Charles Finch

I read some or all of George Orwell's journals, essays, and letters every year, and it's always like talking with an old friend again. I've long thought it was a pity that he's remembered chiefly for 1984 and Animal Farm, both middling novels, while two astonishing memoirs, Down & Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia, seem to recede in our collective memory all the time. As for his best essays, such as A Hanging, Boys' Weeklies, Charles Dickens, and the infinitely accurate and honest Such, Such Were the Joys, they stand for me with any essays in the history of our literature, on par with Montaigne and Voltaire. On a winter day here in New York, with a steady sleet falling, about the best advice I can give anybody is to find a warm spot indoors with one of his books.

A passage from a letter to his agent that I just read this morning and found funny:

"As to a pseudonym, a name I always used when tramping etc is P.S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about

Kenneth Miles,
George Orwell,
H. Lewis Allways.

I rather favour George Orwell."

What a different literary landscape we might look back upon if he had been unfortunate enough to pick the name "H. Lewis Allways"!