Orwell
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When my review copy of The Unknown Orwell arrived, I was surprised to learn that the authors were “deeply grateful” to me as well as to Valerie Eliot, Lord Harlech and the Keeper of the Wall at Eton (who sounds like Snout, the “witty partition” in A Midsummer Night's Dream); grateful to discover that I had been immortalized in a footnote; and somewhat disconcerted to find that some of my ideas—the influence of Jack London's The People of the Abyss on Down and Out—so long embedded in academic journals, had been properly put before the public by Stansky and Abrahams. The “unknown” Orwell is a familiar figure, and this biography of his first thirty years, culminating in the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, fills in the details of a picture that remains substantially the same. The authors have interviewed a great many people but have learned relatively little. They never describe what Orwell's father, a gruff-voiced elderly gentleman forever saying “Don't,” actually did in the Indian Opium Department; they do not state what Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, the terrifying Flip of “Such, Such Were the Joys,” thought about the adult Orwell and his corrosive essay on her school; and their chapter on Eton, where at least one had a cubicle of one's own, is more about the ceremonies and customs of the college (though they do not mention homosexuality) than about Orwell himself. With the exception of Cyril Connolly, who published his memoirs in 1938 and is a major source for this book, Orwell had no close friends in his early life. There was nothing unusual about the young Orwell, no promise of genius, very little to suggest that he would become, after D. H. Lawrence, the most influential English writer of the century.
The theme of The Unknown Orwell, “a study of Eric Blair becoming the writer George Orwell” in 1933, was suggested to the authors by Sir Richard Rees in 1967, but even then it was vieux jeu, for T. R. Fyvel wrote an essay on “George Orwell and Eric Blair” in 1959, and Keith Aldritt published The Making of George Orwell in 1969. Moreover, the central idea that “Blair was the man to whom things happened; Orwell the man who wrote about them,” is too facile, too pat. The crucial event in Orwell's life and the turning point of his political and literary career, what Erik Erikson calls “the moment,” was surely the Spanish Civil War, where Orwell found commitment, compassion and courage. The authors claim that Orwell went tramping to make use of his down and out experience as a writer, but his five years of Burmese experience certainly provided more vital and significant literary material than his rather superficial subterranean sojourns.
The essential thinness of this book (the first of two volumes) is disguised by trivial anecdotes and verbal padding which, like the heavy porridge that broke the boys’ appetites at St. Cyprian's, fill one up without satisfying one's hunger. We are told what fizzy drinks young Eric bought from “the little old lady who kept the village shop,” and the “grateful vignette” of Orwell's sister knitting his school scarf. But Orwell's birthplace in Bengal is described in a series of Eastern clichés—“its spicy smells and pungent flavors, its flamboyant sights and exotic sounds”—popularized by Kim. Because of the restriction on quotation, Orwell's few taut paragraphs on the bedwetting episode in “Such, Such Were the Joys” are expanded into five slack pages; and the authors fail to notice that several significant details in this essay come directly from the school scenes in David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby. (They also ignore, in their account of Orwell's reading, the important influence of Ulysses on the character of George Bowling in Coming Up for Air. The “night-town” chapter in A Clergyman's Daughter has become a dubious critical cliché, for it is not really “Joycean” at all.)
The authors devote three pages to Orwell's unremarkable juvenilia at Eton and five pages to his patriotic schoolboy poem on Kitchener (1916); and though they refer to the Field-Marshal's famous recruiting poster with the slogan, “Your Country Needs YOU,” they do not mention that this was a direct inspiration for the poster with “Big Brother Is Watching You” in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Their rather sentimental account of Orwell's “development” could apply to almost any adolescent: “He was ten years old, taller, wiser, and tougher than the sad-eyed bewildered small boy with whose homesickness ‘Mum’ had tried to cope.” Their description of Orwell's happy childhood—“Eric conformed to the codes of the school, worked hard, did well in his studies”—is based largely on Connolly's rather than Orwell's own account of his feelings; and their pallid comment—“Disgust on one side; joy on the other. The tension between them was essential to him as an artist”—is a thoroughly inadequate treatment of a vital issue in Orwell's life: how he transformed his childhood guilt and suffering into an ethic of responsibility.
The most interesting part of The Unknown Orwell is the chapter on Burma, and though the authors have not found any letters from Burma and did not visit that country, they have discovered some new facts about Orwell's examinations, training and duties in that important and still obscure period of his life. Like the young Joyce Cary in Northern Nigeria, Orwell, as Assistant to the District Superintendent in Myaungmya, “was expected to run the office; supervise the stores of clothing, equipment and ammunition; take charge of the training school for locally recruited constables, as well as the headquarters police station with its strength of thirty to fifty men on active patrol duty and a contingent of escorts for hearings and trials in court. He would also check the night patrols in Myaungmya, and when his Superintendent was away, touring the sub-divisional headquarters within the District, he would assume general charge.”
