Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  ORWELL

  BOOKS BY JEFFREY MEYERS

  Biography

  A Fever at the Core: The Idealist in Politics

  Married to Genius

  Katherine Mansfield

  The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis

  Hemingway

  Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle

  D. H. Lawrence

  Joseph Conrad

  Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

  Scott Fitzgerald

  Edmund Wilson

  Robert Frost

  Bogart: A Life in Hollywood

  Gary Cooper: American Hero

  Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers

  Wintry Conscience: A Biography of George Orwell

  Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam

  Somerset Maugham

  Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt

  Modigliani

  Samuel Johnson: The Struggle

  The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe

  Criticism

  Fiction and the Colonial Experience

  The Wounded Spirit: T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  A Reader's Guide to George Orwell

  Painting and the Novel

  Homosexuality and Literature

  D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy

  Disease and the Novel

  The Spirit of Biography

  Hemingway: Life into Art

  Bibliography

  T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography

  Catalogue of the Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon

  George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

  Edited Collections

  George Orwell: The Critical Heritage

  Hemingway: The Critical Heritage

  Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs

  The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader

  The W. Somerset Maugham Reader

  Edited Original Essays

  Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation

  Wyndham Lewis by Roy Campbell

  D. H. Lawrence and Tradition

  The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence

  The Craft of Literary Biography

  The Biographer's Art

  T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend

  Graham Greene: A Revaluation

  ORWELL

  Life and Art

  JEFFREY MEYERS

  UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

  Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield

  © 2010 by the Board of Trustees

  of the University of Illinois

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meyers, Jeffrey.

  Orwell : life and art / Jeffrey Meyers.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03561-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-252-03561-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  ISBN–13: 978-0-252-07746-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN–10: 0-252-07746-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Orwell, George, 1903–1950—Criticism and interpretation.

  2. Authors, English—20th century—Biography.

  3. Journalists—Great Britain—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PR6029.R8Z73555 2010

  828'.91209—dc22 2010030298

  For

  Joseph Frank

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I: THE LIFE

  1. Orwell's Painful Childhood

  2. Orwell's Burma

  3. The Ethics of Responsibility: Burmese Days

  4. Orwell: The Honorary Proletarian

  5. Orwell and the Experience of France

  6. “An Affirming Flame”: Homage to Catalonia

  7. Repeating the Old Lies

  II: THE ART

  8. Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up for Air

  9. Orwell as Film Critic

  10. The Reluctant Propagandist

  11. The Wind in the Willows: A New Source for Animal Farm

  12. Orwell's Bestiary: The Political Allegory of Animal Farm

  13. The Evolution of Nineteen Eighty-Four

  14. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel of the 1930s

  15. Miseries and Splendors of Scholarship

  16. The Complete Works of George Orwell

  17. Orwell: A Voice That Naked Goes

  18. Orwell and the Art of Writing

  19. Orwell's Satiric Humor

  III: ORWELL AFTER ORWELL

  20. Reviewing the Orwellians

  21. True to Life: Writing Orwell's Biography

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Sources and Jeffrey Meyers: Other Works on Orwell

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  George Orwell, the most widely read and influential serious writer of the twentieth century, has been my lifelong interest. My dissertation and first book, Fiction and the Colonial Experience (1973), considered cultural conflicts in the novels of Kipling, Conrad, Forster, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene that developed when European nations imposed their manners and customs, religious beliefs and moral values on an indigenous way of life. My extensive travels in India and Africa, and professional interest in this subject, led me to Burmese Days and to a passion for Orwell. I eventually wrote four books about him: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell (1975), George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975), George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (with Valerie Meyers, 1977) and—when dissatisfied with all the previous biographies—a full-scale life: Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000).

  The twenty-one essays in this volume were published over a period of forty years, between 1968 and 2009. I return to some striking passages several times, but interpret them differently in various contexts. This book begins with an account of Orwell's autobiographical writings from the beginning of his career through the Spanish Civil War; continues with analyses of his major works, and general essays on his style, ideas about writing and quirky humor; and concludes by focusing on the six biographies of Orwell—including my own.

  Orwell's literary qualities—vigorous style, engaging honesty, sly wit—immediately attract us. And his personal qualities—integrity, idealism and commitment—shine through his writing like pebbles in a clear stream. In his own lifetime Orwell's passionate desire to unite the disparate classes and create a just society in England commanded respect and gave him a special aura. Though he was intensely conscientious, he was hard on himself. His obstinate search for moral values animates his essays and novels, and his lucid prose represents a triumph over the chaos and self-doubt that lies beneath the surface. His legend was partly self-created, and his work has had—still has—extraordinary political and cultural influence. Orwell's books have not dated (though he was born more than a century ago), and we can now see the complexity of his struggle and the greatness of his achievement.

