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Recently, in the process of trying to fit all of my books and

genarti's into one place, I at last remembered that

gramarye1971 had lent me two volumes of collected Orwell after I read Homage to Catalonia, which had been sitting on my shelf ever since.

Relatedly, last weekend, we had the very great pleasure of hosting

gramarye1971 as our first houseguest since Gen moved in! The path before me had been prepared; I determined to finish at least one Orwell volume before she left, thus triumphantly diminishing the household stock of books by one.

Orwell and the Dispossessed contains the full text of Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as various essays, diaries, and correspondences that the editor deemed relevant to Orwell's Feelings About Class. Down and Out in Paris and London is the one where Orwell talks about being broke and starving and washing dishes sixteen hours a day in Paris, and the working conditions of the poor, also, incidentally, does a mini-Upton Sinclair expose on the backstage habits of fancy French hotels and restaurants, just because he's there and might as well; and then comes back to London and lives as a hobo for a while and also, incidentally, does a mini-expose on the poor arrangements of tramp hostels.

The thing that stuck with me the most is the amount of time Orwell spends on just how difficult it is to get enough sleep when you're living in conditions of extreme poverty. The way in which public spaces are inimical to the homeless does not seem to have changed significantly between 1933 and 2019, and the tramp hostels and shelters he encounters are unsafe, unclean, and overcrowded, as well as insulting to human dignity. And, of course, a consistent and terrible sleep debt poisons everything else; he's shocked, three quarters of the way through the book, to meet a pavement artist who does amateur astronomy, because he himself cannot muster any energy at all for intellectual pursuits while struggling just to find something to eat and a place to catch a few hours of sleep each night. (Though of course he did obviously take enough notes to go on to write the book, so, you know.)

That said - Down and Out is very good, and very worth reading, but the most entertaining part of the collection is a set of Orwell's literary essays that were determined to be Class Relevant Enough to fold into the volume. This includes, among other things:

Orwell on Kipling - a kindly patronizing assessment that Kipling, earnestly wrong-headed on the topic of Empire though he may be, was a good bad poet and should be appreciated accordingly

Orwell on Wodehouse - a kindly patronizing assessment that we should all stop ostracizing Wodehouse for that unfortunate incident with the Nazi broadcasts because there are much worse crimes than being an idiot who hasn't yet figured out that it's not 1905 anymore (apparently Orwell bought Wodehouse dinner sometime after this essay came out as a method of demonstrating his sincerity; what one wouldn't give to be a fly on the wall during that meal!)

Orwell on Boy's and Girl's Fiction - an honestly fascinating exploration of British assumptions and expectations about life as expressed through the bad writing in long-running children's magazines

Orwell on Donald McGill - an honestly fascinating exploration of British assumptions and expectations about life as expressed through the bad jokes on seaside postcards

Orwell on Detective Fiction - I don't agree with Orwell about Dorothy Sayers, but I think it's really funny how he seems to have decided that Dorothy Sayers Does Weird Things To Dead Bodies And He Doesn't Like It. (I have to assume he read "The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers", got very uncomfortable, and read no further.) I do agree with him that it's weird and a bit bloodthirsty how detective fiction used to be fine with relatively low-stakes plots about missing jewels and now it's got to be a body a week or everyone yawns and goes home.

Orwell on the Home Guard - this is not a literary essay but I really enjoy Orwell's patient explanation that "look I KNOW joining the Home Guard is uncool but if ALL the Socialists join the Home Guard we can MAKE it a Socialist army, did you think about that?"

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And, of course, a consistent and terrible sleep debt poisons everything else; he's shocked, three quarters of the way through the book, to meet a pavement artist who does amateur astronomy, because he himself cannot muster any energy at all for intellectual pursuits while struggling just to find something to eat and a place to catch a few hours of sleep each night.

I . . . have feelings about this.

I am not sure I could read Orwell on Kipling without shouting at him, but I will try to track down his essay on Donald McGill, since I know nothing about the jokey seaside postcards of their era.

I do agree with him that it's weird and a bit bloodthirsty how detective fiction used to be fine with relatively low-stakes plots about missing jewels and now it's got to be a body a week or everyone yawns and goes home.

That must have been a relatively rapid curve in the development of detective fiction, if Orwell is complaining about it.

I thought you might, honestly.

The McGill essay is really good. The postcards themselves are not things I find particularly funny, and not things that Orwell finds particularly funny either, but he takes them as a jumping-off point and goes some really interesting places as far as the ways in which extremely lowbrow humor functions as an outlet (for reference, the essay was written in 1941).

One of the crime-plot essays takes as its points of comparison the Raffles stories, on the one hand, and No Orchids For Miss Blandish on the other. I'm not sure it's quite fair to compare the two as apples to apples, but it does strike me as fascinating how rapidly the genre of detective and crime plots did develop and settle into something that really strongly resembles its current default state.

but he takes them as a jumping-off point and goes some really interesting places as far as the ways in which extremely lowbrow humor functions as an outlet (for reference, the essay was written in 1941).

