Slow and Hopeful

Averaging a book a year, Solnit’s work is distinguished by a lyrical style of writing that is insistently meandering in its subject matter, and which returns to two principle themes: the art of walking and the art of getting lost. These are books conceived as collection boxes of miscellaneous cultural information and individual memory. A style of writing that is usually confined to the essay is, in Solnit’s work, expanded to a book-length study; the bric-a-brac of academic insight merges into dreamily turned phrases into which one peers mystically. Solnit is far from alone in this literary endeavor, though the tone of her work — Californian, slow, and hopeful — makes it exemplary of a certain mode of nonfiction writing that raises eclectic musing to a literary art.

Solnit’s books move swiftly between as unlikely subject matters as Hitchcock films and Renaissance painting, Californian landscapes and British lanes. As her writing has found its audience, it has been daubed with political activism (initiated, in her account, by meeting Susan Sontag, and wondering why she had not tackled such weighty subjects herself). There is seemingly a continuum, we are to understand, between a politics of the landscape and writing about the landscape, between the op-eds that she writes — also prolifically — on climate change for the Guardian and her attention to caring for the natural world, which has led the New York Times to label her “the voice of the resistance.”

Since the publication of her 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me, published as a collection of essays in 2014, which gave rise to the term “mansplaining” — mobilized as agitprop for the liberal establishment — Solnit has also become a prominent voice of a well-intentioned feminism. The latter is — rightly — preoccupied by the pervasiveness of male violence and the persistent dominance of men in positions of cultural power (which has led to a silencing of female voices).

Writing, reconceived by Solnit as speaking out, is seen as a counter to the threat of violence. In her recent memoir, Recollections of My NonExistence, she positions her writing desk, gifted to her by a friend who was the victim of sexual violence, as providing her with a platform to make her voice heard. It is a neat, symmetrical tale: from one woman’s silencing comes another woman’s voice.

In one of the essays in the collection that takes up a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s work — “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be” — Solnit assigns the feminist novelist the role of Virgil to direct her through “the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown.” Woolf is a natural interlocutor for Solnit’s interests and style, and her use of the phrase is typical of this mode of writing, which uses other writers’ formulations as launchpads for idiosyncratic preoccupations. These are, for Solnit, the questions of hope and optimism about the future, and the failure of language.

George Orwell is a less obvious Virgilian guide to the swamp of uncertainty, climate disaster, and diminishing language that plague contemporary life. Orwell’s Roses seems to pivot around a desire to recover an Orwell who is interested in the natural world from the term “Orwellian,” which, since the publication of his novel 1984, has made his work synonymous with the bleak, violent realities of totalitarian governance. Solnit is far from alone in wanting to claim an Orwell of her own: he is the fetish of the literary liberal establishment, every Tory’s favorite socialist, and the writer that writers write about to talk about (and establish the importance of) their own work.

Sections of Orwell’s Roses open in the style of a prose poem: “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses,” a refrain repeated throughout Solnit’s book with minor variations (a single section — on the Mexican photographer Tina Modotti — opens “In the year 1924, a woman photographed roses”). Even when Solnit turns to subjects too violent or prosaic to fit her chosen metaphor, she remains within a horticultural linguistic register. In the year 1946, she tells us, “a dictator” — Stalin — “planted lemons.”

Early on in the book, Solnit pivots from focusing on roses to the lilacs that Orwell encountered blooming around the corpse of a German soldier near one of the last un-bombed bridges across the river through Stuttgart. For Solnit, the lilacs offer a vision of humanity that persists in the face of fascism: the presence of flowers, in her neat retelling, overwrites the violent reality of postwar Europe, eradicating the fact that these men both committed atrocities and were themselves violently used as cannon fodder.

Plants are, Solnit declares with aphoristic confidence, the opposite of war and on the side of the future. Orwell’s contemporary, the literary critic Rebecca West, had quite a different account of gardens in her reporting on Nuremberg. She saw in the insistent tending of gardens in postwar Germany a desperate attempt to create innocence where history had become unspeakable. The blooming of lilacs is a sentimental offering of hope, a smokescreen of a violence that the writer would rather not see.

In his article “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” written shortly after the war, which returns to the planting of his roses, Orwell formulates a proto-ecological argument for planting trees. Doing so, he suggests, can serve to alleviate liberal guilt, a way to reckon with the horror that has come to pass during the war, and which has become a familiar way of individualizing the collective conundrum of climate change:

I’m not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-de-forestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an anti-social act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground. . . . You might do quite a bit of harm and still end up public benefactor of all.

As a model of social change, a private re-deforestation scheme, as Orwell concedes, offers a limited way of reckoning both with collective guilt and deforestation. But Solnit is taken by this idea and it provides a kind of hypnotic conceit around which she weaves an essay that wants to make a case for roses — and Orwell — as a defense of liberalism and humanism.

