The writer and the cuttlefish

...there is flinty pain in those lines...

...He had the gift of writing a book review, in a single draft, on the typewriter...

...one does not get out of high school without reading at least one of those books).' 'Read the essays...

...It is from those close observations and experiences that he could then describe with that particular moral quality of his...

...Misuse of people, not of orthodoxies, outraged him...

...Most of us rail against oppressive institutions as a matter of instinct, but Orwell insisted, more persistently than any other writer of his time, that the language of institutions could be a deadly tool against liberty and happiness...

...It was only this past year, after reading Bernard Crick's splendid (and definitive) George Orwell: A Life, that I took the doctor's advice and read through the entire four volumes of the essays...

...In his essay ' 'Politics and the English Language'' he writes that "the great enemy of clear language is insincerity...

...I do not intend to portray Orwell, as did his faithful friend the late Sir Richard Rees, as a secular saint...

...Let it be understood in advance that this act of homage, for the relief of those whose eyes glaze over at yet another apocalyptic article on Big Brother, will make only passing reference to you-know-which novel...

...In the final years of his life he turned out columns, reviews, and pamphlets at an alarming rate...

...In the simplicity of Orwell's life, in his horror of cant, in his passion for human values, in his seriousness — in his sincerity — Orwell belongs to that select group of moral and political thinkers who gave grace to a dismal period of our history...

...He had the man clearly in his gunsight but did not fire: "I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists,' but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a 'Fascist,' he is visibly a fellow creature...

...read Road to Wigan Pier,'1'' he counseled...

...I would like to suggest that Orwell' s close observation of the particular for a moral purpose is linked to, and derived from, his lifelong desire to write in as clear and unadorned a prose style as possible...

...Orwell wrote books, but he wrote only after he clearly observed (or, in some cases, after he experienced...

...to end a letter'' Sincerely yours'' is the meekest of conventions...

...At one level one could say as much about the Marquis De Sade if one took sincerity to be the same as self-revelatory honesty...

...I see now why Coles was so insistent...

...What saved Orwell from being a strident ideologue was his persistence in articulating political positions with a steady LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is professor of religion at the Florida State University, Tallahassee...

...She is a sister to those women who culled coal in Lancashire...

...they are real people who really suffer...

...Not for him are evasions about quaffing beer, good peasant bread, and a Distributist fancy about backyard gardens...

...A subtheme of The Road to Wigan Pier is its disgust with a Chestertonian vision of the poor as happy and snug in their grime...

...That hatred was allied to his equal hatred for the oppressive power of political abstraction...

...While serving on the front lines Orwell saw a fascist soldier running away while clutching at his trousers, holding them up...

...He had to since he was a free-lance journalist, one of a class he listed as among those teetering on the brink of irreversible penury...

...After the inevitable faculty reception I drove him back to his motel...

...Like Silone, Weil, Koestler, and Camus, he burned with a passion for justice, a love for humanity, and the deepest respect for the power of true language...

...He begins The Road to Wigan Pier from a train window, viewing a woman attempting to unclog a drainpipe in the yard of her squalid row house...

...She knew well enough what was happening to her — understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe...

...It hardly needs demonstration that Orwell hated the power of bureaucratic oppression in modern political systems...

...It does seem clear to me that there are few people in modern letters whose life and art were so clearly related: who he was and how he perceived himself was never at odds with what he wrote...

...He asked if I had ever read George Orwell...

...Some years ago Robert Coles visited our campus to lecture...

...To do that requires discipline, which means, in turn, constant writing...

...His insight was that clear language and revolution in thought is at least as old as The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads when Wordsworth and Coleridge issued their manifesto in favor of demotic speech...

...They are glad enough to do it...

...Written after his participation in the Spanish Civil War, Homage is a book, as his biographer said, that was hated by the Right because the author was a socialist and hated by the Left because the author told the truth...

...The word sincerity was first used for things ("this is a sincere wine"), but was soon applied to people...

