Spring reading 2024

As I hinted at last month, this has been a tough semester, with a lot of illness in the middle and plenty of simple busyness throughout. For a good part of it my reading felt almost as lifeless as I did. Being wrung out by work, the babies, my commute, and many, many trips to the doctor (all good problems to have), I read more fiction than history or other non-fiction this spring, and much of that I didn’t feel too strongly about. Even the disappointing books were only disappointing, not outright bad. Everything felt grey. But looking back several weeks after final grades were in and I could rest for a moment—mentally if not physically—there was actually quite a lot of good reading packed in with the mediocre stuff.

Here are the highlights: my favorite fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books as well as the handful of books I revisited. For the purposes of this blog, “spring” is defined as everything from New Year’s Day to the end of my first week of summer classes, which was last Friday.

Favorite fiction

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, trans. William Weaver—Two monks, a widely-read Franciscan scholar and his young Benedictine assistant, investigate a series of strange, seemingly symbolic murders in a remote Italian monastery ahead of a conference of monastic leaders. This is one of the great literary historical novels even if Eco takes the wrong side in the medieval disputes over Ockham’s Nominalist theories and perpetuates some medieval stereotypes along the way, which is frustrating given how well he knows the era. But those a niggles. Erudite and richly detailed but fun, engrossing, and, above all, atmospheric, I greatly enjoyed it.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers—A wide-ranging collection of more than twenty stories that deal with ghosts, vampires, used books, time travel, custom-edited Bibles, revenge in the afterlife, the sacrament of confession, tomato plants under siege by pests, the grave of HP Lovecraft, and, yes, Purgatory. As with any 700-page collection of short fiction, these are of mixed quality, but all range from good to excellent, with plenty of the creativity, surprises, and wry humor of Powers’s novels. Personal favorites included “The Better Boy,” “The Bible Repair Man,” “Through and Through,” “Fifty Cents,” “A Time to Cast Away Stones,” and the title story, “Down and Out in Purgatory.”

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler—An English writer in Istanbul, his curiosity piqued by the discovery of the body of a notorious gangster, investigates the gangster’s life and discovers there’s no bottom to interwar Europe’s dark underworld. Evocative and atmospheric, this is a detective story and crime thriller wrapped up in the globetrotting of a spy novel. Full review here.

Medusa’s Web, by Tim Powers—An intriguing supernatural tale of the last remaining members of a cursed family living in their ramshackle old mansion, ominously named Caveat, in the Hollywood Hills. Scott and sister Madeline return to the family manse following the death of their aunt but their cousins, wheelchair-bound Claimayne and angry, standoffish Ariel, make it clear to Scott and Madeline that the siblings are unwelcome and the house rightly belongs to them. We soon learn that the members of this family can travel through time by staring at eerie, abstract, spider-like illustrations on slips of paper. The downside is that using the spiders is addictive and can cause permanent physical and mental damage. In the course of the family drama, trips into the past involve the characters in unsolved mysteries from Hollywood’s silent era, and an unexpected love story blossoms between one of them and a long-dead film star. It also becomes clear that a fabled über-spider, a drawing that contains the visions of all the others and guarantees lethal insanity if even glanced at, may not only still exist but be much nearer Caveat and the warring cousins than Scott would like. And on top of the visions and body-jumping and Old Hollywood gossip and Lovecraftian threat of world-ending madness there are overtones of Poe’s House of Usher, ancient myth, and more. Medusa’s Web has a lot going on and it’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but I greatly enjoyed it and read the entire book in just a few days. Worth checking out if you’re looking for something completely different.

The Mysteries, by Bill Watterson, illustrated by John Kascht—A simple but haunting “fable for grownups” from the creator of “Calvin & Hobbes.” A story of the disenchantment of the world, human hubris, and the inevitable consequences of both. One of my favorite books this spring. Full review here.

