Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  After the success of Animal Farm, Orwell wanted to get away from the distractions of London in order to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four. A friend told him about the remote island of Jura, off the west coast of Scotland, and he moved to Barnhill in May 1946. Crick opposes friends and critics like T. R. Fyvel and Anthony West who believe the move to Jura was a fatal mistake. He calls it a “long premeditated and quite sensible decision,” and then inadvertently provides evidence that contradicts his own argument. Barnhill, at the end of a seven-mile rutted track that was “extraordinarily uncomfortable and exhausting,” was far from a telephone, a doctor, a hospital. The paraffin stove in his writing room gave off “smelly and heavy fumes.” The farm life was physically arduous, the climate was wet, the dampness “obviously harmful.”

  Orwell had two hemorrhages in 1945–46; he was in poor health when he went to Jura and gravely ill when he left to enter a hospital in 1947. He had an adverse reaction to the newly discovered streptomycin, which could cure the disease and was specially imported from America. He desperately needed a warm, dry climate and would almost certainly have lived longer if he had gone to Switzerland, Morocco or the Mediterranean. He was the last of the modern writers—Chekhov, Mansfield, Kafka, Lawrence—to succumb to tuberculosis.

  Orwell married the beautiful Sonia Brownell, who had been Connolly's secretary at Horizon, in University College Hospital in October 1949 and died there three months later at the age of 46. “The tragedy of Orwell's life,” wrote Connolly, “is that when at last he achieved fame and success he was a dying man. He had fame and was too ill to leave the room, money and nothing to spend it on, love in which he could not participate; he tasted the bitterness of dying.” But, as Orwell said of Gandhi, “How clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!”

  III. MICHAEL SHELDEN, THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY (1991)

  No Orwell biographer had ever gone to Burma, though Michael Shelden made the forty-eight-hour journey from London to Orwell's house on Jura. Shelden's life is decent, dutiful and dull; his style is graceless and he fails to bring Orwell and his circle of friends to life. But his account of Orwell's two marriages is interesting, and he's surely right in stating that Sonia Brownell married Orwell on his deathbed for mercenary motives.

  There is a real need for a new life of George Orwell (1903–50). Stansky and Abrahams’ biography is thesis-ridden and superficial; Crick's is turgid and imperceptive. Michael Shelden's decent, dutiful and thoroughly researched life has made good use of the Orwell Archive at London University. But his numerous interviews do not seem very probing, and neither he nor the previous biographers have searched for traces of Orwell in Burma or given firsthand descriptions of the places where he served as a policeman in the 1920s. Shelden's assertion that the chief Burmese official of the district could not have been excluded from the English club is highly unlikely. Julius Nyerere, as prime minister of Tanzania, was excluded from the white club in Dar-es-Salaam even after his country had become independent.

  Shelden's work also has serious flaws. He has a graceless style (“There is a description of a horse named Boxer being beaten by an army officer with a whip, and the horse is given the name ‘Boxer’”) and lacks the vivid details that bring his now-familiar subject to life. His criticism of Orwell's work is descriptive rather than analytical, and frequently descends to awkward paraphrase. The rare insights are always derived from previous critics.

  Shelden clumsily and obviously maintains that “Orwell has no box into which he is determined to stuff Dickens, no ideological sledgehammer with which he wants to pound him.” Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of the Spanish War, “is an intensely personal book” that “refuses to accept easy answers.” Completely missing the wit of a provocative simile, Shelden solemnly characterizes as “intemperate” Orwell's deliberately outrageous but acute attack on socialist cranks: “all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of [Marxist] ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat.” Worst of all, Shelden is disappointingly dull.

  He tends to elaborate the obvious—Orwell's father was “disappointed” when his son left the Burmese police, and Orwell was “very pleased” when his first book was accepted—but tends to miss the more subtle points. The Lucknow Pioneer, which offered Orwell an editorial job in 1938, was Kipling's old newspaper. Andrew Morland, who treated Orwell during his last illness, had been D. H. Lawrence's doctor. And when Orwell told Middleton Murry about his tuberculosis, he knew that Murry's first two wives had died of that disease. Shelden gives very little sense of what Orwell's friends were like, what drew him to these men and what kind of relations he had with such diverse figures as the conventional Murry and the bohemian Henry Miller, the editor Max Plowman and the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, the professorial William Empson and the Hungarian refugee Arthur Koestler.

