Introduction
If one discounts what Orwell wrote in his schooldays and the very few scraps that survive from his time in Burma, he was a published author for twenty-one years, from the time the Paris journal Monde published his ‘La Censure en Angleterre’ (translated from his English text by H.-J. Salemson) on 6 October 1928, to 22 July 1949 when The Socialist Call of New York published his refutation that Nineteen Eighty-Four was an attack on the British Labour Government (see here). It may be slightly fortuitous but the fact that these two publications appeared not in England but abroad and in two different continents says something of his reach as a journalist. In those twenty-one years, as the twenty volumes of his Complete Works and also The Lost Orwell demonstrate, he was remarkably prolific and, almost sixty-five years after his death, he is read even more widely and in many more languages. It is remarkable given that much journalism is ephemeral that a significant amount of Orwell’s writing is still relevant and speaks directly to us.
Orwell wrote perceptively in his essay ‘Why I Write’ of what drove him to write. He famously described his own motivation as sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm (hence perhaps his first and life-long attempts at poetry), historical impulse (that is a ‘Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity’), and political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense – as the desire to push the world in a certain direction (Orwell and Politics, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 460). He wished, he wrote, ‘to make political writing into an art’, and ‘because there is some lie that I want to expose’. Journalism is the perfect medium for this, although some journalism – unlike Orwell’s – might not be seen as art. Orwell described all writers – presumably including himself – as ‘vain, selfish and lazy’. Orwell lazy? Hardly! In ‘Why I Write’ he says he wrote his first poem when he was about four or five and he was about sixteen when he ‘suddenly discovered the joy of mere words’. He never lost his love of poetry nor his desire to write it and scraps of unfinished poems appear in his last literary notebook. Writing poetry was not his forte, and he would never have claimed to be ‘a poet’, but a number of his poems still delight and are included here.
It is clear why Orwell wrote and so is the way he approached writing, but I think we must also ask why he was not merely prolific but seemed so driven as a writer. Time, it must have seemed to him, was not on his side. Indeed, four of his nine books begin with a reference to time, memorably Nineteen Eighty-Four:
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ [This was originally written as: ‘It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen.’]
A fifth has a reference not to early morning but to last thing at night:
‘Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but he was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes.’ Animal Farm
Even in his journalism, such as his review of Peter Fleming’s News from Tartary (15 August 1936 – see here), he can ponder lyrically on passing time:
A journey by train or car or aeroplane is not an event but an interregnum between events, and the swifter the vehicle the more boring the journey becomes. The nomad of the steppe or the desert may have to put up with every kind of discomfort, but at any rate he is living while he is travelling, and not, like the passengers in a luxury liner, merely suffering a temporary death.
With the benefit of hindsight and our knowledge of Orwell’s wretched health and early death, is it assuming too much to argue that he was driven by a desperate if unconscious need to write whilst he still had life? The idea of wasting time was anathema to him.
Orwell arrived in Burma on 27 November 1922 to serve in the Indian Imperial Police. On returning to England on leave in August 1927 he decided to resign his commission and in the spring of 1928 he went to live in Paris intending to become a novelist. It is unclear whether he wrote one or two novels (he gives both numbers) but he destroyed what he wrote, much to his later regret. However, he did have some success as a journalist, and, indeed, was paid for the seven articles which were published – six in Paris and one in England. These articles encapsulate what would be his prime topics of interest: social justice, literary criticism, the evils of imperialism, censorship, and a format that he virtually created: popular culture (which appeared in the title of one of his books when published in New York decades before it became fashionable in universities). Two representative articles have been selected for inclusion here – that on popular journalism and one on the evils of Empire. Although Orwell continued to the end of his days to strive for success as a novelist, three of his nine ‘books’ are the product of his journalism in a form in which he excelled: documentary reportage – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.
Daniel George, chief reader for the publisher Jonathan Cape, in the first sustained critique of Orwell as essayist and journalist, broadcast by the BBC on 16 September 1946 (and printed here for the first time, here), stated that Orwell ‘writes about what he has experienced rather than what he has read’. Given that Orwell’s corpus of journalism includes 379 reviews of some seven hundred books, plays and films, George is presumably arguing that in his writing on the political and social Orwell draws not on theory but his own experience and a close involvement in the world about him. This one can see from the writings reproduced in this selection in such essays as ‘Common Lodging Houses’; ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’; the review of Borkenau’s Spanish Cockpit’; ‘Three Years of Home Guard’; ‘Democracy in the British Army’; and ‘Defeatism and German Propaganda’. George continues:
He writes nothing that has not an immediate bearing on life in the present and future. And he is a passionate defender of intellectual liberty. What seems to distress him particularly is not that writers – daily journalists particularly – have often to distort or suppress truth but that they are losing faith in the virtue of personal integrity. ‘Political writing in our time’, he says, ‘consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like pieces of a child’s Meccano set … To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox’ … Orwell himself is not orthodox either in politics or literature. That is why he writes fearlessly, but, as I have tried to indicate, it is not a loud-voiced fearlessness. Insidious persuasion is his method.