Favorite non-fiction

Great Uncle Harry, by Michael Palin—A biography of Palin’s great uncle, a man who was killed in action at the Somme and whom Palin never knew, this is a remarkable piece of detective work, archival research, and familial pietas that also commemorates a lost world and a generation destroyed. A continuously engaging and moving book. Full review here.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell, by DJ Taylor—An excellent short introduction to Orwell’s life and work, ranging from his childhood to his death and posthumous reputation—indeed, the book begins with the birth of his legend almost the moment he died—and covering everything from his personal character, novels, journalism, and his evolving political ideas to his attempts at farming, his friendships with other writers, his love of England, and his hatred of pigs. I strongly recommend this book to any and everyone. Taylor is also the author of two (two!) full-length biographies of Orwell. I have his Orwell: The New Life on standby for future reading. I blogged about Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four twice based on observations made in Taylor’s book. You can read those posts here and here.

Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, by Mark Brotherton—A solid examination of the psychology of conspiracy theories and conspiracist thinking. Brotherton does not make a case that conspiracy nuts are, well, nuts, but rather that they let run unchecked natural and useful thought processes that simply need discipline. Some of this will be old hat to anyone who has studied conspiracy theories seriously, but this may be the best and fairest one-volume assemblage of this material that I’ve come across. Full review here.

Campaldino 1289: The Battle that Made Dante, by Kelly DeVries and Niccolò Capponi—A thorough and thoroughly-illustrated guide to the bloody battle between Guelf Florence and her allies and Ghibelline Arezzo and her allies, in which a young Dante Alighieri participated. I wrote a paper about Campaldino in a graduate seminar on medieval and renaissance Florence at Clemson and the available material was thin back then. This book would have been a godsend. Worth looking at for anyone interested in Dante, medieval Italy, or military history.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak—This briskly written book tells two stories in alternating chapters. The first is an overview of Poe’s life, with all of its hardships and all-too-brief victories, up to 1849. The second is the story of Poe’s final months, in which he both behaved erratically (telling friends in Philadelphia that pursuers were trying to kill him and had, in fact, murdered and dismembered his beloved mother-in-law, who was alive and well in New York at the time) and also seemed to be on the cusp of overdue success (having reached an understanding with a childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, and working on soliciting support for his long-dreamed-of literary journal) before dying under unexplained circumstances in Baltimore. Dawidziak offers a good capsule life story of Poe in the one half and a thorough examination of Poe in the weeks before his death in the other, and follows these up with a good explanation of the evidence and competing theories about what exactly happened to Poe on that final trip. Had Poe had an alcoholic relapse? Was he the victim of cooping? Some kind of brain swelling? Cholera? Syphilis? Rabies? The theory Dawidziak offers is one of the more convincing that I’ve come across, and he makes a good case for it. I would have liked a slightly more scholarly and well-sourced treatment of this subject but this is a good book and a worthwhile read for any fan of Poe. I wrote a short post about one offhand comment by an interviewee in this book. You can read that here.

Rereads

As usual, audiobook “reads” are marked with an asterisk.

• Inferno and Purgatorio, by Dante, trans. Stanley Lombardo

• No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy*

• Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton*

• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor

A strong set of books to revisit, especially Wise Blood, which I last read in college and hardly remembered. I’m enjoying but not loving Lombardo’s translation of the Comedy. I hope to read his Paradiso this summer.

Kids’ books

The Mysterious Goblet, by Sophie de Mullenheim, trans. Janet Chevrier—The third in a series set in the Rome of Diocletian and the Great Persecution, in which the emperor is all-powerful and Christians are despised and suppressed as threats to order. This wasn’t my favorite of the series so far but it has an engaging, multi-thread plot and was enjoyable both to read aloud and, for my kids, to listen to.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl—Somehow I’ve made it to the age of 39 having never read anything by Roald Dahl. I read this on my daughter’s recommendation and loved it. (And what a joy to take a book recommendation from one of your children!) Clever, briskly paced, darkly and wryly funny, and most of all really fun to read. Looking forward to James and the Giant Peach soon.

