Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

That summer before my trip to England, when Sam was in town, we had gone to admire the trees planted in San Francisco by Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who had become a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist, as well as a player in the elite money politics of San Francisco.

To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.

They were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.

They’re a widespread wild plant, or many species of plant, and a widely domesticated one, with new varieties created every year, and when it comes to the latter, roses are also big business.

In songs roses often represent love and the beloved as the prize that cannot be grasped or kept. Among the popular songs of the last several decades are “La Vie en Rose,” “Ramblin’ Rose,” “My Wild Irish Rose,” “(I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden,” “A Rose Is Still a Rose,” “Days of Wine and Roses.” In country singer George Jones’s gorgeously lugubrious 1970 hit “A Good Year for the Roses,” however, the rosebushes that go on blooming have proven to be more enduring than his marriage.

“Truths and roses have thorns about them,” says the old aphorism, and Marianne Moore’s poem “Roses Only,” which, like a surprising amount of poetry, is addressed directly to the rose, ends with the remark “Your thorns are the best part of you.” Medieval theologians speculated that there were roses in the Garden of Eden, but the thorns came after the fall from grace.

“How Flowering Plants Conquered the World” is the way a recent scientific article put it. Flowers are the sexual parts of the plants called angiosperms and seeds the offspring of that sexual reproduction, and the revolution was at least as much about the seeds.

Insects that coevolved with flowers received pollen and nectar in return for pollination services, as did the birds and bats that also pollinate as they feed at blossoms.

Seeds constitute a major food source for many other species, including ourselves, as grains, legumes, nuts, fruits, and those vegetables—squashes, tomatoes, peppers, and the rest—we forget are seed-bearing fruits. Seeds too developed mutually beneficial relationships—for example, the berries eaten by birds who sow the undigested seeds far from the parent plant.

They are part of a plant family, Rosaceae, of more than four thousand species, including apples, pears, quinces, apricots, plums, and peaches, as well as brambles and the thorny blackberries and raspberries whose flowers resemble wild roses’ blooms.

Over the last few centuries breeders have produced variations on those forms so that there are now thousands of varieties of rose, ranging from some of the old musks, damasks, and albas to the innumerable current versions of the hybrid tea rose, from miniature to hulking cabbage roses, single blooms to clusters, bushes to climbers, stark

white to murky attempts at mauves and purples, and a vast array of crimsons, pinks, reds, and yellows, and scents described as sweet, spicy, citrus, fruity, myrrh-like, musky.

I returned to his writing after the roses startled me, and there I found another Orwell whose other perspectives seem to counterbalance his cold eye on political monstrosity.

What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear—to others, sometimes even to oneself—trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.

He had several extended stays in hospitals and sanatoriums before his last decline institutionalized him for the year before his death of TB at forty-six in January 1950.

He had an austere and martial disposition in many respects, didn’t flee physical discomfort, and pushed himself through his bodily limitations until he was bedridden, then got back up, again and again, but he reached for the occasional strawberry.

He managed to both love Englishness and loathe the British Empire and imperialism and to say a lot about both, to be an advocate for underdogs and outsiders, and to defend human rights and freedoms in ways that still matter.

“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

A young communist who went to visit him late in his life reported that Orwell “bored him to death with endless descriptions of the habits of birds,” possibly to avoid discussing politics. This Orwell feels like a nephew of Thoreau (who botanized, kept diaries about the timing of bird migrations and first flowerings, grew produce for sale and for consumption by his circle, and, of course, advocated for radical political positions and actions in some of his most important essays). He is not someone I expected to encounter, but once you know what he looks like, you run into him often.

A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect.

Elsewhere in the book, Orwell declares, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” which makes direct observations and firsthand encounters in the material and sensory world likewise acts of resistance or at least reinforcements of the self who can resist.

He mentioned, in The Road to Wigan Pier, that he was writing the above passages in front of a coal fire from coal delivered by a wagon and workmen shooting it into the coalhole under the cottage’s stairs, and how easy it was to not think past the workmen or the coalhole.

Friedrich Engels also wrote about the condition of the miners in his 1845 Condition of the Working Class in England, noting that some of the children emerged back into the upper world so depleted they fell asleep on the way home or at home fell so fast asleep their parents could not feed them after work.

In “Why I Write,” Orwell declared, “The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

The beauty of flowers is not merely visual; it’s metaphysical, and tactile, and with many of them olfactory: they can be smelled and touched and sometimes tasted. Some lead to fruit or seeds or other bounty humans value or even depend upon, so a flower is also a promise.

