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Essay
From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I
grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and
twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the
consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or
later I should have to settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on
either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and
other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable
mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the
lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with
imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions
were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew
that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts,
and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get
my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of
serious--i.e. seriously intended--writing which I produced all through
my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote
my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to
dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a
tiger and the tiger had 'chair-like teeth'--a good enough phrase, but I
fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's 'Tiger, Tiger'. At eleven,
when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was
printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the
death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote
bad and usually unfinished 'nature poems' in the Georgian style. I also
attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total
of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all
those years.
However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary
activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I
produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from
school work, I wrote VERS D'OCCASION, semi-comic poems which I could turn
out at what now seems to me astonishing speed--at fourteen I wrote a
whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week--and
helped to edit a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These
magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine,
and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest
journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I
was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was
the making up of a continuous 'story' about myself, a sort of diary
existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children
and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say,
Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but
quite soon my 'story' ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became
more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I
saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my
head: 'He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of
sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table,
where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand
in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a
tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf', etc. etc. This habit
continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary
years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I
seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under
a kind of compulsion from outside. The 'story' must, I suppose, have
reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages,
but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive
quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words,
i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from PARADISE LOST,
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my
backbone; and the spelling 'hee' for 'he' was an added pleasure. As for
the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear
what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to
want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic
novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting
similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly
for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel,
BURMESE DAYS, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier,
is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information because I do not think one can
assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early
development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in
--at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own--
but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional
attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no
doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some
immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early
influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting
aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for
writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees
in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from
time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They
are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be
remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed
you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a
motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with
scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful
businessmen--in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great
mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about
thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all--and
live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But
there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined
to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and
self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world,
or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in
the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the
rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is
valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble
in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will
have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian
reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc.
Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic
considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out
true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose.--Using the word 'political' in the widest
possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter
other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion
that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political
attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another,
and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.
By nature--taking your 'nature' to be the state you have attained when
you are first adult--I am a person in whom the first three motives would
outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or
merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my
political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of
pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the
Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the
sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made
me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working
classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the
nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me
an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil
War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.
I remember a little poem that I wrote at that date, expressing my
dilemma:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn't born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and
thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have
written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST
totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism, as I understand it. It
seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can
avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or
another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what
approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political
bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing
one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make
political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of
partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do
not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art'. I write it
because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I
want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I
could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article,
if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine
my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains
much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not
able, and 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 a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless
information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job
is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially
public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and
it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one
example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the
Spanish civil war, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA, is of course a frankly political
book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard
for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without
violating my literary instincts. But among other things it contains a
long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the
Trotskyists who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a
chapter, which after a year or two would lose its interest for any
ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I respect read me a
lecture about it. 'Why did you put in all that stuff?' he said. 'You've
turned what might have been a good book into journalism.' What he said
was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened to know, what
very few people in England had been allowed to know, that innocent men
were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that I should
never have written the book.
In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of
language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say
that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more
exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style
of writing, you have always outgrown it. ANIMAL FARM was the first book
in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse
political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written
a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is
bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some
clarity what kind of book I want to write.
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it
appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I
don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain,
selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a
mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long
bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if
one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor
understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that
makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can
write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's
own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with
certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them
deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it
is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless
books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning,
decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
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