From a young age, the author knew he wanted to be a writer. He tried to abandon this idea between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, but realized that it was outraging his true nature. The author was the middle child of three, and their loneliness made them unpopular in school. He developed a habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, which mixed his literary ambitions with feelings of being isolated and undervalued.
Throughout his childhood and boyhood, the author produced only half a dozen pages of serious writing. He wrote his first poems at four or five, a poem about a tiger, and a patriotic poem during the war. He also wrote bad and unfinished nature poems in the Georgian style and attempted a short story. Throughout this time, the author engaged in literary activities, such as making-to-order stuff, semi-comic poems, and editing school magazines. For fifteen years or more, he carried out a continuous “story” about themselves, a kind of diary existing only in the mind. This habit continued until he was about twenty-five, and he found the joy of mere words, such as the sounds and associations of words. The author’s first completed novel, Burmese Days, was a naturalistic novel with unhappy endings, detailed descriptions, arresting similes, and purple passages where words were used partly for their own sound.
The author discusses the four great motives for writing, focusing on herer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. These motives exist in different degrees in every writer and vary depending on their atmosphere. Sheer egoism is a strong one, shared by scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, and successful businessmen. Aesthetic enthusiasm is a less common motive, but even writers may have pet words or phrases that appeal to them for non-utilitarian reasons. Historical impulse is the desire to see things as they are, finding out true facts and storing them for posterity.
Political purpose is the desire to push the world in a certain direction, altering others’ ideas of the kind of society they should strive after. The author reflects on his own experiences, including being forced into a pamphleteer during the Indian Imperial Police, poverty, and the Spanish Civil War. He struggles to reach a firm decision on his political orientation, expressing his dilemma in a poem he wrote at the end of 1935. He reflects on his past, stating that he was born in an evil time and missed the pleasant haven of preaching about eternal doom. the author emphasizes the importance of understanding a writer’s early development and the various motives they have for writing. By addressing these factors, writers can better navigate their writing journey and ultimately achieve their goals.
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 shaped the author’s perspective on writing, with every line of serious work written against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. It is essential to be conscious of one’s political bias to act politically without sacrificing aesthetic and intellectual integrity. The author aims to make political writing into an art by reconciling a feeling of partisanship and injustice with the public, non-individual activities of the age. This process raises problems of construction, language, and truthfulness. For example, the author’s book about the Spanish civil war, Homage to Catalonia, contains a long chapter defending Trotskyists accused of plotting with Franco, which would have been uninteresting for ordinary readers.
Critics criticized the book for turning it into journalism, but the author remained angry about the false accusations. The author has not written a novel for seven years, but hopes to write another soon. He acknowledges that all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and that writing a book is an exhausting struggle. Good prose is like a windowpane, and the author knows which motives deserve to be followed. Looking back at his work, the author sees that it is invariably where he lacked a political purpose that he wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally.
