From a very early age,
perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew
up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about
seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea,
but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging
my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to
settle down and write books.
I was the middle child of three, but
there was a gap of five years on either side, and I
barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and
other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed
disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular
throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit
of making up stories and holding conversations with
imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my
literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of
being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a
facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant
facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private
world in which I could get my own back for my failure in
everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious -- i.e.
seriously intended -- writing which I produced all
through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half
a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four
or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot
remember anything about it except that it was about a
tiger and the tiger had "chair-like teeth" -- a
good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism
of Blake's "Tiger, Tiger." At eleven, when the
war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which
was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two
years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to
time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually
unfinished "nature poems" in the Georgian
style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly
failure. That was the total of the would-be serious work
that I actually set down on paper during all those years.
However, throughout this time I did in
a sense engage in literary activities. To begin with
there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced
quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself.
Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion,
semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now seems
to me astonishing speed -- at fourteen I wrote a whole
rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a
week -- and helped to edit a school magazines, both
printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most
pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I
took far less trouble with them than I now would with the
cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for
fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary
exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making
up of a continuous "story" about myself, a sort
of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a
common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small
child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and
picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but
quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic
in a crude way and became more and more a mere
description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For
minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running
through my head: "He pushed the door open and
entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering
through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table,
where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With
his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the
window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was
chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit continued
until I was about twenty-five, right through my
non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did
search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this
descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind
of compulsion from outside. The "story" must, I
suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers
I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it
always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
When I was about sixteen I suddenly
discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and
associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost
--
So hee with difficulty and labour
hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
which do not now seem to me so very
wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the
spelling "hee" for "he" was an added
pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all
about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I
wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to
write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous
naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of
detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also
full of purple passages in which words were used partly
for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first
completed novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when
I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that
kind of book.
I give all this background information
because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives
without knowing something of his early development. His
subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in
-- at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary
ages like our own -- but before he ever begins to write
he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he
will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to
discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at
some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he
escapes from his early influences altogether, he will
have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need
to earn a living, I think there are four great motives
for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in
different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer
the proportions will vary from time to time, according to
the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
- Sheer egoism. Desire to
seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered
after death, to get your own back on the
grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc.,
etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a
motive, and a strong one. Writers share this
characteristic with scientists, artists,
politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful
businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust
of humanity. The great mass of human beings are
not acutely selfish. After the age of about
thirty they almost abandon the sense of being
individuals at all -- and live chiefly for
others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.
But there is also the minority of gifted, willful
people who are determined to live their own lives
to the end, and writers belong in this class.
Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole
more vain and self-centered than journalists,
though less interested in money .
- Aesthetic enthusiasm.
Perception of beauty in the external world, or,
on the other hand, in words and their right
arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound
on another, in the firmness of good prose or the
rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an
experience which one feels is valuable and ought
not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very
feeble in a lot of writers, but even a
pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet
words and phrases which appeal to him for
non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly
about typography, width of margins, etc. Above
the level of a railway guide, no book is quite
free from aesthetic considerations.
- Historical impulse. Desire
to see things as they are, to find out true facts
and store them up for the use of posterity.
- Political purpose -- using
the word "political" in the widest
possible sense. Desire to push the world in a
certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea
of the kind of society that they should strive
after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from
political bias. The opinion that art should have
nothing to do with politics is itself a political
attitude.
It can be seen how these various
impulses must war against one another, and how they must
fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By
nature -- taking your "nature" to be the state
you have attained when you are first adult -- I am a
person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the
fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or
merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost
unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been
forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer. First I spent
five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian
Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty
and the sense of failure. This increased my natural
hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully
aware of the existence of the working classes, and the
job in Burma had given me some understanding of the
nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not
enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then
came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of
1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision. I
remember a little poem that I wrote at that date,
expressing my dilemma:
A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;
But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.
And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.
All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.
But girl's bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.
It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.
I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;
And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.
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?
The Spanish war and other events in
1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I
stood. Every line of serious work that I have written
since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against
totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I
understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like
our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such
subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or
another. It is simply a question of which side one takes
and what approach one follows. And the more one is
conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one
has of acting politically without sacrificing one's
aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
What I have most wanted to do
throughout the past ten years is to make political
writing into an art. My starting point is always a
feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit
down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am
going to produce a work of art." I write it because
there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to
which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is
to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing
a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not
also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine
my work will see that even when it is downright
propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician
would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not
want, completely to abandon the world view that I
acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well
I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to
love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in
solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no
use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to
reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the
essentially public, non-individual activities that this
age forces on all of us.
It is not easy. It raises problems of
construction and of language, and it raises in a new way
the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one example
of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book
about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia,
is of course a frankly political book, but in the main it
is written with a certain detachment and regard for form.
I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without
violating my literary instincts. But among other things
it contains a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations
and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were accused
of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which
after a year or two would lose its interest for any
ordinary reader, must ruin the book. A critic whom I
respect read me a lecture about it. "Why did you put
in all that stuff?" he said. "You've turned
what might have been a good book into journalism."
What he said was true, but I could not have done
otherwise. I happened to know, what very few people in
England had been allowed to know, that innocent men were
being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about that
I should never have written the book.
In one form or another this problem
comes up again. The problem of language is subtler and
would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of
late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and
more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you
have perfected any style of writing, you have always
outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in
which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was
doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose
into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven
years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is
bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do
know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I
have made it appear as though my motives in writing were
wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the
final impression. 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 if one were not driven
on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor
understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the
same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And
yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable
unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own
personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot
say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest,
but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And
looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably
where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless
books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences
without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug
generally.