Dante at the end of his Divine Comedy journeys through a series of concentric rings to a great rose that is the heart of Paradise itself. He addresses the Virgin Mary, who was often represented as a rose:

Orwell was still so poor that to cover his travel costs, he asked his bank for a loan and pawned the family silver (Eileen, when asked where it was by his visiting sister and mother, said they’d sent it out to have the family crest engraved upon it, and a few months later set out for Spain herself, where she did administrative work for the cause in Barcelona while he was at the front).

By early 1937, Orwell was at the front. His youth shooting rats and rabbits in the countryside and his years in the imperial police force in Burma had made him competent with a rifle and familiar with military discipline, and he was appalled at the lack of training and equipment for the soldiers around him and moved by the generosity of spirit of the Spanish people he met.

He passed days and weeks in squalor and stagnation, got lice, helped seize a fascist machine-gun nest from which, it turned out, the machine gun had been removed, watched the spring come in.

Like Hannah Arendt, Orwell distrusted rigid ideologies, seeing them as shields or perhaps cudgels against the complexity and contradictions life might present you with.

To be a communist had often come to mean being a supporter of the Soviet Union after its founding in 1922, and to support the Soviet Union came to mean supporting Joseph Stalin when he seized control of the nation, and so by degrees people who had begun with noble ideals of freedom and equality and revolution came around to supporting one of the most brutal dictatorships the world has ever seen (in part because it was seen as a bulwark against another, Hitler’s Germany, and while at the time they were routinely portrayed as opposites, afterward their resemblances would become more widely recognized).

This support often meant swallowing or spreading lies and denying facts.

be

the politicization of science.

“His primary liberty,” Baker said of scientists, “is freedom of inquiry. Without that he is as you would be if a dictator could control even your imaginations. When scientific autonomy is lost,” said Baker, “a fantastic situation develops; for even with the best will in the world, the political bosses cannot distinguish between the genuine investigator on the one hand and the bluffer and self-advertiser on the other.” And scientific autonomy had been lost. Baker declared that Trofim Lysenko, the director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, “provides a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a totalitarian regime.”*

The story of the rise of Trofim Lysenko, the bogus scientist and brilliant political strategist, is also that of the fall of the magnificent agronomist Nikolai Vavilov, a story about the triumph of a liar ...

Vavilov was, as the contemporary ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan writes, “the only man on earth who had collected seeds of food crops on all five continents, the explorer who had organized 115 research expe...

ways that humanity could feed itself,” and the scientist who published more than a...

His most celebrated achievement was establishing the world’s largest seed bank in Leningrad, as Saint Petersburg was called from shortly after Vladimir Lenin’s death in 1924 until the end of the Soviet era. The vast collection, part of the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry Vavilov directed from 1921 to 1940, offered the possibility of food security through biodiversity—species and strains that might be disease or pest resistant, grow in various conditions, increase yield or nutrition, and the like (and it is celebrated in part because its devoted caretakers starved to death rather than devour its tons of seeds and other plant matter during the 872-day Siege of Leningrad).

The conclusions Lysenko and the Soviet press drew from his slipshod work were unsound as science but useful for his self-advancement.

Public figures—notably the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who had been flattered extensively by the regime—denied the existence of the famine, as did The New York Times’s Walter Duranty, who used his prestige to discredit other journalists who tried to report the facts.

The American journalist Eugene Lyons repented afterward that he’d gone along with the lies, in a 1937 book called Assignment in Utopia. Orwell observed in his review of the book, “Like many others who have gone to Russia full of hope he was gradually disillusioned, and unlike some others he finally decided to tell the truth about it.

As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue.

“Execution was the favored solution to every problem, including those caused by previous executions,” writes Adam Hochschild. “When the national census showed that his reign of terror was shrinking the country’s population, Stalin ordered the members of the census board shot.

The same year that the show trials began, the geneticists attempted to debate the Lysenkoists in a public conference. It was a proxy war for empiricism and the freedom to pursue knowledge. The consequence of this dissent for a dozen of Vavilov’s colleagues was arrest and execution. Vavilov had been denounced by Lysenko, but he was unbowed. In March 1939, he stood up at a meeting of scientists at Leningrad’s All-Union Institute of Plant Industry and declared, “We will go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.”

His death sentence overturned by appeal, he was sent to a prison camp. There, on a diet of raw flour and frozen cabbage, the man who had done so much to address hunger starved to death, dying on January 26, 1943.

Orwell himself had had trouble publishing first Homage to Catalonia and then Animal Farm, because anti-Soviet positions were unpopular even after the British-Soviet alliance and the war had ended.

Orwell stood apart from his peers in his capacity to critique the sector of the left that had drifted toward authoritarianism