Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

In the current issue of the New Yorker, in a piece called "HONEST, DECENT, WRONG: The invention of George Orwell", Louis Menand says of the man whose legacy includes Animal Farm, 1984 and Homage to Catalonia: "He was a writer, of course — he was a graphomaniac, in fact: writing was what he lived for?"

Good word that, "graphomaniac". Those who have sought for clues to Orwell's staying power tend to hold up his 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language," as both the key to his integrity and the beacon by which aspiring writers should be guided, but Menand is less than enthused by it, saying that although Orwell wrote many "strong" essays, "Politics and the English Language" is not one of them.

Menand points out that most of the vices highlighted by Orwell had been identified in Fowler's Modern English Usage, and he then delivers this judgement: "Somehow, Orwell has run together his distaste for flowery, stale prose with his distaste for fascism, Stalinism, and Roman Catholicism. He makes it seem that the problem with fascism (and the rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style." This is bound to stir debate, so while the pot is simmering, it may be worth quoting the conclusion of "Politics and the English Language":

"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse —into the dustbin, where it belongs."

Whatever faults Menand may find in the essay, Orwell's conclusion, with its warning about the corruption of words and its demand to fight linguistic complacency, has not been bettered in the past 50 years.

By the way, the provocative title of Menand's article, "HONEST, DECENT, WRONG", comes from a debate with Christopher Hitchens, author of the recently published "Why Orwell Matters", in which Hitchens argues that on the three great issues of the 20th century, imperialism, fascism and Stalinism, Orwell was right. Menand's response:

"Excellent. Many people were against them in Orwell's time, and a great many more people have been against them since. The important question, after condemning those things, was what to do about them, and how to understand the implications for the future. On this level, Orwell was almost always wrong."

This is strong stuff and one gets the feeling that the last word on the matter has not been written.

Diarist of the day: Leo Tolstoy, 21 January 1854

"Here is a fact which needs to be remembered more often. Thackeray spent thirty years preparing to write his first novel, but Alexander Dumas writes two a week."