Orwell on writing

It’s 63 years today since the writer George Orwell died, and 110 years since he was born. And to mark the occasion, Penguin Books, the Orwell Estate and the Orwell Prize have joined forces to launch an annual Orwell Day. (I discovered this through reading a short and entertaining column about 1984 and Animal Farm, repurposed by Margaret Atwood in The Guardian.) Penguin have marked the first one by reissuing his books with new covers.

Leaving to one side for the moment the thought that Orwell might have found the idea of such a day a little, well, Orwellian, my modest contribution was to go back to his fine essay “Politics and the English Language” and extract from it his six rules for writing clear English:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I think these have held up pretty well since Orwell wrote them in 1946. I do quite a lot of editing, and sometimes have to help colleagues with their writing style. Sometimes, 60 years on, I send them back to read Orwell’s essay. Of course, rule (vi) gives the writer enough rope, if they need it, and not always to hang themselves. While doing the research for this post, I found a couple of others which teased out some subtleties. They are here, and here.

this picture of George Orwell at the top of this post is from the Unleaded blog, and is used with thanks.

The English murder

In The Decline of the English Murder, written 60 years ago, George Orwell reflected on how murder reflected the times. The celebrated pre-war murders typically featured respectable men who had got themselves into unrespectable affairs with women, often of a lower social class, who were done away with by poison. The wartime murders which prompted the essay, in contrast, were done by an American Army deserter and his British girlfriend, who seemed to kill their victims – almost existentially – because they could. The randomness of war re-enacted as a celebrated crime.

The thought is prompted by Patrick Forbes’ documentary The Force, shown on Channel 4 this week, about Hampshire Police investigating a body found burned beyond recognition in the village of Dummer. This murder also reflected its times. The victim was Polish, the murderer Bangladeshi, who had worked together in an Ibis hotel in London and had started having an affair. Her mobile phone had been used to delay suspicions about her disappearance; his by the police to piece together his movements around the time of the murder. Fragments of the story were pieced together from CCTV footage, most compellingly when the police traced the film which showed him dragging the suitcase with the woman’s body in it to his car. But the breakthrough came from traditional policing, knocking on doors and handing out photos. And the motive was also traditional: he killed her out of jealousy. As a by the way, some of the housing conditions seen or reported during the film were quite shocking.

I need to declare an interest; I work with Patrick Forbes’ wife, and she had reminded me the programme was on. But – in contrast to most of  the factual programming on British television – the film used the people and the pictures to tell the story. Even the rhythm of the events – with only a small amount of programme-maker’s artifice – provided the cliff-hangers. And what a relief all of that was; no celebrity presenter, no urgent voice-over, and none of those horrible post-ad break intros which now seem compulsory at Channel 4, in which you’re told, again, what the programme is about, which have the unintended aesthetic effect of making every programme seem the same (“I’m Kevin McCloud and I’m on the trail of the 18th century aristocrats who transformed the way Britain thinks about design”. Please).

In other words, it was a proper documentary. It’s repeated late on Friday and there are two more to come, on the next two Tuesdays. [Update: There's a reflective review in The New Statesman.]

The picture at the top of the post is courtesy of Channel 4.

Politics, hypocrisy and Orwell

An interesting article by David Runciman on politics and hypocrisy – taken from a forthcoming book – comes to some slightly unexpected conclusions. Here are some extracts:

This obsession with sincerity, and loathing of bogus sentiment, has benefited some politicians and damaged others. George W Bush, Tony Blair, John McCain and Barack Obama have all taken advantage of the premium we place on politicians who seem to be comfortable in their own skin, and with their own values; Al Gore, John Kerry, Gordon Brown and Hillary Clinton have all suffered from appearing to hold something back, so that we can never be sure who it is we are dealing with. Brown in particular is paying the price for his inability to come to terms with the new confessional politics. People want to know who he really is, but if what he is really is a cautious and reserved politician who plays the percentages, then the public don’t want to know. So he is forced to tour the daytime-TV sofas trying to show his human side, and ends up revealing only how uncomfortable he is with the politics of self-revelation. His caution and his constant calculation make him look like a man in a mask – the classic hypocrite with something to hide.

But, he argues, there is a ‘necessary hypocisy’ about politics. Journalists who want politics to be ‘better’ than this often use Orwell as a touchstone. Runciman argues that this is a misunderstanding of Orwell:

But using Orwell the anti-hypocrite as a stick to beat up anyone whose political values are not entirely consistent and robust in their defence of freedom is too easy, and it is wrong. Orwell himself was by no means a straightforward anti-hypocrite, and his attitude to hypocrisy is both more interesting, and more complicated, than his present-day champions would have us believe. Orwell does offer us a way out, but only if we stop treating him as someone who can save us from the curse of hypocrisy. Instead, Orwell shows us that the only escape from the most corrosive forms of hypocrisy is to accept that other forms of hypocrisy are unavoidable. He wanted the language of power to be transparent, but that did not mean that he thought either people or the political systems they inhabited should be transparent as well. He also accepted that hypocrisy in politics is invariably preferable to its opposite – an excess of sincerity. There were many forms of politics that Orwell was prepared to countenance in which a kind of double standard, hypocrisy or deliberate concealment was being practised, so long as that concealment had an element of truthfulness about it.

And Orwell’s description of the interplay between democracy and imperialism has a surprisingly modern feel to it, even in an apparently post-imperial age, when one remembers the resource footprint needed to maintain a current western lifestyle (this quote is Orwell, not Runciman):

“It is so easy to be witty about the British Empire. The White Man’s Burden and “Rule Britannia” and Kipling’s novels and Anglo-Indian bores – who could even mention such things without a snigger? . . . That is the attitude of the typical left-winger towards imperialism, and a thoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is . . . For apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.”

OK, I’ve adapted an Orwell view to the modern issue of sustainability here. But that requires a form of ‘sustainable hypocrisy’ – as the issue of imperialism did in Orwell’s time.

In a way, it is easy to see what the solution is to this clash of hypocrisies: democracy needs to abandon imperialism, as Orwell was convinced that Britain needed to divest itself of its empire, and to face up to the sacrifices which that would involve. But it is important to recognise that the democracy that abandons imperialism does not abandon hypocrisy: rather, it preserves its own sustainable hypocrisy by ditching the form of power that makes a mockery of it. There is an alternative remedy, of course, which is to abandon hypocrisy altogether. This is what would happen if imperialism jettisoned democracy, rather than the other way around. An imperial order unconstrained by democratic or liberal hypocrisies, in which power can be called by its proper name, in which the sword is always unsheathed because there is never any need to conceal it, is certainly possible… Imperialism without hypocrisy is called fascism, and it is one of the distinguishing marks of fascism, as of other totalitarian regimes, that it does not need to be hypocritical. Totalitarians can afford to be sincere about power.

Runciman also has an interesting take on Orwell’s famous apercu that by the age of fifty ‘every man has the face he deserves’:

This does not mean that we deserve our physical appearance; what it means is that we deserve our mask, the face we choose to show to the world, because having lived with it for so long we can no longer claim that it is merely a façade.