9. Orwell’s Voice: A Brief Introduction to the Man and his Work
One of the great ironies about George Orwell’s life and career, and their legacies, is that we have no recording of his voice. Whereas we have audio evidence of famous contemporary writers like H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Agatha Christie, E. M. Forster, and J. R. R. Tolkien, we have nothing of Orwell. We just don’t know what he sounded like, not really. His voice went out into the airwaves on a regular basis in the early 1940s, when he worked at the BBC as a Talks Assistant and then as a Talks Producer. Yet no recordings of his own radio broadcasts survive. Despite producing a radio ‘magazine’ called Voice, Orwell’s voice is lost. We do not have Orwell, at some level, without the sound of his voice. We do, however, have witnesses. One of Orwell’s biographers, D. J. Taylor, notes that the ‘testimonies of [Orwell’s] friends’ allow us to get a sense of what the man sounded like.[1] Carrying the stereotypical register of the upper class, Orwell’s speech is said to have been slow, or drawling, high-pitched, unenergetic, and highly peculiar. Perhaps there is something of Orwell in the ‘weary, cultivated’ voice of the Rector, Charles Hare, in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935); or, as Taylor suggests, in the middle-class suburbanites of Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939), who speak in ‘a passable imitation of the upper crust’.[2] Whatever the case may be, Orwell’s voice has been hidden from us for decades. As his ideas and opinions have come into the language, ever more likely to be voiced by others, Orwell’s bodily voice has remained out of hearing.
He nearly lost the voice altogether. One of the most decisive events in Orwell’s life was the Spanish Civil War. He went to Spain right at the end of 1936 to support the Republican government against a Nationalist-Fascist military uprising. In this effort, he joined the likes of Ernest Hemingway, author of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and Laurie Lee, author of A Moment of War (1991), who went to report on and to fight in the conflict. Orwell did both. He spent the first half of 1937 in various parts of the north-eastern areas of Spain, around the Huesca province and the city of Barcelona, fighting Fascists and gaining an education in the complex power politics, within and beyond Spain, leading up to what became the Second World War. One day, on the front lines, Orwell was shot in the throat. (The wound was reimagined and given to the character George Bowling, in Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939), as shrapnel in the buttocks and legs.) In the book he later wrote about these events, Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell recalled that in the moments after his injury he ‘had no voice, only a faint squeak’.[3] Later, when he was examined by a doctor, he was told that he wouldn’t get his voice back. This diagnosis turned out to be wrong, but his voice was permanently altered. Orwell’s friend George Woodcock remarked on the thinness of his voice, after Spain, which was weak and piercing.[4] His voice, Taylor writes, ‘had lost its vigour. In a crowded room, or against background noise, Orwell had trouble making himself heard. A friend from the 1940s remembered him at a packed luncheon table trying once or twice to raise the necessary decibels and then abandoning the attempt, to pass the rest of the meal in silence.’[5] A voice nearly lost was a life saved.
In being saved, Orwell’s voice was allowed to live on in a different way. Although we don’t have a record of what he sounded like speaking person to person, or over the radio, we know what Orwell’s quote-unquote ‘voice’ sounds like in the sense of how he expressed himself in words, and how he used particular rhetorical strategies and techniques to give his words the best chance of being noticed. The Orwellian ‘voice’, in this sense, is one of the most familiar forms of utterance we have in our culture. Patient, calm, authoritative, curious: these are just some of the attributes of the Orwellian style which, depending on the context, can also be lurid, abstracted, playful, surreal, poetic, and exalted, among many other things. Orwell gave a voice to the dispossessed in works like Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), his tale of two cities that gives a memorable account of precarious employment and living rough; or The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which tries to write into and then back out from the perspectives of mining communities in the north of England. He also warned in Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), his most famous books, against losing one’s voice, against losing the right or liberty to speak, or to put pen to paper. These givings and takings of voice are expressed in a style that’s forthright, understated, and measured. The Orwellian style is a style of restraint, except when it doesn’t have to be, or can’t be. The voice is still hugely powerful. It’s still a voice for our times.
