Read Orwell for Free Online Page B

unclearly, “there is nothing either concealed or spectacularly revealed in his letters,” the unpublished letters and papers in the Archive at London University are not available to scholars, while those in the New York Public Library and the University of Texas can be read but not quoted. Only selections from the last Notebook are published, so that Orwell's notes for a projected essay on Evelyn Waugh are printed while those for an essay on Conrad and a long short story are not.
    Though Mrs. Orwell writes, “Anything he would have considered as an essay is certainly included,” the long political essays in
The Betrayal of the Left
and
Victory or Vested Interests?
, and the Introduction to
British Pamphleteers
(which is better than “Pamphlet Literature”) have been omitted. The following published though uncollected writings have considerable value and deserve to be printed in a fifth volume: the sixteen film and drama reviews for
Time and Tide
(1940–41); the fourteen war reports from France and Germany for the
Observer
and the
Manchester Evening News
(early 1945) which (pace Mrs. Orwell) are much more like “straight reporting” than his wartime “London Letters”; the very important book reviews on Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, Butler, Edmund Wilson and F. R Leavis; the other interesting reviews of Milton, Byron, Balzac, Stendhal, Gogol, Chekhov, Rilke, Mann, Hardy, Hopkins, Joyce, Silone and Richard Wright; and finally the shorter reviews on the subjects of his major essays in which he first worked out his ideas on novelists who influenced him: Dickens, Gissing and Koestler, and on those whom he criticized for their reactionary political views: Swift, Tolstoy, Kipling, Wells, Wodehouse and Henry Miller. 3
    The most interesting unpublished material printed in these volumes includes 284 letters (relatively few of them before Orwell became famous in his last years), the “War Diaries” (1940–42), the brief “Manuscript Notebook” (1949) and the Preface to the Ukrainian edition of
Animal Farm
where he describes the original creative impulse of that book: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx's theory from the animals’ point of view.” Of less interest are “Clink,” “Hop Picking,”
“The Road to Wigan Pier
Diary” and “Notes on the Spanish Militias,” which are very similar to material already published in Orwell's early books. The remaining 1500 pages of previously published material consists of the 32 major essays (autobiographical, literary,sociological and political), 77 short articles and reviews, 73 (nearly all) of the “As I Please” column and all the 15 “London Letters.”
    The most striking thing about this occasional journalism, produced in Grub Street fashion at the rate of three or four pieces a week, is how readable and interesting it still is, for Orwell is the great master of colloquial ease. His style is extremely flexible and far-ranging, from very close observation:
    A few rats running slowly through the snow, very tame, presumably weak with hunger;
    and witty aphorisms:
    Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers;
    Nine times out of ten a revolutionary is merely a climber with a bomb in his pocket;
    to a strange Swiftian presentation of the seemingly familiar:
    All our food springs ultimately from dung and dead bodies, the two things which of all others seem to us the most horrible;
    and the startling, almost Donne-like openings of his major essays:
    As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me;
    Autobiography is only to be