George Orwell knew that he wanted to become a writer from an early age. He had a talent for prose, but much more importantly, he had a knack for facing inconvenient truths that other people preferred not to notice. His intellectual honesty was so strong that he could write about important, but emotionally charged subjects — such as imperialism, fascism and Stalinism — without identifying himself with any of them. Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, he was never swayed by idealistic communism. Through his essays and books, he became a beacon for freedom throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Besides that, you know you've made the big time when your name becomes an adjective in the OED.

Besides that, you know you've made the big time when your name becomes an adjective in the OED.

Life

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, India, which was at the time still part of the British Empire. His mother brought him back to England (without his father) at the age of one. He first attended a small parish school in Henley-on-Thames, then got a scholarship to attend St. Cyprian's School in Eastbourne, Sussex. Later, in an essay, "Such, Such Were the Joys", he would describe the horrors of English bording schools for boys, where the boys were underfed, underwashed and, by today's standards, savagely beaten for even the slightest infraction. In this 1947 essay, Orwell projects back onto his childhood themes that will be common in his adult writing:

It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say I was "silly" and "ought to have known better." Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of the credulity other people can work on it, infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws.

If I'm reading this page correctly, Saint Cyprian of Carthage is the patron saint of prisoners and correction officers, which is fitting. It is said that Orwell based his Big Brother character in part on the headmaster's wife.

After this, Orwell went on to Wellington and Eton, where he was a King's Scholar. After Eton, Orwell couldn't afford a university education and had no prospects for a scholarship, so he joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922. The experience of being a policeman in Burma taught Orwell to hate imperialism. In an essay he wrote in 1936 called "Shooting an Elephant", he shows how imperialism can drive men to absurd behavior:

Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is a condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant.

I'm not going to go on chronicling his life, there is a great Wikipedia article that does the job better than I can. I just wanted to get those two wonderful quotes in.

Politics

That same Wiki article says, under the heading of "Politics", this: "Orwell's political views changed over time, but there can be no doubt that he was a man of the left throughout his life as a writer." While this is more or less true in fact, it is completely wrong in spirit. Orwell hated the ideas of partisanship and nationalism. He called each shot as he saw it and hated the idea of viewing the issues through the distorted lens of partisanship. There were issues, such as abortion or gun control, where he sided with the right and whenever he pronounced himself in favor of "democratic socialism" he always added "as I understand it" to make it clear that he was talking about his brand of democratic socialism and not some political party's idea of it. In his essay, Notes on Nationalism, he said,

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by "our" side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.

A little uncomfortably close to the situation today, isn't it? Orwell was always willing to take on unpleasant facts, always willing to point out his own flaws as willingly as those of his opponents. At the same time, he was no moral relativist. He believed that some points of view were superior to others and that being unwilling to recognize this was a moral failing.

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War—and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings—there is always the temptation to say: 'One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral'. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

In this attitude he was far ahead of his time, to the point of being ahead of our present time. He was no fan of Gandhi's passive methods, either. In "Reflections on Gandhi", he sneers at pacifism and passive resistance, particularly Gandhi's recommendation that the German Jews should have committed mass suicide to gain the moral high ground over Hitler. He didn't seem to like Gandhi's holier-than-thou attitude, either: "No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid."

While he was dismissive of the Right, he castigated the Left, especially its tendency to cosy up to communism.

But notice the phrase 'necessary murder'[in Auden's poem "Spain"]. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men? don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means?he terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don't advertise their callousness, and they don't speak of it as murder; it is 'liquidation', 'elimination', or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible, if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

That last phrase could be used today with good effect, when it comes to the War on Terror. For years now, people like John Kerry could have been described as "playing with fire when he didn't even know that fire is hot" — willing to make wild political statements like "this wouldn't have happened if I had been elected", but not willing to face the fact that the War on Terror heated up from the dying embers of WWI and has been in full flame for at least thirty years. Orwell saw something ugly in the people of the Left. There was a willingness to ignore unpleasant facts about communism and to ignore unpleasant facts about human nature and believe in impossible things. That odd quirk is still there, fifty years later.

Orwell had just one blind spot: capitalism. Probably, this was because capitalism hadn't really developed yet before WWII. To Orwell, capitalism meant no holds barred, every man for himself, red of tooth and claw economic warfare between workers and owners. While this style of capitalism may have been prevalent around the turn of the century, it certainly wasn't the case in the US by the 1940's. Considerable progress was made on anti-trust legislation, workplace safety, working hours, child labor, overtime pay and so on between 1900 and 1945 and Orwell seemed to ignore almost of it. In Inside the Whale (1940) he wrote:

It was obvious that laissez-faire capitalism was finished and that there had got to be some kind of reconstruction; in the world of 1935 it was hardly possible to remain politically indifferent.

Yet, in England Your England (1941), he wrote:

The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.
...
The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker? villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer? cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be?ndeed, visibly is?ore middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.

So, he was aware of something he called "advanced capitalism" and was aware that it improved people's lives. His exposure to ugly capitalism in the Spanish Civil War simply negated any hope he had for the system. The kind of capitalism he saw in Spain was generally corrupt and unfair (in the sense that money could buy off the police) with no regard for anyone's rights but the rich. There were few unions and workers were simply worked to death a whatever wages the big shots pleased. Orwell also spent a good deal of time in English coal mines, where he saw men worked to death under inhuman conditions for a pittance. Across the Pond, in the US, capitalism was being completely transformed by the factors mentioned above, but Orwell knew very little of the US.