I want to give a brief sense of Orwell’s motivations in coming to be a writer, and what sort of writer his motivations made him. We know that Orwell was a stickler for precision. He cared very much about writing simply, unfussily, and with a straightforward sense of purpose. Clear, precise language is the best medium in which to convey thought. My words, but a very Orwellian position. And the reverse is true: clear, precise thought is the ground on which simple language rests. Confused thought will result in confused language, and vice versa. Hence Orwell’s concerns, in his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), about the ‘slovenliness’ of a language making it easier to have ‘foolish thoughts’ in that same language.[6] Orwell worked through these anxieties in relation to what he took as some of the worst writerly offences being committed in his time. The things he blamed for linguistic slovenliness included the use of dying metaphors, excessively long grammatical constructions, pretentiousness in speech and diction, and meaningless words. His criticisms were always directed at utterances seeking to deceive through imprecision, or being deceptive in their unthinking laziness. Orwell would have been very suspicious of a phrase like ‘Brexit means Brexit’, for example, although he would probably have taken very seriously, as a critic, the impudence upon which it depends. In this specific case, the phrase is meaningless not because it’s tautological (i.e. because it defines itself through reference to itself), but because it can mean anything at all to anyone, no matter their politics (or, indeed, how they voted in the EU referendum, in the United Kingdom, in 2016). In meaning anything at all, the phrase means very little. But this is not to say that a meaningless phrase can’t have significant effects, or be important, or influence people in particular ways.
Orwell’s concern here was not grammatical so much as it was political. Or maybe it’s more important to say that he found the politics in the grammar. He argued that there is a link between slovenly language, and the slovenly thought it generates, on the one hand, and political trouble, on the other. The ‘sound’ of the Orwellian voice, in this respect, is the sound of a conscientious socio-political critic. Communicate effectively, he claimed, and politics moves from being about conflict to being about reconciliation. The problem, he knew, is that this is an idealistic position. Many politicians communicate ineffectively by design. It’s not that they try to be clear and fail, although this certainly happens, but rather that their very ability to function in political terms so often relies on clarity being suspended, or avoided. For so many politicians, even politicians with good intentions, their words are not badly chosen, but chosen well in their badness. Because Orwell was convinced that in his time ‘political speech and writing [were] largely the defence of the indefensible’, he argued that the language politicians used had to consist ‘largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.’[7] He was very clear about how despicable he found this:
Defenceless villagers are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. […] The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.[8]
It’s hard to read a passage like this and not feel the moral anger coming through it. Similar thoughts course through Homage to Catalonia, with its scathing remarks about the so-called ‘disappearing’—i.e. murdering—of people for political purposes.[9] Orwell had a shameless pedant’s irritation with technically careless language, but he was much more incensed by the use of language for disingenuous purposes. In examining ‘language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought’, he always came down on the side of lucidity.[10] This is why Newspeak, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, takes the form it does—it puts into practice, as part of Orwell’s satire against totalitarianism, what he called the ‘invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases’, a process that can only be avoided ‘if one is constantly on guard against them’.[11] He had already made this point in Coming Up for Air, through the character of the lecturer with a ‘very mobile mouth’ who not only speaks but also quite possibly dreams in slogans.[12]
The Orwellian voice, then, seems to have been characterized by clear speech and by clear prose, and to have been refined in discussions of precision in language. Orwell valued clarity for stylistic purposes. He valued it on ethical grounds, too. When we think of the Orwellian voice it’s usually in these terms that we think of it: as a mode of speaking and writing that’s easy to understand, and which remains opposed to unclarities, be they intentional or unthinking. All of this led to another of Orwell’s famous proclamations—about the so-called ‘rules’ of good writing. Here’s his list:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.[13]
An echo of the commandments, in Animal Farm. Orwell never meant these directives to be turned into strict rules, although that’s sometimes how they’ve been understood. What’s more likely, as the sixth statement implies, is that he meant them as an attitude, a way of thinking. Think about doing these things, when tempted otherwise. The key word is ‘barbarous’. Orwell wanted writing in English, and particularly politicians writing and speaking in English, to be more exact and honest with their words. He was also just as concerned to argue against ‘barbarity’, to suggest that beneath or behind his commitment to clear language was a deeper, much more fundamental striving for decency.
