Why I write

George Orwell's essay Why I Write was published in an obscure, short-lived English literary magazine in 1947. It was reprinted in (I think) an Australian literary magazine a year or so later, and that's where I must have read it. It made me think for the first time about why I had this odd compulsion to arrange my thoughts in what seemed to be an orderly manner, and set them down on paper.  I remember trying to set down my reasons why I wrote. I wish I still had the two or three badly typed pages I managed to produce as my answer when I was in my early 20s, but like nearly everything I wrote in those days, it hasn't survived. 

Orwell spent a few pages describing how he wrote, and on what topics - fact, political polemics, infrequently fiction, though later works, his two most famous, most timeless books, Animal Farm and 1984, are classified as fiction. He seems to have found it difficult to address the question in the title of his essay, because he flits around it like a bee buzzing from flower to flower and his reasons are sometimes buried almost shamefacedly in paragraphs about something else. At one point in the essay he tries to compile a list of reasons: egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; to store facts for posterity; political purpose. But he gets distracted, and this essay, which could have been a valuable contribution to literary scholarship, is in the end a rather frustrating, rather inchoate, rather annoying and disappointing mess. I suppose that's one reason I tried to write my own essay on the matter in 1948 or thereabouts. Other collections of essays that I formerly possessed, by E M Forster, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, half a dozen other 'public intellectuals' of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, are long gone, not part of my shrunken downsized library, so I can't check; but I don't recall any other writers or thinkers who addressed the question, and stated their reasons for writing.

My reasons then included desire to clarify complex concepts and ideas, to explain, perhaps to simplify these concepts and ideas by expressing them in my own words, and not insignificantly, the pleasure I got from writing. These reasons are implicit, sometimes explicit, in much of my professional writing. Among my books, I've edited a massive reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine, compiled and edited technical dictionaries of epidemiology and of public health, and co-edited an encyclopedia of public health and a 'Companion' to Medicine in the 'Companion' series published by Oxford University Press. I wrote large parts of all these books, even the encyclopedia, to which I contributed more than my fair share. Working on all of these and other books and articles, and writing editorials for journals I edited, gave me immense pleasure, partly because of collegial relationships with other editors and authors, but mainly because it was such a pleasure to do all that writing. I've always been chuffed to get feedback from readers who say it's a pleasure to read what I've written, more enjoyable than many other textbooks and works of reference because I wrote with a lively style that kept readers awake.

Until recently I've always been able to find exactly the right word, the appropriate phrase, the rounding off paragraph to sum it all up. Alas, as I enter my 90th year I find all this no longer falls trippingly off my tongue, it's no longer there at the surface of my mind, waiting to be plucked and used to the best purpose. Now I must often search, sometimes in vain, for the needed words and phrases. These, no doubt, are signs of declining intellectual vitality that I must accept and make the best of, smiling bravely through unshed tears as I lament the ravages of time.  No, correction: I don't lament them at all, I acknowledge and accept them, thankful to be here still after all these years and insightful enough to recognize my limitations.

And I can add another reason to my list of reasons Why I write: It's the perfect therapy.