Like a windowpane
Dear Reader,
George Orwell was ‘an impassioned advocate of clear, plain English’ (Colin Burrow) who specialised in ‘plain prose’ (Janan Ganesh) and exhibited ‘stylistic Calvinism’ (Patrick West). All recent examples from perceptive writers, but you could add dozens more. And there is, plainly, some truth in it. You don’t need to read Orwell’s sentences twice. He hated euphemism and pretentiousness. He famously advised his readers to ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’ and that ‘If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.’ If you asked a hundred bookish people to guess who opened a book with, say, this sentence –
The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking.
– nobody would mistake it for Orwell. There is the half-truth.
And yet all this gives a completely false impression of how Orwell used the language. It suggests that he wanted English prose to have the smooth, clean-swept, slightly shiny texture of a warehouse floor, the better to trundle great pallet trucks of content from A to B.
A lot of contemporary writing is like that. But if I sit back and think of what sticks in my mind from Orwell, it is this kind of thing:
The elephant who, when shot, ‘looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old.’ The springtime toad who emerges from hibernation with ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent’. The working-class mother in Nineteen Eighty-Four whose body has been ‘blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip’, and yet is somehow beautiful. The statement, regarding art and morality, that ‘it should be possible to say, “This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.”’ The passage which gives Coming Up for Air its title: ‘Like the big sea-turtles when they come paddling up to the surface, stick their noses out and fill their lungs with a great gulp before they sink down again among the seaweed and the octopuses’. The picture of Enlightenment man, sawing at the branch he was sitting on, only to discover that ‘The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.’ The journalist reaching for pat phrases as ‘a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow’…
In short, what comes to mind is images. And that last one, the packet of aspirins, is the key: it is Orwell’s image for the writer who is just grabbing at whatever language comes to hand. What should a writer do instead? This is the part of ‘Politics and the English Language’ which nobody ever really pauses over, unlike the ‘never use a long word when a short word will do’ stuff. I hesitate to quote it because it is probably the secret of non-fiction writing, and obviously it is in the Pineapple’s commercial interest for all other prose to degenerate into unreadable tedium. But the Pineapple also considers itself a friend to humanity. So here goes.
When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person.
This is a very arduous discipline. If everyone did it, there would be an epidemic of nervous breakdowns in the literary and journalistic world, though on the other hand the quality of prose would skyrocket. Because this is really hard – perhaps too hard for anyone to do all the time. Looking back over the last 500 words, I did try with ‘the smooth, clean-swept’ warehouse image. I tried not to use any words to describe contemporary writing: I sort of held my breath and focussed on what sort of pictures and impressions rose to the surface of my mind, and then tried to bring that impression out in words. Did it work? It’s OK, and probably some readers will like it and some will think it’s lame, and both have a point. That’s the thing about arduous disciplines: you can’t get instant results.
I half-did it with ‘arduous discipline’, because I do think the monastic way of life is a suitable image for self-sacrifice, the refusal of soft comfort, in pursuit of some high goal. But I didn’t really pause over it. I didn’t see any monks. Likewise with ‘skyrocket’. I did imagine and feel the quality of prose surging upwards; but I didn’t properly see a skyrocket. Actually, what is a skyrocket? Is it a military thing or a Bonfire Night thing, or both?
I didn’t do it at all with ‘the key’. I wasn’t thinking about a locked gate, standing formidably between the writer and good prose, and Orwell coming along, whistling and jangling a set of keys, and the writer’s heart leaping as they realise he is going to let them in. I just tapped out ‘the key’ because it was the obvious phrase to use.
So there is a brief Orwellian examination of conscience, which I can only recommend as a fellow sinner. If it was universally adopted, we would certainly be saved from the really abysmal stuff; you know, ‘the melee, which has generated considerable buzz, is a microcosm of deeper fault lines…’ But it would also redeem the sort of middling good-enough prose which we all tend to produce. Let me take an example from a seriously gifted journalist, Andy Beckett, whose revelatory history books and brilliantly intelligent features are enough to make one weep with envy. Even he, when writing about politics, will say something like
During the 2005 election, the improvements Blair had made to public services were overshadowed by Iraq. In a similar way, Starmer’s still relatively radical policies on workplace rights and the environment – already not as visible to voters as they should be – are being further obscured by the acrimony inside and outside the party over his stance on Gaza. Centre-left politics loses much of its moral force when its interest in morality seems to evaporate outside Britain’s borders.
Does ‘overshadowing’ evoke a shadow falling across the page, or ‘stance’ summon the image of Keir Starmer decisively placing his hands on his hips, or ‘evaporate’ make one feel that morality is vanishing like dew rising from a field? Not really. It is all just the kind of thing we – me too – write because we’re on deadline and ‘evaporate’ does a reasonable job. But when you turn to a genius like R.H. Tawney, who surely wrote by the Orwell principle even if only by instinct, and come across something like
Labour programmes [are] less programmes than miscellanies – a glittering forest of Christmas trees, with presents for everyone.
or
the tenure of much of the land of England by men with whom, however poor, no landlord or employer could interfere, set a limit to the power of wealth, and made rural society at once more alert and more stubborn, a field where great ideas could grow and great causes find adherents. Political and religious idealism flourish bravely in a stony soil. What makes them droop is not poverty, but the withering shadow cast by complete economic dependence.
it is as warming and invigorating as changing water for wine.
So here’s to more Orwellian ‘plainness’, if plainness means what he meant by it. ‘Good prose is like a windowpane,’ he wrote, which people assume implies it should be unadorned and barely noticeable. But in an age of mass travel, that is not all that windowpanes do. You can look through them and see things you never dreamed of.
Photo: © Ian Taylor (Creative Commons)