Was George Orwell a good literary stylist or bad literary stylist?

[astro]

The subject of this article, NY Tinmes art critic Robert Hughes likes Orwell’s bluntness & clarity, My ex-Government 400 teacher,Professor Glendening (also ex-Governor) thought Orwell’s ideas were bold, but that he was a something of a ham handed stylist.

George Orwell

Which is it?

In Things I Didn’t Know, which chronicles his career through 1970, he says the single greatest influence on his approach to criticism was George Orwell. For Hughes, Orwell’s no-nonsense prose style and clear, everyday language offered an astringent antidote to the “airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry” that filled the art magazines of the early ‘60s. As a result of this early training—and probably also as a matter of temperament—Hughes’ writing is muscular and dazzlingly lucid; he refuses to indulge in sublime metaphysical musings or languid adjectival swooning, opting instead for precise, verbally nimble descriptions of art’s effects.

Orwell’s Rules for writers

In his essay “Politics and the English language,” George Orwell provides six simple rules for all writers of English:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive [voice] where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous

[Bryan_Ekers]

There are a few literary glitches in 1984 and Animal Farm, possibly from expressions common in 1940s Britain which were unfamiliar to my (then) 1980s Canadian eyes, but his work is eminently readable and clear and I’ll take that over pointlessly flowery any day.

[RealityChuck]

If Orwell followed his own rules, his prose would be in very good shape.

[wonky]

Despite my love of and experience with poetry, I like straightforward prose and most of my favorite authors are direct and unflowery.

I like Orwell’s style.

[Tracy_Lord]

His prose is clear and simple and fantastically effective – I’d be curious to hear the “ham-handed” argument, actually!

[Siam_Sam]

I liked him. That’s all I know.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

It seems likely to me that Hughes was referring more to Orwell’s essays than those late two highly stylized novels.

[Derleth]

Orwell repeated the old canard about avoiding the passive voice because he, like the majority of people who use the English language, had no idea what the passive voice is. He’s far from alone in his ignorance: Strunk and White made the same mistake in “The Elements of Style”. What he was searching for a way to inveigh against is the practice of using language to shift the responsibility for actions away from concrete people or groups. This is perfectly exemplified in the now-famous phrase “Mistakes were made.”, which implies that nobody can be to blame for those mistakes any more than somebody could be blamed for an ice storm.

The most important part of that essay (“Politics and the English Language”) was his decrying of the use of stock phrases and gobs of muddy, largely meaningless verbiage instead of articulate and precise language to convey articulate and precise ideas. In his lifetime, the Communists went from supporting Hitler (during the pact he made with the Soviet Union subsequent to his capture of Poland) to demanding his head on a pike (after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union), yet they never admitted the reversal and they never changed their official doctrine as represented in their speeches and pamphlets. They simply redefined their words on the fly to fit the new circumstances. If your words mean nothing, you can use them to cover up absolutely anything. This was the foundation of his conception of Newspeak.

Orwell was much more than competent as a writer (Compare him to Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example.) and while he didn’t attempt poetry, he sometimes pulled it off anyway. Take his opening to “The Lion and the Unicorn”:

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

This is, in a spare style, more effective than a thousand polemical anti-war screeds written by earnest pacifists. Orwell was no pacifist, but he never glorified any aspect of war.

[Bryan_Ekers]

He wasn’t a musical stylist, that’s for sure. He totally swiped Beasts of England from La Cucaracha and My Darling Clementine.

Newspeak’s B vocabulary specifically was full of compound words that implied praise when talking about an ally but abuse when talking about an enemy, like duckspeak and blackwhite. Personally, I find doublethink to be the most terrifying concept in the book, wherein a person can sincerely talk about justice and freedom while simultaneously being oppressive and tyrannical; the contradiction simply absorbed and ignored.

[pseudotriton_ruber_ruber]

Funny, but I read 1984 for the first time very recently and was surprised by how well written it was, and how ingenuously constructed (as a novel) it was. I had alluded to its content for decades without having read it, but I somehow assumed it was heavy-handed and stylistically inept, my admiration for Orwell’s other writing (which I know well and have read often) aside.
**
Derleth,** I’m not sure I’m following your definition of the passive voice. Could you elaborate?