Flight for Freedom: The Wetzel Family’s Daring Escape from East Germany, by Kristen Fulton, illustrated by Torben Kuhlmann—A short, simple, but nicely illustrated retelling of the story of two East German families who flew over the wall to West Germany and freedom in a homemade hot air balloon. A fascinating story that my kids really enjoyed, and a good opportunity to talk about why Germany was divided and what Communism is (as opposed to what some people would like it to be). This also prompted us to check out the 1982 film Night Crossing, which we enjoyed.

Saint Patrick the Forgiver, by Ned Bustard—A delightful picture book with a rhyming story and beautiful woodcut illustrations by the author. Bustard also has books on St Valentine and St Nicholas of Myra—the real Santa Claus—but this Patrick book is far and away his best of the three. Going to add this to my list of recommended St Patrick’s Day reads soon.

Looking ahead

That’s it! I’m already reading some good stuff—a Viking adventure by the author of King Solomon’s Mines, a study of Dante by Charles Williams, a short book on Old Testament wisdom literature by a favorite philosopher, and my first novel for this year’s John Buchan June—and I’m looking forward to more in the relatively more relaxed days of summer. I hope y’all found a book or two above that sound enticing and that you’ll check them out. Thanks as always for reading!

Further notes on Orwell and Big Brother’s puritanism

At the end of my post last week about Orwell’s failure to see how totalitarian regimes can—contra his criticism of Huxley’s Brave New World—have “a strict morality” that is not sexually repressive, I noted that the Soviet Union exploited just such conditions in order to obtain kompromat—compromising material that could be used for blackmail, either of its own people or foreign agents.

I hadn’t finished reading DJ Taylor’s Who is Big Brother? when I wrote that post, but as I did later that evening Taylor raised an interesting possibility about Nineteen Eighty-Four’s central love affair, one that hinges on the ambiguity of Julia, Winston Smith’s lover. Not just ambiguity, but inscrutability. “What goes on in her head?” Taylor asks. “Orwell never says.”

This is not because, as some recent feminist critics have argued, Orwell is too sexist to write women well, but because she is mysterious by design. There is a dimension to Julia that she keeps from Winston, that he is too smitten and desperate and unworldly to detect.

Consider: When Julia throws herself at Winston, he, “desperate for companionship . . . takes this at face value.” She is considerably younger than him, is both bold as the instigator of their affair and furtive in its execution, has unexplained access to small luxury items, and confesses to a history of sexual indiscretions with Party elites. Taylor continues:

Julia, it seems clear, is up to something. But what exactly? Some of the most revealing passages about her turn up in the chapter that begins with the disappearance of Syme. Half of her is oddly naive and uninformed: she has only the faintest idea of who [Emmanuel] Goldstein is and the doctrines he is supposed to represent. But the other half is ominously sophisticated, tuned in to ideas and deceptions that are beyond Winston’s power to comprehend. When on one occasion he mentions the war in Eurasia, she insists that the conflict is simply imaginary and the bombs which fall on Oceania are probably fired by its own rulers ‘just to keep people frightened’.

Further, when Winston tells her about his irrational desire to confess his thoughtcrime to O’Brien and recruit him as an ally and defender, Julia tells him to do it. It is O’Brien who eventually arrests them—in a love nest owned by an undercover member of the Thought Police—and who tortures Winston in Room 101.

Considered from outside Winston’s naive point-of-view, Julia’s personality and behavior—her forwardness, her attitudes toward the Party, her mysterious access to goods usually reserved for the elite, and especially her seduction of an unattractive older man—make her look less like another love-starved prole driven into a doomed relationship by sheer need and more like bait. Julia, Taylor concludes, “is a honey-trap, gamely enticing Winston into O’Brien’s lair so that he can be exposed, tormented, and ultimately re-educated. From start to finish, you infer, their whole affair is a put-up job.”

This makes a lot of sense. Even Winston and Julia’s final meeting, post-Ministry of Love, can be read this way. But Taylor notes that the reader can’t be sure, which is probably part of Orwell’s point. Julia remains ambiguous to the end.

Interpreting Julia as a tool of the Thought Police does not resolve the problem of Big Brother’s repressive sexual puritanism, the aspect of his regime that fundamentally jars with the rest—which was the point of last week’s post—but it does add a note of realism to how Big Brother might exploit and suppress a potential enemy. It also makes Winston’s story that much more pitiful.

Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell turned out to be excellent, by the way. You can look for more about it when I finish my spring reading post. I am aware of the recent parallax novel Julia, which retells Nineteen Eighty-Four from Julia’s perspective, but I have no interest in reading it. I do, however, need to reread Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell’s failure

I’ve almost finished reading George Orwell biographer DJ Taylor’s new guide to Orwell’s work, Who is Big Brother? It’s been an excellent short read so far, capably tracking the changes in Orwell’s life, views, and writings and insightfully linking them to each other as well as judging the man’s character fairly but not uncritically.

Of special interest to me, considering the way Orwell’s dystopian novel is so often compared to Aldous Huxley’s, was a line Taylor quotes from Orwell’s review of Brave New World. Faulting Huxley for his overemphasis on shameless hedonism in the society of Brave New World, Orwell asserted that “A ruling class has got to have a strict morality, a quasi-religious belief in itself, a mystique.”

This comment made sense of an aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I’ve puzzled over since first reading it in college twenty-something years ago. Reading CS Lewis’s 1954 review of that novel a few years later focused and sharpened that puzzlement. Here’s Lewis on what he regards as the biggest flaw in Orwell’s dystopia:

In the nightmare State of 1984 the rulers devote a great deal of time—which means that the author and readers also have to devote a great deal of time—to a curious kind of anti-sexual propaganda. Indeed the amours of the hero and heroine seem to be at least as much a gesture of protest against that propaganda as a natural outcome of affection or appetite.

Now it is, no doubt, possible that the masters of a totalitarian State might have a bee in their bonnets about sex as about anything else; and, if so, that bee, like all their bees, would sting. But we are shown nothing in the particular tyranny Orwell has depicted which would make this particular bee at all probable. Certain outlooks and attitudes which at times introduced this bee into the Nazi bonnet are not shown at work here.* Worse still, its buzzing presence in the book raises questions in all our minds which have really no very close connection with the main theme and are all the more distracting for being, in themselves, of interest.

Lewis, in a rare moment of Bulverism for him, chalks this up to Orwell’s coming of age in the “anti-puritanism” of the DH Lawrence era. Maybe. But Lewis is right that the sexual repression of Big Brother’s state does not mesh organically with everything else—the state-mandated calisthenics, the brainwashed children, the mass surveillance, and most especially the manipulation of language.** Why would Big Brother care who’s doing it to whom and in what way as long as neither party engages in wrongthink?***

He wouldn’t. What Orwell failed to see is that the “strict morality” required of a tyrannical ruling clique need not be sexually traditionalist. It could indeed be the opposite, granting total sexual license but fastidiously and ruthlessly policing the terminology surrounding it, or by concentrating on some other occasion of sin—the accused’s carbon footprint, perhaps, or how much privilege they have, or what kind of ancestral sins they owe amends for. “[T]hough Brave New World was a brilliant caricature of the present (the present of 1930),” Orwell wrote, “it probably casts no light on the future.” On the contrary, George.

But to return to the point of comparison between Huxley and Orwell, a tyranny is, in fact, often better served by an out-of-control libido, which more than just about any other appetite has the power to distract and enervate. This is what Huxley saw that Orwell could or would not.

I should have more to say about Who is Big Brother? in my spring reading list later this month. In the meantime, check out Theodore Dalrymple’s review at Law & Liberty, which is what convinced me to read the book.

* “At times” is the right way to address this. The Nazis were not much concerned about sexual morality beyond guarding racial boundaries. Look into the private lives of Ernst Röhm, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and especially Joseph Goebbels sometime.

** The Soviet-style manipulation of language is, I think, the real point of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a point easily lost among the book’s other terrifying visions. Cf. Fahrenheit 451, which Bradbury intended as a critique of TV rather than censorship.

*** Combining licentious sexual behavior with mass surveillance is also a useful source for kompromat, something the Soviets knew and that Orwell surely must have as well.

Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math

Earlier this week I read this really interesting piece by William Fear on the most distinctive trait shared by Orwell and Albert Camus: “Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas.” I can’t weigh in on whether this is true of Camus—I think I read The Stranger and The Plague somewhere around seventeen years ago in college—but it strikes me as a good assessment of Orwell.

Fear uses a particularly striking example to illustrate the closeness of Orwell and Camus’s thought on truth and the threat posed to truthfulness by modern ideology, a major concern for both men—what Fear calls “common ground.” He begins with a line from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”

— George Orwell, 1949

He then points out that, in fact, “these words are not Orwell’s at all. This is a quote from Albert Camus’ novel La Peste, which was published two years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1947.” Fear doesn’t give the exact quotation but this is what I turn up in searching for it:

“But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.”

— Albert Camus, 1947

Orwell’s quotation is almost exact, and the import of the quotation—the ideological threat, enforced through peer pressure and naked authority, to admitting what is objectively true and the courage required to do so—is precisely the same. Again, common ground for these writers.

So Orwell got the idea from Camus. But… did Camus get the idea from Orwell? Fear quotes one of Orwell’s book reviews from 1939:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

— George Orwell, 1939

Fear declines to speculate on precisely whether Camus got this mathematical example from Orwell, noting that the nature of each man’s influence on the other is really beside the point, and continues with his essay. I recommend reading the whole thing.

But a longtime reader of Chesterton cannot read the these three variations on one idea without going back yet further, to a column by GK Chesterton published in the Illustrated London News in 1926. I quote this at greater length because the context makes it clear that the parallel runs deeper than the use of 2+2 as an example:

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four.”

— GK Chesterton, 1926

But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption. Reason was self-evident before Pragmatism. Mathematics were self-evident before Einstein. But this scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

And this in itself recapitulates something Chesterton wrote as early as his essay collection Heretics, published in 1905. Its stunning final paragraph includes this passage:

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

So did Orwell get this example from Chesterton? We know Orwell read Chesterton, and that Chesterton even published some of Orwell’s earliest work. So I’d add Chesterton to the lineage of this idea.

But alongside Fear, I’d also say it doesn’t entirely matter. What does matter is the reason Chesterton and Orwell and Camus kept coming back to the childish simplicity of 2+2: an abiding concern for the truth, a truth to be found out there in reality rather than in here in personal perception or political ideology, and a shared—and quite justifiable—anxiety about the threats it faces.

I’ve written before about Orwell’s view of the relation of the modern historical discipline to objective truth, here and here, and about Chesterton and Orwell’s overlapping concerns with language and clarity here. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni quoted the Heretics version of Chesterton’s line in a clip that went mildly viral—at least among Chesterton fans—several months ago. I still know next to nothing about Camus, largely owing to a prejudicial suspicion of twentieth-century French thinkers, but Fear has convinced me to look again, and more closely.

Revisiting Orwell on history: faster, more intense

A few weeks ago I wrote about Orwell’s contention that modern ideological attacks on history were a threat to objective truth itself. The passage I quoted from and glossed came from a 1944 “As I Please” column. That’s still worth reading. But yesterday I ran across this passage in a much longer essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” from 1942:

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

This somehow manages to put the point even more pithily.

A little more, because I can’t help it:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. . . . It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.

You can read more here. These passages come from a paragraph in § IV.

Compare my thoughts on cynicism in the study of history, which went viral on a small scale last month following a share from Tom Holland himself. For the mathematical implications of the denial of objective truth, see again Chesterton.

Orwell on history and objective truth

I doesn’t take much to get me on an Orwell kick, and the most recent started with an interesting piece in First Things entitled “What Orwell Learned from Chesterton.” Somewhere during this most recent dip into Orwell’s essays, I came across an “As I Please” column from February 4, 1944—the spring before Operation Overlord, when an Englishman could visit Dover and look over the Channel into the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating short reflection, and right up my alley.

Orwell begins with an arresting apocryphal tale:

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

Orwell tells this story to introduce the topic of the investigation into truth in history, and considers how well Raleigh might have succeeded in his historical project. “Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison,” Orwell writes, Raleigh “could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events.” Why? Because

“A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it.”

