Orwell's Roses

I recommend Rebecca Solnit’s recent book Orwell’s Roses. I didn’t know what to expect of it, but it brought together my real, though shallow, interest in Orwell with my deep interest in plants, as only one of our best essayists could. 

Now I’m better informed on Orwell—possibly to the point where I might sound like a bit of a know-it-all—and I have even more to say about roses. Plus England, coal, enclosure, Tina Modotti, and a number of other subjects.

Some of the things I learned:

• That Orwell planted roses, and generally gardened and almost-farmed throughout much of his adult life.
• That he found replenishment in his digging and sowing, and in nature. And that he knew his interests in these activities were not acceptable to a large part of the left, because they were outside the capitalist system and lacked a "class angle."
• That what grounded Orwell’s world view is the fact that he was a reporter. He didn’t just pontificate from a room somewhere, or even his garden. He went places, like coal mines or the Spanish Civil War, and knew what people’s lived experiences were there. 
• That Orwell’s father’s family was descended from sugar plantation owners—enslavers—in Jamaica. Sugar, that historically evil substance, and the Blairs were part of it in the 1700s, before intervening generations became part of the army and civil service colonizing India. His mother grew up in Burma with a French father who was a teak farmer. Solnit writes, “I don’t believe in ancestral guilt, but I do believe in inheritance, and Orwell came from people who benefited from the imperial enterprise and the domestic hierarchies and who sometimes held real power” (page 168). 
• Where the phrase “bread and roses” came from and how it makes even more sense than I thought it did. Once Solnit introduces it, she weaves it throughout the rest of the text. 
• That dahlias, while named for a Swede named Dahl, were first the cocoxochitl plant, which is native to the valley of Mexico that is now Mexico City, and that Jamaica Kincaid wrote an essay about this called “Flowers of Evil,” which I should look up.
  

One part of Orwell’s Roses that particularly spoke to me was about coal mining and his book The Road to Wigan Pier. The chapter starts out by referring to Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," because the children used in coal-mining were like the desperate, degraded child in "Omelas." Except there were many children, who weren’t metaphors, as Solnit shows through the stories of children who were U.K. miners in the 19th century. And people organized to change it, instead of walking away.

By the time Orwell went into the mines in the mid-1930s, the miners were adults and teenagers, but the conditions were still horrific: three-foot ceilings, 100°F temperatures, and the air full of coal dust. The connection from that past of coal mining to our present of tar sands oil extraction, other oil extraction in post-colonial countries like Nigeria, and the mining of rare-earth metals—all fueling perpetual growth and climate change—is not lost on many readers, I imagine.

The idea of some of “us” living a softer life while others suffer (and that this is structural) is a recurring theme in Orwell’s writing. I’ve mentioned it before, and Solnit later cites two different Orwell quotes on a similar point: “In order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream” and then 10 years later, “You have got to choose between liberating India and having extra sugar. Which do you prefer?” (both on page 183). Later in the book, Solnit comes up with the phrase “knowing is an act of volition”: those who know, like Orwell after he visited the coal mines, feel compelled to act in some way to change the situation.  

What did Orwell believe? I've always been a bit confused about that, with my admittedly shallow knowledge of him and his work. He wasn’t a modernist, Solnit says, and he was skeptical of industrialization. Centralized authority was not the answer, and utopia not possible. Socialism was not about perfection: “Socialists don’t claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better” (Orwell, quoted on page 98). They also are not about creating happiness, but rather human brotherhood, which I would call solidarity or mutual aid — “a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another” (Orwell quoted again, page 100).

As a closing, here’s one final quote from Solnit in the early pages of the book:

"If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it…" (page 5).