George and Me

George Orwell and I have a complicated relationship--all on my part, of course. Because of the enthusiasm of his early admirers, his reputation has been relentlessly torn down even as it was being built up. Recently, claims have been made that he raped an early girlfriend of his, Jacintha Buddicom, despite her writing a loving memoir of their growing up together, Eric and Me. Orwell's alleged use of Burmese prostitutes during his time in the Indian Police there is also said to have been his attempt to fulfill his fantasies with the diminutive Jacintha. The witnesses are all dead, in either case.

Orwell still passes for me the crucial test of being almost infinitely rereadable--the litmus test that I tell students should be their chief means of selecting a major research subject. If you eventually tire of your subject's style, it will affect your analysis--and/or your mental health. I am slowly working my way through Peter Davison's monumental edition of Orwell's writings, and I still do not cringe at his wild over-generalizations, his flip-flops on issues, his about-faces that have been never fully explained. (Bonus question: Reconcile Orwell's linguistic strictures in "Politics and the English Language" and in "The Principles of Newspeak" in Nineteen Eighty-Four.)

At any rate, two sentences sum up Orwell's appeal for me. The first is a sentence from his seminal essay, "Why I Write" (why, indeed, do any of us?). The essay as a whole is an attempt to come up with a dispassionate anaylsis of why some people feel the need to write. Near the essay's conclusion he comes close to his own credo:

"I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."

Notice the qualification: "completely to abandon" (and the unsplit infinitive). Solid objects? "How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?" And scraps of useless information. Decades before the concept was imagined, Orwell had his own blog, "As I Please," his column in Tribune, where he was able to discuss, for example, the derivation of the word "jackboot," metal railings around squares in London, or a bound volume of The Quarterly Review for the year 1810.

The second quotation is from his last major essay, "Reflections on Gandhi":

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push ascetism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon individual humans."

Or upon those creatures with whom we inhabit the earth on our journey upon it.

"To be defeated and broken up by life..." Yes. That sums it up nicely.