Without a private income Orwell increasingly turned to book (and later theatre and film) reviewing and to journalism. Motivated, as he put it, by ‘a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice’, he succeeded in creating an art of political writing and, in particular, the analysis of popular culture. This ‘sense of injustice’ was not any injustice he might have felt he suffered, but invariably that experienced by others – by George Gissing (here); by P.G. Wodehouse when fiercely unpopular at the war’s end (here); by Poles under the threat of deportation to a vengeful Communist government in their homeland (here, here, and here); by the persecution of writers in the USSR (here); and even injustice suffered by someone whose politics he abhorred – Konni Zilliacus (here).
Perhaps no topics more directly show Orwell thinking in this vein than ‘On Hanging’ and the review of Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey In the latter he considers an aspect of life that was virtually unmentionable at the time he wrote – 1940. ‘The central fact about jails and concentration camps’ (this, of course, before the horrors of Belsen and Buchenwald were exposed to the world) ‘is something unmentionable.’ Then, subtly and directly, a dozen lines later he states that although prison reformers will cry out against leg-irons and bread-and-water they are ‘shocked by the suggestion that convicts should be allowed a normal sexual life’.
It is a mark of Orwell’s genius that so much of his journalism is still relevant, whether he is discussing ‘Anti-Semitism’ ‘Skin Colour and Living Standards’ and ‘The Colour Bar’ or ‘Scottish Nationalism’ and ‘Polish Immigration’. Even when an article is firmly rooted in its time such as the ‘Sporting Spirit’ (prompted by the 1945 soccer match between Moscow Dynamos and Glasgow Rangers, here), it is still strikingly relevant today. And some of his journalism has a timeless quality. ‘Woolworth’s Roses’ roused the ire of some readers of Tribune because it was deemed a piece of ‘bourgeois nostalgia’ and that it had been written as if by Godfrey Winn rather than George Orwell, but as Orwell correctly responded: ‘One of the outstanding characteristics of the working class of this country is their love of flowers … sometimes even growing roses to the exclusion of vegetables.’
Orwell’s urge ‘to push the world in a certain direction’ depended upon his writing for journals to provide a very modest income whilst giving him time to write books. It is evident that he was sometimes short of money on his return to England from Paris. There is a memorable instance in his Diary for The Road to Wigan Pier when, desperately cold and not wanting to spend the night on the winter streets, he first tried to pawn his raincoat – but the shop had too many and wanted no more. Fortunately, he was able instead to pawn his scarf for 1s 11d and was thus able to spend the night in a common lodging house.
In a letter to Jack Common from Marrakech of 12 October 1938, he wrote:
I don’t know what my financial situation will be next year. I don’t believe my book on Spain sold at all, and if I have to come back to England and start on yet another book [he was then writing Coming Up for Air] with about £50 in the world I would rather have a roof over my head from the start. It’s a great thing to have a roof over your head even if it’s a leaky one. When Eileen and I were first married, when I was writing Wigan Pier, we had so little money that sometimes we hardly knew where the next meal was coming from.
A Life in Letters, pp. 130–1
We do not know what income Eileen might have had. She worked in Whitehall at the start of the war for a censorship department (itself somewhat ironic) and later for the Ministry of Food. In a letter to Orwell written just before she died she mentions the possibility of selling ‘the Harefield house’ (A Life in Letters, p. 248 and fn. 7, p. 255). This was let but it is not known for how much.
It is difficult – indeed, impossible – to give precise figures for Orwell’s earnings after he returned to Europe in 1927 and until he joined the BBC in 1941. We do know that when he was in Paris, Le Progrès civique paid him 225 francs for each article it published (about £1 16s in 1928). Adelphi paid £2 for articles and reviews; New Statesman and Horizon paid £2 for reviews and Tribune £5 for articles and 10 shillings to £2 for reviews. New English Weekly seems not to have paid him anything. Advances from Gollancz for books seem to have varied from £33 to £50. Gollancz liked to ensure that further payments would be recouped from sales. Secker & Warburg paid a relatively huge advance of £150 for Homage to Catalonia but that seems not to have been earned by sales in Orwell’s lifetime. Although too much reliance cannot be placed on the figures, Orwell’s income from reviewing, writing articles, book advances and, sometimes, subsequent royalties, and part-time work can be estimated for the period 1922 to 1945 as shown in the tables in appendix II.
