“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”
-1984
Ten years later, upon eligibility, he scored second highest in his class and became accepted into either Eton or Wellington. But there was a waiting list for the welfare cases, so had to wait for an opening. Wellington had the first opening and he was admitted in January 1917. I believe he only attended one semester at Wellington before there was an opening at one of the colleges in the more prestigious Eton, where he now transferred.
A somewhat erratic scholar, in that he often presented papers from personal research that might contradict some of his teachers. He received middling to good marks, but received quite a few negative responses from many of his lecturers (I believe that is the English term for their professors.) He did get a hearty response from his French lecturer, however, a gentleman named Aldous Huxley. ( I guess he chose French for the exact reason I chose German, a familiarity with the language from our maternal parent).
But Arthur progressed more remarkably at Eton with his discourse with his lecturers at Eton than he had at Wellington. At least Blair liked the atmosphere better and made connections with some of his mates who would later assist him in his first publications. But some rude comments by some of his lecturers meant he would not be able to get a scholarship to go on to university.
His family, including his now retired father, decided he should go to the East and Arthur decided he preferred the Imperial Police to the civil service. Since his maternal grandmother still resided in Burma, Arthur chose to be stationed in Burma. In Burma he worked his way up to a senior position and was eventually sent to Syriam, the site of the Burmah Oil Company’s refinery. He found the landscape a " land a barren waste, all vegetation killed off by the fumes of sulphur dioxide pouring out day and night from the stacks of the refinery."
Syriam was relatively close to Rangoon, and to escape the toxic atmosphere, Arthur began spending as much time as possible in Rangoon. Blair would later recall that “in the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves". He recalled that "I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible".
He also became something of an outsider preferring to read as much as possible and apply his readings to his observations. He had his knuckles tattooed with the Burmese native tattoo of little blue circles, thought by natives to be a protection from bullets and snakebites that could suck the poison of either into the tattooed knuckle.
He would later draw on these experiences in his novel Burmese Days, but would also use the experiences in several of his essays. In 1927 he had earned a vacation to England, and decided not to return to Burma. He decided to become a writer. One of his favorite writers was Jack London and he explored the east end and the povertized class of England, much as London had done in America. He took many menial jobs there, and then went to Paris, hoping he could find more success as a writer there, but he sold nothing, and continued to be a laborer.
But he did compile a volume, and with the assistance of some of his former schoolmates, was able to get his first book Down and Out in Paris and London published in 1933. On the eve of publication decided to be Arthur Blair no more and George Orwell was born. Not so well known, I somehow had found this volume on the library shelves before his better known tombs and felt he was writing the story of my life.
His next venture was a trip to live with coal miners and, now as a commissioned journalist, wrote a series of articles that became the book Road to Wigan Pier. The book, his publisher thought, especially the second half where he advocates against the treatment of labor, and the government that permitted such class conditions, was thought too provocative and he inserted a statement of non-support for the ideas expressed.
If anyone has ever seen the version of Glenn Gould playing the Brahms No. 1, before conductor Leonard Bernstein begins the performance, he announces to the audience that he cannot Gould’s interpretation, but he nevertheless is going to give the audience the opportunity to determine for themselves. I do not know if Bernstein was acquainted with this insertion into Orwell’s account, but it was nearly word-to-word (changing the names to implicate the guilty) of the publisher’s insertion in Road to Wigan Pier. (the concert is available on youtube).
And of course it did alarm the government, the Special Branch put Orwell under continuous monitoring for the rest of his lifetime.
From there he was sent as a war correspondent to Spain. He became alarmed by the dispatches his fellow journalists were sending back. Truth, he would later profess, was not the objective of the reports but conversion through propaganda. Orwell would resign his post and join the Republican cause in combat (perhaps, once again, Gollancz, his publisher, did not publish what Orwell was writing.)
Of course it would become nearly another ten years before Orwell would sail into international fame with Animal Farm. Orwell had tuberculosis by then, but Animal Farm had lifted him from the lower part of his lower-upper middle class background, and he was able to sustain his final work in rented comfort instead of being cast into a hospital for the indigent. He published that story of it having happened when he fell ill in Paris almost immediately after his fame, and then set to work on 1984. Though a relatively short book, between his illness and the need to make the work completely transparent he would work on it for almost four years.
Within a year, Orwell would die. But he died in despair. Despair, because though 1984 was massively successful, one of the last published articles before he died he wanted to let it be known that 1984 was not about the evil of communism.
It was about, Orville would write, about any type of Totalitarian subjugation that thrived on misconstruing truth to support itself. This could be as true in democracies as in communism. It was the totalitarian propensity to use speech as nonsense to support a relevancy to its own irrelevancy that crippled society into obedience. It was especially true, in corporate democracy, that used advertisements to confuse people into massive confusion.
I do not feel the need to try to explain the books, I’m sure everyone knows the stories. But we take note of the closing lines.
"the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which".
-Animal Farm
“He loved Big Brother.”
-1984
And perhaps take heed of what Orwell would describe as falling for the nonsense of nonsense. But what might be better known as newspeak.
writings by George Orwell.
Standalone Novels In Publication Order
Burmese Days (1934)
A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
Coming Up for Air (1939)
Animal Farm (1945)
1984 (1949)
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
Dickens, Dali and Others (1946)
Posthumous Collections
Shooting an Elephant (1950)
British Pamphleteers (1951)
Critical Essays (1951)
England Your England and Other Essays (1953)
Selected Essays/Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1957)
Selected Writings (1958)
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1961)
The Lion and the Unicorn (1962)
Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (1965)
As I Please, 1943-1945 (1968)
A Collection of Essays (1970)
An Age Like This 1920-1940 (1971)
In Front of Your Nose 1945-1950 (1971)
My Country Right or Left 1940-1943 (1980)
The English People (1982)
The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (1984)
The War Broadcasts (1985)
Orwell The Lost Writings (1985)
War Commentaries (1985)
Orwell: The War Commentaries (1985)
Selected Prose (1991)
The Sayings of George Orwell (1994)
Pages From a Scullion’s Diary (1995)
All Propaganda is Lies (1999)
Facing Unpleasant Facts (1999)
I Belong to the Left (1999)
I Have Tried to Tell the Truth (1999)
It Is What I Think (1999)
Keeping Our Little Corner Clean (1999)
A Kind of Compulsion (1999)
Our Job is to Make Life Worth Living (1999)
A Patriot After All (1999)
Smothered Under Journalism (1999)
Two Wasted Years (1999)
Orwell and Politics (2001)
Orwell and the Dispossessed (2001)
Orwell in Spain (2001)
Orwell’s England (2001)
Orwell: The ‘Observer’ Years (2003)
Why I Write (2004)
Orwell In Tribune (2007)
Books v. Cigarettes (2008)
All Art Is Propaganda (2008)
Orwell: A Celebration (2009)
Narrative Essays (2009)
Diaries (2009)
Such, Such Were the Joys and Other Essays (2010)
A Life in Letters (2010)
Orwell on Truth (2017)
Notes on Nationalism (2018)
Orwell on Freedom (2018)