Reliable Essays by Clive James Read Free Book Online

he loved the surface of the earth and the process of life – which, it should be repeated, is not the same thing as wanting to have a good time and stay alive as long as possible. Of course, it is not because of the quality of his thought that Shakespeare has survived, and he might not even be remembered as a dramatist if he had not also been a poet. His main hold on us is through language.
    A writer has to know a lot about the rhythms of natural speech before he can stretch them over the distance covered by those first two sentences. Each of them is perfectly balanced in itself, and the second is perfectly balanced against the first – the first turning back on itself with a strict qualification, and the second running away in relaxed enjoyment of its own fluency. They could stand on their own, but it turns out that both of them are there to pile their combined weight behind the third sentence – the short one – and propel it into your memory. It hits home with the force of an axiom.
    And it isn’t true – or, anyway, it isn’t true enough. Elsewhere in the essay, Orwell shows signs of being aware that the relationship of Shakespeare’s language to the quality of his thought can never be fully resolved in favour of either term. But not even Orwell could resist a resonant statement that fudged the facts – a clarity that is really an opacity. Yes, Orwell did write like an angel, and that’s the very reason we have to watch him like a hawk. Luckily for us, he was pretty good at watching himself. He was blessed with a way of putting things that made anything he said seem so, but that was only a gift. His intellectual honesty was a virtue.
    Orwell’s standards of plain speaking always were and still are a mile too high for politicians. What finally counts with politicians is what they do, not how they say it. But for journalists how they say it counts for everything. Orwell’s style shows us why a style is worth working at: not just because it gets us a byline and makes a splash but because it compresses and refines thought and feeling without ceasing to sound like speech – which is to say, without ceasing to sound human. At a time when ideological politics still exercised such an appeal that hundreds of purportedly civilized voices had ceased to sound human, Orwell’s style stood out. The remarkable thing is that it still does. Ideologues are thin on the ground nowadays, while any substantial publication has a would-be George Orwell rippling the keys in every second cubicle, but the daddy of modern truthtellers still sounds fresh. So it wasn’t just the amount of truth he told but the way he told it, in prose transmuted to poetry by the pressure of his dedication. This great edition, by revealing fully for the first time what that dedication was like, makes his easy-seeming written speech more impressive than ever, and even harder to emulate. To write like him, you need a life like his, but times have changed, and he changed them.
    New Yorker , 18 January, 1999: also included in Even As We Speak , 2001
    Postscript
    Even if our intention is the most abject homage, we can’t write in praise of heroes without taking their limitations into account, because unless we had noticed their limitations we wouldn’t be writing at all: they would have silenced us. While you are reading them, the great stylists make you want to give up, and in the case of Orwell, the stylist with the anti-style, the effect can last a long time after you have finished reading. I was in bed with a convenient nervous breakdown when I read the four volumes of his collected journalism that came out in 1969. I already knew the standard essays quite well, but the accumulated impact of reading them again, along with all the other material which had become generally available for the first time, would have kept me away from the typewriter for years if I hadn’t noticed something fundamentally wrong amongst everything that he got right.
    He was