Orwell's Roses

Orwell's Roses

Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021)

I'm always drawn to books that serve as portals to the Infinite Library, and this one is a classic. Delightful in its own right, it would also serve well as a companion to a book club or an adult education class reading George Orwell. Orwell's Roses is lightly biographical, but far more than that; Rebecca Solnit is the contemporary writer who can actually match and follow Orwell's range of interests, small and large, botanical and political.

I read Orwell in high school, like most people perhaps, and some of the essays still linger in mind: "Such, such were the joys," an essay about the misery of his school days, being crammed with facts for the entrance exams to Eton; "Shooting an Elephant," about serving in Burma as a colonial policeman; and "Politics and the English Language," surely still a guide to the wiles of propaganda. But now I'd want to read Homage to Catalonia alongside other people's war stories, and side by side with Animal Farm, to find out how Trotsky figures in both.

Orwell planted the roses of the title in 1936. Later the same year, he went to Spain to fight on the Loyalist side against Franco, an experience that deeply informed him as a thinker and a writer. Ten years later, he wrote about the roses and their outsized return on investment: "One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence."

Solnit was actually looking for those trees when she stopped, on her way from London to Cambridge, in the tiny Hertfordshire village of Wallington, to which Orwell and his wife moved in 1936. The trees are gone, but two of the roses still bear flowers. Solnit felt a 'joyous exaltation' to stand in their presence and realize that "this man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses." As she will discover, and demonstrate, Orwell lets nature and beauty into his writing, even at its grimmest.

In the 1940's, many of his essays were published in Tribune, a socialist weekly. Then as now, the political Left had a puritanical, ascetic streak, which Orwell resisted head on: "...is it politically reprehensible...to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so." At the heart of such idiosyncratic, personal pleasures lies a fundamental sense of liberty. There must always be things, however small and transient, that no one can take away from us; many of the best of them were not given to us by people in the first place.

At the same time, Solnit is looking into the largest possible distances and spans of time. What trees are still standing that your grandparents might have planted? No, go back to the Sequoias of Solnit's native California, standing for thousands of years. No, go back to the Carboniferous period, three hundred million years ago, when the sunlight was captured that would become the coal and oil deposits we've been burning for the past three hundred years.

And, much as Orwell reported on the northern coal mines in The Road to Wigan Pier, Solnit goes to Colombia to look into the industrial growing of roses for the North American market. How did you think those millions of dozens of roses got to all the local florists for Mothers' Day? It's a far cry from picking up a few plants at Woolworth's.

Still, at least as far back as 1910, 'Bread and Roses' have been paired as necessities of life worth fighting for. "Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right." Orwell may not have known the slogan, but he was evidently in full sympathy with what it stands for. In one of his greatest essays, "Why I Write," he says this: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information." What a worthy ambition!

 

 

Any Good Books, April 2022, by email