...Sincerity, in its deepest sense, however, has a profoundly moral side to it...

...To write clearly and plainly was both a blow struck against class distinction, and an act of solidarity with others who spoke the same tongue but dropped 'aitches...

...Orwell was professedly a man of the Left...

...These women do not stand as emblems of poverty...

...Plain speech was also the most economical way to communicate what was urgently true without pretense or evasion...

...We sat in the parking lot for a bit speaking about authors we both loved: Simone Weil, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee...

...His glimpse of her is fleeting but' 'what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal...

...Orwell had witnessed that hanging while serving with the colonial police in Burma — the setting for his first novel Burmese Days...

...Orwell is openly hostile to those who would either patronize or rationalize that kind of poverty...

...It was the sight of a condemned prisoner avoiding a puddle as he walked to the gallows (in ' 'The Hanging'') that taught Orwell the essential humanity of the person and, as a consequence, made him an implacable foe of executions.' 'It is curious," he wrote, "but until that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man...

...I replied that I had read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four (not much of an accomplishment...

...One sees that clearly in those small epiphanies in which a close portrait of common human life is brought forth to argue a central moral point...

...it is more important almost than food...

...For Orwell the cleansing of language from Latinate flourishes and donnish ornaments was not merely a rejection of class language...

...eye on the individual...

...In rereading Trilling recently it struck me that sincerity, understood in that moral sense with its original gravity, is an apt adjective to describe the late Eric Blair aka George Orwell...

...Meanwhile all round, as far as the eye can see, are the slag heaps and hoisting gear of collieries, and not one of those collieries can sell all the coal it is capable of producing...

...It was a hatred mixed with a profound compassion...

...His social program for England would still warm the heart of Mister Tony Benn...

...it also took aim at the more elegant evasions of English parliamentary rhetoric and political sloganeering...

...Hdwever much he loathed class privilege and the poverty of the poor which he thought sprang from it, his loathing was always focused on what class did to this or that individual...

...Yet, as Lionel Trilling argued in his 1969-1970 Norton Lectures "Sincerity and Authenticity" (published under the same title by Harvard University Press in 1972), sincerity entered the English language in the sixteenth century and remained a vital concept until near modern times...

...In that sense Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four are as much about language as they are about ideology...

...17 May 1985: 303...

...With 1984 over, reading Orwell is still very much worthwhile for its bracing moral tone and its demand for that rarest of commodities: honest political language...

...Orwell did plenty of that...

...In the latter usage it took on a particular meaning: the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretense...

...Sincerity was honesty, not only about the self, but about the self in relation to others...

...In Winter they are desperate for fuel...

...the dumpy shawled women, with their sacking aprons and their heavy black clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind, searching eagerly for chips of coal...

...None of the facts or statistics in The Road to Wigan Pier illuminates working class poverty in the England of the 1930s as compellingly as vignettes like...

...Since 1984 is now behind us it might be well to look back on Orwell without the attendant clamor of an anniversary year...

...Orwell's critique of political language and its abuses was not solely directed against the corruption of language coming from Berlin and Moscow...

...The sincere person spoke the truth about himself and about the world...

...In a short piece ("Why I Write") Orwell stated that he wanted to turn political writing into an art form...

...Moral sincerity takes seriously the sense of the self in relation to a larger human community...

...It is then, Orwell says in a memorable phrase, that a' 'mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like wet snow...

...His most recent book, from Crossroad, is The Catholic Heritage...

...When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink...

...Orwell came back to the experience of poverty again and again...

...The sincere person was the opposite of the dissembler, the mask wearer, the villain...

...That moment at the hanging is so similar to his observations about the poor women we have already alluded to that it is almost a personal signature of the kind of writing he did...

...Another incident of the kind is in his Homage to Catalonia...

...Yet sheer bulk does not of itself create style in a writer — as reading anything by Isaac Asimov (apart from science fiction) demonstrates...

...It is one of the supreme paradoxes of our time that the adjective "Orwellian" should ring so sinister...