The more I read Orwell's essays of the 1940s the more they seem like a master class in how to write, which means they are also a master class in how to think. The clarity and impact in his style are so powerful that it's actually shocking. Moreover, it seems to be aging well, so Orwell's reputation (specifically for this) has been increasing.
Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is.
Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded, even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of that.
Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into. I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.
> I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.
Orwell said it himself, in Why I Write: he believed he has a "power of facing unpleasant facts".
By all accounts that sometimes made him difficult company. This focus on negativity probably contributed to his bouts of melancholy.
But this power, I believe, came from always putting people first. Unlike most intellectuals he never fell in love with his own intellect, or with the admiration of "honorable" people. Maybe he romanticized the common people a little too much, especially early in his career, but for him it was never an abstraction. I am not sure if there can be any explanation for this. That's just the way he was. He never stayed inside the lines drawn for him, not the traditional ones of class, nor the ones that one might draw around "radical" intellectuals.
So as a policeman in Burma, he got to know the locals and began to understand the horrors of imperialism. Later in life, he traveled to Catalonia to participate in the anarchist revolution as a common soldier, and saw what was beautiful, and ugly, about that. And Orwell saw firsthand how Stalin was engaged in pragmatic and brutal geopolitics, and was not the center of some worldwide proletarian movement.
Yes, and there is a special class of "unpleasant facts" that Orwell was particularly adept at facing: facts which contradict one's preferred ideology. In this he was remarkably strong and remarkably rare; a refusal to face such facts practically defines political discourse.
Compare that to someone like Hitchens (who comes to mind because he wrote a book-length homage to Orwell and clearly identified with him), who was more typical (and more shallow) in refusing to concede so much as an atom to his enemies.
Even more remarkable is that Orwell could critique ideology without slipping into "on the one hand, on the other hand" wishy-washiness. If you look at contemporary discourse, that's what nearly everyone who isn't a strong partisan does, and it's a false note of its own.
Christopher Hitchens has a few hour long talks recorded on youtube about his book 'Why Orwell matters' and explains what gave him that kind of insight. 1984 was widely distributed in the Soviet underground and those who read it could not figure out how Orwell understood perfectly what life under Stalin was like without having experienced it himself.
Somebody today with that kind of directness and clarity would be John Ralston Saul, who advocates writing in clear language. Voltaire's Bastards was written in the 90s and is very much still relevant today.
If you're like me and prefer reading print books, there's an excellent (and very comprehensive) collection of Orwell's letters, essays and journalism. It's slightly difficult to track down but worth the effort.
There's also the 20-volume, 8500-page Complete Works, which I first saw on the bookshelf of Christopher Hitchens in some interview video. Much more difficult to find [0].
Thanks! I've been looking for something just like this and ended up getting stuck in a maze—there are a lot of uncompelling editions out there. I'm going to try to track this one down.
gruseom asks, Is there anyone writing today with anything like that quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)?
Steven Pinker is attempting to advocate for more clarity and directness in writing. I think his rather long lecture on MIT video, "Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century,"
You might be looking to read in the vein of "creative non-fiction". Many practitioners, at least the ones I tend to appreciate, also had careers as journalists. Into Thin Air was a mammothly famous example.
Other great examples:
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/nose/english/e_nose
Is anyone writing today with that particular quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)? All the candidates I can think of fall far short of it, and only clarify how distinctive Orwell is.
Edit: It's also interesting that this material is now widely seen as classic when at the time it was mere pamphleteering. To my knowledge, Orwell wasn't thought of as a hack—he was respected—but this sort of writing was regarded, even by him, as throwaway work, with a sense that it was too bad that circumstances didn't allow him to do better. (He touches on that in "Why I Write", the first link above.) It's a common theme in the history of art for high-status things to start out as low-status things; this may be a case of that.
Edit 2: Another interesting thing—he was writing this stuff about current events in more or less real time. That's a very murky pond to be looking into. I would very much like to know what it was that gave Orwell that degree of insight.