From July 1943 to December 1945 we have precise details of what Orwell earned from writing articles and reviews because he kept a very careful record in order that an accurate income tax return might be submitted to the Inland Revenue (CW, XVII, 463–78). A by-product of this record is that Orwell also calculated the word counts of what he wrote for this period. The figures are slightly inaccurate – Orwell seems to have been better with words than figures – but corrected they show that in this period he published 244,650 words and received £1,709 1s 0d. However, the word counts do not include fifty-nine ‘As I Please’ columns which amount to about 80,000 words. A further 5,400 words were excluded for two articles that were not published and for another that he seems to have overlooked, but Orwell did include Animal Farm (for which he records an advance of £132 16s 4d). When all this is taken into account it appears he wrote some 330,000 words in this thirty-month period – some 11,000 words a month, month after month, comprising almost 180 articles, reviews and broadcast talks.
The title Orwell used for his article on George Gissing in April 1943 – ‘Not Enough Money’ – must often have applied to him, but by September 1946, in answering the questionnaire for Horizon’s ‘The Cost of Letters’, he could write:
Personally I am satisfied, i.e. in a financial sense, because I have been lucky, at any rate during the last few years. I had to struggle desperately at the beginning, and if I had listened to what people said to me I would never have been a writer …. To a young writer who is conscious of having something in him, the only advice I can give is not to take advice. … If one simply wants to make a living by putting words on paper, then the B.B.C., the film companies, and the like are reasonably helpful. But if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged – something rather like a house sparrow – and one gets on better if one realizes one’s position from the start (here).
For Orwell perhaps a rather large house sparrow! When Orwell died he was owed £670 in sums ranging from £25 to £250 which he had lent to seven friends. Probate on his estate was granted in May 1950 showing it amounted to just under £9,909. It was only after his death that the value of his estate grew markedly, from the proceeds of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell’s abomination of time-wasting is particularly apparent of his months at the BBC. He joined the Indian section of the BBC Overseas Service on 18 August 1941, initially as a Talks Assistant. Just over two years later, as he was leaving its service, he complained in a letter to Philip Rahv on 9 December 1943 (CW, XVI, p. 22) that he had ‘wasted two years’ at the BBC. But Orwell had not wasted his time. He had, of course, an enormous amount of administrative work arranging broadcasts and persuading distinguished authors and academics to broadcast for very small fees – the likes of T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Joseph Needham, Ritchie Calder and Gordon Childe. However, he managed to write some 220 commentaries on current events – not news bulletins – for broadcast in English and for translation into several Indian languages: approximately four commentaries a week. Their topics are, naturally, now very dated but the two examples reproduced here – on the Soviet victories at Rostov and Kharkov and his final commentary (broadcast to Indonesia; here) – give an insight into his radio journalism. Though he feared no one heard these commentaries in the Far East, especially in occupied Malaya and Indonesia, there is evidence to show that they did. By chance I bought, in a batch of books, a diary for the year 1943 kept by Albert Gentry, a civilian prisoner of the Japanese held in a fenced-off portion of Bangkok’s University of Moral and Political Science. These prisoners were allowed out of the camp and Mr Gentry records hearing broadcasts from London probably at either the Swedish or Swiss consulates. (This diary is now in the Imperial War Museum.) We also know that nuns in Malaya heard Orwell frequently and passed on the news to others (see A Life in Letters, p. 195).
Long before the founding of ‘distance learning’ as practised by the Open University in the UK and the Deutsches Institut für Fernstudien, Tübingen, Germany, Orwell organised thirteen courses in literature, science, medicine, agriculture and psychology for students of Bombay and Calcutta Universities based on their syllabuses; these he then had printed in book form. One example is reproduced here – his broadcast on Jack London in his series ‘Landmarks in American Literature’. That he was able to attract speakers of an international stature is a mark of the quality of what he was innovating. He also ran practical drama courses and those had a dynamic effect in India, especially on one of the main participants, Balraj Sahni (1913–73), who became a leading film actor.
Orwell also invented a form of broadcast literary magazine programme (see his introduction to the first of these, p. 172) which attracted leading poets and critics. Another of his innovations is shown in his ‘Imaginary Interview with Jonathan Swift’. He was not afraid, despite the circumstances, to run a series of talks on ‘great books’, which included The Koran and Das Kapital, and arranged discussions on such social problems as ‘Moslem Minorities in Europe’ and ‘The Status of Women in Europe’. Despite censorship, he was allowed to organise talks by the Quaker Reg Reynolds on prison literature at a time when leading Indians such as Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru were imprisoned by the British in India. He adapted famous books and stories, such as The Emperor’s New Clothes and Ignazio Silone’s ‘The Fox’, for radio. After leaving the BBC he dramatised Little Red Riding Hood for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, and wrote a radio play, The Voyage of the Beagle. It was, however, a bitter disappointment to him that listening figures in India – partly because of lack of radios there, time shifts, and language problems – were tiny.