Cottage Romance

The Wallington home, a cottage without electricity and running water, demanded considerable labor, principally from Orwell’s wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy — a brilliant thinker and Oxford graduate, who was a crucial figure in transforming Orwell’s writing. O’Shaughnessy gave her husband’s prose the human, comic elements that it often lacked.

The writer Jack Common, who lived in the cottage briefly in the 1940s, and who was given detailed instructions on how to milk the goats (rather than tend the roses), recalls, with characteristic discerning levity, Orwell as a Don Quixote who “weaved and wandered this side, that side, defeating windmills of gravity till he grew tall on the hillbrow.” The Wallington cottage was a kind of utopian project in traditional living. Orwell did not seem to see the irony in the fact that this rejection of modernity, which he notes in The Road to Wigan Pier underlies reactionary opposition to socialism, was something that he willingly embraced in his private life.

Toward the end of the book, Solnit swerves from meditating on the roses growing in an English garden to a form of investigative journalism on rose factories in Colombia, which she describes as “invisible factories of visual pleasure.” Elsewhere, she connects Orwell’s tending of roses to the popular slogan “bread and roses,” adopted by the worker’s movement in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. What this rallying cry points to is a desire to fight not merely for survival but for a life that could also contain the small luxuries that Orwell saw as a counterweight to revolution.

In her reflections on Orwell’s Spanish Civil War reporting, Homage to Catalonia, Solnit shifts from roses to the cry of buttered toast that the anti-fascists would use as bait for the fascists on the front lines. (The less sumptuous staples of bread and potatoes, rather than roses, were the subjects that Orwell returned to insistently in his work.) In the essayist’s account, the promise of buttered toast made by Republican forces is recounted to show the way that most fascists — in the Spanish Civil War, at least — were quickly conscripted without a strong ideological leaning, and therefore could be won back over to socialism by appealing to their material needs. But Solnit takes it up as way to suggest that a left politics could formulate itself as an invitation rather than a threat; and by implication that the failure of much left-leaning politics might be rooted in its inability to make room for pleasure. But is pleasure what is at stake in a want for food so desperate that one would risk crossing gunfire?

While Solnit was constructing her collage of roses that is and is not about Orwell, Sylvia Topp was undertaking a meticulously researched biography, Eileen, of the English writer’s first wife. In the biography, there is no space for the romanization of the Wallington garden, but rather a clear-sighted reckoning with the labor that Eileen O’Shaughnessy undertook on behalf of her husband, and the effects that it had on her health. In taking roses as the protagonist of her study, Solnit cherry-picks the Orwell that she wants to tell, conveniently sidestepping some of the less palatable aspects of his politics which stand in sharp contradiction to Solnit’s own.

It was part of the oddity, exceptionalism, and exasperating nature of Orwell’s work that he managed to be at once disarmingly candid in his writing about his class position and caught up in its fantasies: an indeterminacy that he attributes to the strange social fact of belonging to the in-between, anachronistic category the “lower-upper-middle class.” The Eton drop-out spent much of his life feeling out of place (his gangly stature didn’t help), a psychic and social insecurity that he sensed as a kind of infertility, even years before the Orwells tried and failed to conceive a child. This sense of unease, both at his own identity and his body, made him a reliable narrator of the British position in imperial India, and at times a perceptive illustrator of his country’s class system, but not of intimate relations between men and women.

In D. H. Lawrence’s portrait of the public school man as eunuch in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Orwell recognized himself with a hysterical clarity. Alongside documented accounts of thrusting himself on women (tearing clothes and bruising skin), in Topp’s biography we also find accounts of Orwell’s aversion to pleasure, his disgust at women’s insatiable desire for sex. At the center of the rose is perhaps, then, a deep uncertainty, or dislike, for women.

Solnit does not stray far away from defending the need to preserve beauty and pleasure within society — to not trade in roses for bread. But her defense of the subtleties of pleasure, apparently denied by rigid ideologies, obscures the purposes to which this line of argument has often been put by the liberal tradition: anti-communism. Capitalist societies have often failed to even satisfy people’s basic material needs, drawing attention away from their inadequacy by pointing to luxury. What is the cost of a rose? Solnit balks at this line of questioning, choosing to turn her attention instead to the promise of hope present in flowers blooming in capitalism’s wreckage. Who has caused this mess and which forces need to be assembled to clean it up? Again, here Solnit is largely silent.

Instead of programmatic answers, we are left with calls for nuance against authoritarianism and dichotomous thinking. What room does this worldview leave for conflict or class struggle, or even confrontation with the fossil fuel companies destroying our planet? Rather than radical politics — Orwell named his dog Marx to remind himself not to read the German thinker — we are left in the murky realm of hope: a word that floats in the ether attaching itself uncertainly to an object that blooms everywhere. But roses simply proliferate in the book without purpose, ignoring real politics entirely: as Gertrude Stein once perceptively remarked, a rose is a rose is a rose.