That both sounds great and is the sort of thing I really enjoy people doing with pop culture even or especially if I have no interest in it.

I'm not sure it's quite fair to compare the two as apples to apples, but it does strike me as fascinating how rapidly the genre of detective and crime plots did develop and settle into something that really strongly resembles its current default state.

Agreed on both counts. (Especially since No Orchids for Miss Blandish was explicitly an import of the American hard-boiled style, which is the only reason I've heard of it; it would be fairer to compare the body count in Raffles with Christie or Sayers.)

Yeah, he does also have an interest in the comparison between British-writing levels of violence and American-writing levels of violence -- it crops up a few times across several different essays -- but I would have loved to have seen him do a really serious study of Christie or Sayers, rather than essentially writing them off as Detective Books I Think Are Dull.

Yes, but it's so fun to yell at Orwell while reading this essay.

It's been ages since I've read any Orwell (and I think I just read Animal Farm and then 1984 and 1984 kind of broke me so I stopped) but now is probably a good time to pick up with him again. Orwell on Boy's and Girl's Fiction sounds particularly Relevant to my interests but really all of it sounds potentially fascinating.

Also YES, I would absolutely like to be a fly on the wall during the Orwell-Wodehouse dinner. What would they even talk about? Would Wodehouse just come to dinner in character as Psmith on the grounds that this ought to be agreeable to that socialist chap Orwell?

I find I enjoy Orwell's nonfiction (or mostly-nonfiction) much more than his fiction -- I mean, that said, it's been many years since I read 1984. But when he's first-person-narrating he has this very sympathetic way of presenting quite complicated issues and laying out Some Thoughts about them while acknowledging they are probably more complicated than can really be summed up in the way he's writing about them.

ONE ASSUMES. (Orwell's like, "I'm not sure that Wodehouse has ever understood what a Socialist is but in the Psmith books he seems to have a vague idea it's all about treating other people equally which I guess? is a start??")

Hilariously, immediately after the essay came out, Wodehouse wrote a letter to a friend that was like "that Orwell fellow, so clever! frightfully entertained by his analysis of my stuff!" and only several years later did he publish a rebuttal along the lines of "ACTUALLY I am WELL aware that time has passed since 1905, THANK YOU VERY MUCH MR. ORWELL!"

Thanks to this post I've started reading some Orwell essays (probably not exactly the same selection as you; the collection is All Art Is Propaganda) and he's sooooo good. He reminds me of C. S. Lewis (a comparison I suspect they would both dislike) because his writing is so clear and readable and persuasive, even if after the fact I'm sometimes like "Hey wait, I'm not sure I do agree with you actually..."

I'm not sure if this collection has the detective fiction essay but there have been a number of references to Lord Peter Wimsey, Archetype of the Upper Class Twit Who Makes Good in a Crisis, so clearly Orwell has Opinions about Sayers.

I really enjoyed his essay about Dickens and the one about the picture postcards - especially because he described one with a gag I actually recognize, the girl who is describing something to her friends as "Thiiiiiiis long" and there's a fish on the wall as cover... but we all know she's not talking about fish. Are usually-not-very-funny 'funny" greeting cards the slightly smutty picture postcards of our time?

This makes me want to read some C.S. Lewis essays, which I have never done!

And YES it's so funny, because, like, it's a fair analysis of some Lord Peter and obviously he just gave up before he got to, say, Have His Carcase or any of the books which really start to complicate the class stuff. (...the Harriet books really, I guess, because she's the one who has the most uncomfortable feelings about Percy's class.)

The volume I have didn't have the Dickens essay and clearly I'm going to have to hunt it down! I would definitely say 'funny' greeting cards/birthday cards fill the same ecological niche as smutty picture postcards, though the audience target feels slightly different; I feel like those cards are aimed at, like, a female 40-60 demographic? and the smutty cards aimed at more of a male one? which is kind of an interesting shift, but also not at all based on any kind of exhaustive study!

I suspect that C. S. Lewis and George Orwell would not have gotten on AT ALL, but their style of argument is similar enough that they would have failed to get on in an extremely entertaining and enlightening fashion. Everyone would end up with a sharper idea about their own views by the end, certainly.

Re: 'funny' greeting cards and smutty picture postcards - I always wonder who is sending those. You'd have to be very certain that the person on the other end is going to enjoy the joke!

Orwell on Boy's and Girl's Fiction - an honestly fascinating exploration of British assumptions and expectations about life as expressed through the bad writing in long-running children's magazines

Orwell on Donald McGill - an honestly fascinating exploration of British assumptions and expectations about life as expressed through the bad jokes on seaside postcards

Oh, I love those essays. I came across them in one of my first paperback essay collections of his stuff (I have several sets now) and it was great how thoroughly and objectively and interestedly he went through it all.