Laurence Brander, the BBC’s Intelligence Officer for India and one of the first to write a biography of Orwell, wrote that what Orwell did for Indian students ‘was the inspiration of that rudimentary (BBC) Third Programme’. That came into being not long before Orwell’s death. For many people, of whom I am one, the Third Programme has opened minds and eyes to worlds that might well have passed them by. Indeed, it was hearing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales recited in the late 1940s that inspired me to study in my spare time, become an academic, and in due time edit Orwell’s work.
The extent of his work for the BBC Overseas Service is apparent from the fact that of the eleven volumes of the Complete Works containing his letters and essays, three are chiefly devoted to these ‘two wasted years’. For a man who believed that ‘every book is a failure’ (‘Why I Write’, p. 463) it is easy to see why he responded in this way to the frustrations of dealing with the bureaucracy of the BBC’s Indian Service. This, surely, is typified by his choosing the number 101 for the dreaded room in Nineteen Eighty-Four: it was the room in which he had to attend committee meetings at 55 Portland Place, a couple of hundred yards from Broadcasting House. If time is wasted it is in committee rooms.
Orwell’s last day at the BBC was Tuesday 23 November 1943. He started writing letters on Tribune’s headed paper on Monday 29 November so it is likely that that was the day he started work as its Literary Editor. In addition to organising book reviews for the journal, one of Orwell’s principal contributions to Tribune as literary editor was a personal column, ‘As I Please’, a random causerie, sometimes deeply serious, often light-hearted. He wrote eighty ‘As I Please’ columns, sometimes with longish breaks between one and another. The first appeared on 3 December 1943 and the last on 4 April 1947. Raymond Postgate had contributed to a short series under that title in Controversy (edited by C.A. Smith) in 1939. Jon Kimche told the editor of this volume that it was he who suggested to Orwell that he use that title for his series. Another earlier use of the title, by a writer whom Orwell noted in a list of those with real or suspected left-wing leanings, was I Write As I Please, by Walter Duranty (1935). (Duranty, who died in 1957, was foreign correspondent for the New York Times, 1913–39.)
Sir Bernard Crick suggested that Orwell was probably paid ‘only £500 a year’ as literary editor of Tribune, rather less than he was paid at the BBC. Only two payments from Tribune to Orwell are noted in Orwell’s Payments Book whilst he was literary editor: £5 5s 0d for a special article of 2,000 words on 20 December 1943 and 10s 6d for a poem of thirty-six lines on 17 January 1944. His salary as literary editor, whatever it was, seems therefore to have also covered his writing of ‘As I Please’.
Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), creator of the National Health Service, was a powerful director of Tribune whilst Orwell wrote for the journal, and gave Orwell free rein to conduct his ‘As I Please’ columns precisely as Orwell did please. As a result, ‘Protests were frequent, both at the frivolous use he made of his column and at his frequent attacks on the Soviet Communist Party.’ Bevan defended Orwell, and without his support Orwell ‘might not have lasted – even though the circulation manager coolly reported that those who wrote in regularly threatening to cancel their subscriptions were rarely subscribers’ (Crick, 445–6).
Orwell’s Head of Department at the BBC, Rushbrook Williams, writing a confidential report on him in August 1943, praised not only his work but ‘his moral as well as his intellectual capacity. He is transparently honest, incapable of subterfuge … a mind and a spirit of real and distinguished worth’ (A Life in Letters, pp. 195–6). This, I would argue, is apparent not only from his work for the BBC but in all that he strove to say in essays, personal columns, and reviews. This selection of a few poems, quite a large number of reviews (including one or two of drama and film), some critical essays and broadcasts, extracts from the ‘London Letters’ addressed to American readers of Partisan Review, and many items from his causerie ‘As I Please’, does, I hope, in its many varieties demonstrate Rushbrook Williams’s assessment and also confirms Daniel George’s summation of Orwell’s approach:
Orwell strikes no attitude, adopts no pose. He never proudly claims to be a lowbrow. All he appears to claim is common sense. His style is a common sense style, unadorned by tricks and graces. It represents the man himself – a man, one cannot help feeling, who assumed the garb of simplicity after some practice. He now wears it naturally. It is now natural, or at least habitual, for him to see things not so much from the point of view of, as on behalf of, a much lower social class than that to which by birth and education he belongs. The old Etonian speaks for the Islingtonian – oh, but not crudely, not in his language, and not, on the other hand, with too-too exquisite sympathy or with smart paradox. He sees no nobility in poverty and no advantage in lack of education, no point in bad taste, no virtue in humility.
Peter Davison