It’s pure joy reading English writer George Orwell’s (1903-1950) work. He has a wonderful, simplistic and very economical way with words, which makes all his prose, points, and puns extremely succinct and to the core. Being a journalist, he favoured clear and concise English, and detested when people used big words thinking it would make them appear clever. In fact, this issue got to him so much, that he wrote an essay about it in 1946 called Politics and the English Language – an entertaining piece of writing, and highly recommended reading.
Orwell is probably best known for his novels Nineteen Eighty-Four, the almost prophetic tale about an extreme big brother society, and Animal Farm, a satirical criticism of the Stalin regime. Lesser known, perhaps, is Orwell’s account of his life as a tramp in Paris and London in the late 1920s, early 1930s. Orwell was from the ‘lower upper middle class’, as he preferred to call it, and had no problems paying for his own food and housing. But he wanted to investigate the conditions of the poor and deprived, and concluded that the best way to obtain such knowledge accurately, would be to familiarise himself with the homeless’ lifestyle first-hand. So for a period, Orwell voluntarily became a tramp, and published his recollections in 1933’s Down and Out in Paris and London.
In many ways the book made Orwell a pioneer for New Journalism, a style of writing spearheaded by journalists such as Tom Wolf and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and 70s, where one of the key aspects was for the journalist to go to great lengths in order to absorb himself/herself fully in a subject matter. Many would argue that for an outsider to step into a ‘new’ society for a short period, and afterwards claim to know what that particular society is all about, is impossible and utter nonsense. But that’s a long discussion, and a whole other blog in itself.
What I wanted to share, however, and the reason for writing this little piece about Orwell, is an excerpt from Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell’s writings are always saturated with clever observations, but this is one of my absolute favourites:
“Is a plongeur’s [dishwasher and kitchen assistant] work really necessary to civilisation? We have a vague feeling that it must be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue.”
- George Orwell -
