George Orwell
show什么意思Why I Write
1.From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about venteen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to ttle down and write books.
2.I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. Nevertheless the volume of s
erious — i.e. riously intended — writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had ‘chair-like teeth’ — a good enough phra, but I fancy the poem was a plagiarism of Blake's ‘Tiger, Tiger’. At eleven, when the war or 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a patriotic poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style. I also attempted a short story which was a ghastly failure. That was the total of the would-be rious work that I actually t down on paper during all tho years.
3.However, throughout this time I did in a n engage in literary activities. To begin with there was the made-to-order stuff which I produced quickly, easily and without much pleasure to mylf. Apart from school work, I wrote vers d'occasion, mi-comic poems which I could turn out at what now ems to me astonishing speed — at fourteen I wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week — and helped to edit
a school magazines, both printed and in manuscript. The magazines were the most pitiful burlesque stuff that you could imagine, and I took far less trouble with them than I now would with the cheapest journalism. But side by side with all this, for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exerci of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about mylf, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I ud to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture mylf as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ cead to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoishell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to arch, and did arch,
一般将来时pptfor the right words, I emed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppo, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.
4.When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from Paradi Lost —
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
足球下载Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.
stupid是什么意思which do not now em to me so very wonderful, nt shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure. As for the need to describe things, I knew all about it already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also f
ull of purple passages in which words were ud partly for the sake of their own sound. And in fact my first completed novel, Burme Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.
I give all this background information becau I do not think one can asss a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perver mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impul to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing pro. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
amendment
crumpler(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to em clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely lfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the n of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and lf-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
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