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| decadence | Posted
on 24-Oct-03 10:05 AM
www.aldaily.com George Orwell, whose books have sold a phenomenal forty million copies in more than sixty languages, was the most influential prose stylist of the twentieth century. Kingsley Amis observed that no modern writer has his air of passionately believing what he has to say and of being passionately determined to say it as forcefully and simply as possible. Norman Mailer maintained: I dont think theres a man writing English today who cant learn how to write a little better by reading his essays. Even his maxims and instructions on how to write well are superb. Like Hobbes and Swift, Orwell saw writing not only as a powerful tool for conveying ideas, but also as a demanding and enthralling art with a moral imperative to search for truth. In an autobiographical note of April 1940, Orwell said the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills. Both writers were masters of lucid prose and advocated direct language and unambiguous expression. They believed that the writer ought to communicate in the clearest possible way, and they employed a plain style that appealed to their readers common sense. Maugham wrote that good prose should be like the clothes of a well-dressed man, appropriate but unobtrusive ; Orwell echoed him in his famous simile: Good prose is like a window pane. Despite their preference for simplicity, both were also deeply moved when young by the rich sounds and exotic associations of John Miltons high style. Maugham noted the exultation, the sense of freedom which came to me when first I read in my youth the first few books of Paradise Lost. Orwell also recalled that when I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words& . The lines from Paradise Lost & sent shivers down my backbone. Like Maugham, Orwell trusted his audience to share his values and understanding of the world, but he also sought to increase their political awareness. He developed a clear, racy, supple style, fluent and readable, forceful and direct, with a colloquial ease of expression. The critic Edmund Wilson, defining his essential qualities, praised his readiness to think for himself, courage to speak his mind, tendency to deal with concrete realities rather than theoretical positions, and prose style that is both downright and disciplined. The English historian Veronica Wedgwood elegantly described Orwells combination of passion and restraint: the strength of his feelings and his determination that they should not intrude make his style spare and economical, while his acute observation and sensibility make its very bleakness the more powerful. Fascinated by every aspect of an authors life, in the course of his all-too-brief career Orwell discussed the teaching of creative writing, revising ones work, being edited, editing others, authors notes, and the limitations of reviewers. In his As I Please newspaper column in the Socialist London Tribune, he satirized ads for writing courses (which were just beginning in England and have since become entrenched college courses, even majors, in America). He effectively punctured their pretensions with a commonsensical question: If these [anonymous] people really knew how to make money out of writing, why arent they just doing it instead of peddling their secret at 5/- a time? & If Bernard Shaw or J. B. Priestley offered to teach you how to make money out of writing, you might feel that there was something in it. But who would buy a bottle of hair restorer from a bald man? In June 1940, chronically poor and still under pressure to earn money after more than a decade as a writer, Orwell reflected that his apparent ease of composition had been achieved by years of practice and repetition: Nowadays, when I write a review, I sit down at the typewriter and type it straight out. Till recently, indeed till six months ago, I never did this and would have said that I could not do it. Virtually all that I wrote was written at least twice, and my books as a whole three timesindividual passages as many as five or ten times. Reviews and articles kept Orwell going as he labored to complete his novels, and he was interesting on the practical problems of writing for newspapers. As a highly contentious and polemical author, hostile to any form of censorship, he loathed cuts that weakened his argument and changed his meaning, yet had to accept the reality of being edited. He told his agent: In my experience one can never be sure that ones stuff will get to press unaltered in any daily or weekly periodical. The Observer, for instance, habitually cuts my articles without consulting me if there is a last-minute shortage of space. In writing for papers like the Evening Standard, I have had things not merely cut but actually altered, and of course even a cut always modifies the sense of an article to some extent. What really matters here is whether or not one is dealing with a civilized and intelligent paper. When Orwell took over as literary editor of the Tribune in November 1943, he found his desk drawers stuffed with letters and manuscripts which ought to have been dealt with weeks earlier, and hurriedly shut it up again. As an editor himself, he had a fatal tendency to accept manuscripts which he knew very well could never be printed, but didnt have the heart to send back. When he considered manuscripts submitted to the newspaper, he must have remembered Gordon Comstocks bitter rage (in Orwells novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying) when his verse was politely rejected: Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, We dont want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge with. In June 1947 Or- well, an ex-policeman, recalled his generous weakness as editor and concluded the discussion with a characteristically witty simile: It is questionable whether anyone who has had long experience as a free-lance journalist ought to become an editor. It is too like taking a convict out of his cell and making him governor of the prison. .......for more visit aldaily.com |