ideas of what sort of society they should strive for.
Orwell was one of those people who had an inkling, early on, of what he should do with his life, but drifted away from it. Early on, he wanted to be a writer. But after school he moved to India and worked for the British Empire as a policeman. Then he came home and lay about. But, as he was avoiding writing, he “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.”
Finally, at age twenty-five, he succumbed to his destiny. He decided that if he was going to be a writer he needed to do three things. First, he needed to live among the poor. He was a man of the left, but believed that the problem with his fellow socialists was that they didn’t have much direct contact with the poor people they were allegedly liberating. So at the start of his writing career he went tramping. Homeless people in those days were forbidden by the Vagrancy Act to beg or erect permanent camps. Many tramped from one village to the next, all across England, staying in one charity hotel one night and then another in a nearby town the next. After that experience, Orwell worked as a dishwasher in a French hotel and restaurant, thirteen hours a day. These experiences gave him firsthand knowledge of the working class, and increased his natural hatred of authority.
Next, he needed to invent a new way of writing. He would turn nonfiction writing into a literary form. He became a master at using parable to make a political point—how shooting an elephant symbolized all that was wrong with British imperialism. He did not get intrinsic joy out of the writing process. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness,” he wrote. “One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” But the pain was purifying. Like T. S. Eliot, Orwell believed that good writing involves a continual extinction of personality. One struggles, Orwell wrote, “to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.” The act of writing well involved self-suppression, putting the reader in direct contact with the thing described.
Finally, Orwell decided that in order to fulfill his calling he had to be ruthlessly honest, even about the people on his own side. In the 1930s, with the fascists fighting the communists in the Spanish Civil War, he went to fight with the anarchists, taking the hopeless side in that conflict. He learned to see reality without illusion. He learned, as Albert Camus put it, “that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.”
But he did not become a cynic. Totalitarianism, in Spain, Germany, and the Soviet Union, presented Orwell with the moral challenge that controlled the rest of his life. He wrote, from then on, because he wanted to expose a lie or draw attention to some fact. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism.”
When Orwell returned from Spain he was transformed. He had experienced his call within a call, that purifying moment when you know why you were put on this earth and you are ruthless about pursuing this mission. A friend remarked, “It was almost as if there’d been a kind of fire smoldering in him all his life which suddenly broke into flame.” He became angry at any injustice and coolly passionate. He was outraged by lies, but kindly toward people. He was fully engaged in fighting fascism, but always detached enough to be able to face the unpleasant truths about his own side.
He wasn’t always a joyful man to be around. He was wintry, bleak, prickly, independent, fierce, both shy and assertive. But by the end of his life, when he was deathly ill and writing 1984, his vocation had given him a purity of desire and a unity of purpose. As George Bernard Shaw once wrote in another context, Orwell’s vocation took “a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles.” People began to recognize him as some sort of saint of the age.