This is a book I picked up while browsing at the University library for other books on Orwell, and am very happy for the random find. For those who want to track it down, the copyright page says the edition was put out in 2000 with just /Essays/ as the title, but originally was put out in (appropriately) 1984 under the title /The Penguin Essays of George Orwell/. The introduction is by Bernard Crick. All the essays are supposed to have originally appeared in a four volume /The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell/ ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

The book contains all of Orwell’s most famous essays, and by “most famous” here I mean “ones I had heard of and read previously.” These are “A Hanging,” “Shooting and Elephant,” “Bookshop Memories,” “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” “Politics and the English Language,” “Politics vs Literature: An Examination of /Gulliver’s Travels/,” and “Reflections on Gandhi.” The first two of these are based on Orwell’s experiences as imperial police in Burma, good examples of Orwell simply telling about things his witnessed yet explaining where he got his ideas from. He tells of what it’s like to be a servant of power, and to wield power after a fashion, to take orders you theoretically don’t agree with and then get swept along by the emotions you’re expected to feel, and to see that even at their weakest the ruled have a sort of power over the rulers.

“Bookshop Memories” gives us Orwell’s personality as someone who simply loved books for being books, and who lived when books were different then our books. There was no option of reading books in PDF format, and even more importantly no Amazon.com, and so little experience of walking into a bookshop and buying something that you just happen to see, even though you had no plan of buying it. It’s a feeling I get only occasionally–when I go to the University Book Store to buy textbooks and see some random non-textbook I decide I have to have, when the Library decides to get rid of books by selling them cheap. “Bookshop Memories” reminds me how different things used to be. We also get a bit of that flavor in “Books v. Cigarettes,” where Orwell estimates how much he’s spent on both items.

“Raffles and Miss Blandish” looks at first like a work of literary criticism, but is as politically important as /1984/. It’s a comparison of two crime novels that both glorify the criminals to some extent, but in different ways. /Raffles/ is about a gentlemen thief with a code of honor, who only ever causes the deaths of a few more reprehensible sorts, and eventually must repent by going off to die in a war. In /No Orchids for Miss Blandish/, however, we are expected to sympathize with murderers and rapists simply because they are powerful, and “If ultimately one sides with the police against the gangsters, it is merely because they are better organized and more powerful, because, in fact, the law is a bigger racket than crime.” The political importance of Orwell’s observations lies in this: if ordinary readers can be expected to side with the monstrous but powerful, we can better understand why the agents of totalitarian regimes, as depicted in /1984/, find it so easily to behave monstrously simply because they are powerful. We find the same impulses in common fiction readers as SS troops.

“Politics and the English Language” is the one essay you must read even if you don’t intend to pick up the whole collection, here’s a link, here’s another if the first goes bad, if both go bad, use Google. Here, Orwell gives real examples of what he satirized in the “Newspeak” parts of /1984/, imagines a re-write of /Ecclesiastes/ in that style, and gives four rules for good writing. The last is the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten, aside from Stephen King’s “read a lot, write a lot” rule, and I’ve kept them in mind writing this review, though like Orwell I admit to probably having broken them through carelessness.

“Politics vs Literature” (on /Gulliver’s Travels/) is one of several essays–others including on on Kippling and another on Tolstoy’s attack on Shakespeare–where Orwell states two beliefs about literature: one, almost all literature is political, two, literature can be judged apart from politics. Thus, Orwell condemns Swift’s politics while respecting his book as a novel. We get a similar attitude towards Kippling in that essay. Once again, we get reminded of Orwell’s era, when everyone, even a poor journalist styling himself as a champion of the little guy, had an agreed-upon cannon of great literature based on what withstood the test of time. Ironically, some what Orwell naturally respected does not seem to be aging so well, as though the Modern Library’s 1998 list mostly re-canonized the canon, putting Joyce at the top, my sense is that Joyce is on the way out, increasingly recongized as unreadable garbage. I’m also not sure how his official ideas about what withstands the test of time links up with his idea of the “good bad book”–the books without much literary merit which is still a good read. (Though the phrase “good bad book,” and the essay of that name, are still wonderful).

Last on my list of famous-i.e.-I’d-heard-of-it essays is “Reflections of Gandhi,” a reminder of when Gandhi’s canonization wasn’t so far along that you felt like a horrible radical for coming up with a more mixed assessment:

One may feel, as I do, a fort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim for himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Of course, Orwell’s cautions about sainthood are good for more than history. They pick out a troubling tendency in human nature, the need for saints, even if it’s as not as troubling as some of Orwell’s observations.

I’ve picked out the best essays, but they’re all worth reading, as I’ve tried to show by mentioning less well-known (by me) ones along the well-known ones. Orwell hits repeatedly on the same themes by different means, so to discuss every essay would be repetitious, but that doesn’t keep them all from being worthwhile. I’ll mention a handful of others in brief: “The Spike” and “How the Poor Die” can teach a modern person what poverty used to mean, “Looking Back on the Spanish War” contains a wonderful passage on the tendency of people to believe atrocity stories about the enemy but not their own side, “Antisemitism in Britain” gets some good laughs at people we’re used to simply despising, and Orwell’s thoughts on Englishness is simply enjoyable.

I’m tempted to complain at the lack of any excerpts from Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War and how the experience disillusioned him of Soviet Communism. The book contains many wonderful passages–the “fat Russian agent,” in chapter 10 “whose profession was telling lies,” the use of “Trotskyist” in Communist rhetoric as described in chapter 11, and the account of being shot through the neck in chapter 12, and general accounts of life in wartime Spain. However, the book still drags a little in places. These two things make it good material for excerpting. However, doing that would have made the essay collection no longer a collection of essays, but a collection of writings, and thematic coherence seems worth leaving that out.

In the spirit of “Reflections on Gandhi,” I’ll close with a reminder that Orwell was not, in fact, a saint. One thing I got from the /Essays/ is a reminder that Orwell was a socialist, largely a Marxist, and worse had little conception of the basic ideas behind the free market–that’s assuming he hadn’t heard them and consciously ignored them. But Orwell, like Gandhi, made no claims to sainthood, and in spite of all the things Orwell got right it would be a disservice to him to try to make him a saint.