Category: Books

Ask me who my favorite essayist is and, hands down, I’ll say George Orwell. Known primarily for Animal Farm and 1984, he excelled at the essay, writing in a direct, plain style, eschewing fancy big words, wordiness, and cliché.

You’re mistaken if you think his wise maxims are easy to practice. Orwell didn’t start out as a prose master, but worked diligently to achieve it. The trick is to heed his counsel, yet avoid the staccato effect of incessant short sentences that English teachers label, “choppy.”

I admire Orwell even more for his honesty as an essentially political writer. Famously, he taught us the dangers of “doublethink,” or language that deliberately obscures, distorts or evades.

When you get into ideology, it’s difficult to avoid partisanship and distorting your opponent’s argument; more difficult still, to candidly address the polemical liabilities of both yourself and your cohorts. A committed socialist, he nonetheless acknowledged Marxism’s own strident hypocrisies as exemplified foremost in Soviet revisionism.

All of this explains my eagerness to read Rebecca Solnit’s recently published Orwell’s Roses. Solnit’s a formidable essayist in her own right, and this is her twenty-sixth book.

She admires Orwell for his honesty and sides with his isolated criticism of Stalin and speaking out in a context of liberal, socialist idealism, unwilling to confront Soviet malevolence, resorting not infrequently to disingenuous rhetoric.

Readers will like her ardent empathy in the book for the marginalized, whether by race, sexual orientation, gender—or often missed—the working class. It stamps her indelibly as an Orwell protege. She credits Orwell for inspiring her to adopt the essay as her medium.

Feminists may find her Orwell embrace disconcerting. A strident women’s advocate elsewhere in her work, she details Orwell’s misogyny, yet gives it a cursory pass: “He was part of an age that was (with some notable exceptions) strategically oblivious to inequalities we have since worked hard to recognize…. One of Orwell’s most significant blind spots.” She admits his essays are limited to men.

Nor does she sufficiently address his marriage to first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who died on the operating table at age 39, presumingly from the anesthesia, following a routine surgery. An Oxford grad and student in psychology at the University of London, she gave up a promising career, typed and edited his manuscripts, did the housework, cooking and shopping. She accompanied him to civll war Spain, where he served as a Loyalist soldier.

Readers may be interested in pursuing Sylvia Topp’s biography of Eileen, The Making of George Orwell, tracing her influence upon Orwell. She had written a poem in 1934, speculating on the future, “End of the Century, 1984.” Her funeral occurred on April 3, 1945. In 1984, Winston Smith begins his journal on April 4.

Orwell mentions Eileen in his diary (1946) when visiting her grave on his way to his sister’s funeral and ultimately Jura, where he would write 1984: ”May 22, stopping to tend Eileen’s grave near Newcastle: Polyantha roses on E’s grave have all rooted well. Planted aubretia, miniature phlox, saxifrage, a kind of dwarf broom.”

Solnit was inspired by a passage in Orwell’s “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray” (1946): “One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence.”

The fruit trees actually, not the roses, were what initially motivated her search for a more rounded Orwell, more quotidian in his private pursuits than his readers have known. Visiting his residence with her friend Sam, she found the fruit trees had been cut down to make room for a shed expansion. That left only the roses, though of the planted seven, she tells us only of two that still bloomed.

Nonetheless, they bequeathed Solnit with an immediate sensory connection to Orwell and his long-ago essay about roses and fruit trees: “The apparent directness of these two plants’ connection to him and to that long-ago essay about roses and fruit trees and continuity and posterity filled me with joyous exaltation. So did the fact that this man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses.”

If you’re looking for the elusive Orwell, be prepared to meander through a thick copse of digression only tangentially relevant to Orwell. It’s her way of doing things in everything she writes.

The reality is that her book leaps beyond both roses and Orwell as a springboard for political asides, the exploitation of the working class in particular. Politics leap quickly to the surface in all her books, and may well account for their composition. Is Orwell’s Roses simply just another platform?

You will explore the history of roses, the role of British colonialism in their development, the evils of industrialism, and even climate change among other concerns.

I found the lengthy horticultural tracing of roses tedious. I tired of the long chapter exploring the origin of coal. I wanted the man. I wanted Orwell in full bloom.

