Why I Write

1947

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I

grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and

twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the

consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I

should have to settle down and write books.

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either

side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other

reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms

which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's

habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons,

and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the

feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with

words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a

sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in

everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of serious -- i.e. seriously intended

-- writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not

amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or

five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything

about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had "chair-like

teeth" -- a good enough phrase, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of

Blake's "Tiger, Tiger." At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I

wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was

another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when

I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished "nature poems" in the

Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure.

That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on

paper during all those years.

However, throughout this time I did in a sense engage in literary

activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced

quickly, easily and without much pleasure to myself. Apart from school work,

I wrote vers d'occasion, semi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now

seems to me astonishing speed -- at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play,

in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week -- and helped to edit a school

magazines, both printed and in manuscript. These magazines were the most

pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble

with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side

with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary

exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous

"story" about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe

this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I

used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero

of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my "story" ceased to be narcissistic

in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was

doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would

be running through my head: "He pushed the door open and entered the room. A

yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on

to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his

right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a

tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf," etc. etc. This habit continued

until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although

I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making

this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion

from outside. The "story" must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the

various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it

always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.

When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e.

the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradise Lost --

So hee with difficulty and labour hard

Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my

backbone; and the spelling "hee" for "he" was an added pleasure. As for the

need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what

kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to

write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels

with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes,

and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the

sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burmese Days,

which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that

kind of book.

I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess

a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His

subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in -- at least this is

true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own -- but before he ever

begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he

will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his

temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse

mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have

killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I

think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing

prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one

writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the

atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be

remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who

snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is

not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with

scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful

businessmen -- in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The

great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of

about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all

-- and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.

But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are

determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in

this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain

and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money .

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or,

on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in

the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or

the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one

feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is

very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of

textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for

non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography,

width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is

quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true

facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose -- using the word "political" in the widest possible

sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other

peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion

that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political

attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and

how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time. By

nature -- taking your "nature" to be the state you have attained when you

are first adult -- I am a person in whom the first three motives would

outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely

descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political

loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.

First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial

Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure.

This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time

fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma

had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these

experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation.

Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc. By the end of 1935 I had still

failed to reach a firm decision. I remember a little poem that I wrote at

that date, expressing my dilemma:

A happy vicar I might have been

Two hundred years ago

To preach upon eternal doom

And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,

I missed that pleasant haven,

For the hair has grown on my upper lip

And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,

We were so easy to please,

We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep

On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own

The joys we now dissemble;

The greenfinch on the apple bough

Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl's bellies and apricots,

Roach in a shaded stream,

Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,

All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;

We maim our joys or hide them:

Horses are made of chromium steel

And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,

The eunuch without a harem;

Between the priest and the commissar

I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune

While the radio plays,

But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,

For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,

And woke to find it true;

I wasn't born for an age like this;

Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter

I knew where I stood. 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. It seems to me nonsense, in a

period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of

which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is

conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting

politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make

political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of

partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do

not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because

there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw

attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do

the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not

also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see

that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time

politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want,

completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long

as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose

style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid

objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress

that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes

with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces

on all of us.

It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it

raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness. Let me give just one

example of the cruder kind of difficulty that arises. My book about the

Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is of course a frankly political

book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for

form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my

literary instincts. But among other things it contains a long chapter, full

of newspaper quotations and the like, defending the Trotskyists who were

accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly such a chapter, which after a year

or two would lose its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the book.

A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about it. "Why did you put in all

that stuff?" he said. "You've turned what might have been a good book into

journalism." What he said was true, but I could not have done otherwise. I

happened to know, what very few people in England had been allowed to know,

that innocent men were being falsely accused. If I had not been angry about

that I should never have written the book.

In one form or another this problem comes up again. The problem of language

is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late

years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case

I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have

always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with

full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and

artistic purpose into one whole. I have not written a novel for seven years,

but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every

book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want

to write. Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made

it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I

don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain,

selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a

mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout

of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were

not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For

all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby

squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing

readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.

Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my

motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed.

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked

a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple

passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug

generally.

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