George Orwell: Lion and unicorn

From a collection of nineteen superb essays and tasty columns emerges a fuller image of the author – different from what conservative circles would like to see him. It's an image of an intellectual who's not subject to peer pressure, a criticism of political passiveness, an anti-fascist, a man who's clearly on the side of left-wing values, a individual who's delicate to beauty, the beauty of life, and the pleasance you can derive from Nature. (from the publisher's description).

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Why I write

"Gangrel", No. 4, summertime 1946

From an early age, from the age of 5 or six, I knew that erstwhile I grew up, I should be a writer.

About between the age of seventeen and twenty-four, I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the cognition that I was lying to my own nature and that sooner or later I would gotta quit and catch a pen.

I grew up with 2 siblings, but we were divided by a large age difference – 1 of my sisters is 5 years older than me and the another 5 years younger – I saw my father with rareness; the more frequenter of my own home became only after my eighth birthday. This was 1 of the reasons why I felt lonely and rapidly developed bad habits that did not bring me besides many friends or classmates on the school bench. Like many another single children, I utilized to think stories and talk to imaginary friends – my literary ambitions were intertwined with a sense of alienation and underestimate from the very beginning. I knew that I had the ease of choosing words and the strength to face a sad reality. This allowed me to make my own private planet in which I could make up for the failures of everyday life. However, I was not peculiarly a prolific creator. All my serious works from childhood and youth years – 1 for which I had serious intentions at the time – would fill only a fewer pages. I wrote the first poem at the age of 4 or five, dictating it to my mother. All I can remember is that he was about a tiger with "throats like rods," which inactive sounds awfully bad, although I fishy my work was plagiarism. Tiger Blake. As an eleven-year-old, after the outbreak of the 1914–1918 war, I wrote a patriotic poem, and 2 years later another, about Kitchener's death; both appeared in print in a local newspaper. erstwhile I grew up a small bit, from time to time I drew mediocre and usually unfinished “odies to nature” in the Georgian style. It besides happened to me twice for writing a story, but it always ended in a terrible defeat. In this, all my "serious" literary achievements of that time were closed – in all these years I did not put anything else on paper on my own initiative.

However, in 1 way or another, I was constantly active in literary activity.

First of all, I did customized texts, writing them rapidly and easily, but besides without greater pleasure. In addition to my schoolwork, vers d’occasion, for half of the humorous poems, at a rate which from today's position seems to me to be rather quaint – at the age of fourteen I wrote a rhymed play modeled on Aristotle's comedy – and helped with the editing of school magazines, both printed and published in manuscripts. There were any truly grotesque pieces in them, so I put much little effort into this work than I have done present even in the biggest publicist fushes. At the same time, for 15 or more years I have devoted myself to a different literary practice: I have kept an uninterrupted “narration” about myself, a peculiar diary that exists only in my mind. Creating specified stories is, I suspect, rather common among children and teenagers. As a young boy, I imagined that I was, say, Robin Hood and let myself be kidnapped by amazing adventures. However, my “narration” rapidly ceased to be subject to specified openly narcissistic impulses and turned into average descriptions of what I was doing and what I saw. At the time, my thoughts bothered me, sometimes for a fewer minutes without interruption, like this monologue: “He opened the door and went inside. The gentle rays of the sun were sipping through muslin curtains, throwing reflections at a semi-open box of matches arranged on the table at the squid. With his right hand in his pocket, he came to the window. In the street, a black-and-red cat chased a fallen leaf”, and so on, and so on. This habit accompanied me until I was about 20 - 5 years old, all the years erstwhile I was only passive with literature. Although choosing the right words required conscious effort from me, I created these descriptions almost against my own will, as if under external coercion. This “narration” most likely imitated the styles of these writers, which I admired at a given moment, but always, if memory serves, had any mystery of the description.

At the age of about sixteen, I unexpectedly discovered the pleasance that words can supply through their sound and called associations. As in these verses from Paradise Lost:

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and Labour hee[1]

Now they do not seem so wonderful to me, but erstwhile they gave me the thrill of excitement, and the pleasance added to the archaic evidence of the pronoun he as hee. I knew everything about the request to describe the world. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to compose – as far as it can be said at all, that I had this desire at the time. These were expected to be fathom naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of meticulous descriptions and catchy comparisons, as well as passages written in flowery style, in which words are chosen primarily due to their sound. My first novel, Myanmar days, written at the age of thirty, and conceived much earlier, is this kind of book.

I quote all this information about the early years of my life here, due to the fact that I believe that it is impossible to measure the motives of the author without first knowing the circumstances in which they were formed.