Essays

Orwell insisted that no writing is free of politics, least of all the kind that pretends to be. "In our age," he wrote, "there is no such thing as keeping out of politics." He came to this the hard way. In 1936 he went to Spain to fight against Franco, was shot through the throat, and watched the Republican side turn on itself as Soviet-backed factions purged their allies. Homage to Catalonia grew out of that, but the essays carry the aftershock: a lifelong suspicion of the lie told for a good cause.

That suspicion is what separates him from the ordinary partisan. Orwell was a committed socialist to the end, yet he spent as much energy attacking the dishonesty of the left as the cruelty of the right. He loathed the fellow-travellers who excused Stalin's show trials, the intellectuals who mistook toughness for realism, the comfortable radicals who had never met the working class they claimed to speak for. "The Lion and the Unicorn," written during the Blitz, is a socialist's love letter to England that also skewers the English intelligentsia for their reflexive contempt of their own country.

Not everything Orwell wrote about was war and tyranny. Some of the finest essays are about tea, toads, cheap furnished rooms, murder in the Sunday papers, and the exact contents of a well-run English pub. He turned to these small subjects deliberately, because he believed the texture of ordinary life was where a culture actually lived, and where a writer's honesty was most easily tested.

"A Nice Cup of Tea" lays out eleven rules for brewing with mock-solemn precision, and the joke is also a defense of the modest pleasures that make life bearable. "The Moon Under Water" describes his ideal pub in loving detail before admitting, at the end, that no such place exists — a quiet essay about the gap between what we want and what we get. "Decline of the English Murder" mourns the tidy domestic poisonings of the past, displaced by wartime brutality, and manages to say something serious about a society's changing relationship to violence.

Step back from any single essay and a larger claim comes into focus, one Orwell returned to again and again: how we write is bound up with how we think, and both are moral matters. Muddled prose, for him, was rarely just carelessness. It was usually a sign that someone was avoiding a thought they did not want to have — softening a cruelty, dodging a fact, borrowing a ready-made phrase so as not to have to look at the thing itself. Clear writing was hard because clear seeing was hard.

This is why the essays have outlasted the arguments they were fighting. The specific quarrels — over Spain, over Stalinism, over the failings of the 1940s English left — have cooled into history. But the underlying diagnosis has not. Every generation produces its own supply of comforting jargon, its own euphemisms for things it would rather not examine, its own pressure to say the acceptable thing in the acceptable words. Orwell's demand — name it plainly, or admit you are hiding — travels intact.

Orwell died in January 1950, at forty-six, of the tuberculosis that had shadowed his last years, months after Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared. He never assembled the essays into the monument they later became; that was done by others, sifting through columns and reviews and letters, and finding in them a body of work that arguably rivals the fiction. The man who wanted his prose to be a windowpane got his wish — we still look through it and see the thing itself.