Why I Write is a small volume of four essays by George Orwell (1903-1950), the author of 1984, Animal Farm, and many other works. The essays include the title one, “Why I Write;” “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” “A Hanging;” and “Politics and the English Language.”
Orwell’s writing, and his understanding of it, reflected his political beliefs. He had a five-year stint with the Burma Division of the Indian Imperial Police, but eft with a medical certificate because his health was ruined, he dabbled in writing and a somewhat itinerant life and married, but then joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. That experience shaped the rest of his life, his politics, and the books and essays he wrote. He became a democratic socialist, but he was opposed to totalitarianism in all its form, both right and eft.
He identified four motives for writing, all of which are present in a writer but to varying degrees, depending upon the immediate context. The four are sheer egotism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. “Writing a book,” he wrote, “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 who one can neither resist nor understand.”
“The Lion and the Unicorn,” the longest essay in the volume, is a meditation upon writing England, socialism, and how they all have mixed together. In its own way, it’s Orwell’s manifesto for a very specific kind of socialism.
“A Hanging” is one of Orwell’s best-known essays, a short account of the hanging of a prisoner in Burma. Orwell formed part of the police escort for the execution. “It is curious,” he says, “but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.” When the prisoner steps to avoid a puddle, he sees “the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.” The essay is not a direct discussion of writing, but it is an example of writing very well done.
The last essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is one with which I was familiar. Some 30 years ago, a new CEO at the company where I worked said that everyone in communications, and everyone in the company, in fact, should read this essay by Orwell. To my knowledge, I believe I was the only communications who did so. The previous CEO had had an inclination toward the writings of Winston Churchill and the novels of Charles Dickens. I was his speechwriter, and so I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
I read the Orwell essay. It’s about the decline of the practice of the English language in writing; Orwell saw it descending into a staleness of imagery and a lack of precision. He also identified the problems of dying metaphors; what he called “verbal false limbs,” or sentence padding; pretentious diction; and meaningless words.
The former CEO, whether he wrote for himself or used what I’d written for him, was never guilty of any of that; he had run through half a dozen speechwriters and freelancers before me and booted them all until he was satisfied. The new CEO, however, the one who urged everyone to read the Orwell essay, spoke from notes and memory.
It might have helped if he’d read it himself.