  Shelden's new discoveries, based on “previously unknown documents,” tend to confirm what is already known: that Down and Out in Paris and London was based on fact and that Orwell was in serious danger of being arrested by his political enemies in. Spain. Though Orwell's prep school may not have seemed too bad to many other boys, it was hellish for him. His crush on another boy at Eton was commonplace. The information about Burma has been known since 1972, and the police report from the archives of Madrid was published in the Observer in 1989. Many of the names on Orwell's private list of crypto-Communists were extremely doubtful.

  The most interesting part of Shelden's book is his account of Orwell's two marriages and his suggestion that Orwell's first wife, Eileen, may have had an affair in Spain with Georges Kopp, the heroic commander who was idealized in Homage to Catalonia. After Eileen's doctor-brother was killed at Dunkirk, she went into a deep depression and had serious marriage problems. As Orwell wrote after her unexpected death during an operation: “I was sometimes unfaithful to Eileen, and also treated her very badly, and I think she treated me badly too at times, but it was a real marriage in the sense that we had been through awful struggles together.”

  Shelden is justly severe on Orwell's second wife, Sonia. She was, like Orwell, born in India; and as a teenager she was responsible for the death of a friend by drowning. She gave in to Orwell's “clumsy efforts” at lovemaking at least once before his final illness; and her other notable lovers included the English painters William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, and the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. She married the wealthy, famous and gravely ill Orwell for mercenary motives, bought herself an expensive engagement ring and was in a Soho nightclub with one of her former lovers when Orwell died.

  Orwell's life seems to be divided into separate phases: being miserable at prep school, slacking off at Eton, shooting an elephant in Burma, tramping and dishwashing when down and out (which resembled T. E. Lawrence's self-conscious degradation in the ranks of the RAF), getting shot through the throat in Spain (and having the hospital assistants steal his valuables), broadcasting futile war propaganda to India for the BBC, achieving astonishing success with Animal Farm (which was rejected by T. S. Eliot, who completely missed the political point of the book), retreating to the unhealthy Scottish island of Jura and dying of tuberculosis when he reacted adversely to the newly discovered streptomycin.

  The consistent element in this extraordinarily diverse life was Orwell's elusive, guilt-ridden, masochistic character. A former friend vividly described him as “a tall, big-headed man, with pale blue, defensively humorous eyes, a little moustache and a painfully snickering laugh.” A fellow fighter in Spain called him “a good shot, a cool customer, completely without fear.” He was capable of “intellectual brutality” and was intensely fair-minded, cynical yet idealistic. Self-deprecating about the romantic fatalism of his conventional early novels, he brilliantly fulfilled himself in his late political satires. This nobly impressive man, whom Victor Pritchett called “the wintry conscience of his generation,” was, in Shelden's words, “willing to sacrifice everything—his he
alth, his security, his career, his happiness, his life—for his dreams.”

  IV. D. J. TAYLOR, ORWELL: THE LIFE (2003);

  GORDON BOWKER GEORGE ORWELL (2003)

  D. J. Taylor's and Gordon Bowker's lives appeared in Orwell's centenary year, three years after my own biography was published. Unlike Crick's self-defeating book, these two lives attempted to explore the inner man. Orwell, who helped construct his own personal legend, has been dishonestly appropriated by extremists like Mary McCarthy on the Left and Norman Podhoretz on the Right. His great themes are longing and loss. Bowker's biography, though more careless than Taylor's, is more dramatic and penetrating, and he's discovered more new material. Burma gave Orwell a knowledge of two Asian languages (Burmese and Hindi), Oriental people and colonial society, and provided valuable legal and quasi-military experience.

  Samuel Johnson defined biography as an attempt to understand the lives of others, as “an act of the imagination.” Ideally, the modern biographer—an investigative reporter of the spirit—should have Johnson's sympathy and intuition, critical judgment and healthy scepticism. These new lives by D. J. Taylor and Gordon Bowker—the fifth and sixth biographies of Orwell—attempt to explore the inner man.