In her defense, and look to the title, she tells us early that “there are many biographies of Orwell, and they’ve served me well for this book, which is not an addition to that shelf. It is instead a series of forays from one starting point, that gesture whereby one writer planted several roses. As such, it’s also a book about roses….”

We do, however, ultimately piece together Orwell, Solnit providing a biographical sketch and expanding on his frequent allusions to his love for gardening and planting of roses. Readers will find her uncovering the unfamiliar Orwell, masked by his public persona, revelatory.

One of the best parts of her rose narrative is her retelling of her visiting a gargantuan Columbian greenhouse complex outside Bogota, which flies roses by the millions daily to the U.S, especially at Christmas and on Valentine’s day in a chapter called “Going Underground.” A vivisection of labor abuse unknown to American consumers, it made me sit up and draw potential dots between other international corporate interests bent on profit heedless of worker welfare.

As I write, Chipotle reports In its Q4 that the company’s total revenue increased 22.0% to $2.0 billion in 2021, eliciting Bernie Sander’s umbrage: “The Corporate greed is Chipotle increasing its profits by 181% last year to $764 million, giving its CEO a 137% pay raise to $38 million in 2020 and blaming the rising cost of a burrito on a minimum wage worker who got a 50 cent pay raise. That’s not inflation. That’s price gouging.”

Despite the chapter’s pretentious title, “Going Underground,” Solnit has never truly gone underground in terms of its nuance. Orwell investigated labor abuse and the plight of poverty first hand by working in the coal mines of northern England and living among the homeless in London and Paris.

That said, I never tire of Solnit, despite her inveterate meanderings and intrusive politics. I like her introspective view of things in her many books, unveiling hidden foregrounds behind what I see, even admire, a kind of turning things inside out as when taking off a sweater. Her gift is one of expanding consciousness of the myriad strands of interconnectivity. Orwell’s Roses assures that continuity.

–rj

Some books are meant to be re-read, simply because they not only entertain, but because they engender an influence, often enduringly subtle, on what we think and do.

Moments ago, I finished William Boyd’s Any Human Heart (2001) for the second time, a melancholic exploration of a life’s passage by journal keeper Logan Mountstuart, who chronicles the perambulations of his career as a journalist, novelist, art connoisseur and private citizen.

I had been introduced to Any Human Heart previously, following its superb PBS adaptation in 2011. I refrain from calling it a novel, since it purports to being a series of journals. It isn’t my intent to summarize the plot, a non-starter really, since journals by their very nature cannot plot. My focus is primarily on Logan Mountstuart and how his journals define him.

Logan’s journals (there are several) are pensive in tone, which may deter some readers in giving thumbs-up to what they read. Tallying up life as its elderly witness, he resorts to math analogy: “That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up—look at the respective piles. There’s nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says.”

Luck, in fact, becomes a repeated motif in Any Human Heart from its outset, something very reminiscent of Hemingway perhaps, whose ironic intrusions frustrate human resolve in his narratives. Logan records meeting Hemingway in Paris and, as a mutual journalist in the Spanish civil war, enjoys a reciprocal friendship with him. His violent suicide shocks Logan.

Nor will every reader tolerate Logan Mountstuart’s licentiousness, if not sexual addiction, that compromises two of his three marriages and the boundaries of a key friendship. Incongruously, his psychiatrist recommends sleeping with two women simultaneously to dampen his sexual craving, counsel he carries out in recruiting two New York street prostitutes.

In defense of the protagonist, I offer Any Human Heart’s inveterate theme of the human condition, our limitations manifest in varied ways, the dichotomy of aspiring to our better selves, yet failure to do so, the assessing a life by its attempts, not its non-sequiturs. What I like is Logan’s honesty, no blemishes hidden, no journals burned. Logan is a man in search of himself.

The initial journal establishes the genesis of what will be lifelong friendships, beginning in boarding school, with Peter Scabius and and Ben Leeping. Both are successful, career-wise, more so than Logan, though differing in character make-up. A best selling novelist, Peter achieves knighthood, but behind his public persona relegates women, including multiple wives, to sexual subservience. Logan projects his own sexual infidelity on to Peter, finding it reprehensible.

On the other hand, Ben, a professional art dealer, proves consistently dependable for doing the right thing and a template for temperance and integrity.