— George Orwell

Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts—the casualty figures, for instance—were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now.

That’s because of ideology; everyone now has ideological reasons to obscure, hide, or attempt to alter the truth. Orwell supplies numerous examples from his personal experience and contemporary events, most notably the Spanish Civil War, in which he was a participant, as well as the Battle of Britain, Trotsky’s supposed betrayal of the Soviet Union, and the factuality of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “In no case,” he writes, “do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.”

I was particularly struck by that last line, as it’s a perennial favorite of a certain kind of eager student who wants to let others know he’s not naïve. That is, it’s usually a species of the cynicism I wrote about last week. (It’s also easily disproven by visiting the History section at any Barnes & Noble, where you can find apologia, exonerations, and revisions in favor of any number of “losers” in history.)

But Orwell isn’t using it that way here. Rather than a universal statement about unreliability or bias, he is describing the end result of ideological struggle. This is how history will be written—even if our side wins—if we are not careful, as his next line suggests: “In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries.”

The Allies could rightly claim to have salvaged something from the wreck of the war if they would at least be truthful about it after the fact. It’s still not entirely clear that that was the case, and insofar as even the “good guys” in a conflict like World War II take the same ideologically motivated approach to the truth as their totalitarian enemies, subjecting the truth to the claims of usefulness rather than subjecting themselves to it, they become totalitarians, too. Indeed, they share the most important characteristic of their enemies:

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

— George Orwell

This is broadly applicable, because it’s true, and this is why history in particular is so hotly contested right now—along with everything else. Totalitarianism is, after all, total.

After a few caveats and notes about the effects of the war on freedom of the press, Orwell concludes by suggesting that “[t]here is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don’t envy the future historian’s job.”

Me neither.

You can read the entire “As I Please” piece in several places online. I found it here. I definitely recommend the MD Aeschliman piece on Orwell and Chesterton mentioned above, and if you want to begin or complement an Orwell kick like mine, let me also recommend a 2017 piece from Ben Sixsmith that gets at one of the things I most like about Orwell: “George Orwell Would Dislike You, Me, and Our Opinions.”

Lewis and Orwell on bad words

Or, that is, words for things we want to label as bad.

George Orwell, under the heading “Meaningless words” in his essay, written in 1945 but published in Horizon in 1946, “Politics and the English Language”:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

CS Lewis in his 1944 Spectator essay “The Death of Words”:

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker’s yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

Let the reader understand.

Some years ago I wrote in more detail about carelessness with language and thinking, with reference to Orwell and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.

Chesterton and Orwell on long words

GK Chesterton (1874-1936) and George Orwell (1903-50)

In Orwell’s celebrated essay “Politics and the English Language,” which I’ve revisited several times recently, he concludes by offering the writer a set of six “rules that one can rely on when instinct fails.” Among them is:

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Orwell’s concern here is with clarity—both of expression and of thinking.* Earlier in the essay he writes:

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Compare this passage from Chesterton (in Orthodoxy Chapter VIII, “The Romance of Orthodoxy”), which I’ve just rediscovered thanks to my Facebook memories:

But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”

Chesterton and Orwell’s concerns neatly overlap here.** And the example provided by Chesterton also helps make clear (I almost wrote “clarify”) another of Orwell’s rules:

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

I’ve heard this rule dismissed as “linguistic chauvinism,” an odd charge to make against a man like Orwell, but the truth is that most of our bureaucratic jargon, especially the legalese and pseudoscientific managerial talk that passes for political discourse and social critique now, comes into English from other languages. To take just one example, Latinate words, which tend to be longer, with more syllables to go rattling by, have been an occasional feature of English since before the Conquest,*** but have grown like wisteria all over the solid oak of the language’s basic Germanic grammar and vocabulary. It can certainly be pretty, but if there’s too much of it it will obscure the tree underneath—and even kill it.