  D. J. Taylor mentions the vats of ink expended on Orwell's ghastly prep school and the shelf-full of memoirs by his contemporaries at Eton. He concedes that Orwell's life is a “well-trodden path, and the scenery can be distressingly familiar.” He asks, but doesn't answer, the crucial question: “what more [is] there to be said?” Taylor uses Peter Davison's twenty-volume edition of Orwell's Complete Works and the unpublished memoirs of Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit and David Holbrook—just as I did in my recent life of Orwell. And some of his sentences are surprisingly déjà lu: “He impulsively proposed marriage to several attractive younger women whom he scarcely knew” (Meyers) and he made “proposals of marriage to a series of younger women some of whom he barely knew” (Taylor); “the outboard motor … was wrenched off the mounting and fell into the sea” (Meyers) and “the engine sheared away from its mounting and disappeared into the sea” (Taylor).

  There are a number of minor flaws in Taylor's book. His doubts about Orwell's elusive life and character, though commendably honest, are tactically unwise and undermine his credibility as a biographer. He insists that there are “few verifiable facts” and “no hard evidence,” Orwell “is impossible to pin down” and it's “anyone's guess,” his motives “are unfathomable” and circumstances “are not wholly decipherable,” whatever happened “is lost in time” and “beyond recreation,” “there is no way of knowing” and “we shall probably never know.” Repeating the epigraphs to the chapters in the text blunts their effect, and there are several other pointless repetitions. Lady Grigg is identified twice in three pages, and Orwell's well-known disdain for his early novel Keep the Aspidstra Flying is mentioned three times.

  Taylor did not go to Burma, where Orwell spent five years as a policeman in the 1920s—surely (contra Taylor) a more glamorous, exotic and responsible job than teaching or working in the City—and gets lost on the geography. Maymyo is inland (not on a peninsula); Twante is ten minutes across the river from Rangoon (not “a thirty-six-hour steamer trip”); Katha is northeast (not west) of Mandalay; and the Governor in Orwell's time was Sir Harcourt Butler (not Harcourt Brace, his American publisher). Other errors have also crept into the text. The correct title of Orwell's four-volume works is The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters; the condemned man in “A Hanging” went to the gallows (not the block); Dwight Macdonald's surname is spelled two different ways, both incorrect; William Phillips and Philip Rahv (not Macdonald and Clement Greenberg) were the editors of the Partisan Review; the van Georges Kopp sold Orwell was not just “in poor condition,” but had to be pushed off the Jura ferry and was permanently abandoned on the dock; Orwell's adopted son Richard got sick after smoking a pipe (not a cigarette); and, in a famous scene, Orwell saw a woman trying to unblock a drain pipe from a train (not while walking up a back-alley) in Wigan.

  There are also some unresolved contradictions. Was Orwell unable to get the northern miners to treat him “as an equal” or were they “willing to take [him] for granted”? Did Henry Miller give him, when he was on the way to the Spanish Civil War, a corduroy jacket or a more useful pigskin jacket? Did he leave Spain with only a tiny oil-lamp as a souvenir or did he also have a goatskin water-bottle? Did he “probably” or “certainly” make his first trip to Jura in the autumn of 1944? Was the climate of Jura “temperate” or was the remote Scottish island lashed by ferocious storms, with endless icy rain “blowing east from the Atlantic?”

  Finally, Taylor does not always extract the maximum meaning from the events he describes. He asks, if Orwell wasn't proud of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, “why try to get it published in the first place?” Clearly Orwell was aware of its faults but believed in its merits. He wanted to justify his years as a dishwasher and tramp, get into print and make some money. Taylor doesn't fully explain the bond forged between Orwell and his devoted wife Eileen, both of whom risked their lives in Spain, as well as Orwell's guilt about exposing her to this risk both in Barcelona and when she visited him during an artillery bombardment on the Aragon front.

  Despite these criticisms, Taylor's is a highly competent book, which reinforces rather than changes the traditional view, and has several merits. His style is clear and lively, and he sympathizes with his subject. His interchapters on Orwell's face, voice, obsession with rats, attitude toward Jews, paranoia and possessions are useful and interesting. He's been industrious and turned up some new bits of information: Orwell being chased on South-wold common by a romantic rival on a motorcycle; Orwell working as a “male charwoman, cleaning the house for half a crown a day.” He suggests that Rayner Heppenstall's description of Orwell's “sadistic exaltation” during their fight in the 1930s was retrospectively influenced by the sadistic torture scenes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Taylor (like Bowker) is sound on Orwell's now notorious but quite innocuous “List” of well known Communist sympathizers and (in contrast to Hilary Spurling's absurd self-serving whitewash) on the self-serving character of Sonia Brownell, who married him on his deathbed.