The authors report the statement of Mabel Fierz, Orwell's friend in the early 1930s, that he told her “he had never been present at a hanging,” but they do not discuss the literary implications of this “most sensational confidence” in their long description of “A Hanging” (1931). Whether Orwell was imitating life or his own art, he repeated specific details from this essay in Symes’ enthusiastic report of a hanging in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The authors quote the observation of a colleague in Burma: “As for female company I don't think I ever saw him with one,” as well as the suggestive remark of Brenda Salkeld, a young woman whom Orwell met in 1928 after his return from Burma, “He didn't really like women.” These comments correspond with Orwell's surprisingly celibate early life in the public school and police (he boasted of a brief liaison with a French tart, though his book on Parisian low-life has very few references to sex), and also to the unhappy sexual experiences of John Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon Comstock and Winston Smith in Orwell's novels. But these statements do not explain Orwell's two marriages (his first wife died unexpectedly after an operation in 1945) to two attractive women nor his love of family life.
Early in the book the authors state that at the end of his life Orwell overcame his long-standing dislike of Scotland and went to live on the island of Jura; and at the end of the book they relate Ruth Pitter's story of how the tubercular Orwell deliberately exposed himself to fierce winter weather: “It was suicidal perversity.” These two events are closely related, for Orwell had a strong masochistic streak, a permanent residue of the childhood guilt he describes in “Such, Such Were the Joys.” His “suicidal perversity” compelled him to live in a country he disliked and on a rugged and rainy island that undermined his precarious health and led him to an early death at forty-six. The Unknown Orwell ought to—but does not—explain how the Orwell of St. Cyprian's evolved into the Orwell on Jura; how an unremarkable youth, who began by writing banal poems in rhymed quatrains, became the writer who transformed the political experience of an entire generation into the veritably mythic power of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
II. Bernard Crick, GEORGE ORWELL: A LIFE (1980)
Bernard Crick's biography is even worse than Stansky and Abrahams’ book. His style is flat and filled with clichés. He plunders previous scholarship without acknowledgment. He does not believe that biography can reveal the inner man and deliberately offers a strictly external view of Orwell's elusive and contradictory character: an odd mixture of personal gentleness and literary ferocity. And Crick is quite mista
ken about Orwell's suicidal sojourn on Jura. When he came to that remote, wind-ravaged Scottish island in 1946, wartime shortages were severe, essential supplies strictly rationed and often impossible to obtain.
Orwell's uncompromising intellectual honesty made him one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. In his credo “Why I Write” (1947), he recalled the effect of his combat experience in the Spanish Civil War on his style and thought: “What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art…. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” Because of his attacks on the Right and the Left, Orwell was praised and condemned by both sides. Lionel Trilling called Homage to Catalonia, which describes the Communist attacks on their Socialist allies in Spain, “one of the most important documents of our time.” But Mary McCarthy, in a rancorous essay, claimed Orwell would have supported America in the Vietnam war.
Animal Farm, a political allegory on the betrayal of revolutionary principles in Stalinist Russia, was rejected by T. S. Eliot and many American publishers. But Orwell's clarity, precision, vigor and wit made it a popular success: it was translated into thirty-nine languages and had sold eleven million copies by 1972. Nineteen Eighty-Four, which created the concepts of Big Brother, Doublethink and Newspeak, alerted the postwar world to the dangers of a totalitarian future. Like Don Quixote and Pilgrim's Progress, it became familiar to people who had never read the book. Like Silone, Koestler, Malraux and Sartre, Orwell was a political novelist who “felt responsible in the face of history” for moral awareness and social justice. He belongs with Johnson, Blake and Lawrence in the English tradition of prophetic moralists.
Bernard Crick, a professor of politics at London University, introduces his book by defining Orwell's achievement: “the finest political writer in English since Swift” and announcing his own curiously crippling method: “the best that a biographer can do is to understand the relationship between the writer and the man.” He does not believe a biographer can enter into his subject's mind, rejects “the fine writing, balanced appraisal and psychological insight that is the hallmark” of English biography, and dismisses the great line that runs from Johnson's Lives of the Poets to George Painter's Marcel Proust.
He writes in a consistently flat and graceless style (and even “takes up the cudgels”—a cliché specifically condemned in “Politics and the English Language”); emphasizes “how his books and essays came to be written” and published, rather than Orwell's development as an artist; and provides a strictly external view of the man—with neither vivid details nor rich revelation of character—that tends to ignore his psychological motivation, guilt, masochism and self-hatred. But Orwell (echoing Heine) stressed the inner life and self-reflectively wrote in his essay on Salvador Dalí: “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying; since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
Crick was the first scholar with permission to use and quote from the unpublished papers at the Orwell Archive in London. He provides a more thoroughly documented factual biography than Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’ two-volume life, which appeared in 1972 and 1979. But because Crick is more interested in Orwell's political ideas and their context than in the man who thought them out, we come no nearer to understanding the contradictions in Orwell's elusive character: Etonian prole, anticolonial policeman, Tory anarchist, Leftist critic of the Left, puritanical seducer, kindly autocrat. Though Orwell was radical in politics, he was conservative in feeling. Malcolm Muggeridge, who once planned to write his life, said he “loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future.”