The thing that stuck with me the most is the amount of time Orwell spends on just how difficult it is to get enough sleep when you're living in conditions of extreme poverty. The way in which public spaces are inimical to the homeless does not seem to have changed significantly between 1933 and 2019, and the tramp hostels and shelters he encounters are unsafe, unclean, and overcrowded, as well as insulting to human dignity. And, of course, a consistent and terrible sleep debt poisons everything else

One of the things I really like about him is how he went out and Experienced stuff. If he wanted to know about tramping, he tramped. If he wanted to be dirt poor, he got dirt poor. If he wanted to see the conflict in Spain up close, he went off to fight. (And quite characteristically alienated absolutely everyone with his book about that.)

They're so good! One sort of gets the impression that if you handed George Orwell any random collection of popular material he could find something really interesting and thoughtful to say about it. If I had a time machine I'd just dump the entirety of Game of Thrones or the whole of Stephen King's backlog on his doorstep and wait with eager anticipation for his thorough deconstruction of society based solely on that media.

You really do have to respect him, both for his willingness to get up close and personal with whatever he thought about writing about, and for his determination to share his honest opinions about it regardless of whose interests he offended in the process.

HAH, yes! King would be the perfect mix of pulpy and sociological.

You really do have to respect him, both for his willingness to get up close and personal with whatever he thought about writing about, and for his determination to share his honest opinions about it regardless of whose interests he offended in the process.

A friend said "He could not blow his nose without philosophizing about conditions in the textile factories." I kind of adore him.

I do agree with him that it's weird and a bit bloodthirsty how detective fiction used to be fine with relatively low-stakes plots about missing jewels and now it's got to be a body a week or everyone yawns and goes home.

I know this is dumb but it's my #1 complaint about all Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Sometimes he just fucking looked for treasure, damn it.

(Which, I mean, I feel like the only semi-recent thing to get this and also be an actual detective show rather than police-consulting-blah-blah is Veronica Mars. Which okay they then started piling on bodies but at least initially it was 1 body and then things like credit card fraud or where's my missing dad.)

Yeah! I forget if you were the person I first talked with about this or if I saw someone else complaining about it also, but now I can't unsee it. Mystery producers, can I have just one episode where nobody dies or even fake dies? Just one! There are so many other kinds of crime!

(Yeah, that's one of the things I really liked about S1! Like, they made a high school detective and even though there were high background stakes so much of the stuff she investigated in the day-to-day really was high school stakes.)

Did your volume include Orwell's essay on Charles Dickens? That's one that has stuck with me.

It did not (though he gestures at his thoughts on Dickens in some of the other essays; he clearly thought about him a lot and had a lot to say about him) but I have now read and loved it, thank you for linking! (And now I'm struck with an urge to immediately go read a lot of Dickens.)

Orwell on Boy's and Girl's Fiction
One of my favourites, I've read and re-read it!

It's such a fascinating analysis - so thoughtfully eviscerating and yet still full of genuine affection!

so thoughtfully eviscerating
What a spectacular, accurate phrase.

Have you read Homage to Catalonia? If not, I recommend it!

I have, and loved it, but that was some years ago now -- the other Orwell volume I have from

gramarye1971 is "Orwell in Spain", which includes Homage to Catalonia as well as a lot of related essays and writings, and I'm really looking forward to rereading it.

I really enjoy Orwell's patient explanation that "look I KNOW joining the Home Guard is uncool but if ALL the Socialists join the Home Guard we can MAKE it a Socialist army, did you think about that?"

*gives Orwell a long, disapproving stare*

I had this former friend from university who had this hope that he could get all his gay and lesbian friends to join the Anglican Church to make it super gay. ...Whether or not they were even Christians to begin with. Without considering the comfort or safety of the friends he was trying to rope into this given homophobia and misogyny and longstanding interpersonal dysfunction within individual churches as well as the hierarchy more generally. Or troubling to inform them that this was part of his agenda when asking them to sing in his church choir and promising them paid choral scholarships that somehow never materialised. And would then tell them "but didn't you learn a lot? Wasn't it beneficial to your development as a singer?"[*] NOT THAT I'M BITTER.

[* I wouldn't go that far, but it was definitely a Learning Experience. And gave me heaps of comic material to write about one day.]

How old was Orwell at this point? If he's only in his early 20s himself I might give him partial exoneration for not having learned yet the difference between sentencing yourself to a doomed attempt at changing the system from within and roping your friends into your doomed attempt at changing the system from within too.

I don't think that's a parallel, though.

The Home Guard was a new institution at the time, and part of Orwell's point was that it would be shaped by the people who were willing to get involved, because it hadn't yet settled down into institutional inertia. Plus, being a Socialist in the Home Guard of British Army was not unsafe.

