The four volumes of the collected essays and journalism of George Orwell are among my oldest friends, books I reread often. In one of them, Orwell talks of planting some roses and fruit trees at his Hertfordshire home. This was in 1936, just before the Spanish Civil War where Orwell was wounded.
A decade later, he wrote, “Between them, those seven rose bushes will have given up to a hundred or a hundred and fifty months of bloom … the planting of a tree is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root, it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”
The American novelist, essayist and feminist Rebecca Solnit, who read the same essays, was impressed enough to go looking for the rose bushes. How the less familiar Orwell – the gardener and nature lover – informs the better known personality is the journey Solnit’s brilliant Orwell’s Roses takes us on. It introduces us to another facet of the ‘wintry conscience of a generation’, and is confirmation that you might prepare for your central mission in life by doing things that may seem unrelated.
It is a rambling journey which takes in the horrors of the flower industry in Colombia, a large painting by Joshua Reynolds (Orwell’s great great grandfather Charles Blair is a subject), coal mining in Britain, climate change, a fresh look at 1984 and Animal Farm, Englishness, Orwell’s farm on the island of Jura in Scotland in his last days, etymology of some English words, the writer Jamaica Kincaid, colonialism, the connection between Ralph Lauren and The Great Gatsby, feminism, Stalin and Trofim Lysenko, Vermeer, the idea of beauty, the river Orwell, and much more.
It is, to use a Solnit word, a “rhizomatic” book, one that spreads in many directions.
“Outside my work,” wrote Orwell, “the thing I care most about is gardening,” Solnit says, “His grimmest writings have moments of beauty; his most lyrical essays nevertheless grapple with substantive issues.”
It was said of Orwell by his friend Cyril Connolly, that he “could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.” Solnit cannot smell a rose without moralising on the conditions of the flower industry. Writer and subject are perfectly matched.
Take this, about the Soviet dictator Stalin: “What did it mean to be the enforcer of lies, to prop up illusions and conceal brutal realities, to demand obedience to a version of reality that was a result of your orders and suppressions rather than the data?” It might have been written by Orwell, but it is by Solnit. The meanderings are not only fascinating but appear inevitable.
Not surprisingly, Orwell’s Roses is as much about Orwell as about Solnit the roaming philosopher. “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses,” begins the book. Now, eighty five years later, another writer tells us the significance of the act. For him, and for us.
