The Printer’s Devil

Jump to Comments

Eric A. Blair, one of the greatest reporters of the 20th century and may be of all time, was born 104 years ago today, June 25, in Great Britain.

You know him by his pseudonym — George Orwell.

You’ve probably read many of his books and essays; “1984″ and “Animal Farm” defined the 20th century and remain politically important works for the 21st century.

Orwell wanted to turn political writing into literary art, an ambition at which he succeeded.

Be it fiction or non-fiction, Orwell’s work remains some of the best political analysis in the English language and was more than a recitation of facts and counterfacts. He really told his readers the way things really are. And telling readers the way things really are is the ultimate in good reporting.

Orwell followed my favorite newspaper dictum of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

And Orwell had no sacred cows. Although he was a proud socialist and fought in a Marxist militia in the Spanish Civil War, he called things as he saw them, whether it was criticizing capitalism or the “democratic socialism” of Josef Stalin. His sharpest attack, in the classic book “Animal Farm,” took on Stalin at a time when few liberals and socialists — or even industrialists and capitalists — in the West were willing to criticize him, then a World War II ally who had joined the fight against the Nazis.

As a small-town editor, you’ll profit immensely by reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.”

I have a well-worn copy of a book of Orwell’s essays that includes “Politics and the English Language” and I try to re-read it at least once every year. The essay has become easier to find and I found at least one copy on the Internet.

The essay includes one of the best short list of rules on how to write I’ve seen anywhere. Says Orwell:

• “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

• “Never usr a long word where a short one will do.”

• “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”

• “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”

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

• “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

I also recommend that you read Orwell’s appendix to “1984,” in which he described the language of 1984 and how language could be subverted to obstruct communication and to prevent “thinkcrime” about freedom and liberty by eliminating or sanitizing the words that described the concepts. Chilling reading and still true more than 60 years after it was written.

Orwell also has written one of the best book endings — not to mention a dead-on prophesy — in his book “Homage to Catalonia” about his experiences fighting the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

At a time when the world was trying to ignore the Nazi and Fascist menace during the 1930s, Orwell said that Hitler wouldn’t stay ignored for long:

“And then England — southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere.

“Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface.

“Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen — all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”