And of course it was also doing an important job guarding the country from Nazis, which was kind of in the interests of anyone who was identifiably a Socialist and liked not being in a concentration camp....

Looks like I put my foot in it. I'm not familiar with the role of the Home Guard at the time (I don't even know the data of the essay, for that matter) and assumed. Sorry.

That certainly seems like ... a somewhat misguided venture D:

I mean, Orwell and the Home Guard is really interesting to me because (as

tree_and_leaf said) at the time the Home Guard was a very new venture and also Orwell's sort of gesturing at the notion that if his socialist friends really want to learn about institutional military power this is probably the best way to do it; but also, as he points out, it's only a year or so in and the Home Guard which did start as sort of a common man's army without the usual class-related power structures is already starting to collapse into more of the mold of the regular army because nobody's pushing against it. So, after a certain point there's not much hope of changing things from within, but Orwell is hoping that point isn't yet.

(World War II is also a tricky time to navigate in general if you are an enthusiastic young Socialist because no one can argue that war is a good thing, and indeed Orwell doesn't, and goes quite extensively into all the problems with the army and its power structures, and yet, you know, Hitler.)

...every time you do a book post my TBR pile grows.

My nightstand is collapsing under the weight of my own TBR pile so I SYMPATHIZE.

Orwell on Detective Fiction - I don't agree with Orwell about Dorothy Sayers, but I think it's really funny how he seems to have decided that Dorothy Sayers Does Weird Things To Dead Bodies And He Doesn't Like It. (I have to assume he read "The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers", got very uncomfortable, and read no further.)

With only this description to go on, it seems to me he might also have tried to begin at the beginning with Whose Body? and got no further -- that's got weird things happening to dead bodies, too, both the body that kicks off the plot and the second body who Lord Peter disinters.

I do agree with him that it's weird and a bit bloodthirsty how detective fiction used to be fine with relatively low-stakes plots about missing jewels and now it's got to be a body a week or everyone yawns and goes home.

What this reminds me of is that when Raymond "send a man through the door with a gun" Chandler did his take on an English-style amateur sleuth story, it was just a stolen necklace and for once in his ouvre nobody died. Although knowing him that was because he had firm views on the place of amateur sleuths in murder investigations (namely that they didn't have one and he was astonished what the English fictional police put up with) and needed it to be lower stakes so he could persuade himself to let the amateur handle it.

You're probably right, I forgot how awkward Whose Body is with ... well, the body. (IIRC the Orwell actually uses about Sayers and bodies is necrophilia, which is awful, but it's also really funny to imagine Orwell reading about the body in the bathtub and just having to drop the book and clutch his pearls for a bit.)

I didn't know that Raymond Chandler ever did try to write an English-style detective story! I find the prospect deeply hard to imagine and now I want to go read it.

Admittedly, part of the point of the story is that the young fellow who takes up sleuthing to help his girl out of a jam starts out carefully hunting clues to reconstruct an elaborate explanation of the mystery, but by the end of it he's going "you know, this elaborate-explanation-of-the-mystery business really isn't how real life works most of the time".

It's called "Pearls are a Nuisance", and if you do go read it, I hope it won't turn out I've oversold it.

Always happy to provide reading material for book posts. ^_^

I think the Penguin Orwell collections might not be in print any longer, which is a terrible shame. They're one of the most accessible approaches to Orwell's prolific writings, and really help to flesh out his thinking. Definitely looking forward to your thoughts on the remaining collection!

Edited (Autofill error) 2019-08-22 11:56 (UTC)

Orwell in Spain up soon, so as to return it to you in September! :D

how detective fiction used to be fine with relatively low-stakes plots about missing jewels and now it's got to be a body a week or everyone yawns and goes home.

One of the things I like about Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman mysteries is that, at least in the ones I've read so far, the mystery isn't always a murder. (Phryne Fisher, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be able to get through a book without someone being offed.)

I didn't know that Greenwood had written anything but the Phryne Fisher books!

Yep! The Corinna Chapman mysteries are about a baker living in modern (well, turn-of-the-millenium) Melbourne. The mysteries are decent, but I read them for the interesting people who live in Insula, the building where Corinna has her shop and her flat, and for the other characters that pop up along the way.

She's written a bunch of other books as well, not all mysteries, but I haven't read any of them.

Ooh, I should get my library hands on this! I haven't read any of his nonfiction before and it seems very much up my alley.

I probably would never have gotten around to reading his nonfiction if

gramarye1971 hadn't encouraged me and I'm so glad she did, because I like it much better than his fiction, as it turns out.

(Sidenote though that there are a couple passages in Down and Out in Paris and London that are definitely a bit anti-Semitic in a way that I think later Orwell would probably avoid.)

Mm, good to know. Thank you!

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