The beginning of a Journal is a
difficult task. It takes a great deal of courage and even greater amount of
talent to be able to write diaries, when written honestly. Journals are a great
way to get a good start into a literary journey if only one could gather enough
courage and is blessed with talent to tolerate the mundane realism of life. You
need a sharp pen and thick skin to get down writing a readable journal. It can
be a starting point for a writer. You can use the real to reach out to
imaginary. Not all diaries become The Orwell Diaries or The Notebook of Samuel Butler, Autobiography of Anthony Trollope or that of
Mark Twain. Some are propelled by the honesty and courage of the writer to
expose him or herself to public scrutiny and ridicule, but mostly, these
memoirs are made memorable by the immense talent that goes into writing them.
Journals tell the world your point
of view with a rare honesty. You have, of course, written them without knowing
or intending that they will someday be read.
This is where the demarcation between the public and private position of
the author on various issues melts and merges into one. Journals look back
mostly at the recent past and allows the inherent way with words that the
author has be exploited and make him look wiser than he really is. But then,
they also make him look sillier than he really is if his lies are caught. A
smart writer of journal travels through the truth telling with a skillful
skirting of opinion. He does not make an opinion, does not posit, he merely states,
or at least, pretends to.
George Orwell’s diaries (in all
eleven of them covering the period 1931-1949) are similarly descriptive and do
not eminently attempts to take a position. Even when he speaks about the Jews
outnumbering the rest in the tube, Christopher Hitchens suggests that the writer
merely attempts to objectively state a fact, and is not prejudiced. The
simplicity and sparseness of style makes one believe Hitchens. Even when the
writer at certain occasion makes a comment on the general state of being around
him for instance, “..I don’t think an intelligent man can be consistently
cheerful these days”, there is some attempt to escape the attention of the
reader in spite of the universality and profundity of the statement.
One cannot help but notice a keen
eye which notices the truth which hides beneath the labyrinth of pretense and
hypocrisy which plagues the society as much today as it did in the 1930s. For
instance, the statement, “…beyond a certain point (therefore) Socialism and
Capitalism are not easy to distinguish, the state and the capitalist tending to
merge into one” – a lament as true and as common today as it was then. Truth
has this inherent capacity to transcend time, it survives time. In fact, the
eternal existence of truth is the measure of its veracity. That is what denotes the strength of a
Journal, its honesty, not its style. Orwell’s diary doesn’t work on emotions
like say, Paul Aster’s Winter Journal; it plays on truth, stark and glorious
(not to say, that an emotional diary doesn’t have its charm, it does, in fact
Paul Auster mesmerizes with his emotive narrative). It is not an introspective
style of diary writing. It doesn't dwell into the inside of his own minds and
feelings, it doesn’t brood in melancholy. It is an outward-looking writing
which keenly observes the world around him with rare objectivity. He mentions
painstakingly his statement of account and the miles he walked in the day (also
the recipe of fruit loaf attributed to Mrs Searle). Truth is strikingly attractive when it is
without pretense. He writes, “Women are allowed to do all the housework
unaided, even when the man is unemployed, and it is always the man who sits in
the comfortable chair” and in its plainness and factual nature, it hits home
the truth better than any complicated essay on gender equality.
The diary is a social commentary
of the times Orwell lived in. The truth he writes stays true even today. “A working man always feels himself the slave
of a more or less mysterious authority” which would hit home any working man
even today, though it would be hard to perfectly define the boundaries between
a middle-class and working man that Orwell refers to in today’s world of
knowledge worker as they overlap into each other. Sometimes the diaries gets too
dreary to keep the interest of reader captivated but then one needs to sift
through cabbages and eggs and potatoes (his domestic diaries which are the
one’s made most popular through online blog being run by Orwell Prize,
beginning on 9th of August, 1938) do become tiresome, for the egg is
an egg even if they were laid by George Orwell’s Moroccan hens) to discover the
grim optimism of war time in his war-time diaries. His writings turn political
here, from the social commentary of the road to Wigan pier. These diaries
without attempting to aggrandize the war offer a peek into the mind of common
citizens as they wait for impending calamities and rare hope of peace, sometime
ahead in their lives. He is tired of war, critical of leaders and saddened by
the megalomania wrapped in patriotism and faux-nationalism but still hopes and writes,
“I have so much to live for, in spite of poor health and having no children.”
There is a general disgust of war and the dilettante decision-makers, the
rabble-rousers- the media, responsible for the war being thrust on hapless
citizens which reflects in his writing
for instance, when he quotes from Homage to Catalonia, “One of the most
horrible features of war is that all the war propaganda, all the screaming and
lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting..; the
soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot
ever gets near a front-line trench..” The matter is even more relevant today
with armchair pundits advocating war on twitter and Facebook. This is a journal
which does not for a minute, pretends to be an autobiography, being too
unemotional, too sparse and too objective to qualify as one. But it is the same
laconic dryness which makes it interesting and even interesting at places while
one wades through the mundane and counts the eggs hatched by Orwell’s Moroccan
hens. We lesser mortals can only look in awe at Orwell’s Moroccan hens just as
we are charmed by Mr. Eliot’s cats.
This post celebrates Orwell Diaries which starts today, though in year 1938. The same is being preserved in a blog format by Orwell Prize society which proclaims to be working towards transforming political writing into art.The Orwell Diaries
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