Facing Unpleasant Facts by George Orwell

At the library recently I picked up a recent collection of essays by George Orwell. The first of two volumes, Facing Unpleasant Facts includes narrative essays while the second, All Art Is Propaganda, is devoted to critical essays.

Like a new selection from Thoreau’s Journal, a new collection of Orwell essays provides an excuse for going back to work you may have been meaning to return to. Selecting the contents of these two volumes couldn’t have been all that difficult, since Harcourt had already published Orwell’s complete essays, journalism, and letters in a four-volume set. (I can leaf through my own set without getting up from the breakfast table.)

However, editor George Packer does his part by providing a foreword and an introduction, and making a strong argument that despite all the copies of 1984 and Animal Farm in print, Orwell was first and foremost an essayist.*

As if to underline the title Facing Unpleasant Facts, the perennially grumpy Packer begins with “The Spike” (about homelessness), “Clink” (about prison) and “A Hanging” (self-explanatory). He ends with “How the Poor Die” and “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a fifty-page reminiscence of the public school where the young Orwell was chronically underfed and beaten for wetting his bed. But in between are pieces like “In Defence of English Cooking,” “A Nice Cup of Tea,” “The Moon Under Water,” and “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” that are thoroughly enjoyable and often quite funny.

*At the PEN festival, Philip Gourevitch and others discussed how the “big game” of the novel has caused literary masters of nonfiction like Primo Levi (and, I would add, George Orwell, John McPhee, Edward Hoagland, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Richard Rhodes) to get second-class treatment.