13.
It is not easy. It raises problems of construction
and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem
of truthfulness.
Let me give just one example of the cruder kind of
difficulty that arises. My book about the Spanish
civil war, Homage to Catalonia, is, of course, a frankly
political book, but in the main it is written with
a certain detachment
and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to
tell the whole truth without violating my literary
instincts. But among other things it contains
a long chapter, full of newspaper quotations and the
like, defending the 
Trotskyists
who were accused of plotting with Franco. Clearly
such a chapter, which after a year or two would lose
its interest for any ordinary reader, must ruin the
book. A critic whom I respect read me a lecture about
it. "Why did you put in all that stuff?"
he said. "You' ve turned what might have been
a good book into journalism." What he said was
true, but I could not have done otherwise. I happened
to know, what very few people in England had been
allowed to know, that innocent men were being falsely
accused. If I had not been angry about that I should
never have written the book.
14.
In one form or another this problem comes up again.
The problem of language is subtler
and would take too long to discuss. I will only say
that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely
and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time
you have perfected any style of writing, you have
always outgrown it. Animal Farm was the first book
in which I tried, with full consciousness of what
I was doing, to fuse
political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.
I have not written a novel for seven years, but I
hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to
be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know
with
some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
15.
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that
I have made it appear as though my motives in writing
were wholly public-spirited.
I don't want to leave that as the final impression.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the
very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle,
like a long
bout of some painful illness. One would never
undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by
some demon
whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all
one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that
makes a baby squall
for attention. And yet it is also true that one can
write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles
to efface
one's own personality. Good prose is like a window
pane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives
are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve
to be followed. And looking back through my work,
I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political
purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed
into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative
adjectives and humbug generally. 
