George Orwell Diaries, edited by Peter Davison, opened the door to George Orwell for me, and I’m forever grateful. I learned why Orwell is the most important writer of the 20th century and why he is as relevant today as he has ever been. Orwell is the ultimate cold warrior, who fought against imperialism, communism, and fascism.
Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are two entertaining and vivid works of first-person reporting. You’ll find the roots of both in his diaries, as well as the seeds of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The book begins with a fine introduction by the late Christopher Hitchens: “By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage.”
You’ll find some of the most perceptive examinations of poverty in 1930s England as Orwell goes undercover as a day laborer, working in the fields and orchards picking hops and fruit. His writing talent is well served by his acute observation and his open, nonjudgmental attitude toward everyone and everything he comes across.
“As to our living accommodation, the best quarters on the farm, ironically enough, were disused stables. Most of us sleep in round tin huts about 10 feet across, with no glass in the windows and all kinds of holes to let in the wind and rain.”
His love of animals, nature, and farming is abundantly evident in his journals. There are long sections musing on daily gardening, hens laying eggs, goat’s milk, and more. One of his goats is named Muriel, just like the goat in Animal Farm. He loved to fish. He also gives a daily weather report. This can be a bit tedious, but it gives us an excellent sense of a man rooted in real things, such as the earth or the impact of a storm.
The Morocco diaries capture the flavor, politics, animals, and people of that time and place. “…there is an obvious great difference in the water supply between peasants’ plots and the plantations of Europeans and wealthy Arabs. The difficulty of water makes an immense amount of work.”
My favorite section was his World War II diaries, which show Orwell the patriot and political activist. He was eager to help in any way he could. He served in the Home Guard and eventually worked for the BBC, producing propaganda broadcasts to India as part of England’s war effort.
He shows the psychological effects of constant air raids as well as the physical damage in and around London, along with the resilience of the English, who went about their daily routines despite the bombardments. These are the early days of the war, and we see the confusion, the shifting attitudes, and the fear that England could be overrun and might even lose the war. He saw through every hypocrite, particularly the rich and the so-called “patriots.”
“[I]t struck me how easy it is to bamboozle an uneducated audience if you have prepared beforehand a set of repartees with which to evade awkward questions.”
He both criticized and praised Churchill, called other politicians imbeciles, and explained why their strategy would likely lose the war. “C said he thought Churchill, though a good man up to a point, was incapable of doing the necessary thing and turning this into a revolutionary war, and for that reason shielded Chamberlain and Co.”
Like his novels and essays, his diaries fit nicely into American politics today. Here is a comment he made about the upper classes: “Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.”
I would have liked to see more about his relationships with the people closest to him, or a little about his literary life, but there’s not much of either.
Orwell’s diary entry about visiting his wife Eileen’s grave becomes even more poignant after reading Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses (2021). He writes: “Polyantha roses on E’s grave have all rooted well.”
He is brave until the end, but it is painful to know he was dying as he finished Nineteen Eighty-Four. He died at the young age of forty-six. A powerful voice like his does not come along very often, and this is an important piece of the Orwell oeuvre.
Find the George Orwell Diaries on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
You’ll love The Best Recent Books about George Orwell. You might also like Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks
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