Here’s a picture of the trees and the gray sky outside the rain-streaked window in my study. The first week of freshman English is over. We worked through different pieces by George Orwell. You always have in Orwell the appeal to simplicity and directness, particularly in “Politics and the English Language”: “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse the these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and one phrase (”time and chance”) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single, fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.” But in his long essay “Inside the Whale,” which has been read a bit unjustly as an argument for quietism, Orwell strikes a more varied, and altogether richer, note: “But get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear, i.e. without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back, after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it, something quite different from the cautious statements and snackbar dialects that are now in fashion.”

Re: quietism. Orwell’s argument in “Inside the Whale” is that the passive and apolitical Henry Miller is “able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers.” What does this mean? Orwell compares the books written about the First World War with those about civil war in Spain. He writes, “The immediately striking thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, right-wing or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to think, whereas the books about the Great War were written by common soldiers or junior officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about.” This is a profound, perceptive statement, and it will be disliked only be academic writers–writers whose sole wish is to prove that they understand the full workings of the world. Against such certainty and arrogance, which is in inverse proportion to any real power in society, we should pit Orwell’s real appeal for writing that doesn’t make spurious political claims for itself, writing which he describes as “a voice from the crowd, from the underling, from the third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political, non-moral, passive man.”