And our brains know this: Old English words are gut words, bone words, the words we learn at our mother’s breast, while the multisyllabic vocabulary ported into English from specialist fields—medicine, science, law, theology—tends toward the abstract. It is clinical language. Phrases like capital punishment, lethal injection, execution of sentence all hold the fact that a man is being killed at arm’s length. And consider how much the adjective of the decade, systemic, muddles and covers up.

I could go on, but Orwell’s own famous example is enough. In his essay, he quotes Ecclesiastes 9:11:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

And reimagines it as a modern man might be tempted to express it:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

None of which is to say never to use Latin-rooted words. It’s impossible—which is itself of Latin origin. But if you want to write clearly and forcefully, you’ll hew as closely as possible to the clear, hard Germanic words we learn first, as babies.

And to kick it back to Chesterton, in a passage from The Everlasting Man that I’ve written about here before, “No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”

Footnotes or, if you prefer Latin, citations:

*I’ve written about Orwell’s rules here before, examining their overlap, especially that concern with clarity, with the rules of two other celebrated but quite different writers—Elmore Leonard and CS Lewis. Read that here.

**Interestingly, Orwell’s first published essay appeared in Chesterton’s own newspaper, GK’s Weekly, in December 1928.

***The Norman Conquest gave us the first big spate of French and Latinate vocabulary in English, but lots of theological jargon had already made its way in. One example: bishop is a modern spelling of bisceop, which is what you get when an Anglo-Saxon cleric tries to pronounce the Latin episcopus, which had already been borrowed from the Greek ἐπίσκοπος.

Chesterton (and Orwell) on careless language

From "New Religion and New Irreligion," an April 4, 1908 piece in the Illustrated London News:

“It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else.”

In its fuller context: 

Our generation professes to be scientific and particular about the things it says; but unfortunately it is never scientific and particular about the words in which it says them. It is difficult to believe that people who are obviously careless about language can really be very careful about anything else. If an astronomer is careless about words, one cannot help fancying that he may be careless about stars. If a botanist is vague about words, he may be vague about plants. The modern man, regarding himself as a second Adam, has undertaken to give all the creatures new names; and when we discover that he is silly about the names, the thought will cross our minds that he may be silly about the creatures. And never before, I should imagine, in the intellectual history of the world have words been used with so idiotic an indifference to their actual meaning. A word has no loyalty; it can be betrayed into any service or twisted to any treason. 

Chesterton goes on to give examples, 110 years old now, of one of my least favorite moves in the political rhetoric playbook: claiming one's position is the truer form of one's opponents' position, e.g. this recent op-ed asserting that supporting abortion is more pro-life than opposing it. This is surely an iteration of "no true Scotsman," but if it's been named I'm unaware of it. "Of all the expressions of our current indifference to the meaning of the words," Chesterton writes later, "I think that the most irritating is this cool substitution of one kind of definition for another." That, as it happens, does have a name. 

Before moving on to the religious controversy surrounding the "New Theology" of R.J. Campbell, Chesterton concludes:

“The fact is, that all this evasive use of words is unworthy of our human intellect.”

"Mr. Campbell has excellent brains," Chesterton continues, "but thinks it more advanced and modern not to use them. . . . He is guided in his choice of phrases by mere aimless sentimentalism." We cheat ourselves when we cheat with our language. We were made for finer things. Our minds are precision instruments.

Chesterton here anticipates some of the arguments in Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" by almost forty years. Writing in 1946, Orwell argued that "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought," and devoted the bulk of his essay to examples which he surgically dissects. Compare: 

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Slovenliness is a good word for it. Not chaos, not anarchy, but an utter "you know what I mean" indifference to good order–a linguistic dorm room. A pervasive slovenliness degrades not just political discourse but all communication today. I'm not talking about emojis, slang, and memes, but rather the intellectual path of least resistance onto which all of us route our thoughts, "gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug." The appeal, Orwell writes, is that this mode of communication, this way of thinking, is easy.

But will it lead us to truth?

Quick: What is the difference between a country and a nation? Between enhanced interrogation and torture? Between racism, prejudice, and bigotry? Between faith and a faith? What is love? What is violence? What does the word free mean in free speech, free country, free love, free will, free with any purchase?