So much of 20th century history is unfurled here, along with a pantheon of the century’s notable artists and writers, all of whom have crossed pathways with Logan, who vehemently disdains the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The only false notes in an otherwise attempt at plausibility is the allusion to a nonexistent painter, Nat Tate, an extension of a literary hoax Boyd had previously produced in a spoof biography (1998) in an otherwise meticulous attempt at realism to the point where Logan’s journals are replete with an editor’s introduction, efforts at authenticating probable dates and locales, explanatory footnotes, an index of people and fictional characters intrinsic to Mountstuart, and listing at end of works attributed to him

My crucial question in reading this sprawling 478 page narrative is Do we have a changed Logan Mountstuart at the last journal end? Certainly, that was author Boyd’s intended purpose at outset. The roman á clef here lies in recognizing we have several journals, not one. “For a start,” Boyd tells us, “it’s written without the benefit of hindsight, so there isn’t the same feeling you get when you look back and add shape to a life. There are huge chunks missing (The Telegraph, 16 April 2002). People aren’t one self. They’re an anthology of many selves (The book of life, The Guardian, 8 March 2003).

Logan’s tone mellows as he ages, transitioned subtly as we passage through time and place and from journal to journal. Boyd wanted the style to reflect the major theme that we change and grow throughout life: “I wanted the literary tone of each journal to reflect this and so the voice subtly changes as you read on: from pretentious school boy to modern young decadent, to bitter realist to drink soaked cynic, to sage and serene octogenarian, and so forth” (web.archive.org).

Life events and time’s forfeiture of youth, its infliction of inevitable loss, morbidity, the growing awareness of our imminent ending, can make us bitter and self pitying, but not surely so. Empathy is often time’s grace in lending cognizance of our universality and with it, our weaknesses committing the follies we wish could be undone.

We are individuals, yet in our collective experience across time, we are many evolving selves, linking us to a wider humanity, impacted by life events, with similar longings, disappointments and traumas that life brings. This is where Boyd’s introductory borrowing from Henry James accumulates its nuance: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”

Whatever his past shortcomings, the elderly Logan isn’t lacking in expansive empathy. There is his generosity to his step-daughter Gail, to whom he bequeaths his French homestead; his compassion for the sickly Gloria, Peter Scabius’ discarded wife, whom he takes in and nurses in her final weeks of cancer, despite his marginal financial resources; his intervention on behalf of Madame Gabrielle Dupetit, Sainte-Sabime neighbor, whose concern over the vandalization of her father’s memorial he takes on as his own.

He cries when his dog Bowser dies: “I experienced a form of grief so intense and pure I thought it would kill me. I howled like a baby with my dog in my arms. Then I put him in a wooden wine case and carried him into the garden and buried him under a cherry tree.”

We aren’t keeping company with the same man we met in the earlier journals. Logan acknowledges such in reviewing his journals from the retrospect of a man now in his eighties: “Rereading my old journals is both a source of revelation and shock. I can see no connection between that schoolboy and the man I am now. What a morose, melancholy, troubled soul I was. That wasn’t me, was it?”

I think of Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Time’s anvil has hammered a less selfish, more fulsome human being, well-liked by Sainte Subime’s citizenry. I don’t want to give the journals’ salient elements away, but Logan has endured “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” exceedingly beyond what most of us are heir to among life’s undulations: failed marriages, two years solitary confinement in war time, unanticipated deaths, and abject poverty that reduces him at one point to dining on dog food.

Much of the latter part of Any Human Heart deals with inevitable aging and its accompanying marginalization, demise, and hovering mortality. Its universality impels we live life meaningfully, experientially, mindful of our temporality.

On a beach crowded by young, handsomely tanned bodies, he reflects: “…highs and appalling lows, my brief triumphs and terrible losses and I say, no, no, I don’t envy you—you slim, brown, confident boys and girls and whatever futures await you….Over the beach and the ocean as the sun begins to drop down in the west, a strange sense of pride: pride in all I’ve done and lived through, proud to think of the thousands of people I’ve met and known and the few I’ve loved. Play on, boys and girls, I say, smoke and flirt, work on your tans, figure out your evening’s entertainment. I wonder if any of you will live as well as I have done.”

Though some readers will never latch-on to Logan Mountstuart, I venture most readers will likely mourn his death at Any Human Heart’s end, and that says everything for exchange of a static character for one whose maturation hints his redemption.

–rj