[ITR_champion]

@Derleth

Orwell repeated the old canard about avoiding the passive voice because he, like the majority of people who use the English language, had no idea what the passive voice is. He’s far from alone in his ignorance: Strunk and White made the same mistake in “The Elements of Style”. What he was searching for a way to inveigh against is the practice of using language to shift the responsibility for actions away from concrete people or groups. This is perfectly exemplified in the now-famous phrase “Mistakes were made.”, which implies that nobody can be to blame for those mistakes any more than somebody could be blamed for an ice storm.

Many good authors have used passive voice, and many other have firmly refused to do so. While not all sentences in passive voice necessarily conceal the source of action, there are other arguments against passive voice. For instance one can write “The roadway was filled by a mob of fleeing refugees.” We know it’s the refugees who are acting. Even so, Orwell and others would argue that this is a bad sentence because the reader’s mental focus goes to the roadway rather than the refugees.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

Strunk & White on the passive voice:

III. ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION - Collection at Bartleby.com

This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary.

Looking at the rest of the section doesn’t reveal a problem. Of course, their advice is aimed at beginning and unsure writers, for whom simple and consistent advice is superior to a boatload of qualifications and pedantic explanations about the subtleties of language. If you read anything by most ordinary Americans you’ll understand how good their advice is, even if the finest writers know how best to contravene it.

Derleth, could you explain what you meant by your comment?

[Derleth]

Here are two insightful Language Log articles on the passive voice:
When men were men, and verbs were passive
Passive aggression

From the first link:

Because George Orwell recommended Passive Avoidance in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, Geoff Pullum quoted an ironic observation from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage: “Bryant 1962 reports three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals; the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in ‘Politics and the English Language.’” Since Strunk & White provide another of the streams feeding the massive river of contemporary anti-passivity, I checked a couple of pages of E.B. White’s prose, and found 21% passives. Yesterday, as I read Winston Churchill’s The River War in search of collective nouns, I was struck by the frequency of passive verbs. And as you’ll see below, the numbers back me up – in the passages I checked, Churchill uses passive verbs about as often as active ones. But Churchill, even more than Orwell, Strunk and White, is a model of forceful eloquence. Should 21st-century composition teachers reverse course, and advise their students to bulk up on passives so as to develop powerful, muscular prose?

So, how could they so forcefully inveigh against the passive voice when they use it with such reckless abandon? In addition, from the second cite:

Isn’t that gorgeous? More passives in Orwell’s pompous essay with the warning about how you mustn’t use them than in any periodical you can lay your hands on! The man was either utterly without shame, or blithely unaware of the characteristics of his own usage, or cynically certain that we wouldn’t check.

I’m guessing Orwell honestly had no idea what the passive voice was. Also from the second:

In most cases, Liberman observed, the passive clauses could easily have been re-phrased to make the passives into actives, but White had chosen not to do it. For example:

"This company had a factory in Harlem, where the cases for uprights, squares, and baby grands were manufactured by a crew of beer-drinking Germans, skilled artisans. The actions (keyboard, hammers, dampers, etc.) were bought from a company that specialized in that and were installed at the Horace Waters factory." 

Why not say, where a crew manufactured the pianos? Why not say, the Horace Waters company bought the actions from a company that specialized in that, and installed them at the Harlem factory? I’ll tell you why. Because Strunk and White aim to tell you that you mustn’t use passives; it doesn’t apply to them. What a shameless, pontificating, ignorant, hypocritical, incompetent, authoritarian pair of old weasels they were.

I’m being charitable when I say Strunk and White don’t know what the passive voice is. The alternative is pure assholery on their part.

[Wendell_Wagner]

I think it’s more likely that Orwell simply didn’t realize how much he used the passive himself. I’ve heard people before claim that they didn’t use a certain grammatical construction, but then later on in conversation they did use it. Most people don’t have a good feel for their own grammar.