GEORGE ORWELL by Gordon Bowker
Little, Brown, £20; 512 pp
ORWELL: THE LIFE by D.J.Taylor
Chatto and Windus, £20; 448 pp
LIKE MANY writers George Orwell, the person formerly known as Eric Blair,
emerged from a family of fading fortunes. He was part of the imperial ruling
class even as the sun was beginning to set behind that monument of privilege
and power. His father was an opium agent in India, monitoring the sale of
the drug for the sake of the English Treasury, and Orwell himself would join
the Imperial Police in some kind of determined atavistic gesture.
Like all good Anglo-Indians, however, he was brought up in a quiet English
town. Nothing much happened to him in Henley-on-Thames, and in later life he
cultivated a myth of isolation and loneliness. But this myth may have been
true. According to Gordon Bowker the first word he ever uttered as a baby
was "beastly". D. J. Taylor has the longer story about young Eric
Blair. When found standing on his head he is supposed to have remarked that: "You
are more noticed if you stand on your head than if you are the right way up."
Here are the makings of a most interesting artist.
Despite being on occasions the wrong way round, he always seems to have
disappointed himself. When he left his preparatory school at the age of 13,
he said (albeit at a later date) that he felt "Failure, failure,
failure - failure behind me, failure ahead of me. . ." He carried that
sense with him, like a bad head cold, for the rest of his life.
At Eton he was described as "a boy with a permanent chip on his shoulder".
It is of course very like that someone who disappoints himself will be
proportionately disappointed in others. He expressed indifference to his
school at a later date but, if he had never been at Eton, he would never
have wanted to become a tramp. He was not a success at school, but like so
many of his contemporaries he created much of his adult persona there -
aloof, sardonic, and thoroughly self-absorbed. He had the shyness of the
proud person.
From the beginning he wanted to become what he called a "FAMOUS AUTHOR",
even going so far as to compose a poem on the outbreak of the First World
War entitled Awake! Young Men of England! He was so sure of his
eventual destiny that he speculated on the book bindings of his collected
edition. He was intensely superstitious, according to Gordon Bowker, and
probably realised at an early age that if you wish for something hard enough
it is almost bound to happen. That collected edition did emerge five years
ago, in a resplendent red, blue and gold which any schoolboy would admire.
But surely even the young Eric Blair would have been astonished by its 20
volumes? Taylor, in his admirable biography, calculates that Orwell wrote
some two million words in 20 years.
From Eton he progressed (if that is the right word) to Burma where he became a
member of the Imperial Police. The image of him as an agent of the Empire
and the law, wielding a baton where it was necessary to do so, fits oddly
with the image of the fervent anti-authoritarian. But there was always a
severity about Orwell, a secretiveness and a streak of cruelty that suggest
a recessive personality. He was in certain respects a person of darkness.
Yet Taylor also suggests that to most people he appeared ordinary to the point
of being utterly conventional. He did not leave the Imperial Police in a fit
of anti-imperialist conscience, but as a result of the ill health which
surrounded him all his life. He came back to England at the age of 24,
determined to begin a career as a writer. So he embarked on what Taylor
calls "a tramping expedition to the East End", apparently with the
sole purpose of obtaining "copy".
It has been suggested that Orwell adopted the role of a tramp in order to
escape a bad conscience over his period in the Imperial force, but Taylor
notes how carefully his descent into the lower depths was constructed and
how dependent it was upon earlier literary models. Similarly a visit to
Paris in 1928 was not so much to enjoy the sensation of washing dishes,
which he memorialised in Down and Out in Paris and London, but to
join the "bohemian" world of Parisian literary society. There may
however be a further explanation for his travels into the lower world.
Orwell really did feel the need to escape from his confined and somewhat
dingy personality; like T. E. Lawrence he suffered from self-loathing. He
wanted to immerse himself in dirt and stench.
On his return to England he contributed reviews to the Adelphi and other
periodicals, interspersed with bouts of vagrancy and casual "low"
labour such as hop-picking. He kept a diary, perhaps with the intention of
presenting something sensational to the reading public. He also took up
teaching for a while, and became interested in matters religious. He gives
the overwhelming impression of not quite knowing what to do or how to handle
himself. He had not yet found his great theme.
He had not found his vision. The publication of Down and Out in Paris and
London (under the name of George Orwell, adopted so that he would not
offend his family) did not materially change his isolation or his tendency
to self-pity.
Despite what seems to have been several strongly felt relationships with young
women, he was essentially solitary; he was always on the margins, on the
edge of a crowd or in the corner of a room. He did not impress anyone as
particularly significant or interesting. He was considered merely to be odd; "strange"
was the adjective most often used about him. There are also unexplained gaps
in his life - silences, absences, call them what you will - which suggest a
most elusive persona. If he had any distinctive quality, it was that of the
willed ascetic - gaunt, hollow cheeked, prematurely aged. Bowker pertinently
quotes Orwell's description of Herman Melville as "a kind of ascetic
voluptuary".
