On a bright cold day in early April, right after my little brother was tucked in for an afternoon nap, our babysitter and I sat on the living room sofa and pulled out our books. I had picked up yet another Nancy Drew mystery, and she had brought a novel assigned for her college literature class. Silence briefly descended as we settled into our books, but within seconds, she started laughing. When I looked questioningly at her, she shared the book’s first line that had given her such pleasure: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” I leaned over to look at the page as she read — and I continued to read over her shoulder for the rest of the afternoon.
A few hours later when the babysitter left, I rifled through my parents’ bookshelves until I found a mass-market paperback of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I finished the novel late that night — not fully understanding some of the major points in the book but nevertheless feeling transformed. I was stunned by Orwell’s picture of totalitarianism, but the transformation I went through was not only into a more politically aware person. I had also become a real reader; Nineteen Eighty-Four was the first “grown-up book” I ever read.
When I started ninth grade several years later, I discovered that all the students in my high school were assigned Orwell’s novel in the spring of their junior years. I realized that my class would — wildly — be reading it in the spring of 1984. Surely, I thought, the Thought Police would not start monitoring everything we did as soon as that — but still, the idea that we would completely escape the world of Big Brother seemed unlikely. I was not hopeful about 1984. Orwell himself, steeped in political ideas about fascism and other forms of injustice, must have sometimes felt overwhelmed himself as he imagined the future as “a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.”
But Orwell found a way to persist: he planted roses — as well as fruit trees and vegetable gardens. “A garden is always a place of becoming,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Orwell’s Roses, her brilliant new collection of essays about the author. Gardening is “a gesture of hope, that these seeds planted will sprout and grow, this tree will bear fruit, that spring will come, and so, possibly, will some kind of harvest,” she says. “It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.” This kind of work was a “reinforcement and refuge” for Orwell, reminding him of “what makes our lives worth living.” In her collection, Solnit is interested not only with Orwell’s literal gardening but also with his use of gardening as a topic in his writings. “If you dig into Orwell’s work,” she says, “you find a lot of sentences about flowers and pleasures and the natural world.”
The breadth of Solnit’s thinking is on full display in Orwell’s Roses. Arguing that roses are “so ubiquitous they’re literally wallpaper and are routinely depicted on everything from lingerie to tombstones,” Solnit has filled her book with essays far afield from Orwell’s own digging. She considers a diversity of topics — from Tina Modotti’s famous rose photography to working conditions in the commercial rose industry in Colombia, from the enclosure movement in 18th-century England to Jamaica Kincaid’s discussion of colonialism, from Stalin’s efforts to force lemons to grow in an inhospitable climate to Orwell’s disturbing descents into England’s own coal mines, and from Ralph Lauren to Emma Goldman. Essays that might initially feel like fascinating diversions are intricately juxtaposed against each other, highlighting broad themes that thread throughout the collection: that roses (and pleasure in general) can give us the strength or rejuvenation we need to work for justice, that access to pleasure is an essential element of true freedom, and that the cultivation and appreciation of beauty can itself be a kind of resistance.
In one of the strongest essays, Solnit explains that the slogan “Bread for All, and Roses Too” came into widespread use during the fight for women’s suffrage at the beginning of the 20th-century. Activist Helen Todd articulated the meaning of the phrase: “Life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security” should be “the heritage of every child that is born in the country,” but each citizen should also have “the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books.” Reflecting on Todd’s call for reforms beyond the provision of food and housing, Solnit states that roses have the ability to feed “something subtler: not just the hearts, but imagination, psyches, senses, identities.” Humans, she suggests, need roses because we need to be nourished in a more personal and subjective way than bread alone can provide.
Activists have sometimes argued that these roses are merely distractions from the real work of providing bread to those in need. They dismiss desires for pleasure and beauty as indulgent, bourgeois and counterrevolutionary. “The desire for them should be weeded out and scorned,” says Solnit as she summarizes their argument.
But she disagrees. Art unrelated to political questions can, she suggests, “reinforce a sense of self and society, of values and commitments, or even the capacity to pay attention, that equip a person to meet the crises of the day.” That is, beauty (in its broadest meaning) can help us both understand and engage in what is happening around us. Even artworks we consider apolitical “can and do help construct the self that engages in politics,” she says. They help “produce the empathic imagination, the insights, principles, orientations, collective memories that engagement requires.” Experiencing these roses may encourage us to create a society based not only on the bread of justice but on the beauty of empathy and compassion.
These metaphoric roses can even be tools of political resistance themselves. This type of “crucial beauty” can inspire “gesture[s] of defiance” — a defiance that is both expressed and preserved in people’s personal and private lives. Solnit’s most direct articulation of this idea may be found in her analysis of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. She sees a tremendous amount of “lushness and beauty and pleasure” in the novel. Those pleasures are “endangered, furtive, corrupted,” she acknowledges, “but they exist.” And the moments of beauty and pleasure are the moments when resistance to totalitarianism is both created and practiced.
When protagonist Winston Smith sees a “peculiarly beautiful” old book in the window of a junk shop, he is “stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it,” writes Orwell in his novel, despite his awareness that the totalitarian government in Oceania would find the purchase treasonous. Smith opens the marbled cover to find blank pages of “smooth creamy paper.” The beautiful pages inspire him to begin a diary in which he writes words far more critical of the government than he fully realized he felt. Suddenly, Smith realizes why he is writing: the diary is “for the future, for the unborn,” and it is a project which allows him to imagine a world unlike the one in which he lives. The book gives him a space both for recordkeeping and contemplation. This kind of knowledge of the past as well as the imagining of a future makes it impossible for a state to have total control over its citizens. “Memory is subversive,” summarizes Solnit. “Hope is subversive.” And beauty — whether seen in the roses a gardener plants or the blank pages awaiting a new story — can inspire those transformative acts.
In this collection as in her other writing, Solnit proves herself a worthy successor to master essayist Orwell himself. She recognizes that her subject is timely: “I wrote this book in a time of intense crisis,” she concludes, arguing that our contemporary braid of environmental chaos, political authoritarianism and dishonesty, and violation of human rights mirrors in some ways the world about which Orwell wrote. In her acknowledgements section, Solnit considers the people who do Orwell’s work in our own time. Journalists, cultural critics, social justice organizers, and environmental activists all perform a central part of his mission. But Solnit also insists that the people who produce “pleasure and joy, beauty and those … musing, meandering moments” — the gardeners but also the artists, poets, and musicians — “also feed us and shape us.”
Near the end of Orwell’s life, in the years after his wife died, he and his son moved to a quiet island in the Hebrides. Despite the author’s poor health, he planted primroses, tulips, pansies, and lupines around their remote cottage, as well as seven different kinds of fruit trees and an abundance of roses. Orwell was, recognizes Solnit, “planting a future again.”
[Published by Viking on October 19, 2021, 320 pages, $28.00 hardcover]