The writer Orwell became, and the voice he adopted in becoming it, always aimed at this—at civility, politeness, virtue, integrity, and, simply put, rightness. He claimed in a famous essay, ‘Why I Write’ (1946), that he knew from ‘a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six’, that he’d be a writer.[14] Yet the Spanish Civil War clinched something in him. He remarked that in ‘a peaceful age’ he might have produced ‘ornate or merely descriptive books’, and that he could quite feasibly ‘have remained almost unaware of [his] political loyalties.’ In his view of things, and as his novel Burmese Days (1934) spells out, the time he spent as a policeman in 1920s British Burma gave him a ‘natural hatred of authority’ and ‘some understanding of the nature of imperialism’. But although he emphasized the importance of Burma to his personal development, and stressed that his times of poverty and precariousness in Paris and London made him ‘for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes’, these experiences were not enough, for him, to develop ‘an accurate political orientation.’ Something bigger was needed. Something more calamitous. The ‘something’ came in the form of Hitler and Spain, which prompted Orwell, in retrospect, to write the following oft-quoted passage:
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 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.[15]
It’s a classic statement of artistic purpose, with Orwell accounting for himself as a writer who took his craft seriously and in pursuit of a declared critical objective: to write against the evils of totalitarianism and for socialism within the framework of political democracy. Writing, in these terms, has a function, a reason for being, an explicitly announced rationale conveyed as much by what the writer writes about as by how he writes about it.
If the Orwellian voice as defined in these terms, in all their authoritativeness, has a clear justification—to write against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism—this is not to say that the Orwellian manner, and the suppleness of style it contains, is simple, or easy. An Orwell book is often an easy read in the sense that Orwell’s manner of expressing himself is accessible to most readers. His prose is always clear, even when it’s unrestrained—as in, for example, some of the dream sequences in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell never wrote a novel in the formally ambitious styles of his modernist contemporaries, and when he tried briefly to write like a modernist, as he did in the Joycean third chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter, the experiment didn’t quite work.[16] His way of writing, and the voice it underpins, is about simplicity, an objective captured in another famous remark (also written in the essay ‘Why I Write’): ‘Good prose is like a windowpane.’[17] The acquisition, or achievement, of ‘good prose’ in this sense was for Orwell a matter of constant exertion, of constant seeking after an ideal that effaced the ego, with all the paradoxes such a position entails. Good prose means prose that doesn’t make a show of the author’s skill. Yet good prose in this sense, once recognized, can only be recognized as the writing of a particular, highly characterful writer. Orwell’s self-effacing prose is recognizably his precisely because it seeks to be a model of self-effacement. This unpretentiousness hides, through its very economy, a significant amount of sophistication.
A defining characteristic of Orwell’s voice, then, appears to be its orientation towards a particular politics, socialism, coupled with a tightening of prose into modest, thrifty form. We recognize Orwell’s writing as Orwell’s writing because it makes political points in an unassuming way. A description like this is reductive, but it seems to match up well enough with most of Orwell’s books and essays to be meaningful. Or does it? Alex Woloch has drawn our attention to the doubleness in Orwell’s position, suggesting that ‘we can connect the plain style and Orwell’s (avowed) political commitments’ in two quite distinct ways. The first way is to see the Orwellian voice as involving a ‘happy’ relationship between language and politics, with political values permeating ‘the very operation of the plain style.’ By this remark, Woloch means that we should think about Orwell wanting ‘to write plainly’ and about how this ‘plainness’ might itself be ‘value-laden’, or ‘infused with certain principles.’ In effect, Orwell’s commitment to plainness at the stylistic level is a commitment to plainness at the political level, a pledge towards accessibility, equality, and transparency; to democracy, in short. But another reading cuts against this view, because we can also think of Orwell’s position as more unsettled. ‘Because it is so difficult’, Woloch writes, ‘adequately to develop, maintain, define, and communicate a politics, the writer aspires toward—rather than simply inhabit[s]—the plain style.’[18] Whereas the first view presents Orwell’s apparently plain voice as the vehicle for a particular kind of politics, the second implies that his voice can be seen as a site of struggle and effort, with writing positioned as an ongoing attempt, through plainness, or the search for plainness, to communicate the socially democratic politics with which Orwell has come to be associated.