He might have turned into a frustrated "literary man", a
medium-sized novelist or essayist, if it were not for his journey to the
north of England at the beginning of 1936. He was by no means a committed
socialist before this pilgrimage, and in fact seems to have had no coherent
political philosophy at all. He seems only to have been led by curiosity
about the conditions of an area badly affected by economic depression and by
some instinctive belief that you can see a civilisation more clearly in the
shadows which it casts. The Road to Wigan Pier is in many ways
instructive, therefore. He regarded the victims of the world with a certain
sympathy, derived in part from self-pity, but he never felt in any sense
close to them. He remained a public school boy on a slumming expedition.
There is perhaps one act which does mark him out as an English radical. With
his new wife (who receives no less than her fair share of attention from
both biographers) he opened a small shop in an English village. With that
act he can join the radical confraternity of English writers such as Blake
the hosier and Bunyan the brazier. He was eminently self-reliant and
practical, with a gift for making and fixing things. It is aligned with his
plain style - the word "workmanlike" has often been used to
describe it - and with his general pragmatism in social and political
matters. That is why he is continually worrying away on the subject of
religion. He really should have been a Dissenter - a Muggletonian or an
Anabaptist - and his lack of religious faith profoundly irked him.
He was not destined to be a shop-keeper, however, and soon after his marriage
he decided to volunteer for the International Brigade fighting against
General Franco in Spain. Taylor suggests that "he wanted to fight"
rather than simply to write a book. Taylor also suggests that it gave him
more than an opportunity. It gave him a vision. He could see humankind in
extremis. He could shake off what he considered to be the greyness of
England. His decision is connected also with what Taylor calls his "self-absorption".
The fighting could shake him out of his own grey self as well. Perhaps he
wanted to be shot. He was. He learned something about authoritarianism, too.
In Spain he suffered from the feeling that "your friend might be
denouncing you to the secret police".
All his life, according to Gordon Bowker, he feared political assassination.
Paranoia is very much the vice of the secret man, or of the man who wishes
to remain secret. He held himself back, with an immense taciturnity and
gravity. He exhibited a wilful refusal to engage with other people, an
emotional blockage which can be mistaken for "reserve" but was
actually more pathological than that. It has to do with his secretiveness,
and his streak of cruelty.
His health had never been vigorous and, on his return to England, he suffered
increasingly from disorders of the lungs. He spat blood and lost weight. On
the outbreak of the Second World War his damaged body meant that he could do
nothing forceful or brave. He was on the margins again, bewailing "the
strange boring nightmare" in which he found himself. He continued to
write essays and articles on such subjects as boys' comics and seaside
postcards. Bowker acutely describes him "as one of the first serious
writers about English popular culture". All his life, in fact, Orwell
was steeped in nostalgia and its concomitant, wishful thinking. He was a
conservative in everything except politics - conservative, that is, in
everything that really matters. That is why he relished the opportunity of
joining the newly established Home Front, and became a member of the St
John's Wood volunteers.
By this time he had written Homage to Catalonia as well as Down
and Out in Paris and London and several now unfashionable works of
fiction - unfashionable, that is, compared to the works that eventually made
him famous. He dismissed his novels as pot-boilers but that did not stop him
writing them. Towards the end of the War he began Animal Farm, that
medieval beast fable brought up to date. But he had great difficulty in
finding a publisher for it, since most reputable houses turned it down on
the then apparently reasonable grounds that it might offend Stalin. On its
publication, however, it was an immediate success.
But he was at the same time beset by pressing domestic problems. He and his
wife had just adopted an illegitimate child, when his wife died of cancer.
He hired a young woman to look after the child, and then embarked on a
number of not very serious romances with not very suitable women. As he grew
older and his tuberculosis increased in virulence, he took the
characteristic decision to retreat to a remote Scottish island, where he
might subject himself to a way of life so intense that it became a kind of
punishment. In fact his doctors believed that his last bout of illness was
caused by his exertions in the Inner Hebrides. Nevertheless it was here that
he set to work on 1984. He completed it just in time. His death-bed
marriage to his second wife has been extensively documented, and it loses
nothing in the retelling here.
Both biographies in fact have their share of virtues. There are differences of
fact, but they do not require a duel to settle them. Was the juvenile Orwell
educated by Catholic nuns (Bowker) or by Anglican nuns (Taylor)? Was the
child minder for his adopted child paid £5 per week (Taylor) or £1 per week
(Bowker)? Bowker has the interesting story that, during his time at Eton,
Orwell killed a contemporary by making a wax image of him and breaking its
leg. Taylor has the less sensational account of an image made out of soap,
with no mention of an untimely death. Bowker pays more attention to Orwell's
sexual life, to which Taylor more modestly alludes. Bowker in fact believes
Orwell to have been "homo-erotic", which may of course account for
his dislike of homosexuals. Such matters are the small change of
biographies, and do not really alter the larger picture of a man and writer
in permanent internal exile.
Further reading
Down and Out in Paris and London (£5.99; Buy the book)
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (£5.99; Buy the book)
Animal Farm (£5.99; Buy the book)
Homage to Catalonia (£5.99; Buy the book)
Nineteen Eighty-Four (£5.99; Buy the book)
The Complete Works Of George Orwell Volumes 1-20 ed. Peter
Davison (Secker & Warburg, £750; Buy the book)
Orwell's Victory by Christopher Hitchens (Penguin, £7.99; Buy
the book)
The Girl from the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling
(Penguin, £6.99; Buy the book)
