George Orwell barely saw his father in his first eight years of life, his two siblings were each five years distant in age, and he was unpopular among his schoolmates because of “disagreeable mannerisms.” His was a lonely childhood, and his early knowledge, from the age of five or six, that he was to be a writer, was linked to his feelings of being isolated and undervalued. He knew he had a facility with words, and “a power of facing unpleasant facts" that marked him out from his fellows.
For fifteen years or more, he was engaged in narrating his own life. As he opened a door, he would be thinking to himself: “He pushed the door open and entered the room.” Orwell suggests this is common among children and adolescents, and he did it until he was about twenty-five, during which time he made few efforts to actually write seriously, though he always knew he was going to be a writer.
Orwell's Reasons to Write:
There are 4 reasons why a writer writes: 1 Sheer egoism. 2 Aesthetic enthusiasm, perception of beauty in the world, or the beauty of the word. 3 Historical impulse: to see things as they are, and to set it down for those who have not seen, or who come after, and 4 Political purpose: desire to change the world, to change people. Orwell believed by nature he was motivated by the first three, but because of various circumstances of his life: working at a job he disliked (Burmese policeman), undergoing poverty and a sense of failure, becoming acquainted with working-class life, and finally the political situation of the 1930s: Hitler in power in Germany, the Spanish Civil War, he was driven towards the fourth motivation: political purpose.
As Orwell wrote "Why I Write", aged 43, he was shortly to begin Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the century’s key novels. That is the work he refers to when he writes: “I hope to write another [novel] fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.” And Nineteen Eighty-Four was to be the most powerful and resonant statement of Orwell’s politics, his hatred of tyranny and his sympathy with the common man.
Orwell ends “Why I Write” with a reminder that, for all he has said: “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” But though it is so, Orwell insists that the only writing of his that is worthwhile is that actuated by political concerns. where this lacked, lifeless writing resulted, florid and ostentatious but empty and meaningless – “humbug”, he calls it. Good writing involves effacing one’s own personality, and that is what Orwell always tried to do in his mature work.
“Why I Write” is a short essay, only some ten pages, but a fascinating and immensely clear-sighted exploration of the psychology of writing. Orwell had only one more novel to write, and only four years to live, but this is the testament of a man who understood his profession completely, who had a rare gift for honesty, and who writes as if he has nothing to prove and nothing to hide.
Orwell, George, Why I Write (Penguin, 2004) [Penguin Great Ideas edition, also includes “The Lion and the Unicorn”, “A Hanging” and “Politics and the English Language”.]
Mark Wallace - "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Join the Conversation