My guess is that Orwell saw the US only in books and magazines (he never visited). In particular, he read the "literary" writers of the day, most of whom were left-leaning and tended to set stories amongst the evil fat cats of the east coast (think The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald or most of the works of Dorothy Parker, just to pick two at random). These types of books don't give a very good picture of the country as a whole. Orwell also read a lot of pulp fiction from America (we know this because he talks about it in some of his essays: apparently England was a good market for the really trashy stuff) that concentrated on crime and gangs and – to an amazing degree – sexual sadism. Again, not a very accurate portrayal of the country in general. If Orwell had ever visited the middle of the country, Ohio or Colorado or Texas, I think his ideas of capitalism would have been transformed. In his excellent work on Orwell, Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens says, "America, in other words, is the grand exception to Orwell's prescience about the century in which he lived."

I've noticed that Europeans in general, even to this day, don't really understand capitalism in the US. I can't say whether this is intentional or simple ignorance. To rail on about giant corporations grinding up the lives of their workers in single-minded pursuit of profit is kind of farcical when you remember that 99 percent of businesses in the US employ less than 500 people and that about a third of US workers work for companies employing fewer than 100 people. Hell, about one in fifteen US citizens is self-employed, a sure sign that they have a soulless, money-grubbing jerk for a boss, but not in the way Europeans mean. They also simply don't accept or understand class mobility. When a dirt poor, abused son of an alcoholic can rise up to become President, they must think it's a fluke. But that sort of thing is common all over the country. For generations, a part of the American Dream was always, "I want my kids to grow up to a better life than I had" and, generally speaking, that has been the case.

Writing

People today concentrate on Orwell's two most famous books Animal Farm and 1984, and, with 1984 in particular, his ideas were strong enough and frightening enough to justify the myopia. Orwell's best, most direct writing, however, is in his essays. They are models of clear thought, presented in tight, transparent prose. Orwell had a knack for finding the story beneath the surface, no matter what the topic.

In his essay "Such, Such Were The Joys...", Orwell looks back on his youthful days in a private school in England. Average writers might focus on the brutal beatings or the paucity of food or the fears of homosexuality. Orwell goes past these, into the psychology of school children and the hopelessness of their plight amid the casual injustice of boarding school.

The real question is whether it is still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misunderstanding.

In another essay, "The Art of Donald McGill", he cast his gaze on an odd artifact of English culture in the 1940's: the lurid penny postcards.

Who does not know the "comics" of the cheap stationers' windows, the penny or twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow's egg tint and Post Office red?

Rather than moralize about their raunchy humor or lurid art, Orwell analyzes the images and the society that begat them. At the end of several pages of careful thought, he comes to a clear conclusion:

In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humor, integral to our literature until 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationer's windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be quite sorry to see them vanish.

He unearths the truth behind the raunchy post cards: they are a safety valve. A way to poke fun at institutions like marriage and marital fidelity and family values. These institutions, like all others, must be mocked and the post cards provide this release that isn't permitted in any other form.

Politics and the English Language was Orwell's call for writing of better quality in the sphere of politics. Poor writing, he thought, lead to poor ideas. "It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." He goes on to lay out rules for writing good essays that are every bit as relevant today as in his day. Every blogger today should read this essay. His ire is particularly raised by those who use stock phrases that have lost their meaning through repetition. In his day, these were phrases such as ring the charges on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song and hotbed. He noted that some of these phrases had so lost their original meaning that they were being misspelled: tow the line, for example.

Of course, our political writing is still full of these types of hackneyed phrases today. Phrases such as secure the borders, will of the voters, corrupt corporate democracy, step up to the plate and social justice are all used as boilerplate to string together half-baked ideas into essays and news articles. Orwell was just a sick of it in his time as we are in ours:

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

He also criticizes the use of foreign words and phrases when they are used merely for effect and he does this using one of the most beautiful and apt similes I've ever come across: "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details." An inspired turn of phrase, as far as I'm concerned.

Orwell wrote a lot of these essays and almost every one is a gem. He could have run a hell of a blog in the twenty-first century (there: I almost said "this day and age" but instead took his advice and went with the more clear and obvious "twenty-first century"). He tackled a lot of subjects and made unique observations about all of them. Usually, the observations were of the sort that other writers were uncomfortable pointing out. Orwell had the courage to write whatever he saw as the truth.

What about the books? Books have been written about the books and I'm not going to go into much detail here. Most interesting to me is that 1984 was a more important book than anyone knew at the time, even Orwell. He so completely nailed the mindset and institutions of totalitarianism (right or left) that it had immediate relevance for those under communist rule at the time. In his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens quotes Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish cultural official who saw the Stalinization of eastern Europe from the inside and saw the reaction of communists to Orwell's book:

A few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well ... Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

Hitchens goes on to note that nearly all of the heros who spoke out against communism (much to their individual peril), Vaclav Havel, Rudolf Bahro, Miklos Haraszti, Leszek Kolakowski and many others, all paid tribute in one way or another to Orwell. The fact is that Orwell was a hero of the Cold War (and probably was the originator of the phrase "Cold War", for whatever that is worth) even though he died before it went into full swing. His writing fought on for him after his death and helped to free millions from oppressive rule.

Orwell is one of my personal heroes. Orwell's writing exposed the truth underlying a great diversity of subjects, from the mundane world of the English schoolboy to the gyrations of international totalitarianism. He didn't rely on "the courage of his convictions", that would have been too easy and not nearly as honest. After all, one's "convictions" may not be correct. Instead, he honestly applied his intellect to each subject and let his intellect inform his convictions.

Orwell used his literary connections in the US to obtain streptomycin (which was in very short supply in Great Britain at the time) to treat his tuberculosis. He was apparently allergic to the drug, however, and had to stop taking it. In January 1950 he succumbed to the disease and died only shortly after finishing 1984.