George Orwell

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George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it means the
right to tell people what they do not want to
hear.
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Eric Arthur Blair 1903 - Born in Motihari,
India 1907 - Moved to England - Attended
Wellington and Eton - poor student placing 138
of 167 1922 - Joined the Indian Imperial Police
and trained in Burma 1927 - Resigned while in
England on leave
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is
the restatement of the obvious.
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1927 - Portobello Road in London learning to
write 1928 - Began living among the poor of
London and Paris. 1929 - Returned to
family 1930 - A Scullion's Diary later Down
and Out in Paris and London 1933 - Book rejected
twice before being published 1934 - Burmese Days
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1935 - A Clergymans Daughter 1936 - Marries
Eileen O'Shaughnessy 1936 - Keep the Aspidistra
Flying 1936 - Joined Republican forces in
Spanish Civil War 1937 - The Road to Wigan
Pier
On the whole human beings want to be good, but
not too good, and not quite all the time.
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1938 - Homage to Catalonia 1938 - Diagnosed with
tuberculosis and moves to Morocco 1939 - Coming
Up for Air 1939 Returns to England and tries
to enlist to fight in WW2 1941 - Joins BBC India
Service
During times of universal deceit, telling the
truth becomes a revolutionary act.
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1943 - Becomes Literary Editor of the
Tribune 1944 - Adopts Richard Blair 1945 -
Animal Farm
1945 - Eileen O'Shaughnessy dies 1948 Moves to
Scotland 1949 Marries Sonia Brownell
All animals are equal, but some animals are more
equal than others.
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1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four 1950 George
Orwell dies of TB
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Orwells Legacy
At first criticized, his work has since been
recognized as groundbreaking Rejected and then
later claimed by both the political left and
right Along with his books, Orwell was an
accomplished essayist, critic and newspaper
journalist
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An Orwellian world
Since he died in 1950 he has become an adjective
("Orwellian"), a year (1984), and, as a literary
and political figure, the focus of innumerable
squabbles among intellectuals and critics in the
United States and Great Britain. William Jones
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Homage to Catalonia
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Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
Uprising under General Francisco Franco
Nationalists (Fascists) vs Republicans
(Socialists/Communists/Anarchists) Soldiers from
around the world joined both sides
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Spanish Civil War
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Homage to Catalonia
Orwell arrives in Barcelona in 1936 to cover
war Joins the POUM socialist militia in December
1936 At frontline near Alcubierre until June 1937
- shot in the throat Became disillusioned by
factionalism and fled
Why can't we drop all of this political nonsense
and get on with the war?
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Homage to Catalonia
Rejected by several publishers, later seen as his
greatest work Only 700 copies sold in Orwells
lifetime Experiences would frame his views for
Animal Farm and 1984 Created a life-long paranoia
that communist agents were trying to kill him
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
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Why Orwells Words Sing

• The appeal to your senses
• Short, sharp sentences
• Puts himself in the story
• Dialogue
• Characters

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Sight
It was vile weather, with alternate mist and
rain. The narrow earth roads had been churned
into a sea of mud, in places two feet deep,
through which the lorries struggled with racing
wheels and the peasants led their clumsy carts
which were pulled by strings of mules, sometimes
as many as six in a string, always pulling
tandem. The constant come-and-go of troops had
reduced the village to a state of unspeakable
filth.

