Orwell's Roses

George Orwell, nee Eric Blair, is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. During his relatively short life—he died of tuberculosis in 1950 at the age of 46—he penned over 500 essays, several nonfiction books, and two masterworks of modern literature, Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell was committed to truth-telling and exposing the abuses of power, as well as promoting social justice, human rights, and the pleasures of everyday experience—the latter being one of Solnit’s preoccupations. Orwell’s primary legacy is that his chosen surname has been used as a shorthand—Orwellian—for totalitarian grimness, for thought control, and for the processes by which history and truth are erased. Solnit suggests that Orwell left another, equally important legacy behind: that of taking pleasure in nature and in combining ethical standards with aesthetic achievement.

Orwell lived a somewhat epic and certainly peripatetic life: he was born in India; attended boarding schools in England; served as a police officer for the British Empire in Burma (now Myanmar); lived rough days on the streets of Paris and London; fought in the Spanish Civil War; reported from the front lines of World War II; and spent time gardening, both at a cottage in Wallington, England, and on the Scottish island of Jura. Orwell wrote well-known books about most of these things (see Further Reading & Resources for a bibliography).

Given his rich, active life, it’s surprising that Orwell was in poor health for much of it, prone to lung ailments even before contracting the tuberculosis that killed him. Solnit notes that “[s]ometimes the shadow of death frightens or depresses people, sometimes it makes them live more vividly and take life less for granted, and Orwell seems to be among the latter” (26). Indeed, Orwell eked out as many experiences as he could during his abbreviated life. Solnit notes that one of his friends said of him, “He was a rebel against his own biological condition and he was a rebel against social conditions; the two were very closely linked together” (26).

Thus, Orwell spent much of his career committed to promoting human rights and social justice: “Orwell is renowned for what he wrote against—authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the corruption of language and politics by lies and propaganda (and sloppiness), the erosion of the privacy that underlies liberty” (47). His experience during the Spanish Civil War was instrumental in shaping his political points of view. As he himself wrote, and Solnit quotes, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it” (68). In this way, Orwell was both a contrarian—arguing against the unjust forces of history, questioning the status quo—and a proponent of hope.

His writing, however serious, placed importance on aesthetic value and beauty—although not necessarily the kind of static beauty that first comes to mind. Solnit writes that “Orwell was passionate about the beauty of gestures and intentions, ideals and idealism when he encountered them, and it was to defend them that he spent much of his life facing their opposites” (207). Thus, his commitment to aesthetic beauty was inextricably linked to his ethical ideals, and both supported the other within the writing itself. No matter how grim the world of Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, he manages to find a lovely, if useless, paperweight, and a simple, if dangerous, journal in which to record his hopes, fears, and dreams. Solnit notes that Orwell himself never gave up hope—for the future of society or for his own increasingly uncertain future. When Orwell embarked on planting a large garden on the island of Jura near the end of his life, she suggests that “Orwell’s confidence in the longevity of both the garden and the gardener might have been misplaced, or perhaps it was a gesture of defiance or a gamble” (249). Gardens symbolize rebirth and new life, and thus they’re always symbols of hope.

Orwell’s legacy, of course, lives on decades after his death: “Not many writers become adjectives, and even Joycean or Shakespearean don’t circulate the way Orwellian does” (267). Still, her project is to connect the notion of “Orwellian” to something besides the totalitarian oppression it often represents—because Orwell himself and Orwell the writer were much more than that. He was a man who reveled in beauty and in nature. When he died, Solnit reports, there was “a fishing pole in his room” (263). Even in the hospital at the end of his life, he was thinking about catching fish out in the open air, communing with nature one last time.