  Very few writers’ lives can stand up to the intense scrutiny of modern biographers, but the more I studied Orwell, the more appealing he became. I found few flaws, and even those made him seem rather eccentric, even charming. There is an admirable consistency between the values he advocates in his work and those that guided his behavior, often under difficult and dangerous conditions, in his life. He was a seeker after justice and truth, with an instinctive insight into the heart of social and political problems. His vision is sharp, concrete and absolutely realistic. His political beliefs were determined by harsh experience rather than by ideological considerations. His most impressive personal
and literary characteristics were a Conradian concern with human solidarity; generosity of spirit that extends to enemy prisoners, French collaborators and Fascist war criminals; intellectual honesty in admitting his own mistakes; balanced judgment; courage to speak out against any mean or cowardly attitude; and defense of provocative and unpopular views.

  The recent Polish film Katyn is a striking example of the suppression of truth for political reasons by those in power. Both the Russian murderers and (for once) the innocent Germans accused each other of massacring thousands of captured Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia in the forest of Katyn, near Smolensk, in April 1940. The Russians did not admit the truth about this mass murder until 1989. Though he died sixty years ago, we need Orwell now more than ever.

  Two passages from Anna Funder's brilliant memoir, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (2003), suggest the lasting political influence of Orwell's final books. After noting that Orwell's works were banned in East Germany, Funder suggests that a widely viewed television program cunningly reflected the oppressive Communist state: “‘Big Brother’ was a wildly popular ‘reality tv’ program screened here recently, where people were locked in a house together and filmed day and night by security cameras. Named for the head of the surveillance regime in Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the program offered a cash prize for the person who could survive the longest living with others under such closed and scrutinised circumstances.”

  Funder tells the story of a friend who experienced a dangerous moment when the East German police were “going through all our drawers, everything on the desks, the record collection. One of them was up a ladder searching the bookshelves when he found Orwell's Animal Farm, which, of course, was blacklisted. We held our breath as he pulled it off the shelf. I remember the cover clearly: it was the pigs, holding a red flag aloft. We watched as this young man looked at it, the pigs and the flag. Then he put it back. Afterwards we laughed! We could only think that he saw the pigs—that was bad—but that they were holding a red flag, and they seemed to be on a collective farm—he must have thought that meant it was all right!” The subversive nature of Animal Farm, with its radical criticism of the Russian Revolution, gave hope to East Germans who opposed the Communist regime. But the satire was so potent that merely owning a copy could send people straight to prison.

  At a time when virtually all significant works in the modern period have been exhaustively analyzed and interpretive criticism has almost come to a dead end—apart from the rare brilliant article, most textual explications are either far-fetched or tediously familiar—the historical and biographical approaches, which bring new facts and new learning (often based on archival material) to illuminate literary works, seem to be the most innovative and useful way to discuss modern authors. I am particularly interested in the life in the work, in the relations between biography, culture, politics and literature. My critical position is similar to the one expressed in a letter of 1842 by the young cultural historian Jakob Burckhardt: “My own substitute [for abstract thought] is my effort to achieve with every day a more intense immediacy in the perception of essentials. By nature I cling to the tangible, to visible reality and to history. But I have a bent for incessantly looking for parallels in co-ordinating facts and have thus succeeded on my own in arriving at a few generalized principles.”

  I'd like to thank John Rodden and John Knapp for their perceptive reports, which enabled me to improve this book, and Willis Regier for his enthusiastic support.

  THE LIFE

  ONE

  ORWELL'S PAINFUL CHILDHOOD

  This essay compared Orwell's early years to those of Thackeray, Kipling and Durrell in India, and to Dickens and Joyce in Britain. It argued that his work was rooted in his childhood, and in the themes—poverty, fear, guilt, masochism and sickness—that were expressed in his posthumously published essay about the cruelty in his prep school, “Such, Such Were the Joys.” I might have added that Orwell also felt intensely guilty about his father's job in the Indian Opium Department. The production, collection and transportation of opium to China was the most vicious and indefensible kind of imperialistic exploitation.