  Bowker's biography—which attempts to explore the roots of Orwell's emotional life and illuminate his shadowy self—is better than Taylor's: more lively, dramatic and penetrating. He reveals the French influence on Orwell, the dominant patterns in the life and work, the paradoxical elements of “one of the great misfits of his generation,” the romantic and tragic aspects of his character. Bowker has also discovered much more new material: Eurasian relatives in Burma; letters to the unattainable girlfriend Brenda Salkeld (source not cited) suggesting a ménage à trois (Orwell said that Eileen unselfishly wished he could sleep with Brenda “about twice a year”); a letter from another girlfriend, Celia Kirwan, to her twin sister about Orwell's marriage proposal; an interview with Orwell's sometime roommate Michael Sayers; the diary of his publisher Roger Senhouse, at Eton; material in the Archive de Paris, the Marx Memorial Library in London and the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam; and the Spanish political poster that probably inspired O’Brien's picture of the future in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

  But Bowker is more careless than Taylor. In addition to misspelling twenty proper names, he misstates the first names of John Aubrey and Heinrich Mann, confuses a duck with a goose and Herbert Read with Harold Acton, garbles a sentence on page 332 (lines 6–7) and misplaces a parenthesis (with Tether misspelled) on page 340 (lines 10–11). Many of his factual statements are inaccurate. Orwell's father did not remain in the same grade of the Indian Opium Department for twenty-two years, and his service in the Great War was reflected in the fictional George Bowling's; Orwell didn't blow up toads, but punished boys who did; Rangoon is not in the mouth of the Irrawaddy Delta; Maugham's On a Chinese Screen is a travel book (not stories); Orwell's “Clink” (1932) was published; his
memoir Down and Out in Paris and London is more autobiographical than his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Málaga was not captured “without a shot being fired”: the city fell after a naval bombardment and a three-pronged land attack; Malraux was not a “journalistic spectator” during the Spanish Civil War, but flew many dangerous missions with the Escadre España; Orwell was not “paranoid” about being murdered by the Communists: they tried to kill him in Spain and his name “was on a Moscow hit list”; Victor Pritchett was not “always appreciative” of Orwell, but wrote a harsh and unjust review of Homage to Catalonia; T. S. Eliot did not “resist” Orwell's invitations, but stayed overnight in his flat during the Blitz; Orwell, pushing a wheelbarrow, couldn't possibly have made an “eight-mile round trip during his lunch-hour”; he had a motorboat (not a sailboat) on Jura; and Kafka did not destroy his papers, but gave them to Max Brod.

  Bowker could also have extracted more meaning from several passages. He misses Orwell's quotation of Scott's Marmion in “what tangled webs we weave” and allusion to Maugham's story “The Hairless Mexican” in his unpublished story “The Hairless Ape.” It's not “astonishing” that during his wife's mourning for her dead brother Orwell lusted after Brenda Salkeld: when Eileen rejected him and withdrew into prolonged depression, he naturally sought the consolation of other women. Bowker fails to comment on Orwell's weirdly self-denigrating proposal to Anne Popham (which recalls Kafka's tortured letters to Felice Bauer); and he fails to note that Sonia's futile wish to save the moribund Orwell by taking him to Switzerland was an attempt to compensate for the lifelong guilt she felt about her inability to save a friend who'd drowned in that country.

  Bowker exaggerates Orwell's superstitious schoolboy dabbling in black magic and the negative influence of his early education at a Catholic school, for there's no evidence that he disliked the nuns or was unhappy there. He mistakenly asserts that Orwell—who did his job well and could have returned after home leave—had “failed” in the Burmese Police. In the 1920s Harold Acton had got ahead in the literary race and published several volumes of poetry, but Orwell's precious years in Burma were worth infinitely more than those now forgotten poems. Besides a knowledge of Asian languages, Oriental people and colonial society, he gained valuable legal and quasi-military experience. While still in his teens he had tremendous responsibility. Burma was a crucial experience that provided material for his best early novel, Burmese Days, and two of his greatest essays: “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.” As a young recruit on the voyage out he was horrified to see a white policeman kicking a coolie, but soon compromised his values and began to beat his servants. When he left Burma he abandoned his casual brutality and taught himself compassion for the oppressed. He also gave up the purple passages in his exotic, jungly novel and cultivated a prose as transparent as a window pane.