Burmese Days

From his youth Orwell saw himself as a writer. He tells us in his essay “Why I Write” that he had “the lonely child’s habit” of making up elaborate stories featuring him in various situations, a phenomenon not uncommon with young people. He also relates that he was fascinated by the very sounds of certain words. Orwell fought this lure of the literary life when he joined the Imperial Police in Burma. But the need to write was such a powerful force in him that he eventually gave in. His dilemma was the choice of what to write.

Orwell tells us that while living in Paris for eighteen months he wrote constantly – short stories, poetry, prose – anything that took his interest. He even made stabs at writing novels. Very little of this material has survived. He did succeed in getting some journalism published before returning to England in late 1929. But at heart he believed that to be a writer one must produce “enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings,” as he noted in “Why I Write.”