Crick's comparison with Hobbes’ political thought is misleading, for Orwell had comparatively few ideas and tended to express the same thoughts in all his works. He is more important for his brilliant style and noble character than for his rather superficial and frequently inconsistent political beliefs. His personal qualities—courage, compassion, honesty, integrity—led, immediately after his death, to the legend of the tall, lined and shaggy man who shot the elephant in Burma and was wounded in Spain, witnessed a hanging and saw the poor die, lived with tramps and went down the mine, and was canonized as a secular saint. Crick fails to mention that this legend was based on Orwell's own carefully constructed self-image.
Crick rejects Stansky and Abrahams’ dubious theory that in 1933 Eric Blair (his real name) was suddenly transformed into the pseudonymous George Orwell (the transformation in this biography is Orwell into Crick). But Orwell was such an impersonal and aloof figure that his obscure friends of the twenties and thirties have almost nothing significant to relate about his Burmese or Parisian days. There was nothing unusual about the young Orwell, no promise of genius, very little to suggest that he would become, after D. H. Lawrence, the most influential English writer of the century. Crick does not explain how the youth who began by writing banal poems finished by transforming the political experience of an entire generation into the mythic power of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Crick's attitude toward Orwell scholars is churlish. He sneers at their errors, though they can scarcely be blamed for being misled by the published chronology of Ian Angus, the curator of the Archive, who was instructed to prevent scholars from checking the facts. And he plunders the discoveries of his predecessors, who first established the bibliography of criticism, the history of Orwell's reputation, the reason he went from Eton to Burma (he supposedly could neither win a university scholarship nor afford the expense), and his selection and training as an imperial policeman. His account of Orwell's constabulary duties (84), for example, is lifted straight from Stansky and Abrahams (179)—without acknowledgment.
Crick argues—against the generally accepted belief first proposed by the New Yorker critic Anthony West—that the autobiographical essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” was probably written in 1938 rather than in 1947 (when Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four), and that the origins of his most important novel lie in the political events of the thirties and forties rather than in his terrifying experiences in the authoritarian school. Crick quotes Orwell's statement: “I originally undertook [the essay] as a sort of pendant to Cyril Connolly's autobiography, Enemies of Promise (1938), he having asked me to write a reminiscence.” But this does not necessarily mean that Orwell wrote the essay just after Connolly's memoirs appeared. Crick also insists that Orwell's censored letters home during his first term at prep school give “no evidence of disturbance.” But Kipling, who also endured agonies at school, wrote in Something of Myself: “Badly treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.” Contrary to Crick's theory, Orwell states that these traumatic memories took place “thirty years ago and more,” which makes the date of composition precisely 1947. Connolly regards “Such, Such” as the “key to Orwell's formation.”
Once Orwell decided to become a writer—he was a late and slow starter—he pursued his goal with fanatical determination. His friend Ruth Pitter observed: “He had the gift, he had the courage, he had the persistence to go on in spite of failure, sickness, poverty, and opposition, until he became an acknowledged master of English prose.” His imaginative powers were limited, and he often sought experience for literary purposes (“I would like to spend Christmas in gaol”). Nearly every phase of his life was reflected in his books: school days in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” the East in “Shooting an Elephant” and Burmese Days, dishwashing and tramping in Down and Out in Paris and London, illness in “How the Poor Die,” teaching in A Clergyman's Daughter, working in a bookshop in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, investigating the condition of slums and mines in The Road to Wigan Pier, fighting for Republican Spain in Homage to Catalonia, convalescing in “Marrakech,” childhood fishing in Coming Up For Air, farming at Wallington
in Animal Farm, working for the wartime BBC in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell, who had a chronic cough as a child, was hospitalized with pneumonia in 1929, left teaching after a second attack in 1933, and had his first tubercular hemorrhage in 1938. He was always careless about his health. He worked compulsively, ate poorly, lived austerely, wore no overcoat during wintry rides on a motorbike and distrusted doctors. An anonymous gift from the novelist L. H. Myers allowed him to spend the winter of 1938 recovering in the mild climate of Morocco.
Orwell had predicted the war throughout the thirties. When it came, Connolly thought he was “enormously at home in the Blitz, among the bombs, the bravery, the rubble, the shortages, the homeless, the signs of rising revolutionary temper.” His proletarian affectations in the BBC staff canteen—slurping tea from a saucer and rolling shaggy cigarettes—em-barrassed colleagues and shocked the doormen. Friends were struck by his peculiar combination of gaiety and grimness, of personal gentleness and literary ferocity.
Though Orwell believed he was sterile, Crick suggests that the fault was more likely his wife's. They apparently had sexual problems. The heroines of Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, and Nineteen Eighty-Four are all frigid; she may well have been frightened of his contagious disease; he had several casual affairs during the last years of the war. They finally adopted a month-old baby in June 1944. In March 1945 his wife (aged 39) died of cardiac failure during an operation for cancer of the uterus. Orwell, who had another hemorrhage while reporting the war in Germany that month (Crick says nothing about his direct experience with concentration camps), was shattered and guilt-ridden by her death. But he was determined to keep the baby, precipitously proposed to four women who gently turned him down and then capably cared for his son.