  Orwell was always extremely reticent about his personal affairs, so we know virtually nothing about how his character was formed in his earliest years. He was born in 1903 in Motihari, situated on the bank of a lake in the state of Bihar, between Patna and Katmandu. His father was a sub-deputy agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, and Orwell's family was part of that “upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the eighties and nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, and was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded.”1

  Thackeray, Kipling and Durrell spent their first years in India before being sent to England to begin school. Orwell's mother took him to England when he was one year old. Kipling's Something of Myself gives a lyrical description of a secure Indian childhood, protected by the gentleness and affection of bearer and ayah; and Fraser writes of Durrell that “the Indian childhood, the heat, the colour, the Kiplingesque social atmosphere, deeply affected his childish imagination.”2 But both Thackeray and Kipling stress the wrenching trauma of leaving India at five years old. In The Newcombes, Thackeray writes: “What a strange pathos seems to me to accompany all our Indian story! … The family must be broken up…. In America it is from the breast of a poor slave that a child is taken; in India it is from the wife.”3 Kipling's “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” describes his sudden and painful departure from servants and parents (“through no fault of their own, they had lost all their world”), and the horrors of an alien family that engulfs him with meanness and cruelty. Like Orwell, Kipling endured inexplicable accusations of crimes, constant fear of punishment, unjust beatings, terrifying threats of hell and utter despair, and he concludes that “when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion, and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.”4

  Orwell attended the local grammar school at Henley-on-Thames and lived in that strangely artificial atmosphere that Anglo-Indian families recreated for themselves “at home.” George Bowling, the hero of Coming Up for Air, married into one of these families and describes it with satiric wit: “As soon as you set foot inside the front door you're in India in the eighties. You know the kind of atmosphere. The carved teak furniture, the brass trays, the dusty tiger-skulls on the wall, the Trichinopoly cigars, the red-hot pickles, the yellow photographs of chaps in sun-helmets, the Hindustani words that you're expected to know the meaning of, the everlasting anecdotes of the tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in ’87. It's a sort of little world of their own that they've created, like a kind of cyst.”5

  Orwell writes in “Such, Such Were the Joys” that, even while at home, “my early childhood had not been altogether happy…. One ought to love one's father, but I knew very well that I merely disliked my own father, whom I had barely seen before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘Don't.’6… Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards…. I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust.”7

  An archetypal image of a warm and secure family hearth, which Orwell never had and always wanted, appears again and again in his works as an idealized domestic portrait that reflects his deprivation: “In a working-class home … you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which is not so easy to find elsewhere…. On winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking-chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing.”8 Orwell states that at eight years old he was suddenly separated from his family and “flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a gold-fish into a tank full of pike.”9 />
  Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell won a scholarship to a mediocre prep school that intended to exploit his intelligence. His family, who made financial sacrifices for his education, counted on him to succeed and retrieve their diminishing fortunes. He spent the crucial adolescent years from eight to fourteen in Eastbourne at St. Cyprian's school, which he anatomized, condemned and attempted to exorcize in “Such, Such Were the Joys.”

  This essay, Orwell's most poignant and (after Animal Farm) his most perfect work, is of the greatest value for an understanding of his character, life and works. Just as Nineteen Eighty-Four is a final synthesis of all Orwell's major themes, so “Such, Such” (which was written at the same time) reveals the impetus and genesis of these ideas. Its central themes—poverty, fear, guilt, masochism and sickness—are manifested in the pattern of his life and developed in all his books.

  Orwell confesses that he was “lonely, and soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays”; and he states that one of the school codes (which he accepted) was “an almost neurotic dread of poverty, and, above all, the assumption … that money and privilege are the things that matter.” In school, Orwell felt guilty because he did not have money and also because he wanted it. (When Orwell doubles his father's income, a Russian boy calculates that his father has more than two hundred times as much money.)

  The experiences Orwell describes in Down and Out in Paris and London are a direct reaction against and refutation of this privileged school ethos, just as his use of a pseudonym (George is the patron saint of England, Orwell an East Anglian river) beginning with that book is an attempt to abandon that hateful part of his life he associated with St. Cyprian's, Eton and Burma. “People always grow up like their names. It took me nearly thirty years to work off the effects of being called Eric,” he writes; and when he gave up the family name of Blair, he rejected the Scottish birth of both parents and the odious cult of Scotland that pervaded his snobbish school. The hero of Keep the Aspidistra Flying admits that “‘Gordon Comstock’ was a pretty bloody name, but then Gordon came of a pretty bloody family. The ‘Gordon’ part of it was Scotch, of course.”10 Comstock's experience at a school where nearly all the boys were richer than himself and tormented him because of it has led to his renunciation of ambition and the world of money. As Comstock says, “Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to a school among children richer than itself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies such as a grown-up person can scarcely even imagine.”11 In this respect, Orwell's childhood was like that of Dickens, who “had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it,” for they both came from a middle-class family going into decline. Orwell's painful treatment at school was the emotional equivalent of Dickens’ servitude in the blacking factory (which occurred at the same age), and both men bore the scars of early poverty throughout their entire lives. Dickens “prayed when I went to bed at night to be lifted out of the humiliation and neglect in which I was. I never had suffered so much before,”12 and Orwell writes of “suffering horrors which [he] cannot or will not reveal.”13