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Sound
Somewhere in front an occasional rifle banged,
making queer rolling echoes among the stony
hills. We had just dumped our kits and were
crawling out of the dug-out when there was
another bang and one of
the children of our company rushed back from the
parapet with his face pouring blood. He had fired
his rifle and had somehow managed to blow out the
bolt his scalp was torn to ribbons by the
splinters of the burst cartridge case.
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Smell
We were near the front line now, near enough to
smell the characteristic smell of war - in my
experience a smell of excrement and decaying
food A little nearer, and you could smell a
sickening sweetish stink that lived in my
nostrils for weeks afterwards. Into the cleft
immediately behind
the position all the refuse of months had been
tipped - a deep festering bed of breadcrusts,
excrement, and rusty tins.
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Touch
It is curious, but I dreaded the cold much more
than I dreaded the enemy. The thought of it had
been haunting me all the time I was in Barcelona
I had even lain awake at nights thinking of the
cold in the trenches, the stand-to's in the
grisly dawns, the long hours on
sentry-go with a frosted rifle, the icy mud that
would slop over my boot-tops.
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Short, Sharp Sentences
Barbastro, though a long way from the front
line, looked bleak and chipped. Swarms of
militiamen in shabby uniforms wandered up and
down the streets, trying to keep warm.
War, to me, meant roaring projectiles and
skipping shards of steel above all it meant mud,
lice, hunger, and cold.
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Dialogue
I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying
to find the Fascist trench. 'Where are the
enemy?' Benjamin waved his hand expansively.
'Over zere.' (Benjamin spoke English-- terrible
English.) 'But where?
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Orwell as a Character
In secret I was frightened. I knew the line was
quiet at present, but unlike most of the men
about me I was old enough to remember the Great
War, though not old enough to have fought in it.

A little while later, however, a bullet shot
past my ear with a vicious crack and banged into
the parados behind. Alas! I ducked. All my life I
had sworn that I would not duck the first time a
bullet passed over me but the movement appears
to be instinctive, and almost everybody does it
at least once.
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Characters

• Italian Militiaman
• Georges Kopp
• Levinski/Benjamin
• Williams
• Faceless, nameless Spaniards

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Did he get it right?
Homage to Catalonia had two appendices added in
later editions to clarify errors He may often
have been wrong about getting it right, but in
the crucial matters he was right about what was
wrong. And sometimes, if properly articulated,
that is enough. Andrew Anthony, The Observer
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Orwell on writing a Sentence

• What am I trying to say?
• What words will express it?
• What image or idiom will make it clearer?
• Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

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Orwells Six Rules of Writing

• 1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure
  of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• 2. Never use a long word where a short one will
  do.
• 3. If you can cut out a word without losing the
  meaning, cut it out.

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Orwells Six Rules of Writing

• 4. Never use the passive when you can use the
  active.
• 5. Never use a foreign phrase or a jargon word if
  you can use an everyday equivalent.
• 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say
  anything outright barbarous.

The line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black
all over, driving their huge shovels under coal
with stupendous force and speed. The Road to
Wigan Pier
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Critics on Orwell
A Trotskyist with big feet. - H G Wells
(1984) invented...a complete poetics of
political invective. - John Newsinger A simple
minded anarchist for whom any movement forfeited
its raison d'etre the moment it acquired a raison
d'etat. - Isaac Deutscher He put the
revolutionary socialist cat among the Communist
apparatchik pigeons. - Anna Chen
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Critics on Orwell
My thirteen-year-old daughter was bored stiff by
the novel, because she, like most students today,
was too new to political ideas to have any frame
of reference for the story. Stephen Sedley His
biographers exhaustively examine his rather
unpleasant sexuality, revealing a singularly
unappealing mix of Puritanism, lubricity, sexism,
and sadismhis work betrays unmistakable
instances of gratuitous anti-Semitism. - Martin
Rubin
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Critics on Orwell
Here was a man who said that every word he had
written was for democratic socialism, and who
fought for it in Catalonia as a revolutionary,
yet so much of whose writing is clearly
anti-socialist in a general way and not just on
particular questions, and indeed has had an
enormous anti-socialist effect. - Raymond
Williams
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Critics on Orwell
Spoke in a voice so plain and so insistent that
he has continued to command the world's
attention. - John Rodden
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Orwell Postscript
In 1949 Orwell gave a list of 38 writers,
journalists, actors and politicians he considered
politically unreliable to the British Foreign
Office Propaganda Unit Among those listed as
crypto-communists Charlie Chaplin, J. B.
Priestley and Stephen Spender, Walter Duranty
(New York Times Moscow correspondent) and Joseph
Davies (US Ambassador to the USSR)
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For a creative writer possession of the truth is
less important than emotional sincerity.