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Before anything else," George Packer writes in his foreword to a newly published two-volume selection of Orwell's essays, "George Orwell was an essayist." This being so, Packer goes on to observe, "it's an odd fact that even readers who know 1984 well and have read one or two of Orwell's other books are likely to be unfamiliar with the most essential Orwell. Aside from 'Politics and the English Language' and perhaps 'Shooting an Elephant,' none of his essays are widely read, and some of the best remain almost unknown."
My immediate reaction was that Packer is simply wrong here—surely Orwell's essays are much more widely known than he supposes?—and that's what I said in the first draft of this column. Then I had an opportunity to poll some bright young journalists. The results confirmed Packer's judgment. All the more reason to get the word out about these books.
In compiling his selections, Packer sought to show how Orwell the essayist worked in two quite different modes. One volume, All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, introduced by Keith Gessen, is intended to highlight Orwell's mastery of critical analysis, while the other, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, introduced by Packer, features pieces that "build meaning from telling a story." The division between the two modes isn't always clear-cut, Packer concedes, but it's a useful rough-and-ready distinction.
I'm grateful for these volumes. Packer and Gessen are both enlightening introducers. Gessen's piece in particular is one of the best I've read on Orwell in a long time, combining to an unusual degree a great admiration for Orwell's achievements with a critical assessment that Orwell himself would have appreciated.
Orwell is one of those figures—like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—whose exceptional moral authority is claimed over and over again by rival factions in current debates. One reason to read these essays, though certainly not the most important, is to arm oneself against such appropriations, which are typically facile.
Reading through these two volumes, I was struck again and again both by the immense distance between Orwell's world and my own 21st-century world (which is in some respects different from yours, Dear Reader, as yours will differ from your neighbor's, but is also in many ways the same) and by the powerful idiosyncrasy of his style, his sensibility, his "inscape," as Hopkins would say.
Consider for example the 1940 essay "My Country Right or Left"—I was going to say "the well-known essay"—included in Facing Unpleasant Facts, in which, in the course of his reflections on the nature of patriotism and his own patriotic impulse, Orwell notoriously wrote:
Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago and for such different reasons is somehow persisting.
That is not one of the passages cited by champions of the war in Iraq who sought to invoke Orwell's moral authority, nor is it one that he would himself have endorsed by the end of his short life (he died in 1950 at the age of forty-six). But the essay doesn't stand or fall on the basis of its politics or its prescience (or lack of same). It begins with one of Orwell's arresting opening moves: "Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present." He recalls his own impressions of "the war of 1914-1918," which "is now supposed to have had some tremendous, epic quality that the present one lacks." Not so, Orwell says: "if you were alive during that war, and if you disentangle your real memories from their later accretions, you find that it was not usually the big events that stirred you at the time." He instances the battle of the Marne, and then observes that "nothing in the war moved me so deeply as the loss of the Titanic had done a few years earlier":
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