If this academic reading of Orwell’s style seems to take us rather far from the evident plainness and directness of his own prose, then it’s worth considering the possibility that Orwell’s prose—and through the prose, his voice—is more complex than it seems on a first encounter. Similes matter. Orwell stated a decade on from his time in Spain that what he’d most wanted to do throughout the intervening period was ‘to make political writing into an art.’[19] This desire brushed up against his youthful delight in what he called ‘the joy of mere words’—their sound, feel, weight, register, almost their smell.[20] Orwell’s goal to make political writing into an art had to contend with his strong feelings about prose style, with his love for capturing in words ‘the surface of the earth’ and the pleasure he took ‘in solid objects and scraps of useless information.’[21] Good prose is like a window pane, then, to the extent that it’s an artefact, a construction, a humanly made thing from whose making the maker can take a certain amount of satisfaction. But good prose is like a window pane also in the sense that its ‘glassy’ features are always prone to become opaque, to be dirtied, smudged. If we take Orwell’s simile seriously, if we think that it really does describe the kind of writerly voice he was trying to cultivate, then we have to recognize that a ‘window pane’-like style of prose might be less a matter of a fully achieved and realized clarity and more a case of struggling to achieve those things—of trying always to keep the glass clean. The effort bothered Orwell right to the end. As Lisa Mullen writes: ‘The windowpane through which Winston gazes in the opening chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four does not deliver a simple transfer of information: it both reveals and occludes, despite its apparent transparency.’[22]
Orwell voiced himself, in his novels, essays, reviews, and letters, in a style that’s as supple as it’s convincing. I suspect it’s convincing because it’s supple. Some of the suppleness comes from Orwell’s use of a distinctively personal tone that appears to be off-the-cuff and spur-of-the-moment, but which is in fact ‘artfully contrived’, as Roger Fowler has put it.[23] There is, ultimately, a great deal of craft in Orwell’s prose. As he wrote about the protagonist of his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Gordon Comstock: ‘He could use words with the economy that is only learned by years of effort.’[24] The same needs to be said about Orwell. A work like Animal Farm, apparently so simple and unadorned, could only have been written by someone who had done the hard work beforehand. And conscientious books like Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier could only have been written by someone who knew how to find the social justice in simple prose. What I’ve tried to do here, albeit briefly, is give a sense of how and why this particular kind of prose made sense, for Orwell. The best way to find out more about it is to read more of it—to read Orwell in all his multi-sided, self-possessed, and lithely influential brilliance. We don’t need the voice of the man to know about the voice of the writer, even if the bodily voice has been lost. It remains astonishing that Orwell remains ‘silent’, in this sense, even as his works continue to speak to us, and sometimes for us, in a world ever more crowded by the voices of deception and unreason.
[1] D. J. Taylor, Orwell: The Life (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 103.
[2] George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 15; Taylor, Orwell, p. 103.
[3] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), ed. Peter Davison (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 144.
[4] See Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), pp. 216, 223.
[5] Taylor, Orwell, p. 103.
[6] George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (completed 1945, published 1946), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 17: I Belong to the Left, 1945, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison (1998; London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 421-32, at p. 421.
[7] Ibid., pp. 427-8.
[8] Ibid., p. 428.
[9] See Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, p. 169. Orwell wrote in his essay ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), that the ‘Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is “liquidation”, “elimination” or some other soothing phrase’ (The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 12: A Patriot After All, 1940-1941, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 86-115, at p. 104).
[10] Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, p. 430.
[11] Ibid., p. 429.
[12] George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011), p. 592.
[13] Ibid., p. 430.
[14] George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’ (1946), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 18: Smothered under Journalism, 1946, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), pp. 316-21, at p. 316.
[15] Ibid., p. 319.
[16] I briefly discuss Orwell’s response to Joyce in my editorial introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of A Clergyman’s Daughter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. xxv-xxix.
[17] Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, p. 320.
[18] Alex Woloch, Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 9.
[19] Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, p. 319.
[20] Ibid., p. 317.
[21] Ibid., pp. 319-20.
[22] Lisa Mullen, ‘Orwell’s Literary Context: Modernism, Language, and Politics’, in Nathan Waddell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 95-108, at p. 106.
[23] Roger Fowler, The Language of George Orwell (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995), p. 9.
[24] Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, p. 466.