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Why I Write (Penguin Great Ideas)

Penguin (Non-Classics)

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A genuine account of the writer's motives

This review is based on the first of the four essays that are included in the book. In the essay "Why I Write", Orwell describes the factors that led him to be a writer.

He portrays him self as a lonely child who found comfort in writing poems and short stories. His personality was not, however, the most significant factor that made him a serious writer; it was the time into which he was born. The political turmoils of the 1930s made Orwell ideologically ambitious and created the political motivation to write. The Spanish civil war and Hitler's ascension led Orwell to the conclusion that totalitarianism was the greatest threat to humanity and that socialist Democracy was the political counterforce. Orwell's mission as a writer was to fight against the former and promote the latter.

The essay "Why I Write" is an account of the role of ideology in a writer's work. Orwell concludes that without the political motivation his prose and writings would have been "sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally".

For the writers of today, this essay stands as a remnant of the time where the world politics seemed bipolar and it was easy to choose a side. Orwell chose the anti totalitarian side. From there he found the purpose and vocation.

Fab Four

This little book contains three fabulous essays and a story by the greatest essayist of the last century. The title WHY I WRITE is also the title of the first essay. These essays represent types as well as specific writings- types that can be found in other essay collections. This little book reveals Orwell's lost legacy as an essayist and journalist which has been overshadowed by his novels.

WHY I WRITE.Why did Orwell occupy his life with writing? His early childhood was punctuated with poetry from the age of four and ended with high school editing. I have tried to find these early writings but,alas,have failed to find anything from earlier than 1920...seventeen in Orwell years. Orwell gives us insights into the reasons he writes: his ego, historical documentation, political influence (unavoidable for the citizens of the Twentieth Century according to Orwell), and ascetic impulse. Orwell, in a letter, once described himself as a "half intellectual" who avoided abstraction; here he tells us that he is concerned only with material things and "the surface of the earth." p.9.

The earthiness of Orwell's writing lead to a humble, direct style of writing that is exemplified in his essays on society. ENGLAND YOUR ENGLAND closely resembles another essay not in this book: My COUNTRY RIGHT OR LEFT.

ENGLAND YOUR ENGLAND discusses the changes and characteristics of England at war. The crumbling British Empire with its useless class peerage system is seen as doomed not only by a possible NAZI victory but the technocracy creatd by a large, growing middle class. England is seen as incipient revolutionary society with an expected upheaval in "six months to a year" from 1940- which could not be stopped unless England was invaded. In MY COUNTRY... the revolution was also incipient but would be marked by "Red militias at the Ritz" and "bloody London gutters." One revolution by the supplanting of the peerage class and yet the other as an old style proletarian uprising. The Labor Party gets short mention as being pro-capitalist since it depends on rising wages to placate union members who support the party.

The reality was the election of Winston Churchill and the Tories during the War, the post war victory of Attlee's Labor Party and the creation of the welfare state by the same middle class Orwell mentions in this essay...hardly a revolution.

A HANGING. The closest Orwell gets to Camus' THE STRANGER. A policeman observes the execution of a Burmese Hindu who dies for unknown reasons. The doomed man politely avoids a puddle before he hangs and a lone dog seems prescient about the coming death. The brutal administration of Burma was no resort hotel job...did Orwell know more about the execution than he writes about?

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE- a typical language essay. Often quoted in relation to totalitarianism. Orwell tells us that language molds thought and that " changing language will change the political climate". We are introduced to examples of bad writing and given specific rules for avoiding wasted thought "the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness." Eliminating useless metaphors, operators, pretentious diction and meaningless words will change the thought life of politics and avoid the Newspeak of Big Brother.

The essays are good and the book is worth a good commute reading. These are light and nimble essays-well written, but in the case of the social essays, not very deep. The "half intellectual" had a gift of clarity which has weathered the decades since the mid-Twentieth Century, yet his heart belonged to another time.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls, and woke to find it true;

I wasn't born for an age like this; was Smith? was Jones? Were you?

Poem from "Why I Write" by George Orwell, 1946

Orwell's unique talent as a writer

In the book, George Orwell, one of the most talented and gifted writers in the English world, depicts in a frank manner about his literary writing motives and how he reconciles aesthetic enthusiasm with his political purpose.

The book consists of 4 key chapters. Chapter 1 is a full introduction of his literary journey from childhood to adulthood. Orwell maintains that a writer's real experience in life can substantially determine his/her impulse to write (P.4). The four key motives in literary writing including sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose exist in different degree in different writers, depending very much on the atmosphere he/she is living. To Orwell, the key motive to write is that he intends to tell devastating truths about non-individual and public activities with his literary writing skills without humbug, purple passages, meaningless sentences, and decorative adjectives (P.10).

Chapter 2 is about English politics during the Second World War. As a key champion of democratic Socialism, Orwell criticized decadent hypocritical and privileged high class who dominated every aspect of political and economic life in England but they failed to resist any serious war attack by Fascism (P.35). He maintained that England should undertake a wholehearted political change (P.48) if people intended not to be conquered by Hitler. Democratic Socialism could centralize all goods of production for armament purpose and unite people from top to bottom due to approximate equal distribution of income (Pp.74-76).

Chapter 3 was a hanging case in Burma. Orwell uses his literary writing skills to narrate the hanging process of a Hindu condemned prisoner. This unhappy narration is full of detailed descriptions and arresting scenario, and also full of purple passages in which Orwell's literary writing skills are demonstrated. From the condemned cell where the hanged Hindu squatted at to the gallows where the prisoner's neck was hanged for execution, Orwell looked at this sudden life and death process with great unhappiness but smiles. Chapter 4 is a critique of the decadent English language. Orwell maintains that a good piece of political writing should avoid having difficult and useless phrases and jargons (P.120) and it should be clear and meaning and short in words (P.119). In this chapter, Orwell illustrates how academicians and political writers use operators, pretension diction, dying metaphors, and meaningless words (Pp.106-109) to make their works to be a sheer humbug.

Writing can be a very exhaustive and horrible struggle, particularly for those who aspire to write a book. This book is highly recommended to readers who intend to think hard about how to write.

Not all the essays listed on the product page

This is a great little volume of three of Orwell's essays (aka Eric Blair essays). Unfortunately the product description page give the impression that more than three essays are included.

Why I England

Don't be fooled by the title. _Why I Write_ is not a discussion on how Orwell writes, when he started writing, what young writers should know about writing, what veterans should do about their own writing, etc. You'll get a five-page blurb in the beginning about how he was compelled to write and about how he tried to shy away from his dream, and then you get a seven-page blurb at the end about what not to do when you write (e.g., don't use cliches, don't use more words than necessary, don't use a long word when a short word will do, etc.). The rest of it is a discussion about England, Germany, and the history of the times.

Don't get me wrong, the history is interesting, learning about countries and their characteristics and Orwell's thoughts on politics at the time. We learn about British habits and how the meaning of the word "Fascism" has changed from what it originally meant. But we don't learn anything about what we thought the book would be about: Writing.

Flip past page 11 to find out whether or not to buy this book. If you don't like that stuff, just read the beginning and the end. Save yourself the money. And if you're looking for a book that's actually about creative writing, go for King's _On Writing_ or Bradbury's _Zen in the Art of Writing_.