels were better, they were minuscule compared to the books he wrote just before his premature death. The writer was able to improve at this rate because of the inhuman standard he held himself to:

[T]here has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, and that my total output was miserably small. Even at periods when I was working ten hours a day on a book, or turning out four or five articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling that I was wasting time.

(Crick, George Orwell: A Life, p. 233)

This feeling drove him to produce a colossal output: over 100k words in both 1944 and 1945, by his own tracking. Toward the end his work ethic so worried his doctors that they had to confiscate his typewriter. There is no greater inspiration for writers. Orwell makes them believe that, if they worked as hard he did, it is possible to soar far past the false boundaries they contrive for themselves.

Yet all that skill would be worth nothing if it were not for his courage. He knew that publishing Animal Farm was going to be near impossible because of its anti-Stalinist sentiment. He wrote it anyway. In spite of his lifelong, unaffected commitment to socialism, he disassociated himself from any organization, declaring that “a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free of party labels” (Crick, 359). Unlike the modern Right and Left, who can never find fault within their own circle jerks, he relentlessly criticized those he believed were wrong, no matter which party they belonged to. He was compelled by truth as pathologically as others are compelled by lies. Yet the truth wasn’t easy for him either:

“There is one part of you,” he wrote, “that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul.”

(Crick, George Orwell: A Life, p. 305)

It was as though Orwell lived with a permanent ledger in his mind. On one side there was honesty; on the other, cowardice. Had he believed in God, the finally tally of this record would have determined his entry into heaven. On what would have been his 122nd birthday, it’s safe to say that he would have made it past the pearly gates.

Anthony Marigold writes Non Grata, an unpretentious literary publication that focuses on rebellious writers. If you like Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, and other troublemakers then you may enjoy his book reviews, short stories, and essays.